QuidComp has long claimed to be a good company for which to work. Recently, its bloated bureaucracy and attendant employee disgruntlement got in the way of business performance, which prompted a major corporate overhaul aimed at increasing productivity and employee satisfaction. Now, many services are farmed out or automated, the management hierarchy is flatter, and the research division performs many tasks formerly in the purview of the development division. Two thousand employees, mostly middle-aged engineers and project managers, were offered either to leave with a nominal subvention—the wooden parachute—or to work on the graveyard shift of the circuit board assembly line. A committee of consultants and managers devised a set of "processes" to regulate the execution of the technical work, along with a policy of "employee empowerment," all to dilute managerial responsibility without delegation of authority. A mystifying procedure aimed at capping the growth of salaries and benefits was put in place to compute a magic number—the rank—representing each employee's usefulness to the company. On the surface, the reorganization looked good enough to warrant a small boost of the company stock.

It turns out that these changes have not improved employee satisfaction. If anything, they have made the situation much worse. This was predictable, because the reorganization, which was conceived behind closed doors by managers and consultants, has left the management culture intact. Experienced engineers, who had some good ideas about correcting the company's malfunctions, were not invited to make suggestions. Actually, many had to leave because their higher salaries had made them the cost cutters' preferred targets. 

As in many corporations, the "management team" has an absolutist view of the hierarchy, whereby a manager's first priority is to feather his nest not by showing creativity or leadership, but by toadying to his superiors and, if possible, directly to the CEO-King. His second priority is to avoid direct contact with the people under his authority, mostly to hide from them his deficiencies and the personal characteristics that made him opt for the management track—for example, he is an inept, unscrupulous, self-centered, wimpy nerd who was picked on in high school. While a manager congregates almost exclusively with other managers for communication of company inside information, he discloses to his troops little of that information under the theory that one's authority stems from others' ignorance. To him, a flatter hierarchy is everything he can wish, because it boosts him closer the CEO-King. The law of optimal toadying then makes him unwaveringly concentrate all his attention on the top of the hierarchy and away from the engineers in the trenches. 

Meanwhile, my friend Jack, an experienced engineer with advanced degrees, in his 8'x10' cubicle lost in a sea of identical cubicles feels like Dilbert. His life is run by meaningless buzzwords and anonymous processes. Working longer and longer hours seems to have become his condition of employment, because his projects are assigned impossible deadlines and insufficient staffing. He seldom sees his manager, who has power over his salary, promotions, and employment, except for department meetings where discussions of individual interest are eschewed. When he can corner him—for five minutes—his questions are skirted and his concerns are lightly dismissed. Jack is miffed. Then, there is the annual appraisal interview, when his unarguable rank seemingly pulled out of a hat and unrelated to his high level of performance is dropped in his lap. Jack is more miffed. To add insult to injury, he has to attend inane company pep rallies with pizza, beer, Evian, and karaoke, where managers make self-congratulatory speeches, shamelessly toady to the executives, wear silly hats and silly T-shirts, sing silly songs, and generally make fools of themselves to try to show that they, the big shots, are just plain folks with a sense of humour. Being of the wrong race and sex, Jack is also miffed by a continuous flow of sanctimonious messages from the CEO's office about "diversity" and the supposedly righteous use of race or sex preferences in hiring and promotions. He periodically must enroll in "sensitivity" workshops, under the implicit assumption that, consciously or unconsciously, he is racist, xenophobe, misogynic, and prejudiced in any other possible way. He knows that his employer so keen on diversity hires Chinese, Russians, and Hindus with H-1B visas to keep salaries as low as possible, and that his employment with QuidComp may end any day when he is over thirty-five years old and some cheaper replacement can be imported from Moldavia. He also knows that the company successfully lobbies the Federal Government to increase the quota of H-1B visas under the bogus claim that there is a shortage of qualified labour. Jack is so miffed that he is ready to move anytime to any company where he could maintain a semblance of self-respect and sanity, but these are rare. Ironically, he would stand a better chance to find other employment if he had much less experience or if he were just out of college, because he would be as cheap as an H-1B import. For some time, he has been thinking of hanging out his shingle as a freelance consultant, but he knows that most companies prefer to spend money on fat university contracts that look impressive on annual reports. 

Fortunately, specialists in QuidComp's diverse and bloated Human Resources Department had the time to attend numerous expensive seminars where they learnt that the demands of "the new global-economy metaphor" may seriously shorten employee temper. So, with high praise from the CEO himself, the ever-vigilant Human Resources Department has initiated a set of classes on "Anger Management" that all employees are strongly advised to attend. 

Is it any wonder that Jack is angry on the job?