May 25, 2006
If it weren't so scary...
...I'd take comfort in the fact that simply being a competent individual puts you head and shoulders above the vast majority of the American population.
This article describes the phenomenon thusly: "In the long-dead past, incompetents generally recognized their own incapacity and behaved accordingly. Today, every jackass sees himself as a genius, and every fool fancies herself a philosopher."
Haven't I seen it. One of my former co-workers, a product of a vo-tech school in the area who was proud of skipping classes and still being marginally ahead of her cohorts, seemed to believe that she was not only the single most talented individual in the department, but unfairly treated any time she was called to account for making blindingly stupid errors. She quit after being suspended as the result of an annual performance review.
Related to this, is an article by Glenn Reynolds entitled "Managing to Look Busy", about how companies are starting to crack down on web use at work by forbidding all access without explicit prior permission. He thinks this is a way to discourage talented people from working for your company, and he's right. But near the end, almost as an aside, he says:
"Ultimately, this issue isn't about employees but about management. Managers tend to resist output measures because output measures require managers to take uncomfortable action: They have to tell the good employees that they're doing a good job (which tends to encourage the good employees to want more money) and they have to tell the bad employees that they're doing a bad job (which tends to make them resentful and unpleasant)."
He's right about that. During the same performance review after which my co-worker quit, I received glowing scores. My manager told me I was doing an excellent job and wanted me to keep at it. I received a 0.5% raise. If you think my morale took a bit of a hit, you'd be right. When it became apparent that though my superior guest service was not worth enough to pay me more than the people who were merely showing up for work, well... needless to say I found other ways to pass the hours. If I'm going to get paid jack, I may as well get paid jack for doing something interesting. I accepted a position at a local paper less than a month later.
