Re: Sorry IT guys you aren't unique in this
Oh, trust me, nobody in IT believes they've invented the corporate fad. At plenty of companies, the management-style-du-jour roller coaster was fucking things up for the entire corporate drone population long before the endless revolving door of educational fads or IT trends swooped in to make knowledge workers' lives more "interesting". Plenty of that crap's been in heavy rotation since the 1980s, if not longer.
The thing that sets IT trends apart, though, is that they have this tendency to captivate non- IT people. Because IT is everywhere and every company makes use of IT, scenes like the one in this episode are all too common. Some management type catches wind of a new shiny that the company absolutely must be doing, despite not actually having the first clue what it even IS. I mean, that stuff's for the nerds to sort out, right?
You don't really get much of that, outside of IT. Management styles and trends mostly infect management, and while the workers are definitely the ones who suffer at least whatever nonsense they're enduring is being implemented at the right levels. And whatever educational initiative is in vogue this week, at least you know the people dabbling in it are educators, or involved in the educational system to some degree. You're not going to see the manager of a coffee shop stroll in some morning and announce that they're going to be implementing Mindfulness. Employees at the nearest big-box electronics store aren't likely to receive memos detailing the TV department's new Brain Gyms initiative.
In IT things like that happen all the time, even within companies that aren't remotely in the IT business. Here in the US recently, a beverage company decided (while in the death throes of failing as a beverage company) that they were going to radically reinvent the company to save it. They changed their name to something absurd involving (you guessed it) blockchain, and then promptly still folded because oddly enough a beverage company isn't well-positioned to make the transition into the exciting world of blockchain. (Plus, I wouldn't be surprised if the one person on staff with any sort of technical know-how resigned on the spot the moment they got wind of that idiot plan.)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
