@ Mike Smith Posted Tuesday 9th June 2009 15:18 GMT
Right on there, pal.
I'm a graphic designer by profession, and not an engineer, but I have quite a few friends who are engineers, so I can totally empathize with them in that regard.
I first started my career in 1980, right at the dawn of that wretched fashion of managerial types using sports jargon like "team player" even though none of them looked like they'd ever been involved in organized sports in their lives, let alone having had to do any actual work on a project outside of "managing". If I had a buck for every time I saw a req for a new position, or a proposal presentation that used the phrase "team player" I'd be George Soros by now.
"Team player" to me has always been a euphemism for "give up your identity, your self, your soul, your life".
In every design department in every ad agency I've worked in, there were always designers who were best at one thing, whether it was layout production, pre-press, typography, photography, illustration, what-have-you, and it's like Mike Smith says back up the scroll there -- the creative directors would always break up the project into components which were handed around to the various designers in the department according to their particular strengths, and would be sure that we were all communicating regularly, and ended up delivering a campaign on deadline, on budget, and which made the clients wet their pants with delight. The CD never gave a rat's ass if we were "team players" according to some ignorant-assed pointy-haired managerial diktat.
That, to me, was always the true essence of "teamwork".
Reading this article, I found myself thinking: if the engineers working on Project Apollo were measured according to today's bullshit managerial blather about "team players", we'd never have put a man on the Moon.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
