Global Employee of the Year

Colin was instrumental

Director

Colin was a developer I originally wrote loads of stories about after he got unfairly promoted to Senior Developer. There was more injustice a few years later, when he found himself promoted to Principal Developer. Weirdly, his work best-friend always got promoted at the same time, or close to it, so he eventually found himself as a Technical Architect even though he is the shyest person that I know at work, and he has low productivity.

I’m not sure if Colin has some dirt on the Development Managers or the Directors but he seems to have so much influence now. My close colleagues also think it is farcical but laugh it off when I say he must have some dirt on the senior management. But how else can you explain these nonsensical decisions?

Colin had recently proactively tried to address issues that occur for users, and the CTO was impressed with him so gave him an interview at the monthly update presentation. Recently, he changed role from Principal Developer to Technical Manager, which I think is more a sideways move than a promotion but it’s interesting how he seems to get what he wants.

Near the end of last year, the Directors announced they would be hosting an Employee Awards event to celebrate people, or team’s achievements.

I’ve never been happy with these in the past because awards usually go to people whose managers are enthusiastic about such awards, or are charismatic enough to persuade the awards panel that their line-report/team deserves something. Or, it goes to a team that was assigned a project that was worth loads of money, regardless if it was actually a great success.

Anyway, our team (well, really it is a group of teams) got one of the awards even though I don’t think we have done anything particularly great, and many of the items Colin has been involved in have led to a few Major Incidents.

Furthermore, Colin got Global Employee of the Year.

Employee of the year!

Global!

HUGE impact on our customers through his amazing work following the issues we had earlier in the year, Colin was instrumental in most of the changes that have since been applied, and made such a difference. He led the team to ensure that everyone was able to contribute and fully felt supported and Colin’s high standards in “collaboration” demonstrate the best in our corporate values.

Director

So in multiple offices in the UK, India, and all those smaller companies we seem to buy out and then we don’t hear much from them – Colin is deemed to have contributed the best work last year. So he gets a promotion, a team award, and the highest-rated individual award.

Absolutely ridiculous. I think I have written this many times in the blog, but if I was someone reading it, and was familiar with previous blog entries about Colin – I certainly would not believe this was a real thing that happened.

I had a call with Colin and he said he has been really stressed this week. There were 3 Major Incidents, 4 people across the teams he is managing have resigned, and he has had to sack his work best-friend Technical Architect (no idea why this happened – it is rare that we sack people but it will be a blog entry if I find out).

You would think morale would be high if a team (or group of teams) were performing well enough to win an award. Yet we are 5 people down across these teams, another is on long-term illness, and I don’t think we were producing much when we were fully staffed. Colin sure has a job to do here.