I hit the ceiling

You have my sympathies, and I feel that the performance review was probably unjust.

This is based on your thoughtful post (why is it that below a certain level in the corporation, the ability to write clear English about what's going down is never an advantage?) and also on the general misery of the "performance review".

However, based on my own experience, I'd advise you to think about staying.

Publish the scientific papers. Hell, you can write, can't you?

I sense that performance reviews are at your company the usual kangaroo court, and that they are a superficial cover, meant to hold harmless the company from accusations of racial or sexual discrimination: a meaningless exercise for the most part, except insofar as they usually mean that the hardest working and most intelligent employees are screwed as long as they don't belong to a protected group.

In fact, the hardest working and most intelligent employees are screwed because the performance reviewer needs to "nail" someone, usually, to make an acceptable grade curve, and, in many corporations, there is no meaningful way (despite the management playbooks) for the performance reviewer to relate the performance of any one employee to real metrics...in part because the metrics are hidden.

Upper management is normally diddling middle management, so middle management has no real way of knowing what constitutes a "good" employee.

The outlier cases, especially the more intelligent and harder working, make good targets of opportunity in many cases.

Another alternative: to "grieve" the performance review. I worked hard at Bell Northern Research to keep an internal compiler alive and automated its (previously opaque) installation procedure, but a new manager, who knew nothing about compilers, decided that I was "it" in 1983.

He nailed me, and I proceeded to grieve the review. The result: I was transferred out of his group with no black marks.

But...you can bet your butt I took care not to rub it in. I didn't need an enemy.

It's possible to make a compromise about salary for a few years. But I'm much more reluctant to make a compromise about personal growth.

The key issue is this: now that I have learnt something about project management and team leadership, the next challenge for me is to help others to aquire these skills. To get very far at that, I need management support. I'm not confident I'll get it in my current organisation.

However, there is one hopeful sign. My department has a process improvement programme that is going nowhere, mainly because it is being treated as a matter of technical training rather than culture change. When I made that point to the department head, he said that he would arrange a meeting of himself, me, and the person responsible for the programme.

If this happens, getting the right balance between tact and clarity will be hard. But I'll err on the side of clarity, since I don't have much to lose here.

Well, I agree that we all want and deserve as programmers opportunities for personal and professional growth on the job. I also believe that this is in a state of contradiction to management's desire to deskill all jobs.

I think the basic mistake is that as Americans we demand too much from the job.

Why do you ask for so much?
Why not ask for more?

- Leonard Cohen, Bird on a Wire

What I mean is that there is little allowance made in America for "the sphere of communicative reason" in Habermas' sense because GOVERNMENT has to open this space up on behalf of its citizens, by SUBSIDIZING worthy parts of civil society, and PROTECTING communicative reasoners when on the job, on a private property that is also a public space, they express themselves in some way (for example, by driving into the parking lot with an anti-Bush sticker on their car).

Job interviews and performance reviews are a system.

Is dis a system? - R. Crumb

They are a language game in which we could never, and I mean never, say in response to the question "what are your goals?", "world peace", unless you had just won a beauty contest.

But even in Shenzen most world companies have until recently followed American practice. This means that they, in an ersatz dialog, try to replace Habermas' civil society but cannot by the logic of the corporation, which, as Peter Drucker emphasized, is a mechanism only for making money for its investors.

"Personal growth" is the desire to be a Subject of your life as opposed to an Object and a plaything of blind economic forces.

The problem is that the American model treats "personal growth" to Subjectivity (using it neologistically and arche-logistically: Subjectivity is being-a-subject, its original meaning which I revive here) as a privilege and not a right.

It treats it as interchangeable with money, to be substituted for money, withheld and replaced by higher salary, or, in the worst case from the point of view of the employee, downgraded along with money.

The white-collar employee (cf. C. Wright Mills) is running in place to stay above the set-point of the petite bourgeois, that point below which he feels he has NO RIGHT to any subjectivity or choice. This is typically, unemployment, but it can also be constituted in working for a company in permanent crisis or fire-fighting mode.

My strategy today as an older person whose kids are grown is to downsize my consumption to Asian levels and emphasize "helping others" rather than the dream of being a Subject (for Levinas, the Subject is unreal until it gives hospitality to the radical Other).

This is NOT to imply, Chris, that you are being self-aggrandizing. We WANT to be Subjects in order to help others! But at different times in our lives we should go to the city, or to the forest.

On further thought, the obstacle to me getting the challenges I'm looking for is something more than the attitudes of the people in my line management chain.

I want to do some work on software process improvement. But in my workplace projects are sealed units. They are funded separately and hire separately. Above the level of the project, management do a variety of things, some of them important. But they don't do much to support delivery performance.

As I reported above, my departmental management now do want to improve the software quality. But the structure and habits of the department make this hard to do.

The way academic freedom is understood probably doesn't help either. Each programmer has the rights of an academic author - but the complementary tradition of exposing your work for critique is held to less firmly.

Correct: middle management decision making in MIS is actually an exercise in dealing with reifications, where concepts become unalterable things, leading to meetings about nouns whose referents are unclear: "we should discuss Agile Development today, and only Agile Development, Ed, therefore your observations about Shakespeare are offside".

That is, a reified Agile Development concept would in many UK and USA contexts exclude an important rule: that AFTER you make the daily build, you MUST go home. Even if it is still light out!

The problem with reification is that as a management technique adopted namelessly, it forecloses free discussion. Management has, against its own better interests, to predefine what it is we will discuss.

In real development, the only way management has to control, and to keep promises to upper management about when the hell things will happen for the love of Mike, is to reify and predefine problems and require programmers to think in fact in boxes.

At the same time, it encourages people at many companies to think outside the box. The paradox in fact echoes a paradox of Trotsky's "international revolutionary Marxism" which was and is unsolved in Cuba: how do you, at one and the same time, encourage the homeboys to participate in a continual revolution at home and abroad, and at the same time get the sugar cane crop to market? At harvest time, you as a socialist manager may very well have to drive your "fellow workers" hard, having them work in ways that they, as Subjects, may see as irrational: ways that disrupt the smooth rythym of harvesting without which harvesters drop of heat exhaustion, because you haven't had time to make time and motion studies.

By the time it comes to discuss how to harvest better, you and your homeys are about ready to drop from exhaustion, so you all say screw it, and it's beer call.

[How do you do work and plan work if planning is work?]

This Trotskyist paradox occurs in any MIS shop where management, perhaps in good faith, has encouraged its people to think creatively, but has to meet shareholder goals.

Which means, Structurally, that your best programmers will be in good faith dissidents, always in trouble for pulling various stunts which "get work done" but which violate the contract that they will work within the bounds you have set.

For example, I was told in 1980 to simply "fix" a Cobol program that was messing up in billing phone calls for any complex call forwarding or conference call situation, since it was hopping around trying to reconstruct the complete call from indvidual events (off-hook, on-hook, digit dial, and so forth).

The management contract was that I would be stud whizboy ace, walk in, walk on water, and walk out, with a happy client...willing to pay, in fact, the bill not only for my time but also for the original programmer.

I realized, as I've related in Build Your Own, that the program needed, as Job One, to recognize a complete telephone call, and the only way to do this was by simulating the switch.

But this was to be a dissident within a "Trotskyite" company dedicated early on to the idea of a permanent, disruptive, digital revolution that would make an irreversible change to the way companies did business. I was allowed to go ahead and save the project, and I succeeded, but as is typical when you make bigger fish look like fools, I got no glory, only satisfaction.

This is the norm in Trotskyite organizations. Leon Trotsky was screwed by Stalin: but Trotsky himself made short work of dissidents during the Russian Civil War.

Fortunately, even in the USA, people in corporations don't get shot for disagreeing with the boss or making him look like an idiot. Just fired.

Of course, in my case, I should have had my manager grok my idea and then credit him with it. I hate doing that because so many of my managers haven't even understood so many of my ideas...the good ones, and the ones that sucked, too.

See my own blog for a comment offside to these discussions.