Management Incentive Program

I am a software developer at a big healthcare company. The company is over 100 years old and has been reorganizing itself since I started 7 years ago. My job is software maintenance. I deal with customer issues that require bug fixes. While there are some parts to the design of the software that suck, the worst bugs are more due to bad management than bad design.

Bad management is everywhere. We laugh about bureaucracies and we tolerate middle management. We ask for tools to help us do our job. And when, upon their urging, we suggest ways to help us improve, managers tell us that, to their great dismay, they are powerless to act.

Management is a club. Managers have cash incentives. These incentives are supposed to motivate the managers into thinking they have a real stake in the company. They try to hide their incentives from the employees. Ironically, managers tend to motivate these same employees by telling them they are lucky to have jobs.

Not all managers are bad. Most are merely mediocre. I accepted a position at my current job because I sensed my manager would be a good one. I was correct. This manager let me into the managers’ club and gave me substantial cash incentives that were nominally given to the managers, but were at the time also given to employees that were considered critical assets.

Then she left the company. Two managers later and now I’m being kicked out of the club. Apparently every middle manager in the company is a more critical asset then I am.

I’m sure someone in HR is ‘just trying to be fair’ – but in this case, fairness seems to be where ever management happens to draw the line. Clearly, they draw the line between themselves and their employees.

What makes me angry is that managers at the company I work for have been talking about a separate technical track for those whose skills would be wasted in management. They could have used this opportunity to put their money where their mouth is. They could have expanded the cash incentive program to non-management and included more employees (and, ideally, excluded under-performing managers).

Instead, they retracted their incentives from individuals who were at one time considered critical.

I’ve truly lost my incentive to work there.