Doing Actual Useful Work

I mean, I guess we need bosses, sales people, marketers, advertisers and investors. But do we need so many of them? And where would they be without people to do the actual work?

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Photo by Wes Hicks on Unsplash

You guessed it, this is a Labor Day column.

I’ll start off by saying that I feel very lucky that I had a career that, except for a few years at the beginning, allowed me to stay indoors in an air-conditioned building and rarely break a sweat.

I have, however, done Hard Work.

In the late 60s and early 70s I found myself:

• driving an ice cream truck

• selling peanuts at Anaheim Stadium

• bagging groceries in a supermarket¹

• freelancing with a friend as handymen building walls, painting houses, pouring concrete, etc.

• installing tires and batteries at a tire store

• being a painter’s helper at a welding shop

Anything to pay the rent and buy groceries.

Then, in an almost textbook case of white privilege, Dad, who worked for Hughes Aircraft Company, greased the wheels to get me an entry level job there in late 1969.

I had not done well in college, but once I started working at HAC I discovered that

• nobody expected much from me

• I was being paid a pretty decent wage for the early 70s

• once I was off work I didn’t have to worry about grades or studying

My time was my own!

I figured I’d work for HAC for a few years while I figured out what I wanted to do with my life.²

I stayed for 24 years, earning a AA in Electronics and a BS in Computer Science along the way.

In the early years I was laid off three times, winding up in some of the jobs listed above, but I always got called back.

Mostly I worked in various test labs. It turned out I was very good at taking data and writing test reports.

Who knew?

Early on I developed a disdain for management.

[Digression warning! The story below helps explain my antipathy to Management, but it’s not really necessary to my point. Feel free to skip to the next set of square brackets]

We had a supervisor, I’ll call him Earl³, who’s sole job appeared to be to keep us from getting any work done.⁴

In this test area it could take 30 or 40 minutes to set up a test, maybe 10 minutes to actually run the test, then ten or fifteen minutes to ready the unit to move on to the next step.

Often Earl would get a phone call and come over to tell us to skip the test of a unit we’d nearly finished setting up so we could test a different one that had higher priority.

A complete waste of time, but we were getting paid by the hour.

According to the test instructions if there were more than a certain number of errors the unit needed to be re-tested after re-work.

One day I tested a cabinet that had lots and lots of errors. When it came back from re-work I started to set it up for re-test but Earl told me to “buy it off.”⁵

That would make any missed wiring errors my responsibility.

I suggested that this is why Earl had his own inspection stamp⁶, so that he could buy it and take responsibility for the skipped test.⁷

Instead, he ordered that nobody should touch the unit while he went to talk to his boss. I found out later his boss looked at him and said, “Do you know who this kid’s father is?”⁸

In the time Earl was gone I could have easily tested the unit and bought it off.⁹

Instead he came stomping back, told me “Never do that again!”, turned to another tech and said, “Buy it!”

And he did!

I objected and the tech said “I need this job and I don’t have a powerful father!”

*Sigh*

Later I switched to graveyard shift.

Midnight to 6:30 am, no lunch break, paid for eight hours at the swing shift rate.

I consistently got more testing done than the five guys on day shift and the two guys on swing shift, because I had no “supervision” to slow me down.

[End of digression]

This and similar incidents pretty much put me off management for my whole career.

In my humble opinion there are way too many middle managers who’ve built their little fiefdoms within large organizations that don’t add much, if any, value.

Towards the end of my time at HAC I was working as a Unix System Admin, reporting directly to our Division Manager. It was a revelation. His office was a couple doors down from mine, and if something needed doing, I could bring it up to him and more likely than not, it would get done!¹⁰

It made me wonder what the hell all the people that had been between me and him on the org chart when I was still working in a test lab were doing, other than interfering with actual useful work.

There were many times over my career that I was approached to move into management. I’d respond that I preferred to actual useful work, which often pissed them off, but then they’d leave and let me get back to work.¹¹

Problem solved.

I worked for HAC for 24 years, then Lantronix for 22 years, finishing up with six years at Disneyland.

I worked at Lantronix as a Technical Support Technician. At that time, in 1995, Lantronix only had 50 employees, all of them in the same office in Irvine, CA.

Again, it was a revelation to work at a company where the guy at the next urinal might be the CEO.

The company grew to about 250 employees with offices all around the world and bureaucracy started to set in. The company was not doing well, consistently losing money.

In spite of this the company went public in 2000.¹²

In the early 2000s a management team was brought in to stop the hemorrhaging and within about two years they brought LTRX from something like a $1 million/year burn rate to break even.

In my opinion they were the best management team I’ve ever worked for.

They presented a plan to make the company consistently profitable over the next five years with no layoffs.

So, of course, the board fired them. They wanted profitability NOW!

The next guy laid off one entire layer of middle managers, which meant that I had a working supervisor who also took tech support calls, who reported to the VP of Engineering, who reported to the CEO.

Now THAT’s what I’m talking about!

Unfortunately that CEO got fired for questionable travel expenses.

The next guy had an idea for a new product¹³ that everyone in Tech Support knew wasn’t going to sell¹⁴, and got fired for continuing to beat that dead horse.

The last CEO I worked for considered Tech Support to be an unnecessary cost center rather than, as many customers told me, a major reason folks bought Lantronix products.

I was not happy. I was under so much stress I started having panic attacks, and my wife was concerned that I’d have a heart attack or stroke if I stayed in that job,

So I gave them 18 months notice of my retirement, expecting they’d hire someone for me to train. Nope.

In the eight years since I retired I think pretty much everyone I knew there has left the company. It still exists, but it doesn’t appear to be setting the world on fire.

When I retired I was stuck with a bunch of worthless stock options.

So much for the “Take a lower salary today because you’ll be able to cash in your stock options for big cash later.” story I kept getting.

A few months later, at the age of 68 I achieved a life-long dream of becoming a Disney Cast Member, first working for Resort Transportation and Parking outside of the park, then working in Galaxy’s Edge, cosplaying Star Wars and getting paid for it!

But I was back in a huge bureaucracy.

Layers and layers of management who as near as I could tell had never worked as an “on-stage” cast member, who would come up with all kinds of “good ideas” and new rules to, as near as I can tell, make our jobs harder to do.

I’ve previously written about this before, so I won’t repeat myself here. See the links to previous columns at the end of the column.

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I’ll finish by saying I am aware that I have been very lucky in having a career that (mostly) let me work inside.

That being said, I’m very grateful that there are people who do the type of work in the photo below.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

These people need to be paid a living wage and treated with respect, no matter where they’re from.

Without them our groceries will be a lot more expensive, our hotel rooms will be dirty, our lawns won’t get mowed, and all kinds of hard, dirty, tiring work won’t get done.

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Call your Congresscritters! Keep Calling!

Trump lie of the week:

Lies our President has told recently. Not necessarily this week. I’m only posting statements rated “Pants On Fire!” by Politifact. I’m too disorganized/lazy to keep track of these so I there may be duplicates once in a while.

Musical Coda:

Seems appropriate:

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Previous columns about my time at Disneyland.

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1. For about three days. I was 17 and the manager was maybe 20. When he snarkily said, “If you have time to lean, you have time to clean.” about five minutes before the end of my shift I didn’t react well. We kind-of decided together that I was not a good fit for that position.

2. I’m pretty sure I’ve told this story before, but it’s relevant to this week’s column, so sue me.

3. Because that’s his name.

4. I’m really not sure what value Earl added to the equation. We all knew our jobs and would have done them whether he was there or not. He had a little standing desk in the corner and he…stood there. He did bring us our paychecks on Fridays, so there’s that.

5. Put my inspection stamp on the paperwork and send it off to the next manufacturing step.

6. It was in the pencil drawer in his little desk. It had never been inked, I checked when he wasn’t looking.

7. Yes, I was a snotty, wet-behind-the-ears asshole kid. But I wasn’t wrong!

8. I had never mentioned to anyone that Dad was head of Quality Control, wanted to be judged on my own merits. But apparently everyone knew.

9. I should have.

10. Of course I had to justify any expenses, but that wasn’t hard to do when talking directly to a Division Manager.

11. It has been pointed out to me that I would have made way more money in Management, Sales (ugh) or Marketing (double ugh). C’est la vie.

12. 20/20 hindsight, there was probably never a worse year to take a Tech company public.

13. The xPrintServer. It was supposed to be “plug and play.” It wasn’t.

14. Not that we were asked or listened to. We also told upper management that it would be a nightmare to support. They didn’t believe us. After it released we had to hire more Tech Support agents to handle the higher traffic caused by this one product.