Dumbest thing I heard today

So the PHB got a little peeved about "us" (which, of course, never includes him) dropping the ball about notifying a customer that there were issues with the deployed product.

You know, if we were eligible for a bonus for doing this right, we would not have gotten the bonus.

Stunned silence (in my head, trying to parse the paradox).

Maybe, just maybe, if we had been eligible for a bonus, we would have done better.

In other words, dangling a non-existent bonus in front of us, doesn't actually make us want to work harder (or better). It just reinforces that we do not get rewarded for doing good work.

Still trying to parse paradox. Still failing.

(For the record, I had no knowledge of this "service-level agreement", or whatever you MBA yahoos wanna call it.)


Written by Andrew Ittner in misc on Mon 16 August 2004. Tags: employment