The black box problem (was Re: Reviewers for localized materials - are they required?)

[Martin Bosworth]

Dick,

Unfortunately, it has been my experience that many teams and
supervisors will demand unreasonable standards of perfection and have
that same "dehumanizing" attitude towards their co-workers as they do
other companies or agencies.

I'm not saying you're wrong, necessarily, but more that the
increasingly atomized and self-centered nature of the workplace
culture has caused us to be almost incapable of developing real team
relationships with each other. Passive-aggressiveness, vicious
backstabbing, and the like are the order of the day.

Or maybe I've just had bad luck with employers. ;)

Martin

>
> Dear LQ (but not Lou Quillio, one presumes),
>
> I cannot answer your specific questions, because I don't have the
> relevant experience. But the first part of your post triggered a
> thought about a more general problem.
>
> We all have the experience of work among people of varying abilities.
> These may be team members doing essentially the same tasks we are doing;
> they may be coworkers whose work we review or who review our work; they
> may be managers or company executives. Some of them we judge to be
> brighter than we are and better at their jobs; some of them we judge to
> be complete idiots and wonder how they were hired in the first place.
> But I dare say we see all of them as fallible human beings. We
> anticipate that, in the pressure and chaos of what passes for corporate
> culture, everyone will make mistakes now and then. Some of those
> mistakes go out the door, and we deal with customer complaints as they
> arise--gracefully or not.
>
> The moment we purchase a service from another company, though, we
> believe the blather on their Web site or in their marketing
> collateral--that they are a well oiled machine turning out perfect work
> and garnering unanimous praise from their customers. We are shocked when
> they commit even the smallest error. Waiter! I said hold the mayo! What
> kind of a jerks do you have working in that rat-infested kitchen of yours!
>
> We all do this to one extent or another. It's as if, in not being able
> to see human workers sitting at desks and acting like human beings, our
> brains assume the non-existence of those people and substitute an image
> of an error-free automaton.
>