Why Awards Suck

Yes. Awards do suck. Here are few of the reasons…

Useless Solutions
Some time last year, I was asked by a manger about various content management systems. I asked him about the purpose and he replied that they would use the CMS for interaction and knowledge sharing between technology experts in their unit. It did not make sense to have a separate silo of knowledge when such experts could be spread across different units. It made sense to share the expertise across the organization. Though he did not explicitly state the reasons to me, from the conversation that I had with him, I could figure out the reasons on why he was not so comfortable with the idea.

1. When you set up a separate system, your name gets attached to it. So, for the next appraisal cycle, you get a few points for that. Never mind if the “solution” that you developed, already exists or is not suitable or is not a sustainable model. The target is to get to the next level of the appraisal.

2. In creating independent silos, the unit name gets attached to it. Quite unfortunately, the company wiki (which runs on MediaWiki) does not have a system to pull up statistics based on unit. Managers would be happy to brag about statistics on their unit’s contribution to an initiative.

Some times it might be wiser to attempt a solution at a unit-level before taking it to the level of the organization. However, it does not make sense re-inventing the wheel.

3. Visibility. Someone becomes “famous”!

Creating such independent silos of information does not serve any purpose except for some ego-boost. From the perspective of the organization, it would be a complete waste of time. To conclude the original story, I think they ended up deploying MOSS. I was moved out of the building and never got to know on what happened to the project.

Kill Them
They are called fire-fighters. I know well about them as I was one too. If everything in the project is going wrong, just call the fire-fighter! He/She will come down from heaven, spend day and night looking at your problems and will work their brains off to get the code out to the customer on time. At the end, everybody is happy. The customer is happy. More than that managers are happy – the project was saved and nobody got screwed! And of course, the fire-fighter walks off with an award.

Fire-fighters are the prime reason for continuing incompetency. When something goes wrong, the folks in charge must take the fall for it. Instead, we have these fire-fighters come in and save the day and everybody seems to escape without a scratch. So, nobody pays the price and the cycle of torture and incompetency repeats over and over again. Thejesh said that every project needs a hero. I say, kill them!