Re: I Can’t Help but Feel Like You’re Trying to Intimidate Me Into Pretending to Agree with You
A Twitter thread from my drafts
I hear substack links are currently banned, but I really liked this very short piece:
The title says it all: I Can’t Help but Feel Like You’re Trying to Intimidate Me Into Pretending to Agree with You
The biggest instance of this that I encountered was during a brief stint at automotive megacorp before getting fired by NotBoss. NotBoss brought me into a meeting where she explained that the old machines had names in NonStandardA, and the current standard docs are StandardB
But because this plant seems to be used to using NonStandardA, we're going to just name everything according to NonStandardA, ignoring the standardization docs and the general corporate policy of getting everyone onto the same StandardB.
I, being a brand new hire, didn't say anything. Nobody did. Just dead silence. This time I was in the room with her, but in other conference calls, she was the constant receiver of eye-rolls and shrugs, especially since she had a habit of yelling at people. Like actually yelling.
I was completely sure that most people muted and were shaking their heads thinking "this is dumb" but nobody said anything.
Among the unnamed sins that caused my subsequent firing ("not a good fit"), I'm sure that one of them is that I added an additional column on our shared
Excel sheet that listed out all devices and their naming, and that additional column followed StandardB.
When I defended the choice, asking why we weren't following the standard, the meeting was brought up as "this is what _everyone_ agreed to. You were there."
I was there. I was intimidated into pretending to agree. We all did it. The long silence was understood correctly as reluctant acquiescence to something we all knew was wrong, and didn't fight.
I also emailed the current maintainer of StandardB pointing out places where new machines did not have a convention, and explained that it could go in two likely ways. This email was seen as "going behind her back".
Amusingly they got back to me months after the firing.