This post was greatly improved by feedback from a friend of mine, who wishes to remain anonymous.

Not Just Something To Complain About at After Work Drinks

Most large organisations are morasses of lies, and slick corporate headquarters is where they take Truth, after shoving her blindfolded into an unmarked van, to be executed by firing squad. This really shouldn't be news to anyone who's been paying attention to anything lately.

But I think you really have to be there, the way I was, and regrettably still am, at least for the next few weeks as I continue to work my notice period.

About me: I am an engineer who started in a large corporation, was shaped by the corporate environment, was ultimately damaged by the corporate environment. I am making like a tree and leaving. I am getting out of here.

Yes, I'm fully aware that my complaints might seem kind of out-of-touch and privileged. Young person graduates school, enters the workforce, and discovers that people in the office are often insincere and standoffish! Big fucking deal, there are real problems in this world - at least I (generally) got to go home on time. At least I get paid quite a lot.

To be honest, I would love it if I could dismiss my own misery as the problems of the 1%, but I don't think I can. I think the problems I experienced at work are indicative of a much worse rot that fundamentally makes everyone's lives worse. I really, really, wish that "makes office workers sad" is the worst effects of this dysfunction. But over the last few years, I've realised, with growing horror, that the sort of thing I experienced has a body count. The things that I witnessed could kill someone - it's only a matter of time. And there are so many more ways to harm society other than simply killing people.

I have decided to leave because I want to get off this flaming wreck before they ram this thing into a primary school. I don't want to be at the mercy of these fuckers anymore.

I think the corporate culture that cost me my health, my sanity, and my faith in humanity is just one tiny glimpse at the larger, more insidious force that has caused airplanes to fall out of the sky, governments to fail at vitally time-sensitive logistics, and caused the biggest oil spill the world has ever seen.

I am writing about this to try find the like-minded. I don't know if there's anyone out here, who has left a similar situation. I don't know what to do at this point. I am just one person, but maybe there's more people who feel the same way I do, and maybe all together, we can accomplish something. Maybe my writing can reach someone who was where I was at a year or two ago, constantly feeling sad for seemingly no reason, and help them find their way out.

Let's start at the beginning. Some years ago, I was finishing up my engineering degree. Like most high school students who were good at exams, I picked my degree out of a prospectus almost at random¹. Three years later I was freaking out about impending graduation and what I thought was eventual unemployment, so I applied to internships like crazy, which I now know to be a horrible strategy², but by sheer dumb luck it worked for me and I landed an internship in an incredibly lucrative industry. Because I hated the job application grind so much, I then took the grad offer at the same place after that without thinking.

Besides, my 12 weeks working with them as an intern seemed fine. With a permanent position like this with guaranteed advancement for at least the next few years, surely I was basically set for life!³

Several years after I started, I found myself having to take burnout leave. I was having panic attacks basically every night. I had some kind of gnarly insomnia that I didn't want to rely on benzos to fix, but the melatonin wasn't really working. I had everything someone could ask for, so young - renting sucks ass, so I bought a little CBD apartment as insurance against eviction. I convinced my long-distance partner to move interstate to live with me. I saw an orthodontist⁴ and fixed my wonky teeth. All of this provided by my nice, stable, very very well paid job, which allowed me to do all this stuff before the age of 30. I'm very, very, very lucky, alright.

And I was also very, very, very miserable.

Why Am I Sad All The Time?

I came to understand that at my workplace, the word "work" tends to mean two very different things.

There was work in the normal sense of the word, where you show up and you trade labour to get paid. And then there was the kind of work which seemed to mostly consist of PowerPoint slides and meetings with managers.

Weirdly enough, whenever management celebrated our successes, they mostly focused on the second kind of work.

Communicating about work to stakeholders is definitely important. There's a huge amount of value in getting people into a room together, because different people know different things - if, for example, we're planning to inspect equipment, there was a workshop where we'd get engineers from other disciplines to sit in and bring up anything they knew of relating to the equipment. Often it would be hugely valuable, when another discipline told us about a malfunction destroyed much of the machine⁵.

But these sorts of workshops rarely registered as good work, so to speak. It all kind of became parcel of our regular jobs as engineers. Just business as usual.

Going above and beyond would involve pitching something to Management, who is never, ever interested in the first kind of work.

I didn't know how to recognise work and "work" when I first joined, but I picked it up as I gained experience and figured out how to become well-regarded. The basic mechanics are:

1. Manager identifies some need to Save Money or Cover Our Ass⁶
2. Engineers get asked to pitch some ideas to Save Money or Cover Our Ass. Generally the least technical idea wins because that's the one that the Manager can understand best, because a technical hard-to-understand idea Sounds Kind of Expensive⁷
3. Engineers prepare a slidepack where the technical quality ranges from "actually sounds kinda viable" to "Oh Fuck No", and this will get paraded around various important people until it gets approved.
4. Regardless of how reasonable the proposal was on technical grounds, the execution gets done in the cheapest or laziest possible way, producing predictable fuckups and several unanticipated ones
5. Engineers, usually everyone who didn't participate in the PowerPointFest, struggle with the aftermath of the changes. Sometimes these things get rolled back on the down-low. Other times it's impossible to roll it back at all so I guess we're just stuck with it now

By the way, this facility handles large quantities of hazardous chemicals and has a high potential to kill people and cause an environmental disaster if things go wrong. So this is obviously a totally fine way to manage things.

The net effect of all these brilliant ideas over the past several decades is that, day-to-day, my section of the plant is full of problems. It's also full of things that I don't know are problems yet, but because I am constantly busy dealing with some crisis or another, I really do not have time to go understand all the problems unrelated to the present crisis, let along dig up new ones.

When I first landed in this role around three years ago, I had a vague idea of what the role was supposed to be - run the maintenance program for a particular part of an old and large chemical plant. In my second year as a grad, I worked with some more experienced engineers on this, so I knew a couple of basics and I felt kind of excited to get back to doing this.⁸

Now, I have figured out what my role is. I am the person who is accountable for maintenance. If something breaks, it is my job to know about it and get it fixed. I am expected to try to keep on top of it by running equipment inspections well, but my database of past inspections is kind of a dumpster fire.

The stress, the sleepless nights, the loss of appetite on work days - it was tied to the fact that I didn't know enough to do my job. I didn't know enough about the equipment, because I was new and our database was awful. I didn't know enough about the general problems I could expect to see because I was inexperienced.

I was a knowledge worker that didn't know anything. I knew I had the responsibility to change the situation, but I couldn't see how myself. So I did what I thought was the right thing to do.

I sought out the Wisdom of My Manager, who told me:

"That sounds really rough. I think you're being too hard on yourself, since from my perspective you seem to be doing a great job. Why don't you try working on your self-esteem?"⁹

Viewpoints of Management and Me

I think this is a good place to talk about viewpoints. Specifically, who is believed, and who is told to defer to the wisdom of someone else. I don't think this was an isolated incident, and it is definitely not unique to my workplace - see Iris Meredith's Who has permission to know things?.

For me, the wildest moment was my own doubts about competency being countered with I think you have imposter syndrome. I was the person doing the work and realising that, fuck, I don't actually know what I'm doing, I really need help, and people who had more experience were also perpetually putting out fires so I couldn't necessarily count on their total availability. When I brought that up, I was actually hoping to get budget and managerial support to go on some external training and maybe learn something.

Anyway, I carried on. I tried to do my job. I discovered a latent issue, which I needed an inspection to assess. The scope I wrote would cost about $1 million, which is quite expensive, but I was pretty sure we didn't have any other choice. I was told to double-check with the technical authority, who... came back with the same scope.

A colleague on another asset had been struggling in a similar position to me. Two engineers fresh off the grad program were expected to manage some hugely complicated and old assets with lots of problems, and there were no senior engineers around. These assets eventually hired someone external with years of experience, but he didn't really say anything different to the two junior engineers - management just finally hired someone they were willing to listen to and then credited all the fixes to him.

Maybe I could have worked my way up the ladder, but while the senior engineers had enough authority to do my job, they didn't have enough to do theirs. While they could ask management to fix problems that junior engineers found, the really big, well-above-my-paygrade problems ran into the exact same kind of pushback.

If you found a Real Problem, no you didn't - because to find out if you're right we're going to have to extend this outage and miss out on production. If you're right then it's going to need fixing, and that's going to be inconvenient, potentially embarrassing. Senior engineers would say things like "this outage isn't long enough because we have ten years of maintenance backlog to do" and they'd be asked to "just make it fit, try your best, okay?".

We were in the middle of a maintenance campaign and management announced that they had fucking cancelled the next maintenance campaign for this unit. What the fuck? The senior engineers were, of course, not in the loop about this, and we had all been making decisions on the basis of coming back in four years times to check on things.

It is so discombobulating to be in this situation of being constantly told no, you're wrong, you're not competent enough to do the job we hired you for (but also, you don't need more certs or training - you're doing fine!). It's disorienting to have to second-guess what is happening, all the time. Especially if you're inexperienced - if you came to this job straight out of uni, and you haven't seen this type of thing before.

And the thing is, normally, everyone is so nice. They're so good at the apologetic mask, and you find yourself with situational amnesia because these issues get erased from the collective memory.¹⁰ I found myself repressing things, because I needed to be civil in the workplace, and when I trained myself to be civil at all times, I forgot why I was angry. I had to forget.

So eventually, so gradually that it's hard to notice, your viewpoint begins to merge with that of the company's. If something is wrong, the company is meant to fix it, but since we've rationalised why we're not fixing something, that means it's really okay after all. When the wrongs become impossible to ignore, you deal with it in a haze of stress and overtime, and then a week later, you just kind of forget, and things carry on, and on, and on.

You find yourself dismissing problems. You find yourself telling yourself that nothing is wrong. Everything is fine. I'm just paranoid. Inexperienced. I'm not sure, but maybe that's just what the job is supposed to be like. Maybe that's what it's like at the grown-up's table. It's normal to deal with doubt and anxiety and the adults just get therapy about it.

I took up journaling again in 2025. I actually did go to therapy. At the end of the day I reject that premise.

My job as an engineer is to identify problems with my process, my equipment, and raise it to the people in charge. If I don't escalate something I notice, nothing will be done, and it will be my fault because that's literally my job. I'm not allowed to hang around pretending that I know things that I don't. I'm not allowed to bullshit my way up, because this stuff is actually important. People work on these machines. If I fuck up, people might die.

Except, the people in charge don't seem to take me very seriously. In fact, because they're the ones in charge, I'm supposed to take their point of view into consideration. I'm supposed to understand where they're coming from. Let's get everyone into a room together, and we'll all reach a mutual understanding!

Hmmm.

Good work, everyone. Here's the truth: management does not know what the hell is going on, and in their inability to update, they are actively dragging you into their vortex of delusion.

I have gone into meetings convinced about a problem and left the meeting wondering if I am overreacting. Management also leaves the room with you, satisfied that they've dealt with the problem. The problem is me - the inconvenient, uppity junior engineer, who thinks I know more about the equipment I was put in charge of than the High and Mighty Management.

The senior engineers who are allowed to know things are allowed to make the attempt, but it is only ever an attempt. You can't Just Say Things, you have to have Evidence. The senior engineers are constantly buried in work, because management really needs to be convinced for every little thing. We could make this easier if they could delegate some of the workload to me, but I'm not even allowed to try to convince anyone. I am just a lowly junior engineer. Do our technical authorities support what I'm saying? If not, my attempt terminates here.

We've created a cursed ouroboros where objective reality no longer exists - reality is instead something political, dictated by inscrutable social forces and behind-the-scenes discussions. Reality is something we have to earn, by poring over the reports. When we finally scrape together enough evidence, only then are we allowed to go and actually fix the problem.

As the engineer, you're supposed to tell them anything you know, but because you're a lesser being, your opinions don't count - therefore the truth-as-accepted-by-management filters down to you and becomes your own truth.

We are fully severed from reality, folks, all systems go, ready for liftoff.

In Safety, Culture, and Risk, the author, sociology professor Andrew Hopkins¹¹ describes cultures of risk denial. To me, one very salient feature is that the onus of proof lies towards the side of risk.

In the eyes of management, they manage a perfectly safe system that's working fine. I, a troublesome junior engineer, come up to them and tell them that something is wrong. Since everything is running fine, it's right that the onus of proof lies with me to back up my claims and convince them to take the unit offline for inspection.

This is an utterly incorrect view of how our plant really works. Complex systems have a ton of redundancy built in, which means we can build up latent errors while everything looks okay from the outside. Within a complex system, everything should be assumed to be broken until you can prove that it's not, because engineering is hard. You can't just build something and let it rip - the physics of this universe conspires, every moment of the day, to dismantle your operation from the moment of its birth.

The Little Oil Rig That Could

Let's talk about Deepwater Horizon.

On April 20, 2010, the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, killing 11 people, severely injuring 17, and spilling a world record amount of oil. A collection of extremely unfun facts:

1. For at least 3 years afterwards, the 30-50 mile radius around the well was devoid of marine life.
2. There are reports of very unpleasant and disturbing things related to dolphins, like "10x the number of dead baby dolphins washing up on the beaches" and "88% of baby or stillborn dolphins in the area had fucked up lungs, 6 years after the fact".
3. The humans living on the coastlines suffered "burning in nose, throat or lungs; sore throat; dizziness and wheezing".
4. In 2012, commercial fishers reported disturbing numbers of mutated seafood, such as 50% of shrimp missing eyes and eye sockets.

The regular news has us covered on if we want more of the parade of horrors post oil spill. It was bad. It was really bad. Let's talk about how this happened, because no one rocks up to work wanting to die in a massive explosion and cause the biggest oil spill in history.

My primary source is the CSB post-incident reports, which is a good read if you have a couple of hours and you're in the mood to get very angry.

An oil well is basically just a hole in the ground that oil comes out of. The oil has a pressure, because it's deep underground and the ground is heavy, so as soon as there's a path up to the surface it'll shoot up like a geyser. The DWH's job was to drill exploration wells, which are to check just how much oil the well actually has, get some data for a geologist / reservoir engineer to advise the business on whether it's worth building a whole permanent rig there to suck out the oil for the next 15 - 40 years.

Controlling pressure in an oil well is done using drilling mud - which is a slurry of special.... mud. Super heavy stuff. Basically, if you don't want the oil to shoot out, put lots of mud in; if you want to get a little bit of oil out, remove some mud. Drilling engineering is actually very, very technical - but for the layperson, it's pretty much just shoving mud into a very very deep hole to control how fast / whether the oil comes out.

Once you're done drilling the exploration well, you need to plug and abandon it, either permanently (because it's a shit well that has nothing) or just until you can come back once you've built your permanent oil rig (if you've struck it rich).

The Deepwater Horizon (DWH) drilling rig was owned and operated by Transocean, and was drilling wells that belonged to BP. On the day of the explosion, it was doing a plug and abandon job - they had been drilling the Macondo prospect, found a bunch of oil, and was now plugging them to come back and tap them later. The operation was five weeks behind schedule, and for some goddamn reason BP's VP of drilling wanted to visit the platform for some photo op¹².

To plug a well, you basically just put a bunch of cement down there. The specifics depends on the well, and whether you're planning on coming back. Since there was heaps of oil in Macondo (yes, some of which caught on fire, and much of which later ended up in the sea killing dolphins, choking coral and mutating shrimp), BP supplied plans for temporary abandonment. There were a couple things the BP engineer could have done, but look, the Macondo job is behind schedule and it's very likely management was on their back bugging them for the plan and asking what's the hold up. The CSB investigators found no explicit risk assessment for the final procedure used.

Once you put the cement in the hole, you need to test it to check that it's holding. Keep in mind that the hole is like, 18,000 feet deep below sea level and like 3,000 feet deep below the sea floor, which is to say you can't run down there and get someone to look at it - when running the test, you're going to have to use your imagination.

There were two tests. They've already passed the first test. Now for the second one, which was the negative pressure test.

BP's procedure asked for this test, but didn't give a procedure. No one had given the crew any kind of acceptance criteria, or what to do in the event of a fail result.

The crew spent three hours looking at pressure readings while doing this test. They repeated it four times, and couldn't explain what was happening the first three. On the fourth go, someone came up with a theory that sounded pretty good to everyone, so they declared the job done and they could move onto the next thing.

Spoiler: the tests were not working because the cement had failed. The fourth test didn't pass, either - the crew just managed to Come Up With Something and agreed that they could move on.

Since the well "passed" the pressure test, the crew then proceeded to remove all the mud in the hole on top of the cement which was, until this point, holding all the pressure in. The rest is history, since the cement did not, in fact, hold all the pressure in.¹³

That being said, because these drillpipes are extremely long, after the well "passed" and the crew gave the order to take out the mud, it would still take nearly two hours for the oil and flammable explosive gases to actually make it to the top in significant amounts. It took nearly an hour for them to remove enough mud for the well to start flowing up, and 48 minutes for the geyser of flammable explosive stuff shooting out onto the rig to show up. Why wasn't anyone watching the pressure in the hole?

That's the topic of this specific report on monitoring. Here we introduce yet another company, Sperry Sun (there were 13 different ones onboard the DWH, we're lucky we only need to think about 3).

The Sperry Sun guy is a mudlogger; he lived to give his side of the story (because the drilling crew, who worked for Transocean and were also supposed to be watching the pressure were killed in the blast). His job was to sit in a different room to the Transocean crew and just monitor things. He wasn't involved with the plans; the interview after strongly indicated that the Transocean crew would just sort of Do Stuff and he'd be radio-ing them when his pressure readings went haywire to ask what they were doing.

Effectively, his job is to watch the pressure and figure out if the well was doing anything weird. But because he wasn't in the know about the drilling plan, and they didn't exactly tell him when doing stuff, he was left to constantly radio the drillers going, "hey, I saw a weird reading. Is that something you guys are doing?"

To which the drillers would basically go, "yeah mate, we're just cycling the pumps."

How the hell are you supposed to tell when the well is doing something weird when you don't know what the well is supposed to be doing at any given time, because the people who are doing stuff in the wells don't tell you anything???

We can only speculate what the drillers were doing for the 2 hours before everything went to hell. Most likely: moving onto the next job.

According to one employee: “it was just passed around by other people that this well was taking too long and they were in a hurry to complete it so they could move on to the next."

BP's drilling division had a target to get costs down by 7%. Both Transocean and BP employees had bonuses that depended on cost reductions, which depended on doing things fast (see: rig leasing costs charged daily).

It's insane that the effect of Management Says can be strong enough that the people directly doing the work can get sucked into the vortex of delusion.

I Want My Internal Model of the World Back

When drilling an oil well, all the action happens at 18,000 feet below you, so drillers rely on a strong internal model of what the hell is happening down there. It is terrifying to consider that this can be overwritten with their manager's version of reality, considering that management, as we already established, doesn't fucking know anything.

So, even though this isn't really my area, when I read about this, I had to wonder how close I am to being those Transocean drillers, where the management desire for the job to Just Be Over Already translated to The Pressure Test Passed and There Is Nothing Wrong with The Pressure Readings, up until the oh shit moment when the mud shot out and splattered onto the deck. From that point on they only had a couple minutes before the fireball, and generally speaking in drilling rig disasters, by the time the mud is spewing out, your facility is also being absolutely flooded by an invisible, rapidly expanding gas cloud, i.e it is way too fucking late at that point.

Even if you're not in a position to blow up a drilling rig, this isn't okay. This isn't remotely okay.

People who have been gaslit for a long time tend to experience anxiety disorders, depression, or low self-esteem - all of which I can now confidently attribute to my work environment. At my worst, I was severely burnt out, and I was having nightly panic attacks. I was so anxious at work that it took me hours to do simple tasks. These are apparently not uncommon experiences.

I'm one of the lucky ones. In the past few years, I was offered the opportunity to do work that was significantly more hands on than normal. The actual work conditions seemed horrible on paper (I stayed in FIFO accommodation, I worked 12.5 hours a day, with a half hour commute each way) - but I was having a great time.

For the first time in months, I was having fun at work. What in the goddamn hell???

It was like having a vacation from my day job. I went from struggling to get myself to my normally cushy office job by 8.30AM, to waking up at 4.30AM every morning excited to get hash browns from the mess and to get in to the handover. I finished every day at 6PM, buzzing with adrenaline after handing over to night shift.

I loved crawling into filthy places to stare at weird bits of rusty metal, or crouching over some wildly unergonomic arrangement of heavy industrial equipment with two sweaty blokes to write down numbers while being attacked by a billion sticky Australian desert flies. I was having a blast, and I was making bank.

While taking my time off in lieu after, literally all my depression / anxiety symptoms just... mysteriously cleared up.

What I was experiencing was the ability to trust my senses and build an internal model of the world again. It turns out that constant cognitive dissonance of trying to reconcile facts that you know with Management's Reality is a massive nerf on functioning. During these short, short campaigns, I reported to the senior engineer on my team, who took pains to make sure everyone was on the same page, and I was listened to whenever I brought anything up. If there was any doubt about anything, the go-to was to physically walk out there, crawl into the equipment, and check it with our own eyes.

I discovered that I didn't actually hate engineering. I love it. I love this job when it didn't come with a side of constantly violating and hollowing out my understanding of reality.

Just Get A Hobby, Dude

Typical advice to deal with work-related burnout is to get a hobby. It does work for a lot of people.

Many smart, wonderful people with these kinds of jobs kind of start to disengage from their jobs - turn up and do the bare minimum, just try not to think about it, and then end up channelling all their passion for life outside of work into hobbies, particularly hands on creative hobbies like cooking or gardening, or active competitive hobbies like sports.

When you spend so much of your working hours with a limited and distorted view of reality, you need to engage with things that will moor your mind to what's true and beautiful and Good, things like the aroma of 4 hour chicken stock, the mouthfeel of properly leavened bread, pleasant melodies from your guitar strings, or the impact of a tennis racquet connecting with the ball.

No one can survive the onslaught of viewpoint subversion present in most office jobs, without something real to return home to.

For me, though, I tried cooking and gardening and running and while all of those activities improved my mood and symptoms during, the curative effects would vanish as soon as I needed to return to work.

I think I can't accept spending all my working hours immersed in a reality that isn't actually real, engaging with theoretical truths. Someone else can deal with all the fiction. I want the real world.

This Is the Part Where I Defend Management

That being said, managers are genuinely really important. I cannot do this job - but someone's gotta.

In a society as complex as ours, where we're routinely operating incredibly advanced equipment, not everyone should be at the coalface, directly interfacing with all the messy detail of work. If we were all doing the work, we'd all be subsistence farmers, which is significantly less cottagecore than the modern office drone imagines.

We do, in fact, need people to manage people. This is an inevitable consequence of production surplus. A little bit of surplus is not hard to deal with - I baked too much banana bread, time to give some to my neighbours.

If you start creating vast amounts of surplus, though, you're going to need a whole bunch of technical and sociopolitical infrastructure to actually extract any value from it - and avoid dealing with its downsides.

Like in my banana bread example, too much banana bread from my own oven is easy to deal with. The output of an industrial scale banana bread bakery is way harder - I guess you drive it to the food bank? But you have serious logistical problems like storing it and distributing it all before it goes mouldy. Ideally you've have figured out what the fuck you're doing with 5,000kg of banana bread before you make 5,000kg of banana bread, but I don't have to do that when my surplus is about 200g because no one's going to be mad about receiving like, a little box of food, vs an entire truckload.

It's absolutely worthwhile to have managers around to try to stop people from accidentally ordering 500 bags of cement if you don't need that much cement, and to figure out what the fuck to do with 500 bags of cement if someone does accidentally buy that and the vendor isn't taking refunds.

Fractal Workfronts

In a world where we have tractors and high output mills and huge conveyors, a very small proportion of humans are actively at a small number of workfronts; but this kind of interaction with the workfront can only happen because of a complex interconnecting web of work both before and after the work at the workfront.

In the past, the workfront was just the coalmine, which is a big hole with coal in it, you and like a thousand other guys each get a pickaxe and start swinging. Maybe someone builds a pulley system so you can get your coal out of the pit.

But mining is now an insanely technologically complex field that involves machines and conveyors and planning and dealing with the tailings and sorting the grades of ore.

For any given type of work in the modern world, any given coalface requires a huge amount of work to get to the point of actually mining the coal, and a huge amount of work to deal with all the coal you mined.

The geologists who study and figure out what's in the ground, to find the damn seams to begin with - that's a coalface. The dewatering of the mine is the coalface that enables access to the actual coalface. The surveying of the mine is another coalface. The person who manages the rosters and makes sure that FIFO workers show up to site when they're meant to - that's also a coalface, and so is the person in marketing and trading who finds someone willing to buy the damn coal, and the people in logistics who physically transport the coal, and on the buyer's side it's the inspector who checks the coal to make sure that it's coal and not a bunch of rocks. It's coalfaces all the way down.

It's absolutely vital that these massive machines all work in concert. The marketing and trading people must not sell more coal that the company is actually producing, and they have to know what grade of coal they're actually selling - you don't sell thermal coal to a buyer who needs metallurgical, because the buyer will get angry and never talk to you again, which means marketing needs constant input from the geologists who know what kind of coal exists in the mines the company owns, and the mining engineers who know how much the company can realistically produce, and then realistic deadlines / shipping dates, which then need to be fed back to the mine site because there's no point digging up a all that tonnage that the buyer doesn't want showing up three months early. Logistics needs to know how much coal needs to go where and onto which ships. The people who design the conveyors need to know how much tonnage their conveyors are expecting to shift.

Management cybernetics¹⁴ is really, really important here. To organise all of these fractal workfronts, you really, really, really need a shitload of people do convey information between fronts and do big picture stuff, like realising no one's buying coal anymore, so there's no longer a point in operating a coal mine at all.

To effectively do this work, management needs to try to understand reality. Try, because on that scale, simple models break down and things get, pretty frigging crazy. Information has a tendency to decay. It's telephone but featuring people in the middle who aren't picking up the phone, and maybe you go to the office and realise that you've been phoning some other department entirely, and the division you needed to talk to like, no longer exists.

But that's not normally what most managers do, is it?

In Conclusion: Death First to Vultures and Scavengers

"The plot congeals. Since when has the Ninth been bosom with the Sixth?"
"We're not."
"Then - "
Harrowhark said, in the exact sepulchral tones of Marshal Crux: "Death first to vultures and scavengers."¹⁵

The problem is that many managers, perhaps even the majority of all managers worldwide, do not actually realise that their job should be management cybernetics. Many managers think their job is to make their own manager happy; their own managers ultimately report to the C-suite, who think their job is to make the shareholders happy, which means telling the market things that the market wants to hear. In short, everyone thinks their job is to control someone's viewpoint, culminating in controlling the public's viewpoint.

It is unclear to the average manager how a sincere attempt at modelling reality would help, because at many organisations, this would raise some really awkward issues that will not make their own manager happy. As per Upton Sinclair, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

These people do not understand reality, and they make no effort to, because even if their version of reality blows up an oil rig, they will not be on the oil rig. Any actual problems are for the people at the workfront to deal with. These problems include the safety of ourselves, our colleagues, the public, and the environment.

These bastards are literally too stupid to understand that their actions have consequences. I reject the premise that ignorance and stupidity allows them to remain innocent. Negligence is negligence. Do not pretend to manage systems you cannot understand.

I'm convinced that the corporate environment preferentially attracts people who have an aversion to actually doing work or taking any risks, but endlessly covet power and status. This is fucking vulture behaviour.

In management, you don't build anything, or try to control outcomes in any way. The world just kind of spits out outcomes at random, and you take that information and repackage it up the chain in a way that earns praise and dodges blame. This is fucking scavenger behaviour.

I can no longer tolerate working under vultures and scavengers. Can you?

My motives are mostly selfish. I want to know I'm not alone. Am I crazy? Is anyone else out there, also wondering why the hell do they feel so bad all the time?

If I'm not alone, I am also hoping for allies. I am so fucking sick of being accountable for outcomes because the leadership is not, and someone has to keep all the critical infrastructure in the world from exploding. I will be the first to admit that I don't know how, but I do know that I can't do it alone and I'd love to make friends and get some ideas.

Please join me in my prayer circle as we all chant: death first to vultures and scavengers. Stay safe out there, and stay real.

I'm just one person, who's very sad about the state of the world. Anyone who wants to commiserate should email me at entropic_eng@fastmail.com