Deja vu and amnesia at the same time

I know, everyone who's worked in a cube thinks Dilbert is about their company. And "Office Space" was the film version. Let's get over ourselves, eh?

Thing about this strip is, this happened. A FRIEND OF MINE was working at a big consulting company. His group was a bit outside of normal consulting, however, as they had created an actual services group that provided real servers and real software and stuff like that. Radical for this company. Their leader was a go-getter that we'll call Tim. Tim had created this group from the ground up, and had the support of most of the executives. But he'd also ticked off a few of the old timers on the way up. Then one day, a washed up VP who'd been tossed from a huge software company -- and who sat on the board -- decided he wasn't quite ready to retire.

So, after some talks with our CEO, in which they couldn't really decide where he'd fit, they made him the new uberchief of the little group. Tim wasn't all that happy about that, and soon moved on to greener pastures. The new uberchief brought in basically his entire staff from the old software company, something like 15 people (the group had been 22 people before he came along). One of them was his nephew, whom we will call Ernie. Ernie was all of 28, and prior to coming to my company, had never done anything more rigorous than create the uberChief's PowerPoint slides. But in the new job, he became a managing director -- the same level Tim had been. And the youngest in the history of the company.

Things rather went downhill from there. About half of the existing employees were laid off, which gave the uberChief a chance to hire even more of his old staff. Most of them came in at the managing director level as well. From MY FRIEND's back of the napkin calculations, payroll increased by a factor of 14.

In the middle of all this was the last remaining manager from the old group, whom we will call Chip. Chip had direct experience in this kind of work before, and had a long series of successes. He was a couple of years from retirement, and a very decent man. The uberchief realized he had to have some level of management between him and the idiot nephew, so Chip became Ernie's de juro supervisor.

One day, MY FRIEND was approached by Chip to lead a new group, one that would be granted $1M to spend developing the branding, collateral, and other marketing communications materials around the product. MY FRIEND said that this was basically what he was doing already, and didn't really need a staff of six to do the work. Chip, off the record, told him that it had nothing to do with actually producing any content. The company was in trouble, and was laying people off left and right. A new edict had come out of Mahogany Hall that any partner (managing director) had to have at least six employees to maintain his title. Ernie had one at that point -- MY FRIEND.

So, MY FRIEND started pulling in people, some internal, some external, and desperately tried to figure out how to keep them all busy. He became more frustrated, even telling Chip that he was considering leaving the business, as this charade represented everything that was wrong with the industry. Meanwhile, Ernie put in maybe four hours a day of work, as he basically didn't have anything to do either. So MY FRIEND spent over half a million dollars, from the coffers of a publicly traded company, and one that was downsizing at the rate of 12% per year, in order to keep a VP's nephew in his partner slot -- a nephew that MIGHT have been qualified to be a junior analyst at the same company, had he not been enjoying the fruits of nepotism.

A few months later, MY FRIEND called Chip and said "put me on the next layoff list." He moved on to a new career, and never looked back.

Well, until Dilbert documented it for him.