A Letter to manager

(A fictitious letter to myself, I am a manager myself).

Hello My Dear Manager,

When I hear you  teaching us the significance of missionary role than being mercenary, it sounded pretty promising.  

At high level, I see every engineer as a "just a mercenary" or a "resource that does given task"  and someone doing something of  ask of someone on the top.   We make releases not knowing what is the end user of the release. We make it so that it's off our plate,  may be the release management, support or ops have no clue about what to do next, did we miss knowledge transfer or did we miss a whole lot of implementations or integrations and we never realized it? How did we miss helping other counter parts of our organization? You know what, it's may be a bi product of treating employees as mercenaries and expecting them to do everything may not work all the time.

We solve problems and always keep solving problems, but are they right problems? if they were not, then why the heck we are solving them?  Why is it always around making every engineer super busy? is that truly "agile"? did the British invent "agile" by chance?  as the next phase the reforms to education system ("to make them more clerks in the schools"?) , this "workplace reforms in the name of agile" is keeping everyone busy,  why are these engineers still have families? I wonder.

Is it that new technology initiative that you wanted to Brag to your boss? did you ever give it a second thought that you present this whole "disruptive solution" as your hard work to get your bonuses and promotions , while actually that poor silent working class ants that made all the difference?   Do you even recognize anything beyond  mere "resources"?

Did you know, the so called "engineers" are made up of the similar flesh and blood like you?  Your FOMO  drive to be a top notch  manager (you may be thinking of "leader" as the right word, but dictionary meaning is different for that word) at the cost of poor engineers may be unethical, did you think of that?

Honestly, we are not doing many things right, poor engineers are working hard and doing something, it takes some guts to accept it and then act on it. We have way too many managers and too few true leaders who have their skin in the game. It's a challenge. WE can not run big organization based on heroics of few engineers and need to have strategy to decongest and bring in healthy work life and sense of satisfaction to everyone's work.

May this new year  ring in some changes and some re-reckoning  positive changes.

Me, 

Engineer AKA resource