Turtles at Work

Prior to dropping the Raid parting gift to my clueless ex boss I had my scheduled exit interview with Human Resources. I have written about the HR department at my old company in many posts and their tendancy for the bizarre and idiotic continued in my exit interview.

I first met with the HR manager to go over the exit interview form. In a nutshell the exit interview form is completely for show. You see the HR department at my former company has zero employees with any type of HR certifications. What they do is take ideas they see in HR magazines and implement them half assed, like the exit interview. There is zero understanding of how they can apply the exit interview information to improve the company, identify poor mangers, etc. In any case, I completed the exit interview assessing such areas as company culture, my boss, etc. Since I am competent and logical I provided actual written examples that supported my ratings of the areas of was assessing. Upon completing the form I hand it in to the HR Manager, who seeing low ratings for many of the categories seems astonished. She then uttered "Wow, I guess we really didn't do so well." "That's an understatement" I replied. Why the hell does she think I'm leaving? People don't leave places they like for the most part, they leave because they hate their boss. or their compensation or the company culture.

After a few minutes of mindless discussion the HR Manager sends me over to the HR Director. It's like going from dumb to dumber. At my past company, and probably the company you work for, the higher the title the dumber the person. The HR Director is no exception and I took advantage of her incompetence to identify why I was basically given a final written warning and poor performance review after having reviews of exceeding expectations. It was after about 10 minutes of discussion that the HR Director mentioned "this company is about face time." Viola!!! There it was. The reason why I was basically blackballed. You see at the company I left it's not what you did it's how long you were in the office. My idiot boss sits on his fat ass for 12 hours a day eating cereal and playing solitaire and was revered, yet I put in 8-9 hours and get significant results and I'm a lepper. Amazing!

Aside from getting away from my idiotic boss I realized after the exit interview how lucky I really was to be leaving. You see my past company has all the wrong values and culture. They believe in rewarding people for what they did 10-15 years ago (my boss is a prime example), not for what they do now or can do in the future. They also believe that "face time" means hard work. Maybe I should forward my post to the HR Director on a day in the life of my(former) boss.

Posted by The Turtle King at Tuesday, February 19, 2008    

Labels: career