I was a programmer at AT&T. My supervisor did not understand a word about programming and only valued data entry. Rather than employing scripts to find discrepancies in database tables, my supervisor would make people print out error logs and go through database tables manually to find discrepancies and manually fix them. Long story short, we fought a lot before I got laid off and found a much higher paying job in a matter of hours. My supervisor absorbed another programming team a few months ago. On Friday, she told that team none of them are allowed to program anymore and is making them do data entry. How is this allowed as the company moves towards 2020? The company is allowing unintelligent supervisors to chase off the programmers they claim they want.
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Encouraging frequent supervisor-team dialogues may sound obvious, yet in reality, it's all too rare at AT&T, Most senior executive teams preach a gospel of engagement, but they abdicate responsibility to corporate staff, often HR. That delegation is misplaced, as HR is not in a position to take or direct the actions required to affect attitudes at the employee or team level, sadlly many line AT&T supervisors are clueless about the products their teams support, management tends to push HR to launch a burst of short-term initiatives, often without broad input from line managers. With HR leading the survey design, administration and interpretation, line supervisors feel no ownership of the process. People stay focused primarily on managing some sort of engagement score, rather than having a thorough conversation about the subject, I agree 100%, incompetence reigns at AT&T, your post validate this post.