Huns Valen

I have worked at several internet companies and there was always a certain group of people who didn't give a shit about the customers. Same at every company. There is no way LL can hire hundreds of people and not get a few people with the attitude "who gives a rat's ass, if we abuse one of them too much another will take his place." I have had to clean up HUGE messes left by people like this, or who just don't have it together mentally and wind up making it up as they go along & subsequently doing retarded silly bullshit. I watched the traffic on one of our most popular sites drop FORTY FUCKING PERCENT OVERNIGHT because of one of these ham handed types, who had managed to pull the wool over his manager's eyes (actually over many people in middle and upper management, who apparently know nothing about body language or eye contact. If they had just watched his body language in meetings they would have picked up on these things.) He is still there as far as I know, and while I don't keep track of what he's doing I wouldn't be surprised if he's kept bludgeoning good sites to death.

That 40% drop was in spite of some emergency maintenance done by myself and several people who actually give a damn, to get the site running at an acceptable speed. By the time we were able to get it tuned properly the damage was already done. They had pulled the switch on an upgrade without any notification to the community and without properly testing any of it. I spent so much time on that site actually communicating with the members, telling them what was going on and trying to get the site back to being usable. So did several other employees. The trouble is that when a company gets blindsided by someone they give decision power, who is not capable of responsibly using it, it usually means all the people who really know what's up have to drop everything and clean up the mess. I had expressed misgivings about this and other upgrades to management but basically been told words that might as well have been "blah blah, dicks and dongs, go fuck yourself." You would think they would have listened to me, because unlike that guy, I actually had a track record of pulling off major upgrades and having the users really happy about it, rather than pissing off almost half of them to the point they leave.

At another company, they made someone a manager because he played golf with the right people. LITERALLY *EVERYONE* IN THE ENTIRE IT DEPARTMENT, OVER A HUNDRED PEOPLE, HATED HIM WORSE THAN HITLER. The only person who liked him was the fucking moron who promoted him. This kind of stuff goes on all the time.

So you see, there are people at LL who are like that, because there is just *no* way to hire hundreds of people and have them all genuinely take pride in their work and give a shit about their customers. The only way I know of to fix this is transparency, but that will never happen. It would be politically impossible at any of the companies I've ever worked at, and I doubt LL will ever have enough people with high enough personal integrity to stem the tide of this crap. The talent pool is too full of people who take no pride in what they do.

Furthermore, there are doubtless many employees at LL who are actually good at what they do, and responsible about how they go about their business, and they get tarred with the same brush as the don't-cares and other fuckups. Please believe me when I tell you that just *one* of these people in a management position, or who has the ear of a gullible manager, can drag down an entire department. That's all it takes!!! And because management is almost always dysfunctional in some way, these cankers can cripple entire teams for YEARS. I've personally only seen it stop when the manager shielding the dumbass leaves. At that point, the fuckup has no one to protect him or her and one way or another they leave the company.

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