Recently,
I’ve been thinking about an early experience in my engineering career. Specifically,
about teambuilding and leadership, and how it relates to the events I’ve seen
unfold within the federal government over the past several years.
I was
hired at my former company as a systems engineer, part of a team that would
integrate various hardware subsystems and software in a new, networked
communication system for the US Navy. The program was somewhat unique at the time
as it used rapid development and prototyping.
Which meant in my first two years with the company, we had to field and
demonstrate two iterations of this data delivery system, the second to be temporarily
deployed aboard a pair of Navy cruisers to test.
Those two
years were hell. Not because of the deadlines or engineering challenges, though
there were plenty of both. Not because of the mandatory unpaid overtime or the steep
learning curve. No, it was hell because of other people.
Up to this
point, the company had been primarily known for its hardware design. This was
one their first major software driven systems. Not to say there wasn’t cutting
edge hardware involved. There was. A phased array antenna springs to mind. But
in the end, the big push would be getting the hardware and software to play
nice to create a network.
Normally,
that would have been the job of the Systems Engineering team. In a standard
development cycle, we would have written the requirements and specifications of
the system based on the contract, handed them off to the Hardware and Software
teams and overseen their implementation, integrated all the pieces into a final
working system, tested it, and deployed it for final certification and signoff.
If all went well, we’d get to do it again, and again, until we had a fully
functional system ready to be deployed throughout the fleet.
Like most
plans, this one did not survive first contact with the enemy. In this case, the
enemy was within.
The director
in charge of this project, the man whose baby it was, was an old hardware designer,
an engineer born and bred in the heyday of heroic defense contracting in the
60s with all that implies. Think a mildly toned-down version of Mad Men. I was
familiar with the archetype. My father was cut from the same engineering cloth.
I’d heard all his stories along with those of the older generation I worked
with in my first job. By the late 80s, defense contracting had transformed like
the rest of society, only somewhat more slowly.
I quickly developed
the impression that, to this director, software was an add-on. A fad that just wouldn’t
go away. Real engineering was done on breadboards, not in code. And Systems
Engineering? That’s where real engineers were sent to die. At best, they were
good for doing the scut work that real engineers had neither the time nor
inclination to do, things like documentation, fieldwork and final testing.
Ideally, all done after the hardware engineers had moved on to bigger and
better projects.
Adding to
the dynamic, I got the sense this Director firmly believed all engineering was
a trial by fire. To mix several metaphors, cream rose to the top. For everyone
else it was sink or swim. Mentoring and instruction was for literal pussies.
By the
time I dropped into this organization, it was already divided into three armed
camps, Hardware, Software and Systems, each occupying its own floor of the
off-campus building the project was housed in. The cafeteria was balkanized
into territorial cliques worse than any I’d seen in high school, table by table
with jeers flying between. The work environment was a toxic brew of insults,
undercutting and inter-team rivalry. Not the good-natured ribbing that all team
sports seem to breed. No, this was the kind of interservice rivalry that nearly
ground World War Two to a halt in the Pacific theater before FDR intervened to
put an end to it.
We had no
FDR, only a Trump who seemed to thrive in the entertainment of this environment
with the hedge of protecting his favored hardware engineers. They were allowed,
if not encouraged, to distribute but not necessarily endure the abuse. Most of
their team leads sat outside the chain of command. They did not answer to the hardware
manager or up through Program Management but to the Director himself. The
definition of prima donnas.
Again, these
weren’t the kind of locker room, “boys will be boys” antics I’ve never really had
any use for or seen as productive. I mean the kinds of behavior HR, the
company’s Ethics Department and the EEOC take a vested interest in, or are
supposed to if they are doing their jobs.
In the
best case, if we asked a question or explanation of a hardware engineer or design
lead, we were simply ignored, flat out. I mean like elementary school: I don’t
see or hear you so you don’t exist.
In the
worst case, we were insulted with impunity, directly to our faces. We didn’t
have the intelligence or IQ to understand, never mind critique any hardware engineer’s
design. And by critique, I mean troubleshoot and point out when it wasn’t
working. As in, our job. My degree in Electrical Engineering? A worthless piece
of sheepskin not fit to wipe a designer’s ass. Race, religion, gender? Nothing
was off limits. Who was sleeping with who and how, who grew up where and why
they were traitors not citizens (which we all had to be to get a clearance), racial
or ethnic slurs. Every day for almost two solid years.
Anything
reported up the chain, even to program management, died at the director,
dismissed as the whining of incompetent engineers.
Like grade
schoolers everywhere, we adapted to our situation. We endured and deflected the
attacks, defending the vulnerable where we could. We sussed out who might be
willing to exchange information, and who might be willing to act as proxies or
mouthpieces to get problems solved. We developed networks of contacts with the few
outsiders who might talk to us or answer questions but only if the cool kids
weren’t around.
When hardware
engineers refused to supply the basic design documents we needed to debug the
system, things as fundamental as up-to-date schematics and interface documents,
we resorted to clandestine, nighttime raids. We searched workbenches, riffled desks,
broke into file cabinets, and illicitly obtained combinations to cypherlocks to
gain access to private labs. We made copies of everything we needed, down to
the designers’ notebooks, all of which showed up in our lab without preamble or
explanation.
Remember,
as the Integration team, our job was to make this system work so that everyone
could get paid.
But that’s
all just background to what this essay is about.
At the end
of the two-year, dual prototype cycle, the hardware was mostly set. The next
phase, the phase where the true money of the contract was to be made, would end
with the system being deployed throughout the Navy. That was fundamentally a
software design effort, not hardware. But in order to preserve the expertise in
the overall system, key hardware leads were transferred to Systems late in
integration as design efforts were winding down. These were the people the
company wanted to keep but didn’t have any new contracts to absorb them
directly.
One of our
problem children, a hardware engineer I will call Kevin (not his real name), got
transferred to Systems approximately two months before we were scheduled to
deliver units to the field for testing. The leadership of his team was taken
over by his second, a hardware engineer whose arrogance was matched only by the
mediocrity of his design. A man who had adopted the worst superior schoolyard
behaviors of his prima donna boss without even a minimal level of competence.
If anything, Kevin was a master of ambiguity, mouthing the right words to the
right people to imply cooperation without actually following through. His
second had all the subtlety and nuance of the sidekick to a bully.
Kevin’s
lab was one we’d broken into. We’d acquired the combination from a former
Systems colleague who’d been given access for related work. We’d pillaged it
mercilessly, though not maliciously. We’d stolen and copied every scrap of
documentation we could find. But rather than concede defeat and embrace a
veneer of cooperation after discovering we held the informational keys to his
tiny kingdom, he changed the combination to the door and refused to give it
out. By then, we didn’t really care as we had enough information to piece
together what we needed.
Needless
to say, there was some uncertainty and trepidation the first day he showed up
for duty in our lab. He was senior to all but the integration lead and one or
two others on our team.
That day,
like most days, Kevin was cheery, which I took to be part of his
passive-aggressive nature for deflecting criticism. He asked what we were
working on. Well, we’re debugging the digital part of your subsystem as it
turns out, trying to get it to communicate to another terminal without success.
What are you seeing? This, we gave him snapshots from a digital systems
analyzer. Hmm, that doesn’t look right. Let me see the schematics. Hey, these
are two revs back. Before we could address that comment, he says, you know
what, I’m going upstairs to tell the new lead of my team to get his ass down
here right now, and bring updates to these schematics.
And off he
went. Within fifteen minutes, he dragged his former second to the lab, then
proceeded to berate him publicly, telling him to get the problem fixed, in the
exact tone and words just a week before he would have directed at us for bothering
anyone on his team about a perceived problem. He was still an asshole but
apparently now he was our asshole.
We all
just stood there looking at each other, stunned, wondering what the hell had
just happened. It was surreal.
This
wasn’t one-off behavior. He did the exact same nearly every day for next six
weeks. It didn’t matter if he was talking to members of his previous team or other
engineers in Hardware. Except the other prima donna hardware design leads.
There he softened his tone to something more like a smug satisfaction of
pointing out an issue with their design, like he was keeping score. But he used his contacts to update our
documentation to the most current all the while.
The
situation struck me very much like he was a professional athlete who had been
traded. As soon as he was transferred, Kevin was playing for his new team,
using all his talents to help that team to win, in the way he defined winning.
As if it was all a competition to him. As if he honestly believed that abusing
an engineer publicly was what we were doing when we filed problem reports
during debug. His personality and tactics hadn’t changed, just the team he plied
them for. Very much like he had changed jerseys, but continued to play full
speed, full contact, now with his former team as his opponent.
Which a
month or so later became even more surreal when he submitted his resignation
and two-week’s notice. Come to find out, the moment he was transferred to
Systems (which he viewed as a demotion and betrayal), he started looking for a
new job, which he quickly found. So, the whole time he was abusing his former
team members and Hardware compatriots, he knew he wasn’t going to stick around.
To him,
this was all just the way you did business, the way things were done. Was it
personal? Absolutely it was to anyone on the receiving end, because Kevin and
his kind went out of their way to make it so. To him, that month was just a fun
way to turn it around on his former colleagues, almost as if to demonstrate
what it might have been like if Systems team had been staffed by competent
(read ruthless) engineers. Like him.
He could
have ridden out his last couple months without contention or rancor, just eased
into a new company, a new chapter of his life. But looking back, I am convinced
that he knew no other way to act. No, that’s not quite right. He knew. I could
see that. He just wouldn’t voluntarily choose to use that knowledge even for a
few weeks. Somehow that would have diminished him.
So why
have I been thinking about him lately? What dredged up all this in my mind?
Until
recently, I hadn’t really witnessed a repeat performance of Kevin’s behavior,
not to the extent or the intensity I remember from those two years.
It strikes
me that right now Kevin’s last name could be Pompeo or Mulvaney, or half a
dozen others who, while in Congress, have completely switched positions.
They, also, value team over institution. All the perceived injustices they went
at hammer and tongs while in Congress during the previous Administration, they currently
deflect. Executive overreach, lack of oversight, obstruction, corruption, criminal
activity, any perceived misconduct they railed against as Congressmen, they now
defend as prerogative and privilege. With the same tactics, the same lies, the
same personal attacks and abuse they used before, whether directed at their
peers or their subordinates in the departments they control. They would rather
burn down the government than lose a fight, regardless of what’s right or wrong,
regardless of what’s best for the country. While ignoring or compartmentalizing
the irony and hypocrisy of their own actions. Bullies led by a bully.
To them,
like Kevin, it’s all a game. And like any game, if you play, you play your
damnedest to win, by any means possible, no matter the cost, not matter the
carnage you leave behind. It’s an elaborate, lifelong fraternity hazing
constantly paid forward only because you can. In the end, if you are talented
enough, or powerful enough, or have influential enough friends, you will never
be held accountable for your actions. Or for the damage you cause the
overarching organization whose interests and employees you are supposed to be
looking out for. It’s all about the individual or the small-t team, not the
institution or the greater good.
It’s the
rest of us downstream, and our government, and our democracy itself, that will
pay the price when they move on to bigger and better gigs as the lobbyists
they’ve so long lobbied against. Leaving the next Administration to clean up
the morass they’ve dug deeper. In part because the easiest way to win in their
minds is to undermine the institutions they swore an oath to uphold, then
demand that they be blown up precisely because they no longer function. A Machiavellian
strategy to its core.
As I said
at the beginning of this essay, all this represents a fundamental failure of
leadership, in this case at the very top, as much as any individual moral or
ethical deficiency.
But valuing
party over country always does. And there’s no correcting that. At least as long
as these individuals remain in power.
© 2020 Edward P. Morgan III
