Switching Sides - Imbolc 2020

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