Wankers, Whiners & Trollers

The thing about management which I still find it hard to stomach is the overarching worship of the Peter Principle, to ad lib; people tend to get promoted to their next level of incompetence.

Naturally, being in Management, in particular IT management means that the person will be inundated with brainless bureaucracy and the act of covering ass, tai chi and such that he will be so far behind technology, incompetence becomes second nature to them. To compensate for this testicle lobbing experience the Dark Manager goes through a transformation.

The metamorphosis from a competent task executor, into a wanker.

Wankers
Wankers are folks that live in the past, reminiscing glory days and how much tougher things were back then. I trust that most if not all of you have met managers that somehow swoop in a technical discussion and supply experiences (most of it unwanted) on how disaster recovery meant dislodging the 35 pound hard drive from the mainframe and hauling it to the DR site. Or how they use to write in assembly yada, yada yada…

The self gratifying act or rather “expansive” notion of falsely inflating their egos, not achieving anything, while feeling good about it is similar to wanking, hence the given name.

The act of “wanking” also kicks in whenever the Dark Manager receives suggestions which he/she perceives as territorial encroachment. E.g a Software Manager telling a Infrastructure
Manager that the applications need more RAM, leading to the Infrastructure Manager wanking furiously.

Whiners
Whiners are managers that complain about what they “do not have” in order for them to get the job done right. But the moment someone else does it, they transmogrify into a wanker; along the lines of how he would have done it better.

Whiners don’t climb high up the leadership ladder as upper management eschews bad news; which indirectly makes them responsible to follow up on the status of the events. ( Remember selective amnesia) Dark Managers would rather not know that there is a problem, and prefers to a have a group sigh of:-

“WTF! Why did this happen, no one told me about this?”

Another characteristic of whiners are their lack of impetus to resign even after all the whining. Their tasks revolve along funneling responsibilities upwards while pushing tasks downwards.

Trollers
These are overgrown wankers, the worst of the lot, typically appearing in general public to put down another manager for their achievements. If the project is successful, you troll about how many people resigned in the process. If it meets the dateline, you troll on the lack of quality assurance and adherence to standards. You get the general idea.

Whiner Wanker Complex
To summarize, you wank when someone else is shoveling the manure and you whine when assigned the shovel - Short of performing Tai Chi, and alas; Trolling.