Their office in Mahwah was something out of a Nazi era setup, where the senior people did very little while consultants did most of the work. Coincidentally, the senior people are mostly German, the consultants were white, and the non-senior staff were minorities (Indian, Spanish, West African, Carribean, etc). The cast of characters include the following:
1. A Principal engineer who routinely proclaimed "I'm 200 pounds and 6 foot 4" in order to win debates about how things should be done, both on the phone and in person. Also he shoved his face into the faces of other people whenever he was proven wrong, with reprisals such as "you forgot to turn your monitor off, so now you're going to pay". The same bully organized a meeting of the entire department to dictate that people should watch their desk phones for use by unauthorized people, in an open office setup that was accessible to anyone (i.e. no doors, no walls), which was impossible for anyone to prevent someone else from using your desk phone 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. A total witch hunt weirdo.
2. A Phd who was so cranky that other employees avoided speaking to him every morning, who would track schedules and give people grief about deadlines that couldn't be met. Apparently the source of his misery is his wife, who he regularly complained about kicking him whenever he was down and whenever he wasn't down. However, his face would light up and drool would begin to appear anytime he would talk to his busty subordinate, who apparently would play this card to her advantage. An oversexed overeducated over moralistic miserable snob, no wonder his wife treats him badly.
3. A manager who rarely left his office to get involved with his employees, relying on hearsay to run his department. When he was not patting himself on the back for accomplishments at previous companies, he was using second hand information to chastise employees, because he would stay in his white tower office all day. When I complained to him that the principal engineer mentioned in item #1 was being verbally and physically threatening, he passively replied that he had told said bully that his behavior was "not constructive" as if this aberrant behavior was no big deal.
4. Minorities who apparently were hired to fill an EOE requirement, because they did very little work, spending most of their time sitting at their desk eating, chatting on the phone, playing games, and spacing out.
5. A recently promoted programmer from West Africa, who moonlights on the graveyard shift performing x-rays for a local hospital, resulting in him coming in late and exhausted everyday (1130am or later), while I was being chastised for coming in at 930am. His "promotion" disturbed me because he had told me that simple code I written to round a number up to the next power of two (that any 12 year old could have written) meant that I really knew my stuff, and that he was unable to understand the code LOL.
6. A fellow from the Carribean who spent the afternoons sleeping at his desk, and rather than sleeping quietly, he snored loudly within ten feet of where I sat. After the president of the company accidentally received an email I wrote complaining about the situation, the manager of the department was forced to leave his office to occasionally stop by to see if the sleeper was awake or not. Although this sounds very much by the book, it was exceptional for the manager to ever leave his office for any reason other than for food or using the bathroom. Furthermore, the sleeping employee's work output (or lack thereof) was never tracked, which allowed him to sleep every afternoon in the first place.
7. The only three employees who are worth anything were regularly overlooked, ignored and / or mistreated, to the point where one of them complained to HR that the cranky Phd was insensitive to say the least, which resulted in the cranky Phd being sent for sensitivity training LOL, which is like putting a band aid on a gunshot wound. The other two good employees were ignored & overlooked, especially when they tried to ask for requirements or point out that things were being done incorrectly.
Considering all of this, no surprise that a one year project in this department has taken over five years and is still not completed. But the flip side is that it was easy for the dysfunctional people above to blame me for the problems with their work and their schedule, making me an easy scapegoat for their own shortcomings. One of the three good employees actually stated that for the work to get done, I would need to come back; while that is a compliment to me, it makes a statement about the losers there who can't even complete a project.
