Member-only story
At one of my last full-time jobs, I was under a specific boss that kind of overall ran “content.” It seemed a logical place for me, generally-speaking, although within about two weeks of working at this place, I already knew the job role was a farce, which is sadly all too true at companies.
One of the ways I knew it? I was the “digital content” person. But see, this lady — my boss — had a magazine/editorial content team as well for an in-house magazine. That was her bread and butter. She came from that world and “got” it. Most of her digital experience was online shopping, which is a much different ballgame than online editorial.
To make matters worse, there was a team in Seattle that controlled how the website looked and felt, and they operated according to different metrics, incentives, and road maps than we did. So even getting a color/font change could legit take 12–15 months.
My boss’ boss could have intervened and gotten timetables moved up, but again, not her incentive structure to do so.
This job became miserable fairly quickly, and I ultimately got fired from it. Probably all for the best. Hard at the moment, but it’s worked out.
So in addition to the misery about trying to be productive, here was Tier II: every week, there was an “all-hands meeting” for my team, which was mostly…
