Top-heavy

We grunt workers often complain about behemoth administration and overly-managed parts of the organisations we work in. We accuse large companies of having poisonous meetings and the middle-management of obeying the Peter principle. More often than not we're right to be disgruntled with this in our day-jobs. Or are we?

Take my current project as an example. This morning, my business project lead sent me this list of project participants:

1. Business PL
2. IT PL
3. Lead Architect
4. Lead Requirement
5. IT-agreement lead
6. I&O-PM
7. Test
8. Test
9. Lead Developer
10. Business Expert
11. ACI Agreement Lead
12. Business Expert

Number 9 happens to be me (and, yes, the "Lead" could easily be removed on that as well as on all other role descriptions). The other people involved are there to either have meetings, produce documents as input for the developers or test the developer's code. The project has one developer. Me. Sure, not all other roles full-time in the project, but neither am I. And sure, there are integrations with third-parties. But. Please. Come. ON!

I'd need a tester say 1/4th of the time and a nagging PM 1/8th of the time. The first part of the project, running over six months, had the architect and requirements guy produce their documents after the development was done. They weren't able to put together the documentation before implementation. I wouldn't have read it anyway as planning is only guessing. I only went to a couple of meetings, and could have skipped those as well. The realistic overhead for my day-job is thus:

This is, as we grunt-IT-workers know and lament, common in large corporations. But my private little tide is turning. When I was younger I was certain that I wanted a lean and effective workplace. I'm not as sure anymore. Is a company with 100% efficiency as dull as a 100% efficient relationship? Perhaps 14.6% is better, softer, more laid-back, comfier, happier and healthier than 50%? I'm actually starting to think it is.

Nonetheless there are two interesting questions here. The first one is: what is it going to take for top management to catch on? Because eventually they will. And capitalism kills dead meat. The answer to the second question will affect us all in inconceivable socioeconomic ways: what are all the meeting people going to do when it's obvious for everyone else that there is no demand for purposeless meetings and unread documents? Shangri-la or abyss? Hard to tell.