The views expressed in this post are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer. This is a personal account, written from my perspective, and is not an official statement on behalf of the company. In short: it’s me talking, not the company issuing a press release — though I suspect its press office would have chosen different punctuation.
I am a software developer. Or, at least, that is what my job title says.
I have not done much software development for quite a while. For a period I was maintaining Oracle Cloud servers. Later I was looking after the GitLab Linux installation. Both were useful jobs, but neither gave me much of the development work I had expected to be doing.
There were long stretches when I struggled to find enough work to keep me busy. I asked for more. Then I asked again. I was bored, and I wanted to contribute. I did not want to spend my working day trying to look occupied, which is a surprisingly difficult performance when there is nothing in front of you to do.
Eventually I was given some Siebel work. It was outside my skill set, and I struggled with it. That is not especially mysterious. If you ask someone to do something they do not know how to do, there is a reasonable chance they will find it difficult.
At my annual review, I received a “Needs Improvement” rating and was put on a Performance Improvement Plan.
In my response to the appraisal, I used this analogy: “You wouldn’t hire a brain surgeon and then be disappointed when he couldn’t fix your washing machine.”
It was meant to be funny. It was also the point I was trying to make. I had been asking for work. When I was given work outside my experience, I struggled. Somehow, the gap between the work I could do and the work available to me had become a problem with my performance.
Looking for work
I understand that businesses have to respond when the work changes. If the workload has fallen and a company needs to reduce its costs, I would rather have an honest conversation about that than pretend nothing has changed.
What is hard to accept is being assessed as though there was plenty of suitable work and I simply failed to do it. I had asked for more. I had tried to make myself useful. I was still bored, still trying to find work, and then given something I did not know how to do well.
I complained about what was happening. HR became involved, and I felt the process took management’s side. I know HR is part of the company. I know the name does not promise that it is an independent advocate for employees. It still felt different to see that in practice.
Human Resources.
The phrase has started to sound less like a department and more like a description of how a company sees the people who work for it.
Coal is mined and burned. Oil is extracted, refined, and used. Trees are felled and processed into timber. Natural resources are turned into things that can be put to use, and the waste is dealt with afterwards. The comparison is uncomfortable, and people are not fuel or timber. But organisations do talk about people as resources: something to allocate, measure, and use.
The odd thing in my case is that I was not being worked until I had nothing left. For long periods, I was left with too little suitable work. Then the lack of output was treated as my shortcoming. The resource was underused, and I was told I needed to improve.
A trigger point
Recently I took one day off sick with a migraine. One day. My director contacted me to confirm I had not exceeded the company’s rolling absence trigger.
The policy says:
“To help maintain a fair and consistent approach, [REDACTED] has established a trigger point against which [REDACTED] measures attendance levels. The trigger point is 4 separate occurrences of absence and/or a total of 10 working days of absence in a rolling twelve-month period, pro-rated for part-time and shift worker [REDACTED] Partners.”
I understand what the policy says. I had taken one day off, and my director was checking that I had not gone over the threshold. But I suffer from migraines, and stress can bring them on. Being autistic and living with additional physical disabilities already means there are things I have to manage that other people may not see.
After that contact, I found myself thinking I could not afford another migraine for at least three months. The policy calls it a trigger point. I started to feel as though I was being sighted down a gun barrel, waiting to see whether the next headache would count against me.
That may not be what my director intended. It is how it landed.
What the guidance says
[REDACTED]’s own stress-risk guidance says it aligns with the HSE’s Management Standards for Workplace Stress. Under “Managing Workloads”, it says leaders should provide appropriate training and resources, set clear and achievable expectations, allocate work in line with people’s skills and abilities, encourage open dialogue about workload concerns, and review work allocations during annual performance reviews.
I have read those words alongside what has happened to me. I asked for work. I was given work outside my skill set. I struggled with it. At my annual review, the focus became my performance.
The guidance does not tell the story of my particular appraisal. I can only tell that from my side. But the distance between what the guidance says leaders should do and how this has felt to me is difficult to ignore.
Stress is not an abstract thing I can simply choose to set aside. It can become a migraine, and then the migraine becomes an absence that is measured against a trigger point. The work situation adds to the stress; the stress can make me ill; the illness is recorded as an attendance issue. It feels as if I am being asked to carry the consequences at every stage.
The story being told
The next bit comes from the more emotional, occasionally irrational side of my brain. I have no evidence for it; it is only a suspicion.
I am a vocal supporter of the neurodiversity forum at work. I have a fairly popular neurodiversity blog and am vocal about “fairness” and “equality” and my colleagues all know this. I have wondered whether that makes the situation more complicated for the people managing this situation. If the amount of work has fallen, perhaps they worry that letting someone go for that reason would look bad. A Performance Improvement Plan creates a different explanation: that the company tried to help, but the employee did not improve.
I do not know that this is what is happening. I cannot prove it. It is a suspicion I have because, from where I am sitting, the story seems to have shifted. The shortage of work was there first. Now I am the person on a plan to improve.
That is the part I find hardest to reconcile. I am not asking to be excused from doing my job. I have been asking for work to do. I know businesses change, and I know nobody is guaranteed a job forever. I would rather be told plainly that there is less work than be made to feel that the shortage is evidence of a personal failing.
The name Human Resources keeps coming back to me. Resources are useful when they can be put to use. People, inconveniently, have skills, limits, health, and lives outside the spreadsheet. I would like to be judged on the work I have actually been given, and on what I have actually been able to do with it.
I am still a software developer. I would quite like to do some software development.