Back in the day – “ee when I were a lad” – and just a leaf-level developer node in a very large unnamed insurance company, there was a palpable dichotomy between those that were at the bottom working as individual contributors and the seventeen layers of management between us and the CEO. This idea that we were “just” worker bees and that the decisions got made somewhere up in the aether. That we were not privy to the forces that shaped those decisions, and certainly had no influence.
I don’t know if that happens everywhere. I hear stories of the camaraderie of the factory floor vs. the management structure. Or stories of the labor union representatives and the company management representatives. But all anecdotal.
We had a term back then for what we assumed that the management must be doing when going about their daily deeds: bizzling (or v. to bizzle). Kind of a cross between “buzzing” and “business”.
It was always used as a pejorative or cynical term. This idea that a bunch of mid-level management (or the Kelly-Jelly, named so by a colleague after a particularly malleable individual) did mostly nothing except buzz around, like bees, bumping into one another and essentially cancelling out most of the net effects of the motion. This jelly-like layer existed to protect the line-workers who needed to get stuff done, and the upper level of management where the serious decisions were made. They were a layer of management where you could rotate people freely with almost no impact to the work happening beneath them. When the time came to have a layoff, you had a robust middle layer to pick from.
The people at the top were called the Yuk-yuks. I don’t recall if that was because they were laughing all the way to the bank, or it was a bastardization of “High-falutin’ Muckity-Muks.” Or maybe both. Lost to the sands of time.
Anyway, for most of our leaf-node days, we wouldn't see these decision makers. The Yuk-yuks were respected, contrary to what you might think based on the silly name. But when you got invited to be in the room with the decision makers, you could immediately see why they were not in the jelly. They made decisions. They didn't defer. The buck stopped at them. They came prepared to meetings to make things happen, and they did. Often based on real metrics and evidence (another difference between them and the gelatinous mass between us and them).
These were not the Pointy-Haired Bosses of Dilbert fame. These were not the clueless CEOs from that comic either. These Yuk-yuks were people who you could reasonably set up as role models. Pity we didn't get to work more directly with them. To keep their effectiveness, they typically delegated all work to a team of mid-level managers, who picked up the balls and ran into each other instead of toward the corporate goal lines.
Maybe that was part of their strategy.
Whenever one of our number was invited to a meeting, that member was said to be “Off bizzling with the Yuk-yuks.” More often than not, the person that got to go was admired for being invited to see the inner workings of the Yuk-yuk echelon.
Of course, that was before I learned more about effective management, and I now understand how these layers could naturally stratify. I also recognize the whole us-vs.-them as also culturally destructive. I don’t think like that anymore. But I had to share these ancient shibboleths. Those from my tribe may recall them.
