> And, truth be told, you probably don’t trust most of your colleagues
> or your boss, either.
From all the places I worked at as an employee or a freelancer in the last twenty years, in the US or in Germany, that was not true for about 2/3rd of them. And the remaining 1/3rd wasn't so much that I didn't trust my colleagues, the whole place was "lost". For example my 2nd job, in a startup with waaayyyyyy too much money and attention for its own good.
Even if I include the time of my apprenticeship in an East German (GDR) chemical factory of several thousand employees, even there the majority of people did a good job at work and were competent.
Even when I extend that to numerous summer jobs in a brewery, sausage factory, chocolate factory and a dozen others (non-food), I rarely had the impression that the sentence I quoted demonstrates.
That a job may be useless - okay, that happens a lot, but I can rarely attribute it to complete incompetence, most of it is much larger forces at work than an individual - even a CEO - can fight. And yes, sometimes people are in over their head, but that happens, so what. In the day to day operations I must have been incredibly lucky that my experiences are overall very positive? Hard to believe.
Since "trust" is the centerpiece of that article I question whether their entire premise is even true.
From reading your comment and the article, I think you're talking about different types of trust.
I trust my colleagues at all levels, say, not to steal £10 I leave in my desk. But the article is talking about the kind of trust to be working hard the whole time, competently, totally for the best interests of the company.
Given how common it is for us to moan about our useless and lazy bosses (and fellow programmers), I have to agree that trust of that nature isn't very common. I can't say whether it has got more or less common prevalent over time, though.
No, you got that wrong. I mean exactly that kind of trust in their abilities as coworkers. The thought of interpreting that in a "criminal" sense never even occurred to me. You may (re)interpret that as you will.
I can see now how a possible interpretation that surely somebody will come up with - whether they post it or not - is that I am clueless myself and that that's the reason I had such positive experiences. May be, I would be the last one to know, right? On the other hand, work as a well-paid freelancer who likes to not just not get fired but also to get the contract renewed would be hard if that was so, I think?
That previous paragraph shows I actually do have a trust issue: (now speaking generally, not in response to the comment) online I've come to expect bad things happening. You post something you think is positive and interesting and out of nowhere comes an interpretation that is dark and turns it all on its head.
Even in the GDR chemical factory, where it would have been extremely easy and would have had few repercussions, most people (actually everybody I ever worked with there, and I saw many different departments) voluntarily decided to do what it takes to keep things running as well as they could. When they didn't work it was because there really wasn't anything to do. I never saw anyone neglecting their duty. My apprenticeship was for a very technical job "BMSR Techniker" - measurement, control and regulation technology, so I never was an office worker but in the production line or in construction (electrical infrastructure).
I do remember that a (random) manager in the chocolate factory I worked for three weeks during winter break at university didn't trust me:
I had just fed a machine - more thoroughly than necessary - and had nothing to do until it would be finished 10 minutes later, so I sat down and read in my French lesson book - always with an ear for the machine next to me. I could not have done any other work even if I wanted, there was only that machine in that room.
In comes a manager (that I didn't know) - immediately assuming I'm a lazy SOB. It was the complete opposite - I LIKE to work, and I had until then - without any supervision or pressure - done much more than asked. That changed somewhat after that !$%"§$ manager treated me like dirt.
Okay, so there is this guy that I didn't trust, but he wasn't even my manager, he just happened to walk by, never met him again but he ruined the entire three weeks of work experience. I never bought anything that I knew was made in that factory again.
Well, the "scrum" methodology can be summed up as "how to (convince yourself even though you actually aren't) force people you don't trust to do stuff that you don't actually trust them to do", so the popularity of scrum suggests that the bosses don't trust any of us. If you trust them, that trust is strictly one-way.
You generalize, but I spoke about my own actual experience. If I talked about the things I read I'd say what you say, but I chose to speak about my personal actual experience.
Since you mention scrum, I was on one project with "mild scrum". It was a very good project with very good people. Other freelancers came from non-IT (but STEM) field, they worked in IT because there was no money in their own field. Even they "knew their shit", in their specialization (an Oracle product) more than me, no need to check on them, they too delivered on time and good enough quality ("good enough" sounds bad until you factor in the usual business pressures, like accumulating ever more technical debt because there wasn't a penny for refactoring, and that project had outgrown its initial spec by orders of magnitude).
Anyway, I only ever read about the horror stories, never been in one myself. The closest may have been a few weeks in an already late project for the German government that I was added to for no other reason then to show the customer that we try. Nobody really incompetent either, the project was doing as well as it could, the actual problem was that in order to get the project my company had to promise more than is possible. You can't blame the government either though, if they don't go for the lowest bidder the newspapers and the public are up in arms about "government waste". Everybody actually seems to act quite sanely individually, much of the insanity is a system outcome. Change would have to come from everybody changing at the same time.
Even if I include the time of my apprenticeship in an East German (GDR) chemical factory of several thousand employees, even there the majority of people did a good job at work and were competent.
Even when I extend that to numerous summer jobs in a brewery, sausage factory, chocolate factory and a dozen others (non-food), I rarely had the impression that the sentence I quoted demonstrates.
That a job may be useless - okay, that happens a lot, but I can rarely attribute it to complete incompetence, most of it is much larger forces at work than an individual - even a CEO - can fight. And yes, sometimes people are in over their head, but that happens, so what. In the day to day operations I must have been incredibly lucky that my experiences are overall very positive? Hard to believe.
Since "trust" is the centerpiece of that article I question whether their entire premise is even true.