That reminds me of a few years ago when a director gave a presentation to the whole organization about innovation. Near the end of the presentation, he summarized that everyone needed to share ideas. Then he anticipated a few questions.
If we a good idea, would we be able to work on it? Probably not, the "innovation team", which was his team, would be the ones to build the prototype.
If we had a successful good idea, would we receive any compensation? No, and that's very selfish. He insinuated that we should rethink priorities or place of work if compensation was important.
He also talked about how he only wanted ideas that had the potential to make billions.
My very first job I built a code library that, when I trained my teammates on its use (I was angling for a team lead position) we found, on average, reduced their time per project by a range of 50-90% per project by automating out tons of boilerplate, and allowing us to leverage previously created work.
We're talking about things that used to take 1-2 weeks, being done by Tuesday, if it was assigned on a Monday morning. It was nuts.
My immediate manager, didn't understand it.
His manager sat down with me and read through the code, and was ecstatic.
He brought the CEO in (it was a small shop, that was the next level), and explained out the implications.
AND..... that was the last I ever heard of it. They bought me some pizza.
On their own they decided that if they repackaged the library itself, they could sell it as a b2b tool (which was a pretty good idea).
And they assigned devs and PMs from other teams to build it.
And those devs and PMs never took a look at my code. I'm guessing they were never told about it. They did, however, build their design the exact same way they had built everything else before my library. Which meant, it made all the same mistakes they had always made. Their final product didn't really move the needle. It did not really save anyone much time. And it did not successfully sell to other businesses.
Except by then, it was the new "company initiative". And the % of resources the company had put into its development was substantial. So when it failed completely to materialize real results, it was devastating for the company.
They ended up laying off some ~20% of the company to recover losses in the months after I quit.
So yeah: "Give me your best ideas so we can implement them with out you" doesn't work. If you could have implemented the idea, you would have had it already.
Exactly, at least it was easy to just not share with that team.
A couple years later an engineering manager at the same level gave another presentation about how innovation and ideas have been lacking. He placed the blame on software engineers not trying hard enough.
I think there's a certain type of person who thinks that the only type of success is one where all of the profit/credit goes to them. Sadly, they seem to be the leaders of many organizations.
Well the compensation there is fine. It's not really correlated with results in my opinion, but that's typical in massive organizations.
It probably sounds worse on paper and due to my phrasing. I'd say he was stating the reality and being a doofus (he's the excitable and friendly type). It wasn't so sinister.
I myself might be overreacting a bit; having "noped" out of a large bureaucracy relatively recently, my "stick it to the man!" mode gets triggered easily by such things, as well as such articles as OP.
Honestly, the line "had me question everything, including my self-worth, my identity, and purpose" resonated with me so deeply, not just the first time I was laid off, but even now 20 years later and having left by choice.
On the flipside, to get CYA-managery, but any time someone in management says anything approaching "you should quit" that can be a bit worrisome. They might be doing you a favor, but the org is more than likely to be hurt by you leaving.
If we a good idea, would we be able to work on it? Probably not, the "innovation team", which was his team, would be the ones to build the prototype.
If we had a successful good idea, would we receive any compensation? No, and that's very selfish. He insinuated that we should rethink priorities or place of work if compensation was important.
He also talked about how he only wanted ideas that had the potential to make billions.