Just had a boomer with 40 years of experience throw me, a 1 year vet in the industry, under the bus to our boss because I ‘took too long’ to do something so he couldn’t finish his work, even though I tried coordinating the handoff to him 2 hours before the end of the day.
Same guy who loudly listens to right wing talk radio (Glenn beck and Megyn Kelly of all people) from across my desk. The day after the kidnapping of Maduro I made some comment about being woken up to news of an invasion and the guy somehow got super defensive about it not being an invasion and US just taking a bad guy out.
Like, I’m always polite and personable but I just want to go mask off. I’m not going to throw people under the bus, and hell, if I did, I’d still get fucked. In a reasonable world my boss would be like, ‘dude you are a grown man complaining about the most junior person on the team’
But this will likely result in me getting fired for undermining the performance of the company. Fucking ridiculous man.
Missed deadlines are never a junior’s fault. Is always either that the deadline was nonsense to begin with or someone lost something because there was a lapse in communication across multiple people. Anyone who has any amount of experience in a field should be able to recognize that.
Shifting blame is always part of the game in corpo world, but the most effective way to shift it is to flood the zone and not single anyone out because then it becomes an issue. Just offer a series of solutions and ask them to pick one. If you know the solution, but don’t want to make it look like you or anyone else messed up (assuming it was a mistake), offer 3 or 4 solutions with the only reasonable one being your solution. Middle management loves multiple choice and it lets them give options to other people making it look like they did due diligence.
I have a lot of control over workflow and procedure where I’m at and I’ve always found it to be really easy to take a lot of blame on myself and just say something like “we’re working on a better workflow for this currently, if there’s any other issues you want us to address while we’re at it please let me know”.
This also works if you did get singled out for something, just don’t play the blame game back and deflect with a flood of info.