April 22, 2019

Ambiguous Goals

So I am job searching. Yet again! It seems like I have been doing it forever. Anyhoo. Came across a specific advert in Banking sector with one of the requirement as:
"Ability to drive projects with ambiguous goals and come up with innovative solutions for complex business problems."
Not asking for much, are they? How can someone, no matter how smart, can come up with innovative solution for something that they don't even know or understand? I mean, I understand some times not everything is perfect but if management themselves don't know what they want, how can then know when they have found the innovative solution.

Any project with ambiguous goal is bound to fail. Working in such a place is setting yourself up to failure. You can never succeed. Worse is that people or rather management actually think it is inability of candidate to adapt to such an environment when it is actually ineptness of the management. They like to use buzz words to hide their ineptness and then make the poor employee think that they are not cut out for such a thing.

I understand complexity, I don't get ambiguity. Simple goal of any capitalistic organization is to make profit. How different project will help acheive that goal is not that hard to define. If they are not able to do so, they shouldn't be working on those projects. As simple as that. They are wasting money, resources, and energy.