> This is a pain signal. Some IT dude saying things are crap in every meeting is not.

More often than not it is some IT dude observing network crap-out once a month, performing analysis, noticing an upward trend and then saying in every meeting that things are crap and there will be issues twice a week in some time.

> If you're an underfunded IT department and your network has an issue twice a week, you will get that funding.

More often than not, if the IT department is already neglected they will not get that funding. Things will be delayed until the crap outs eventually actually happen twice a week and then some external heroic consultants will be hired to fix the issue underfunded IT department "could not".

The problem is sometimes management knows who the heroes are and so by not fixing things they know you are not competent. Thus letting things bubble up isn't always a good plan. It is really hard when you are on the bottom to know which case things are.

The problem is that management witnesses the pain, but the response isn't to adjust behavior, it is then to punish the limb where the pain originated from. The reason that people pull heroics is also because the organization isn't healthy, and cannot reflect on its actions. Papering over organizational flaws is a symptom of a larger, often unseen problem. If it was healthy, someone would have already said, "hey, I think we need to work on this networking component" and it would have been looked at.

Pain propagation, to use the corpus metaphor isn't enough.