161–170 of 238 posts
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How did you get people to listen to your suggestion to rewrite, or did you have that authority? I made similar suggestions to my boss about a system once. They basically told me it would never happen and to stop thinking about stuff like that so I could focus on the day to day stuff. Well, 2 years later and they outsourced that entire group to a company who will end up rewriting the system...
I was the CTO.
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What do you consider first-level details? It’d be super put off if my boss asked me if I had a fever when I emailed in sick.
“Nothing to serious I hope? Can I be of any help?” works for me as an employee.
Personally, if I'm sick, the last think I want to do is communicate with my manager - it means you have to be careful, you never know if they're digging, or 'professional but not exactly sincere empathy' etc..
'Adult Professionals' shouldn't need to be coddled. If you're sick you're sick and that's that.
If you have something that's a 'big deal' then you have that in a conversation in which the managers emotional response one would expect is empathy but beyond that it's a matter of 'how to work around it'.
'Trust' is a multifaceted thing, I generally do not trust that people will do their jobs well at the outset, until I've seen evidence of that, but as far as those kinds of workplace issues I definitely 'trust by default'. People get sick and that's that.
And then have a lot of tolerance because we are all a little odd in our own ways and it's just easier not to get caught up in stuff.
I feel like it's hard to say. I'm a midlevel dev, so I have no real authority. I was in charge of elevating some code when I first started. I screwed it up and had to spend 6 hours redeploying while the team waited. It did not feel good telling everyone about the situation. It turned out ok in the end. I was the ASC for a team (actually 6 teams across 2 departments). The application had a serious vulnerability that r…
There are a couple of terms here that I'm not familiar with. What is "elevating code"? (I'm trying to work out of autocorrect has screwed up the word "deploying".) What is an ASC?
ASC is Application Security Champion. Essentially the role requires some internal security training then you are responsible for following the processes to identify and remediate vulnerabilities.
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Edit: this comment misunderstood the parent
CIO and CTO ar quite different roles, so why do you think how your company does it has any relevance to what tluyben2 has done? Why do you think they are talking about your company?
Accepting that I was seen as a leader. I've never wanted a leadership position, I just wanted to build cool shit. I'm good at it. At some point in my career (I've been doing software for 22+ years professionally) people started taking me really seriously. I could no longer make certain jokes and I had to be careful about my opinions because they were taken (in many cases) as "the right thing to do". So I got in all s…
The jokes things is something I realized too. Not because I ever tell off-color jokes, but because I realized certain people felt compelled to laugh. And others would then quietly roll their eyes, not at me, but at the exaggerated reactions. It was causing small divisions on the team. When I just had peers and made a stupid pun, my friends/coworkers would just groan and tell me not to quit my day job. But when people…
Keep the 'bad puns' though, that's more of an expression of humility than anything and it gives them an excuse to groan.
Everyone 'hates/resents their manager' just a tiny bit, and a little opportunity to groan but not get too serious about it is a nice valve.
And yes - the greater the power, the greater every little thing gets parsed and possibly taken out of context, I loathe that because it's the thing that stops us from being candid, and why even in the long-form podcast world, people are not truly forthcoming.
(throwaway) I'm a developer at a fairly small company. I never really wanted to be managing people but after some internal drama a bunch of stuff was moved around and I found myself in charge of the team I had been on while we looked for a permanent manager. One of the devs who now reported to me decided that this was the best time to demand a raise- not just a cost-of-living increase, which are scheduled, but an amo…
People are weird - all of us.
We get into our own head-space, and we interpret the world differently than others, sometimes objectivity falls by the wayside.
Sometimes someone is truly working is rear off advancing the mission, but but that nobody really noticed, or if they did, that it didn't matter because 'hard work' isn't necessarily the only management requirement. They get upset because they didn't get the promotion.
Lashing out at 'management' is the easiest, most common thing for any worker to do, often there's a basis for concern, but just as often people don't recognize how inherently chaotic it is the higher one treads.
The moment you're in a leadership position, you will constantly be challenged by at least one 'hard case' of some kind or another.
Once simple rule to help differentiate: if they are making a fuss about the product, or something that will help the company/team, then there's probably good faith there. If the fuss is always about themselves or their career, that's not good.
I was leading a team of thirty five people in the US and India and working weekends and holidays powering through a death march of one terrible release after another. I got a lot of accolades for work; called out at town halls and even a hand written letter from our CTO thanking me for everything I'd done. Things were slowly improving as we collected metrics to improve poor code quality and shoddy releases that were…
You're working at a toxic place and putting your own self worth up to them for measurement - this is not healthy.
People out of school until age 35 sometimes have a hard time truly separating their work from their professional identities, something we could all work on.
So sorry for your losses, I wish you well.
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In management you can't really deflect responsibility downwards.
I'm not trying to suggest that. I'm suggesting an accurate diagnosis of the mistake that was made by management. In the case of my example above, it was a failure of management to hire a sufficiently competent person, or a failure to fire the person when their lack of competence became apparent. It wasn't (in my example) a failure to communicate requirements properly.
If the employee understand the task given but does not have the skill to carry it out satisfactory, then it may be a question of the competency of the employee.
Learning to let my go of my ego and trust... Understanding that delegating tasks, instead of doing them myself, was of the utmost importance the more people I managed... especially, greenfield work. Literally: do not steal the fun. This also means inherently trusting people, and if you can't do that you shouldn't be working with them. two important notes about that: 1. If you just thought of someone you can't trust i…
Eh, that describes exactly my last job (which wasn't bad, I liked my coworkers, but my last manager made it a horrible experience), worst job I had so far. He wasn't bad as an engineer, but he had this crazy OCD to a point that even keys in YAML file should be ordered alphabetically. He had his vision how things should be, and how he would implement them. First, he was not happy that my solutions were done differentl…
I feel like this is more common among insecure managers than with secure managers. The insecurity shows up in micromanagement. Micromanagement takes many forms, all the way from verbal status updates to toxic code reviews to lack of coherence in project plans or career plans.
Until this recent manager, I never truly understood what micromanagement and insecure management meant. Maybe I was lucky to have good experienced managers in the past. Insecure micromanagement truly crushes my motivation to work.