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I get "Whoa there! You have triggered an abuse detection mechanism. Please wait a few minutes before you try again." When trying to visit the page. Can anyone post it in the comments?
There you go buddy.
I get "Whoa there! You have triggered an abuse detection mechanism. Please wait a few minutes before you try again." When trying to visit the page. Can anyone post it in the comments?
Me too, luckily it's in google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
At a former job as a software engineer at a smallish (~250 employees or so) enterprise, I sat down quarterly with my manager to sketch out "my" goals for the quarter. I did my best to set my sights high, and I outlined technical goals (underneath most folks' radar but my own) that I wished to accomplish.
Ultimately, though, I didn't have the authority to set my own priorities. Generally speaking, I was assigned work to execute, and it was my job to complete that work; I was not supposed to choose, as the OP did, that my goals were ever more important. But I did. I still tried to make progress on my goals, either by delaying completion of assigned tasks, or by staying late and hacking away after everyone else went home.
Looking back, it would have been better for me (because you do get judged on this stuff in reviews) to just write down goals for myself along the lines of "do the work that is assigned to me", "keep management informed whenever I am unable to do the work that is assigned to me in the timeframe expected", and "report to the office during business hours."
It's great to have employees that are passionate about making your business succeed. But you need to wield that passion during normal working hours -- don't hope that it somehow seeps out of the cracks during evenings and weekends.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
author also wrote I always prioritized my work based on a cost/benefit estimate. Amazon culture always places higher priority on work that direct-line superiors consider higher priority. If I had a billion dollar project in the backlog, I could still have my time redirected towards a Senior Manager's pet project or a Director's pet peeve. [...] I had to directly refuse to work on a VP escalation So basically, (s)he w…
Yeah, that was the bit that struck out for me. Fundamentally, an organization is impossible to manage if everyone thinks that they know best. If you argue to your line that you think that the company should do X (or more precisely, the company should pay you to do X), and lose, then you have three options: a) Do it anyway. The company will judge you as incapable of being managed correctly and will leave you with no r…
That's not a good answer. A person staffing an assembly line making widgets may know how to double through-put. They do not know how to sell widgets.
It's unreasonable to expect them to "start their own business" because they're competent at their job, which is probably one out of 100 jobs in the company.
As for (a) and (b), I also find those outcomes unsatisfactory.
There are people who manage to get promoted in corporate hierarchies precisely because they can solve problems. By your choices (a) and (b) above, doing anything is bad, and will result in bad outcomes.
Good grief, this is the first time I've seen Github rate limit anything.
Link is down due to Github's rate limiting. Mirror anyone?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
author also wrote I always prioritized my work based on a cost/benefit estimate. Amazon culture always places higher priority on work that direct-line superiors consider higher priority. If I had a billion dollar project in the backlog, I could still have my time redirected towards a Senior Manager's pet project or a Director's pet peeve. [...] I had to directly refuse to work on a VP escalation So basically, (s)he w…
Or to put a positive spin on it, this person was hired to do a job, was good at it, but was prevented from doing so by internal corporate politics. I've worked at companies where meeting major customer deliverables fell through the cracks. The managers simply didn't notice, and didn't care that the software was late and/or non-functional. What is an engineer to do? a) say he knows better, and get called "difficult to…
So then maybe it wasn't important? (I don't know, i'm just suggesting maybe this goal was not as important to the business as you think it was. :P)
"let the managers run the company into the ground."
Look, if you escalate stuff up your chain, and the answer comes back "no, please do what they are telling you", then either do it, or find another job.
Otherwise, yes, you are "difficult to manage" The fact that you think it's running the company into the ground is an opinion, and one apparently not shared by the people responsible for directing work. So while you are welcome to shout such a thing from the rooftops, if you don't actually do what you are supposed to be doing (and note, very carefully, what you are supposed to be doing is not what you think is the right thing, but what the business thinks is the right thing), you are difficult to manage.
I get "Whoa there! You have triggered an abuse detection mechanism. Please wait a few minutes before you try again." When trying to visit the page. Can anyone post it in the comments?