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I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet

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Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet

#21

Post by codemac »

ryandrake wrote: post #15

In most companies I've worked, approval process is the scar tissue of years of mistakes. In every case where you need to ask for approval to do something, you can probably trace back in the company's history and find the past mistake that some goofball made that necessitated getting approval to do something like that. Someone got us sued. Someone lost us some money. We need to take some kind of corrective action and…

Though, having human judgment manage the approval is another form of organizational immaturity..

When the decision is in the domain of the actor, you should make it your organization's goal that though computers, policy documents, or documentation process that they can try to make the decision without outside human intervention. Outside of very unusual requests, escalation up management or other stakeholders shouldn't even be required.

Places where I've seen pushback on actually documenting these choices have usually fallen into one of two camps:

- too much approval required for just about anything, to document it is to admit they have a problem and would take a long long time (hint: this is a lot of engineering groups).

- making the policies public would be embarrassing to management in some form (prejudice, illogical, half-baked, etc).

Both of these are "fish rots from the head first" type of problems, and unfortunately I haven't seen good ways for people down the ladder to fix them.

Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet

#22

Post by xemdetia »

devmunchies wrote: post #17
ryandrake wrote: post #15

In most companies I've worked, approval process is the scar tissue of years of mistakes. In every case where you need to ask for approval to do something, you can probably trace back in the company's history and find the past mistake that some goofball made that necessitated getting approval to do something like that. Someone got us sued. Someone lost us some money. We need to take some kind of corrective action and…

My company has been getting a lot of talent from Amazon and Microsoft, so we are getting their "scar tissue" without any of the context, jacking up our culture. I have to do a detailed doc and plan for everything . It wouldn't be a big deal but we've gone from 700 to 1500 employees in just 2 years, so its been fast change.

I find it almost required to try and jolt these people out of it if they move between organizations. There is definitely a value to procedure but it often comes up that the underlying assumptions have moved as well. You have to encourage people to reevaluate eventually or the third or four generation handling the bureaucracy does not understand the why and does the same thing covered by the first procedure on some grand new thing that looks about the same.

Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet

#23

Post by d--b »

ryandrake wrote: post #15

In most companies I've worked, approval process is the scar tissue of years of mistakes. In every case where you need to ask for approval to do something, you can probably trace back in the company's history and find the past mistake that some goofball made that necessitated getting approval to do something like that. Someone got us sued. Someone lost us some money. We need to take some kind of corrective action and…

Move fast and break things => Move fast with stable infra

Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet

#24

Post by sbuttgereit »

shawnbaden wrote: post #7

I can’t help but think having such autonomy is tied to profitability. I’m sure there are plenty of examples where an employee at a profitable company doesn’t have autonomy. But how many have autonomy where there's not profitability?

Think about a financial trader (stock, commodities, etc) that place big, but risky, bets on their own initiative. The times we know about this sort of thing happening have all been disastrous to the companies they work at. Of course, what we hear about in this regard selects out all but the disasters (nature of news reporting)... and as far as I know were almost certainly not the de facto sanctioned actions of a bottom-up culture. But these cases of autonomy were anything but profitable.

Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet

#25

Post by Tomis02 »

jameskegel wrote: post #18
tricinel wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I wonder how many companies have benefited from the experience said programmers gained while working on pet projects...

I look at it like taking a walk, or a smoker taking a smoke break. That small reprieve, the 15 minutes I take working on a side project, or tinkering with something for fun, rejuvenates me and gets me jazzed about the task at hand when I get back to it. That's a productivity booster, and ultimately a benefit.

A rationalization that's likely to get you fired if you were to own up to it publicly. Although it's true, the company would benefit from you feeling excited about the task at hand.

Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet

#26

Post by endymi0n »

ryandrake wrote: post #15

In most companies I've worked, approval process is the scar tissue of years of mistakes. In every case where you need to ask for approval to do something, you can probably trace back in the company's history and find the past mistake that some goofball made that necessitated getting approval to do something like that. Someone got us sued. Someone lost us some money. We need to take some kind of corrective action and…

"Process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity"

-- Clay Shirky

The root problem is that while process is usually something that's quickly thrown onto the pile, there's rarely any companies that continuously revisit process in order to remove as much of it as possible as soon as it doesn't make sense anymore. We do that religiously and it makes a huge difference.

Recently we even got rid of our Daily Standup because we saw it wasn't bringing any value with the way we already communicated.

Process needs to be continuously lived, renewed and owned by the team, otherwise it tends to rot and negatively impact speed, morale and innovation.

Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet

#27

Post by aptwebapps »

ryandrake wrote: post #15

In most companies I've worked, approval process is the scar tissue of years of mistakes. In every case where you need to ask for approval to do something, you can probably trace back in the company's history and find the past mistake that some goofball made that necessitated getting approval to do something like that. Someone got us sued. Someone lost us some money. We need to take some kind of corrective action and…

Basecamp was founded in 1999 so I think they've had time to make plenty of mistakes. While I don't dispute the idea of approval processes as scar tissue, perhaps most companies scar too easily. I mean that both in the sense of being fragile and in the sense of over-reacting.

Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet

#28

Post by naasking »

wccrawford wrote: post #5

>If you can make a decision and you don’t think it’s going to get you fired, just do it. This advice only applies to people with enough experience. I'm thinking of a certain ex-employee that followed that advice all the time, despite us constantly correcting him. Even on their final day, they was still insisting that they was doing good work. To this day, we are still finding code they wrote or modified that is wrong…

> I'm thinking of a certain ex-employee that followed that advice all the time, despite us constantly correcting him.

The natural addendum then is, "listen to feedback".

Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet

#29

Post by stupidstupid1 »

d--b wrote: post #23
ryandrake wrote: post #15

In most companies I've worked, approval process is the scar tissue of years of mistakes. In every case where you need to ask for approval to do something, you can probably trace back in the company's history and find the past mistake that some goofball made that necessitated getting approval to do something like that. Someone got us sued. Someone lost us some money. We need to take some kind of corrective action and…

Move fast and break things => Move fast with stable infra

Easy to say when you don't hold the pager.

Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet

#30

Post by louithethrid »

xemdetia wrote: post #22
devmunchies wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company has been getting a lot of talent from Amazon and Microsoft, so we are getting their "scar tissue" without any of the context, jacking up our culture. I have to do a detailed doc and plan for everything . It wouldn't be a big deal but we've gone from 700 to 1500 employees in just 2 years, so its been fast change.

I find it almost required to try and jolt these people out of it if they move between organizations. There is definitely a value to procedure but it often comes up that the underlying assumptions have moved as well. You have to encourage people to reevaluate eventually or the third or four generation handling the bureaucracy does not understand the why and does the same thing covered by the first procedure on some gr…

If you have a floorplan, and get to draft a process, you can use that to draw turtlegraphics with emails.
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