My response: "That's a great question, and I think it would be better to have a face-to-face chat on [slack,teams,meet,whatever] so we can communicate clearly. It shouldn't take more than an hour. Let me know what works for you."
Ask HN: What should I say to my manager when my performance starts suffering?
21–30 of 165 posts
Re: Ask HN: What should I say to my manager when my performance starts suffering?
#22It sounds like the manager may have an intuition that your partner is burned out and is giving them an opening to discuss it. Generally if a person has done good work in the past, and now they aren't, there is a reason for it, and clear communication is the quickest way to surface and resolve the issue. This is somewhat situation dependent - some workplaces are truly toxic.
> how can a company expect to retain employees/contractors if the only work available is the same tedium over a long period of time
Not everyone is that ambitious. Lots of people made a good life out of pulling the same levers for 30 years in a Ford plant. If you are ambitious, go somewhere that has room for it. If you find a happy little niche, there is also nothing wrong with being happy occupying it.
Re: Ask HN: What should I say to my manager when my performance starts suffering?
#23"In software this would be the equivalent of just writing components or html for an extended period of time without any variety, which is soulcrushing." I actually want less variety. I never get consistent work. How can I be an expert if I don't have a steady type of work. I'm really struggling right now. A lot of that is because I know that anything I learn at work will be used once and then thrown away. What's the…
I think fondly of the two summers I spent mowing and wheedwhacking. There was a skill curve, I practiced and got better, and then got to ride that peak for a while.
Re: Ask HN: What should I say to my manager when my performance starts suffering?
#24Would a vacation help?
Yes, from the employer point of view, this is why vacations exist. A vacation would have helped to avoid this. Unfortunately, that ship has sailed. The OP situation looks like burn-out. If someone has reached actual burn-out, a mere 2 weeks isn't going to be enough. I think a lot of people are going through this now working without boundaries and no real vacation, it leads to really bad outcomes. Burn-out is serious.
Coming back from a break if it is burn-out can be worse. You hit the same walls you left 2 weeks before, with a stronger sense of what you want in your life, implicitly "not this"
Can be restated as an upside: "makes things clear"
Re: Ask HN: What should I say to my manager when my performance starts suffering?
#25I’ve found that when most managers ask questions, they’re just trying to get a sense of what’s going on. I wouldn’t over analyze it. I would also suggest that honest answers are the best. If you’re having a hard time doing the work, is there something else you could be doing? As much as it doesn’t feel like it, companies do not want to fire employees. It’s expensive to lose someone who knows the business, and expensi…
> It’s expensive to lose someone who knows the business, and expensive to hire someone.
That's not true. Letting people go is a great business strategy because it means companies don't need to give salary increases. They will right after that hire someone with less experience and making less money.
But what about the business knowledge, you ask? Well, any company that knows what they're doing won't ever let important business knowledge in the hands of only one person. They will automatically distribute responsibility for important things into a group of people, so that if one of them leave the company it is not a big deal.
Moreover, in the rare case that someone is really important for the company, by necessity she is just one out of several hundred. What I said continues to be true for everyone else.
Re: Ask HN: What should I say to my manager when my performance starts suffering?
#26I've sent out almost exactly this message recently. Obviously I can't decode what your particular manager means by it. In my case, yes, it's a check-in, or an invitation to have a conversation, because I've noticed something isn't working and my job is to figure it out and make it work better.
I prefer to know when somebody doesn't like some aspect of their job. Sometimes I can do something about it, sometimes I can't, but either way I can't do anything about it if I don't know what the problem is. There are people who are perfectly happy doing the same thing every day, in fact they prefer it. Sometimes those people have personal problems that are affecting their performance and maybe there's an opportunity to provide some short-term flexibility to help. If someone has gotten stuck with mundane work and they aren't a good fit for that kind of work, that's important to know.
For me, a message like that is never a prelude to a termination. That's pretty much the very last thing I want to do. It sucks. It might be necessary, but I'd rather avoid it. It becomes necessary when there is no other solution available and the organization can't just absorb the loss in productivity. Getting radio silence or a non-answer from the employee takes a whole lot of other solutions off the table.
But let's set all of that aside for a moment.
A more critical problem here IMO is that your friend is doing themselves a disservice. Being stuck doing something you hate for half your waking hours is a bad way to live. Sometimes you need a paycheck, but your friend should be trying to figure a way out of this situation ASAP. Talk to the manager, or start job hunting, or start making other decisions that allow them to not need that specific paycheck.
Re: Ask HN: What should I say to my manager when my performance starts suffering?
#27> while sitting in our apartment with the sun shining outside You can always go work at a park with wifi or something for variety.
I know what it's like to see the sun shining outside and lose all motivation to work.
I know it's well-meaning, but whenever someone suggests that I work outside when I feel that way, I feel like they are missing the point. I don't want to be outdoors on my computer, I want to be outdoors experiencing and engaging with the world.
Re: Ask HN: What should I say to my manager when my performance starts suffering?
#28"In software this would be the equivalent of just writing components or html for an extended period of time without any variety, which is soulcrushing." I actually want less variety. I never get consistent work. How can I be an expert if I don't have a steady type of work. I'm really struggling right now. A lot of that is because I know that anything I learn at work will be used once and then thrown away. What's the…
The sad reality is that programming as we knew years ago is going into extinction. The only thing that remains is to work as library integrator and debugger for X, where X is something that is popular this week. All interesting software development left is in open source, and SEs are now just required to integrate existing libraries into a GUI done by somebody else, or a server side component that talks to that GUI. With AI coming into the picture fast, the prospects are even worse.
Re: Ask HN: What should I say to my manager when my performance starts suffering?
#29I’ve found that when most managers ask questions, they’re just trying to get a sense of what’s going on. I wouldn’t over analyze it. I would also suggest that honest answers are the best. If you’re having a hard time doing the work, is there something else you could be doing? As much as it doesn’t feel like it, companies do not want to fire employees. It’s expensive to lose someone who knows the business, and expensi…
> It’s expensive to lose someone who knows the business, and expensive to hire someone. That's not true. Letting people go is a great business strategy because it means companies don't need to give salary increases. They will right after that hire someone with less experience and making less money. But what about the business knowledge, you ask? Well, any company that knows what they're doing won't ever let important…
This is definitely not universally true. My current employer sets compensation by asking "what is the business cost of losing this person?"
Re: Ask HN: What should I say to my manager when my performance starts suffering?
#30Where I work, depending on exactly how it was phrased, that would be a genuine, earnest, proactive hint from manager that a) They've noticed that you are not performing at your norm and b) They want to understand your circumstances, tactfully, and help & support.
How an employee responds to that depends on many factors: The relationship employee and manager have, the trust between them, the motivation on employee side to be open and honest and look at mutually-beneficial alternatives, remain in that team/company, etc. It also depends on culture of the company, and hugely on just the person - what they want and how they want to approach it.
Not knowing any of those factors, I cannot suggest how you or your partner should approach it; however, how I would approach it, and how I hope my team members approach it is:
1. Be as open as comfortable, as detailed as productive about:
a) What you feel is your impacted performance, e.g. "I don't feel I'm creating code to my standard of quality" or "I've noticed it's become difficult for me to concentrate in afternoon meetings" or whatever it may be
b) Circumstances / causes you may be of that. Again, personal comfort and relationship/trust are a factor. I would feel comfortable talking to my manager "My newborn is keeping me up at night, and the 7am daily standup puts me between rock and hard place", or "My A/C is not working and I'm finding it hard to mentally focus when my office is 30C", all the way to something as longterm as "I don't mind remote work on daily or weekly basis, but i've noticed over last 12 months that I've lost some subtle motivation, internal vision of the goal and camaraderie" (fwiw, I've discussed these three with my manager last 6 months). Your relationship may be more formal/distant however, so you may be more comfortable being more generic or abstract. Note managers are highly constrained in HR and rules WHAT they can ask you; that doesn't mean they don't want to know/support - it just means burden is on you to volunteer that information. Here, e.g. Manager CAN NOT ask you if you have a medical problem and what it is; but you are allowed to volunteer it (NOTE: this is specific to my province in my country; check your local religation) and they are then allowed to support you with it.
2. Come prepared, if possible, with proposals and compromises. It's awesome if you come to manager not just with problem, but possible solution
"Would it be possible for me to skip 7am daily standup, to ensure I am rested and productive rest of the day?"
"I think I might be more productive on QA then on development for next few months as it would motivate me and engage different part of my brain"
"I cannot maintain the tempo of operations in the long term, but I think my ops experience could really make me a productive release manager / developer / whatever to support this team"
etc etc etc
3. Be positive, open, non-confrontational. Explore possibilities together. Give their proposals a chance; sleep on them if that's what it takes to remove initial negative gut-reaction.
... Hope this helps a bit, and good luck! :)