Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]

Post by eloisant » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 8:54 AM UTC

ForgotIdAgain wrote: post #148

keyle wrote: post #17

I've been in those companies where "struggling departments" ended up getting all the praises and raise in budgets the following quarter because of the heroic saves they did, and raising awareness on how important they are... For stuff they totally caused on themselves. Meanwhile, my perfectly purring department was struggling to keep the lights on. It's a serious problem in this industry due to the disconnect between…

I guess the point of view is that if a department is well running, it means it is overressourced. So you reduce the ressources until it's breaking point, just enough for it to not fail. A jaded service manager told me it was part of its official training: if the clients was too satisfied that meant that human ressources were wasted on them, so he had to spin plates between clients. I guess it was economically optimal…

Post by blitzar » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 9:15 AM UTC

whatever1 wrote: post #47

I never gave credit to my electricity company for delivering electricity to me. I only get mad when there is an outage.

Post by doublerabbit » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 9:30 AM UTC

thelastgallon wrote: post #91

This is how people get promoted at work. They break something, it escalates and gets visibility, emails sent to executives. Now, they 'fix' it, many thank yous from everyone for a job well done. Another version of this is delay the work you are supposed to do a long time back and let it gain visibility. Executives are blind, they can't see work being done by people who take ownership and get shit done before it becom…

Post by palata » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 9:58 AM UTC

keyle wrote: post #17

I've been in those companies where "struggling departments" ended up getting all the praises and raise in budgets the following quarter because of the heroic saves they did, and raising awareness on how important they are... For stuff they totally caused on themselves. Meanwhile, my perfectly purring department was struggling to keep the lights on. It's a serious problem in this industry due to the disconnect between…

Post by eru » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 10:01 AM UTC

HlessClaudesman wrote: post #126

dchevell wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By building pain into the system. If your hands dealt with injury directly without sending pain signals up to your brain, you'd never change the behaviour that led to that harm or reconsider your priorities. Like it or not, sometimes the best thing for an organisation isn't to just fix every problem and prevent it from bubbling up; it needs to be treated like a learning opportunity for org leadership, which means sen…

The Dunning Kruger effect suggests that the people who caused the pain are also those least likely to feel it.