Ask for no, don't ask for yes (2022)

I have always used this method and my managers love me because they know I get important shit done without much supervision or needing dozens of planning meetings. It doesn’t even feel like there is any leash at all.

Of course the company i work at isn’t extremely disfunctional and a growing startup, so once we move into enterprise territory it might change the culture and it’s more about saving your ass and less about doing actual work.

if you tell somebody you're going to to do something, you're not asking them to take responsibility. you're telling them that you're taking responsibility for whatever you're going to do. If you ask somebody's permission, you're asking them to take some portion of responsibility for what you're doing.

which is the same risk that the sibling comment is warning about - if you're trying to do this for things that you aren't ultimately responsible for, you're goign to piss people off. only take responsibility for things that are actually within your area of responsibility.

If there is a decision that you need to make don’t ask me for input, do the thing that you think makes sense and then write down what you did and why.

If it’s the wrong thing I’ll update the docs to make it clear for next time.

Without this I would always wake up in the morning to an inbox full of questions and no work done, rather than an inbox full of finished tasks and maybe a couple of corrections.

With LLMs if I ask for a code analysis and plan to fix something they tend to put a list of questions at the end about which they want confirmation.

Then I have to waste time saying yes or no or coming up with the solution. If I tell them to instead just make assumptions and record them all at the end then I only need to correct 1 or 2 assumptions if required.

It will be new to someone.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

But even amongst those for whom it isn’t, sometimes a reminder of things you know is useful and may come at just the right time.