Say No
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Say No
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Re: Say No
#2In my experience Muskovitz was probably three weeks to three months too late in saying no. It's a really hard thing, culturally, socially shutting down people face to face like that is something we are all wired not to do, on top of which he probably derived a lot of personal identity and kudos from being the goto guy - hard to turn off.
But the pressure had to be immense to react like that - and one suspects that it's only because of good well balanced people around that they could take the social shutdown and come back to work still focused instead of suddenly fostering a poisonous atmosphere - something that can easily happen if the no was taken as "no I don't value you" instead of "no we have to find new ways of working"
Would be interesting to hear others views of this formative time.
Re: Say No
#3A lot of this is culture dependent I believe, but i am under the impression that at least on western countries you cannot do this a lot of times without a high cost, specially if you re not a manager.
If someone comes to your desk directly, you are supposed to stop what you are doing and give your attention to that person, even if you are working on something really urgent.
Refusing meeting requests is also not well seen unless you have another appointment, meetnaping happens all the time.
A lot has to do also with open space offices, where everybody is just sitting there and makes it even more awkward, and you are right there available to be interrupted.
Interruptions from persons on your own team are to be taken with even more priority, the modern open office is just a high-interruption environment and there is nothing to be done about it.
In the end it might be really a good thing, because if a person is blocked it walks to the desk of someone else and sometimes can be unblocked and the company as a whole goes forward.
Doing what his boss did of cutting another person off with a 'not now' is not something that his boss can get away with a lot of times, even if he is under pressure: its demoralizing, it just ends up creating a weird atmosphere.
One solution might be: one or two days of remote work a week for everybody.
Re: Say No
#4This is also a good reason to make explicit if your "go-to" person in your organization is on the management track or the technical track. This is something I think we struggled with for awhile at Kiva where we didn't make explicit that you could remain technical and still get promoted, so people would become Engineering Mangers only to then expect to still stay in their corner plugging away on code in the zone without interruptions. But when you are the guy tasked to train others and generally help people clear roadblocks (as managers generally are designated to do), then it hurts everyone when you instead try to hang on to a "coder only" mentality. You get frustrated cause you are getting interrupted and the people interrupting you get frustrated by getting brushed off or feeling like they are wasting your time.
Fortunately, we eventually made it clear that you can move up in title, but remain focused on engineering instead of management. This helped tremendously to set it up so we have a set of people who have time set aside specifically for talking about problems, and you can chat with them in order to solve problems while leaving the folks solving code problems alone so they can maintain their productivity.
Re: Say No
#5That's Facebook's culture. They're building a new HQ building. It has one of the world's largest bullpens. Almost everybody is in one huge room.
(Floor plan: http://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2012/08/dezeen_Frank-Gehry-...)
Apple is at the other extreme - they keep their groups isolated, often behind locked doors. Microsoft used to run recruiting ads for programmers pointing out that their programmers get offices with doors. Google tends to have medium-sized bullpens surrounded by many small glass conference rooms.
Re: Say No
#6While I agree it's important to learn how to say no sometimes in order to keep priorities and deadlines, I feel though that what is missing in this advice is that you should also learn how to say no in a manner that doesn't generate negativity and a tense atmosphere. It really doesn't take that much to add a sincere smile and say you're busy right now, perhaps a bit later.
Re: Say No
#7[deleted]
Re: Say No
#8That's just rude. A short and polite "I'm a little busy, can we talk later" would require no more effort or concentration than just saying no.
Re: Say No
#9This article has inspired me to say no to Hacker News for the rest of day... :-)
Re: Say No
#10I wish I had a little LED at my desk that would sync with my IM status to show people when I was busy or available to chat online or in person. One of the earliest usability features in the online world but still not replicated in the real world.