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Focus Is Saying No

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Re: Focus Is Saying No

#11

Post by Aurornis »

hexis wrote: post #9

Seems pretty awful that the manager let him work on software upgrades for two years without telling him that work would not lead to the promotion he was clearly planning on.

> without telling him that work would not lead to the promotion he was clearly planning on.

The way I read it, he waited two years to express his desire to pursue promotion.

The manager saw the topic as a starting point for the promotion discussion and tried to explain what steps to take to get there.

The employee saw the discussion as the end point of his unrevealed promotion quest and was surprised that his history alone was not aligned with promotion exportations.

This all could have been clarified with a simple conversation 1-2 years ago expressing intent to pursue promotion and asking what it would take to get there.

Re: Focus Is Saying No

#12

Post by kaveh_h »

Nice post, really relatable. It also feels like a management miss. If someone spends years modernizing and only finds out later it “doesn’t count,” that should have been clarified early on.

Tech debt work absolutely adds value, it just rarely gets measured or recognized. Maybe that is one reason so many companies struggle over time, they keep skipping payments on their tech debt interest.

Re: Focus Is Saying No

#13

Post by majormajor »

If you're waiting for your manager to tell you "do X" before saying, "no, I won't do X, it's not valuable" you are still way behind for high-level promotions even on an individual-contributor track.

Figure out what is important to the business - and specifically, what's important to the business under you're manager's area of responsibility. Figure out and clearly articulate why. Sometimes this will be modernization (especially if there are ongoing costly outage, downtime, or compliance issues), sometimes it will be features (if your customers, stakeholders, and other devs aren't having big issues from tech debt. Proactively propose this to your manager, work collaboratively to build the roadmap. Your manager rarely has enough time to deep into the weeds on prioritization from a technical POV, so your input will be appreciated as long as (a) it's actually in line with business priorities in a way relevant to your manager, and (b) your manager isn't a paranoid psychopath who thinks you're undermining them or coming for their job.

But if your manager is a paranoid psychopath you've got bigger problems and you're not gonna finesse your way around them by declining tasks either.

You should also communicate your career goals and expectations - this might help you figure out "is my manager a psychopath" earlier rather than later too. A strong manager would've stopped you from spinning your wheels much earlier, in this scenario; but even a meh manager can help you climb the ladder if you're collaborative. Especially if they start to feel like you're key to their success too.

Re: Focus Is Saying No

#14

Post by beder »

Aurornis wrote: post #11
hexis wrote: post #9

Seems pretty awful that the manager let him work on software upgrades for two years without telling him that work would not lead to the promotion he was clearly planning on.

> without telling him that work would not lead to the promotion he was clearly planning on. The way I read it, he waited two years to express his desire to pursue promotion. The manager saw the topic as a starting point for the promotion discussion and tried to explain what steps to take to get there. The employee saw the discussion as the end point of his unrevealed promotion quest and was surprised that his history…

This is how I read it too. What's more, it looks like they're interested in going senior -> staff; at all Large Tech Companies, senior is a perfectly reasonable "terminal" role for a SWE, and many SWEs don't want to get promoted to staff. (Staff SWE is a different job from senior SWE; you might not want want to do that job, and that's typically fine.)

So I think the lesson here is wrong too - when the manager said

> These tasks aren’t business priorities and had no impact on customers and other teams

that didn't mean they were worthless tasks - just that they weren't business priorities and had no impact on customers or other teams. Which is probably true(ish - I would have phrased it very differently if I were their manager).

Improving the release process is great, and helps the team a ton - and indirectly helps customers by enabling the team to ship faster. This is incredibly valuable! And at the right scale, it can be a staff job: at my Large Tech Company, I know several people that have been promoted to staff SWE for this kind of work, but it's for systems that hundreds of SWEs work on. I also know people that have been promoted to senior SWE for this kind of work - these are systems that tens of SWEs work on. It sounds like this example was more like that - this person was doing a good senior SWE job, and the manager didn't see any reason to course correct given that they had given no signal they wanted to get promoted.

Re: Focus Is Saying No

#15

Post by lolive »

Aurornis wrote: post #10

> Now if my manager asks me to do tasks that I believe add no value to the team or business, I’ll politely say no. This is the wrong lesson to take from this situation. If you start saying no to tasks assigned by your manager, you are not going to get promoted. You’re going to end up on PIP track for insubordination. The appropriate response is to communicate. The OP arrived in this situation because they didn’t comm…

During a face2face with my n+2, he once told me « manage your manager ». I discovered later that he had been forced to hire my n+1 but did not like him at all. And that the message was basically: « he is a bozo whereas you a competent engineer. Don’t be fooled by the organization chart. »

So sometimes saying no to your n+1 is totally in line with your n+2 :)

Re: Focus Is Saying No

#16

Post by Buttons840 »

Aurornis wrote: post #10

> Now if my manager asks me to do tasks that I believe add no value to the team or business, I’ll politely say no. This is the wrong lesson to take from this situation. If you start saying no to tasks assigned by your manager, you are not going to get promoted. You’re going to end up on PIP track for insubordination. The appropriate response is to communicate. The OP arrived in this situation because they didn’t comm…

On a related tangent:

Does anyone have any advice on how to politely say "I like the company, I want to stay, but I don't like my current work and if it doesn't change for the better I'm going to leave in 6-months".

I once tried to say this as politely as possible, but I think I might have been too polite and tactful and they didn't understand. I had a date in mind, and had a conversation 6-months, 3-months, and 1-month before I left. When I announced my departure they tried to get me to stay.

Re: Focus Is Saying No

#17

Post by doesnt_know »

Aurornis wrote: post #10

> Now if my manager asks me to do tasks that I believe add no value to the team or business, I’ll politely say no. This is the wrong lesson to take from this situation. If you start saying no to tasks assigned by your manager, you are not going to get promoted. You’re going to end up on PIP track for insubordination. The appropriate response is to communicate. The OP arrived in this situation because they didn’t comm…

> If you start saying no to tasks assigned by your manager, you are not going to get promoted. You’re going to end up on PIP track for insubordination.

I've had a lot of success in asking "are you asking me to do this or telling me", when I've been tasked with something I think is extremely dumb.

If the response is "I'm asking", then I will usually respond with some variation of "can you assign it to someone else, or better yet, throw the task in the garbage".

If the response is "I'm telling you", then I'll go on a spiel about how I think it's incredibly stupid and the people involved in this decision are bad at their jobs, then get on and do it.

But if you're reading this, there is a good chance you are American, so take this advice with a massive grain of salt as I'm not. The culture here in NZ sounds extremely different to almost everything I've read on this forum.

Re: Focus Is Saying No

#18

Post by shibaprasadb »

Buttons840 wrote: post #16
Aurornis wrote: post #10

> Now if my manager asks me to do tasks that I believe add no value to the team or business, I’ll politely say no. This is the wrong lesson to take from this situation. If you start saying no to tasks assigned by your manager, you are not going to get promoted. You’re going to end up on PIP track for insubordination. The appropriate response is to communicate. The OP arrived in this situation because they didn’t comm…

On a related tangent: Does anyone have any advice on how to politely say "I like the company, I want to stay, but I don't like my current work and if it doesn't change for the better I'm going to leave in 6-months". I once tried to say this as politely as possible, but I think I might have been too polite and tactful and they didn't understand. I had a date in mind, and had a conversation 6-months, 3-months, and 1-mo…

In a similar boat right now. The org is good. So is the culture. The manager is also good. But the work....! Neither learning something nor finding any alignment. Really confused.

Re: Focus Is Saying No

#19

Post by teddyh »

Company without a strategy:

[Phone rings]

Employee thinks: “Oh-oh… What should I do?”

Company with a strategy:

Employee says on the phone: “We don’t do that”

— Build a Better Life by Stealing Office Supplies: Dogbert's Big Book of Business, Scott Adams, 1991

Re: Focus Is Saying No

#20

Post by doesnt_know »

Buttons840 wrote: post #16
Aurornis wrote: post #10

> Now if my manager asks me to do tasks that I believe add no value to the team or business, I’ll politely say no. This is the wrong lesson to take from this situation. If you start saying no to tasks assigned by your manager, you are not going to get promoted. You’re going to end up on PIP track for insubordination. The appropriate response is to communicate. The OP arrived in this situation because they didn’t comm…

On a related tangent: Does anyone have any advice on how to politely say "I like the company, I want to stay, but I don't like my current work and if it doesn't change for the better I'm going to leave in 6-months". I once tried to say this as politely as possible, but I think I might have been too polite and tactful and they didn't understand. I had a date in mind, and had a conversation 6-months, 3-months, and 1-mo…

I personally don't think ultimatums are a tool that you should ever employ in an employment situation outside of collective action.

You can just leave off the ultimatum and attempt to improve your situation by communicating it in a way that is directly actionable (I'd like to work on X instead of Y, can you arrange that?). You'll have your own internal deadlines of course, but you shouldn't communicate them.

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