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

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

#121

Post by k3liutZu »

fugaziboutit wrote: post #38
timmg wrote: post #9

There are a lot of things like this. My favorite is how elegant solutions often look simple in retrospect. So if you noodle on a problem for a while and then come up with a clever solution: once you explain it to someone they'll be like, "yeah, of course." Meanwhile the guy next to you that overcomplicates the problem ends up getting kudos for building something so difficult :D

"Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte." ("I have made this longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.") Blaise Pascal

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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

#122

Post by atoav »

SteveGerencser wrote: post #101

I began migrating from network/hardware/IT work and into marketing after nearly 2 years of heavy lifting getting ready for Y2K. In the end, "nothing happened," so all that time and money was wasted, according to nearly every company I worked with. Even had one demand a full refund. I agreed as long as I could revert all the work that I had done. They agreed, and the next day after that their entire system collapsed.…

On your dad:

"This is what my regular customers pay me. If I hired one of my friends or relatives I see it as my duty to pay them at least what they are worth, this is the way you raised me."

I believe this to be true btw. If someone is really your friend, you want them to do well and that means you pay what they usually get or you don't bother them and get someone else.

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

#124

Post by atoav »

locknitpicker wrote: post #112
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…

> 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. I don't think that's it. Emergent problems require attention and action from leadership, who in turn can make the problem visible to higher ups. This creates signal, and positive feedback when the problem is fi…

Well I think it is even more complex. If you're a plumber in a rotten system of pipes the whole company depends on, you can fix issues day in and day out, without speaking a word and they will notice everything is a bit unreliable and thus you do a bad job. You could do the exact same work, but make a big thing about every major fix, warn people a week ahead, give them the feeling the company depends on it and then do the exact same work and tell them how you fixed it. Suddenly you did a good job, despite you literally doing the exact same thing with your hands.

The difference is how it was communicated. Most non-Tech/non-infrastructure-people got no clue about these things. If they know you're battling the demons of plumbing on their behalf they will thank you, if you're the weird guy that has smeared dirt in the face and is seen once a week while the plumbing fails ever so often, guess what.

That means even if the problems and their fixes remain the same, the communication around them really matters. Tech people can be extremely bad with this. And if we're talking IT it is really the plumbing that holds the company together.

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

#125

Post by menaerus »

pulse7 wrote: post #104
SteveGerencser wrote: post #101

I began migrating from network/hardware/IT work and into marketing after nearly 2 years of heavy lifting getting ready for Y2K. In the end, "nothing happened," so all that time and money was wasted, according to nearly every company I worked with. Even had one demand a full refund. I agreed as long as I could revert all the work that I had done. They agreed, and the next day after that their entire system collapsed.…

I'm sorry your dad didn't respect your IT work...

If I move out a bit of my circle, where people do all kinds of work, I'd say that there's generally a stigma on the "IT" workers. Moreover the stigma is there even within the IT company/industry itself, where sales, marketing, non-engineering parts of management, and other similar types of supporting roles also look down on the engineering. And this unfortunately includes family members too. I learned that people are mostly envy but when you're surrounded by many it can become overwhelming - numerous times I heard phrases like "oh, you're bricklayers of a modern age" ... like wtf

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

#126

Post by HlessClaudesman »

dchevell wrote: post #73
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…

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.

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

#127

Post by sfn42 »

cm11 wrote: post #65

I'd guess a lot of people here consider this "reality" at this point. Has anyone come up with a response—not a fix for the company or leaders behaving this way, but a response for their own path? Did you change from a quiet diligent one to manipulating and playing the game (now that you know the game)? Did you go from quiet and diligent to quiet and not diligent (why do good work when meh work does the trick)? Anothe…

I just do my job to the best of my ability. I have to change jobs every couple years anyway to get proper pay bumps, so I don't really care what the higher ups think of me. The people near me are who I'll use as references and they generally know I'm great at what I do.

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

#128

Post by friendzis »

atoav wrote: post #114
antonvs wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is it's systemic. Ultimately, pain needs to come from outside. As long as society rewards incompetence, we'll have incompetent organizations.

No it does not need to come from the outside. If you're an underfunded IT department and your network has an issue twice a week, you will get that funding. If you're heroically obscuring the fact that things are falling apart you won't. That means even if you could somehow, heroically fix it, it isn't perceived as such if nobody ever felt the problem and saw you fix it. This is a pain signal. Some IT dude saying thin…

> This is a pain signal. Some IT dude saying things are crap in every meeting is not.

More often than not it is some IT dude observing network crap-out once a month, performing analysis, noticing an upward trend and then saying in every meeting that things are crap and there will be issues twice a week in some time.

> If you're an underfunded IT department and your network has an issue twice a week, you will get that funding.

More often than not, if the IT department is already neglected they will not get that funding. Things will be delayed until the crap outs eventually actually happen twice a week and then some external heroic consultants will be hired to fix the issue underfunded IT department "could not".

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

#129

Post by chii »

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.

That's why you change it to make the pain work. This does need CEO-level cooperation to implement, but i think it is possible.

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

#130

Post by Forgeties79 »

dchevell wrote: post #73
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…

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…

Honestly? I’m just super direct with the exec team now after trying to do this dance. Obviously this is not allowed at every company, I’m just lucky to be at a place where the company culture allows for this.

I’ll ask for something preventative or that otherwise hardens our systems. They ask “is it a need?” and I’ll say something like “we can function without, but that means we have a 5-10% chance in the next 6mo of having a major failure and embarrassing ourselves in front of a live audience in the thousands as well as our client.” They then decide how much that risk is worth to them, and whatever they decide is kind of out of my hands at that point. If the thing I warned them of comes because they didn’t pay for it, I can point to the receipts (though I’ve never had to, we’re small enough people remember those conversations).

60% of the time they just get what I need maybe? But ultimately it’s about CYA. Tell them what’s up, tell them what the solution is, tell them what the consequences are if they don’t do the solution, and make them decide.

Again this obviously depends on company culture and structure, but I can’t imagine on the only person who can do this!

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