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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]

#191

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…

> 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. At some point in one's early single-digit they learn that touching hot stuff hurts. They start to avoid stuff that they know is hot, but still come in contact with hot stuff accidentally. Later they learn techniques minimizing probability of to…

Unlike a teenage child, management has the unfortunate effect of being made up of people who can leave the company, forget past experience, etc. So you do kind of have to treat them like a child who needs continuous feedback and signals.

For a more broad example than IT cost center stuff, you can look at how some large companies go through cycles of arrogance with their customer bases, launch a product that fails, and then are humbled enough to try and pivot and earn good will back. Microsoft is always somewhere in this cycle for instance. The organization can never really learn this lesson permanently and will "regress" from time to time based on financial pressure or greed or some other impulse.

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

#194

Pendatically speaking, people do get credit for fixing problems that never happened. E.g. if the problems are quantifiable and there's a record, like dropping homicides from 100 per year to 20 per year in a city. Those extra homicides "didn't happen", but the improvement is understood. For an one-off problem, it depends on how clear the path to the problem is. An electrician doing an inspection and noticing and fixin…

> Those extra homicides "didn't happen", but the improvement is understood.

People are gonna criticize by saying "see? it was an overreaction to the problem, since there's not been many homicides at all!", when in fact the homicides were prevented by fixing the original problem. Same way with the electrician: "how much are you gonna charge again? And you're charging for a fix to a problem that didn't happen yet? Nah, I'll call you when the problem happens".

Its maddening.

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

#195
My time in IT has really oscillated between these two extremes:

- "Everything around is working just fine. What are we paying IT for?"

- "Everything is broken. What are we even paying IT for?"

Personally, I strive for the former rather than the latter; I like to say "If I do my job right, you never know I'm here." But that's what got me let go.

(and for karma's sake, I keep in touch with folks at the old company; it's an absolute crapshow. So I got that going for me; which is nice)

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

#197
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…

Which they should. I've been lucky enough to work at places that had great non-technical managers that promoted based on great execution, as well as highly technical managers that also promoted based on great execution.

Now I'm at the other kind of place and it sucks. They'll fire the performative engineers though during layoff season. It's almost like they like playing politics until it really matters.

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

#198
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's pretty silly. 2000 Euros is almost nothing in the grand scheme of things, and it would have showed that the policy was sincere.

Even dumber, they've now got a disgruntled employee, and everyone around them knows they were cheated by the company. If the policy is wrong and needs to be more specific, pay it out this time and change the policy. Don't just break your word. The policy they think they've implemented is stupid. "Save money in someone else's department" is just going to create a ton of anger as people rush to step on each other's toe…

Freefall has a discussion of that (mini-arc starting here: https://freefallmirror.com/ff4300/fv04289.htm).

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

#199
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams that just work can't exist in stack ranked companies. You can't keep the team as a whole, you always have to cut someone. Which means that everyone is playing the game to not be cut.

True, stack ranking is a terrible management approach, and if you work at a company that does it, then playing the game is the only way. But frankly, I'd be looking to get out anyway. The best way to play thr stack ranking game is to be job hunting. But I'm not sure the author of this thread works in such a place. In that case the game is different. In the case where the "urgent midnight fix" is important, it's neces…

> I'm not sure the author of this thread works in such a place

I worked at Amazon, previously.

> Management needs visibility.

I know this very well, and this is a problem. The nature of jobs in any industry is that not all of them are equally visible. As a manager, you should be proactive in assessing the state of things rather than waiting for people to deliver visibility to you. People who deliver "visibility" in spades are often charlatans. People who deliver fixes, code, and improvements in spades usually do not have time to manage their own public relations for your visibility.

However, you have ALL the tools to proactively see what they've been upto. You can attend their standups and other regular meetings, you can set up an updates document, you can see what they've been posting in Slack, you can look at their PRs and commits, you can look at JIRA tickets, and in the age of AI you can have AI explain to you all of the parts of the above that you do not understand.

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

#200
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's pretty silly. 2000 Euros is almost nothing in the grand scheme of things, and it would have showed that the policy was sincere.

Even dumber, they've now got a disgruntled employee, and everyone around them knows they were cheated by the company. If the policy is wrong and needs to be more specific, pay it out this time and change the policy. Don't just break your word. The policy they think they've implemented is stupid. "Save money in someone else's department" is just going to create a ton of anger as people rush to step on each other's toe…

> a disgruntled employee

With access to the SSL certificates.

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