261–270 of 342 posts
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Seeing this and the todolu work advice girl ... I think educating people on how threats are composed and used is something that everyone should understand. I'm now realized that I've been soft threatened quite a lot.
Being able to understand threats is not always beneficial.
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Any anecdotes of a company that was successfully split up as you suggest?
No, but it feels good to say it. I just think middle management is a recipe for disaster. Their perceived high status means they aren't easily criticized or managed for rational output in a way normal workers are managed. For some, middle management is a mere bus stop on the way to the top. So they play it hard. Elbow tactics. Other knows they end in middle management and forever try to sustain artificial kingdoms by…
Isn't this the ironic part of the post? The "middle managers" empowered the common workers who were ostensibly in the best position to identify and solve the problem. Yet those common workers seem to interpret their role as just messengers and not wholly owning the situation by also offering alternative solutions. It's not even clear to me that they identified the root problem so that it wouldn't happen elsewhere *
* yes, they said it was performing work that wasn't spec'd. But why were they doing it? Bad requirements management? Bad contract management? Something else?
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Your take is exactly what is wrong with the culture. An existential problem is not a problem because you didn't sell it correctly. You first need to "massage" the individuals to create some kind of coalition. A coalition willing to accept basic facts or responsibility. If a CEO were to be a fly on the wall in this room and overhear it all, they ought to fire every single manager in the room. Quite obviously they are…
> You first need to "massage" the individuals to create some kind of coalition. A coalition willing to accept basic facts or responsibility. Hard agree with this approach! Why surprise and upset people enmasse when you can talk to individuals more privately and test the waters beforehand.
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Some of what you said is true, but your analog is a little off. It wasn’t a junior and a senior in the same role, it was a technical team deputized to do what they did, and a management group that apparently thought the deputies would fail, or convinced themselves their conclusions were wrong. The failure here is not one of lack of politics or communication on the part of the author or their team, but on the culture…
For what it’s worth, I don’t think they could have done more. But the conclusion of the story is to heroically drive off a cliff, and say “it’s all I could do.” That’s where I disagree. If it were me, I would have privately (emphasis on private) worked my way up the chain of command, trying to alert more and more people that there was a serious problem brewing. The meeting in the story was obviously going to be a fai…
I raised my concerns up the chain of command, and got to a VP of the new parent company, who was looking into the situation until he was let go (or sacked, depending upon your point of view). All I wanted to do was go back to our previous style of development, which worked. But no, the parent company wants to do it their way.
I left shortly thereafter.
[1] Our customer was (well, technically still is if they're still a customer) a major cell phone carrier where a sprint for them is two years, not two weeks.
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Everyone should rise to the political occasion. Why is that the engineers should not rise? Politics is how we solve problems without resorting to fists.
Engineering is the engineers domain. If engineers are expected to puppet master the managers then what is the point of the manager?
exactly
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> concoct a plan to stage the product development and release such that it gets done and you don't cost a giant contract Yes, always showing up with a solution to problems that you've surfaced is a good idea and good for your career, ... BUT: isn't coming up with a solution to this problem literally the job of the management team that they presented to? If management hears "the thing you think will happen will absolu…
Suppose you were a junior engineer working with a senior engineer. They gave you a task, and you came to a similar conclusion: it was their job to do X, but they weren't doing it. Would you simply tell them they're not doing their job, or would you ask questions, talk in private, and try to dig in tactfully? When I was 22 or so, I did go around telling a certain senior engineer that they weren't doing their job. I st…
One of the many benefits of being having extremely employee friendly laws is that you can absolutely do this.
It still doesn’t really help, but it’s not ‘career limiting’ either.
I could never relate to people who care about their career, "success", getting ahead, or climbing the corporate ladder. For me virtually everything else in life has been more important, and careers/jobs were just a necessary evil because it's almost impossible to survive without money.
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I wanted to touch on that: one of the things you learn is that it’s better to be liked than right. We devs often fixate on whether we’re right and the other person is wrong. One specific incident comes to mind. I was working on Heroes of Newerth, a DotA clone. We achieved a bit of popularity in those days, and we reached around 50k concurrent users. So our servers tended to melt. One day, the servers went south, and…
If it makes you feel any better, I don't think technical issues were the reason HoN failed. For context, I have played a lot of DotA2 and HoN (5.2k hours in DotA2, probably 1k hours in HoN). This is anecdotal, but I was never really bothered by outages and neither were the other people that I played with. Instead, I think HoN made some very bad decisions regarding cosmetics and fostered an extremely toxic playerbase.…
> drove me away to play DotA2
How toxic is the HoN playerbase if DotA2 is an improvement? I don’t think I’ve ever not enjoyed my games as much as in DotA2.
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I was hired on as a full-stack developer to help a 2 person team (dev and designer) get a year-long project over the finish line. This was a November and the project was slated to go live on January 1. My first week was getting my PC configured, orientations, onboarding meetings with various external departments and perusing the project to get familiar. Week 2 I was supposed to get assignments from the lead developer…
I'm baffled when people (the lead) behave this way. I'm not asking this sarcastically and you probably wouldn't know, but were they on some heavy sedatives or psych drugs?