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Story: “It would be career limiting..."

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Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#291

Post by [deleted] »

yarg wrote: post #288
bumby wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m familiar with the story, and actually came across your comment a few days ago. He didn’t feel right about it, but that’s not the same as hard data. They didn’t actually have data on the performance of the material at those temperatures, which is part of the big discussion with his managers. He essentially said, “we don’t know how it will act in those conditions.” Granted, on a safety critical system, having no da…

Perhaps - but one engineer with a niggle is a problem, and a room full of them is absolutely a justificantion for re-evaluation.

[deleted]

Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#292

Post by chaostheory »

lmm wrote: post #248
chaostheory wrote: post #171

> Two years later, the client canceled the two-years-late project before it ever launched. They ate a $60M loss. This has to be a project for the government

Disagree; could be any large organisation - government, NGO or private company, it's all pretty much the same once you get too big to manage.

Yes, but they ate $60 million in a failed project. I don’t feel that a private entity would do the same thing

Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#293

Post by lmm »

chaostheory wrote: post #292
lmm wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree; could be any large organisation - government, NGO or private company, it's all pretty much the same once you get too big to manage.

Yes, but they ate $60 million in a failed project. I don’t feel that a private entity would do the same thing

They absolutely do lol.

Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#294

Post by _carbyau_ »

peteradio wrote: post #205
vaidhy wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Once you are a Manager, you are NOT an engineer.

If Engineers don't like Managers-with-no-Engineering-background, then Engineers should try to fill the Manager role from their own ranks.

Otherwise, what else do you expect will happen? Like a lot of things, you won't win if you are not in the race.

Having said that, having an Ex-Engineer as a manager doesn't guarantee anything. You need the right ExEngineer - a person who can manage!

Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#295

Post by WesleyJohnson »

sitzkrieg wrote: post #270
peteradio wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

pride and ego are not rare in small/solo dev situations in my experience

He allegedly used to work for Amazon as a developer, but I never did my research. So ego certainly could've come into play.

Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#296

Post by WesleyJohnson »

peteradio wrote: post #258
WesleyJohnson wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I didn't get to know them well enough to really say. There were anecdotes from other employees (before I started) about him falling asleep at his desk (during work hours) on several occasions. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't done that a few times in my career, so certainly not a smoking gun. It's hard to explain, he just wasn't very excitable and had no sense of urgency. "It's fine, it's fine. No big deal. I'll do it."

Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#297

Post by thaneross »

invig wrote: post #202
VincentEvans wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The skill of reading a room in this particular case - is to realize the kind of place this is and go elsewhere before going through all that effort for it be disregarded by bruised egos, not do even more unnecessary work to bail out incompetent managers.

I'd go a step further and say don't work for people who are clearly liars.

I have known very few managers who didn't routinely lie. The advantages of subtle (or not so subtle) manipulation are too tempting when trying to get something from someone.

Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#298

Post by duped »

fleddr wrote: post #118
duped wrote: post #47

I mean this story is cathartic, but I don't get what the "rabble rousers" expected to happen. You don't go into a meeting like that to present problems, but to present solutions. And a 12 month delay on a $60 million contract isn't a solution, it's another problem for the sales/client success people. And doing it in front of a group of management, no less - that's like firing a shot across the bow, declaring that the…

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…

I think you're taking it in a different direction than I meant. It's not about massaging anyone. Information can only be acted on to effect change if it's delivered with the context to do so.

I've been in similar situations. The fallacy is thinking that "truth bombs" are an effective communication style. If you want to effect change you need to do some social engineering and politicking. Hate it all you want, but the human psyche isn't a technical problem to solve with data and figures. What you do is manage expectations and present ideas that let people walk out of the meeting feeling like there's some direction that can be taken without disaster. Otherwise you're Chicken Little.

Good management responds to bad situations by negotiating scope and translating delays into milestones that are achievable. Like the story makes ICs feel like heroes for dropping truth bombs and quitting before seeing anything change, then seeming to be proven correct is an example of that. In my opinion they failed at the task given to them, which was to analyze the state of the project and implicitly give management something to do about it.

And that was a lesson I learned early in my career, being tasked with analyzing the state of a project and assessing why it was shit. The mistake was concluding that it was shit, because someone got fired afterwards who could have actually done a good job. What I didn't do was deliver information in a context that could have translated into change. The same is true of the ICs in the story. This is bragging about failure.

Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#299

Post by [deleted] »

kazinator wrote: post #93
ddoolin wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't sound like that was the job of this little committee. As written, it was to review and particularly identify extra work. Presenting solutions to this kind of problem isn't explicitly and often implicitly the function of the developer(s), especially in a room full of managers. Whose job it is literally to identify solutions to this exact kind of problem.

The managers might not understand the exact nature of the work. They want to know how they can reduce the scope: for which they need information about which work is urgent, or necessary at all. The mission is "please identify and estimate all untracked work so we can blindly put all of it into the plan, no matter how it delays the project".

[deleted]

Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#300

Post by srcreigh »

bombcar wrote: post #240
maptime wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, never ask a user what they want But you can't go wrong with talking to users to understand the problems they are dealing with

I've heard "The Mom Test" is a good book around that, but I've never read it. https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone/...

It’s great. It strongly warns against ego pitching, aka talking about your fancy solution, which only prompts people to say “That’s great” so you go away.

The whole book is basically how to get useful information by being curious about the potential customer, how to decode “That’s great” by asking for commitments/intros/money, and also a bit about how to know whether you’re talking to the right person in the first place.

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