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Focus Is Saying No

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Re: Focus Is Saying No

#31

Post by lolive »

Buttons840 wrote: post #21
lolive wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

By the time a company is that dysfunctional, why bother? Just do the minimum to get paid. I mean it. I want to work for a company where everyone is working towards the common goal of making the company profitable. But there comes a point where the company is overrun by politics and selfish and harmful decisions. By the time dysfunctional company politics empower a "bozo", why should I stress or put any care into such…

My company is insanely profitable, plagued with bozos as middle managers. But after some years you have your network of righteous fellows, and live with them much more than with your organization chart. So that is not a big deal.

But I agree that promotion is not exactly an option, as I would become crazy only surrounded by bozos.

There is also an expert path, for people wanting to be promoted, but for their technical excellence. Guess what? There too, the political tricks have led to empower not so excellent people, i.e bozo-compatible ones.

Re: Focus Is Saying No

#32

Post by QuantumGood »

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…

Saying "no" can get you into trouble in a hierarchy. There are many ways leading to no without saying "no", such as:

• I'll look into it

• I'll see what I can do

• I'll review that right away

This isn't me saying "say these things", I'm just pointing out this is an age-old problem, and saying "no" inwardly is different than saying it outwardly. Various ways of inquiring about options are also commonplace.

Re: Focus Is Saying No

#33

Post by iddan »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #30
kaveh_h wrote: post #12

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.

As a manager you may have 10 people reporting to you. Some do more important work, some do less important work, but when you are considering them for promotions there are other factors too. I am not talking about promotions from junior dev to regular or regular to senior, I am talking about promotions to positions where they are responsible for other people. In my almost 30 years working in IT in multiple companies I…

https://youtu.be/QplyFXgIx7Q?si=zhSSJ5Hcu2hNWZkz

Re: Focus Is Saying No

#34

Post by jcelerier »

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…

> but I don't like my current work and if it doesn't change for the better

I try really hard but never understand where does this belief comes that you have to love your work.

Re: Focus Is Saying No

#35

Post by bluGill »

doesnt_know wrote: post #20
Buttons840 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ever is too strong, but remember the less often you give an ultimatum the more powerful it is when you do. When you have a long standing reputation (must come first) as a 'team player' a sudden ultimatum will get a lot of attention, but it will be years before you can give another.

if like many you switch jobs every few years you can never develop that reputation needed for an ulimatum in the first place. (Staying for years is never 100% in your power but some jobs have better chances of it)

Re: Focus Is Saying No

#36

Post by eptcyka »

QuantumGood wrote: post #32
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…

Saying "no" can get you into trouble in a hierarchy. There are many ways leading to no without saying "no", such as: • I'll look into it • I'll see what I can do • I'll review that right away This isn't me saying "say these things", I'm just pointing out this is an age-old problem, and saying "no" inwardly is different than saying it outwardly. Various ways of inquiring about options are also commonplace.

If I tell someone to do thing A and they look into it and decide to not do it, the reason better be a whole lot better than I didn’t feel like it or I wouldn’t be promoted if I did that.

Re: Focus Is Saying No

#37

Post by bluGill »

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…

Managers should figure out plans with their employees. It is too easy for someone focused on one thing to get lost in something that doesn't matter. It is your manager job to stop from doing that.

note that often preventing problems is not rewarded. Putting out a fire you caused is. Good managers will help you explain why this not obviously useful thing is valuable because of the proplem it prevented.

Re: Focus Is Saying No

#38

Post by ants_everywhere »

Buttons840 wrote: post #21
lolive wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

By the time a company is that dysfunctional, why bother? Just do the minimum to get paid. I mean it. I want to work for a company where everyone is working towards the common goal of making the company profitable. But there comes a point where the company is overrun by politics and selfish and harmful decisions. By the time dysfunctional company politics empower a "bozo", why should I stress or put any care into such…

> Just do the minimum to get paid.

Who wants to live like this?

Re: Focus Is Saying No

#39

Post by shmerl »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #27
shmerl wrote: post #5

> Because… some lack business value Very dumb response to the code modernization work. Just because it's not a product feature, it absolutely doesn't mean it has no business value. I also completely disagree that the lesson from it is saying no to such efforts. Increasing tech debt in the name of "more business value" is the worst idea any team can have. If team leadership sees no value in such work, the team is set…

These days I am working on some 20 year old code used in a few dozen manufacturing plants around the globe; the reason I asked to be allowed to fix it and the reason my manager allowed me to do it is that we have performance issues in some of the biggest plants (by the number of production lines) and this code is part of the problem. If that would not be the case, that code would continue to run as is for another 10…

In some cases it does make sense (imagine something like Voyagers for instance where you simply can't change things even if you wanted to), but in most cases it doesn't.

Re: Focus Is Saying No

#40

Post by paulryanrogers »

Buttons840 wrote: post #23
randunel wrote: post #2

> Looking back, I realized I had worked on a lot of low-impact projects — tasks that made no impact on users and no impact on the team, like updating outdated libraries. The old library worked fine without any updates. Updating it took weeks of my time but delivered zero value to the team or business. I did it simply because my manager told me to. > Early in my career, I said “yes” often. As I got more experience, I…

What company has ever been seriously harmed by a security breach? I'm clearly a bit nihilistic, but I've never seen a case where it matters. If a company leaks the information of millions of people there is, at most, a small financial cost and stock prices keeps going up.

Maybe that's true once companies are too big to fail or avoid. But small companies may face existential risk [0]. Even big companies like Sony can lose a lot of money despite recovering in the long term.

[0] https://www.mastercard.com/us/en/news-and-trends/stories/202...

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