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

doomedprojects.com

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

#321

Post by bumby »

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #320
bumby wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the same logic, canceling the project to focus on others is a success story. If the expectation is that employees are more than cogs in a machine and are expected to solve real problems, both the author and company have problems. Washing your hands of a problem, especially when you’ve been empowered to create a solution, doesn’t solve anyone’s problems.

"that would be a career limiting move" apparently means empowered in your vernacular.

The article actually said they were empowered by management to act as the Architecture Board.

Had they come up with an actual workable solution, I seriously doubt it would be career limiting. In the context of the article, that statement was made about not fixing the problem but just saying it couldn't be done. Not finding a solution is what is career limiting.

Circling back to what you originally commented about on, i could have just told them the software they bet on was crap. I would be right, but it would have been “career limiting.” If you can actually focus your energy on a solution, maybe you won’t get the ego boost by showing everyone how right you are, but you can move the ball forward in a meaningful way.

I do think it's telling that the author viewed being given authority as a subversive act. That sounds much more like somebody who's interested in pointing fingers than taking responsibility to solve problems.

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

#322

Post by P5fRxh5kUvp2th »

bumby wrote: post #321
P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"that would be a career limiting move" apparently means empowered in your vernacular.

The article actually said they were empowered by management to act as the Architecture Board. Had they come up with an actual workable solution, I seriously doubt it would be career limiting. In the context of the article, that statement was made about not fixing the problem but just saying it couldn't be done. Not finding a solution is what is career limiting. Circling back to what you originally commented about on,…

followed by blaming the messenger.

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

#323

Post by bumby »

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #322
bumby wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article actually said they were empowered by management to act as the Architecture Board. Had they come up with an actual workable solution, I seriously doubt it would be career limiting. In the context of the article, that statement was made about not fixing the problem but just saying it couldn't be done. Not finding a solution is what is career limiting. Circling back to what you originally commented about on,…

followed by blaming the messenger.

Do you think they would be blamed if they had actually come up with a solution?

The “message” was just stating a problem, not offering a solution. That’s the point.

They apparently thought they role was simply to uncover the problem, not figure out a way to solve it, despite being given the authority to do so. In general, people who just point to problems aren’t very well received in either business or personal life.

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

#324

Post by bernardonw »

cryptonector wrote: post #315
BWStearns wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh for sure if you have a solution then get it in front of a person who should care about it. But a lot of times they _don't_ care because they know they're going to be promoted or leave the company before the pound of flesh is due. The problem described in TFA is that leadership was happy to ignore a problem rather than do anything. In that kind of culture you don't make your career by raising attention to issues (e…

I assume the leadership structure and culture just didn't lend itself well to handling crises discovered in the trenches. But also, the crisis in TFA seems like a complete failure to properly understand the problem and solution spaces from the get-go, and that can just be very difficult even on good organizations.

No post body was provided.

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

#326

Post by bernardonw »

Aeolun wrote: post #269
maest wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> 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.

No post body was provided.

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

#327

Post by yarg »

bipson wrote: post #305
yarg wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is easy to be right. It's easier to be wrong. In the article, the management team had already failed to do their jobs. They had already failed to notice (or ignored) obvious problems, and the company clearly had a culture that discouraged raising or acknowledging such issues. They also had failed to work with the client to establish a complete set of requirements - 9 months before the end of a multi-year project…

> It's easier to be wrong. And it is cinsiderably harder to be actually helpful . While everything you said is true, we and the author do not know what was previously discussed with the client. We don't know what was promised by either party, we don't know what the client messed up Heck, I attended meetings with partners/clients that were simply impossible to get an output from, since the expectations in general were…

Sure, but you're acting like acknowledging a problem is less helpful than pretending that there isn't one.

That isn't the case, has never been the case and will never be the case.

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

#328

Post by P5fRxh5kUvp2th »

bumby wrote: post #323
P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

followed by blaming the messenger.

Do you think they would be blamed if they had actually come up with a solution? The “message” was just stating a problem, not offering a solution. That’s the point. They apparently thought they role was simply to uncover the problem, not figure out a way to solve it, despite being given the authority to do so. In general, people who just point to problems aren’t very well received in either business or personal life.

> we further suggested that there was probably work we had not discovered. Finally, *we made our primary recommendation*, which was to slip the project 12 months to cover the newly-discovered work, and provide margin for any additional remaining work.

note the usage of the word primary there.

stupid messengers.

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

#329

Post by bumby »

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #328
bumby wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think they would be blamed if they had actually come up with a solution? The “message” was just stating a problem, not offering a solution. That’s the point. They apparently thought they role was simply to uncover the problem, not figure out a way to solve it, despite being given the authority to do so. In general, people who just point to problems aren’t very well received in either business or personal life.

> we further suggested that there was probably work we had not discovered. Finally, *we made our primary recommendation*, which was to slip the project 12 months to cover the newly-discovered work, and provide margin for any additional remaining work. note the usage of the word primary there. stupid messengers.

Are you implying they offered more to solve the problem? Being generous and conceding maybe that was the case, why don’t you think that fixed anything?

Just asking for more time or more people isn’t really a solution. Maybe it can be part of the solution but it should rarely be the primary fix. They already said they had over 200 people on the team, so I would expect some pushback on saying they continually need more resources. It’s like asking for more inventory to cover up quality control issues. It only shows a superficial understanding of the problem.

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

#330

Post by yucky »

tonnydourado wrote: post #247
sillysaurusx wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> it’s better to be liked than right. Broadly, maybe. At work, I don't care about being liked by people that can't admit they are wrong. That doesn't being a dick to anyone I think is wrong. The whole point of telling someone that they're wrong is to correct course and fix things, and bullheaded, righteous, approaches never accomplish that. But it does mean you don't keep quite. You don't give up. You ask questions,…

   Because part of the process of saying that something is wrong is being willing to learn that maybe you are the wrong one.
Ironically, you are wrong.

Not only are there better ways to let people know they're wrong when you're 100% right, but in your example you aren't even sure you're 100% right, yet telling others they're wrong.

Good luck with that :)

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