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Focus Is Saying No

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Re: Focus Is Saying No

#41

Post by Aurornis »

lolive wrote: post #15
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…

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 :)

I’ve seen a situation like this. The n+2 changed jobs, leaving the employee reporting to an n+1 who now hated them and no n+w to back them up.

I’m with the other commenter: If you find yourself in a situation this dysfunctional, you’ve already lost. Blowing off your boss to appease your skip level isn’t guaranteed to work out, even if the skip level likes you.

Either way, that’s not relevant to this blog post. The author said they were just going to say “no” to assigned work, which isn’t going to work out.

Re: Focus Is Saying No

#42

Post by Aurornis »

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.

The solution is to have a conversation with your manager about the work you want to take on, not to play word games where you pretend to take on a task but don’t do it.

If you say you’ll review something or look into it, you still have to follow through on it. Using those phrases to dodge the work isn’t much different than failing to do the work. It will be noticed

Re: Focus Is Saying No

#43

Post by esseph »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #38
Buttons840 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Conservation of energy is highly selected for biologically.

Re: Focus Is Saying No

#44

Post by Buttons840 »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #38
Buttons840 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't want to live like this. It's miserable, but not as miserable as putting in effort to change a dysfunctional organization that doesn't want to change.

Consider this example: I once worked for a contracting agency and we were on a project that was going really poorly and so I put in some effort to improve things and try to make it better. Things were not improving, people were angry with me. Eventually I learned that the person I was working for wanted me to fail, because he wanted to use a different contracting agency, so he wanted me to fail and look bad to give him an excuse to switch to a different contracting agency. But, then people even higher in the organizations were friends with my contracting agency and so I stayed on the contract and kept doing an honest but minimal amount of work. My boss literally wanted the project to fail.

It's fairly common for organizations to become this screwed up, and yes, it sucks to work for them, but it sucks even more to burn yourself out trying to change them when they don't want to change.

Re: Focus Is Saying No

#45

Post by Buttons840 »

jcelerier wrote: post #34
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…

> 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.

That is part of what I would be politely saying to my boss.

The truth is some jobs suck so much that I refuse to do them long term, and other jobs suck but I can do them long term.

I once left a job after I was so stressed I got shingles, I believe it literally would have killed me had I stayed.

Re: Focus Is Saying No

#46

Post by Viliam1234 »

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…

> I'd hate to be the one who refused updating the libraries which caused the security breach and significant loss of data, reputation and money.

The trick is to be working on a different project when that happens. Then it's someone else's fault.

Basically, your career advancement can be slow (if you do the technical work that is necessary to prevent problems, but "has no business value" from the perspective of the management) or fast (if you outrun the problems), but there is no medium speed. If you want a career, you need to commit to it fully.

Re: Focus Is Saying No

#47

Post by impjohn »

Buttons840 wrote: post #44
ants_everywhere wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just do the minimum to get paid. Who wants to live like this?

I don't want to live like this. It's miserable, but not as miserable as putting in effort to change a dysfunctional organization that doesn't want to change. Consider this example: I once worked for a contracting agency and we were on a project that was going really poorly and so I put in some effort to improve things and try to make it better. Things were not improving, people were angry with me. Eventually I learne…

What were the clues, in hindsight?

I wonder if someone can get scent of 'want you to fail' early, so one can play their cards a bit differently armed with this knowledge.

Re: Focus Is Saying No

#48

Post by KronisLV »

> 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.

It's all nice and good until you're stuck with an EOL version of Spring, migrating to something newer is a gargantuan task that's measured in months so ofc nobody does it and as a consequence the project startup is slow and it eats resources, some libraries are incompatible and there are bugs that will not get solved and CVEs just pile up. Whereas if you update things constantly (or at least monthly), the deltas and breakages between any two states of the system and its dependencies will be way easier to manage.

You can prioritize what and who should do what, but I don't think you can categorically describe certain work as below someone, if they're good at it (assuming nothing urgent elsewhere) and it has a positive impact.

> “You’re doing great work,” my manager replied calmly. “But I have to stack-rank the team, and those tasks aren’t staff-level. Because… some lack business value. These tasks aren’t business priorities and had no impact on customers and other teams. Also, at the staff level, you need to work across teams, influence broader decisions, and build visibility beyond just our team.”

At that point:

  * if it's not a golden handcuffs situation, might be easier to find another company to prosper in
  * if it is, then yeah, you have to play their game if you care about promotions
  * or just do good work where you're at, no matter what their myopic incentives say
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