"So now, you’ve committed to a big, one-time effort of saying No to everybody. "
assuming you have the luxury to do that.
How To Do Less
61–70 of 74 posts
Re: How To Do Less
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure. The business unit is always demanding more. I don't have a solution for that. I just know enough from my brief stint in management that always saying "No" is a great way to get people to say you're "difficult to work with" or "aren't a team player". That was a hard lesson to learn: "team player" means different things at different org levels.
You aren't saying "No", you're saying, "What drops?" People who say, "No." are being hard to work with. People who engage honestly with the CTO who is trying to change priorities is someone who you actually want on your team, the only kicker here is that the conversation ends with, "Okay so what gets shelved for this new thing we've been talking about, or should we finish out what we're currently doing before jumping…
> what you can do is find ways of explaining the cost of what they're asking in a way that is effectively no
What's good about that is that your superior may want to actually eat the costs because he may have information that he has not shared yet with you.
Re: How To Do Less
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not managing upwards is how you wind up in a fail state. Business, teamwork and employment isn't a zero sum game. Everyone is working together to achieve something. Helping your boss understand why something shouldn't be done/prioritized/cancelled is paramount to being efficient. If you think you can never tell your boss no because you'll be fired, you're not going to have a good employment story.
It's the boss' responsibility to make it safe to say "no". You can't expect the more vulnerable party in the relationship to take the initial risk when there is a power imbalance.
If your stance is that the weaker party can take no risk because they're the weaker party then you'll always be a victim.
Work _with_ your boss, not against them. You have more agency than you realize.
Re: How To Do Less
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the boss' responsibility to make it safe to say "no". You can't expect the more vulnerable party in the relationship to take the initial risk when there is a power imbalance.
If your stance is that the weaker party can take no risk because they're the weaker party then you'll always be a victim. Work _with_ your boss, not against them. You have more agency than you realize.
Spoken with the cheerful idealism of a person who has always had a safety net.
My stance is that you cannot pretend the power dynamic does not exist. Boss can fire worker, worker cannot fire boss. Consquences of getting fired range from irritating to life-threatening, depending on worker's resources. Consequences of having to fire someone... not such a problem. You ignore that reality at your peril.
If the boss wants workers who can say "no", the boss has to create an environment where people don't have to fear the consequences of doing so.
Re: How To Do Less
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your stance is that the weaker party can take no risk because they're the weaker party then you'll always be a victim. Work _with_ your boss, not against them. You have more agency than you realize.
Spoken with the cheerful idealism of a person who has always had a safety net. My stance is that you cannot pretend the power dynamic does not exist . Boss can fire worker, worker cannot fire boss. Consquences of getting fired range from irritating to life-threatening, depending on worker's resources. Consequences of having to fire someone... not such a problem. You ignore that reality at your peril. If the boss want…
There's a area between "power dynamic is everything and I can never say no" and "power dynamic does not exist and I can always say no" that I'm arguing from.
Power dynamics can't be ignored, but just because someone has the upper hand in that dynamic means you always have to be subservient and do everything they ask you to do. Always saying yes to a boss is probably a faster way to get fired than being a partner and pushing back when needed.
Re: How To Do Less
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spoken with the cheerful idealism of a person who has always had a safety net. My stance is that you cannot pretend the power dynamic does not exist . Boss can fire worker, worker cannot fire boss. Consquences of getting fired range from irritating to life-threatening, depending on worker's resources. Consequences of having to fire someone... not such a problem. You ignore that reality at your peril. If the boss want…
There's a area between "power dynamic is everything and I can never say no" and "power dynamic does not exist and I can always say no" that I'm arguing from. Power dynamics can't be ignored, but just because someone has the upper hand in that dynamic means you always have to be subservient and do everything they ask you to do. Always saying yes to a boss is probably a faster way to get fired than being a partner and…
Sounds like we actually agree on this, we are just emphasizing opposite ends of the scenario. Sorry to have claimed that you did not understand what I was talking about. I've had some painful life experience which leaves me a bit sensitive here.
Re: How To Do Less
#67I'm currently reading through Johanna Rothman's "Manage Your Project Portfolio" and related literature and a bunch of this resonates: * Finishing work is more important than starting it * Teams working together on a single priority ("swarming") seem to be more successful than teams where each person is doing 1-2 things on their own A few subtle points in this article that made me think: * Keeping existing features wo…
> Teams working together on a single priority ("swarming") seem to be more successful than teams where each person is doing 1-2 things on their own
I wonder if there is a reference supporting that statement. I believe it, but it would be nice to have a reference.
Re: How To Do Less
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a area between "power dynamic is everything and I can never say no" and "power dynamic does not exist and I can always say no" that I'm arguing from. Power dynamics can't be ignored, but just because someone has the upper hand in that dynamic means you always have to be subservient and do everything they ask you to do. Always saying yes to a boss is probably a faster way to get fired than being a partner and…
Sounds like we actually agree on this, we are just emphasizing opposite ends of the scenario. Sorry to have claimed that you did not understand what I was talking about. I've had some painful life experience which leaves me a bit sensitive here.
We're all human :-)
Re: How To Do Less
#69One interesting thing I learned from the book "essentialism" is that the word priority used not to have a plural. It described the single most important thing to do.
Re: How To Do Less
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes there’s that as well. But I have seen plenty of the type of code bases you’re praising that were a nightmare to maintain and debug. Everything is a trade off. Most developers probably shouldn’t write their own database engine. But at the same time adding another dependency to handle padding a number with zeroes is overkill. In practice after 2 decades doing this, I’m much more likely to run into an over reliance…
Left pad was more of an issue with mutable dependencies it seems like, and with using tons small dependencies instead of larger trusted ones. Yarn's zero install and the like could probably have stopped that from ever being an issue. Many lodash/underscore/whatever utilities have that feature, and with dead code removal I don't know why people still use micro libraries. There's of course malware concerns, but that's…
> using tons small dependencies instead of larger trusted ones
That’s certainly not what the JavaScript community as a whole does. If anything that’s closer to the way many other languages do it with large standard libraries.
> There's of course malware concerns, but that's why you don't use things that aren't popular with a million eyes on them unless you want to check it yourself.
Those popular libraries often have hundreds to thousands of dependencies and sub dependencies themselves, many of which almost certainly don’t have a million eyes on them.