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

doomedprojects.com

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

#61

Post by wiseowise »

giantg2 wrote: post #18
unethical_ban wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people thrive on their work and on problem solving. Not every employer is this malicious or incompetent. Given the necessity of work, I would rather enjoy my work and excel at it than sluff off.

"Given the necessity of work, I would rather enjoy my work and excel at it than sluff off." True, but from my perspective the career oriented people don't actually care about that stuff or solving problems. In my mind, the people I would label as career oriented are usually pretentious assholes preoccupied by the "status" of someday being in the C suite and driving the most expensive BMW/Tesla. On the other side, you…

> True, but from my perspective the career oriented people don't actually care about that stuff or solving problems. In my mind, the people I would label as career oriented are usually pretentious assholes preoccupied by the "status" of someday being in the C suite and driving the most expensive BMW/Tesla.

One does not exclude another.

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

#63

Post by pyrolistical »

Seattle3503 wrote: post #55
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…

Yeah, it seems like scope needed to be reduced in order to deliver an MVP on time.

I wonder if we have conditioned clients to expect everything now. Are we harming our own customers by allowing them to make demands that in turn only harm themselves in the long run?

Do we have too much of a revolving door for an organization to see this trend?

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

#65

Post by fsckboy »

$60 million project somebody's paying you to do? there's no way that this project doesn't have heavy requirements on their end too, and the trick to managing a project like this is to make sure that every time you meet the client that they have milestones/deliverables to present to your team also. They will be late, as you are, but now you got them to ask for deadline extensions.

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

#66

Post by maptime »

donatj wrote: post #40

> I spent about 18 months working on a doomed project. For a lot of that time, I thought I was the only one who realized it was doomed. I had a similar feeling about a project once. I thought "Boy is this stupid. No one in their right mind is going to pay for this. Why are we building this." Let me manager know my feelings. Stayed and built it. Thing is a huge success. One of our best selling products. Boy do I still…

It sounds like you were working on the project without enough contact with users to understand the value of the thing you were building.

That doesn't sound like it's your fault!

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

#67

Post by jrockway »

duped wrote: post #51
maxbond wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are a manager, and you make this type of remark, do not get it twisted. You have made a threat, and you have created an adversarial situation that limits your report's ability to trust you. You've telegraphed to them that you're willing to throw them under the bus, and they will remember. If it doesn't feel like you're making a threat - it may feel to you like you're genuinely giving advice - then you have not…

What do you think an IC is doing when they walk into a room full of managers and declare the project they're managing is horribly mismanaged?

Presumably you're conveying the results of your research, which means new facts are on the table that the "mismanagers" weren't previously aware of. They assigned you that research work presumably because they wanted to know those facts. Now that you're showing up with useful information, they can go back and deliver an even better estimate of the project than they had before.

If you show up and are like "hey idiots, you fucked up the estimate, man you're dumb" then, sure, people will react negatively. If you show up and say "you were right that we needed to look into this more; we found 9 months of work we hadn't incorporated into the plan" then they're going to have a lot of work to do, but they probably aren't going to be unhappy about being in a position of higher certainty.

To some extent, it's not really different from what engineers do. Are you mad when there's a production outage? No. You just debug it and mitigate it. Project planning is no different; new facts are on the table, and the plan has to change. Changing the plan is a lot of work, and that's why project management is a dedicated profession. They can now go do their job better with the data that you collected. No reason to be mad.

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

#69

Post by memorysluice »

Oof. Had a similar experience on the other side quite a few years ago. I had recently started a job where my new employer had been working with a contractor on their "next gen" web application for 4 years and it was nowhere near production ready.

To weeks into the new gig, I looked at my boss and expressed to him that it was a failed project and it needed to be canned. I got the "are you kidding me, we've already got millions tied up in this project."

Fast forward, 2 years went by and it's still not production ready. I was then asked to take over the project to help save it. I politely declined, knowing my limitations, to which I got the "this is limiting your career" speech.

Another year went by (7 years into the project) to which the contractor said they needed yet another year.

After hearing that news, I took on a skunkworks project that basically reimplemented the core of the project. After I demoed it, the contractor was canned a month later. 9 months later, the fresh project went to production for the phase 1 release.

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

#70

Post by Apes »

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…

An organization entrenched with managers like this is not salvageable. There's no "right" way to fix organizational rot this extensive from the bottom up. The organization has evolved into a parasite that exists only to suck assets out of other companies, and the management exist only to suck assets out of the company they purport to manage.

Don't waste your time playing political games and undermining incompetent management trying to "fix" massive organizational rot from the bottom up. Your reward is going to be negligible at best relative to your effort, and it's more likely you'll be punished instead. Go start your own company, or work for a small company where you can make a massive and positive difference - and get massively rewarded for it.

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