I'd guess a lot of people here consider this "reality" at this point. Has anyone come up with a response—not a fix for the company or leaders behaving this way, but a response for their own path? Did you change from a quiet diligent one to manipulating and playing the game (now that you know the game)? Did you go from quiet and diligent to quiet and not diligent (why do good work when meh work does the trick)? Anothe…
Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]
71–80 of 274 posts
Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
I refuse to play those games. If they want to fire me for avoiding problems instead of sacrificing my sleep, fine. I’ll go stock shelves at Walmart. If someone is constantly playing the hero, I see that as incompetence. If the boss can’t see that, they are also incompetent. I have no respect for “leaders” who don’t know how to get out of the firefight. I’ve made some high profile appearances, working 18 hour days on…
> I’ll go stock shelves at Walmart Yeah, but then I wouldn't have been able to pay for my healthcare. A certain toxic company's health insurance paid for my care, though. Prior to joining said toxic company I'd be racking up $6000+ in healthcare bills a year with shitty startup-sponsored insurance. After 2 years, it was decided I didn't play the hero well enough though, and ended up having to leave. I work for a less…
Health insurance does complicate things. I hope your heart is doing well now.
I will say my motivation for helping other people avoid issues has dropped. If they want to make problems for themselves, they can. Me helping them hasn’t worked so far, so maybe some sleepless nights will be a better teacher.
I had a former boss call me Brent after reading the Phoenix Project. That made me step back and stop helping so much. Everything seems worse, but whatever… if that’s what they want.
Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]
#73I've been in those companies where "struggling departments" ended up getting all the praises and raise in budgets the following quarter because of the heroic saves they did, and raising awareness on how important they are... For stuff they totally caused on themselves. Meanwhile, my perfectly purring department was struggling to keep the lights on. It's a serious problem in this industry due to the disconnect between…
By building pain into the system. If your hands dealt with injury directly without sending pain signals up to your brain, you'd never change the behaviour that led to that harm or reconsider your priorities. Like it or not, sometimes the best thing for an organisation isn't to just fix every problem and prevent it from bubbling up; it needs to be treated like a learning opportunity for org leadership, which means sending the pain signals upward before just repairing it.
Building the right incentives around that can be tricky, those incentives need to ensure the highest levels of management aren't themselves disincentivising their directs & their departments from surfacing pain & problems - but it's also pretty common for people to mask those signals purely out of a well-intentioned desire to help. It's important to coach people on the idea that in large group sizes, it's more efficient to let certain kinds of problems play out and not be so reactive to them.
Too many companies ground their performance incentives & processes around oversimplified ideas that don't match the reality of human behaviour
Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]
#74I've been in those companies where "struggling departments" ended up getting all the praises and raise in budgets the following quarter because of the heroic saves they did, and raising awareness on how important they are... For stuff they totally caused on themselves. Meanwhile, my perfectly purring department was struggling to keep the lights on. It's a serious problem in this industry due to the disconnect between…
By building pain into the system. If your hands dealt with injury directly without sending pain signals up to your brain, you'd never change the behaviour that led to that harm or reconsider your priorities. Like it or not, sometimes the best thing for an organisation isn't to just fix every problem and prevent it from bubbling up; it needs to be treated like a learning opportunity for org leadership, which means sen…
The problem is it's systemic. Ultimately, pain needs to come from outside. As long as society rewards incompetence, we'll have incompetent organizations.
Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]
#75I never gave credit to my electricity company for delivering electricity to me. I only get mad when there is an outage.
I think of electric vehicle fires and jet airliner crashes.
Also, telsa self-driving. yes, we know about the greatly publicized accidents, or the tweets of the founder, but the avoided incidents not so much.
Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry about your experience. Personally, I only rehire people from projects that went smoothly, not ones where I had to make the urgent phone call. Teams that "just work" are highly valued. They clear up my attention for other things.
Teams that just work can't exist in stack ranked companies. You can't keep the team as a whole, you always have to cut someone. Which means that everyone is playing the game to not be cut.
True, stack ranking is a terrible management approach, and if you work at a company that does it, then playing the game is the only way. But frankly, I'd be looking to get out anyway. The best way to play thr stack ranking game is to be job hunting.
But I'm not sure the author of this thread works in such a place. In that case the game is different.
In the case where the "urgent midnight fix" is important, it's necessary to promote the visibility of your (just working) team. If visibility is the game, then be visible.
You know how test-driven-dev was always "write the test first"? In that environment a test is always written before any code.
Well in the "ticket closing" scenario it's important to open a ticket, regardless of how trivial, for every code action taken. For every meeting attended. For every scenario dodged. If tickets are the way to score then write tickets.
If "being a hero" is the valuable thing, then be a hero. Be prepared to champion your team every chance you get. Every time you interact with management stress the emergency you just fixed (before it became an emergency.) Tomorrow do it again with the next thing.
Management needs visibility. Be visible. I know, this seems stupid and beneath you. But that's why they call it a job, not playtime.
Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]
#77Its called doing your job.
Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]
#78I never gave credit to my electricity company for delivering electricity to me. I only get mad when there is an outage.
Counterpoint: I absolutely give credit to Sonic for being a great ISP and recommend them to everyone. I got my parents to switch when Sonic finally rolled out to their neighborhood.
If online comments are anything to go by, I'm not alone.
If you're in the Bay Area and you can get a Sonic fiber connection, I would highly recommend them over AT&T/Comcast/etc.
Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]
#79I've been in those companies where "struggling departments" ended up getting all the praises and raise in budgets the following quarter because of the heroic saves they did, and raising awareness on how important they are... For stuff they totally caused on themselves. Meanwhile, my perfectly purring department was struggling to keep the lights on. It's a serious problem in this industry due to the disconnect between…
I feel like this is a cultural symptom and something many people are hoping to solve in healthcare. Basically we treat solving problems as amazing rather than preventing problems. You get rewarded if you treat a sickness instead of keeping a healthy person healthy.
This is the same thing. We need to reward things never going wrong as a society since this is pervasive.
Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]
#80I've been in those companies where "struggling departments" ended up getting all the praises and raise in budgets the following quarter because of the heroic saves they did, and raising awareness on how important they are... For stuff they totally caused on themselves. Meanwhile, my perfectly purring department was struggling to keep the lights on. It's a serious problem in this industry due to the disconnect between…
lol. I hate presentations. I like to run a tight ship. But that does not shine, so they made me do presentations every quarter. If you do some work, you must "take" credit. It is kinda a need when you manage people since you need to build their careers. I finally moved on to be an IC. Same story, same pressure :) You need to present to directors not because they need to know, but because your managers have a quota of…
You define "productivity" as coding.
The business defines it as "meetings, presentations, support, coding, whatever".
Your productivity remains at 100% when you are doing what they want.
I get that you thought you were hired as a coder, and thus measure your productivity by that. That's what I thought too. I ended up doing a lot of support (which is good, but that's another thread). Until I recalibrated my definition of productivity that frustrated me. When I realized that support was productivity I got much less frustrated.