Story: “It would be career limiting..."
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Story: “It would be career limiting..."
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Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."
#2Probably wouldn’t have been career limiting since you quit anyway
Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."
#3Probably wouldn’t have been career limiting since you quit anyway
For the managers. Admitting you got it wrong is [more] career limiting than proceeding with a doomed project and then (presumably) blaming other factors. Heck, you may even have gotten promoted in the intervening 2 years.
Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."
#4I could never relate to people who care about their career, "success", getting ahead, or climbing the corporate ladder.
For me virtually everything else in life has been more important, and careers/jobs were just a necessary evil because it's almost impossible to survive without money.
Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."
#5I could never relate to people who care about their career, "success", getting ahead, or climbing the corporate ladder. For me virtually everything else in life has been more important, and careers/jobs were just a necessary evil because it's almost impossible to survive without money.
I think I agree. The job is a means to an end. The only two times that I actually applied for a higher position is when I noticed a really, really bad candidate applied ( with a good chance of getting that position too ) and would effectively become my boss. I am not the manager type, but sometimes you have to bite the bullet and choose lesser evil.
Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."
#6> we hadn’t even received all of the specifications from the customer that we would need to complete the project
> And then one of them said “It would be career limiting if the client were to hear this.”
> I’d met my responsibility to the company – and the company had threatened me as a result.
The author interprets that they were threatened. But really, for whom would it be career limiting? Perhaps I'm being too charitable, but the manager could also be read to be making a statement of fact about the perception of their own performance. The author says there's already a project plan and a project manager, and the plan is clearly incomplete and the project manager was not aware for an extended period. Someone's career probably _should_ be limited.
But the larger question is, did any of this matter? If the customer is not engaged enough to make clear what they want, is there perhaps an equal amount of dysfunction on the customer side? If they really wanted something delivered, wouldn't they be trying to deliver clear requirements as soon as possible? Or perhaps someone on the customer side is able to get promoted off of being the point person for a 2 year $60M contract before it finishes? Or someone is able to use the slowness and expense of the contracting firm to argue for building an in-house development team?
Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."
#7I could never relate to people who care about their career, "success", getting ahead, or climbing the corporate ladder. For me virtually everything else in life has been more important, and careers/jobs were just a necessary evil because it's almost impossible to survive without money.
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.
Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."
#8> Two years later, the client canceled the two-years-late project before it ever launched. They ate a $60M loss.
Sounds like that might be half the problem: the firm with the contract had tens of millions of reasons (dollars) not to do honest product/project management.
(The other half is that product/project management is hard.)
Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."
#9Probably wouldn’t have been career limiting since you quit anyway
There is a spectrum between full principled rebellion and complete acquiescence to a shit project.
As the OP said, he was absolved. He (she?) couldn't stand the idea of incompetence or lack of communication/recognition of the fire in the room. Once the boss said "let it burn", their sanity was confirmed and they left the room.
Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."
#10At Sun Microsystems this notion was so common that there was a TLA for it:
CLM = "career limiting move"