Project managers, ducks, and dogs marking territory (2013)

Quite often the person believes they are helping with their suggestions (or at least that's what I believe when I'm the one doing the suggesting). But there is certainly better and worse ways to make those sort of suggestions.

On the other hand, I quite often don't bother rounding the corners of boxes when working on a web UI until one of the last things. That way anyone who just wants to make their mark can just suggest rounding the corners :D

I tend to interpret this as a sure sign of a manager who secretly knows they're useless.

If you're the manager, your job isn't to do my work. Your job is to optimize my (and the rest of the team's) ability to do our own work. If I've missed something that should be part of a procedure, that should be in a checklist I should have reviewed before submitting my work. You shouldn't have to tell me to tweak it.

If I'm handing the work off to a team that is responsible for small stylistic choices, they too should have a set of standards, but at least if they change their minds about something, that's their role and their job.

A prior thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9137736

I remember an interview from Soviet cinema director Georgii Daneliya, mentioning that to make their movie pass the approval committee intact (what you'd call "censorship"), they'd make absurd and provocative "sacrifice" episodes (like "sacrifice bolts"). The episodes were fought over and finally seceded to the committee, but the rest of the film went into the theaters.

(Movies had to pass two such committees: one before production, approving the scenario, and the other one approving the final cut.)

Another example of "what you measure is what you get".