5 ms·

If everything is your job, how can you be measured by what is your job fairly?

draw_down 8y ago
Spoiler: There are plenty of things that people avoid doing because it's not their job, it's just that this situation must sometimes be finessed a bit. So, you don't avoid doing something because it's "not your job", you move it to another team who is better positioned to address the issue. Or maybe you deprioritize it because it doesn't fit in with your team's current priorities, etc. Eppur si muove.
icebraining 8y ago
Having worked for a tiny company, where this is pretty much inevitable, I'd say you define what your job is at the moment by what you commit yourself to do.
rarecoil 8y ago
I don't think that's the point of the statement. Facebook culture makes a similar statement: "Nothing at Facebook is someone else's problem." I don't take it to mean that you are supposed to be the Atlas of the organization, but rather that when you see problems and issues that might arise, you don't ignore them because it's "not my job" or "not my problem" - you embrace it, escalate or forward it to the correct people, and then go back to what else you have to do. This type of thinking stops issues from being buried when they're noticed by someone, even if it's something outside of what they are judged on in their responsibilities (and performance reviews). A good hypothetical example of this is a crash condition you may trigger as an engineer. You might not quite know what is going on but you have a reproducible testcase of a crash condition in someone else's stack, and saying it's not your job means the bug doesn't get fixed or reported. Had you submitted that crash condition and made it temporarily your problem, you could have indirectly helped patch a deserialization bug that could've led to code execution on that tier with a more malicious testcase (i.e. exploit). In smaller companies, I think everything technical kind of ends up being your job, so your job becomes what you make of it at that moment. Do what needs to be done to ship the thing.
- plausibilities 8y ago
  >you embrace it, escalate or forward it to the correct people This here is key. There are plenty of seemingly-intelligent individuals out there who refuse to acknowledge gaps in their knowledge. They instead favor suppression and/or deflection over escalation because their own fragile egos could not handle the fact. Full ownership mentality tends to weed these people out.
  - itronitron 8y ago
    I don't know about weeding them out, usually the only people that can afford to have fragile egos have power in the organization.
  - afarrell 8y ago
    Note that isn’t the only cause of Suppression. In fact, suppression is the default as it requires mere inaction. So another way that suppression can happen is, “oh that seems like it could be a problem. But is it? Who would I ask? Would asking about that be a distraction? {switches back to original task}” Yet another way is, “this error email seems like this is a problem. But I’m new and nobody else is responding to it and there are like 30 of them. I should probably filter them out so as to avoid getting distracted. I wish I knew why we weren’t allocating time to dealing with these alarms. {switches to remain focused on original task}.”
    - plausibilities 8y ago
      Sure, what you are describing I would consider "passive suppression". I should have been more specific and mentioned "active suppression" to imply a focus on behaviors inclusive of things like pre-emptive sabotage.
      - afarrell 8y ago
        I think what you call “passive suppression” is more important to pay attention to because I assume that sabotage is pretty rare but not-knowing-what-to-do and being-overwhelmed happens occasionally.

Spoiler: There are plenty of things that people avoid doing because it's not their job, it's just that this situation must sometimes be finessed a bit. So, you don't avoid doing something because it's "not your job", you move it to another team who is better positioned to address the issue. Or maybe you deprioritize it because it doesn't fit in with your team's current priorities, etc. Eppur si muove.

icebraining 8y ago

Having worked for a tiny company, where this is pretty much inevitable, I'd say you define what your job is at the moment by what you commit yourself to do.

rarecoil 8y ago

I don't think that's the point of the statement. Facebook culture makes a similar statement: "Nothing at Facebook is someone else's problem." I don't take it to mean that you are supposed to be the Atlas of the organization, but rather that when you see problems and issues that might arise, you don't ignore them because it's "not my job" or "not my problem" - you embrace it, escalate or forward it to the correct people, and then go back to what else you have to do. This type of thinking stops issues from being buried when they're noticed by someone, even if it's something outside of what they are judged on in their responsibilities (and performance reviews). A good hypothetical example of this is a crash condition you may trigger as an engineer. You might not quite know what is going on but you have a reproducible testcase of a crash condition in someone else's stack, and saying it's not your job means the bug doesn't get fixed or reported. Had you submitted that crash condition and made it temporarily your problem, you could have indirectly helped patch a deserialization bug that could've led to code execution on that tier with a more malicious testcase (i.e. exploit). In smaller companies, I think everything technical kind of ends up being your job, so your job becomes what you make of it at that moment. Do what needs to be done to ship the thing.

plausibilities 8y ago
>you embrace it, escalate or forward it to the correct people This here is key. There are plenty of seemingly-intelligent individuals out there who refuse to acknowledge gaps in their knowledge. They instead favor suppression and/or deflection over escalation because their own fragile egos could not handle the fact. Full ownership mentality tends to weed these people out.
- itronitron 8y ago
  I don't know about weeding them out, usually the only people that can afford to have fragile egos have power in the organization.
- afarrell 8y ago
  Note that isn’t the only cause of Suppression. In fact, suppression is the default as it requires mere inaction. So another way that suppression can happen is, “oh that seems like it could be a problem. But is it? Who would I ask? Would asking about that be a distraction? {switches back to original task}” Yet another way is, “this error email seems like this is a problem. But I’m new and nobody else is responding to it and there are like 30 of them. I should probably filter them out so as to avoid getting distracted. I wish I knew why we weren’t allocating time to dealing with these alarms. {switches to remain focused on original task}.”
  - plausibilities 8y ago
    Sure, what you are describing I would consider "passive suppression". I should have been more specific and mentioned "active suppression" to imply a focus on behaviors inclusive of things like pre-emptive sabotage.
    - afarrell 8y ago
      I think what you call “passive suppression” is more important to pay attention to because I assume that sabotage is pretty rare but not-knowing-what-to-do and being-overwhelmed happens occasionally.