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> This is the most annoying question in the world. But this is exactly the information that other people need to plan around to get on with their own work. You
by titzer 5y ago
> This is the most annoying question in the world.
But this is exactly the information that other people need to plan around to get on with their own work. You need to see things from their perspective. The inner workings of your processes and the long-winded explanation, from their side, is "the most annoying" response in the world.
It's a simple question. The ETA is the only information that is actionable for them. If the answer is "anywhere from a couple days to a month", then flat out say that. If you think that sounds wishy-washy and absurd and that it must then require a long-winded explanation to soften, chances are that it does sound absurd and the long-winded explanation will not soften it, but instead the person may start to think that you are unorganized and clueless. They might start to cringe at the thought of their next interaction with you. Just give them a straight answer.
FWIW, I don't know anything about your system, but it sounds like you need to invest in making triage in your system more efficient.
- lamontcg 5y agoYou can't triage the unknown
- titzer 5y agoTriage involves getting insight into running systems, particularly how well they are performing, or not performing, at many levels of granularity. You can make the act of triaging more efficient by building tools that give you quick insight and help you narrow down what is and isn't working, and how it's failing. I spent years working on V8 and we consistently invested in tools, tests, processes, and best practices to help us fielding the thousands of production issues over the years. Again, I don't know anything about your system, but my advice would be to be more serious and diligent about the requests you field instead of treating them as annoyances. Take a look at your processes and dispassionately try to figure out why it takes you so long to know anything about anything.
- lamontcg 5y ago> try to figure out why it takes you so long to know anything about anything. External dependencies changing without warning at the worst possible times. And many of them we can't arbitrarily prune because when you boil it down they ultimately support things which have a contract value associated with them. The system is large and complicated, mostly necessarily so, which makes it brittle. We spent time making it less brittle and attacking the complexity, but its still large and brittle. We don't get to go back to startup square 1 where we don't have those kinds of contracts and get to reconsider the business decisions that have been made over the past decade.