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At my job I have learned which people ask for things that they aren't really serious about. Only so many times I am willing to reorganize my work to install som

At my job I have learned which people ask for things that they aren't really serious about. Only so many times I am willing to reorganize my work to install some "urgently" needed software or system configuration changes, only to later observe that they were never used. Now when I get requests from those people, they go immediately to the back burner. If I hear nothing more, they get closed; if I get followups then maybe it is something they need after all. It's easy for people to ask for others to do things. But many people are scatterbrained and can't prioritize, and can't see beyond their own immediate needs and how their requests might impact other work. Rather than try to demand some realistic sense of priority for these requests, this approach lets the urgent stuff bubble up naturally and the rest of the chaff sink to the bottom.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
> It's easy for people to ask for others to do things. But many people are scatterbrained and can't prioritize, and can't see beyond their own immediate needs and how their requests might impact other work. But, should they even care? Maybe they think it's not their job? What I mean is, there seem to be two archetypes of ways to ask someone else for something. For lack of better terms, I'll call them "market approach" and "social approach". "Social approach" is when you try to predict how costly your request will be to the other person, and only ask them if the importance is clearly much greater than the cost. You then expect the other person to feel compelled to prioritize your request, as they know you wouldn't be asking if it wasn't very important. "Market approach" is when you don't give any thought about the cost to other party - you just make your request, and expect them to tell you whether they'll do it, how long will it take, and what they expect in return. You then negotiate the scope of the request and the "price" until both sides are satisfied, or the request is rejected. I don't know which one is better. But I think we're living the worst case: everyone operates at a different point between these two idealized approaches. So, in your example, you're taking the "social" perspective - you treat requests as high priority ("they wouldn't have asked if it wasn't important") and get annoyed when your hard work isn't used. Meanwhile, those people may be operating closer to the "market" perspective - perhaps they expected you to push back on their request if it's disruptive to you, and were willing to negotiate (they knew it wasn't that important, but they didn't expect you to assume it was).
- dmurray 5y ago
  This is a great insight and deserves to be turned into a more pretentious blog post that goes viral on VC Twitter. I should get better at recognizing which of my partners are on the social strategy and who prefers a more market-based one. Probably all of us should learn this skill.
- j1elo 5y ago
  I agree with the sibling comment, your comment transmits a great insight that would make for a great longer form read. Deep down, this is another instance of the problem of human expectations and how important it is to handle them correctly for sane interactions with other peers at work.
- doctor_eval 5y ago
  I like this comment too but in many cases the requesting party has almost no relationship to the receiving party. The requester is almost always in a buyers market (filing an issue is cheap) and the receiver is almost always social (working closely with others to resolve issues). This model does explain the different sides, but the problem remains. So it seems that the problem with the requester’s market approach is that there is no mechanism for setting value. So how do we solve that?
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    > but in many cases the requesting party has almost no relationship to the receiving party That is a common occurrence - which makes it dangerous for either side to make assumptions about the other. So the more I think about it, the more I feel that it's the "market approach" that's better-suited for work requests and issue reports, when the two sides don't have a preexisting personal relationship. "Market approach" is assumption-minimizing, and thus also mistake-minimizing. On a side note, I wonder if that's what "rejection therapy" and assertiveness are both about: they're trying to teach you to ask people more (instead of assuming they'll say no), not take rejection personally, and to be ready to just say no to other people. Taken like this, they sound like attempts to correct people into using "market approach" where they tend to use "social approach". > So it seems that the problem with the requester’s market approach is that there is no mechanism for setting value. I think this is not a problem at all. That's why I called it "market approach" - the market is the tool that's used to determine value.
doctor_eval 5y ago
I almost agreed with you until you used the pejorative “scatterbrained”. I think the explanation is “asymmetry”. It’s simply easier to make a request, than it is to resolve it. The cost of filing an issue is greater than the cost of resolving it. This is why schemes like “you can only file your top 3 issues” make sense. Forcing the end user to prioritise their top issues - and to manage the ones that don’t make the cut - distributes the triage work more fairly. We have a job to do too and it’s a waste of developers time to force us to guess what’s important to an end user. That’s their job.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  The people I'm thinking about are actually scatterbrained. They read about something new -- squirrel!! -- ask for it and then they forget they asked. When the requests are completed they never use what they asked for. The social vs. market perspectives are interesting though, I had not thought about framing requests in this way, and I'm going to try to keep that in mind in the future.

TeMPOraL 5y ago

> It's easy for people to ask for others to do things. But many people are scatterbrained and can't prioritize, and can't see beyond their own immediate needs and how their requests might impact other work. But, should they even care? Maybe they think it's not their job? What I mean is, there seem to be two archetypes of ways to ask someone else for something. For lack of better terms, I'll call them "market approach" and "social approach". "Social approach" is when you try to predict how costly your request will be to the other person, and only ask them if the importance is clearly much greater than the cost. You then expect the other person to feel compelled to prioritize your request, as they know you wouldn't be asking if it wasn't very important. "Market approach" is when you don't give any thought about the cost to other party - you just make your request, and expect them to tell you whether they'll do it, how long will it take, and what they expect in return. You then negotiate the scope of the request and the "price" until both sides are satisfied, or the request is rejected. I don't know which one is better. But I think we're living the worst case: everyone operates at a different point between these two idealized approaches. So, in your example, you're taking the "social" perspective - you treat requests as high priority ("they wouldn't have asked if it wasn't important") and get annoyed when your hard work isn't used. Meanwhile, those people may be operating closer to the "market" perspective - perhaps they expected you to push back on their request if it's disruptive to you, and were willing to negotiate (they knew it wasn't that important, but they didn't expect you to assume it was).

dmurray 5y ago
This is a great insight and deserves to be turned into a more pretentious blog post that goes viral on VC Twitter. I should get better at recognizing which of my partners are on the social strategy and who prefers a more market-based one. Probably all of us should learn this skill.
j1elo 5y ago
I agree with the sibling comment, your comment transmits a great insight that would make for a great longer form read. Deep down, this is another instance of the problem of human expectations and how important it is to handle them correctly for sane interactions with other peers at work.
doctor_eval 5y ago
I like this comment too but in many cases the requesting party has almost no relationship to the receiving party. The requester is almost always in a buyers market (filing an issue is cheap) and the receiver is almost always social (working closely with others to resolve issues). This model does explain the different sides, but the problem remains. So it seems that the problem with the requester’s market approach is that there is no mechanism for setting value. So how do we solve that?
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > but in many cases the requesting party has almost no relationship to the receiving party That is a common occurrence - which makes it dangerous for either side to make assumptions about the other. So the more I think about it, the more I feel that it's the "market approach" that's better-suited for work requests and issue reports, when the two sides don't have a preexisting personal relationship. "Market approach" is assumption-minimizing, and thus also mistake-minimizing. On a side note, I wonder if that's what "rejection therapy" and assertiveness are both about: they're trying to teach you to ask people more (instead of assuming they'll say no), not take rejection personally, and to be ready to just say no to other people. Taken like this, they sound like attempts to correct people into using "market approach" where they tend to use "social approach". > So it seems that the problem with the requester’s market approach is that there is no mechanism for setting value. I think this is not a problem at all. That's why I called it "market approach" - the market is the tool that's used to determine value.

doctor_eval 5y ago

I almost agreed with you until you used the pejorative “scatterbrained”. I think the explanation is “asymmetry”. It’s simply easier to make a request, than it is to resolve it. The cost of filing an issue is greater than the cost of resolving it. This is why schemes like “you can only file your top 3 issues” make sense. Forcing the end user to prioritise their top issues - and to manage the ones that don’t make the cut - distributes the triage work more fairly. We have a job to do too and it’s a waste of developers time to force us to guess what’s important to an end user. That’s their job.

throwawayboise 5y ago
The people I'm thinking about are actually scatterbrained. They read about something new -- squirrel!! -- ask for it and then they forget they asked. When the requests are completed they never use what they asked for. The social vs. market perspectives are interesting though, I had not thought about framing requests in this way, and I'm going to try to keep that in mind in the future.