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> Be easy to work with. I’ve been in the industry for less than 5 years, but I might be struggling with this one. I’m an IC and get so many direct requests fro

> Be easy to work with. I’ve been in the industry for less than 5 years, but I might be struggling with this one. I’m an IC and get so many direct requests from my manager, other managers, my team members and people from other teams. Every task I sign up for, they want timelines and status updates every week. Sometimes multiple times every week. If I only had to send out 1 status, once a week, I think I would be way more productive. When I work with other managers/teams, often scope blows up. Hey, can you fix this little thing becomes, you’ve got to build this tool that covers 24 different use cases and give us ETAs for when every single use case will be completed. My defense strategy has become to keep adding friction to the request process (keep asking for more specifications before I can start work) if the requests aren’t coming from my team/manager. Sometimes people go away, sometimes they pivot to other projects and ask if I can do that instead. Sometimes I get what I call vanity projects. Projects that upper management is leading that don’t make sense (at least I’m not convinced they make sense but could be persuaded otherwise) but are there to win these people brownie points. Sometimes there’s almost an irrational push to work on these things. I feel like I need to do a lot to protect my time so I can do deep work (or what’s left of it) and get the really high priority stuff done. It’s kind of exhausting, I might not be easy to work with and I wish I had more mentorship (I’ve tried to find it at work and haven’t found anything substantial).

yobbo 5y ago
Maybe it should be: If the work creates value: be easy to work with. If the proposed work destroys value: be difficult to work with.
throwawaysleep 5y ago
I had a job where this happened to me and I just let whatever I was currently working on be derailed and worked on that instead. If someone followed up and asked about something else, I would say "X told me to do this." They eventually sorted it out without involving me as they then blamed the other person for the delay.
foobarian 5y ago
The way I figure it is, being easy to work with does not mean you do everything asked of you. They are not necessarily the same thing. With the external work requests, it just means you are cordial. When scope blows up then you follow procedure, e.g. you tell them "OK I can't wait to start working on this. It's a larger project though so I'll ask my manager to prioritize it. Let's have a kickoff meeting later this week to plan things out in further detail." Etc. Bottom line who writes your performance review is who you work for.
unoti 5y ago
> I’m an IC and get so many direct requests from my manager, other managers, my team members and people from other teams. I’ve been where you’re at and I get it. Here is what has helped me get out of that. This is the essential basics of backlog grooming. Track you commitments, manage your capacity, negotiate your priorities. It’s a fact that one person can only do so much per time period, and reasonable people should recognize that. The process I’m recommending here acknowledges the fact that your capacity is limited and must be managed. So you keep a list of what you’re working on now and what’s coming up. You keep that list sorted in priority order. Each item on the list has a description and success criteria, to help you and other interested parties see the scope of the work so you can interleave other items into the list as needed. You have a plan of what you’re going to do with success criteria for each story going out kinda far, so it’s not just a big list of stuff it’s a rough plan of how it will come together. You also keep a task breakdown of how you will approach the items you’re working on this sprint. Together these two facts make it fast to put together a status report of what’s happening now what’s next and when you estimate it will happen. You collaborate with your stakeholders (all these people wanting things from you) to negotiate the relative priority of things on that list. If everyone thinks their item is on the top of the list, then negotiate or escalate, but the true reality is that only so many things can get done at once. It’s better and more professional to push back instead of over promise. Manage yourself to focusing on the things on the list and meeting your commitments as a sign of respect to your stakeholders, and in turn they will help you do what you need to do to manage your backlog and your planning. Once your work process is aligned like that you can focus better. Some say that doing the above is what a manager or technical product manager does for you. If you’re lucky you’ll have such people to take care of planning and management you. But being able to do it yourself is a good because it’ll boost your skills considerably.
- NikolaNovak 5y ago
  Agreed; ordered priority task list allows you to communicate to management in language that you both understand. One thing that's also a REALLY hard but beneficial pill to swallow for a lot of us, is that "business/organization/management/client/stakeholder" (whichever term is appropriate to individual situation) may have goals and priorities WILDLY different from individual contributor. For example, it is entirely possible that they may prioritize a solid flow of updates over fast execution; and it may in some cases even be rational - "We'd rather have predictable and understood slow cadence we can plan around, than a fast but opaque and possibly random cadence of releases". This is why communication and empathy is important; understanding other people, their priorities, and seeing their perspective and why they may make requests or act in a way they do, can be enlightening (... and a burden :P )
kerblang 5y ago
Collaboration & empowerment require balance. It sounds like you've been pushed over the edge into collaborative hell, where you're getting pulled in every direction because there's a lack of clear ownership, responsibility, and empowerment: Teams and individuals solving their own problems. If you're being polite and respectful, you're being easy to work with. A refusal to agree to certain tasks doesn't contradict that.
saghm 5y ago
> My defense strategy has become to keep adding friction to the request process (keep asking for more specifications before I can start work) if the requests aren’t coming from my team/manager. Sometimes people go away, sometimes they pivot to other projects and ask if I can do that instead It's possible that I've been lucky or had an otherwise uncommon experience, but based on the advice of one of my earliest managers, I've pretty much considered it a rule that if someone other than my direct manager asks me to do something, I redirect them to my manager, who will determine the scope and if they think it's something I should be spending time on based on that and then come to me if so. This is non-programming work as well; at one job, I was quite frequently requested by the other managers in my department to serve on interview panels, which can be quite time consuming, so not committing to them without my manager's buy-in helped ensure we were on the same page about how I should be spending my time.
gwbas1c 5y ago
Your manager is supposed to manage you. In your situation, your manager is not managing. My rule in situations like that is: I only do work that comes from my manager, or trusted people that my manager has directed me to work with. All other requests for work (that don't come through my manager or people who I am actively working with) are either: responded to with a polite 5-15 minute conversation where I give information / advice and make no commitments; directed to my manager; re-assigned back to the person who assigned them to me; ignored; or I will say no. (IE, if you use a system like Asana, and someone you don't have a working relationship with assigns a task to you, just re-assign it back to them. Then, depending on context, either offer to have a short Q&A or suggest that they seek out your manager to determine who should complete the task.)
brimble 5y ago
"That's sounds great, be happy to work on it. You should go talk to [my manager, a PM, whatever] to see when we can work it in. Here, I'll [walk you over, CC them on this email, whatever]." When you're getting direction from a bunch of different people who aren't coördinating, set them against each other. What shakes out will be a saner workload, and you're not the one having to say no.

yobbo 5y ago

Maybe it should be: If the work creates value: be easy to work with. If the proposed work destroys value: be difficult to work with.

throwawaysleep 5y ago

I had a job where this happened to me and I just let whatever I was currently working on be derailed and worked on that instead. If someone followed up and asked about something else, I would say "X told me to do this." They eventually sorted it out without involving me as they then blamed the other person for the delay.

foobarian 5y ago

The way I figure it is, being easy to work with does not mean you do everything asked of you. They are not necessarily the same thing. With the external work requests, it just means you are cordial. When scope blows up then you follow procedure, e.g. you tell them "OK I can't wait to start working on this. It's a larger project though so I'll ask my manager to prioritize it. Let's have a kickoff meeting later this week to plan things out in further detail." Etc. Bottom line who writes your performance review is who you work for.

unoti 5y ago

> I’m an IC and get so many direct requests from my manager, other managers, my team members and people from other teams. I’ve been where you’re at and I get it. Here is what has helped me get out of that. This is the essential basics of backlog grooming. Track you commitments, manage your capacity, negotiate your priorities. It’s a fact that one person can only do so much per time period, and reasonable people should recognize that. The process I’m recommending here acknowledges the fact that your capacity is limited and must be managed. So you keep a list of what you’re working on now and what’s coming up. You keep that list sorted in priority order. Each item on the list has a description and success criteria, to help you and other interested parties see the scope of the work so you can interleave other items into the list as needed. You have a plan of what you’re going to do with success criteria for each story going out kinda far, so it’s not just a big list of stuff it’s a rough plan of how it will come together. You also keep a task breakdown of how you will approach the items you’re working on this sprint. Together these two facts make it fast to put together a status report of what’s happening now what’s next and when you estimate it will happen. You collaborate with your stakeholders (all these people wanting things from you) to negotiate the relative priority of things on that list. If everyone thinks their item is on the top of the list, then negotiate or escalate, but the true reality is that only so many things can get done at once. It’s better and more professional to push back instead of over promise. Manage yourself to focusing on the things on the list and meeting your commitments as a sign of respect to your stakeholders, and in turn they will help you do what you need to do to manage your backlog and your planning. Once your work process is aligned like that you can focus better. Some say that doing the above is what a manager or technical product manager does for you. If you’re lucky you’ll have such people to take care of planning and management you. But being able to do it yourself is a good because it’ll boost your skills considerably.

NikolaNovak 5y ago
Agreed; ordered priority task list allows you to communicate to management in language that you both understand. One thing that's also a REALLY hard but beneficial pill to swallow for a lot of us, is that "business/organization/management/client/stakeholder" (whichever term is appropriate to individual situation) may have goals and priorities WILDLY different from individual contributor. For example, it is entirely possible that they may prioritize a solid flow of updates over fast execution; and it may in some cases even be rational - "We'd rather have predictable and understood slow cadence we can plan around, than a fast but opaque and possibly random cadence of releases". This is why communication and empathy is important; understanding other people, their priorities, and seeing their perspective and why they may make requests or act in a way they do, can be enlightening (... and a burden :P )

kerblang 5y ago

Collaboration & empowerment require balance. It sounds like you've been pushed over the edge into collaborative hell, where you're getting pulled in every direction because there's a lack of clear ownership, responsibility, and empowerment: Teams and individuals solving their own problems. If you're being polite and respectful, you're being easy to work with. A refusal to agree to certain tasks doesn't contradict that.

saghm 5y ago

> My defense strategy has become to keep adding friction to the request process (keep asking for more specifications before I can start work) if the requests aren’t coming from my team/manager. Sometimes people go away, sometimes they pivot to other projects and ask if I can do that instead It's possible that I've been lucky or had an otherwise uncommon experience, but based on the advice of one of my earliest managers, I've pretty much considered it a rule that if someone other than my direct manager asks me to do something, I redirect them to my manager, who will determine the scope and if they think it's something I should be spending time on based on that and then come to me if so. This is non-programming work as well; at one job, I was quite frequently requested by the other managers in my department to serve on interview panels, which can be quite time consuming, so not committing to them without my manager's buy-in helped ensure we were on the same page about how I should be spending my time.

gwbas1c 5y ago

Your manager is supposed to manage you. In your situation, your manager is not managing. My rule in situations like that is: I only do work that comes from my manager, or trusted people that my manager has directed me to work with. All other requests for work (that don't come through my manager or people who I am actively working with) are either: responded to with a polite 5-15 minute conversation where I give information / advice and make no commitments; directed to my manager; re-assigned back to the person who assigned them to me; ignored; or I will say no. (IE, if you use a system like Asana, and someone you don't have a working relationship with assigns a task to you, just re-assign it back to them. Then, depending on context, either offer to have a short Q&A or suggest that they seek out your manager to determine who should complete the task.)

brimble 5y ago

"That's sounds great, be happy to work on it. You should go talk to [my manager, a PM, whatever] to see when we can work it in. Here, I'll [walk you over, CC them on this email, whatever]." When you're getting direction from a bunch of different people who aren't coördinating, set them against each other. What shakes out will be a saner workload, and you're not the one having to say no.