3 ms·

Engineers don't get to randomly allocate their time like that.

• eyelidlessness 5y ago
  Joke reply: sure, but we can pseudo-randomly allocate our time like that. More seriously: Many of us can… if it’s enough of a priority to us to accept the consequences. And we’re in such high demand that we often overestimate those consequences. I’m saying this from experience. I had begged to address a serious security issue, and eventually I just refused to work on anything else until it was fixed. The only consequences were that I overworked myself to see it through. All of management either supported me when I declared my intention, or let it happen without comment. I even received a substantial, non-routine pay raise in the same period. There was some pressure by one (IIRC, it’s been some time so details are fuzzy) PMish person to move on to feature work, but that pressure was just noise. Granted communication is essential in this. I made absolutely sure that everyone knew as much as they could understand about the risk factor, and known business impacts (side effects of this issue were also affecting other operations, which wasn’t widely understood by any of us for some time). This knowledge had already been shared prior to my decision to, effectively, go rogue. But the decision had to be mine, because I was the one motivated to fix it without incentive to find more ways to kick that can down the road. This isn’t meant as a story to glorify myself in any way, for what it’s worth. Just to say that we have more power to direct priorities on the job than most workers do, and more safety in choosing to exercise it than we may realize.