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I have a bad habit of working on important things that don't actually glitter, unblocking other teams and people constantly and recommending against shiny cool

I have a bad habit of working on important things that don't actually glitter, unblocking other teams and people constantly and recommending against shiny cool solutions, so promotions this year went to my two colleagues who took a glittery project, recommended a shiny shit idea, and have now delivered shit covered in glitter that is immediately getting sales/support feedback like um but it doesn't do what we needed and it is missing what we asked for. I complained about a bug that blocked our CI for a week, which I'd shepherded around; that the company needs people to be prepared to work on things that they "don't own" because surprise, we don't have anyone assigned to owning the interaction of those six systems! Actual response: well, you didn't have to do that work. Now let me go back to waiting for anyone to respond to any of the EIGHT CRs I have out, just as well I'm working from home so I can use the time to clean the toilet.

colechristensen 4y ago
>Now let me go back to waiting for anyone to respond to any of the EIGHT CRs I have out, just as well I'm working from home so I can use the time to clean the toilet. There's nothing like being annoyed at waiting for a blocker to motivate me to do the dishes. Second best motivation is being in a boring meeting I'm not really needed in.
bambataa 4y ago
I was in a team like that. One person in particular would pick ambitious tasks, do a completely inadequate implementation, reject all feedback and then leave everyone else to deal with the production outages. Unfortunately management only saw the “picks ambitious tasks” and were blind to everything else. You can’t really blame people for responding to absurd incentives in absurd ways.
- Spivak 4y ago
  Ya know what sitting in the manager chair other than not taking feedback I would probably give them kudos too. Being the person who comes up with mediocre solutions to hard problems is way more impressive than the guy who has expertly designed solutions to easy problems. One of the devs on my team is like that. Everything he writes is like 30% broken from the get go but all his stuff ships and nobody else has the moxy to blindly charge into the unknown and not get stuck because their afraid to cut themselves on edge cases.
  - artificial 4y ago
    Just curious, what kind of software is this? Is it ETL stuff or what?

colechristensen 4y ago

>Now let me go back to waiting for anyone to respond to any of the EIGHT CRs I have out, just as well I'm working from home so I can use the time to clean the toilet. There's nothing like being annoyed at waiting for a blocker to motivate me to do the dishes. Second best motivation is being in a boring meeting I'm not really needed in.

bambataa 4y ago

I was in a team like that. One person in particular would pick ambitious tasks, do a completely inadequate implementation, reject all feedback and then leave everyone else to deal with the production outages. Unfortunately management only saw the “picks ambitious tasks” and were blind to everything else. You can’t really blame people for responding to absurd incentives in absurd ways.

Spivak 4y ago
Ya know what sitting in the manager chair other than not taking feedback I would probably give them kudos too. Being the person who comes up with mediocre solutions to hard problems is way more impressive than the guy who has expertly designed solutions to easy problems. One of the devs on my team is like that. Everything he writes is like 30% broken from the get go but all his stuff ships and nobody else has the moxy to blindly charge into the unknown and not get stuck because their afraid to cut themselves on edge cases.
- artificial 4y ago
  Just curious, what kind of software is this? Is it ETL stuff or what?