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Uh... Fulfilling expectations has nothing to do with making decisions on your own. I can guarantee you that no matter how good or bad their manager, if you don

Uh... Fulfilling expectations has nothing to do with making decisions on your own. I can guarantee you that no matter how good or bad their manager, if you don't meet their expectations, you are in trouble. By all means, own your local decisions, be proactive, keep your manager in the loop - AND MAKE SURE THEIR EXPECTATIONS AND YOUR WORK MATCH. That doesn't mean waiting for requirements, but that means your manager knows what you do and agrees, at least in broad strokes. Surprising your manager unpleasantly never leads to good outcomes for you. There's only one person holding power in that relationship. (Positive surprises do work, but they usually take the form of "I did what you expected, AND".) Totally agreed that the 1-2 days in the future thing is wrong. As a senior you should be at least a couple of weeks in the future, better if it's months. At the staff level, 6-12 months. At the principal level, 2-5 years. If it's just a few days between each level, a) somebody is failing at their job, and b) yes, information will be outdated by the time it reaches you.

lowercased 4y ago
> Surprising your manager unpleasantly never leads to good outcomes for you... Not quite 'my' manager directly, but a client's PM. They had a ... PM/PO type person who was quite insistent that we had to have feature X by date Y. Slightly aggressive, but... sure. Between that insistence (over weeks) and the date Y... that person left and a new person started. 4 days before a walk through (where new items were demonstrated to stakeholders, and company owners), I sent the completed functionality over to the new PM (he'd been there a few weeks, but obviously still... new). "looks good" he replied. I checked that he'd at least watched the video I'd sent over. Demo happens and I show the functionality, with the "this is vital to have" from the previous PM. Silence. Then "we didn't know that was being worked on". Behind the scenes I was somewhat thrown under the bus, even though I had jira tickets, paper trail, video evidence and assorted other info. "Lowercased is ... subverting the process" and I made a whole team look bad. Even though... they all had signed off on what I was delivering. But behind the scenes, new PM had told people "feature X won't happen" (i have no idea why that was said) but apparently I made a lot of people look bad, because I'd delivered something they said wasn't going to happen. So so so weird...
- groby_b 4y ago
  Well, yes. Shitty management still exists. And the power imbalance is always there. I'm not saying not surprising your manager guarantees good outcomes, I'm just saying surprising them guarantees bad outcomes. The lesson I've drawn for myself from similar incidents is "know all the stakeholders, and talk to them". Consulting/client work makes it extra hard, because stakeholders just keep coming out of the woodwork :(
  - lifeisstillgood 4y ago
    The power imbalance fascinates me - why should it exist at all? Do as I say or else? Why not, credible mission, great story telling, compelling vision, a well argued rationale. I mean. If we paid everyone UBI, then every compmay would look a lot like the Linux Kernel (insert preferred less shouty FOSS project here)
    - setr 4y ago
      Because communication is inefficient. If you have to produce a well-reasoned argument, and successfully convince all peers that your argument is in fact well-reasoned, and comprehensive, and handles all concerns of all involved or potentially involved, and that all opposing arguments do not meet these criteria… it will take ages to get all stakeholders in agreement, and even when you do, you get a horse designed by committee (a camel). Projects with no owner consistently end up in the same rut — always planning but never doing. Bikeshedding. So you need the owner. But for someone to own the project/task, he needs to be in charge of it — he needs power. For what is power if not the ability to make a decision and have others follow through on it? In arenas without defined power relationships, but manage to produce useful work, it’s usually the case that the power relationships still exist; they’ve just been made implicit. You see this in geopolitics, in your high school group projects, in Valve, etc. Determined not by corporate hierarchy, but instead charisma, money, social networks, physical/military strength, etc. Most of which is reflected by the corporate hierarchy anyways. Businesses just make it explicit, and consider it valuable enough to attach higher pay. You might make the argument that managers don’t deserve higher pay than an individual contributor, but it’s clear enough that a manager has much higher potential impact than an IC — if you manage 100 resources, making them 10% more efficient than otherwise, you’re doing the effective work of 10 ICs. But in my head, a resource-managers role is primarily to make his team more efficient — by optimizing processes, clearing blockers, umbrella’ing against shit from on high, reporting upwards, to guide the overall direction of all involved — not to dictate the every individual activities of his underlings. Also the Linux Kernel clearly has a power hierarchy, and while that power hierarchy doesn’t dictate what you work on, it does dictate whether your work can hold any value (by getting included into mainline). The difference just ends up being in the fact that it really doesn’t cost anyone anything for you to continuously do work that’s ultimately rejected every time, whereas for a business it obviously does (in the format of your salary). Obviously you can fork if you want and make it perhaps valuable… but you can exit the hierarchy just as well in business by quitting.

lowercased 4y ago

> Surprising your manager unpleasantly never leads to good outcomes for you... Not quite 'my' manager directly, but a client's PM. They had a ... PM/PO type person who was quite insistent that we had to have feature X by date Y. Slightly aggressive, but... sure. Between that insistence (over weeks) and the date Y... that person left and a new person started. 4 days before a walk through (where new items were demonstrated to stakeholders, and company owners), I sent the completed functionality over to the new PM (he'd been there a few weeks, but obviously still... new). "looks good" he replied. I checked that he'd at least watched the video I'd sent over. Demo happens and I show the functionality, with the "this is vital to have" from the previous PM. Silence. Then "we didn't know that was being worked on". Behind the scenes I was somewhat thrown under the bus, even though I had jira tickets, paper trail, video evidence and assorted other info. "Lowercased is ... subverting the process" and I made a whole team look bad. Even though... they all had signed off on what I was delivering. But behind the scenes, new PM had told people "feature X won't happen" (i have no idea why that was said) but apparently I made a lot of people look bad, because I'd delivered something they said wasn't going to happen. So so so weird...

groby_b 4y ago
Well, yes. Shitty management still exists. And the power imbalance is always there. I'm not saying not surprising your manager guarantees good outcomes, I'm just saying surprising them guarantees bad outcomes. The lesson I've drawn for myself from similar incidents is "know all the stakeholders, and talk to them". Consulting/client work makes it extra hard, because stakeholders just keep coming out of the woodwork :(
- lifeisstillgood 4y ago
  The power imbalance fascinates me - why should it exist at all? Do as I say or else? Why not, credible mission, great story telling, compelling vision, a well argued rationale. I mean. If we paid everyone UBI, then every compmay would look a lot like the Linux Kernel (insert preferred less shouty FOSS project here)
  - setr 4y ago
    Because communication is inefficient. If you have to produce a well-reasoned argument, and successfully convince all peers that your argument is in fact well-reasoned, and comprehensive, and handles all concerns of all involved or potentially involved, and that all opposing arguments do not meet these criteria… it will take ages to get all stakeholders in agreement, and even when you do, you get a horse designed by committee (a camel). Projects with no owner consistently end up in the same rut — always planning but never doing. Bikeshedding. So you need the owner. But for someone to own the project/task, he needs to be in charge of it — he needs power. For what is power if not the ability to make a decision and have others follow through on it? In arenas without defined power relationships, but manage to produce useful work, it’s usually the case that the power relationships still exist; they’ve just been made implicit. You see this in geopolitics, in your high school group projects, in Valve, etc. Determined not by corporate hierarchy, but instead charisma, money, social networks, physical/military strength, etc. Most of which is reflected by the corporate hierarchy anyways. Businesses just make it explicit, and consider it valuable enough to attach higher pay. You might make the argument that managers don’t deserve higher pay than an individual contributor, but it’s clear enough that a manager has much higher potential impact than an IC — if you manage 100 resources, making them 10% more efficient than otherwise, you’re doing the effective work of 10 ICs. But in my head, a resource-managers role is primarily to make his team more efficient — by optimizing processes, clearing blockers, umbrella’ing against shit from on high, reporting upwards, to guide the overall direction of all involved — not to dictate the every individual activities of his underlings. Also the Linux Kernel clearly has a power hierarchy, and while that power hierarchy doesn’t dictate what you work on, it does dictate whether your work can hold any value (by getting included into mainline). The difference just ends up being in the fact that it really doesn’t cost anyone anything for you to continuously do work that’s ultimately rejected every time, whereas for a business it obviously does (in the format of your salary). Obviously you can fork if you want and make it perhaps valuable… but you can exit the hierarchy just as well in business by quitting.