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Suppose you were a junior engineer working with a senior engineer. They gave you a task, and you came to a similar conclusion: it was their job to do X, but the

Suppose you were a junior engineer working with a senior engineer. They gave you a task, and you came to a similar conclusion: it was their job to do X, but they weren't doing it. Would you simply tell them they're not doing their job, or would you ask questions, talk in private, and try to dig in tactfully? When I was 22 or so, I did go around telling a certain senior engineer that they weren't doing their job. I still cringe at how headstrong I was back then. The people around me were trying to hint that things aren't quite as clear cut as it seems, but it took a swift kick in my backside to reboot my worldview. You're right that the optimal strategy is not to stress about it, though. That would've saved me a lot of heartache. My point is (and the point of many other commenters here) is that you can't really show up to a meeting and say "This project is doomed." That's arguably one of the core advantages of startups over bigcos -- you can pivot. Your options are to climb the politics ladder, or ride it out and see what happens. It depends how much you care, or how much responsibility you want.

tdeck 4y ago
> Would you simply tell them they're not doing their job, or would you ask questions, talk in private, and try to dig in tactfully? Telling a manager "we uncovered work that wasn't in the original spec" isn't literally the same thing as telling them they aren't doing their job.
- sillysaurusx 4y ago
  I think the confusion is, if their job is to execute a $60M contract successfully, and you tell them that it’s going to require an extra 12 months, you’re almost literally telling them they aren’t doing their job. Because arguably they weren’t. Their job was to guide the project successfully, which they didn’t do. In a situation like that, you can recover, but it requires tact. The end of this story was that they left the company. An alternate ending is that they may have been let go. If they’re paying you to work on a doomed project, you have to work on it, or change it. And if you want to change it, political maneuvering is necessary.
  - marvin 4y ago
    Well, yeeeeees... If management, whose job it is to swallow their pride when given a nasty surprise like this, isn't up to the task. I'm sure that OP could, with great political skill and subtlety, have had a very decent shot at turning this thing around. But what's their incentive? They're probably paid as a regular IC, and saving a double-digit million dollar fiasco like this from disaster is super annoying and unrewarding work! You're effectively doing the job of five managers and not even getting their salary -- let alone a percentage of the disaster you're averting! This kind of political-technical skill combination can probably be fruitfully applied in a place that properly rewards the contributor! I very much agree that this thing could have been handled better, when seen externally. But I'm also pretty sure it wasn't in OP's personal interest to do so! That's a very stupid state of affairs, of course, but I guess that might be par for the course of a failed $60 million project.
  - quadcore 4y ago
    In a situation like that, you can recover, but it requires tact. I'd bet it doesnt requires tact to convince them anymore.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    You just tell them it will take 12 months more. Your the development team. Let them rewrite contracts or lose business. You do not get a bonus for contracts sold or kept. If necessary someone else will tell them they are not doing there job. Stick to your role.
    - jacobr1 4y ago
      I prefer to work for companies where this is the case. I get enough equity compensation that finding creative solution to deliver business value _is_ my job and thus am indirectly compensated with the success of the company (even if the overall success is still dependent on other areas of the company succeeding too).
  - treis 4y ago
    This isn't really how big dollar consulting works. Everyone under estimates in order to be the lowest bid and win the deal. Once won then you slowly and gracefully tweak scope/budget to get something done without pissing off the customer too much. That's how the game is played. Pointing out that you've underestimated by X is pointing out something everyone already knows. And advocating to blow up the estimate by X so early in the project is arguing to piss the customer off and possibly walk away from $60 million. That's why everyone patted them on the head and blew them off. Everyone else understood the game but it's a bit gauche for them to explicitly explain what's going on.
svnt 4y ago
Some of what you said is true, but your analog is a little off. It wasn’t a junior and a senior in the same role, it was a technical team deputized to do what they did, and a management group that apparently thought the deputies would fail, or convinced themselves their conclusions were wrong. The failure here is not one of lack of politics or communication on the part of the author or their team, but on the culture of the management team. Why invite that presentation if all it does is publicly humiliate your PMs? Could the deputies have done more? How is amateur politicking by technical contributors perceived at your place of work?
- sillysaurusx 4y ago
  For what it’s worth, I don’t think they could have done more. But the conclusion of the story is to heroically drive off a cliff, and say “it’s all I could do.” That’s where I disagree. If it were me, I would have privately (emphasis on private) worked my way up the chain of command, trying to alert more and more people that there was a serious problem brewing. The meeting in the story was obviously going to be a failure. So if you’re in a situation where you know that X is going to fail, doing something other than X is advisable. I would’ve tried to work with the deputized team to come up with a smaller plan that could be executed in, say, three months, and then figured out how to sell it to management in a way that three months isn’t a dealbreaker. Alternatively, I would have gone to management ahead of the meeting and let them know privately what they should expect to hear. That way they’re not completely surprised when you’re in Zoom, presenting a 12 month extension, and they have to say something. “It would be career limiting” is about the best thing they could say. You want to give them a better alternative. And giving management good alternatives is arguably the job of line engineers like us. We’re a part of a team; our job isn’t merely to do what we’re told, nor is it to say blatantly that a project is doomed. There’s usually a middle ground.
  - peteradio 4y ago
    I don't understand how the deputized team drove off the cliff. At the very least they surfaced the set of problems which would need to be addressed to meet the contract.
xg15 4y ago
> The people around me were trying to hint that things aren't quite as clear cut as it seems, but it took a swift kick in my backside to reboot my worldview. Was your rebooted worldview that you had been factually incorrect (i.e. the senior dev actually did do his work) or was it that you were factually correct, but hierarchy and office culture demanded that everyone pretend you weren't?
- sillysaurusx 4y ago
  I wanted to touch on that: one of the things you learn is that it’s better to be liked than right. We devs often fixate on whether we’re right and the other person is wrong. One specific incident comes to mind. I was working on Heroes of Newerth, a DotA clone. We achieved a bit of popularity in those days, and we reached around 50k concurrent users. So our servers tended to melt. One day, the servers went south, and although games were being completed, none of the stats were being recorded. (Think of it like, the database was in read only mode.) I remember it feeling a little surreal how they decided to handle it. They kept cool, looked into the problem, and got the servers back up within a couple hours. Then they went back to their usual jobs and didn’t seem bothered by the ticking time bomb. I think in my usual 22yo fashion, I said that it was dumb that no one seemed to care that the servers were going down, and that we had to do better for the players. What I should have done was ask questions. Should we try to figure out the root cause, and make sure this doesn’t happen again? Or was it really not a big deal? A few hours’ downtime may or may not have been a big deal. We did end up suffering from some pretty serious server malfunctions which limited our ability to scale. But I certainly mishandled how to approach it, and won no friends. Every team is dysfunctional in their own way. It’s important to adapt to the dysfunction and push things in a positive direction, not merely to be right.
  - maest 4y ago
    If it makes you feel any better, I don't think technical issues were the reason HoN failed. For context, I have played a lot of DotA2 and HoN (5.2k hours in DotA2, probably 1k hours in HoN). This is anecdotal, but I was never really bothered by outages and neither were the other people that I played with. Instead, I think HoN made some very bad decisions regarding cosmetics and fostered an extremely toxic playerbase. At least for me, those were the 2 main factors that drove me away to play DotA2 (even though I thought HoN's gameplay was superior).
WesleyJohnson 4y ago
I was hired on as a full-stack developer to help a 2 person team (dev and designer) get a year-long project over the finish line. This was a November and the project was slated to go live on January 1. My first week was getting my PC configured, orientations, onboarding meetings with various external departments and perusing the project to get familiar. Week 2 I was supposed to get assignments from the lead developer, but they were holding things close to their chest. I was given very, very menial things to do, or just told to continue to study the code. When we'd have project meetings and they'd ask how things were going overall, the lead developer would assure them we were on target - even in the face of ongoing bugs, missing features and incorrect functionality during QA testing. I'd offer the Lead my help, but they hadn't found the right task yet. By the end of week 2, beginning of week 3, I was fairly confident the code I was researching was not lining up with the status reports in the project meetings. I started to speak up and ask questions to surface concerns in attempt to get something thrown my way. Again, the Lead Dev continued to assure management we were on target and that seemingly huge TODO items were trivial and would be handled in short order. I was kept on standby. As things continued to progress in this direction, management finally bypassed the Lead and came directly to me to my feel for where were at. At this point I had only been with the company 3 to 4 weeks, but I had been a developer for 11 years. I told them in not so uncertain terms, "this project is doomed". The Lead dev is wildly overpromising deliverables, minimizing outstanding work and shielding the management team from truly understanding how behind he was. I honestly had no idea what his plan was to meet the deadline, but based on my estimates we were easily 4 to 6 months out. They were flabbergasted. I continued to provide direct status reports at management's request. It felt like politics, but what else could I do? By the 2nd week in December, 6 weeks into my employment, the writing was on the wall. The project was canned, the Lead Dev was fired and I was wondering if I had still had a job myself as the only developer and no projects on the timeline. By the end of the following year, I had been promoted to management overseeing a team of 3 and still developing myself. We rebuilt the project from scratch and implemented it exactly 1 year after its initial planned release. I never wanted management and certainly never wanted to get anyone fired, but sometimes you have to put it all out there in black and white.
- peteradio 4y ago
  I'm baffled when people (the lead) behave this way. I'm not asking this sarcastically and you probably wouldn't know, but were they on some heavy sedatives or psych drugs?
roxgib 4y ago
I think what a lot of comments are missing is that they tried to raise this with management, and eventually management responded by asking them to conduct a review and deliver the results, which they did. Maybe they could have played it better but it doesn’t sound like it was their idea to do it this way.
Aeolun 4y ago
> My point is (and the point of many other commenters here) is that you can't really show up to a meeting and say "This project is doomed." One of the many benefits of being having extremely employee friendly laws is that you can absolutely do this. It still doesn’t really help, but it’s not ‘career limiting’ either.

tdeck 4y ago

> Would you simply tell them they're not doing their job, or would you ask questions, talk in private, and try to dig in tactfully? Telling a manager "we uncovered work that wasn't in the original spec" isn't literally the same thing as telling them they aren't doing their job.

sillysaurusx 4y ago
I think the confusion is, if their job is to execute a $60M contract successfully, and you tell them that it’s going to require an extra 12 months, you’re almost literally telling them they aren’t doing their job. Because arguably they weren’t. Their job was to guide the project successfully, which they didn’t do. In a situation like that, you can recover, but it requires tact. The end of this story was that they left the company. An alternate ending is that they may have been let go. If they’re paying you to work on a doomed project, you have to work on it, or change it. And if you want to change it, political maneuvering is necessary.
- marvin 4y ago
  Well, yeeeeees... If management, whose job it is to swallow their pride when given a nasty surprise like this, isn't up to the task. I'm sure that OP could, with great political skill and subtlety, have had a very decent shot at turning this thing around. But what's their incentive? They're probably paid as a regular IC, and saving a double-digit million dollar fiasco like this from disaster is super annoying and unrewarding work! You're effectively doing the job of five managers and not even getting their salary -- let alone a percentage of the disaster you're averting! This kind of political-technical skill combination can probably be fruitfully applied in a place that properly rewards the contributor! I very much agree that this thing could have been handled better, when seen externally. But I'm also pretty sure it wasn't in OP's personal interest to do so! That's a very stupid state of affairs, of course, but I guess that might be par for the course of a failed $60 million project.
- quadcore 4y ago
  In a situation like that, you can recover, but it requires tact. I'd bet it doesnt requires tact to convince them anymore.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  You just tell them it will take 12 months more. Your the development team. Let them rewrite contracts or lose business. You do not get a bonus for contracts sold or kept. If necessary someone else will tell them they are not doing there job. Stick to your role.
  - jacobr1 4y ago
    I prefer to work for companies where this is the case. I get enough equity compensation that finding creative solution to deliver business value _is_ my job and thus am indirectly compensated with the success of the company (even if the overall success is still dependent on other areas of the company succeeding too).
- treis 4y ago
  This isn't really how big dollar consulting works. Everyone under estimates in order to be the lowest bid and win the deal. Once won then you slowly and gracefully tweak scope/budget to get something done without pissing off the customer too much. That's how the game is played. Pointing out that you've underestimated by X is pointing out something everyone already knows. And advocating to blow up the estimate by X so early in the project is arguing to piss the customer off and possibly walk away from $60 million. That's why everyone patted them on the head and blew them off. Everyone else understood the game but it's a bit gauche for them to explicitly explain what's going on.

svnt 4y ago

Some of what you said is true, but your analog is a little off. It wasn’t a junior and a senior in the same role, it was a technical team deputized to do what they did, and a management group that apparently thought the deputies would fail, or convinced themselves their conclusions were wrong. The failure here is not one of lack of politics or communication on the part of the author or their team, but on the culture of the management team. Why invite that presentation if all it does is publicly humiliate your PMs? Could the deputies have done more? How is amateur politicking by technical contributors perceived at your place of work?

sillysaurusx 4y ago
For what it’s worth, I don’t think they could have done more. But the conclusion of the story is to heroically drive off a cliff, and say “it’s all I could do.” That’s where I disagree. If it were me, I would have privately (emphasis on private) worked my way up the chain of command, trying to alert more and more people that there was a serious problem brewing. The meeting in the story was obviously going to be a failure. So if you’re in a situation where you know that X is going to fail, doing something other than X is advisable. I would’ve tried to work with the deputized team to come up with a smaller plan that could be executed in, say, three months, and then figured out how to sell it to management in a way that three months isn’t a dealbreaker. Alternatively, I would have gone to management ahead of the meeting and let them know privately what they should expect to hear. That way they’re not completely surprised when you’re in Zoom, presenting a 12 month extension, and they have to say something. “It would be career limiting” is about the best thing they could say. You want to give them a better alternative. And giving management good alternatives is arguably the job of line engineers like us. We’re a part of a team; our job isn’t merely to do what we’re told, nor is it to say blatantly that a project is doomed. There’s usually a middle ground.
- peteradio 4y ago
  I don't understand how the deputized team drove off the cliff. At the very least they surfaced the set of problems which would need to be addressed to meet the contract.

xg15 4y ago

> The people around me were trying to hint that things aren't quite as clear cut as it seems, but it took a swift kick in my backside to reboot my worldview. Was your rebooted worldview that you had been factually incorrect (i.e. the senior dev actually did do his work) or was it that you were factually correct, but hierarchy and office culture demanded that everyone pretend you weren't?

sillysaurusx 4y ago
I wanted to touch on that: one of the things you learn is that it’s better to be liked than right. We devs often fixate on whether we’re right and the other person is wrong. One specific incident comes to mind. I was working on Heroes of Newerth, a DotA clone. We achieved a bit of popularity in those days, and we reached around 50k concurrent users. So our servers tended to melt. One day, the servers went south, and although games were being completed, none of the stats were being recorded. (Think of it like, the database was in read only mode.) I remember it feeling a little surreal how they decided to handle it. They kept cool, looked into the problem, and got the servers back up within a couple hours. Then they went back to their usual jobs and didn’t seem bothered by the ticking time bomb. I think in my usual 22yo fashion, I said that it was dumb that no one seemed to care that the servers were going down, and that we had to do better for the players. What I should have done was ask questions. Should we try to figure out the root cause, and make sure this doesn’t happen again? Or was it really not a big deal? A few hours’ downtime may or may not have been a big deal. We did end up suffering from some pretty serious server malfunctions which limited our ability to scale. But I certainly mishandled how to approach it, and won no friends. Every team is dysfunctional in their own way. It’s important to adapt to the dysfunction and push things in a positive direction, not merely to be right.
- maest 4y ago
  If it makes you feel any better, I don't think technical issues were the reason HoN failed. For context, I have played a lot of DotA2 and HoN (5.2k hours in DotA2, probably 1k hours in HoN). This is anecdotal, but I was never really bothered by outages and neither were the other people that I played with. Instead, I think HoN made some very bad decisions regarding cosmetics and fostered an extremely toxic playerbase. At least for me, those were the 2 main factors that drove me away to play DotA2 (even though I thought HoN's gameplay was superior).

WesleyJohnson 4y ago

I was hired on as a full-stack developer to help a 2 person team (dev and designer) get a year-long project over the finish line. This was a November and the project was slated to go live on January 1. My first week was getting my PC configured, orientations, onboarding meetings with various external departments and perusing the project to get familiar. Week 2 I was supposed to get assignments from the lead developer, but they were holding things close to their chest. I was given very, very menial things to do, or just told to continue to study the code. When we'd have project meetings and they'd ask how things were going overall, the lead developer would assure them we were on target - even in the face of ongoing bugs, missing features and incorrect functionality during QA testing. I'd offer the Lead my help, but they hadn't found the right task yet. By the end of week 2, beginning of week 3, I was fairly confident the code I was researching was not lining up with the status reports in the project meetings. I started to speak up and ask questions to surface concerns in attempt to get something thrown my way. Again, the Lead Dev continued to assure management we were on target and that seemingly huge TODO items were trivial and would be handled in short order. I was kept on standby. As things continued to progress in this direction, management finally bypassed the Lead and came directly to me to my feel for where were at. At this point I had only been with the company 3 to 4 weeks, but I had been a developer for 11 years. I told them in not so uncertain terms, "this project is doomed". The Lead dev is wildly overpromising deliverables, minimizing outstanding work and shielding the management team from truly understanding how behind he was. I honestly had no idea what his plan was to meet the deadline, but based on my estimates we were easily 4 to 6 months out. They were flabbergasted. I continued to provide direct status reports at management's request. It felt like politics, but what else could I do? By the 2nd week in December, 6 weeks into my employment, the writing was on the wall. The project was canned, the Lead Dev was fired and I was wondering if I had still had a job myself as the only developer and no projects on the timeline. By the end of the following year, I had been promoted to management overseeing a team of 3 and still developing myself. We rebuilt the project from scratch and implemented it exactly 1 year after its initial planned release. I never wanted management and certainly never wanted to get anyone fired, but sometimes you have to put it all out there in black and white.

peteradio 4y ago
I'm baffled when people (the lead) behave this way. I'm not asking this sarcastically and you probably wouldn't know, but were they on some heavy sedatives or psych drugs?

roxgib 4y ago

I think what a lot of comments are missing is that they tried to raise this with management, and eventually management responded by asking them to conduct a review and deliver the results, which they did. Maybe they could have played it better but it doesn’t sound like it was their idea to do it this way.

Aeolun 4y ago

> My point is (and the point of many other commenters here) is that you can't really show up to a meeting and say "This project is doomed." One of the many benefits of being having extremely employee friendly laws is that you can absolutely do this. It still doesn’t really help, but it’s not ‘career limiting’ either.