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Reminds me of one of my managers who said, “Sometimes, you have to let people fail.” It does take a lot of energy to keep some people afloat. My hope has always

Reminds me of one of my managers who said, “Sometimes, you have to let people fail.” It does take a lot of energy to keep some people afloat. My hope has always been they learn to swim as it were, but sometimes it’s just effort better spent elsewhere. I know one project did not have my involvement and couldn’t have succeeded without my knowledge. They were so bad they would work in questions casually to their actual work. I started avoiding all of them when I found out management had been dumping on my team and praising theirs. It’s just such a slap in the face because they could not have done well and their implementation was horrible.

dpkirchner 9mo ago
> Reminds me of one of my managers who said, “Sometimes, you have to let people fail.” Yup -- I've learned a lot from my failures. Far be it for me to deny others that experience. Assuming their failures won't result in the company imploding or other serious harm, of course.
BeetleB 9mo ago
> Reminds me of one of my managers who said, “Sometimes, you have to let people fail.” I often say "Sometimes, you have to let the manager fail." Some managers don't like being told their ideas won't work. If you refuse or argue, you are seen as the reason his idea failed. I've found what works best with them is to proceed with the work, but keep them informed very frequently, so they can see how things evolve, and will be able to see the failure you had anticipated a long time ago before it is too late. Then you're seen in a positive light, and he'll separate you from the project failure.
- cj 9mo ago
  I can’t imagine holding a job where I had to do work that I expect will fail. Sounds absolutely depressing. What keeps you motivated?
  - cardanome 9mo ago
    The paycheck? The vast majority of software projects fail. Honestly, I can't remember ever in my career working on a project I really believed in. Sometimes I do enjoy the challenge of doing the impossible. Turning a doomed project around or at least minimizing damage. I had some where I thought "this worked out but if anyone but me had been in charge, yeah this would have been a disaster". That feeds my ego. Though I never ever get any thanks from management or any praise. Though this is more of a German culture thing. There is a reason why burn out is so high in software dev. You are set up to constantly fail. If you succeed against all odds you get more and harder work until you fail. You got to focus on yourself and find joy in the little challenges. Don't fret over things that you can't change.
    - BikiniPrince 9mo ago
      That’s crazy sauce. I don’t lose. The one time a project was heading to failure I went to the VP and explained the sabotage I was seeing. This was a very lucrative contract and failure was not an option. He pulled that manager and his team so far off they had a new office on the moon. They were pulling non-sense like submitting the pseudo code I white boarded as a commit. Two weeks in and I’m still explaining to them the plan. Despite the setback I pulled off a mammoth project and strategically moved in devs to areas where they could succeed. If they slowed me down they were given the boot. Success sometimes just takes drive.
      - cindyllm 9mo ago
        [dead]
      - deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
    - aoeusnth1 9mo ago
      That's insane. I think about 80%+ of the projects I see attempted succeed in at least some limited fashion. Even the failures in retrospect produced some insight into the right way forward and were necessary as part of research.
- array_key_first 9mo ago
  What I've learned is that most people are very emotionally immature. This strategy is one that I would expect to work on children, not adults. But it does actually work, I know because I've done it too. It shouldn't be the case that criticism and compromises are seen as attacks. Everyone wants to succeed, so just help each other succeed. But it's never that easy.
ljm 9mo ago
Letting people learn the hard way is a risky endeavour because you have to trust they’re aware of themselves, and they’re not coasting on your support. Gotta accept that a likely outcome is that they do fail and they don’t learn and you have to let them go. But if you tried to support them beforehand, did what you could, at least you can have a clear conscience.
gizmo686 9mo ago
Letting people fail and letting projects fail seem fairly different to me (at least for large projects). There have been a bunch of times in my career where I've allowed people under me to "fail". Often times, an individual failing at something is just not that expensive; while being highly educational. Sometimes, it turns out that there approach actually worked, and we as a group gained a new bit of institutional knowledge.
bodegajed 9mo ago
When executives fail, unfortunately, they don't blame each other. They do postmortems, then hire consultants to layoff senior engineers.
- majormajor 9mo ago
  > When executives fail, unfortunately, they don't blame each other. They do postmortems, then hire consultants to layoff senior engineers. Forced executive churn has been higher than for individual engineers at a lot of my past jobs. Especially for disciplines like marketing/advertising/sales.
7402 9mo ago
> Reminds me of one of my managers who said, “Sometimes, you have to let people fail.” Similar to one I heard about navigating this sort of thing: “People have to gather their own data.”

dpkirchner 9mo ago

> Reminds me of one of my managers who said, “Sometimes, you have to let people fail.” Yup -- I've learned a lot from my failures. Far be it for me to deny others that experience. Assuming their failures won't result in the company imploding or other serious harm, of course.

BeetleB 9mo ago

> Reminds me of one of my managers who said, “Sometimes, you have to let people fail.” I often say "Sometimes, you have to let the manager fail." Some managers don't like being told their ideas won't work. If you refuse or argue, you are seen as the reason his idea failed. I've found what works best with them is to proceed with the work, but keep them informed very frequently, so they can see how things evolve, and will be able to see the failure you had anticipated a long time ago before it is too late. Then you're seen in a positive light, and he'll separate you from the project failure.

cj 9mo ago
I can’t imagine holding a job where I had to do work that I expect will fail. Sounds absolutely depressing. What keeps you motivated?
- cardanome 9mo ago
  The paycheck? The vast majority of software projects fail. Honestly, I can't remember ever in my career working on a project I really believed in. Sometimes I do enjoy the challenge of doing the impossible. Turning a doomed project around or at least minimizing damage. I had some where I thought "this worked out but if anyone but me had been in charge, yeah this would have been a disaster". That feeds my ego. Though I never ever get any thanks from management or any praise. Though this is more of a German culture thing. There is a reason why burn out is so high in software dev. You are set up to constantly fail. If you succeed against all odds you get more and harder work until you fail. You got to focus on yourself and find joy in the little challenges. Don't fret over things that you can't change.
  - BikiniPrince 9mo ago
    That’s crazy sauce. I don’t lose. The one time a project was heading to failure I went to the VP and explained the sabotage I was seeing. This was a very lucrative contract and failure was not an option. He pulled that manager and his team so far off they had a new office on the moon. They were pulling non-sense like submitting the pseudo code I white boarded as a commit. Two weeks in and I’m still explaining to them the plan. Despite the setback I pulled off a mammoth project and strategically moved in devs to areas where they could succeed. If they slowed me down they were given the boot. Success sometimes just takes drive.
    - cindyllm 9mo ago
      [dead]
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
  - aoeusnth1 9mo ago
    That's insane. I think about 80%+ of the projects I see attempted succeed in at least some limited fashion. Even the failures in retrospect produced some insight into the right way forward and were necessary as part of research.
array_key_first 9mo ago
What I've learned is that most people are very emotionally immature. This strategy is one that I would expect to work on children, not adults. But it does actually work, I know because I've done it too. It shouldn't be the case that criticism and compromises are seen as attacks. Everyone wants to succeed, so just help each other succeed. But it's never that easy.

ljm 9mo ago

Letting people learn the hard way is a risky endeavour because you have to trust they’re aware of themselves, and they’re not coasting on your support. Gotta accept that a likely outcome is that they do fail and they don’t learn and you have to let them go. But if you tried to support them beforehand, did what you could, at least you can have a clear conscience.

gizmo686 9mo ago

Letting people fail and letting projects fail seem fairly different to me (at least for large projects). There have been a bunch of times in my career where I've allowed people under me to "fail". Often times, an individual failing at something is just not that expensive; while being highly educational. Sometimes, it turns out that there approach actually worked, and we as a group gained a new bit of institutional knowledge.

bodegajed 9mo ago

When executives fail, unfortunately, they don't blame each other. They do postmortems, then hire consultants to layoff senior engineers.

majormajor 9mo ago
> When executives fail, unfortunately, they don't blame each other. They do postmortems, then hire consultants to layoff senior engineers. Forced executive churn has been higher than for individual engineers at a lot of my past jobs. Especially for disciplines like marketing/advertising/sales.

7402 9mo ago

> Reminds me of one of my managers who said, “Sometimes, you have to let people fail.” Similar to one I heard about navigating this sort of thing: “People have to gather their own data.”