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Doing Everyone Else's Job
- dominicq 17d agoNice post, but I would appreciate examples. Anyone has good examples of this, and of the "not like this" section?
- SoftTalker 17d agoA simple one that occurred to me is picking up litter in your neighborhood. Not exactly work per se but it needs to get done and almost nobody does it.
- proc0 18d agoJust work a lot more for the same pay. Great idea.
- rvz 18d agoFor the benefit of humanity.
- TeMPOraL 17d agoFor the good of all of us. (Except the ones who are dead.)
- distortionfield 17d agoThis is what pretty much every “lifehack” type of tip boils down to, btw lol
- proc0 17d agoI guess I should add "for someone else". In that case it's just bad negotiating skills, but at the same time companies have a lot more bargaining power over individual employees, and it's especially bad in the software industry.
- perelin 17d agoOnly if you add the hours for free and dont punch out when you should.
- proc0 17d agoIt's not possible to do everything. That's when your coworker that dedicates every waking moment to the job will outpace you and then set the standards.
- perelin 17d agoIf they "dedicate every waking moment to the job" they will outpace you anyway. So either join the race or live a balanced life. Choices.
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- dtdynasty 17d agoThe skill to distinguish on whether the extra work will help you get paid more in the future is essential. Developing this skill makes it a bet instead of just working more.
- momento 17d ago[dead]
- RugnirViking 17d agoit seems clear to me that one can slack off at certain times, and work hard at the important times, and overall come out about the same (or with less overall work). IMO as a developer in a large corp, if you know the right team to talk to, it can save you MONTHS of work yourself
- perelin 17d agoI do enjoy learning new things and having a generalist approach. But its not for everyone.
- Brajeshwar 17d agoI learned this the hard way. I have been training a bunch of 5-10 years experience tech-leads, architects, and what not. But on the job, I realized quite a lot cannot switch context and subject at all. I've found people who have spent decades on one topic in a very specific vertical. It is amazing how they know EVERYTHING in that and I can listen with my jaws dropped to the floor for hours. Then I will wake up, with that spine-chilling shake all over my body on how patient and dedicated one has to be to be on that straight line their entire life.
- exmadscientist 17d agoThe other powerful thing about being able to do everyone else's job is that you, personally, gain a lot of leverage, and in a lot of different ways. Someone else needs a favor? You probably know how to deliver. Something's on fire? You probably know what to do next, or at least who to call, no matter what's on fire today. Someone isn't budging on something? You might not have any bigger of a lever than anyone else, but you probably know exactly where to position yours, and exactly what it'll do when you apply a bit of force. It's useful. And then there's times like getting to charge your client $300/hour to drop stuff off at FedEx. Because you can do that and you're here and you'll get it done right -- no one needs to explain the idiosyncracies of this particular deadline or package contents; you've got it. Even if that's not normally a senior consultant's job.
- Brajeshwar 17d agoLOL! My bosses used to tell me that I need to learn to be more `rude` and not just do what others says because I can. I have learnt a lot and one of the biggest is to say NO, in big Uppercase—I can do anything for work but I won’t do that, NO, I won’t do that. Sometime, I still do and I like the fun and thrill of locking in a hotel room after a meeting and coming out in lot less days these days (pppppsssstt, because of AI) and get into the next meeting showing off what can be done that was discussed 48 hours ago.
- exmadscientist 17d agoYou don't do these things because they benefit your boss. (They might happen to, but that's not the point.) You do them because they benefit you. Not going to benefit you? There's lots of ways to say no to a back-channel request. Not a back-channel request? Then I guess it's not someone else's job!
- jampekka 17d agoEasier said than done. Saying no is not so easy. There's a bit of a weird dynamic that if you could do something that others need help with, saying no can be considered rude, but saying (even if lying) that you don't know how to do it is generally accepted. Usually a boss (or even a colleague) backing in saying no helps a lot. Also the helping can cause escalation of "demand". First you help with something quick and easy for you, but soon you find "owning" more and more of the task. It's not dissimilar from the entitled people in open source project bug trackers.
- saqued 17d agoAs long as you keep getting the performance review brownie points, because if you don't you are out and it doesn't matter.
- entropy47 17d agoNo matter how dire things are, the people who can get something done that nobody else can (or on timelines they couldn't) tend to do okay in performance reviews. At least in my experience. There are easier ways to get a false positive though, if you're open to lying, hogging credit, bus chucks etc. I sometimes wonder if I'm the crazy one for Doing Things Right when I could be spending time with my family instead.
- SoftTalker 17d agoIf you're working regular extra hours to "do things right" instead of spending time with your family, then yeah you might want to reconsider. But by all means, do it during the normal workday. Like you said, people notice and it gets recognized. Unless you're in a very disfunctional org, in which case find a better employer.
- qsbuilder 17d agoCharging $300/hr to drop off FedEx packages is great until you realize you're the only one who knows where the tape is.
- cik 17d agoI tend to apply this to myself, within an organization (as opposed to those who like to generically try it all - fair enough). I've always been an enormous fan of touring the organization. Whether I join as a dev, or an exec, I always make it a point to spend some time with product, with support, and with marketing. It ends up providing me a unique vantage point. I encourage others to do the same, and when I 'control' onboarding, make it part of the process. It's literally the fastest way to have someone get up to speed with the customer profile and product. They can play with it whilst listening in to support calls (if a thing). They can learn about pain points and "hard edges" that as developers we don't always come across.
- nkapias 17d agoI've experienced that being knowledgeable of the inner workings is a risk of getting dragged into every projects. When scheduling onboarding, I try to enable touring without those drawbacks.
- RugnirViking 17d agoany tips on how to go about such things? its occasionally hard to find excuses to go hang out at the other end of the building and talk to another team I dont know much about as a regular developer
- nkapias 17d agoI usually asked my managers by framing it to their goals, if agreed they would schedule with other managers. It's harder during crunch or when everyone is remote.
- harry8 17d agoAlways have a folder in your hand when visiting other teams in other parts of the office. Print out some code, a few pages of spec, whatever. Just don't go walkabout empty-handed.
- JR1427 16d agoJust send someone in the other team a message saying you're interested in learning more about what they do, and would like to grab a coffee.
- RevEng 17d agoI disagree with the centralization thought. I'm working on a project to create a central AI platform for a very large corporation. As you can imagine, such a large company already has several different platforms made by different branches within it. Each branch has something they are relatively happy with. But corporate sees this redundancy as waste, so they want to consolidate it into one. The problem with one is the same with any other single source: you are stuck with whatever they offer on whatever timelines they provide. You are sharing this with a hundred thousand other people, so it's not tailored to your use case, but either made as generic as possible, or full of irrelevant features. Both of these cases make it worse for you. I have often made in house libraries either based on or completely replacing a free equivalent because the free one doesn't meet our needs and has extra complications we don't need. Yes, it comes with its costs, but sometimes it's worth it for something that genuinely meets your needs. By forcing everybody to use the same common platform, you are either forcing them to work around the mismatch between the platform and their needs, or your are forcing the platform to provide for everyone's needs. Neither is efficient and it harms every other user. If you are going to make your own, you had better have a good reason for it, but you shouldn't be forced into a single solution for everything - it can end up being more expensive than making a few special purpose applications.
- iugtmkbdfil834 17d agoAs end user of one such platform, thank you giving me hope that at least some people are at least putting in an effort to make decent. We currently have a very weird mix of features applied to everyone and we are not all quite the same almost by definition.
- yosefk 15d agoWhat are you disagreeing with in TFA though? I agree with your points, I just think there are counterpoints and this needs to be decided on a case by case basis
- RevEng 14d agoFrom TFA: > The second common variant is, instead of centralizing a service so that everyone in the company uses it, every department does it on their own. Department managers like it because it’s one less party not reporting to them to depend on (and nothing scares managers more than needing things from people not reporting to them.) And the people managing the department managers like it because they don’t need to deal with the centralized service department allegedly failing — and having to figure out if that’s really true and how to fix it, or if it’s an excuse made up by the other departments for failing at their own job. Here, too, if outcomes are what concerns you rather than what's easiest for senior leadership, standardizing on something across the company vs having everyone roll their own variant is a hard decision to make. The argument is that centralization is the better outcome, even if it's less appealing to leadership. My counter argument is that centralization has downsides that need to be considered; it isn't inherently better.
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- fabianholzer 17d agoIn corporations no good deed ever goes unpunished.
- hdjrudni 17d agoSomeone literally said that to me when I did a thing. I'd never heard it before. But I'm careful about the things I do now because as soon as I touch or fix something I'm suddenly the owner of it for the rest of time.
- phtrivier 17d agoIn case the author reads this : I suspect I agree with some of the ideas (or at least they're though provoking), but the writing does not help. The comma count is a hint ;) (I had to parse a few paragraphs several times to get the idea.)
- entropy47 17d agoConversely, I found this easy and enjoyable to read.
- ChrisMarshallNY 17d agoI got in the habit of using Oxford Commas[0]. Not everyone loves them, and I sometimes need to go back, and uncomma stuff. I got in the habit, because it is better for technical specifications. It makes it clear, to which word an "and" applies. I think it makes reading prose a bit awkward, though. I've noticed that LLMs really don't seem to like using commas, in general. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma
- krenel 17d agoI liked the book “Writing in short sentences”. You end up with condensed ideas. The output text is easy to read. I’m suggesting you to check it out. Then incorporate anything that resonates with you :) Good article, btw!
- ShadowOfThePit 17d agoHuh, that's close to my own writing style. But you are right, it's becomes an issue when three sentences make up a 100+ word paragraph lol
- dude250711 17d ago"For some reason, many resent the idea of working on someone else’s system, and think of it as charity uncalled for in the workplace. Well, did Intel do Microsoft’s job to help poor struggling Microsoft, or did they do it to benefit from Microsoft’s success?" It all depends on stock options allocation, no?
- ChrisMarshallNY 17d agoI worked for a Japanese corporation, and a big part of their HR policy, was to move staff around the company. It was usually in 1- or 2-year stints (people would spend their entire careers at the company, so they could do this). Eventually, they would end up doing longer stints, where they would specialize. They would couple this with things like standardized coding and documentation styles, common tools, etc. Training on these standards was a regular thing for all staff. The idea was that they could rapidly move experienced staff around. It also helped staff to understand how their work was applied in an integrated system (having “blinders” on, is a fairly typical issue, with dedicated employees). It generally worked, but relied on their particular culture, and introduced a fairly significant amount of overhead and rigidity to the system. It would also mean that it takes a long time to cultivate experts. Personally, I’ve always enjoyed learning new stuff (still do). I actually enjoy taking on projects that I don’t know how to do. I wrote about it here: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/thats-not-what-ships-are-built-for/ https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/thats-not-what-ships...
- tomaskafka 17d agoThis is what doctors do in Czech Republic - mandatory journey through hospital departments taking about 2.5 years.
- groestl 17d agoIn Austria as well, it's called "Turnus".
- mitxela 17d agoI think this is done in the USA too.
- elmo-shrugged 17d agoI've been at U.S. companies that paid lip service to this flexible sort of coverage, but once you are actually useful in the dept you're in, your boss never wants to let you go because upper management didn't build in the redundancy to the headcount to ensure you'd be effectively replaced...
- curtisblaine 17d agoI'm always wary of colleagues like that. They start doing everybody's job (worse) and immediately management expects everybody to do the same ("there are no excuses..."), with terrible consequences. From experience, they need to be recognized and isolated soon.
- dmurray 17d agoOne of the things I hate about my current job is that it's impossible to do this. Everything is locked behind multiple layers of permissions. It takes weeks to get the correct permissions set up even for my actual job (which I see any time changing roles here, or when onboarding new hires). Getting the permissions to jump in and improve some other part of the system that I don't officially own - even though I might get granted them if I ask nicely, because nobody knows who is actually meant to have what permissions - is so much higher friction than asking the "right" person.
- LtWorf 17d agoI worked at a company where you could do it, but some people take fixes as insults to their mother's honour, so all in all probably on a personal level it is best to avoid doing it.
- HolyLampshade 17d agoI’ve only worked in a single company where it really worked out, and it took a massive amount of work to massage egos on both sides of the “fix” (one side sees their hammer tool and wants to fix everything with it, and the other has the mother’s honor issue). You really had to spend time with both parties helping them understand things were a certain way for a reason, but that there were always small changes that could improve things. Encouraging the inverse of fixing relationship helped both parties as well. That said, I’ve worked in a few other shops that either had the permissions/compartmentalization shit show as a permanent blocker, or were just completely devoid of a culture encouraging people to care about anything beyond their own career/fiefdom. I absolutely despise both cases.
- moomoo11 17d agosuch companies deserve to fail and the most honorable thing you can do is find another job or start a competitor.
- cm2012 17d agoCompanies underestimate how much this murders productivity. All friction compounds.
- pythonRon 17d agoThis was just business as usual 50 to 100 years ago. People started at the bottom and worked their way up. There were no I've-got-a-degree shortcuts because degrees weren't about training for a job, they were about finding out about the world around us. It's interesting that things are starting to circle around, but I doubt any corporation will drop the degree requirements... unless AI CEO's start rejecting all human applications.
- ChrisMarshallNY 17d agoAs a high school dropout, with a GED, I can relate. Pretty much all of my education has been OJT and seminars/classes. It's earned me lots of sneers, over the years, but the people that mattered, didn't care. I spent most of my career at one of the world's best optical equipment companies, working as a peer with some of the top people in the world. It was quite humbling, and extremely gratifying.
- tristor 17d agoI used this technique to great success in a few companies where infrastructure operations was critical to the business (cloud provider, SaaS companies), by having myself and other members of my team where I was the tech lead work with Support and Sales to get direct exposure to customer problems and the internal problems facing staff who deal directly with customers. Not only did this help our operational staff who are mostly "back of house" gain an understanding about our customers, how they use the product, and the impact of operational decisions, but it also helped us get more empathy for the staff that bridged between us and the customer, and we found ways to bring some actions closer to the customer by enabling Support to do some things without needing to submit a ticket and wait on us. I really wish this was more common in the industry, now as a Product Manager, while I do a lot to engage with field teams (Support, Sales) and work across every group in the company (Legal, Finance, Eng, Ops, Support, Sales, et al), I still only get interactions and snippets, it'd be great to go walk a mile in their shoes.
- moffers 17d agoThis was refreshing to read. I’m a big believer in getting things done especially when some process or people get in your way. In my experience people usually understand “oh this person is trying to make things better so this arbitrary process should take a backseat here”. Even people only working the clock will work with you if you frame it well.
- randusername 17d ago> I believe that not only do 20% of the people do 80% of the work, but that all this work only achieves its ultimate goals thanks to the <5% of the people who do stuff that someone else is supposed to do, but won't, for reasons which are perfectly legitimate in the organization's view of reality, even though the cumulative effect of such legitimate reasons is the certain death of the whole place. I don't know that I've ever felt so validated by a HN submission. I am definitely one of those suckers that does extra work others will not do. It isn't altruistic, I just can't motivate myself to work at all if my tasks are stupid. The problem is that at any sufficiently large organization many of the tasks are stupid because hardly anyone is on the same page.
- redwood 17d agoThere are two ways to do this: helpful mentor, always around, always helping... or inartful toe-stepper. Be the former
- Aurornis 17d ago> If a manager doesn’t actually manage anything, this is fine as long as you can go to his people and effectively manage them > but you can usually find people in his org who’ll work with you, on the theory that they’re supposed to. In 100% of the cases where someone has tried this on me, both as the manager and the naive employee, the real reason was that they didn’t care about what the manager/employee was supposed to be doing. They were looking for easy targets who could be abused to do their team’s work. Most of the “manager doesn’t manage anything” accusations came from other teams who weren’t even trying to understand what other managers or teams did. If the other manager or team wasn’t actively working for them in some capacity, they thought the manager wasn’t doing anything. > It’s true that many of them have long figured out that they’re really supposed to follow orders passed down the hierarchy and do nothing else, even if everything around them is on fire. But some never figure this out, and most managers fail to punish at least some of these slow learners of theirs, so they’re yours to work with. The most generous interpretation is that this is taken idle employees and putting them to use for the greater good, but most of the cases I’ve seen in real companies are from one arrogant manager spreading their work across any workers gullible enough to do anything you ask of them. I’ve worked with and hired a lot of really nice people who always want to lend a helping hand. They’re great, but many of them have a real problem handling workplace sharks like this who will saunter over to their desk (or DMs) and persuade them to work on something else, which puts them behind on their own work. When it happens chronically it gets so bad that you have to start checking in almost daily to make sure they haven’t been pulled into yet another team’s workload from a Slack DM or email. Helping other teams when time is available is a good thing generally. You need to make your manager aware of the incoming requests and time spent, though. Don’t become the person who is working themself to the bone for everyone who comes over with a request but is holding their own team back because they can’t focus on their actual work.
- dasil003 17d ago> the real reason was that they didn’t care about what the manager/employee was supposed to be doing. This is true of course, but you say it as if it’s a bad thing. At the end of the day, everyone has to manage their own time. If everyone only cared about chain of command and scheduled priorities, overall efficiency would plummet. Simple wins that just require a small amount of coordination outside the official org chart would be killed in committees and program manager reviews. I understand the exploitative dynamic you’re describing, I just think there are many failure modes for productive operations that have to be balanced in some meta way.
- lantry 17d agoInteresting choice to include that reviewer comment at the bottom which doesn't really comment on the article at all. The reviewer says "based on the opening paragraph I thought this was going to be about topic X. Here are my thoughts on topic X". That's great, but the article isn't about topic X. What are your thoughts about the actual topic of the article? Did you read it, or just the opening paragraph?
- maerF0x0 17d ago> and most managers fail to punish at least some of these slow learners of theirs False, they punish by not crediting that work as work. Glue work, keeping things tidy, dealing with that annoyance that everyone else has been able to get away with suffering through (and ignoring), all of this will be worth approximately 0 at performance review time because your time is a zerosum game that is traded off with highly visible, political, and otherwise rewardable work. It's been my experience that in larger companies you generally have to play in the framework.(I'd roughly draw the line at 1000+ employees), at quite small companies (or as a self employed / entrepreneur, roughly <200 employees) you should follow the path of highest EROI on your efforts regardless of who's job it is. In the gap you have to read the culture and management.
- 3eb7988a1663 17d agoI can think of at least two people in my career who were, ahem, load bearing for the company. They did all of the BS, non-sexy work required to keep the place running. Never wasted time on vanity projects, just showed up day after day doing the actual necessary things. They were criminally under appreciated by management. Their career trajectory significantly worse than those who engaged in the highly visible projects.
- two_handfuls 17d agoWas the company over 1000 employees?
- airstrike 16d agoIn my case and experience, yes.
- 3eb7988a1663 16d agoSignificantly larger, yes.
- dust-jacket 16d agoI've never understood why people would continue to care so hard when their efforts are unappreciated. But I've also never worked at a large company.
- Oscalemor 17d agoIn the unificaton of knowledge work, doesn't everyone think all other jobs are just a prompt away?
- shinyoo 17d agoIn a hierarchical organization, solving real problems almost always means “doing everyone else’s job,” so the author is right if your goal is to succeed inside organizations. That said, I’d add one more point: in China, where I’m from, it is getting harder for individuals to even survive inside organizations these days, let alone succeed. In that environment, the rational strategy is often to do less, take fewer risks, and make fewer mistakes. Hard not to miss the golden days.
- yosefk 15d agoAh, I call this the defense-dominant workplace. Not a fun situation to be in!
- WorseIsBetter 16d ago[flagged]
- jeffrallen 16d agoI work this way, and apart from being well liked because people know I bring well thought out requests (and sometimes, code) to them, I haven't seen much reward. The reward has to be intrinsic. You have to actually like helping other people selflessly, and that's about the only reward you can count on. Usually, if I dig into something that's not being done by others it's because it is no one's job. And by the rule of "he who touched it last owns it" (a stupid and destructive default rule that exists even in otherwise excellent organizations), I end up owning a bunch of old crap no one wants to touch.
- BeetleB 16d ago> I also believe that you will be well-rewarded for doing everyone else’s job in the many cases where the organization is in a shape bad enough to need this (which is most of them) but is still healthy enough to eventually appreciate it (and if it can’t, it’s on its last breath.) Tread carefully. At fairly large companies, you'll find plenty of people who'll take your reward. I also know people like those described in the article who get hit by layoffs - people didn't realize how significant the unofficial work they did was. Whenever I get a new job, I always research and test the waters. If it's clear I won't get rewarded, I don't do it (and start searching for another job).
- yosefk 15d agoTFA author - I very much agree, don't do this for free
- BobbyTables2 14d agoI’m just amazed there are companies actively grooming employees to be promoted. In my experience, rarely an individual contributor ends up being promoted to a manager (because the latter retired/layoff/etc). At the higher levels, they are filled with executives in acquired companies or hired from the outside. (CEO of LittleCo becomes VP of BiggerCo) Although I have seen 2-3 unicorn cases where someone goes from janitor to director in 3 years - far faster than a high performing junior engineer with demonstrated accomplishments can become a senior engineer… Always assumed the former was flat out nepotism.