7 ms·

Choose from 2 extreme alternatives: a. Treat this project as if it were your sick child on life support. b. Treat this project as if it were a gazelle being r

by edw519 13y ago

Choose from 2 extreme alternatives: a. Treat this project as if it were your sick child on life support. b. Treat this project as if it were a gazelle being ripped apart by a pride of lions. If you choose (a), do anything and everything you can to save it. Be open and sincere and stop at nothing. If you choose (b), prepare a resume and run the other way. No sense risking your own well-being on a lost cause. The worst thing to do would be to make any choice in between these two.

Trufa 13y ago
I think you should post that comment as an answer, it is very graphical but helpful!
- epidemian 13y ago
  Seconded. I don't think the accepted answer is strong enough nor a very sound advise.
  - ghaff 13y ago
    It's deliberately dramatized but I don't really see it as wrong. Here's how I would (less dramatically--and less interestingly)phrase the choices. a.) If you're sure there's a path to success and you're invested in getting there, do whatever you can to achieve that goal--understanding that one of the possible outcomes is to be told to pack your things and leave. Now. The likelihood of this outcome obviously depends on the exact situation. b.) Accept that things are not going to end well. Do your job, keep your head down, and start seeking alternatives ex post haste. In some situations, seeking alternatives ex post haste may, in fact, involve fleeing (especially in a short time horizon such as this one) but I've certainly been in situations where the writing was more or less on the wall but more in the vein of a long ponderous collapse.
    - brudgers 13y ago
      b.) Accept that things are not going to end well. Fresh gazelle is delicious. Try not to overeat. There's a whole heard, and the pride will catch another one tomorrow. It's all a matter of perspective.
- sillysaurus 13y ago
  It's graphical, but not very helpful. How would the employee go about saving the project? The manager has authority over him/her, so their only choice would be to convince the manager that a drastic change is needed. Yet no manager is going to be receptive to the truth that they've personally failed over the past 1.5 months to such an extent that the next 1.5 months are impossible to salvage without throwing away most of the existing work. That conversation would not go well for the employee.
  - dspillett 13y ago
    > It may be graphical, but it's not very helpful. What is OP supposed to do to "save" the project? I would disagree there. A good manager might take the situation well - they may have been misinformed by others and think things are far better than they are. If that isn't the case there may be the option of going above the managers head, though this has to be considered very carefully. In may case once it went rather well: the person above me had grossly misreported things above him. We are still dealing with some of the legacy of that period, but getting through it (and that person is no longer here). Of course depending on local politics this could go very badly, so I'll repeat: consider this sort of action very very carefully before taking the step. In my case saying "things have been X bad for a while, if things don't change either we are going to fail badly very soon or I'm going to burn out inside a couple of months" got the message across (it turns out an honest assessment was appreciated and that not losing some of us through walk out or burn out was important enough to warrant rearranging some plans and expectations). Of course I'm lucky: the Powers That Be here are sensible and I've been here over a decade & proven myself a good few times over so my word carries some weight - a relative new-starter under a less receptive hierarchy would not fair so well. If there really are no options for plan A for whatever reason, no end of time/overtime will fix the problem and there is no way the management can be made to appreciate the scale of the problem, that leaves plan B: get ready to jump ship.
  - PakG1 13y ago
    All good managers rely on the people under them to give them high quality information and feedback to make decisions. don't blanket all managers as being too egotistical to avoid irrational escalation of commitment. That being said, decisions like reversing project directions or pivoting are usually huge multi-party decisions not up to a single person (unless it gets escalated to the very very top). A politically savvy employee would be able to make it work. Albeit, after saving the project (or making an admirable effort that catches everyone's eye), that employee would probably be marked by management for a management role. ;)
Spooky23 13y ago
So do a death march or quit? Very extreme. Unless you're in a tiny company that will literally go out of business if the project isn't complete, there is a valid middle ground: cover your ass to avoid blame, pitch to the PM to get the schedule extended, salvage as much as you can, and move on and do better next time. In the meantime, take a better job if one turns up. But don't be lured into extreme action by magical thinking. If a failed project is inextricably linked to your personal well-being, you're in the wrong business.
- maarten-pi 13y ago
  I agree, that the previous comment sounds extreme, there often is a middle ground. People can be reasoned with, otherwise the company you're working for doesn't sound like a good place to be. Taking a better job is fine, but halfway a project it might kill the project when some of the top guys decide to leave. It might even be worse when the architect of the legacy-system decides to leave with knowledge of all the undocumented business rules. It's so important, that a project is well managed, because a lot of the aspects of building something new are extremely satisfying to work on. However with mismanagement it's easy to demoralize the team.
  - josso 13y ago
    > Taking a better job is fine, but halfway a project it might kill the project when some of the top guys decide to leave. It might even be worse when the architect of the legacy-system decides to leave with knowledge of all the undocumented business rules. Exactly. The world is pretty small and you shouldn't step on somebody's toes unless you absolutely don't see another way out. The sensitive thing to do here, is to make sure you've got your ass covered and if this is a persisting problem or you feel like you can't work there anymore, then you quit after the current job is done. And hopefully you can leave with a good recommendation.
- CodeMage 13y ago
  Maybe it sounds extreme, but I agree with @edw519: you don't want to work at a place that lets a project fail as badly as the OP described it. I've been in situations like that too often and I've learned that particular lesson too well. Like @angdis said elsewhere in this discussion, projects "fail" all the time, but the OP is talking about a specific kind of failure. Notice how many commenters mention "finger-pointing" and "paper trail". When you find yourself in a situation where that becomes important, it's time to consider leaving and it's always better to leave on your own terms. Unless you're deeply invested in that project or that company, it's usually better to start looking for a place where projects fail more gracefully than this.
jlarocco 13y ago
It's not ideal, but if he can put himself in a position where it's obvious to management that the project didn't fail because of him, I don't think he'll end up too badly off. If the parts of the project he's worked on are well put together and working well, then it doesn't look too bad on him that the overall project failed. On the other hand, it sounds like a depressing situation to be in, so I'd prefer your option (b).
angdis 13y ago
The fact is projects "fail" all the time. One has to really define what failure actually constitutes. It can be anything from the completion date skidding a few weeks or months or perhaps something worse like no chance in hell of ever completing the project to the satisfaction of the customer and going out of business in the process. The severity of the consequences determines what approach is best to take-- and there are many choice in-between working like a mad-man and dropping everything interviewing for a new position.
elorant 13y ago
70% of projects fail. According to your options you're either burned out pretty fast by going the extra mile, or you change jobs every couple of years. IMHO the best thing to do is to express your concerns and from there on just do your job without investing any extra effort. You can't be reluctant cause this will be received as not caring, neither invest the extra effort because usually the reason projects fail is not incompetent programmers but wrong specifications. Let someone else take the blame.
crusso 13y ago
There can be mitigating circumstances that could warrant staying, but mostly I have to agree with you. Either fight to turn things around or avoid being stained by the inevitable failure. The worst thing about staying to turn things around is that often the failure is set up from the beginning by those in leadership. Your reward for working your ass off to make the project succeed is probably going to be to make someone look good who was responsible for digging the hole that you helped to pull everything out of. Unless the game board is set up so that you benefit heavily from your hard work (equity, bonuses rewarding the risk and effort) - there's little upside to killing yourself besides some opportunity for personal growth.
TeMPOraL 13y ago
It makes sense if you're absolutely, positively sure that the project is doomed and there's not a slightest hope for it. But even assuming this, choice (b) is only local optimization. One could consider instead doing (c) - to try as hard as possible to convince the management to shut down that project ASAP, and thus saving the company many man-hours of wasted work. The global gain will be much greater then. Of course if management is stubborn and you're still sure the project will fail, then you're back to option (b).
- klibertp 13y ago
  I just today talked with friends that work for Samsung and the amount of wasted everything they told me about was staggering. I don't think that there is anything such companies couldn't waste and forget about. This makes the management stubbornness all the more probable and makes trying to save "work-hours" pointless. That's pretty scary shit, but apparently that's how it works in such companies. I don't want to ever work in such an environment.
  - TeMPOraL 13y ago
    Yeah, I guess it depends on the size and make-up of the company. When I was writing that comment I was imagining a small/medium sized company, doing one or two big projects at the same time. If the company is so big that it can waste everything and still go forward by its inertia, then I guess leaving promptly is the right choice.
PaulHoule 13y ago
There's a good idea here, to manage your level of commitment, but it's lost in the idea that it's a binary decision. To get high performance without burnout it is necessary to switch from complete engagement to complete disengagement every few hours. The Serenity Prayer from Alcoholics Anonymous is asking for the right thing here, even if you aren't religious. "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference." It's great to be passionate but it's also important to be detached about things you can't control. One detail that is missing from this story is the nature of the deadline. Lateness is endemic in software development, and successful projects often get delivered years after they were promised. Late doesn't necessarily mean "failed." You can't go wrong learning more about project management so you can have a more correct understanding of the situation. Whatever you do, keep your honor. Being ambiguous about wanting the job gives you the unique freedom to refuse any order that you truly don't want to carry out.
- lemming 13y ago
  It's great to be passionate but it's also important to be detached about things you can't control. This is fantastic advice, and one of the main things I tried to drill into my team (when I had one), with fairly mixed success. It's very hard to convince people who are attached to a project that they should at any point just go "meh, what can you do?" but sometimes that really is your only option. Advice for any startups in this situation - if you really have to impose some awful condition on your workers, make sure you explain it fully to them. It's easier to accept something you don't like being imposed on you if you understand it, even though you don't agree with the reasoning. Another really tricky fine line is, having done this a couple of times, to then stop people going "meh, screw it" when they really can control the outcome, but just don't feel like it for whatever reason.
onemorepassword 13y ago
How about, sit back, watch what happens and learn. Even if one of us calls it right, which is sheer luck with so little information, the OP clearly has most to gain from experience. That is the only way to learn to correctly identify problems, and perhaps more importantly, what is the best way to deal with for you personally.
barce 13y ago
You are in the pride of lions. You do not know it yet. What many coders don't realize is how much power they actually have. You are the lion and the resources of the company are the gazelle. It's time to feast! It's really a good time to: 1) ask for a raise for more "effort" 2) ask for more budget 3) that new computer they've been holding out on. Ya, you can ditch that 17" laptop from 2006. ;) Just ask! We know that throwing resources into the game this late doesn't work, but it's good to have that extra budget for later just in case you wildly do succeed.
robryan 13y ago
One thing about b I would hate: Bring a small team they may spin my departure as having been the ultimate cause for the projects failure.
- dreamfactory 13y ago
  Ultimate compliment?

by edw519 13y ago

Trufa 13y ago

I think you should post that comment as an answer, it is very graphical but helpful!

epidemian 13y ago
Seconded. I don't think the accepted answer is strong enough nor a very sound advise.
- ghaff 13y ago
  It's deliberately dramatized but I don't really see it as wrong. Here's how I would (less dramatically--and less interestingly)phrase the choices. a.) If you're sure there's a path to success and you're invested in getting there, do whatever you can to achieve that goal--understanding that one of the possible outcomes is to be told to pack your things and leave. Now. The likelihood of this outcome obviously depends on the exact situation. b.) Accept that things are not going to end well. Do your job, keep your head down, and start seeking alternatives ex post haste. In some situations, seeking alternatives ex post haste may, in fact, involve fleeing (especially in a short time horizon such as this one) but I've certainly been in situations where the writing was more or less on the wall but more in the vein of a long ponderous collapse.
  - brudgers 13y ago
    b.) Accept that things are not going to end well. Fresh gazelle is delicious. Try not to overeat. There's a whole heard, and the pride will catch another one tomorrow. It's all a matter of perspective.
sillysaurus 13y ago
It's graphical, but not very helpful. How would the employee go about saving the project? The manager has authority over him/her, so their only choice would be to convince the manager that a drastic change is needed. Yet no manager is going to be receptive to the truth that they've personally failed over the past 1.5 months to such an extent that the next 1.5 months are impossible to salvage without throwing away most of the existing work. That conversation would not go well for the employee.
- dspillett 13y ago
  > It may be graphical, but it's not very helpful. What is OP supposed to do to "save" the project? I would disagree there. A good manager might take the situation well - they may have been misinformed by others and think things are far better than they are. If that isn't the case there may be the option of going above the managers head, though this has to be considered very carefully. In may case once it went rather well: the person above me had grossly misreported things above him. We are still dealing with some of the legacy of that period, but getting through it (and that person is no longer here). Of course depending on local politics this could go very badly, so I'll repeat: consider this sort of action very very carefully before taking the step. In my case saying "things have been X bad for a while, if things don't change either we are going to fail badly very soon or I'm going to burn out inside a couple of months" got the message across (it turns out an honest assessment was appreciated and that not losing some of us through walk out or burn out was important enough to warrant rearranging some plans and expectations). Of course I'm lucky: the Powers That Be here are sensible and I've been here over a decade & proven myself a good few times over so my word carries some weight - a relative new-starter under a less receptive hierarchy would not fair so well. If there really are no options for plan A for whatever reason, no end of time/overtime will fix the problem and there is no way the management can be made to appreciate the scale of the problem, that leaves plan B: get ready to jump ship.
- PakG1 13y ago
  All good managers rely on the people under them to give them high quality information and feedback to make decisions. don't blanket all managers as being too egotistical to avoid irrational escalation of commitment. That being said, decisions like reversing project directions or pivoting are usually huge multi-party decisions not up to a single person (unless it gets escalated to the very very top). A politically savvy employee would be able to make it work. Albeit, after saving the project (or making an admirable effort that catches everyone's eye), that employee would probably be marked by management for a management role. ;)

Spooky23 13y ago

So do a death march or quit? Very extreme. Unless you're in a tiny company that will literally go out of business if the project isn't complete, there is a valid middle ground: cover your ass to avoid blame, pitch to the PM to get the schedule extended, salvage as much as you can, and move on and do better next time. In the meantime, take a better job if one turns up. But don't be lured into extreme action by magical thinking. If a failed project is inextricably linked to your personal well-being, you're in the wrong business.

maarten-pi 13y ago
I agree, that the previous comment sounds extreme, there often is a middle ground. People can be reasoned with, otherwise the company you're working for doesn't sound like a good place to be. Taking a better job is fine, but halfway a project it might kill the project when some of the top guys decide to leave. It might even be worse when the architect of the legacy-system decides to leave with knowledge of all the undocumented business rules. It's so important, that a project is well managed, because a lot of the aspects of building something new are extremely satisfying to work on. However with mismanagement it's easy to demoralize the team.
- josso 13y ago
  > Taking a better job is fine, but halfway a project it might kill the project when some of the top guys decide to leave. It might even be worse when the architect of the legacy-system decides to leave with knowledge of all the undocumented business rules. Exactly. The world is pretty small and you shouldn't step on somebody's toes unless you absolutely don't see another way out. The sensitive thing to do here, is to make sure you've got your ass covered and if this is a persisting problem or you feel like you can't work there anymore, then you quit after the current job is done. And hopefully you can leave with a good recommendation.
CodeMage 13y ago
Maybe it sounds extreme, but I agree with @edw519: you don't want to work at a place that lets a project fail as badly as the OP described it. I've been in situations like that too often and I've learned that particular lesson too well. Like @angdis said elsewhere in this discussion, projects "fail" all the time, but the OP is talking about a specific kind of failure. Notice how many commenters mention "finger-pointing" and "paper trail". When you find yourself in a situation where that becomes important, it's time to consider leaving and it's always better to leave on your own terms. Unless you're deeply invested in that project or that company, it's usually better to start looking for a place where projects fail more gracefully than this.

jlarocco 13y ago

It's not ideal, but if he can put himself in a position where it's obvious to management that the project didn't fail because of him, I don't think he'll end up too badly off. If the parts of the project he's worked on are well put together and working well, then it doesn't look too bad on him that the overall project failed. On the other hand, it sounds like a depressing situation to be in, so I'd prefer your option (b).

angdis 13y ago

The fact is projects "fail" all the time. One has to really define what failure actually constitutes. It can be anything from the completion date skidding a few weeks or months or perhaps something worse like no chance in hell of ever completing the project to the satisfaction of the customer and going out of business in the process. The severity of the consequences determines what approach is best to take-- and there are many choice in-between working like a mad-man and dropping everything interviewing for a new position.

elorant 13y ago

70% of projects fail. According to your options you're either burned out pretty fast by going the extra mile, or you change jobs every couple of years. IMHO the best thing to do is to express your concerns and from there on just do your job without investing any extra effort. You can't be reluctant cause this will be received as not caring, neither invest the extra effort because usually the reason projects fail is not incompetent programmers but wrong specifications. Let someone else take the blame.

crusso 13y ago

There can be mitigating circumstances that could warrant staying, but mostly I have to agree with you. Either fight to turn things around or avoid being stained by the inevitable failure. The worst thing about staying to turn things around is that often the failure is set up from the beginning by those in leadership. Your reward for working your ass off to make the project succeed is probably going to be to make someone look good who was responsible for digging the hole that you helped to pull everything out of. Unless the game board is set up so that you benefit heavily from your hard work (equity, bonuses rewarding the risk and effort) - there's little upside to killing yourself besides some opportunity for personal growth.

TeMPOraL 13y ago

It makes sense if you're absolutely, positively sure that the project is doomed and there's not a slightest hope for it. But even assuming this, choice (b) is only local optimization. One could consider instead doing (c) - to try as hard as possible to convince the management to shut down that project ASAP, and thus saving the company many man-hours of wasted work. The global gain will be much greater then. Of course if management is stubborn and you're still sure the project will fail, then you're back to option (b).

klibertp 13y ago
I just today talked with friends that work for Samsung and the amount of wasted everything they told me about was staggering. I don't think that there is anything such companies couldn't waste and forget about. This makes the management stubbornness all the more probable and makes trying to save "work-hours" pointless. That's pretty scary shit, but apparently that's how it works in such companies. I don't want to ever work in such an environment.
- TeMPOraL 13y ago
  Yeah, I guess it depends on the size and make-up of the company. When I was writing that comment I was imagining a small/medium sized company, doing one or two big projects at the same time. If the company is so big that it can waste everything and still go forward by its inertia, then I guess leaving promptly is the right choice.

PaulHoule 13y ago

There's a good idea here, to manage your level of commitment, but it's lost in the idea that it's a binary decision. To get high performance without burnout it is necessary to switch from complete engagement to complete disengagement every few hours. The Serenity Prayer from Alcoholics Anonymous is asking for the right thing here, even if you aren't religious. "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference." It's great to be passionate but it's also important to be detached about things you can't control. One detail that is missing from this story is the nature of the deadline. Lateness is endemic in software development, and successful projects often get delivered years after they were promised. Late doesn't necessarily mean "failed." You can't go wrong learning more about project management so you can have a more correct understanding of the situation. Whatever you do, keep your honor. Being ambiguous about wanting the job gives you the unique freedom to refuse any order that you truly don't want to carry out.

lemming 13y ago
It's great to be passionate but it's also important to be detached about things you can't control. This is fantastic advice, and one of the main things I tried to drill into my team (when I had one), with fairly mixed success. It's very hard to convince people who are attached to a project that they should at any point just go "meh, what can you do?" but sometimes that really is your only option. Advice for any startups in this situation - if you really have to impose some awful condition on your workers, make sure you explain it fully to them. It's easier to accept something you don't like being imposed on you if you understand it, even though you don't agree with the reasoning. Another really tricky fine line is, having done this a couple of times, to then stop people going "meh, screw it" when they really can control the outcome, but just don't feel like it for whatever reason.

onemorepassword 13y ago

How about, sit back, watch what happens and learn. Even if one of us calls it right, which is sheer luck with so little information, the OP clearly has most to gain from experience. That is the only way to learn to correctly identify problems, and perhaps more importantly, what is the best way to deal with for you personally.

barce 13y ago

You are in the pride of lions. You do not know it yet. What many coders don't realize is how much power they actually have. You are the lion and the resources of the company are the gazelle. It's time to feast! It's really a good time to: 1) ask for a raise for more "effort" 2) ask for more budget 3) that new computer they've been holding out on. Ya, you can ditch that 17" laptop from 2006. ;) Just ask! We know that throwing resources into the game this late doesn't work, but it's good to have that extra budget for later just in case you wildly do succeed.

robryan 13y ago

One thing about b I would hate: Bring a small team they may spin my departure as having been the ultimate cause for the projects failure.

dreamfactory 13y ago
Ultimate compliment?