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An experienced and mature manager might appreciate the frankness.

by rapind 12y ago

icebraining 12y ago
You can be frank without laughing at it.
- rapind 12y ago
  For sure. Don't be a dick is a pretty good strategy. However, I didn't get the impression that was his intent though: "I laughed along with her joke until, with a shock, we both realized that I was actually laughing at her actual plan".
  - SiVal 12y ago
    Right. I was neither being "frank" nor intentionally laughing at her plan. She was smiling, and I thought she was kidding. I was smiling, and she apparently thought I was approving. Suddenly, we both realized we were wrong. Oops. At that point, the damage was done. I tried to explain why her approach of changing N things simultaneously wasn't more efficient than changing N things sequentially because of the combinatorial explosion of interactions, but she wasn't technical enough to understand what I meant by that, which made her angrier, and when I suggested an approach that would give us a temporary "Plan B" just in case we "ended up a couple of weeks late", she declared me "unsupportive" and ended the meeting.
    - marktangotango 12y ago
      Holy shit dude, living this now. The pain in terms of support and phantom, impossible to reproduce errors will go on for years.
tel 12y ago
It was a failure of communication. Even before analyzing why or what happened, a failure of communication is something that arises out of actions of both parties and even the prevailing culture of the team. Nobody really likes it, but half of the "politicality" of management has to be set in place to allow people to communicate with others who may or may not suffer from a sensitive ego and the company hasn't had time to figure it out yet. On top of that, it's usually a judgement call and may be a poor idea to formalize into your process an escape hatch based on judgement. So maybe the original mistake was from the manager who presented a sensitive idea without enough seriousness to induce a careful response. Or the op who was too quick to feel comfortable interpreting it as a joke in what turned out to be a serious meeting. Or the culture which enabled the terms of the meeting to be ambiguous to begin with. Only after that can you get into things like speculation on the maturity of the manager. It's actually quite a high maturity bar to jump over to stomach being laughed at by an expert. Not saying you can't set that as a goal, but merely that you ought to think about what happens when you find yourself dealing with someone who hasn't met that expectation.

An experienced and mature manager might appreciate the frankness.

by rapind 12y ago

An experienced and mature manager might appreciate the frankness.

icebraining 12y ago

You can be frank without laughing at it.

rapind 12y ago
For sure. Don't be a dick is a pretty good strategy. However, I didn't get the impression that was his intent though: "I laughed along with her joke until, with a shock, we both realized that I was actually laughing at her actual plan".
- SiVal 12y ago
  Right. I was neither being "frank" nor intentionally laughing at her plan. She was smiling, and I thought she was kidding. I was smiling, and she apparently thought I was approving. Suddenly, we both realized we were wrong. Oops. At that point, the damage was done. I tried to explain why her approach of changing N things simultaneously wasn't more efficient than changing N things sequentially because of the combinatorial explosion of interactions, but she wasn't technical enough to understand what I meant by that, which made her angrier, and when I suggested an approach that would give us a temporary "Plan B" just in case we "ended up a couple of weeks late", she declared me "unsupportive" and ended the meeting.
  - marktangotango 12y ago
    Holy shit dude, living this now. The pain in terms of support and phantom, impossible to reproduce errors will go on for years.

tel 12y ago

It was a failure of communication. Even before analyzing why or what happened, a failure of communication is something that arises out of actions of both parties and even the prevailing culture of the team. Nobody really likes it, but half of the "politicality" of management has to be set in place to allow people to communicate with others who may or may not suffer from a sensitive ego and the company hasn't had time to figure it out yet. On top of that, it's usually a judgement call and may be a poor idea to formalize into your process an escape hatch based on judgement. So maybe the original mistake was from the manager who presented a sensitive idea without enough seriousness to induce a careful response. Or the op who was too quick to feel comfortable interpreting it as a joke in what turned out to be a serious meeting. Or the culture which enabled the terms of the meeting to be ambiguous to begin with. Only after that can you get into things like speculation on the maturity of the manager. It's actually quite a high maturity bar to jump over to stomach being laughed at by an expert. Not saying you can't set that as a goal, but merely that you ought to think about what happens when you find yourself dealing with someone who hasn't met that expectation.