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Comment by JepZ | Hacker News Reader

Most of what you say are qualities I like managers to have too, but 'someone tried to ask us for help with someone else's project without asking her first--she was furious.' is a quality I do not value. I mean, protecting your people is one thing (an essential quality), but being furious because someone in need of help asked in the wrong order doesn't foster cooperation beyond the borders of the own team (causing silo mentality).

I don't know the companies culture and the people who asked for help, so maybe it was a good reaction at the time, but in general, I would advise being cooperative towards other departments.

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I've seen this go both ways. It depends on how funtional/dysfunctional other parts of the organisation are. If they're as competent as you and just asking for things they genuinely need, cooperation is great. If they're not, they turn into "help vampires" and you have to put up a firewall to prevent them destroying your productivity.

I think my current workplace suffers from too much team defensiveness + not having a CTO or equivalent to integrate across teams.

It also depends on you (and others in similar roles) having a reasonably well-tuned sense of what is reasonable and what is not. I have a fairly broad charter myself but I help out all the time with things that I could argue are "not my job" as narrowly defined. However, they're mostly at least adjacent to my primary responsibilities and are mostly not a big deal to do.

Were someone to come to me with a request that looked to have the potential to be a big time sink--or if I was getting overloaded with too many one-offs--I would definitely have a discussion with my manager at that point.

Yeah, what's the point of having Microsoft Lync or whatever chat thing on every computer if I have to escalate up to our common report? A place I worked at, the investors had bought two different American companies and joined them at the top. So, when I needed a service I was supposed to consume to fix something (pretty obvious if I remember), the person at my level and his manager didn't respond to me or my manager at all. My manager said he had to escalate it like three levels above him and turns out the engineer simply forwarded my messages and emails to his boss, who did the same to his boss, who was on vacation. Took almost a week to resolve something so simple.

It was just outright bizarre that someone would not even write one line back to say "dude, hold on. I can't do anything without my manager's sign off". Like anyone not in their immediate team was an outsider they wouldn't talk to.

I had this at a healthcare job I had. Even within IT, every silo was obstructing the others at almost every step.

I think a lot hinges on whether it's truly asking for help vs. telling you you need to do something, and possibly phrasing it as a question. Depending on how the organization is set up and the seniority of the person asking, it can be very hard for a low-level employee to say "No, I don't have time to do that."

Having multiple people that can give you contradictory orders about how to spend your time makes for a miserable job experience. You either work overtime to meet both sets of demands, or you get negative feedback from one of your "bosses" for not completing their tasks. It's the manager's job to prevent this, and it's important that they do so.

The correct response would be along the lines: 'Sorry, but you have to ask my boss if we can push it to the top of our task list as she has the overview over the priority queue'.

That is different than a 'No, I don't have time for that.', as it teaches how to do it right in the future, and your boss doesn't have to get furious because everything that happened was that the team informed the org about the regular process.

I have worked enough time in the midst of a QA team to know that planning is essential to their job. Nevertheless, a team lead which is going to be furious because you didn't use the correct process isn't someone you want to ask for help. So, in the long run, it might cause more problems than it solves.

That assumes that your manager has a reasonable process for prioritizing these kinds of requests, which is often half the battle. It also requires a manager that will go to bat for you and defend that process, even when the requester says "This is critical and time-sensitive, I don't have time for that, so can you just do it?"

Margaret certainly had both of those things. :)

It’s very context sensitive. QA usually needs someone strong to protect the team, as they’re the ones who most frequently get asked to make up for cost/scope/schedule/quality problems that others caused.

In other casss, being too standoffish causes local optimization (“look how efficient my team is!”) at the expense of the broader org.

> QA usually needs someone strong to protect the team, as they’re the ones who most frequently get asked to make up for cost/scope/schedule/quality problems that others caused

Bingo. That combined with the odd guy from a completely different department coming over and singling me out for help (at the time, we were the team pushing the envelope with what was possible on the web).

That being said, (a) Margaret always offered our team's help to other teams, and we frequently spent large blocks of time assisting with outside projects. But there was so much demand for us that she had to insist they go through her first; and (b) of course we could answer people's questions and assist them for a few minutes here and there. I'm talking about requests like "hey could you do this work for me", where it ends up taking several hours or more.

My point, though, was that she protected us from outside demands so we could stay really productive.

You should toast her tonight. I haven’t met her, but I will!

Not software, but I supervised QC inspectors at a medical manufacturer. R&D engineers would constantly try to steal their time to inspect some pre-production part, when we were trying to supply the $250k+ per day manufacturing floor with production parts that were backordered and running out on the floor (we had horrible issues with supply, but that's another story). Sure, your "brand new" part needs some pre-production inspections, but not right now since that part isn't needed for a few weeks. Once I got it into their heads that if they absolutely needed a part NOW they should come to me (so I can work it into the schedule) they always got their parts on-time from us.

I'm sure this is similar to a software workflow with QA, where every developer is vying for limited QA time, so I don't think "getting furious" is too far a step.

I'm wrapping up my first year as a manager and I have to say this is really one of the most context dependent things I have to worry about. I can definitely see a QA manager being fierce about it. I have yet to work at an organization that actually valued the QA function, at least enough to give it resources necessary to do its job properly.

> protecting your people is one thing (an essential quality), but being furious because someone in need of help asked in the wrong order doesn't foster cooperation

This depends entirely on intent, no? If they simply got it wrong, that's one thing. If they were intentionally subverting the 'chain of command', that's quite another.

Sure, the intention is relevant.

I agree. Because of that, I've made it clear to my team that the immediate responsibility for out-of-the-blue requests is triage, not solutioning. There are plenty of tasks for which 15 minutes fixes the problem. There are also requests coming in that represent days of work and need to be prioritized against existing commitments. What I need is for the team to do enough to know which is which, and make me aware of the latter so that I can get that prioritization discussion moving.

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