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Comment by Ididntdothis | Hacker News Reader

“Let me how I can help"

Besides not forgetting the word “know” make sure that you are actually prepared to honestly listen and act on what people tell you. I hear this phrase quite a bit but when you tell them how to help they promptly ignore it because it wasn’t what they wanted to hear.

A lot of today’s management phrases are totally empty and just sound good without any meaning. “Let me challenge that assumption” or “but what if we had an anti-gravity drive?” are fashionable phrases that sound insightful to the person saying them but really aren’t.

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Also, that sentence should come only after you exhausted the ways to help that you already know. If someone already voiced needing help with something during past conversations, they won't repeat that thing while answering that question.

Start helping, then ask what else you could help with

That’s a great point that often makes an otherwise genuine “how can I help” look/feel empty unnecessarily.

An important thing we can actually do to help is think about what we can do to help and not wait to be told that. It’s hard, especially when your team grows, but it’s where you earn your team’s trust the most.

I view people claiming they're "there to help" like I view people saying they welcome feedback. Assume it's not true without evidence.

A real request for help often implies things are going wrong, and tends to involve a lot of work, so the emotional reaction will tend to be negative.

Also be prepared to ask that a lot before you get the truth and be SEEN actually doing those things when others ask to establish that there is value in answering.

I worked for a VP who got upset if he didn't get questions, or requests when he asked, but he never answered any of them in the past and somehow he never understood that those two were related and by the time he wanted to do it he had established the culture and it was impenetrable.

> “but what if we had an anti-gravity drive?”

What does this one mean? I know you said you think they're meaningless, but in what context is this one used?

I have been in several meetings where somebody said that a thing is simply not possible and a manager asked "but what if it was possible?". How are you supposed to respond to that? It's just a silly thing to say. Now if somebody says "I think it may be possible because of A, B and C" you have something to discuss. Otherwise it's just an empty phrase.

I'm not so sure that's silly. There's two discussions - one is 'is X possible', and the other is 'what do we do if X is possible'. They're asking you the second question, and you're answering with the first, which is probably the silly thing here.

They're possibly asking you the second question because they have context that you do not about the first, or they have conflicting advice from another expert on the first question. It may not be possible to pass on that context, for example for reasons of time or security, but they want your answer to the second question anyway.

It's reasonable to answer the second without the first.

It’s not always necessary to explain why you think something might be possible in order to ask whether it’s useful. Ideally you could trust your team enough to assume that they wouldn’t waste your time with “what if X was possible” unless they had reason to think that it was possible.

> somebody said that a thing is simply not possible and a manager asked "but what if it was possible?"

I've been an Individual Contributor, and a Manager, and am back to being an IC.

I've been on both sides of this conversation.

One of the benefits of being a manager is being able to see the forest from the trees while your team members may be so focused on their tasks they do not see the big picture.

Sure, sometimes the answer to "but what if it was possible?" if just "it's not."

But a lot of times, the good managers I've had would propose an approach to MAKING it possible that I just simply didn't see. And I've been able to do the same in their shoes.

Sometimes it requires a paradigm shift -

Q: "How do we get to the other town faster?"

A: "The horses are running as fast as they can"

Q: "What if we found a faster horse?" (e.g. a car)

But honestly in day to day office culture it rarely needs to be so revolutionary -

Q: "Could we finish the project faster if Bill's team helped us?"

A: "No, it's not possible. Bill's team said they are completely swamped"

Q: "Okay, I've chatted to Bill, and his team is fully available to help us finish the project."

I'll leave you with this "Expert" saying that something is simply not possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

And an actual expert showing how it can be done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7MIJP90biM

interestingly, your examples revolve around making things faster. Which basically is understood as : "well, we've already too much pressure and our PM wants to put even more pressure on us". Going faster (or being more efficient) always mean being able to take more work.

No, it doesn't. For instance, at a place I worked at, we wanted to build a particular ad tech product to reinforce strength in a different area. The correct answer to "how do we make this faster" was "buy the guys who do it and then integrate via a bunch of CSVs on GCS and some RPC". We canned our forays into the space and bought them. Less work for all the engineers and data scientists. More work for M&A but they like doing that so it's not upsetting.

At a more granular level, in a different project, the answer to "how do we develop this faster" was "lose these requirements, and just use AWS services for those". Less work in total.

The horse/car example isn't really about going faster.

It's an example of hitting the limit of a certain technology, saying any further improvements are "impossible", while not recognizing that a "better horse" might just not be a horse at all.

It's not a metaphor for faster project delivery, but a meaningful technological difference that someone may not be able to see.

This ignores the fact that Bill’s team hasn’t been working on the project and is most likely just going to slow things down.

Frequently people early-terminate their ideas. Often to the person doing this it sounds like trying to conquer gravity. A coworker of mine would assume some constraints were immutable. So I'd be on the other side of the table. Examples:

* We need Bob, but Bob is busy working on the other thing -> but what if Bob wants to work on this and this thing is more important. I'll ask him.

* We would need at least 32 TB RAM to process this in-memory -> okay, looks like we're going to GCP with some big requests then

* We can't scale like that in the datacenter (the capital costs are too high) and we don't have the time to move to the cloud -> I can find you the time.

* We can't fix that bug, it would cause downtime -> okay, tell me when you want that downtime. How much do you want?

* They won't sell us their data -> we can buy the company itself.

Almost everything except natural laws are mutable.

EDIT: Sadly, chris, I am rate-limited but we actually did take all the actions on the right. That isn't to say someone can idiotically offer these things when they aren't an option, but asking the question does often have value.

I’m confused by the edit, was there originally a response to this comment?

There was.

Speaking of nonsense lines from managers. One I'm hearing more and more is "this is one really smart group of engineers. I know you can figure it out."

This goes back to what you're saying. You need to actually be ready to listen, analyze, and present actionable plans. There's a lot of management like Homer Simpson who just buys everyone hammocks and parrots one liners.

You might want to think about "let me know how I can help" from the other side.

A lot of people tell you things, just to talk about them. They don't want advice, they don't want you to problem solve.

Let me know how I can help is appropriate to figure out if they want help and if they want it from you.

A much better phrasing is “what help do you need?”. This works with people you’re responsible for, peers, and others. This has a better chance of discovering if they’re using you to vent to, or discovering a need that someone else can provide and you can connect them with. Secondarily it prevents the problem from becoming your problem because the question stops being an offer.

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