What is your excuse for not doing all you can? | Hacker News Reader

What is your excuse for not doing all you can?

thenextweb.com

31 pointsBorisBomega24 comments

If the work would have mattered to you, you would have found a solution.

This is an easy thing to say, and perhaps for many people in many circumstances, it's true enough.

But I have no doubts about my work ethic—I've spent 50+ hours per week in the zone at a startup, until I hit my physical limits—and I can estimate project scope reliably enough to offer my consulting clients fixed bids.

But even so, I do occasionally have to e-mail a client and tell them that something will be delayed by a few days, or even a week. It's not that the work isn't important, but rather that when I push hard enough, there's no padding left, and a few days of illness (or caring for a sick kid) come directly out of work time. Similarly, sometimes there's a hard technical issue that nobody expected, and it takes some time to engineer around.

So for people already working near the top of their game, this manager's notebook and attitude comes over as so much motivational B.S. Professionals work hard. But if 90% of challenging projects come in on time, and the other 10% slip by a few days or a week, that's not necessarily evidence of moral failure.

In situations like that, the real reason is often deeper than the "excuse". I'm a big fan of "five why's' [1] for root cause analysis. I think finding the root cause is far more important than differentiating between reasons and excuses, or belittling people because you think their reasons aren't good enough.

Example: "Laptop ran out of battery" - is that really a bad excuse? What if there aren't enough charging points in the office, so not everyone can keep their laptops topped up all at the same time? Analysing the surface reason alone is not enough to know whether it has merit, there may be a valid root cause for what appears to be a poor excuse.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys

There is a difference between a reason and an excuse. An excuse is an attempt to remove blame ("it's not my fault, the traffic was bad") whereas a reason is an explanation of the cause ("the traffic was bad"). The latter, isn't an attempt to remove blame, but to a) identify risk factors that can potentially be mitigated in future and b) to remove misunderstandings ("I bet he was late because he didn't care" or as in the article "If the work would have mattered to you, you would have found a solution.") by explaining the true factors that caused the issue.

Assuming people are maliciously trying to ruin your day, and flat out don't care, is a sign of poor thinking patterns and a precursor for mental illness.

   The latter, isn't an attempt to remove blame

I actually have a different view.

Excuse: "I'm sorry, but the traffic was bad".

Reason: "The traffic was bad << now fuck off >>"

    If the work would have mattered to you, 
    you would have found a solution

Over the years after getting my brain fucked for pennies and consistently treated as a resource that shouldn't question the powers that be, I get pretty cynical when I hear such words.

Cute story, but shitty management.

So you go to your boss with (a) unfinished work and (b) some accompanying data. He searches his manual database, looking for a match of your data, then "classifies" it as an excuse, not a reason. (After reading the entire post, I still don't know the difference.) He's so busy belittling you that he spends no time:

  a. trying to understand your data
  b. trying to separate causes and effects
  c. getting down to the root cause
  d. identifying systemic problems the enabled the cause
  e. fixing the current problem
  f. implementing systemic changes to prevent further instances

Here's my take:

My excuse is that the job will not get done.

The reason is that I got fired after shoving my boss's little book up his ass.

I understand school-kids have excuses, but if you're late you're late. It doesn't matter why. The small book of excuses is laughable. I'd rather not work for a guy like him.

If I can't come in at 9.15am, then I'm not staying a second past 5pm. In my experience, the places that are strictest on this kind of thing are the same ones that browbeat you on not being a team player when your hours are up. This kind of management practice is probably the biggest reason I went it alone.

I think this manager didn't care about you being late or not. All he cared about was results. If you would have come in at 9:15 AND showed poor results and then came up with an excuse he would have punished you for it. But if you came in, with a confident smile on your face because life was good and you loved your work, he would have just smiled back at you.

That's not the impression I get, with the little book and all. It's no different to the managers who walk around with hand puppets that fulfil the 'bad cop' part of his routine.

Any place that enforces posted work hours for salaried employees is not a place where the enforcers are looking at the quality of the output.

If work hours or company policies are not posted, couldn't you also say that expectations aren't made clear and communication is lacking? Aren't some sort of standards still needed? Otherwise everyone would cram everything into a 4 day workweek and be MIA on the 5th day.

To be fair, I think he's a fake guy. Look at the start of the "article" it has all the weasel words that you'd expect to see in a dodgy email forward. "I once heard a story of a an unnamed manager at an unnamed company who..."

Go to Snopes and you can find a hundred emails that start like that.

What's there's a word for this type of story, that I can't recall at the moment. Straw-man set up to illustrate the moral of the tale. Truth is with only so many hours in a day, and burn out is just a much a risk as anything else, work-life balance is sometimes required.

The article might be interesting and eye opening if you're a teenager, when I was a high school teacher, the constant use of low value excuses was worth drawing attention to. In fact occasionally delighting a high-school teacher with a new excuse sounds appropriate and realistic. A manager at a big-company though? Fuck that, adults do sometimes have real excuses - their kid was sick, the roof on their house was leaking, whatever. Could you imagine some dude checking off "ahh sick child #123, delightful" when you told him your kid was sick? You'd punch that miserable fucker in the nuts.

I call bullshit.

I left those details out because I didn't think they would add to the story. The big company was KPN to which I sold my WiFi Hotspot operator in 2003. The manager who told me the story was Jan Kroon and it was about a manager he reported to. See, all that info doesn't make the story that more interesting really.

Actually, it's those details that do make the story interesting. Some little details that make the characters seem real are essential to hold your audience. (At least, so says my wife, who is a writer.)

> If the work would have mattered to you, you would have found a solution.

Sorry, but my life matters to me a great deal more than work. Sorry, work. No harsh feelings, I hope.

The older I get, the more I learn that in many cases in the past, 'having done everything I could' did not make a difference to 'doing the 80% solution' in the end.

Doing everything you can is a perception within you, your imagination of an ideal solution. This does not mean that this is always necessary to achieve a certain goal. There is always more to do, better things to achieve no matter how close to perfect you get.

The reason i'm not working right now is because i'm reading on Hacker News

An unwillingness to accept and identify the causes of problems instead of dismissing all causes as facades for laziness indicates poor project management ability. A good project manager works with the team to identify why goals weren't met and to include these new risks in future estimates. If he spent half as much time identifying and mitigating risks as writing up his book of excuses he might not have had so many people giving them to him.

My excuse is that you either whittled down the amount of time available to get the job done, or didn't pay enough to make the job the sole focus of my life for the time required to get it done, so something else came along and took priority instead. You are not the most important thing in my life.

There, now you've been a dick, and I've been a dick. Is this better?

I was really hoping for something inspiring, something that would make me realize I wasn't being the best human being I could possibly be and would give me insight towards how I could achieve that. Instead I got a crummy made-up story that only contained platitudes and unrealistic expectations: If the work would have mattered to you, you would have found a solution.

Your work and other elements of your life can both matter to you. It's not an either-or situation. "Don't worry about my dog being hit by a car and bleeding out on the street, I got those BI reports done on time, boss! We can fromogulate an additional 3 widgets per year! Can I leave early and go bury my dog?"

I wonder what the author's excuse for this drivel is?

If the work would have mattered to you, you would have found a solution.

Clearly the manager in the article is infallible, and has never had an issue that has caused late/non-delivery.

Excuse 201: My manager p-ed me off so much with his stupid Book of Excuses mind games that I spent all my spare time look for a job elsewhere.

It's not what happens to us, but our response to what happens to us that defines us.

Could be due to lack of social mobility http://goo.gl/K8Pg

I can only speak for myself.

In the general case, I am a bit scared of being burned out again. So I make a point of relaxing, eating dinners with people and taking care of myself. This is fading.

In the particular case, I just moved to work in a cool new place (Cluj, Transylvania). I do work hard, but there is just too much fascinating stuff!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com