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Comment by eecc | Hacker News Reader

Outside? I got mobbed an entire year while doing tech support for a what-used-to-be poster child of successful tech.

Manager would randomly chronometer the time it took me to answer tickets and warned me I spent too much time thinking before typing responses... (turned out the rest of the team was just smarter and pretended to work hard: hitting backspace as often as they typed other random words... oh but the display of “intensity” and “customer delight” was glowing hot.)

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At my last job I wasn't micro- but nano-managed - the "project manager" sometimes sat next to me and looked at me while I was debugging code. The IT sector definitely has its share of morons.

In a large company I once worked for I suggested a ticket prioritisation scheme based on assigning a numerical value to each staff member (e.g. CIO = 1000, lower values for lesser deities) and calculating a value for each ticket based on the sum of the values for each person standing behind the person actually fixing the problem.

This was based on observing 4 people (CIO and managers from intermediate levels) standing behind some poor helpdesk guy while he fixed a problem with the CEO's desktop background being the wrong picture or something....

In repair shops, one used now and then to see a sign running something like

Hourly rates:

$30 $60 if you watch $120 if you help

That's actually a genius idea. I wonder how much money is wasted on such things.

I wasn't entirely serious and short of surgically grafting location detectors to all managers (maybe not a bad idea in itself) not sure how their location could be tracked with enough precision to make it worthwhile. ;-)

Next time that happens ask him/her to bring you a coffee, works most of the time...and you can have e little "secret" chuckle.

Great advice. Another variation on that is just getting them to look something up for you that is at least tangentially related to your work. Anything where they are now helping you changes the power dynamic and will make them super uncomfortable.

A good project manager will be confident in their position and in doing whatever they can to help the project and won't mind. But that type of person wouldn't be looking over your shoulder unless invited.

oh that’s fantastic! keeping this in my back pocket

Heh. Fortunately, I don't work there anymore.

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