Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

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Sometimes letting someone know about a piece of information too early can cause problems.

I have some very anxious team members who will get on edge when the development team starts to use key words like "refactor" and "iterate". Our organization has a historical track record of certain technical efforts being a complete dumpster fire and the PTSD of that has stuck around with many of us.

In order to make everyone's lives easier, I will sometimes work in secret on prototypes of more "controversial" ideas to bring before the team. I find starting the conversation with "Here's a new thing you can actually see and play with" eliminates 99% of the annoying bullshit you get out of non-technical folks.

It takes some discipline to do this correctly (i.e. don't ferret away on a secret prototype for more than ~1 week). That said, I can't imagine how you would scale an organization if everyone had to know everything always.

Also, none of this stuff is actually secret. It's more of a need-to-know basis. If someone explicitly asked me about one of these efforts, I would tell them everything they wanted to know and then some.

What you're talking about is sometimes referred to as "exercising covert agency" and IMHO it's absolutely essential for the well-being of creative folks in heavily project-managed corporate workplaces.

"Not keeping secrets" effectively ends up meaning that you need "permission" or at least consent for everything you work on. Depending on how tight things are this can be a recipe for misery because it's common in managerial ranks for people to be change-averse to the point of absurdity.

Google turns up nothing on that concept, but I agree that it is essential. You need a strong leader who can sense when stakeholders don't want to put up with that shit and when it's OK, and counterbalance that with how much of a dumpster fire the codebase is becoming.

You have to define who is in the team and who is not. Maybe Stakeholders are not. But inside the (cross-functional) team I would advise against "submarines" (german name for a secret project). If the team can't handle this, the problem is somewhere else.

There's a difference between things that are secret because of people find out they will care, and things that are secret because people should not weigh in due to lack of knowledge or interest. I'm not sure how complex the system you are thinking of is, but in a system of even moderate complexity, the concept of team becomes abstract very quickly.

Completely agree with this. On numerous occasions I let an idea out while it wasn’t developed enough to go in the right direction on its own. It turned into a shit show.

Many many ideas I write down and develop. Many I throw away. But I learned never to throw information on the table without analysing the consequences of doing so.

This applies to teams as well.

This. Sometimes holding information until things are ready is the kindest thing to do for anxious people.

I feel like that doesn’t quite count as a secret, if the aim is explicitly to show people a fully expressed idea as opposed to something theoretical/conceptual.

> Our organization has a historical track record of certain technical efforts being a complete dumpster fire […]

I think your urge to hide things until ready is clearly a symptom of other (root) problems within the organization. I have never seen what you describe in a healthy organization, and many seemingly “healthy” places are not. It sounds like the organization fears failure and refuses to learn from mistakes or believes it’s impossible. This is a cultural issue that needs to be fixed by senior leadership but, if I had to guess, is probably caused by senior leadership being unwilling to trust.

I’d encourage you to look to solving roots and not symptoms or go somewhere else where you’re allowed to. Good luck.

“Sometimes I work on things for up to a week before showing people unless asked.”

“Your company isn’t healthy. Either get senior leadership to change or leave.”

Internet advice is weird.

It's easy to not have seen things in healthy workplaces if you don't have a lot of experience. This is why we have implicit bias against folks who look really young, fair or not.

> I have never seen what you describe in a healthy organization, and many seemingly “healthy” places are not.

You've never screwed something up and had to try it a different way?

I honestly do not know how that was your take away from what I wrote. Can you please elaborate on how what you quoted at all implies:

1.) I’ve never screwed up.

2.) (and never) Had to do something different.

I’m saying the lack of transparency you’ve been forced into to accomplish things is the result of people who are incapable accepting mistakes or doing things differently. You must work in secret because people don’t believe the technical team can or will learn from their mistakes. In a healthy organization you would not have this burden.

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