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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I totally agree. I’ve met a lot of people who feel like a hero when they work crazy hours to “save the day”. But if the problem they fixed was caused by bad planning or bad decisions made by upper management, their heroics prevent the decision makers from learning how to run the company properly. Pain is an incredibly important signal. Our bodies need it to survive and companies are no different.

Go above and beyond, sure. But never ever be an invisible martyr. If it’s management’s mistake, management needs to feel some heat or they won’t learn.

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A colleague once said that if you sacrifice yourself to make up for the firm's inefficiencies, they will never get fixed.

Which is basically what you've written. This concept should be discussed more often.

Tangent to this idea is the concept of 'back pressure' related to data flow, and the need to have a way to return feedback in a system.

I think reading this and other comments slid something in place for me about “Living Systems”.

What does the individual care more about tho, a chance at affecting change, or potentially getting fired?

Really shows the limits of an individual when their livelihood depends on the source of the problem

The trick to spreading pain upwards without getting fired is to communicate the situation upwards, repeatedly, ahead of time. “Hey I think that artificially imposed 6 month deadline is unrealistic”. “We’ll see”: Closer to the date: “That deadline is coming up fast. As I mentioned a couple months ago, I think we’re making good progress but I don’t think we’ll hit the deadline with the feature set we’re building. I think we need to cut features, push back the deadline or all start working crazy, unsustainable hours. And that’s not a precedent I’d like to start. What do you think boss?”. Etc.

If they don’t change anything, don’t suddenly pull all-nighters to then meet the deadline. A bad timeline was never your mistake to fix. And assuming you’re a productive member of the team, you’re not going to be fired for helping management plan like this.

I agree but my real experience with similar situations (twice so far) was at badly managed firms. I was ignored and branded a "trouble-maker"

The principle of spreading the pain upwards extends to making ownership feel the pain of bad management. But that’s a slow mechanism, and in the case of public companies, shareholders are so thoroughly isolated and insulated that it hardly works at all.

It works in the evolutionary sense - the worst compianies just die.

Counterpoint: SAP remains a going concern.

SAP is really fascinating. On the one hand, it apparently works. On the other hand, it seems to feed on suffering.

Hmm. That brings up an interesting take on “make work visible”.

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