Hacker News Reader

Comment by everdrive | Hacker News Reader

Point #2 is correct, but there’s no good reason it _has_ to be correct. Why can’t we tell management that a question they asked is non-sensical? The answer of course is that you don’t buck the hierarchy. But this adherence to hierarchy doesn’t actually help the business. It seems like this is a value which needs to be more easily discarded.

View on HN

> Why can’t we tell management that a question they asked is non-sensical?

You should absolutely do that (I tell my team to inform me if what I'm asking doesn't make sense.) If I'm coming to someone with a request, it's because I think they're the right person to address it. Just tell me if I'm off-base.

FWIW, I encourage everyone to not care about the hierarchy, so that may not work in every place.

This is a great point -- and I do, when I can. I guess it's the culture shock that I find most difficult. I'm only asking for clarification so I can fulfill the request more effectively -- but even this is seen as risky and pushy in many businesses.

I do this all the time and have done with every boss I've had over the past 25 years. None have ever objected. The phrase I use with my current CEO is "I'm not sure what you're asking for, can you clarify?" With my line manager this is shortened to "huh?" But then again I don't work for Americans who seem to be much more into hierarchy in the workplace and not asking questions.

> I don't work for Americans who seem to be much more into hierarchy in the workplace and not asking questions.

In my experience, this is not true at all. But, as you say you don't have direct experience to come to this conclusion, may I ask what makes you think this?

Not OP but I have that experience. Europeans have been much more open.

My personal theory is that it's connected to job security and how big personal problem it is to lose your job in a layoff. If you get laid off in Europe, your health insurance is paid from public budget now and you get several months salary from your employer. If you worked for a big name, it may be six months or more. If it was a small startup, you get at least two months.

Our US colleagues always made more money but also were more afraid of losing their jobs. All of that said from the IT perspective. I'm sure being a coal miner and getting laid off is much worse.

Americans being into hierarchy is a bizarre opinion. Are you confusing it with asian countries?

Same experience here. See my reply to the sibling comment.

A lot of Americans, particularly the more traditional minded, really are into hierarchy.

The only time I have ever been “ordered” to do something was for an American middle manager (not in my line) in an American company. “Haha get fucked” wasn’t the answer he was expecting, but my non American manager told him the same thing when he went to demand I’d get fired.

I mean, that'd probably get you fired even in a country that really does allow for a lot of informality with your bosses (e.g. Australia).

I think Anglo-Saxon countries are all pretty much the same in that respect.

No fan of Suella Braverman, but she got fired not because of what she said, but because she publicly went against hierarchy, which seems to be a terrible offense. Which in the UK it probably is.

Where i’m from, if your manager literally states “you are ordered to do xyz” that manager will be fired. It’s not the fucking military.

Were your quotation marks meant to indicate that was the literal language used? I interpreted it in the opposite way (as scare quotes), but would agree extremely authoritarian orders will produce interesting and counterproductive reactions.

JFYI, scare quotes are also indicating the it is "the literal language used". The quotes are added to say that you are quoting literally what other people/the culture uses, but that you disagree with how that term/phrase is used.

I'm aware, but what I meant is the ironic usage - you can use scare quotes in an ironic way (i.e. you may be quoting someone or an expression or idiom but we do not know it is the boss being quoted verbatim).

They’re probably confusing hierarchy with our obsession with middle managers who fear it being discovered that they don’t actually do anything.

It's not as bizarre as you might think. The United States is not a monoculture, different parts of the country are more hierarchical than others.

Being American and having worked in American companies we absolutely are. Not as much as Asian countries, but much more than European countries.

The whole point of a hierarchy is division of labor - managers are supposed to be looking at the big picture and monitoring resources so that they can direct their subordinates more efficiently than the subordinates could self organize. Of course there needs to be two way communication, the people down in the trenches are inevitably going to have a much better grasp on the details than the general 100 miles away. But assuming you have told management all the information they need from you, setting priorities correctly is managements entire reason for existence. It is not and should not be the responsibility of every employee to monitor all information and identify whether an ask should or should not be given its current level of priority. You should be confident that when your boss tells you to do something that it is for good reason even if you don't quite see what that reason is. If, on the other hand, you have to do your boss' job for them, then it's better for both the company and you to just cut out the middle man.

I think it’s important to make those requests as minimal as possible. If we have a well oiled system of Jira tickets, estimates, and expectations for each sprint, these one off requests fly under the radar and impede engineer performance and expectations

You could have a percent of each sprint dedicated to one-offs, but then are they really one-offs in the colloquial sense?

The smaller the team and org, the easier it is to handle the one-offs (imo), because we can more directly connect the request to tangible impact more often. At the very least, in a small co your manager (or C suite executive) would easily back you up as the engineer if other executives were questioning output or something etc etc

In larger orgs the extra communication burden makes the one off requests more expensive

The OP responded so seems to understand the link between what you've written and their point #2, but I don't see how it addresses point #2. Point #2 to me seems to be about prioritization of work tasks, and the need for a manager to appropriately prioritize anything they ask for within the context of everything else the worker is doing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com