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Comment by mthreat | Hacker News Reader

One thing that I've found extremely demotivating is when a manager tells me what NOT to work on. I'd have a side project that I'd start on my own time, and I'd tell my manager "I've got this prototype of X working, and I'd like to spend more time on it / test it out." He'd say "I don't want you to spend any time on that". Instant loss of motivation. And this wasn't my first month on the job, it was after maybe 3-4 years on the job, already having proved myself, etc.

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This is really tricky. Often the person telling you not to put more time into something is trying to protect you from later disappointment or waste effort. Sometimes you need time to look at a prototype and figure out how it fits into your broader strategy.

The danger is that you keep working on it, and develop it in a certain direction. Then we often end up in one of two failure modes:

1. We need something different from what you built. You have to throw your (perfectly good) work away. This is even more demotivational!

2. We need something different from what you built. But you've already built this thing that sort of does what we need . . . so we keep it anyway. This is bad for the organization.

I'm seeing negatives on all sides. Suggestions on how to deal with these situations?

Instead of commanding to stop working on the project say what needs to be changed to make the project useful for the organization.

Or maybe figure out why this particular side project by your employee is important. It seems like a lot of these "side project to fix problem" situations come from a manager not knowing / not caring about the true barriers their employees are encountering or what is really costing the company time and money.

I see the risk. However, after 4 years at the company, I felt I should have been trusted. Here's the rest of this particular story:

A year later, I said screw it and worked on it anyway, for 2 weeks (manager was out of town). It was an internal tool. It became the most popular internal tool in the office (95% of people have it open in a browser tab all day). At one point, the founder checked it out and said "I love [name of tool]!". Vindication. I left the company after that, and they use the tool to this day.

I've had a similar experience several times as well.

There's a real disconnect when you are chewed out for having wasted company time on improving a process and it is still used years after you have quit the company. (I actually managed to replace about 20 hours of my work week with several scripts that took two or three minutes to run. The best part is that I also did the same for a project manager - and he would regularly get bored web surfing and come and ask if I ever needed any help.)

That's what project management is there for, at least I was told that. You can't replace simple routines by a script, you know you made this guy out of work? ;-)

Disclaimer: Not at all serious, except the first sentence.

The few times I've gone "off the reservation" to work on something important to the organization, but I know I would have been told to not work on it, I usually: 1. Don't tell the boss about it until is partially functional. They can't forbid you to work on something that they do not know exists. 2. Work 1-2 hours a day on it. When they ask you what you are working on today, you can honestly talk about the main stuff you are doing for 6-7 hours of the day, without mentioning the side project.

I've been on the receiving end of what this, more than I care to remember and usually it spells the beginning of the end at that place of work for me. Here's what I've gathered from having it happen to me so many times.

If someone brings something like that to you as a manager, you have to realize that they are highly motivated about what they're doing and that you shouldn't get in the way of that unless its affecting other things that are a priority for you.

Its a very rare case where there is a valid reason to tell someone to completely stop working on something that they're doing, if there is, then outline it in simple terms and have a good discussion about it and how they feel about it, instead of just commanding them to stop.

The only valid reason these side projects are a problem is that they become a distraction for the employee. A skillful manager will know how to use this project as a carrot to let the employee perform better on the major projects that you want them to do. "If you can get me x by the 12th instead of the 15th then I'll give you 2 days to work on your side project on company time".

Its also the case that as a manager, you're overconfident about your abilities to foretell the usefulness of an idea to the firm. Only 1 out of about 5 side projects I've ever done for companies , I worked for, turned out to be total busts, all the others were pretty popular when I put them out but if I bet if I had asked my managers before I did them, they would have told me they wanted me to work on something else.

Overall, show interest in what they're trying to do ... talk through it with them, you'll learn a lot more about your employees by seeing what genuinely excites them than the stuff you just assign to them.

How about assuming your employee isn't a child (trying to protect someone from disappointment or wasted effort is what parents do to their 3 year old)?

Give the people a reason (a real reason, not a bullshit one). If you don't believe it will be useful say so, if you need to be different in some way say so.

My last company was so dysfunctional, that this would happen on a weekly basis. I would get an assignment for some new feature the boss wanted. Within a week or two, there would be some kind of managers meeting and the new feature would be cancelled. In the beginning, I would get pissed and feel like my work was wasted, but then I turned it around and used it to my advantage.

It got to the point where I would only actually do enough to show the boss that I was working on it. I only stayed there because it gave me the opportunity to get paid and work on my own projects/business ideas.

This lasted around 3 years. The company eventually ran out of money because the boss couldn't ever decide on anything and would change his business strategy on a daily (and sometimes hourly) basis. I think he was bi-polar, but I'm not 100% sure. To think, he was making 10 million/year at one point..

I actually wish I could find another company that is like this, so I can fund my next startup.

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