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Comment by anal_reactor | Hacker News Reader

I've realized that at my current workplace it's a recurring theme that I suggest a solution, it gets rejected, we circle around for a year, finally we go back to my solution. It is indeed extremely demotivating, because it gives me an impression that I'm working with stupid people. I don't want to leave the company, but I'll try to switch teams next year.

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At my company there is a team like this who are solely responsible for a significant piece of internal infrastructure.

People bring them ideas. They reject them out of hand. "Can't be done" "We'd have to rewrite the whole thing" "That's not how it works". Even if you write all the code and show them exactly how to do it and that it does work.

Then they come back three moenths, six months, a year later and have a big demo showing the cool thing "they thought of". Yep, the idea they previously rejected, usually pretty close to exactly. They live by the ole adage NIH.

They're a fun bunch.

Sounds like you don't argue hard enough

Having seen this story happen: sometimes a "leader" would rather their entire team quit than admit a mistake.

Hey, in my case I've been kicked out a couple times already... it doesn't always pay

Bosses often fire people who ‘argue hard enough’.

It's not his position to argue hard. That's what the product owner or manager is paid for.

That seems to be a rather short-of-support conclusion based on the evidence available.

The evidence is based on what was given. If the parent cannot convince the team/management then there is something wrong.

It could be confidence.

It could be social standing.

It could be that they are not explaining their viewpoint properly to the stake holders.

If the parent is not gaining traction and blaming it on intelligence, likely, the parent can't see others viewpoints either and is not trying to bring the team along...

Engineering is not just systems...

It's not my job an as engineer to fight a broken decision-making process. If the manager sees that he repeatedly makes wrong decisions, then it's his responsibility to answer why, not mine. I'm him subordinate, not the other way around.

Eh. I'm out of fucks to give.

I've been at a couple of places where I've had similar experiences and I get to the point where I'll explain it once, and if they're not listening or discard the suggestion without really considering it, then I'll just wait for them to figure it out themselves.

I get paid either way.

I'm generally looking for another job when it gets to this point. It's not healthy to stick around when things get to that point.

I’ve been there. After a while, I realized that they’re paying for my advice. If they take it, awesome. If they don’t, and I feel like I did a good enough job communicating my reasons, then that’s their option, and their consequences.

It’s annoying, but either way I get paid.

I find I get stuck with the inevitable clean-up work, having voiced an opinion earlier. Learning that not many of these battles are worth choosing.

There's no advancement, just bigger piles of bullshit. The goal is to get paid for shoveling the least.

I get it. The situational context makes a huge difference, too. Most of the people I advise now are Chief Something or Another. Their jobs are generally to take a whole lot of inputs and make business decisions. Maybe I’ll say “I don’t think we should do that because X”, and they’ll decide to do it anyway because Y is a higher priority. As long as it’s not something truly horrible, like “let’s sell our user list” or “we don’t have time to hash passwords” or something else egregious, eh, fine. They asked for my advice, I gave it, and they’re free to do whatever they want with it.

But sure, even then it’d get super annoying if they always ignored it. At some point it’d be obvious that my business goals don’t align well at all with theirs, so maybe it’s time to find a better fit.

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