Stop talking | Hacker News Reader

Stop talking

gurkan.in

56 pointsnpstr60 comments

Everyone can talk and give opinions. The real question is if you can actually make a difference. I tell people there's a gap between knowing how to do something and actually doing it. And that gap is a big part of our engineering skills.

If I'm not going to change something, I'd rather not talk or give opinions.

This is a better way to say it.

Talking at the right place at the right time on the right topic is.

Aye, someone full of ideas for other people to take ownership of isn't actually being helpful (unless that's explicitly their job)

I’m in the situation the article is talking about where I’m both suggesting advice and willing to do the work. But it requires me to have some allotted time and the boss says we don’t have the resources even 1 hour a week.

It’s like we’re moving chopped wood from the forest to the village and I suggest building a wheelbarrow but the boss says what we don’t have time for that we gotta move all this chopped wood. It’s crushing to have a job that could be very interesting but the tooling and processes sap all of that out.

You can’t know if you are going to change something. So, just talk and let there be a chance of being heard.

> If no one asked and no one is on the hook to change anything: Stop talking.

It seems like a matter of knowing who to talk to about what. I don't think the solution is to stop talking to everyone.

Presenting a rationale for something worthy of addressing (need/problem/opportunity) needs to be communicated somehow, and convincingly. In person, in writing, or a simple business case.

From my non-tech background, priorities are fluid, and things that are rationalized as urgent and important are given resources and attention.

If there is someone like the author spinning wheels in frustration, then maybe there's a problem with the organization aligning everyone on goals/objectives/outcomes -> leading to misaligned solutions being raised, and deaf ears. Or, maybe there's no opportunity to raise solutions with the right people.

Bad idea. I want people working around me to notice, be uncomfortable and especially speak up if something is amiss. Unless you work in a malignant environment, this should be normal behavior.

Based on the results (not to mention the Green Mile "I'm tired boss" look on most people's faces), I'd imagine most workplaces are malignant environments.

I want people who are working on a project/initiative that I’m responsible for to speak up and I do a scenario question when I’m interviewing candidates to see if they will speak up.

But I’m not going to stick my neck out and be “the problem”. I will definitely speak up about misgivings over ideas where my manager has some authority to change something. But that’s about it.

But in my experience, line level managers are useless. They have no organizational weight or authority.

When someone reaches out to me about a job where they wanted me to lead strategic organizational changes or initiatives, the first thing I tease out is whether I will be reporting directly to someone who has real authority - in a smaller company someone with C* as their title. In a larger company a director.

Bad advice. If you're thinking this way and you don't think people will listen is it really better to just shut up? How about starting small and implementing fixes or starting with small refactors in the direction of a better code base? I have absolute autonomy at my current employer so it's a different world, I mostly ask for forgiveness rather than permission, but to just shut up? Weak.

So exactly how do you just implement small fixes and get them through your hopefully peer reviewed pull requests? What if you cause a regression?

Usually the push back from making changes is larger structural changes you need to get buy in for - not minor bug fixes.

Does it take away from your assigned work?

I’m putting myself in the position of a journeyman “pull tickers from Jira board mid level developer”. Not my real position over the last decade of having a more strategic position. But I still know which way the wind is blowing and know when to shut up.

I know some people that need to apply this advice. Majority shouldn't, this is just a mitigation for a specific personality trait

Strategically, “stop talking” means nothing unless you would otherwise be slamming out ideas. You don’t need people who don’t talk, we have plants for that. You need your silence to say something.

In many companies (especially in non-tech departments) there’s a culture where the first person to speak up is given credit for an idea as the “visionary”, even if they have no skills to actually implement it. In those environments, speaking loudly and often allows one to “lay claim” to an idea. This can be beneficial as a way to control workload, if you “claim” the idea first, you can control people’s expectations and timelines around building it.

You give way too much credit to what happens in “tech companies”. All companies over a certain size are dysfunctional. It makes no difference.

Absolutisms like this are challenging to strike right because an establishment of context is needed. This post's sentiment sounds like regret and resentment over past events (there is trauma), and the author knows to not put their hand on the stove.

Sometimes not speaking up is the best thing for future situations. Other times, it's too costly to not speak up, and what should follow is the speaker making right by their words: action.

It can be helpful to flip the lens from critic to creator. Instead of asking "what's wrong with this thing" instead ask:

  Who deserves praise?
  What spark here deserves to grow?  
  What new thing am I trying myself?
  Who left today better because I showed up?
  What's something I (personally) could have improved?
  What mistake or new facts have I learned from/ widened by view?

This person is being unfairly categorized in multiple posts as someone just complaining and wanting others to do the work but this person is suggesting actionable steps to take to improve things with evidence supporting why and still getting shot down and wasting their time. I’m in this exact situation right now.

> This person is being unfairly categorized in multiple posts as someone just complaining and wanting others to do the work but this person is suggesting actionable steps to take to improve things with evidence supporting why and still getting shot down and wasting their time.

Yes. And? If the actionable steps and evidence you prepared are getting shot down, i.e. not getting the outcome you desire, then you are doing something wrong (and wasting your time). You can't control other people's actions, only your own. You can sometimes influence others, but if that is your goal the current approach is clearly not working and you require a different one.

> unsolicited wisdom

A big problem I see constantly is the mindset that it's "wisdom". It's audible in the voice every speaker that thinks it true. No matter when it's said, no matter how many self-aware disclaimers precede it, it comes out annoying as hell (e.g. Lex Fridman). Some people, even when they know they're are doing it, can't stop themselves.

It's more about picking battles.

I noticed a glaring problem and pushed to refactor a product to fix it, and kept pushing, and kept pushing. In this case, there was a critical need to fix the product, and I was rewarded for it. It lead to a nice tenure for me for almost a decade. (And, I got to stay long enough to get bored.)

More recently, I noticed a glaring problem, and pushed up to the CEO because he frequently complains about the consequences of the glaring problem. The difference is that I can't fix the problem in a few months. There's a lot more coordination and working around other business needs. But again, as long as I'm persistent, I'll have a nice tenure for a decade or more. (And, the work is large enough that I don't think I'll get bored for a long time.)

I get it. This is roughly me, I don't always have the best answers, but I know most things can always be done better. I've coined a few different terms over the years such as "marketing driven development" when I wind up working in places where the marketing team is driving the devs off a cliff, and pushing new features at the expense of ever having time to deal with technical debt. The industry really needs "Tech Debt Thursdays" or something.

There's always way more work to do and those key enhancements or research stories that could improve everything get deprioritized.

I didn't RTFA - just responding to you:

> Tech Debt Thursdays

Yes, "Fix it Fridays" is another alliteration.

Have you ever heard the phrase "man your battle stations"? Turns out in the US Navy there is also "cleaning stations" and there is a call for all hands to cleaning stations on the regular. I have proposed something similar on a few teams I've been on. Daily won't work and quarterly is too long. The problem is the sprawl that comes from cleaning up things that have unintended side effects. But yes, paying the interest on the tech debt needs to be normalized across our industry.

https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/News-Stories/display-news/...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyJH8VbFE6g

As of late, I've been thinking about how "debt" may not be the right metaphor.

Fiscal debt is a one-dimensional number that becomes higher or lower from some offset, but it can't change direction. There's no "complex numbers debt."

But software engineering is only one-dimensional if your problem domain is so constrained that the only roadblock to execution is time-at-keyboard, and that's rarely the case in most software (especially startups and hacking). I've too often seen that debt just "evaporates" when the company pivots or the entire system is replaced by another system or rendered completely irrelevant to continue accepting the notion that debt works as a metaphor. Even in the small, too often I've seen things flagged as, for example: "debt - we should consolidate these two pipelines on top of a smaller set of helpers" only to see the use of the pipelines diverge over time such that it turned out to be a great first step to keep them separate and duplicated.

Sometimes things to be improved / cleaned up are obvious, but cleanup assumes taking disorder and making order out of it, and that requires us to know what order even looks like.

There's also in some places 'Friday Afternoon Projects' (also known as FAP iykyk) where you're allowed to work on anything, I'd honestly prefer companies allow me to work on whatever I want once a week so I can put energy into tech debt items, and tools that might make everybody's lives easier.

Most problems have been solved except the ability to align incentives.

Until the desired outcome is defined and documented, holding off on solutions and effort would benefit both parties.

Communication bandwidth is a finite resource, as several years of managers have reminded me.

(Although, it's worth noting that in this era of more remote work, perhaps a little more read-in and context is useful to avoid burning time on back-and-forths that used to take minutes in front of someone's desk but can now take hours over Slack).

In a technical environment the first step is probably to write your ideas down. Sleep on it, review, and then share with a few people you trust for candid feedback. From there you can share more widely, fine tune and adjust, or realize that you mis-assessed.

It’s called “pre-wiring”

https://medium.com/@unwrittenbusinessguide/pre-wiring-the-ar...

https://www.manager-tools.com/2007/11/how-to-prewire-a-meeti...

https://candidcio.com/2008/05/09/the-value-of-the-pre-wire/

I think in the early stages, the intent is self-rescue: prevent yourself from going off half-cocked. I see it as a way to gather feedback from trusted peers who have knowledge of the problem area. If it proves out, then they can help you sell it, but my primary intent was to encourage a "measure twice, cut once" approach instead of running with an idea without adequate preparation. If you cannot find at least three things that might go wrong with your approach, you probably have not thought it through. The intermediate step between soliciting feedback and "pre-wiring" is a pre-mortem, where you actively solicit potential failure modes and stumbling blocks.

what this misses (and unfortunately is not always an option, especially in larger orgs) is that instead of talking (read: complaining), just fix the damn thing and present the solution on a platter (on company time, of course). more often than not, if you've already addressed the issue and it's ready for primetime, people will not refuse the change.

if they do, there's an equal chance that you either didn't understand the situation to begin with, or you work in a team with poor leadership and strategy. learn from the former, leave the latter.

There’s an unrelated/related topic to this: people who want to be heard doing something. They themselves won’t do much, so you can expect the royal “we” to be tossed around a lot.

This is terrible advice that will hurt your career progression. The problem isn't that people speak out too much. It's that basically no one is proactive enough to speak out. In my experience the people who speak are the people who get promoted.

Knowing when to shut up is great advice and knowing how the wind is blowing. If I know their is an edict from the top down to be an “AI first company”, no matter how much I disagree with an initiative that comes from on high, I’m going to shut up and be all in.

“The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.”

The last time I worked for a product company was as at a startup where I was the second technical hire by the then new CTO who was building up the technical staff internally. The founders bootstrapped the company through an outside consulting company.

There I had a relationship with the CTO where I could just say “that’s a really bad idea” and he would listen.

Fast forward a few years and I was working for a shitty consulting company, I kept my head down for a year, let them fail after I was sure they wouldn’t listen to me and started interviewing and only stayed a year.

My career progression isn’t dependent on the job I have at the moment.

> The difference between “annoying senior sysadmin” and “good consultant” is often just whether you’re in a room that opted in.

So much that. No one likes "drive-by advice" - if you want something to be fixed, there should be a person responsible for that. Maybe it's you doing all the work, or you convincing management, or management who is asking for an advice... But if you are just saying "we should fix FOO by doing this and that" with no plans as to whom those "we" are, it's only annoying.

I'd say - Stop proposing strong solutions until either the room is ready, or you've found or founded the right room

If ever someone should take their own terrible advice, it’s the author of this sad post. Because one reason to shut up is if you what you are saying is BS.

There are times and places and reasons to hold your tongue, of course. None of which are covered by the author.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com