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Often, 'leaders' make mistakes and people below suffer the consequences. It is important to let these leaders deal with the pain caused by their decisions from their cluelessness about how things work.

The problem is it's systemic. Ultimately, pain needs to come from outside. As long as society rewards incompetence, we'll have incompetent organizations.

No it does not need to come from the outside. If you're an underfunded IT department and your network has an issue twice a week, you will get that funding. If you're heroically obscuring the fact that things are falling apart you won't. That means even if you could somehow, heroically fix it, it isn't perceived as such if nobody ever felt the problem and saw you fix it.

This is a pain signal. Some IT dude saying things are crap in every meeting is not.

> This is a pain signal. Some IT dude saying things are crap in every meeting is not.

More often than not it is some IT dude observing network crap-out once a month, performing analysis, noticing an upward trend and then saying in every meeting that things are crap and there will be issues twice a week in some time.

> If you're an underfunded IT department and your network has an issue twice a week, you will get that funding.

More often than not, if the IT department is already neglected they will not get that funding. Things will be delayed until the crap outs eventually actually happen twice a week and then some external heroic consultants will be hired to fix the issue underfunded IT department "could not".

IT doesnt control the funding so at that point its not an issue of awareness but a management decision to live with this problem and focus funding elsewhere

more often than not, many things in the business are on fire and underfunded at the same time. you can get recognition for your work without the problem being permanently solved the right way, and it may not result in more funding but peopel will think of you for new opportunities that pop up later as someone who is reliable.

if you dont think the recognition will happen and youre just burning out solving these problems then stop solving them. new problem pops up thats outside your job description, its not your problem. generally though if youre working for someone like that anything you do is a lose-lose

It comes back to communication. If management acknowledges the issue but redirects budget elsewhere due to priorities, it's legit. Communicating it in a way IT personnel understand and accept isn't necessarily easy. Sometimes there's also incentive for management to avoid it altogether (we need to focus elsewhere and this could burn you out, but you're an acceptable loss).

That said, management needs to know there's pain and in a language it speaks - risk. Cost, legal, whatever. Preferably quantified without drowning them in numbers or fear mongering. That's what pain is all about.

> That said, management needs to know there's pain and in a language it speaks - risk. Cost, legal, whatever.

In my own experience, people in management generally refuse to evaluate risks that are not immediate. Instead of looking at risks as something that could happen the general mode is looking at risks as something that may not necessarily happen and therefore does not need immediate attention.

Raising risks becomes a risky business (pun intended, hehe). If you raise, especially repeatedly, that in x weeks/month something will probably happen a manager will sweep that under a rug, ignore any warnings and will not give (even more so fight for) resources to proactively tackle the risk. Yet, if the risks manifests and hurts business metrics, then suddenly you are remembered and get all the blame. Yet, if you wait it out and clean up the mess caused by the risky event, you are a hero.

The higher up the management chain one is, the more prevalent this phenomenon is. I don't want to imply there's no planning or that management types are "dumb" or whatever. It's just that in my experience, the higher up one is, the more they are focused on the proverbial happy path. It's generally easier to get a goalpost moved instead of getting a blocker risk removed. All the projects that exceed budgets and underdeliver are, in part, a symptom of this: raising a simple "we don't have safeguards against a third party in a critical path delivering in time and under budget" project risk makes someone look bad and is generally unacceptable, yet once the deadline is up getting more budget assigned is one meeting away. I'm always surprised how strong a simple moat of simply already being in the market can be: businesses that continuously take all-or-nothing type of risks keep surviving against simple mathematical odds.

How did you make the illogical leap to “could not”?

Repeatedly requesting time/budget to fix an ongoing issue is a requirement of any half-decent manager. If they’re reporting issues then just smiling blankly when asked “what can we do about it?” they’ve failed their basic job duty.

The problem is sometimes management knows who the heroes are and so by not fixing things they know you are not competent. Thus letting things bubble up isn't always a good plan. It is really hard when you are on the bottom to know which case things are.

The problem is that management witnesses the pain, but the response isn't to adjust behavior, it is then to punish the limb where the pain originated from. The reason that people pull heroics is also because the organization isn't healthy, and cannot reflect on its actions. Papering over organizational flaws is a symptom of a larger, often unseen problem. If it was healthy, someone would have already said, "hey, I think we need to work on this networking component" and it would have been looked at.

Pain propagation, to use the corpus metaphor isn't enough.

Honestly? I’m just super direct with the exec team now after trying to do this dance. Obviously this is not allowed at every company, I’m just lucky to be at a place where the company culture allows for this.

I’ll ask for something preventative or that otherwise hardens our systems. They ask “is it a need?” and I’ll say something like “we can function without, but that means we have a 5-10% chance in the next 6mo of having a major failure and embarrassing ourselves in front of a live audience in the thousands as well as our client.” They then decide how much that risk is worth to them, and whatever they decide is kind of out of my hands at that point. If the thing I warned them of comes because they didn’t pay for it, I can point to the receipts (though I’ve never had to, we’re small enough people remember those conversations).

60% of the time they just get what I need maybe? But ultimately it’s about CYA. Tell them what’s up, tell them what the solution is, tell them what the consequences are if they don’t do the solution, and make them decide.

Again this obviously depends on company culture and structure, but I can’t imagine on the only person who can do this!

An example that not all companies are run by idiots. The job market is not a healthy market though, where its more important to know ppl then to be great at some skill. But if leadership sucks just leave if you can, that will fix the problem.

Totally. I am pretty lucky to be where I’m at.

> By building pain into the system. If your hands dealt with injury directly without sending pain signals up to your brain, you'd never change the behaviour that led to that harm or reconsider your priorities.

I don't think that's it. Emergent problems require attention and action from leadership, who in turn can make the problem visible to higher ups. This creates signal, and positive feedback when the problem is fixed or mitigated.

If the problem doesn't exist to begin with, there is no signal. Managers don't get to show their fast-acting skills, and there are no heroics to speak of.

So ultimately poorly maintained and managed projects who deliver fixes for problems of their own doing create a perverse incentive, whereas no one is lauded or promoted for doing normal day-to-day things.

Well I think it is even more complex. If you're a plumber in a rotten system of pipes the whole company depends on, you can fix issues day in and day out, without speaking a word and they will notice everything is a bit unreliable and thus you do a bad job. You could do the exact same work, but make a big thing about every major fix, warn people a week ahead, give them the feeling the company depends on it and then do the exact same work and tell them how you fixed it. Suddenly you did a good job, despite you literally doing the exact same thing with your hands.

The difference is how it was communicated. Most non-Tech/non-infrastructure-people got no clue about these things. If they know you're battling the demons of plumbing on their behalf they will thank you, if you're the weird guy that has smeared dirt in the face and is seen once a week while the plumbing fails ever so often, guess what.

That means even if the problems and their fixes remain the same, the communication around them really matters. Tech people can be extremely bad with this. And if we're talking IT it is really the plumbing that holds the company together.

"You knew there was a problem, and didn't fix it? You're here because I don't know programming. Fired."

I think we've worked with very different kinds of people...

The Dunning Kruger effect suggests that the people who caused the pain are also those least likely to feel it.

That's why you change it to make the pain work. This does need CEO-level cooperation to implement, but i think it is possible.

CEO’s are generally the ones causing the pain

Dunning Kruger's paper didn't even show the Dunning Kruger effect everyone loves.

In the original DK experiment they asked students after they had taken a test that where would their score end up compared to their classmates (which they had no knowledge of). Obviously they picked scores around the middle*

Which resulted in top students 'undervaluating themselves' and bottom students 'overestimating themselves'. Or under/overvaluating a random future variable that they don't have knowledge of, at least.

The original DK paper actually shows a positive correlation between the guesses and the test results: students are generally aware how they are among their peers, and smarter students guessed higher than studetns with less time to study on their hand.

This being said, the 'DK effect' is something people talk about, and it might exist, and it might be perceived by people. It's just that the original DK paper does not support it.

* another lesser talked problem with the DK paper is that people don't actually believe the answers they give, because the question is nonsensical.

If someone just takes a test, they won't think that "I'm sure I'll end up the 24% this time". Even if they are forced to anwser this question, even then they won't believe it, because that's not how random and future work. People are generally aware of about where they will perform (with positive correlation, in fact the original DK paper shows it) but they are not aware of results of specific, random future events, and they are not claiming that they know the results of specific, random future events, or believe it in their hearts.

DK paper tries to frame them as they were actually believing this, but they are not.

More to read at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect

Can't we just get to the pop culture version of the DK effect by deduction?

It seems reasonable to assume that for some group of intellects they are not smart enough to know how not smart they are. There is no definite boundary where this effect is either on or off, therefore there are probably some gradations to this awareness as you climb up the intelligence ladder.

Another way of putting it: if dumb people had more insight they would cease to be dumb.

> Can't we just get to the pop culture version of the DK effect by deduction?

Maybe, but the DK paper doesn't add anything here.

Thanks for elaborating!

> If your hands dealt with injury directly without sending pain signals up to your brain, you'd never change the behaviour that led to that harm or reconsider your priorities.

At some point in one's early single-digit they learn that touching hot stuff hurts. They start to avoid stuff that they know is hot, but still come in contact with hot stuff accidentally. Later they learn techniques minimizing probability of touching hot stuff even by accident. By the time one reaches twenty or so, the only times a person burns themselves is really by being way too reckless.

> Like it or not, sometimes the best thing for an organization isn't to just fix every problem and prevent it from bubbling up; it needs to be treated like a learning opportunity for org leadership, which means sending the pain signals upward before just repairing it.

Should we accept that management as a whole is in general more clueless than your average teenager? The "learning opportunity" should, ideally, happen exactly once, realistically once in a very rare while.

> It's important to coach people on the idea that in large group sizes, it's more efficient to let certain kinds of problems play out and not be so reactive to them.

You are conflating two things here, I guess. Yes, some "problems" are not worth to be fixed proactively or at all, but that has very little to do with group sizes, it's a "simple" cost-benefit tradeoff. As groups grow the left hands tend to become increasingly unaware of what the right is doing and that is the primary reason why we have management class in the first place.

The problem OP raises is attention span of the metaphorical gold fish in the management layers. Even if a department does everything in their power to communicate impending problems, do risk weighed cost-benefit analyses, get proactive treatments pre-approved by higher management, the same higher management forgets the risks and costs savings once they have been mitigated, effectively incentivizing firefighting. Some teams gradually fall into eternal firefighting and burn out, others start manufacturing fires to get rewarded. The biggest problem is that it is nearly impossible to tell the two apart.

Unlike a teenage child, management has the unfortunate effect of being made up of people who can leave the company, forget past experience, etc. So you do kind of have to treat them like a child who needs continuous feedback and signals.

For a more broad example than IT cost center stuff, you can look at how some large companies go through cycles of arrogance with their customer bases, launch a product that fails, and then are humbled enough to try and pivot and earn good will back. Microsoft is always somewhere in this cycle for instance. The organization can never really learn this lesson permanently and will "regress" from time to time based on financial pressure or greed or some other impulse.