Doing Everyone Else's Job
yosefk.com
yosefk.com
They would couple this with things like standardized coding and documentation styles, common tools, etc. Training on these standards was a regular thing for all staff.
The idea was that they could rapidly move experienced staff around. It also helped staff to understand how their work was applied in an integrated system (having “blinders” on, is a fairly typical issue, with dedicated employees).
It generally worked, but relied on their particular culture, and introduced a fairly significant amount of overhead and rigidity to the system. It would also mean that it takes a long time to cultivate experts.
Personally, I’ve always enjoyed learning new stuff (still do). I actually enjoy taking on projects that I don’t know how to do. I wrote about it here: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/thats-not-what-ships...
No, residency is within a specific specialty only.
It’s more like the clinical rotations that occur in year 3 and 4 of medical school in the U.S.
We’re culturally very far from even being able to attempt that.
The silly policy also extends towards things like supermarket managers, midsized companies with a country wide branch network public school teachers and other nonmilitary civil service positions.
If you’re a primary school teacher, you likely won’t see your students graduate.
False, they punish by not crediting that work as work.
Glue work, keeping things tidy, dealing with that annoyance that everyone else has been able to get away with suffering through (and ignoring), all of this will be worth approximately 0 at performance review time because your time is a zerosum game that is traded off with highly visible, political, and otherwise rewardable work.
It's been my experience that in larger companies you generally have to play in the framework.(I'd roughly draw the line at 1000+ employees), at quite small companies (or as a self employed / entrepreneur, roughly <200 employees) you should follow the path of highest EROI on your efforts regardless of who's job it is. In the gap you have to read the culture and management.
They were criminally under appreciated by management. Their career trajectory significantly worse than those who engaged in the highly visible projects.
But I've also never worked at a large company.
Many people get satisfaction from doing their job well. From their perspective, if they are already happy with what they have, why would they make themselves unhappy by constantly pursuing more?
>why people would continue to care so hard when their efforts are unappreciated.
So quite a few marriages.
I accept that public sector, charitable sector etc, make this calculation a bit different. But in the private sector it just seems silly to give yourself to a job that doesn't appreciate what you give it.
Wut?
I'm not encouraging the to grift, ffs, I'm encouraging them to go and work somewhere that will appreciate their efforts!
"Appreciation" in this case means, promotions. I don't want them, and would actively change jobs if you forced it on me.
So I am more than happy to just do a great job at my job. I do not desire or want anyone to notice me in any particular way. I want to be paid a reasonable amount, and make sure everyone that uses anything I touch is happy with the experience.
That's a great life. I don't understand why anyone would think that caring about things matters at all.
There's a massive difference between your users, and peers appreciating you, and management appreciating you.
Management doesn't know anything. Why would I value their appreciation?
I care much more about my intelligent peers, or even commenters here, than what a non technical person thinks.
Fully agree, enterprise failure is one of the most important mechanisms in market economies.
This also applies to gov't bailouts
Successful communication strategy: There is too much work for the department. If we don’t scale up we’re going to have some kind of incident or failed delivery in the next few months. <explain expected failures, provide numbers>. I’m doing everything I can to keep this from happening, but there simply are not enough resources. I’ll email you a summary of all of this.
Then proceed to work a normal number of hours until a genuine incident occurs. Refer back to the earlier conversation (and email summary). Receive resources if the problem actually impacts the company. It may have just been acceptable risk for management.
Key mistake I see: Don’t work 80 hours a week to be a hero unless you have a specific strategic goal in mind. You’re actually hurting the company by hiding a resource allocation issue.
Worse, competent managers won’t promote you for persistent Herculean efforts. For a couple reasons. First, they would need to replace you with two people. Second, you are not exactly showing that you understand how to solve a problem with teamwork if you’re solving every problem by working unsustainable hours.
In terms of work in the job description, I could probably be replaced by 1.2 (1.1?) average competent workers. In terms of other benefits of my employment to coworkers and patrons, my impact is hard to estimate. Others bring in goodies for snacking, but I maintain a consistent but limited selection of snacks; others may spend as much or more money per year on snacks, but knowing that certain snacks will be available has significant value.
While I would have liked being promoted one level (from library page to library aide, from shelving only to shelving and check-in), higher positions have responsibilities I would have found extremely stressful. I was passed over twice for a promotion supported by my immediate supervisor (the decision was made by higher ups, the second time my supervisor was miffed that his input was not given more weight) and I had a meltdown at the interview for a third chance when technical issues (not working audio in an online interview) forced cancellation of the interview. I took my reaction as evidence that I was not ready for more responsibilities.
The first time I was not promoted, I was not especially bothered; the person getting the job was competent and went beyond minimal effort. The second time I was told that I would probably get the job (which I think was part of why my supervisor was not happy about my not even getting an interview) and the person getting the job seemed (after some observation) to be less competent and less enthusiatic than the previous transfer. (I think this estimate was not derived entirely from my disappointment: my first impression was "this is a library person" (glasses et al.). Perhaps seeing a library person not seeming enthusiastic about working at a library may have soured me more than if I had no hints of a kindred spirit.)
I like helping my coworkers (I like most of them and dislike none), but shelving books is not that team-oriented. I do not want to manage people (I am not good at it and do not enjoy it).
Y’all have to answer to boards of various kinds with completely unreasonable expectations. (I have good friends who work in a library. We live in completely different worlds, you and I.)
This seems to be a wisdom issue both for the worker (e.g., avoiding burnout or even just resentment) and the management (workers who have external principles can be more valuable but they can also be more difficult to manage even decently, i.e., with average ROI)
Your comment reminded me of Bunny the accountant's statement that Skeeve must charge the going rate to have the kingdom on a rational budget and Skeeve deciding to refund taxes to those who complained the most (in one of Robert Asprin's Myth Inc. books). What could possibly go wrong? :-)
Meanwhile the actually most heroic work I did was literal PCB level repair of a piece of ancient equipment whose function my boss wouldn't even understand, but the failure of which would stop our main room to a grinding halt. I then had to repeatedly ask to replace that equipment with a new replacement.
The highly visible work is often not the one that really counts, especially if you do not understand the subject matter.
Fixing something that’s visibly and publicly broken (or able to be sold) gets immediate praise. Preventing that issue before it occurs is thankless and invisible.
There are people doing that invisible work in every org. They normally become visible around a week after they quit.
This can become so perverted that the number of extinguished fires is treated as some sort of metric for success by management, instead of seeing it as the failure it is.
Feel free to replace this with "all nighters" in other jobs. Who is more dedicated to the job, the person that just does it all in time with plenty of room for mistakes and unforseen circumstances or the one who slacks around 90% of the duration and then squeezes in some all nighters in the last hours? If your project has to rely on all nighters without good reason¹ this just indicates bad planning to me.
¹: There are legit reasons why working through the night is needed, e.g. the work you do can only be done during the night or there are legit last minute problems that nobody could have planned for. But if you literally have those every time, they are to be expected and are to be scheduled for during normal working hours.
The problem with one is the same with any other single source: you are stuck with whatever they offer on whatever timelines they provide. You are sharing this with a hundred thousand other people, so it's not tailored to your use case, but either made as generic as possible, or full of irrelevant features. Both of these cases make it worse for you.
I have often made in house libraries either based on or completely replacing a free equivalent because the free one doesn't meet our needs and has extra complications we don't need. Yes, it comes with its costs, but sometimes it's worth it for something that genuinely meets your needs.
By forcing everybody to use the same common platform, you are either forcing them to work around the mismatch between the platform and their needs, or your are forcing the platform to provide for everyone's needs. Neither is efficient and it harms every other user.
If you are going to make your own, you had better have a good reason for it, but you shouldn't be forced into a single solution for everything - it can end up being more expensive than making a few special purpose applications.
> The second common variant is, instead of centralizing a service so that everyone in the company uses it, every department does it on their own. Department managers like it because it’s one less party not reporting to them to depend on (and nothing scares managers more than needing things from people not reporting to them.) And the people managing the department managers like it because they don’t need to deal with the centralized service department allegedly failing — and having to figure out if that’s really true and how to fix it, or if it’s an excuse made up by the other departments for failing at their own job. Here, too, if outcomes are what concerns you rather than what's easiest for senior leadership, standardizing on something across the company vs having everyone roll their own variant is a hard decision to make.
The argument is that centralization is the better outcome, even if it's less appealing to leadership. My counter argument is that centralization has downsides that need to be considered; it isn't inherently better.
And of course you can also end up standardizing on something because it benefits someone good at politics even though it's a bad idea, I just didn't elaborate on this stuff because it is too far away from the subject. I didn't say you should always stanardize on something though, I said that it was a hard decision
Everything is locked behind multiple layers of permissions. It takes weeks to get the correct permissions set up even for my actual job (which I see any time changing roles here, or when onboarding new hires). Getting the permissions to jump in and improve some other part of the system that I don't officially own - even though I might get granted them if I ask nicely, because nobody knows who is actually meant to have what permissions - is so much higher friction than asking the "right" person.
Encouraging the inverse of fixing relationship helped both parties as well.
That said, I’ve worked in a few other shops that either had the permissions/compartmentalization shit show as a permanent blocker, or were just completely devoid of a culture encouraging people to care about anything beyond their own career/fiefdom. I absolutely despise both cases.
If you attempt to make it easier for yourself to do more, you might wear yourself out too. The organization has become a demoralization engine, and some can continue on this way for a very long time. Some people might even be frustrated that you're trying to do anything differently.
But sometimes you can make inroads, and you can make things easier for everyone. Through finding the right people to ask, you can start to document or at least remember how to avoid the friction, reduce it, and make things better.
> but you can usually find people in his org who’ll work with you, on the theory that they’re supposed to.
In 100% of the cases where someone has tried this on me, both as the manager and the naive employee, the real reason was that they didn’t care about what the manager/employee was supposed to be doing. They were looking for easy targets who could be abused to do their team’s work. Most of the “manager doesn’t manage anything” accusations came from other teams who weren’t even trying to understand what other managers or teams did. If the other manager or team wasn’t actively working for them in some capacity, they thought the manager wasn’t doing anything.
> It’s true that many of them have long figured out that they’re really supposed to follow orders passed down the hierarchy and do nothing else, even if everything around them is on fire. But some never figure this out, and most managers fail to punish at least some of these slow learners of theirs, so they’re yours to work with.
The most generous interpretation is that this is taken idle employees and putting them to use for the greater good, but most of the cases I’ve seen in real companies are from one arrogant manager spreading their work across any workers gullible enough to do anything you ask of them.
I’ve worked with and hired a lot of really nice people who always want to lend a helping hand. They’re great, but many of them have a real problem handling workplace sharks like this who will saunter over to their desk (or DMs) and persuade them to work on something else, which puts them behind on their own work. When it happens chronically it gets so bad that you have to start checking in almost daily to make sure they haven’t been pulled into yet another team’s workload from a Slack DM or email.
Helping other teams when time is available is a good thing generally. You need to make your manager aware of the incoming requests and time spent, though. Don’t become the person who is working themself to the bone for everyone who comes over with a request but is holding their own team back because they can’t focus on their actual work.
This is true of course, but you say it as if it’s a bad thing. At the end of the day, everyone has to manage their own time. If everyone only cared about chain of command and scheduled priorities, overall efficiency would plummet. Simple wins that just require a small amount of coordination outside the official org chart would be killed in committees and program manager reviews.
I understand the exploitative dynamic you’re describing, I just think there are many failure modes for productive operations that have to be balanced in some meta way.
It's literally the fastest way to have someone get up to speed with the customer profile and product. They can play with it whilst listening in to support calls (if a thing). They can learn about pain points and "hard edges" that as developers we don't always come across.
When scheduling onboarding, I try to enable touring without those drawbacks.
It's harder during crunch or when everyone is remote.
It's useful.
And then there's times like getting to charge your client $300/hour to drop stuff off at FedEx. Because you can do that and you're here and you'll get it done right -- no one needs to explain the idiosyncracies of this particular deadline or package contents; you've got it.
Even if that's not normally a senior consultant's job.
Sometime, I still do and I like the fun and thrill of locking in a hotel room after a meeting and coming out in lot less days these days (pppppsssstt, because of AI) and get into the next meeting showing off what can be done that was discussed 48 hours ago.
You do them because they benefit you.
Not going to benefit you? There's lots of ways to say no to a back-channel request. Not a back-channel request? Then I guess it's not someone else's job!
Also the helping can cause escalation of "demand". First you help with something quick and easy for you, but soon you find "owning" more and more of the task.
It's not dissimilar from the entitled people in open source project bug trackers.
I don't know that I've ever felt so validated by a HN submission.
I am definitely one of those suckers that does extra work others will not do. It isn't altruistic, I just can't motivate myself to work at all if my tasks are stupid. The problem is that at any sufficiently large organization many of the tasks are stupid because hardly anyone is on the same page.
That said, I’d add one more point: in China, where I’m from, it is getting harder for individuals to even survive inside organizations these days, let alone succeed. In that environment, the rational strategy is often to do less, take fewer risks, and make fewer mistakes.
Hard not to miss the golden days.
It's earned me lots of sneers, over the years, but the people that mattered, didn't care. I spent most of my career at one of the world's best optical equipment companies, working as a peer with some of the top people in the world. It was quite humbling, and extremely gratifying.
(Except the ones who are dead.)
Tread carefully. At fairly large companies, you'll find plenty of people who'll take your reward. I also know people like those described in the article who get hit by layoffs - people didn't realize how significant the unofficial work they did was.
Whenever I get a new job, I always research and test the waters. If it's clear I won't get rewarded, I don't do it (and start searching for another job).
I've found people who have spent decades on one topic in a very specific vertical. It is amazing how they know EVERYTHING in that and I can listen with my jaws dropped to the floor for hours. Then I will wake up, with that spine-chilling shake all over my body on how patient and dedicated one has to be to be on that straight line their entire life.
I really wish this was more common in the industry, now as a Product Manager, while I do a lot to engage with field teams (Support, Sales) and work across every group in the company (Legal, Finance, Eng, Ops, Support, Sales, et al), I still only get interactions and snippets, it'd be great to go walk a mile in their shoes.
It all depends on stock options allocation, no?
Usually, if I dig into something that's not being done by others it's because it is no one's job. And by the rule of "he who touched it last owns it" (a stupid and destructive default rule that exists even in otherwise excellent organizations), I end up owning a bunch of old crap no one wants to touch.
There are easier ways to get a false positive though, if you're open to lying, hogging credit, bus chucks etc. I sometimes wonder if I'm the crazy one for Doing Things Right when I could be spending time with my family instead.
The comma count is a hint ;)
(I had to parse a few paragraphs several times to get the idea.)
I got in the habit, because it is better for technical specifications. It makes it clear, to which word an "and" applies. I think it makes reading prose a bit awkward, though.
I've noticed that LLMs really don't seem to like using commas, in general.
I’m suggesting you to check it out. Then incorporate anything that resonates with you :)
Good article, btw!
But you are right, it's becomes an issue when three sentences make up a 100+ word paragraph lol
In my experience, rarely an individual contributor ends up being promoted to a manager (because the latter retired/layoff/etc).
At the higher levels, they are filled with executives in acquired companies or hired from the outside. (CEO of LittleCo becomes VP of BiggerCo)
Although I have seen 2-3 unicorn cases where someone goes from janitor to director in 3 years - far faster than a high performing junior engineer with demonstrated accomplishments can become a senior engineer… Always assumed the former was flat out nepotism.
The reviewer says "based on the opening paragraph I thought this was going to be about topic X. Here are my thoughts on topic X".
That's great, but the article isn't about topic X. What are your thoughts about the actual topic of the article? Did you read it, or just the opening paragraph?