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Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

> So if you go off and do X, then why are they paying you to do Y?

What you describe kind of suggests upholding strict divisions per team like that is one of the main causes of the problem.

Wouldn't being more flexible of temporarily joining another team as a guest work? I imagine that for a number of situations this could work:

- I want to do x, my team needs it

- But we're responsible for X, and x falls under that

- When can you do it?

- We're understaffed, so years from now

- Fine I'll do it for you, I need it now

- Didn't you hear we are responsible for X? If x is not done right we are the ones who get in trouble for that.

- So make me a temporary guest member of your group, vet my work to make sure it's ok, and share the credit for x.

- Ok, that actually sounds like a good return on investment for us, welcome to the team!

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Good luck getting your current manager to agree to this ! Are there any organisations that allow this ?

I mean in theory Google's 20% time allows for this, but all traces of that (like the calendar and gmail labs) have systematically vanished from their products. And that happened years ago, it's not like that was yesterday.

I have expectation of any reasonable manager to agree to some form of this; at least to work on that feature you need and support it so that you get unblocked. This is at least practice at Facebook.

In my experience, while they will do it as a last resort, what's much more likely to happen is that they will continuously "compensate" for lack of features by overloading their current employees, then have them complain about lack of headcount. This is especially true where it comes to things like reports. Reports don't have variance ? Why not have someone copy everything over into a spreadsheet and manually calculate whatever statistics other managers want to see ?

They will actually fight having an "export to google sheets" feature, because it would cost them a lot of headcount.

And of course, demanding that managers learn a bit of basic (and I do mean basic) programming ("querying" would be a more apt description) to, for instance, do SQL queries on the database so they'd include those statistical measures ... that's just so out of the question it's not funny. There seems to be this need for managers to be the dumbest, most idiotic (but agreeable) people that just do whatever their boss asks of them, mostly by subtly threatening whoever is below them. "Good" companies leave 1 level above the rank and file that actually gets promoted from the rank and file to prevent the worst of the inevitable backlash. And yes, Facebook also definitely works like this, from what I've seen during an extended interview.

I can think of 10 examples of this I've seen where I work in the last year.

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