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Comment by 692 | Hacker News Reader

at almost every place that I've worked at, it's been the task of the manager/ senior managers to keep the stake holders, general staff/ users at bay, to keep the techies happy and free of harassment during severity one incidents

and that includes making coffee, tea and bringing sandwiches/ pizzas

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I need to work at better places. Our managers are the ones who schedule the "quick chats" to "see where we're at". In particularly stressful situations I've been blunt in saying we're not going to be able to solve the problem during this meeting so please let us get back to work.

I worked at a company that had our team in a monthlong rolling crisis born of bad management.

They wanted updates for the director who didn’t even understand the technical issues at least twice daily. Frequently, it was done over a teams channel so it was a rolling half hour text conversation/distraction trying to explain technical issues to someone who was bad at listening. By the end of it I was ready to sabotage the project just to end it.

explaining fairly complex stuff to non technical people and using diagrams (we called them crayon diagrams) can be an art form. Its a balancing act of showing something too complex vs too simple ie,showing one box and saying its broken(I've seen that happen).

imho, The best way to start is by asking the stakeholder what they know about the system and asking them stuff. this is good in different ways,

1) you can assess their level of technical abilities

2) assess how interested they really are

3)engage with them and create a personal relationship

and take it from there, using analogies can be extremely useful

heh

In my youth, fixing a bug on factory machinery that had broken down (downtime costing £10,000 ph) with senior management and CO standing behind me watching what I was doing....

..... I told them if they wanted to be useful, then to fuck off and make the tea because watching over my shoulder wasn't helping.

Being blunt and factual is always the way to go :-)

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