Comment by tpmoney | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tpmoney | Hacker News Reader

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If no one bucks up and tells management that the dev environment is a blocker in the first place, how do they know? I've seen way too many co-workers sit and stew in silence about problems that get solved as soon as they start speaking up, or at the very least start getting factored into estimates once someone starts saying "hey this sucks and adds 3 days to every week of work". Maybe it never gets fixed because "reasons" but it at least stops being an "unseen" problem.

I worked on a team that used a free tool as part of the dev process that was just a continual source of problems for about half the team, with no obvious reasons why. Every 4th or 5th launch of the tool would just fail, and you'd lose half a day to trying to resolve the problem or otherwise clear all the settings / caches / accounts and start from scratch. Yet the team had worked like that for a handful of years because "it's just one of those things". It took 2 days after bringing it up to management to get the whole team paid licenses to an alternative tool. No one had bothered to bring it up because no one thought management would pay for a tool when a free one worked. But a half a day lost to a tool failure cost the company an order of magnitude more than just buying licenses to a better tool.

I have found that a lot of engineers learn helplessness because they've been burned by reporting issues to bad managers. Bad managers only shift the blame downwards. Why would any sane engineer ever report anything if there is a chance it will be held against them?

This whole request for more remote work is the clearest example. It has been requested across companies with little-to-no support from management.

Because those bad managers are going to shift the blame downwards regardless and the people around you also see what you do. If you need to add CYA cc's to emails about blockers or bring things up publicly where it will be clear that you were upfront about the issues facing the project. Ultimately bad managers are temporary problems, but a reputation as an unreliable person is permanent.

Oh boy, you must be a decent manager. In my most recent experience, engineers who brought up issues publicly were berated, rated lower and then managed out. Why? Because the goal of the bad manager is only to "look good" for "long enough".

If the company culture is bad enough that you get pushed out like this, almost certainly your good co-workers are or will also be pushed out the same way. Those are the people I'm referring to when I say others will see what you do. They're the ones that make up the network that gets you a better position out from such a dysfunctional organization.

I've left such dysfunctional situations before, and the network of co-workers and other managers I built up in those situations by being reliable and communicating were key in finding multiple subsequent positions. In another case, a skip level manager who I'd probably met in person 2 or 3 times tapped me for transfer to another team out from under a lousy manager in part because of an earned reputation for being honest about what was feasible and then getting that done.

Like I said, bad managers are a temporary problem. Either they're gone or you're gone. But your reputation is what you trade on when you call on your network to help make that problem as temporary as possible.

This is exactly right. I used to think that execs were like “Super ICs” who knew everything under them. As I’ve moved up in my career I’ve been amazed to find that execs do not know all the details of what’s happening or where the problems are. They are human just like the rest of us, and someone else’s problem is not obvious. They need to be told in a meeting or in writing so they can help fix it.

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