Hacker News Reader

Comment by macNchz | Hacker News Reader

My gut based on what you're describing is that there is some degree of "strategic neglect" happening here, where people the people doing this are effectively allowing the things being asked of them to self-prioritize: the proposals/emails/PRs/etc that get attention are the ones where the person who sent it follows up or schedules a meeting to discuss it, meaning they're likely higher priority than things where the person doesn't make that extra effort. This is a longstanding if exasperating strategy many people use, but I think it's getting more popular now that lobbing out a long proposal is easier than ever (because of AI).

View on HN

I've worked with a lot of people who will not engage with a request until the request has been made multiple times.

Its a very lazy way of filtering.

"It couldn't have been that important" is their logic.

I mentioned elsewhere that I was once coached to do this. In that situation it honestly wasn’t lazy at all. At the time I was fielding such a high load of incoming requests that even reading and responding to them was eating up a huge chunk of my time and preventing me from getting anything else (i.e., actually doing any of the requested work) done.

I realize that this looked to the people requesting my attention like deliberate stonewalling. That’s because it was. And it wasn’t cool. But, “This quarter I didn’t ship any software because I was too busy answering email,” would not have earned me a satisfactory performance review. And I certainly was not going to openly admit to anyone but my immediate manager that I was using persistence as a prioritization signal. I saw what happened to the poor schmuck who made that mistake.

Are LLMs are going to neutralize this as a tactic? Or reinforce it? They will happily bombard you with text, and you can set up an agent to fire back. More text than ever will be transmitted, with less and less of it ever coming to the attention of a human.

itll stay exactly where it is.

scheduling a meeting is telling somebody that you consider this to be a priority and therefore they should too

Just because it is your priority, doesn't make it mine.

The current situation I have is that I have 5 people demanding that I have their stuff as a priority, and they will schedule meetings to tell me such.

If I'm in 5 hours of status update and demo meetings every day how much actual work is going to get completed?

This sounds like the tragedy of commons. If someone arranges a meeting with you, it is more likely that you will work on their project afterwards, because you have already been thinking about it during the meeting, you already have the context in your mind, and probably a few ideas about what to do next...

Therefore, everyone starts demanding meetings from you, because they have nothing to gain by not doing so -- you wouldn't use the extra time to work on their projects, but on the projects of those who insisted on meetings.

If you have so many meetings that you can't get actual work done, that sucks for everyone, but again, they have nothing to gain by canceling their meeting, unless everyone else does the same thing. But the others won't do the same thing, because now you have time to work on some projects, and they prefer those to be their projects.

What I learned managing high performers is a disproportionate number of them had very hard childhoods and carry permanent scars that make this behavior destructive. These are the people that generally get ignored in every aspect of their life because their brain is operating much faster than the rest of society and get mistaken for being insane in every facet of their life. So when they experience this kind of behavior in an environment that's supposed to reward them for their ideas, it's stultifying. Those high performers are not going to continue putting effort and energy into novel ideas if they're being ignored.

The solution is pretty simple: just fire the manager.

a high performer will push through that to get what they want done though. the obvious case for a higher performer in this is to develop strong back channels and trust with whoever usually blows off unnecessary work

To be clear, I'm not saying a one sentence Slack message can't be ignored. I've coached these folks about how they might need to make multiple attempts to get someone's attention and they're always receptive.

But that's very different than when an engineer stays up all night investigating a very serious issue, writing it up completely, and offering multiple solutions in a wall of text that can't be brushed off in Slack. The engineer makes multiple attempts across multiple weeks and communication platforms to get their attention, and it's ignored. Not "we're busy but will get back to you when we can." Just completely ignored.

A high performer (and really anyone) should not have to resign themselves to office politics to workaround this kind of dysfunction. It's imperative to fire such managers so that you don't lose the trust of the people doing the work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com