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Comment by sstradling | Hacker News Reader

I'm reminded of a blog post by an old govvie that hated this approach. His argument was that every time we work around a problem in our process, whether it was a bad system or an incompetent co-worker or manager, we became the problem. Every time we added a duck or built a workaround we were building frameworks that would hold a bad policy in place for longer than if we just stopped and said "that's stupid". Adding the duck binds your co-workers and successors to a life of misery.

There's a real risk (of course) to killing the duck. Your client or your boss may hate you, and that's never healthy in the short run, but they also may come out of the interaction a wiser and better person. Or you may find yourself not working for an idiot, and be happier in the long run anyways. Keeping the duck alive is a bigger long-term risk for everyone.

Kill the duck.

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There's merit to this position. You can think of this as the process/organization equivalent to technical debt. Every problem that you introduce a hacky work-around, that root problem sticks around and keeps generating more and more hacks and work-arounds. The end result is incompetent management.

That doesn't mean it's always the wrong decision, though. Sometimes, technical debt is the right trade-off. Sometimes the trade-off of teaching your boss just isn't worth the effort, and getting the job done quickly works out.

And, just like technical debt, doing this results is more problems for other people (including future-you) as your bad boss looks good and calcifies his bad habits and rises in the ranks.

Personally, my preferred solution is malicious compliance. If someone makes a stupid decision, they have them suffer the consequences of that stupidity rather than covering for them and letting them delude themselves that their bad decision was good. This only works on new decisions, though; if you try to remove existing work-arounds for old bad decisions, you're the one that looks bad.

This is how corporate life works & it took five years for me to come to terms with it. However, I have done much better as an Employee (in the eyes of my Manager/Company) ever since.

Once you develop a good reputation by playing the game, you can always fix old bad decisions & at that point, your superiors would actually encourage you to do so.

Put more simply, sometimes you are the idiot. Don't make it worse for everyone by acting like it.

Edit: that's a generic 'you', in case it's not obvious, not a reference to the parent.

Even if you specifically aren't the idiot (though I often am), never spend your time working around the idiot. Any time you work around an idiot, you've done more work and the idiot will still be there...

I agree 100%. We are all idiots now and then, even when we're not purposefully trying to be by adding ducks.

Agreed (although there are few things funnier than a well-placed duck)

I think that you don't really understand the duck until you are unlucky enough to work in a situation that is dysfunctional enough to warrant it. I hope you never do, stranger. I agree with your sentiment as an idealist, but my experience in some deeply deeply dysfunctional situations suggests that the duck can sometimes - when used judiciously - be the tool you need.

I've been in some pretty bad ones (USG software dev) - I agree that sometimes you might need an emergency duck, but that's when you need to start looking somewhere else. If they're crazy or dysfunctional enough for more than an occasional ED, odds are that they'll break you or fire you eventually.

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