[HN Gopher] Project managers, ducks, and dogs marking territory ...
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Project managers, ducks, and dogs marking territory (2013)
Author : lutrinus
Score : 119 points
Date : 2023-11-22 09:13 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rachelbythebay.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rachelbythebay.com)
| scrapheap wrote:
| Quite often the person believes they are helping with their
| suggestions (or at least that's what I believe when I'm the one
| doing the suggesting). But there is certainly better and worse
| ways to make those sort of suggestions.
|
| On the other hand, I quite often don't bother rounding the
| corners of boxes when working on a web UI until one of the last
| things. That way anyone who just wants to make their mark can
| just suggest rounding the corners :D
| notahacker wrote:
| That works up until the point someone says they love the
| squareness of the boxes ;-)
| mannykannot wrote:
| You win either way, so long as you don't care which way the
| decision goes.
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| Yup, I call that Wolf Management for the same reason.
| smeej wrote:
| I tend to interpret this as a sure sign of a manager who secretly
| knows they're useless.
|
| If you're the manager, your job isn't to do my work. Your job is
| to optimize my (and the rest of the team's) ability to do our own
| work. If I've missed something that should be part of a
| procedure, that should be in a checklist I should have reviewed
| before submitting my work. You shouldn't have to tell me to tweak
| it.
|
| If I'm handing the work off to a team that is responsible for
| small stylistic choices, they too should have a set of standards,
| but at least if they change their minds about something, that's
| their role and their job.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| Things change all the time. People, including managers, are
| human and specs aren't something that always can be "carved in
| stone" in advance and carried out to perfection.
|
| There certainly are pathological situations where people really
| do need to leave a mark and that's why "the duck" technique
| that Rachel described works.
|
| This pops up in presentations too. Sometimes you know in
| advance that your presentation is going to have an audience
| with one or more "well, actually..." types who will try to poke
| holes a little too aggressively in your argument.
|
| One technique for handling this is to deliberately leave out
| some persnickety detail in your deck, but cover it exhaustively
| in an auxiliary slide that you don't show unless someone points
| out the omission. It works great. Every. Time.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Sometimes the purpose of those decks is really just to get
| stakeholders to think out loud and express what they actually
| want. A lot of these execs seem incapable of doing so without
| being shown something they don't want first.
|
| So often theres no reason for a deck to be more than 3 slides
| because it will immediately derail and turn into an airing of
| actual needs.
| sokoloff wrote:
| A tip for presentations: in presentation mode in both
| Powerpoint and Slides, if you type the slide number and press
| enter, the presentation will jump to that slide.
|
| If you have notes about which auxiliary slide is relevant to
| which persnickety comment/topic, you can seamlessly warp to
| it and it hits harder/makes you look more prepared/polished
| than a bunch of page up/down and "I know it's here somewhere"
| filler speech.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Yes, I've worked for a couple guys in my career like this.
| Typically they would bet absolutely unhinged about things like
| grammar in emails, code style, PR nitpicks, or how the teams
| wiki looked.. while having no actual input on the teams user
| facing work product .
|
| It's a good way to demotivate the team into slowing down the
| trains.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| A prior thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9137736
| preinheimer wrote:
| I used to live in Montreal. Cabs there need to get a safety
| inspection like every 6 months.
|
| Talking to some cab drivers there, many of them remarked that the
| people doing the safety exam -had- to find something. Your car
| could have been fresh from the mechanic, they'd find something to
| complain about.
|
| So, starting about 6 weeks out from their next safety, if
| something went wrong but the car was still drivable, they
| wouldn't fix it. So the safety guys had something to find, and
| they were going to pay to fix it anyways.
| resonious wrote:
| It's bad but I consider doing this for code review sometimes.
| ysavir wrote:
| I tend to do this in code review. But what I consider
| critical is that it comes without a "I want this changed"
| mentality, and instead a "let's find something we can improve
| on for next time" mentality. The current PR can go in as-is,
| but we should aim for always getting better at the craft.
| mejutoco wrote:
| This reminds me...many graphic designers knows to have a bad
| version of a design. What they do not expect is the customer
| picking that one. It explains some campaigns though
| psunavy03 wrote:
| It's not just graphic design. It's customary in military
| planning to give the commander multiple possible courses of
| action or COAs to choose from or blend together. But it's a
| known danger when you're crunched for time that if you plan
| a "throwaway COA" that's subpar or silly because the boss
| wants X COAs and you can only come up with X-1, beware.
| Because there's a chance the boss is going to moth off on
| the throwaway COA.
| gosub100 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Producers_(1967_film)
| miroljub wrote:
| Another example of "what you measure is what you get".
| morkalork wrote:
| And because they keep finding those obviously wrong things,
| the program justifies itself!
| notahacker wrote:
| My boat is for sale. Most prospective buyers will get a marine
| survey which will identify that among other minor things it
| needs a new bilge pump.
|
| If they don't pay for the survey I'll sort them out with a new
| bilge pump anyway.
|
| (This isn't an argument against surveyors though. Mine sorted
| me out with a new gearbox and had half the boat rewired at the
| vendor's expense)
| brightball wrote:
| One of my earliest bosses was the main web developer for a
| telco's marketing department. He would get everything working
| and ready the way that it needed to be, then prior to showing
| it to marketing would change something to be clearly wrong. In
| my example, he just put a red line down the middle of one
| section that looked out of place.
|
| Marketing would review it and say, "Everything looks good,
| let's just change that red line there. Thanks!"
|
| I asked him why he did that and he said that if he didn't give
| them something obvious to change, they would find something
| that was working that didn't need to be changed.
| sokoloff wrote:
| The 2007-02-02 Dilbert applies: https://assets.amuniversal.co
| m/9df021106cc801301d50001dd8b71...
| mathattack wrote:
| And Scott Adams also previously worked at a Telco.
| begueradj wrote:
| That's funny and a good summary
| sambeau wrote:
| I have a friend who works in games who would secretly add a
| malloc to the initialisation code that would just hold onto a
| large chunk of memory. Come the point just before release,
| where everyone was desperately trying to fit the final assets
| into memory, and about to throw stuff out, he would do an
| 'optimisation' pass and free up the memory so they could ship
| without delay.
| groestl wrote:
| Oh, "the balloon". A quite common technique.
| miriam_catira wrote:
| At one point, we (lead dev (me) and lead designer) colluded
| to submit a terrible homepage design to a nit-picky CMO to
| buy an extra 2wks of development time.
|
| She'd given us 6wks to completely rebuild a small corporate
| website, and we knew we needed at least 8 (it was still a
| nearly impossible rush). She exhibited a classic micromanager
| habit of the inexperienced: she needed/expected everything,
| including copy layout, to be pixel perfect in Adobe before
| any coding could start.
|
| So the developers had the real design we knew she'd approve
| already in development while the design team showed her the
| version filled with ducks. She performed exactly as we
| anticipated and work continued as though she was never
| consulted. It was a risk, but she was extraordinarily
| predictable in her duck removal...
|
| It's not something I'd do to someone with an opinion I
| respect. Thankfully she left right after that. Probably with
| a story of how she single-handedly saved the redesign
| herself, but whatever. ;)
| redler wrote:
| "We love the red line concept! Can you please work that into
| the rest of the design?"
| faet wrote:
| This is how it is in some motorsports series as well. I had a
| teacher who was a mechanic for a racing team. They'd leave
| something 'big' broken for tech so that the people would find
| it, have them fix it. He said they'd miss a bunch of smaller
| stuff, but would feel accomplished for finding the 'big' error.
| taeric wrote:
| I have this same problem with a lot of review culture at many
| companies. Turns out, if you send people into a meeting with
| the idea that they will be criticizing something, they will
| find criticisms. The hard part is distinguishing things that
| need changing, versus musings that are as much evidence that
| the team was looking.
| culebron21 wrote:
| I remember an interview from Soviet cinema director Georgii
| Daneliya, mentioning that to make their movie pass the approval
| committee intact (what you'd call "censorship"), they'd make
| absurd and provocative "sacrifice" episodes (like "sacrifice
| bolts"). The episodes were fought over and finally seceded to the
| committee, but the rest of the film went into the theaters.
|
| (Movies had to pass two such committees: one before production,
| approving the scenario, and the other one approving the final
| cut.)
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I think by scenario you mean "script" (that's the typical way
| to say it in English).
| ethanwillis wrote:
| I don't know if that's necessarily what was meant. But I
| could easily envision needing to even get the idea (scenario)
| approved before even being allowed to actually write a full
| script.
|
| Keep in mind, just _producing_ certain written works was
| justification enough to be killed.
| roter wrote:
| When I was finishing my PhD thesis, the suggestion was to insert
| some low-hanging fruit for the reviewers who would be doing only
| a cursory review but would need to find their "duck". Didn't do
| it because my committee was excellent and didn't want to show any
| disrespect.
| justinpombrio wrote:
| Yeah, I feel like PhD committee members often have the opposite
| problem: you _want_ them to read the thing and suggest
| improvements, but they 're too busy to give more than a skim. A
| duck would just distract them.
| raziel2p wrote:
| Why is the PM the meddling one here, and not the artist who
| (presumably un-prompted) added a duck to the game? Seems clear to
| me that the artist was the one who wanted to leave their mark in
| this story. Are some people allowed to and others not?
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Unfortunately I think you've hit the nail on the head. Some
| people ARE allowed while others are not. Sadly it seems the
| most creative or involved people (devs, artists) are not while
| a PM is.
| dirtybirdnj wrote:
| Class and status are one hell of a drug
| matsemann wrote:
| I learned of this from "New Programming Jargon" a decade ago on
| codinghorror: https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-
| jargon/
|
| I still regularly refer to Smurf naming conventions, Stringly
| typed, Protoduction and others.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| This is closely related to the "hairy arm technique" (it's known
| by multiple names). This is where some people find it is
| necessary to nitpick everything even when it is unnecessary and
| the solution is to purposely make one aspect of some plan
| obviously bad, dumb, or nonsensical.
|
| The person will then insist that be removed, ensuring the actual
| underlying work isn't impacted by their incessant pickiness.
|
| I've had to use this technique myself a few times, mostly with
| micromanagers/agile fanatics/product owners and the like.
| marcinzm wrote:
| I used to work at a startup whose clients worked on behalf of
| large corporations. I once tried to automate some things to make
| the company more money as our clients were rather inefficient at
| their settings but got a lot of push back. Then I talked to our
| clients and they said that unless they had knobs to turn to
| "prove" they provided value they'd be fired by their clients (the
| large corporations). If they got fired then they'd stop spending
| money with us and so we'd actually make less revenue due to
| second order effects. It was an enlightening experience.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Man, I loved Battle Chess as a child. I would play with the aim
| of finding new mach ups I hadn't seen, rather than try to learn
| strategies for winning in chess.
|
| And of course Youtube got us covered today:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7ccs3dRhW4
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| I think we can be a bit less cynical about this behaviour, at
| least in some cases.
|
| Perhaps a fresh pair of eyes is always going to notice a bunch of
| potential changes, which would improve things from their
| subjective point of view. But humans are notoriously bad at
| absolute scales (see _Thinking Fast and Slow_ by Daniel Kahneman)
| so it 's hard for us to decide "I can see a bunch of issues but
| they're all below the threshold for changing". The top of the
| scale is always what is most important out whatever issues are
| left. Adding the duck reshapes the scale so all those other
| things seem (correctly) trivial in comparison.
|
| To put it another way, if the deadline is tight and the program
| kept crashing, maybe they wouldn't have even asked to remove the
| duck! The scale would have changed again, and the bit with the
| duck on it would have been compressed below the threshold.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| I think that's a really great way to put it, but also not
| something the majority of leaders (or people in general) are
| capable of. Nothing is ever perfect, everyone has a different
| opinion/view, at some point you need to wrap up a work product
| and move on.
|
| I found with a former manager the creation of project plans was
| absolutely hell because of this. Arguably project plans are not
| something directly deliverable to a stakeholder or with a firm
| deadline. Sort of like politics in academia, the lower the
| stakes the worst the battles.
|
| So he would spin through 20 iterations of expressing his
| discontents with the current plan.
|
| Typical feedback was what he didn't like / was wrong, rather
| than what he actually desired to see. Sort of like a very hands
| off editor who doesn't want to write the book for the author.
|
| Often times midway through he would be Don Quixote'ing items in
| the plan that were added because of his earlier feedback.
| moate wrote:
| >>Don Quixote'ing
|
| I realize there is no way to say this without sounding like
| an absolute fucking dork, and this may be a syntaxial choice
| you're making, but the phrase is "tilting at windmills".
|
| I regularly say "irregardlessly" because it's fun and I know
| better and if that's what you're doing here I love it and
| it's amazing, but if not you've got a new phrase in your kit.
| notpachet wrote:
| > I realize there is no way to say this without sounding
| like an absolute fucking dork
|
| I don't think you needed this caveat. I appreciated being
| reminded of the phrase.
| wintorez wrote:
| I'm dealing with this in almost daily basis. People are afraid of
| not having an opinion and appearing stupid.
| ulizzle wrote:
| Bad form to remove the duck. Basically every project manager
| ever. Somehow, "A.I" doesnt seek to replace them.
| a_c wrote:
| The flip side is equally true. People don't usually internalise
| suggestion at face value unless they are in the right situational
| mindset. For example, telling your colleague directly that making
| a smaller pull request would make the review process easier may
| fallen to deaf ears. But someday, maybe having reviewed other
| colleague's PR, or maybe reading a blog of a famous professional,
| the same colleague may suggest back to you the very same thing
| you suggested 3 months ago.
|
| There is nothing wrong people giving suggestion or opinion. It
| takes taste to discern which suggestion has merit. And it take
| experience to build up taste
| D-Coder wrote:
| "You have to give an editor something to change, or he gets
| fretful. After he pees in it, he likes the flavor better, so he
| buys it."
|
| -- Robert A. Heinlein, _Stranger in a Strange Land_.
| 99_00 wrote:
| When I do code reviews I always try to find something to comment
| on, even if it is just a optional suggestion or question.
|
| If the code review system has a lot of approvals from me without
| comments in the code review system I suspect it will hurt the
| organization's perception of my work.
| davio wrote:
| When asked to review something, I like to use a version of Brene
| Brown's question, "What does support look like?"
|
| I can rubber-stamp, LGTM, proof-read, rip to shreds, etc. You
| tell me what you want.
| cushychicken wrote:
| As someone whose job includes big components of both technical
| work and project management, I can't help but wonder:
|
| How frequently am I shown ducks?
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