It's funny you should say that. A few years ago, at a company whose name everyone here knows I, an old gray-hair, almost lost my full-time job for warning a VP that she was about to make a mistake I'd seen before. I honestly thought she was joking when she told me about the approach she was going to use to deal with a "hard deadline" of four months. I laughed along with her joke until, with a shock, we both realized that I was actually laughing at her actual plan. She became indignant and ended our meeting (just the two of us), getting me transferred for "not being supportive of the team" and trying, unsuccessfully, to get me fired.
She gave the job to her three dozen "supportive" young programmers, who ended up taking 28 months (!!) to get the "4-month" project finally working.
So, after all that, did she eventually apologize and tell me that, yes, she'd made the same mistake I told her I'd seen before with the same results for the same reason, and that she should have at least asked me more about it instead of throwing me out? Of course not. This is the real world. She never spoke to me again and never forgave me.
To be honest, I don't find it that surprising. Being laughed at is not something people take kindly to. Of all the possible ways of letting her know that you thought her plan sucked, that was the one that was doomed to fail right from the start.
It was a failure of communication. Even before analyzing why or what happened, a failure of communication is something that arises out of actions of both parties and even the prevailing culture of the team.
Nobody really likes it, but half of the "politicality" of management has to be set in place to allow people to communicate with others who may or may not suffer from a sensitive ego and the company hasn't had time to figure it out yet. On top of that, it's usually a judgement call and may be a poor idea to formalize into your process an escape hatch based on judgement.
So maybe the original mistake was from the manager who presented a sensitive idea without enough seriousness to induce a careful response. Or the op who was too quick to feel comfortable interpreting it as a joke in what turned out to be a serious meeting. Or the culture which enabled the terms of the meeting to be ambiguous to begin with.
Only after that can you get into things like speculation on the maturity of the manager. It's actually quite a high maturity bar to jump over to stomach being laughed at by an expert. Not saying you can't set that as a goal, but merely that you ought to think about what happens when you find yourself dealing with someone who hasn't met that expectation.
For sure. Don't be a dick is a pretty good strategy. However, I didn't get the impression that was his intent though: "I laughed along with her joke until, with a shock, we both realized that I was actually laughing at her actual plan".
Right. I was neither being "frank" nor intentionally laughing at her plan. She was smiling, and I thought she was kidding. I was smiling, and she apparently thought I was approving. Suddenly, we both realized we were wrong. Oops.
At that point, the damage was done. I tried to explain why her approach of changing N things simultaneously wasn't more efficient than changing N things sequentially because of the combinatorial explosion of interactions, but she wasn't technical enough to understand what I meant by that, which made her angrier, and when I suggested an approach that would give us a temporary "Plan B" just in case we "ended up a couple of weeks late", she declared me "unsupportive" and ended the meeting.
The interesting thing about engineers is that they have very little tolerance for these destructive social shenanigans. Courtesy and politeness are one thing, but ignoring such a flagrantly flawed plan goes beyond courtesy and into professional negligence.
When empirical thought is your bread and butter, as it is in the case of software developers, it's hard to see why you should have to acquiesce to the VP's ego. If one intentionally stays off the political tracks, there really is no reason they should have to play unreasonable political games. Workplaces would be much more efficient if we accepted, or at least heard, the advice of the people who get paid for their expertise, instead of cowering in fear that we may damage the ego of some fragile soul who ended up in management because they were not competent to do any real work directly.
YMMV, but what one perceives as 'unreasonable political games' is highly personality-dependent. Most people have some set of behaviors that they find appropriate in some situations but not in others. For instance, wearing sweatpants to a wedding is generally frowned upon, for reasons that have little to do with their ability to maintain the body at a reasonable operating temperature. You can wear them anyway, but then you get to face the social consequences of doing so.
It's true that workplaces would be a lot more efficient under the regime you describe. It's also true that if my aunt had a dick she'd be my uncle. I'm suggesting that it might be a good idea for engineers to do the same thing as everybody else in the world and try to figure out when to wear sweatpants.
This is not anywhere near as socially tone-deaf as "wearing sweatpants to a wedding" -- it's more like showing up in a tux when everyone else caught the note on the invite "ironic dress only, please wear trash". The situation the parent described was the presentation of a plan of complete absurdity, which he advised against after realizing it was serious.
I agree with you that developers would be well-served by making a stronger effort to play along with the superficial niceties of corporate politics, but like I said, this transcends that and gets into a professional duty to advise against. If the workplace is so corrupt that reasonable opposition to a blatantly silly implementation plan can only result in the correct subordinate getting shuffled around and possibly fired, it's a liability for professionals to continue employment there.
I am now convinced that an idiot in a management position is unable to raise himself above the level of idiocy he is in - by any means. By definition, he should have to _listen_ and _weigh_ the facts being reported to him, not only to filter out the hidden agendas, but to also see all the facets of reality. Doing this would automatically exclude him from the idiots group.
Unfortunately most of management ones will not tolerate unaligned lower ranks and are unable to utter the words "he may have a point" to themselves and regroup and refocus.
Instead they will do whatever is necessary to remove the opposition.
See the Challenger for recent high profile examples.
You made my day. I meant "for" but indeed time is relative. I was 11 at the time and Challenger event is "recent" to me even now. Maybe because I was into stars and rockets and a friend showed me a newspaper cut with Challenger launch a year before or so.
My reading is that he wasn't laughing at her plan intentionally. Her plan was so bad that he thought she was joking, and he tried to be polite by laughing at the VP's joke.
There's nothing wrong with him. As I wrote above, as the brain ages, you get more experience and depth and foresight. The problem is that the decisions that use these abilities don't belong to programmers - they belong to managers (in this case the VP).
This is one of the main recipes for perennial frustration - be an older programmer trying to act like a manager from the bottom of the hierarchy.
I try to always write minutes from meetings. Sometimes I also send them out. Other times I just store them somewhere that has 3rd party timestamps (dropbox or googledocs).
You should quit working for her.
Either transfer to another department or if it is not possible - transfer to another company.
There is almost no upside working anywhere near her. She would screw up every meaningful project and attach failure to professional reputations of everyone involved.
What was the approach she was trying to use to deal with a "hard deadline"?
I can't give away too much here, but we had bought some companies and had to change our Web stack to show that we ate our own newly acquired dog food. That part was unavoidable.
I just assumed we would make a gradual transition, replacing the two stack layers one at a time, and starting each of those replacements with new, non-strategic web apps (ex: a mailing list signup sheet for some small event), always getting things working before extending the rollout. We would get as many things working as possible by the "hard deadline", and our customers for these new products (who would be developers themselves and would know that these were new products for us) would understand that a gradual replacement of our old technologies was just good engineering, not a sign that our new products weren't good.
But she told me with a smile that we were going to replace all of our Web apps simultaneously with a matched set of replacements showcasing what could be done with our new products (one of which would require using a version so new it wasn't even feature frozen much less production-ready, to show off our coming features) and, as long as we were changing two critical layers of the stack simultaneously, we would change all the other layers, too, right down to the OS and hardware "and just do it right".
And I assumed I was just laughing with her--yeah, yeah, very funny--until we both suddenly realized what was actually happening.
(And, I don't work for her. I was transferred elsewhere, and she was eventually laid off.)
as you allude to in your final paragraph, the unfortunate reality is that unless you're specifically assigned the task (in this case, the VP was), it's not your role to dictate the plan or criticize it to the level you did. at most, you can make your observations known once. this sort of thing very rarely ends in termination or quitting, but usually a sort of political/social alienation which you describe.
in reality, your only two options are either quit, or be the VP. as a non-executive/manager, you don't run the show, end of story.
HAHA, what? yes they are. what you're saying is that the at successful companies, individual contributors never get upset at the direction/architecture/decisions the executives and project managers choose - okay buddy.
She gave the job to her three dozen "supportive" young programmers, who ended up taking 28 months (!!) to get the "4-month" project finally working.
So, after all that, did she eventually apologize and tell me that, yes, she'd made the same mistake I told her I'd seen before with the same results for the same reason, and that she should have at least asked me more about it instead of throwing me out? Of course not. This is the real world. She never spoke to me again and never forgave me.