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by raducu
2627 days ago
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For sure they are not "idiots", but these are people who usually have done well in school/academia where saying "stop, don't do it!" is never the right answer; these are people who were never promoted to where they are now for saying "stop, don't do it!". Recently I've seen a product owner trying to push us on a two week sprint where we needed to complete 100 story points worth of tasks while on the previous two sprints we only completed ~30 story points.
To my protest, the SCRUM master sided with the product owner in saying we should go ahead and commit to the goal. These are not stupid people, they were under pressure to deliver; unfortunately the incentives are not to listed to reasonable people, but to pushers; when the shit hits the fan, they make a big fuss and obtain even more resources to push even harder and they usually deliver -- whit 3X the costs. Very rarely have I seen reasonable and smooth-sailing managers get to the top, usually it's the die-hard/hard-pushers/busy-appearing types that get to the top. I think it's curse of modern society with its unlimited resources; this shit would never fly in the times of Sun Tzu or Caesar precisely because limited resources would prevent such smart "idiots" -- they'd succumb to the elements or their subordinates would do them in their sleep for being so detached from reality. |
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I've encountered a few people with this trait, and the general trend I've noticed is an excess of optimism and a hint of complacency.
"I have the utmost faith that my team can do 100 hours of work in 25!"
"We did 75 scheduled hours of work in 15. That means we can easily do 100 in 25." (completely overlooking that the team - by that point - had been working from 7am until 9pm for the entire week, ordered food in and had to take several days PTO to recover)
Curiously these are usually the same managers who demand crunch-time, but "have a prior engagement" when the team asks if they'll be helping too.