[quickthrower2]

Why do they keep the tasks secret? I bet because they know they are important but they also know they are fragile in the sense no one else will care enough to do those things. And worse someone else will say don’t do them because they waste time.

[magicalhippo]

During a summer not long ago, a client called with an urgent issue. Some critical messages were not being passed on, leading to a full stop on their end.

However I couldn't make heads or tails of what systems this was or how it related to us.

After a bit of back and forth, the customer said "ask Glenn, he always fixes this for us".

Glenn was of course on vacation and didn't respond to messages...

A few hours pass while we make zero progress on this issue and customer increasingly annoyed, when Glenn finally responds to my messages.

Turns out that on a different server from where our software is installed, there was a Java-based message broker service running that needed occasional kick in the pants (IIRC stopping, deleting a file, restarting). We're not a Java shop, we don't use message brokers.

For years, Glenn had been keeping this service running and updated for our customer, as the customer didn't have any internal resources that was capable of handling this. And nobody else at our shop knew this. Why? Well, he just did what had to be done and moved on to the next issue at hand, as he always did...

[crispyambulance]

Not everything that someone does has to be "a deliverable" on some project manager's radar. There's joy in doing work that's satisfying and beneficial but that doesn't necessarily align with the immediate stated objectives of the manager, project or organization.

There's a word for this kind of thing: "covert agency".

I don't remember where I first saw it, but looking back at my own career, being able to exercise some covert agency made miserable jobs worthwhile in some ways.

[redleader9345]

The folks in charge who don't want the foot soldiers to have any agency at all, they call it Shadow IT

[lucumo]

It's probably not so much keeping it a secret, but just not broadcasting everything they do.

[pjc50]

The tasks are rarely secret, it's the other way round: things that nobody above them wants to bother seeing.

[watwut]

They don't do them in secret. Typically they just do them as part of their routine.