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by pikaynu 1428 days ago
I totally agree with this. I am in a situation right now where the skip level manager is asking to schedule meetings every other day to talk on a problem that requires research. They want to talk about a solution and not letting us find one. Another one is defining aggressive timelines when I don't even know what to solve. Obviously the timelines were shot to hell in the worst way possible.
4 comments
hotz 1428 days ago
In the same boat. It's painful, whenever a bug appears or there's something they don't understand; boom! A meeting gets scheduled. It kills the soul nevermind productivity. The other one is having to answer the same questions over and over.

When you're about to go to production, tests have been written and everyone's done their part, you'll get asked, "so you're sure nothing will break production?" It blows my mind.

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summertime42 1428 days ago
In the nicest way possible, get those meetings canceled. Show initiative by simply saying "I will provide an update by the end of the week; let me do my research first."

If the skip-level is refusing to stay out of your lane and not let you do your job, it might be time to dust off the resume. Thankfully, the market is crazy hot for anyone not a junior. Still, that sounds bloody awful; I am sorry you are going through that. :/

And in the best way I can say this, but deadlines don't matter if they are not set by your engineers AND accounting for the time to add unit tests/integration tests/bug fixing/clean code. I've inherited plenty of salvage projects with terrible codebases that eventually get scrapped wholesale and redone from scratch - so if someone tells me to cut corners for bullshit deadlines, I'll push back with those stories and keep the course. Call me cushy/inflexible/unrealistic, but I refuse to write a salvage project of my own.

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theshrike79 1428 days ago
It's a mentality and culture difference. Manager-type people solve issues by having meetings, lots of meetings. Their work is accomplished in the meetings. The can have 7 meetings on the same day, each about a completely different subject and still manage to get something done.

Programming on the other hand requires uninterrupted blocks of time. Working on 7 projects on the same day just means you have 7 projects that didn't progress. Having to sit in a meeting every other hour means you're not getting anything done between meetings because context switching takes time.

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wildrhythms 1428 days ago
> defining aggressive timelines when I don't even know what to solve

I love this one. Someone is desperate to build a Kanban board to show their manager; who cares if the underlying projects are imaginary!

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