working on these sorts of building blocks for big
wins will often actually result in projects and teams
getting axed.
Had this experience at a previous position. My predecessor had implemented a solution that was extremely hairy, and took many hours to run in production.My manager (a software engineer himself, still involved in day-to-day engineering on this product) said that it couldn't be meaningfully bettered. But in the meantime, we were taking a beating from our primary customer upon whom we depended for ~75% of our revenue. I viewed this existing solution as a potential company-killer. So I spent some nights and weekends hacking together an alternative. Got the run time down from several hours to thirty seconds using some basic caching and a basic tree structure... not exactly advanced black magic. It also required about 50% less code. I excitedly showed it to my manager. I walked him through the code. He became angry for the following "reasons." 1. Instead of making the code smaller, he felt it made the code larger. This is because he failed to comprehend that my MVP "hey this is possible" prototype didn't actually remove the old solution. It was just an MVP! I explained this to him but apparently it didn't take. 2. He couldn't understand the underlying concept. Again, it was... a tree. Something you would encounter in a 200-level computer science course, at the very latest. 3. My code lacked tests. Again... this was a "nights and weekends" MVP. Probably the single fucking stupidest moment in the history of my career. I am not a person who typically has communication issues with managers or coworkers. I was dumbfounded that he was dumbfounded and to this day I am absolutely baffled by this whole incident. Our relationship had been deteriorating somewhat but not to the extent that would explain his brain-dead and hostile response. Unsurprisingly this lead to my departure from the company. |
There’s the problem!
I’ve had this experience many times — people will internalise their limitations and assume that their best is the best possible. Etc..
When a junior employee just casually proves them wrong, calling the emperor naked, that makes them feel inadequate and even ashamed.
I’ve been involved in many similar scenarios. Often there is a history of meetings, consultants, vendor techs, etc… trying to fix the problem and then a grudging acceptance and business workarounds. To suddenly reveal all of that as a lie is to undo established history. It’s like trying to close down the Vatican and tell all the priests to go home because you found a “neat proof” that there is no God. To say that you’ll experience some disbelief and resistance to your ideas is an understatement!
I had one of these moments where I got a nightly report batch job down from 3 hours to about 5 seconds. The customer turned red in the face, screamed at me, accused me of lying and stormed out of the meeting room.
Turns out that guy had to stay back each night to make sure the job ran successfully and so that he could sign the print out officially. He’d accepted the impact on his personal life, after many arguments about his work hours with his wife, etc…
To have all that sacrifice and suffering instantly made superfluous!? Ouch.