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by frank_nitti 726 days ago
The most egregious examples of this I’ve experienced are in large corporate environments, where managers are often less technical than their leads. Often only managers/directors are invited to calls with thought leaders, portfolio architects, who are also very technical.

This led to situations where a lead is asked in a quick IM or call “are we doing X in our system?” without any context or materials provided to the lead, which often contain crucially important info that the manager feels is just noise (especially if they consider themselves very technical from engineering roles in a previous era).

Just my two cents there; in my case I just learned to roll with it, after some time of striving to work “around” management to find info they never passed down, which resulted in poorer performance evaluations than simply following oft-misguided orders

1 comments

> This led to situations where a lead is asked in a quick IM or call “are we doing X in our system?”

If you're "representing the team" in a technical call, you should either 1. be prepared to yourself go as deep technically as the other participants, or 2. bring someone deeply technical along to provide that expertise. These "quick side chats" are like trying to pass answer notes back and forth during an exam. Too late bro, you should have studied.