| I really don't like these kind of silver-bullet "hey look I easily solved a complex problem" self-congratulatory posts. This feels like one of those things that should be openly explained as part of the culture instead of "guess our opinion". Anything else seems like reading the tea leaves that day to make hiring decisions. Anecdotally, I've had two opposite experiences just like this. In the first I was walking and talking with the CEO about something important our team was working on when we came to a bunch of water on the floor (enough that clearly there was a problem like a broken pipe or fridge issue in the next room). He stepped over it but I stopped, completely distracted, and said shouldn't we do something about this? His response was short but poignant - he said we don't know the situation, we have great people that he trusts whose domain IS handling that kind of thing, and that there is only so much time in the day and that we, the CEO and a VP, needed to intentionally focus on big things only we could effectively handle even if that meant water on the floor for a little while longer. I've also had the opposite experience where someone took it upon themselves to redesign one of the flows in our product because they (correctly) didn't think it served customers well. This person put a ton of good faith effort into this and produced a decent looking wireframe for a ux that didn't correctly understand how things work or what our goals for the project were. In fact this already had a good redesign that existed and was on the roadmap but he apparently hadn't been told about it. When he showed his design to people (directly to engineers asking them to build it instead of their actual tasks...) it caused a bunch of awkwardness for him and others. There was more drama after his manager continued to handle it poorly but all of it could have been avoided by more communication in any direction before deciding to just go do something outside of your normal zone. These are just anecdotes but they highlight how I feel about this; I think "testing" people on how they respond to situations like this is both broken and disrespectful. The right amount of "just go fix it" is extremely subjective and depends on the culture of the company around you, how specialized the task that needs doing is, and the priority of what you could/should be doing instead. To be clear I think a "doer" attitude is very valuable; I just don't think this is a fair or high signal way to evaluate it. |
Did anyone at the company with the guerilla design effort realize that there was a huge communication problem or did they just spank the guerillas?