Comment on The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe

• davidagain@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  He’s a great boss. He really is.

  I had goodwill stored up because like me, he uses the tool to several times a day, he really likes it because it makes some tasks far easier (v0.1) and I added loads of extras over the years, and it was me that dreamed it up in the first place.

  The new server constraint affected me on the daily but wasn’t going to affect him at all for most of those three months, and even then, not often and there was a workaround, but he trusted me and he wants my end to be as convenient as his is (very fair minded guy indeed).

  I would go a long long way for him. I went to his wedding in 2023 and we sometimes have drinks after work. He knows how it is, has been there, done that and got the T shirt and isn’t afraid to tell truth to power:

  You know you like to have X? We’re gonna need Y…

  Remember the prioritisation of Y you were going to do?..

  Yeah, so no, sorry, we don’t quite have X, partly because of this and that mistake we made, but also we weren’t able to get very close to X because we never got Y.

  Genuinely, cue recommitment of senior management to Y in the next quarter! It might not happen, but no shouting, no blaming, and rationality all round.

  I don’t think they like it at all when he says stuff like that, but they love that the crises pretty much dwindled out when they put him in charge and as he gradually recruited more people who put more effort into making things better than shouting and blaming, and as the shouters and blamers left to find employment elsewhere where shouting and blaming was effective. It simply does not work on my boss even a little bit, and he simply never does it. Customers now praise his department instead of complain about it, so he gets a lot of leeway from management to do things his way.

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  • Reginald_T_Biter@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Brilliant. It’s so valuable to have a manager that actually treats you like a professional in these situations. Sounds like a diamond in the rough alright.

    Some agency when working goes a long way to fostering a really good working relationship. I’m still a lot earlier in my career, so generally in my first non-internship role I was expecting to be given little bits of work like change this button, widen this form, that kind of stuff.

    Turns out I’d joined one of those “sink or swim” smaller companies where you have to wear a lot of hats. Initially I thought quite negatively about it but once I started to gain some confidence I realised he was giving me the time and space to properly learn stuff and develop it until it was “good”. He, thankfully, still shoots down my sillier ideas but if I have a good one he throws his full support behind me.

    Currently he was like, I need you to investigate how to set up automated fraud prevention checks and flag, let’s say things, for clients to investigate further, and he sent me off for a week to analyse the problem, speak to everyone involved and gather a list of data points and how to calculate them. Then he gave me the time to design the system, including the mental room to develop our first shared lib after .net framework.

    Really I’m rambling a bit, but my point is, you can get a lot of good work out of people if you invest in them and allow them some agency. Maybe some can’t work well without constant pressure, but I think a lot of people thrive when supported and enabled correctly by management.

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    • davidagain@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yeah. Some people love to micro manage and play power games, but it’s so refreshing to work for someone who has the confidence to just concentrate on doing a great job.

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