Keep in mind that one thing every manager/owner hears day in, day out, all the time, is advice on how he's doing everything wrong and here's how to do it better. It isn't surprising that this eventually gets tuned out until there's good associated evidence that this particular person should be listened to.

Every one of us is sure we know how to do our manager's job better than he does. There are threads every day on HN (including this one) on this. Is it any surprise that managers tend to tune it out after a while?

There's feedback and then there's feedback.

If a manager makes a decision having weighed the factors, and some team members disagree, but it's an arguable thing (corporate strategy for instance) and the difference is mostly one of opinion, sure, I agree. Constant criticism of that will get tuned out.

There's also cases where something is just clearly dysfunctional. For instance, if the CEO is constantly talking about how the firm needs to move fast and innovate, but installing a new piece of software on your workstation takes six months and involves three forms, it's fair to say that isn't a difference of opinion (all parties want to move faster and innovate more), that's a failure of execution. Someone, somewhere, clearly feels that this bureaucracy is worth it, but they probably can't defend that given the firm's priorities.

You can phrase that as "this process is great, but we could make it even better" if you want to be as well-loved as possible. My experience has been that this usually leads to an answer of the form "thanks, we're glad you love our service, unfortunately we have many other things we're doing right now kthxbye" - i.e. when nothing is bad and everything is merely a proposed improvement, improvements that might be even slightly threatening to anyone just get ignored entirely. And you can't complain because everything is peachy, right?

> Keep in mind that one thing every manager/owner hears day in, day out, all the time, is advice on how he's doing everything wrong and here's how to do it better. It isn't surprising that this eventually gets tuned out until there's good associated evidence that this particular person should be listened to.

Super good point, thanks for that.

When I was younger I played the game of fitting in. I remember one time at a company this guy wanted to improve our process (process improvement and Lean was a big buzzword at the company at the time) by introducing automated testing to augment our completely manual and inefficient way we were doing testing. He fought the good fight but was eventually labeled a black sheep and got "managed out". I learned a lot about what companies say they want and what they actually want from that experience.

The second type is generally better dealt with indirectly so it becomes the first type. Daily stand up taking 1 hour every day. If you say it's a waste of time let's cancel it then people look bad. If you say, we are wasting time let's get faster then management is rarely going to complain.

Do we really need 30 people in this meeting? What if we had someone send out the meeting notes? etc.

Granted, this assumes people want to get actual work done.

I dislike that passive-aggressive dynamic of converting the second type of thinking/feedback to the first. And that dynamic generally has a name: "politics". I've been on teams where I had to use rhetoric to convince a (non-technical) manager that following standard design practices like low coupling/high cohesion, etc. results in more robust software.

What's sad about that whole political dynamic is that it wears people down to the point they just don't care anymore. They're tired of people (often management) who can't make a decision due to political pressures ("I don't want to be the manager who has any project 'fail.'"). This often leads to decision makers succumbing to the sunk cost fallacy. But as long as there are status reports and it looks like work is getting done, then the process continues.

I don't really like politics, but 10,000 years ago people in mud brick huts where taking politics and today people in mud brick huts are still talking politics. If nothing else politics works and ignoring things that work just make your life harder. Also of note, mud brick huts have been around for a really long time.

I understand completely. You have to find the place whose politics interest you as much as the work. That's very difficult (pretty much impossible) to gauge during an interview. You really need someone on the inside to give a complete view.

The other problem with that is it makes it hard to put in place a systematic improvement process. A formal failure analysis process is a wonderful thing that can rapidly drive improvement, but to have such a thing you must first be able to say "that was a failure, let's analyse it". In a highly PC environment where nobody ever fails at anything, everything is always wonderful and the only possible change is to become even greater, it's hard to be fully honest with yourselves.

Here's an example from my own career: I once worked at software firm which routinely sent customer feedback to a black hole. Literally, there were forums where customers could talk to each other, and feedback forms on the website, yet either nobody read them at all or there was someone in customer support who theoretically read them but actually didn't.

I discovered that when I tried to use one of the company's own web forms to report a technical issue with one of their products. When nothing happened, I started asking around. The email thread I started (which was plenty polite: just asking who owned this form and whether my feedback was being processed) quickly got like 20 people CCd onto it as everyone tried to pass the buck and eventually it became clear that whilst it had perhaps once been connected to something, the form had at some point stopped being monitored and nobody had noticed, in fact, the feedbacks weren't even being stored anywhere. We were literally throwing customer feedback in the bin.

Eventually, after asking the question of who was actually responsible for this process and who was going to fix it maybe four or five times (lots of people appeared to be involved in nebulous ways and nobody was willing to take responsibility), I pointed out that this seemed like a fairly serious failure and perhaps there should be a post-mortem of some kind, which was a routine occurrence in other parts of the firm.

This suggestion went down like a lead balloon, as you may imagine. I don't recall if the issue was ever fixed: at some point I ran out of energy and stopped caring. This is how engineers get a reputation as being awkward and difficult: they exist in a world where things work or they don't, and there's no shame in writing a bug because we all do it, but when your software is buggy you're expected to admit that and fix it. Lots of people in fluffier job descriptions don't exist in such a world and interpret any hint that they might have actually ... failed ... as hostile and threatening.

I've found the best tactic, being an underling, is to perform the critical thinking for management and continuously improve your area of work.

As a funny and relevant anecdote, I used to process returns for an e-tailer and we had a particular type of refurb product that had a different part numbers on the box, in the firmware, and on the back tag. One day when I had the shop running full bore, I stopped for a few hours while the boss was out, grabbed a piece of paper, then spent some time in a thought experiment reverse-engineering the manufacturers supply chain to find out why. I discovered they had specs for these devices for a particular market, models a through z, and wanted to refurb to those specs to maximize profits. We got the cobbled together unique items that met no spec. I went to the manufacturers website, pulled up a list of PN's by model series, and plug and chugged until I got a valid warranty on every unit with 3 different PN's.

We also had a lot of mis-shipped, mis-picked, mis-recieved, and mis-advertised product. I asked the guy building the SKU's and Ad's for a spec sheet and then grabbed a factory service manual, and by my logs, discovered the issue was they didn't have the right ports on the side listed. The guy doing the SKU's made a change in how he advertised product, the throughput of devices coming through my shop dropped 80% within 3 weeks. I then had time to do things like assemble reciepts for a dozen AV Head units, find and send skids of them to an ASP, get them repaired and sent back, and restocked. Then we discovered we had someone stealing product. All of those fixes resulted in about $400k a year in savings for a $20 million a year company.

How did the CFO Find out about all this? We were selling to a liquidator anything I couldn't fix. They gave us 55c on the dollar of book value when I started, then 35c, then 25c, then 15c, then 5c. Finally nobody would take the garbage I was producing; literally if I had one liquid damaged item I'd use the parts to repair anything and everything else I could and I even did crazy things like using lego's to replace screwable-pegs inside of TV's using 2-part epoxy. So one day about a year after I started the CFO wanders down to the warehouse to see what's going on, and finds 15 skids of absolute garbage.

He then turns to my boss, the warehouse operations manager\account manager, and begins yelling "WHAT THE !@!@# ARE YOU DOING? WHY HASN'T THIS BEEN SOLD? WHAT HAPPENED TO THE LIQUIDATOR!" and on and on and on. Apparently, nobody in corporate had performed any quantitative analysis. I had with a 200 meg excel 2003 document that would tell me what was coming in and how much it was.

I was saving him $400k a year. The cheapskate gave me a buck an hour raise for the effort, what a crok. They kept me around as the company shrunk from 200 employee's to 20 and went through bankruptcy. On the other end they were going to use my refurb shop since that was the only profitable side of the org entertainingly enough. I eventually left the place entirely.

The problem in America is that there's a boat-load of executive managers who have no critical thinking skills themselves, so their employee's see that fact, and see decisions are made subjectively or arbitrarily, and they are demotivated or as I call it, they catch "IDon'tGiveAShazbotItus". Lots of people catch the terminal version of that disease; doesn't matter where they go, they will never give a shazbot because they've been lied to so many times. You just cannot work with someone who has no critical thinking skills. There's no striving for continuous improvement and no rewards for it either. My entire career has been about doing bad things to computer and even worse things to executives; I have lost count of the number of people I've gotten fired, including executives.

After-all, if some schmuck with 1 IT certification in a warehouse can save you $400k a year at a 20 million a year company, and the CFO doesn't notice where it's coming from. That's either incompetence or abuse.