Re:Ask HN: How can one deal with bad management?
by tptacek on Monday September 15, 2008 @04:01PM
(#305012)
I have two comments:
(1) Though you didn't say it, the comparison to startup life is always implied here, so let's just be clear: most of these problems do not go away at a startup. The pressure to "just get things done" instead of "doing it right" is greater when it's your own company on the line. GitHub, for instance, was apparently bootstraped by shell-out'ing to the "git" command line tool. Shudder.
Yes, you can mess around with aesthetics and hack on cool things without getting yelled at your own company. But on the other hand, a lot of the time, when you do that, you're killing your company. I might rather get bitched at.
(2) You seem to care about some unimportant things. For instance, the "visual appeal" of your current app versus the company standard. Or the download footprint of your Javascript libraries. Or the soundness of your company's UX hired guns.
If you loved the app that you were working on, loved it for its own merits, you wouldn't care about trivia. You sound bored. It doesn't sound like a management problem. Maybe you just need to switch from payroll and pension benefits management software to Flash games? You can do that; just be prepared for the pay cut. Supply and demand, yo!
(1) Though you didn't say it, the comparison to startup life is always implied here, so let's just be clear: most of these problems do not go away at a startup. The pressure to "just get things done" instead of "doing it right" is greater when it's your own company on the line. GitHub, for instance, was apparently bootstraped by shell-out'ing to the "git" command line tool. Shudder.
Yes, you can mess around with aesthetics and hack on cool things without getting yelled at your own company. But on the other hand, a lot of the time, when you do that, you're killing your company. I might rather get bitched at.
(2) You seem to care about some unimportant things. For instance, the "visual appeal" of your current app versus the company standard. Or the download footprint of your Javascript libraries. Or the soundness of your company's UX hired guns.
If you loved the app that you were working on, loved it for its own merits, you wouldn't care about trivia. You sound bored. It doesn't sound like a management problem. Maybe you just need to switch from payroll and pension benefits management software to Flash games? You can do that; just be prepared for the pay cut. Supply and demand, yo!