You should absolutely do that (I tell my team to inform me if what I'm asking doesn't make sense.) If I'm coming to someone with a request, it's because I think they're the right person to address it. Just tell me if I'm off-base.

FWIW, I encourage everyone to not care about the hierarchy, so that may not work in every place.

You could have a percent of each sprint dedicated to one-offs, but then are they really one-offs in the colloquial sense?

The smaller the team and org, the easier it is to handle the one-offs (imo), because we can more directly connect the request to tangible impact more often. At the very least, in a small co your manager (or C suite executive) would easily back you up as the engineer if other executives were questioning output or something etc etc

In larger orgs the extra communication burden makes the one off requests more expensive

In my experience, this is not true at all. But, as you say you don't have direct experience to come to this conclusion, may I ask what makes you think this?

My personal theory is that it's connected to job security and how big personal problem it is to lose your job in a layoff. If you get laid off in Europe, your health insurance is paid from public budget now and you get several months salary from your employer. If you worked for a big name, it may be six months or more. If it was a small startup, you get at least two months.

Our US colleagues always made more money but also were more afraid of losing their jobs. All of that said from the IT perspective. I'm sure being a coal miner and getting laid off is much worse.

No fan of Suella Braverman, but she got fired not because of what she said, but because she publicly went against hierarchy, which seems to be a terrible offense. Which in the UK it probably is.

I've had managers give stupid orders, and seen them immediately backpedal when asked "would you write that down for me, please?"

So yeah, I'll definitely act in good faith but unfortunately I can't assume good faith on the other side, I occasionally need to be a human command line.

I'd suggest that "good faith" means turning those stupid orders into sane orders. In a case like this, help your manager -- educate them.

If your relationship is tenuous, I get this can be hard. Show your good faith and explain to your manager in clear detail why something is stupid. Manage up, as they say.

Feeding into those whims is rarely good for anyone, except the manager's ego.

It's the sort of thing that immediately escalates a situation, and in reality when the card is played it either breaks the trust, or the trust has already been broken.

There was resentment yes, but I did trust them!

You wouldn’t verbally describe a structure to a builder, and then accuse them of not trusting you when they ask to see a blueprint.

If it's a trivial thing like send an email or some small ask then I wouldn't necessarily expect it to be in writing.

For any non-trivial task I'd expect it to be in writing, even from my manager. Reason for me is that where I work I don't only report to my manager when it comes to how my time is used, but other workstreams and projects, etc.

If I'm busy working on a task for you that is undocumented, then all these other workstreams will wonder what the fuck I'm doing with my time, or may question whether its more important than other tasks. Obviously this is industry specific, since I don't actually work directly with my manager on any projects and probably never will.

From my perspective, my manager has failed or is lazy if they fail to put their non-trivial tasks in writing.

A possibility is that asking for a written version of the task got the manager to start thinking about the fact that they were asking for something that would be hard to articulate exactly, which revealed some hidden complexity in the request. But I guess that would be asked in a fashion more along the lines of “let’s work out the details asynchronously.”

I don't want to nitpick but the change of a single word is going to make significant difference in the outcome, time spent, satisfaction, next steps, etc.

Nail down what the requestor *needs* and be sure you both agree...

I wish I had $20 for everytime the initial "I want..." followed by a couple of questions - or even the famous The 5 Whys - evolved into the true (business) need.

There are developers that just want to keep their head down and write code, you'll never get those people to ask the questions that are being suggested here.

When new / jr devs ask me what they should learn, I say: business, marketing, etc, and improve your comms skills ( speaking, writing, and listening). That's not the answer they get typically.

You can give them *exactly* what they ask for and still be wrong. The user / client isn't going to admit that. Nah. They'll just play the "Damn IT" card and it'll be back to the drawing board but now with a shit load of tension.

It's best to ask - sooner rather than later.

Most people have a vague idea of the outcome they want, and the reason for it. They also quickly know what they don't want _once they see it_

And that's why agile and iterative development is actually great for GUI based user interactive app development.

One of the advantages of being helpless is not taking responsibility.

They actually need Y.

Time saved.

Then, six months later, said executive shows back up demanding to know why you haven't provisioned this great Y thingamajig that his golf buddy was raving about.

Do you think people in either of those situation would agree they acted in bad faith? The leader could say they were trying to avoid bikeshedding on what was clearly a quick and simple task. The direct reports may bring up multiple past interactions where imprecise requests led to a waste of their time and negative feedback. Telling everyone to just "don't be these type of people" is not very likely to be helpful.

This situation sounds more like people trying to cover their ass so they aren't blamed for something later. Work to get things accomplished, not to avoid some kind of criticism.

So, rather than being these types of people -- be a person who helps get something accomplished and maybe improves this situation along the way.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/good+faith

good faith just means you assume the person is earnest in trying to make the project you're on successful. Part of that is understanding that people say stupid shit, but the other part is trust.

One of the reasons my current employer is so sticky is that it's a billion dollar company and I've only met 2 people whom I won't accept in good faith, everyone else is earnest even when they disagree with you.

Playing social games is non-optional.

Operating in good faith is so important.

Leaders who operate by pushing the limits of what they can get away with are a stark contrast from leaders who operate to form good faith relationships with their team. Managers who make thoughtless demands all the time will steadily lose their best employees. In my experience, after a long enough time these leaders are reduced to having only juniors reporting to them because everyone with experience avoids the team.

Your description of “human command line” team members is a great example of bad faith operation, too. I’ve worked with people who thought they were so clever by demanding that even the smallest request be delivered through a form they created or a document they need people to fill out before they can get started, which they might try to debate, critique, or circulate for a couple days before they’ll even think about working on your small task. They think they’ve insulated themselves from small asks because nobody wants to go through all the trouble of asking the question just right to get them to acknowledge it, but over time they build a reputation as difficult to work with.

Another variant is the person who tries to exploit ambiguities in every request; These people have a good idea of what’s being asked of them, but they think they’re “teaching a lesson” by exploiting ambiguities in the request to deliver something that technically matches the letter of the request, but that everyone knows isn’t really what was needed or wanted.

Not coincidentally, most of the people I knew who tried these game found themselves laid off in the past year. I think people can tolerate a bad faith coworker who at least does some work for a while, but when it’s time to downsize they’re at the top of everyone’s list to remove.

Sounds like they're completely right, then. "Don't bother Steve unless you really need something from him", which is exactly what he wants.

Then why is Steve in a job in the first place? Such an attitude would find more traction in the contingent consulting world. At a job, where you're paid to deliver for your co-workers, it's asking to be laid off or fired.

Ask a fair salary, do what you can, act in good faith.

Success often follows being the person remembered as being helpful or useful.

It's less important (and implausible) that everybody act as the same game theoretic agent than that the team understands everybody's idiosyncratic shape and can compose those shapes into productive patterns.

You usually have to do very good work to be a Steve and hang onto your job, but very good work is rare and valuable, so if you do deliver on it, you can often be more assertive and draw some of the boundaries that more marginal team members can't get away with. It works because real-world teams are more like an organic ecosystem than a mechanical gear system.

But Steve is an informal manager, so he better be sure that he has the tacit approval of the actual manager for the team, or his actual manager's manager. Otherwise he's not doing his job, and this will eventually put him in conflict with exactly the people who have control over him.

And if Steve is your direct report, you better keep the situation under control, or Steve will eventually have to be let go and you will be made to look stupid for letting a talented contributor fall out of step with the team.

That being said, if I have to deal with the "command line" people by tellong them each and every step of the work they are supposed to do, more often than not I'm faster doing it myself. There are places for those people, places they actually provide a ton of value because strictly following procedure is paramount, things progress faster when people can get an assignment and everyone else can count a) the assigment being completed on time or b) everyone getting a heads if not.

Those other roles are tge easiest to automate, and by no means do they justify the salaries some people are expecting to be paid.

Alternately, he’s solely there because the HR requirements are onerous and take time, and he has dramatically misunderstood his importance and value. Or he used to do good work and thinks he is now irreplaceable because of domain knowledge.

In any case, as a manager, Steve is a needless disruption/drag and there is nearly no situation in which his work outshines his stated personality. The org would be better off without him.

Nope, I absolutely want to be this type of person. I don’t want any level of responsibility whatsoever.

You get to hang yourself if you can’t give good orders.

I am an employee. I don’t win if the company wins so I refuse to incur any risk.

In the first case, I value them at 0. The stock can't be sold unless there's an IPO or the company is sold, and me working harder is vanishingly unlikely to be the difference between there being or not being an IPO.

In the second case, the impact of my actions on the stock price is nil. I'l be happy to take the RSUs and sell them ASAP, becasue they are actually worth money, but I don't see their value linked to my performance.

I don't agree with the GP's position of zero responsibility, but stock is not a better incentive than cash in my experience. That's just internal marketing in my opinion.

Yeah... until the 4th round of guessing what they mean, resulting in months of tossed out work for lack of the exec elaborating on what they want. think "i need a sales report". You'd think there would be a better brief after the first time.

I've recently started teaching my daughters how to play chess. When they hang the queen, I ask them "do you really want to do that move?". If they ask why not, I tell them. If they insist on doing it anyway, I capture the queen.

They've learned to listen when I ask "do you really want to do that?"

I treat my managers the same. :)

There's lots of ways this could be interpreted, that shouldn't stop anyone from attempting to execute a teachable moment.

What happens in every case is that the priority of that task for the assignee is the highest. Sometimes this is a help, because often people have to multitask a lot of tasks with the same priority.

But in even more cases it might be a huge distraction.

That's giving me PTSD. Run if you ever find yourself in such a team. Operating in good faith should be the base line of working together in and with a team but for some it's not. Then it just turns into politics and ego games.

It's a sneaky trap, because you think "I'm making them so empowered!" but you're actually stressing them out and reducing their focus.

As a head's up, the even sneakier trap is that different team members thrive best with different approaches. Some people flail and fret without explicit, procedural direction and others are completely discouraged by it and do feel disempowered.

Rather than taking your lesson as the New Universal Rule, make sure to just add it to your toolbox while trying to learn how to discern who needs what. It's good that you're learning to work better with the people who need more explicit direction, but you're going to burn out managing a team where all of them need that all the time (and if you only practice one approach, you'll eventually get there: filtering down to only have those team members who do thrive by it)

Is this different from the “human command line” mode of operation that the grandparent mentioned?

I later got feedback from my manager that my teammate really appreciated that I was giving him space to figure things out on his own rather than micro-managing him!

Of course, this also happens in real life. I was building new kitchen cabinets and when we got to the doors I gave my wife two options of top rails. Again, one was harder than the other, but I didn't mention that because I wanted her to pick the one she liked better. Of course, she chose the harder one because she thought it would be the easier one even though it turned out that she preferred the other one.

So... always give the other person all the information.

It's curious how "ask" has transformed from an ancient verb into a modern, trendy and awkward noun.

According to the OED, nounification began with colloquial usage in Australia.

https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?q=ask

We all know that language is a constantly changing biosocial cognitive artifact, so there really are no rules.

But this usage grates like chewing sand, especially when we have perfectly good synonyms just sitting there, unused.

I've since given up, it's just too overwhelming. For every "ask" I squash, there's 5 more being thrown at me in Slack and emails and Google Docs and Slides.

Knowing how to use all 4 (affect noun, affect verb, effect noun, effect verb) correctly feels like a superpower.

Oh and speaking of "a lot", it makes me sad every time I see people using "alot". And that non-word gets used increasingly often. It's not like it's a typo or autocorrection. A lot of people unironically type "alot". Ugh!

EDIT: Lol, I received a downvote. I found the "alot" user. Or the "lead instead of led" user! Or perhaps I scored a double strike ;)

For example, "Flirt" used to be a verb that meant to make a brisk, jerky motion. Now it is either a verb, to playfully act attracted to someone one, or a noun, a person who flirts.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/flirt

"Could you action this ask from Bob in Finance?"

"Key learnings this quarter"...