"We plan to defragment the thingamajig on March 1st. We're reaching out to those who might have an interest in case this might cause problems. Please let us know if you have concerns about the defragment. If we don't hear from you by March 1st, the thingamajig will be defragged."

Something like this?

After you’ve been on the wrong side of this dynamic you learn to always confirm things in writing. And to wait for the other person to go to the bathroom and unplug their desk phone so it looks like they’re ignoring phone calls. At the same time, you use your personal vpn to try a few dozen failed logins to their email from 2 or 3 other continents, then drop a hint to their boss alluding to a vague but urgent problem in their domain so the boss will want to get in touch with them immediately.

I once playfully threatened a helpdesk senior manager: if you dont tell your team to shut to coffee pot off in the evenings I'm gunna start putting your LTO tapes into the carafe whenever Im forced to be here at 2AM cleaning a coffee pot so I don't take a box cutter to the entire patch panel.

If I don't hear back from you by lunchtime, I WILL eat your leftovers.

"We're planning on defragging the thingamajig on March 1st unless objections are raised. Please send objections to [email protected]"

Honestly, I've been doing this for decades with legal stuff: "Please confirm that my next pickup date for $CHILD is March 1st." often resulted in the other party just remaining silent and, when complaints against her not allowing the child out were made, she responded with "I never objected to that specific visit".

Using "Unless objections are received, I will fetch $CHILD on March 1st" stopped her from using that excuse.

It's a great way to deal with a difficult party who just wants to have as much creative misunderstandings as possible.

Also used in Bash, ruby, R when referencing elements of a list…

I’m going to guess the GP didn’t want to give their kid’s name here and decided not to insert a generic Billy in its place. So this being a forum with lots of people experienced in $programming_language it’s common to reference a generic placeholder in variable syntax.

Personally, I think comments on HN should use properly type safe syntax, in which case $CHILD is replaced by:

    with Ada.Strings.Unbounded;
    use Ada.Strings.Unbounded;

    Name : Unbounded_String;

I just love HN, no downvote can stop me! Ever!

Today it's anything anti-Musk or pro-Musk it seems.

(edit: added formality)

Confrontation turns into a collaboration request.

What often happens if my manager objects is the urgency of "it's already happening" will result in him wanting to pause on it, if it's important to him.

Most of the time it's "ok, sounds good" where there's a clear trust between us. Or it might result in a "ok, sounds good -- just make sure so-and-so is aware too".

Maybe receiving party should also take active part in understanding the communication so we don’t put whole burden on sender.

Because that’s causing people to stop communicating which is the worst outcome.

I already had couple team mates - that people didn’t want to communicate with.

“I’m going to do X in 5 days if you don’t respond” gives you absolutely no recourse if you do something that can result in reprimand.

About the only place where this works is violating some internal design decisions that are irrelevant to the business.

Most decisions that would be made in the context where this is a useful technique are irrelevant and/or obvious. They should be made by someone lower down the chain, but organizational dysfunction requires tricks like this to get anything done.

Of course criticality matters. The more critical it is, the more required for you to do a more personal message with said boss, like slack, dms, up to meeting face to face for approval.

It’s not about breaking rules. It’s that I already know what you want.

If I buy you ice cream without asking you for the flavor, it’s because I already know what you want because I pay attention to you.

And it doesn’t matter when I get it wrong because you appreciated the 500 other times I cared about you.

I think the context is different if you’ve shown you care twice a day for a year before screwing up. Most people interpret messages in light of their experience of you.

If you don’t have that track record, the words probably have a different flavor.

Try:

- Intentionally violating a safety protocol in a hardware lab

- taking company property for yourself

- stealing from a vendor

- sexually harassing your direct reports

What this thread seems to be talking about is violating soft process norms.

Surely you wouldn't use this for any action that could result in a reprimand?

"Unless we receive objections, we're dropping the domain $X on March 1st and switching to the domain $Y instead" is not something you'd do.

OTOH, "Unless we receive objections from you, we're proceeding with (the current mocked-up UI|the last discussed tech-stack|deployment date|refactor|)" is not going to result in a reprimand.

I don’t know why you feel the need to put “design” in there, but what you are describing seems like all rules governing how teams work together in any organization.

This isn't for breaking rules. And definitely not for breaking ones that say "explicit approval needed".

Teamwork is complex and most of it is not covered by rules. If you are too biased towards asking vs just doing you get stuck.

If it's not obvious if your actions can result in a reprimand, then you can't do the thing, simple as that. Either you have the ownership and can take responsibility, or your boss needs to step up.

The only other acceptable situation is for things that are low risk, high reward but can be important: like clean up, refactoring, whatever..

And the "boss" may have a point: relying on them to read, understand, and acknowledge your email, especially when it's important, is somewhat disingenuous. At the very least one has an obligation to confirm that the recipient actually read and understood what was sent, before taking the default action.

It's obviously different if you know the recipient and that they're able to handle more, but my default assumption is that people will read the first 1-3 sentences of an email, so I do my best to keep it to that, and if I have more to say I'll make a note to myself for once they reply.

This sounds much. Quite often I have to send people complicated lists of instructions to complete a task. Around half the time the remote party only does the first step.

With this type of user I've started removing the top entry on the list and sending the first email.

Around the 4th time I do this the user tends to catch on and completes the original list of instructions solving the problem at hand.

Something fishy about this comment. Apparently you "do this all the time", spelling out the magic phrase you use like a template. Are you sure this is your anecdote and not a projection of how you'd like to be operating at work, as per the main article?

I'm trying to imagine the scene where you "show the paper trail" to achieve victory over your angry colleagues! That's when my bullshit detector is all up in the red zone.

The scene is someone sitting at a computer replying to a chiding email with a blurb about having previously sent a notice and said notice attached. It's not really that theatrical or hard to imagine.

It is alot better when you have someone who keeps track of these changes and says no if needed. As always a drama free work environment makes this easier.

I am planning to leave the company in 20 business days unless I get a substantial raise.

I feel this tone is needlessly confrontational.

You can very well state "II'm going to do XYZ because of [REASONS]. I'm going to do XYZ on [DAY N]. If anyone objects or has any reservations, please reach out to me."

This approach also forces you to present a sound justification beforehand. You might not be aware, but there is always some likelihood what you're hoping to do is a mistake or you're missing out on some key constraints. When you reach out to anyone for feedback, you're hoping to get input to avoid mistakes.

Also, this cargo cult behavior of citing Amazon's leadership principles as if they were a solution to problems is mind-boggling. For example, the reason why "bias for action" works at Amazon is survivorship bias: those who unilaterally take action which results in a failure will ultimately be scapegoated and fired. You won't see those guys posting blog entries on the virtues of bias for action.

- If I don’t hear back from you in [N] days, I am not going to do XYZ, considering you don't deem it to be important.

>this cargo cult behavior of citing Amazon's leadership principles

Technical principles too: microservices. Firm size follow a Zipf distribution, thus in most case the decision was made it wasn't necessary and actually slowed down development.

"I have scheduled beginning $X on $Date. Documentation:... Please remit any feedback, please and thank you"

And in the second example, unrelated to the first scenario: "I had planned to begin $X on $Date, but priorities have shifted and $X is being tabled for now. Documentation:... Please remote any feedback, please and thank you."

Don't lie or whatever, or do. I don't, but none of this feels manipulative, you're just managing your time and workload.

I may have missed some nuance.

Planning to move forward with X on $Date. Docs are here, but if you object, I totally understand and will respectfully accept your decision... though I'd hate for this to be one of those decisions that comes back to haunt you.

I think this is guaranteed to set fire to any goodwill you have in your organisation

It's still needlessly confrontational. Why are you accusing someone of failing to understand the importance of something?

Ask yourself this: do you need someone else's input? If you do not need it, you do not need to ask questions. If you feel the need to request input then in the very least you need to reach out to them in a way you value their input.

This can work for or against you. If your goal is movement, then waiting at every step for a pedantic discussion with back and forth can kill entropy.

It's not. The key difference is that you're needlessly throwing blanket accusations towards other stakeholders. Is there a way to ask for forgiveness without throwing people under the bus?

Sounds even more confrontational.

> I'm going to proceed with XYZ in N days. If any of you fucking idiots have a problem with that, then scrawl it down in crayon and flush it down the jacks, which is where you'll end up if you dare question my decisions in future.

Though I’d tone down the swearing

In that case, the most likely mismatch between the language you provided and the responses you're getting is your use of the word "considering".

If you're using it to describe the state of mind you'll be in after you fail to receive a reply, that was a mistake. It is a common connective in English that explains the reason for something:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/considering

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/considering#Preposition (the preposition)

What this means is that the sentence "I will go ahead with changing X, considering you don't think it's important" is equivalent to "I've noticed that you don't think X is important, so I'm not looking for your input on my proposed change".

Learning a language well is a double-edged sword - if you look like you know what you're saying, and you make a mistake, people will assume you meant what you said. You can get away with really outrageous things if you come off as someone who can barely talk. But long after that point, there will still always be things that you never quite learned.

Maybe they were sick for a couple days. Or were recently on vacation (and you haven't been notified yet). Or dealing with some higher priority emergency. Or just genuinely missed the email for some reason (accidentally sent to spam folder?)

Also even if it is true that the recipient thinks it is unimportant, it doesn't follow that the thing should be done. If somebody sends me an email asking me whether they should swallow bubblegum (or something on that level of trivial stupidity), I'd think they shouldn't -- but probably wouldn't bother to respond, or at least I wouldn't write a lengthy email explaining why not.

I'm not even joking, these days I often scroll through social media with a mild kind of twisted amusement watching people do and believe in stupid things -- while I can reply to each of them explaining why they're wrong, it's a well-known fallacy due to xkcd386. Coworkers are admittedly "closer" and thus I probably should warn them about potential hazards, but if it's a large org and I was just among a long list of cc-ed people... I might decide not to bother.

Every time you send a message like this it's a chance to convert someone to your cause. Don't waste it!

In such case why not just ask: 'Since [reason x] I propose to do y. Please let me know if I should proceed.

If they don't find it important enough to answer, you can just follow your own good judgement, backed with a papertrail.

Still personally I find all above tactics a bit pedantic and not enough to the point... often I just communicate what I am doing and what my next intended steps are, in standups and followup meetings. Or in-between, I just send mails with stakeholders in copy. I will hear it soon enough if someone does not find it a good idea or has a better idea.

Love this phrasing.

As other comments have mentioned, you probably don't want to go into the full depths of reasons in the email. Rather have a high level summary with a link to a long form doc or RFC. And of course, the appropriate level of detail depends on how big and wide reaching the action is.

Neither approval, nor disapproval just straight up quagmire.

There’s no silver bullet to getting things done successfully in any large organisation of humans.

That's ok. Setup a meeting with said stakeholder, clarify your position, ask for input, and in the end ask straight up if they have any objection. Save the meeting minute and send it to everyone who attended the meeting.

They need to put up or shut up. Playing games does not work.

There is no silver bullet. You have to treat each one in the way that works for them. Those who do it well, it's a talent.

Or have the compromising photos of the boss and copies of the bank statements so he's scared and backs you publically always and then just roll anyone who isn't effusively enthusiastic. That works too. Wouldn't recommend it.

Saying "I will do things my way unless someone manages to convince me to do otherwise this within x days" is toxic and places a ton of pressure on your coworkers.

The majority of decisions being made in a company are two-way doors - they can be reversed if needed without great consequence. Those decisions should be made quickly by whomever is close to the topic and everyone else should just be an inform (as a sanity check).

Permission-based cultures are a real drag for everyone though. If no one feels empowered to do anything without the approval of their boss, it defeats the purpose of bringing them on in the first place - for their expertise and capacity to contribute meaningfully in a reasonable time frame.

There are appropriate times to slow down and sort out priorities, especially when other disparate teams are involved in the process (think Product vs. Engineering), but when there's a clear vision to execute on, it's almost always better to delegate to senior contributors to sort out the technical details and let their direct reports contribute to building on that vision.

Some gatekeeping is okay, but having a singular PoC to vet all efforts leads to bean-counting, which frustrates talented / capable team members and robs contributors of their autonomy.

You are then also owning this decision, and would have to face more consequences for it going awry. So I don't think it "places a ton of pressure on your coworkers" as you say. It relieves them of pressure since they don't have to decide and won't be held accountable.

But if you think an action will be controversial or are unsure, then you need to make sure you are getting feedback and buy in from other stakeholders before proceeding.

This is not only to make sure you are making the right decision, but also spreading accountability for this potentially bad decision to other members of the team. This accountability will put more pressure on your coworkers, but it is needed to help make the right decision.

It’s a pattern for action, not for making decisions. I’ve been trained and my job is well understood by managers and decision makers in my organization. Many situations arise which are in scope of my job, but are new or appear different but are not.

I use this technique every week. I don’t need to provide deep reasons. If what I’m doing or why I’m doing it is not already apparent to managers, then they have this opportunity to check in.

If I already know what I’m working on is unusual and needs explanations, then this pattern isn’t appropriate, and a detailed email followed by heads up phone call is my go to.

I think this is missing something. If everything works in exactly the way you just described, that can still be a strategy that Amazon intentionally implements and derives benefits from. We could rephrase it as "hire people who make good decisions, and then don't weigh them down".

It doesn't look obvious to me that this is a bad strategy, or that the success we see people achieve by using it is illusionary. It's a strategy that many people/companies might find difficult to implement, but that's most strategies and essentially all good ones.

And so you can say what you will, but if the CFO does not approve, your stuff is not happening.

My former manager used to do the same. He is a 40 year veteran, retiring in the next few months and for the past 6 years since I met him he wrote many emails telling people what he plans to do and just did it. It works for us very well.

Your recommendation will be the approach that you will continue doing if there is no one disagreeing.

This method forces them to lay out the timeline they can adhere to, and it works as a CYA as it shows you/your group is ready to act and is being blocked by others.

It's up to upper management at that point to deconflict blockers.

Tangential but I work at a moderatly big company (no idea how many employees) but the tech department where I work is like 50 people, so rather small; and that’s what I consider “the company”. I’m so busy I’m really close to burning out. And except for a couple of slackers, everyone is really busy too. So I’m not sure the size of the company correlates a lot with how busy people are.

And that'd be a useful code to include in the subject line of the email, e.g.:

To: Boss

From: Me

Subj: UNODIR by [DATE], upgrading the production database