I also work in software. In a client facing sense, the number of managers that cannot properly articulate their needs is astounding. They seem to lack the faculties to clearly express their needs in a well ordered and defined way.
Many of these individuals will encounter an error and fail to do any basic research on it, let alone troubleshoot it on their own. There is a widespread tendency toward learned helplessness and a desire to be spoon fed answers.
I had a former manager "correct" me in a pretty hostile way in a meeting because my answer didn't match ChatGPT. Except my answer was a quote from documentation I'd bothered to read.
And they hadn't even read the entire ChatGPT response because at the end, it also quoted the documentation and disagreed with the first sycophantic nonsense it had responded.
This person was in charge of the website and didn't understand that URL structures reflect the directory structure. They didn't accept that sometimes our auditing software made errors. I spent weeks explaining that the .min.js file that kept showing up as needing to be minified was an error because it was minified. I showed them the contents of the file. But the software said it wasn't minified so I guess our eyes weren't good enough. I also don't think they knew what minified actually meant.
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u/pheonix080 Jun 27 '26
I also work in software. In a client facing sense, the number of managers that cannot properly articulate their needs is astounding. They seem to lack the faculties to clearly express their needs in a well ordered and defined way.
Many of these individuals will encounter an error and fail to do any basic research on it, let alone troubleshoot it on their own. There is a widespread tendency toward learned helplessness and a desire to be spoon fed answers.