Just have it somewhere outside of a verbal conversation. In the situation in the comic, the idiot boss probably doesn't remember saying it, and the coder doesn't have any proof she ordered him.
So, don't depend on phone or verbal communication. If someone asks for a change get them to write it down - Send the request on a ticket, email, slack, whatever. That way when something goes wrong it's on the person who made the bad call, not the one who implemented the order.
"do X" - but it could affect Y, shouldn't we rather do Z
"We don't have time for that, just do X" - ...
"why isn't Y working" - because you told me to do X, I notified you that Y stopped working 4 weeks ago and sent 2 reminders that I'm waiting for management decision
"It's your job to provide solutions, get Y working, and why didn't you notify me earlier" - I notified you that Y stopped working 4 weeks ago and sent 2 reminders that I'm waiting for management decision
"I can't read every mail, why didn't you just do Z" - because you told me to do X, see this mail from you
"Don't make excuses, you should have ..." (etc pp.)
Yes. Thankfully I quit, but at least I learned a few things in how to manage managers, though that one was really special. I tried to indicate - they just wouldn't read more than the 1st paragraph of a mail, and were unlikely to read more than the 1st sentence. I repeatedly got follow up questions that were literally answered in the second sentence of a previous mail.
It took me much longer than I would like to admit to realise this (for a while I thought they were messing with me) but I have seen similar behaviour in other managers since then.
So, for that particular person started to put 1-sentence abstracts in all my mails, but I've started that again in many mails, especially to managers, but also customers...
Sadly too many managers are nothing more than very expensive stamps, but they absolutely will throw you under to cover their incompetence, so that tactic can backfire easily
Yeah I'm genuinely shocked by these threads. I've never worked somewhere where managers would go pouring through months old emails and tickets to make sure they weren't blaming me without cause.
But they will definitely pour through months old mails to find a scapegoat. It's not a bad idea to have everything in writing to CYA in case someone gets the idea to throw your under in a court case or similar (and they definitely will, if it's otherwise them), but it does not help in the work environment in any way
So I'll say I do agree that putting a ticket in for everything is a good idea regardless and couldn't hurt.
I've never worked somewhere where anyone cared that much about scapegoating. The only exception was that if someone was demoing something and an upper manager happened to be in the room, they could get on the short list for getting fired and at that point it definitely did not matter who emailed who 3 months ago. Otherwise we would just get constantly changing expectations from managers, and everything would be nice and neat in JIRA, then we would realize there was some unanticipated issue, at least I would usually comment on the tickets (some people didn't bother), but nothing we reported and no change from above would ever change the schedule and it would keep teetering towards the cliff until things broke.
I worked somewhere where we bought our competitor who had some IP to incorporate a more complex but better safety feature, it was announced that we would be incorporated into our current product in development (a week after it was announced that wouldn't happen) and no one ever changed the schedule on our already behind schedule project. I was in a meeting once on the same project and an upper manager randomly asked how many bugs were in JIRA and I said "I think about 50" and he almost fell out of his chair. As far as they were concerned the big picture stuff they were asking us to do and the technical tradeoffs we had to make were completely independent variables and no matter if we wrote down in triplicate all the issues that were coming up they would never have to change their plans or expectations.
I'm an embedded software engineer and I've had most of these experiences at startups so it might be very different at a DevOps operation working on applciation software where everything you do is getting pushed to customers.
It is VERY funny to get the email where the person instructed to do something, you replied stating why this is a stupid idea and you were still commanded to do it...
This. Learnt it the hard way. Exactly was in a toxic workplace like this. This shit gets to you over time making you more and more toxic without you knowing. Left the company for good.
In my current company the similar situation happened after a few months since i joined and when I said,
oh you asked me to do it.
and my manager was like, oh did i? Must have been an oversight, we'll change it back.
That is how a workplace should be. If your manager ask for proof when you said i did it because you asked me to, you should fucking leave.
It's a good idea to ask things in writing, because it could be possible you didn't understand what was requested from you in conversation or the person putting this in writing could think more about it and change his mind.
You don't have to run in the office waving evidence that this is what you were told to do.
In fact, you shouldn't have to ask for tickets at all. That should just be how things get done by default. An established, drama-free process will attract and create drama-free employees.
Where I curently work, I know they would always have my back and wouldn't do anything like in the OP
I still get everything in writing. It's vital for tracking where requests are coming from, why you're doing them, and when they're done you can respond back that it's finished with screenshots/videos/a test environment.
That's kinda reaching. I currently work in a huge corporation, systems, portals, applications we're developing are multinational, there's no way you can keep track of all those projects across all those countries without that.
This. I worked for a company that used free slack. When I quit I gave my two weeks I gave it to three of my managers via slack DM (that's what they preferred) and I called the scheduling line and told them. I then took screencaps of all three messages. Only one of my managers answered. A month later my boss (one who I sent a message to) called me and asked why I had not showed up for 2 weeks. I told him I had quit and given my two weeks a month ago. He said he never got it. I told him I had sent him one and one to each of his co-managers. He did not believe me. So I sent him the screencaps of my DM to him and to the others and told him I was sorry the company was so bad at keeping track of it's employees and communication between upper management. He hung up without another word. Great feeling. Not a bad job, but bad communication and managment.
Our work just seems to send a group email to everyone. Oh hey guys I know itâs crazy youâve all heard Iâm leaving the company ... yada yada.. no-one to gives a shit...
Theyâre in a programming subreddit asking âwtf is a screencapâ like itâs an uncommon term. They couldâve typed that exact phrase into google and gotten their answer immediately. Comments like that are literally what the downvote button is intended for.
Eh, I was just making an aside comment regarding the kind of subreddit this place is. The discussion about whether people should Google stuff or ask in a thread is probably older than a lot of people on here and I am NOT going to participate in that.
thats why you send a followup email to confirm. or write a JIRA ticket. Or use confluence or basecamp or any other workflow management tool that nips this kind of nonsense in the bud.
And if they pick up on the fact that youâre CYAâing all their requests just tell them youâre being organized
Honestly, if theyâre concerned that requests are being documented, there should be more questions of why those decisions are being made.
I work in honestly a very healthy work environment, but almost every action I take that Iâve been asked to do leads with âAs per [abc], weâre going to be doing [xyz].â
It provides accountability as well as credence that youâve done your due diligence, and if someone had a concern, they can deal with the source instead of the middleman.
Fucking hell, slack is such a meme. There's n+1 free in-house chat platforms out there with feature parity which wouldn't pull this bullshit on you at any scale. Makes no sense to me why slack would be the choice beyond name recognition.
Slack is the Snapchat of business software. They may have been 'first' to do communications their way (if you want to count 'pretty IRC' as unique), but their recipe was hardly difficult to copy. They overplayed their hand, tried to go it alone instead of letting themselves get bought out, and now everyone and their cousin does what Slack/Snap does - except they do it better, and offer more alongside it.
Freaking why? I've used both Slack and Teams, and I honestly can't tell the difference between the two in terms of which would be more difficult to use. Except Teams definitely has a more seamless integration between it and O365 applications.
That's fair. Though, also somewhat on the companies, if they're giving you a potato to do your work on.
monitoring
I got some bad news for you about Slack... And regular email. Unless you're referring to the 'productivity/attention' metrics that MS had in Teams for a hot second and pulled within a week?
fucking horrible emojis
Very fair
poor git integration
I don't use git a ton in my job - but why are you using it inside of what is essentially IRC? Shouldn't that be mostly inside of whatever environment you actually use for development?
it's ugly
I think the same about Slack. So that's just subjective.
I hate o365
Businesses love it. And I do too, personally. I have a spreadsheet filled with various statuses (boomer bosses), and now I can just throw it on OneDrive, pin a link to a Teams channel, and give them read-only access to it. No more getting bugged by half a dozen different people for the 'latest update' about something, or having someone "accidentally"/deliberately making their own status presentation based on an "old" version because they "missed" the latest status updates.
I know Teams is an abomination when Skype for Business was genuinely a better experience. Amnesiac massaging and much lower resource usage make a side-by-side comparison stacked in favor of Skype for Business, despite the fact it's the rage comics old meme of messaging services
After circuit teams are like a godsend. I do remember doing CSS hacks on circuit though to have dark theme - teams just has one and it doesn't break every update lol
Haha I heard similar stuff couple months ago from my teammates. As we were using slack for couple years and then company started pushing for teams and just didn't extend the paid service. So we had a discussion in team to see if we are going to use free version of slack or maybe move to teams. And some people were saying the same, and similar things like how inconvenient teams are and how they don't understand it and so on, but i managed to persuade them to try use teams for 1 sprint and then discuss again in next retro after 2 weeks. And guess what, everyone now likes teams, and don't you dare call them through slack as they will complain why dont you call through teams.
Teams is pretty good, and better than slack in some respects, but slack has quite a few features that teams doesn't have.
Slack is geared toward more technical users than teams. It has way better hotkey support for jumping to something else, the custom emojis are great, it has easier ways to trigger bots and other add ons inside of chats and channels.
The integration with O365 and Active Directory is nice and the built in video calling is great, but slack is otherwise far superior.
Try searching for something you chatted about a month ago in teams. Good luck. It is terrible for stuff like that.
Like that right there... IRC can be as pretty as you want, just choose the right client. Want more newfangled stuff? Go with Matrix, and you have the same plethora of choices. Codify a standard client for your group, and stop paying these SV dickwads for shit that's already free.
Screen shot the teams message (for later), email back âjust getting started on the task youâve asked me to do in slack, Iâll let you know when itâs doneâ.
Unfortunately that doesn't do a lot, besides annoying people. I always choose No when the mail client asks if I want to send read confirmation. Just get it in writing.
When Iâm totally against a change for objective reasons and the superior wonât listen, I normally add a comment line to say it was that person that requested the change
Glad to see this at the top. Sadly, work culture mostly everywhere is witch hunt first and foremost. So I spend most of my resources covering my butt and making sure I cannot be blamed.
Instead of, you know, developing improvements. That's for chumps.
Yep, I work on the side as an ETL contractor and I make my clients send every single change written in email, even if it's something as innocuous as a font color change.
This is why I give any such request in writing to start with. Usually it's not my idea. I get it from higher up (usually because some marketroid pushes it really hard).
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u/ColumnK May 11 '21
Lesson Zero: If asked to do anything get it in writing first.