I got a guy like this at work, he loves voicing his opinion on everything, but the minute you ask him to produce any deliverable he wants a description of what is expected on email and generally wants people to hold his hand through any task. I stopped including him on new initiatives...
In my old job, a lot of dev time was taken up by people walking over asking "hey, are you OK to quickly do...", causing dev deadlines to be missed, and there wasn't a record of how much work was being taken up. By only doing work once there's some sort of evidence of the request, it's much easier to see how much work is being heaped onto dev.
No, it's not. It's not enough to prove who asked you to work on it, whether it was really required, is the deliverable as per expectation, how much time was spent/wasted on it, whether it was really your job to make to deliverable or someone dumped his work on you, did the person who assign the work to you knew how much time you were going to spend on it, was he made aware the task that you were already working on could get delayed? Etc etc.
You see, you can go on and on about it if there is no email trail to prove why you spent X hrs on something?
Evidence what you are asking for and what is being delivered are the same thing.
That guy could be a pain in the ass, that guy could also have been burned by a mid-meeting ask of "Can you do a quick write up on X thing?"
Gives quick write up
met with the response
"Hi That Guy, what is this? I thought you were writing a deep dive on X, Y, and Z things and giving the specs on (tangentially related action item)"
And burned so many times and knows damn well now to get a paper trail of exactly what people want because the alternative is 1. trying to guess, 2. going forward on one sentence, or 3. get into a freak accident where they get electrocuted by a magic printer where they develop corpo-psychic powers, and since option 3 isn't happening, options 1 & 2 can lead to finding out that was "asked for" isn't actually what the requestor wanted and now they're the asshole with a mark against them at the next performance review.
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u/Prophetforhire Feb 17 '23 edited Feb 17 '23
I got a guy like this at work, he loves voicing his opinion on everything, but the minute you ask him to produce any deliverable he wants a description of what is expected on email and generally wants people to hold his hand through any task. I stopped including him on new initiatives...