Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 389: Sleepy and bureaucracy

Episode Date: January 1, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: The Sleepy Engineer says, Hey SSE, how do you deal with drowsiness? I notice that sometimes when I am very tired at my desk and end up eyes closed head drooped down as I work which I imagine is a bad look for anyone passing by. During this time, I would either get coffee or stand up and walk somewhere which is a temporary fix but ultimately I am still very tired. I know in very few really big company HQs there might be a sleeping quarters if you plan to stay the night but my company is certainly ain’t one of them. Any advice on how to get through the day? Thanks for the great show. After seeing a hyper growth in 2021-2022, our company has become a bureaucratic hell hole. RFCs, PRDs, ADRs, reports. My manager (director of engineering) would request these documents but never read them. When someone doesn’t like the solution proposed, they have the option to say no and the project is blocked. But nobody (including the manager of the team) have the autonomy to say yes and move forward. How do you deal with this? Or is it time to give up and listened to the patented advice to quit my job? Show Notes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc - hammock-driven-development

it takes more than saying hello on a slack dm and after two hours completely forgetting what you're going to ask to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 389 i'm your host dave smith i am your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers who lose track of what they were doing did you know there's a website called nohello.com? Yes, I did actually. And I went there while I was looking at this intro. So did I. If only the people who said hello and then didn't say why they're saying hello read this website. There's also a competing website called nohello.net. That's important. Are there fierce religious wars between them?

now it looks like one is just a little newer you know the other one is more like an irc no hello and the the new no hello.net is more like emojis yeah exactly it's like one is vintage 2013 and one is more recent i wonder if there is a yes hello yes hello.net i mean there is i'm sure but yeah i really shouldn't go to random web domains rolling the dice i think it is a cultural thing i feel like i've noticed that there's just some cultures that like you have to if it maybe it feels rude to say hey i have this question instead of exchange the the protocol first it's like a tcp handshake or something yeah it is and and i know you know i could take the word culture in your statement to mean two things you know something like team culture but also kind of

culture at a more macro level. I'll just give an example. A good friend of mine, he's an American, and he was visiting England. And he went out for a jog along the Thames River in London. And he needed to know what time it was and didn't have his watch or needed to know a direction or something. And he walked up to somebody on the street and just asked them, hey, do you know what time it is and the it was a local brit and apparently in that culture and at least this person in that culture considered it very rude to walk up to someone and not say good afternoon or good day and so instead of answering my friend's question the person said good afternoon and he was like uh yeah great so what time is it so the person repeated i said good afternoon

and it was just this hilarious like cultural obliviousness and cultural enforcement moment well your friend didn't know what time it was how would he have said good afternoon exactly he's trying to figure out the time good sometime sir i'm trying to say the proper greeting but first i need some information from you just goes to show it's very relative where to me it's annoying because i expect people to conform to my culture because there's like enough of a majority that it sticks out when someone does this but i'm sure if i went and worked at a company where everyone said hi and like you had to say hi back before you said something then you'd figure someone would be furiously typing

up yes hello.com passive aggressively send it to me yes for sure okay dave i want to thank our patrons i was hoping you would i will thank you so much to chase w norton type here.dev never is not just a crater on mars flamingo emoji i like chicken i like liver meomics meomics please deliver trash panda the computer science book.com valentin at datafold santa hope our kensi dots jenny kim owen shardle craig motlin the stochastic parrot patreon.com we're hiring ira chan monkey face emoji jonathan king webtau awesome n10 testing will angel ragnar travis braden canes john grant the unsettling nature of not knowing in all caps and nick cantar thank you thank you Thank you so much to these people who have contributed such that we shout them out and

in our minds every day as well. If you want to join them, you can go to softskills.audio, click support us on Patreon, and then do the thing it says, and you'll get an invite to our Slack team and a weekly or one-time shout out, depending on how much you contribute. You keep the show going. You pay for Dave's very expensive coconut water habit. I don't know. he bathes in it it's actually intravenous coconut water it it's very expensive you have too much

blood in your coconut water system gotta fix that thank you thank you thank you all right this episode is sponsored by notion which is the best note-taking app with very useful artificial intelligence features we'll tell you more about notion in the middle of the show today but first a question yes this is from a person calling themselves the sleepy engineer who says hey soft skills engineering how do you deal with drowsiness i notice that sometimes when i'm very tired at my desk i end up eyes closed head drooped down as i work which i imagine is a bad look for anyone passing by during this time i would either get a coffee or stand up and walk around somewhere which is a temporary fix, but ultimately, I'm still very tired. I know in a few really big

company HQs, there might be a sleeping quarters if you plan to stay the night, but my company is certainly not one of them. Any advice on how to get through the day? Thanks for the great show. All right. Well, I guess we're officially pivoting to a medical advice podcast now. Yeah. We're just going to tackle this. I mean, get enough sleep is probably reasonable advice. I'm assuming that is well no i won't assume there's probably stuff you can do to get more sleep can you be better about your sleep hygiene can you stare into your phone late at night less or go to bed earlier

but you can feel the waves of hypocrisy coming off of me right now hopefully hopefully this podcast is transmitting at high enough bit rate that you can just like smell the utter you can smell the the empty cans of energy drinks scattered around my desk so easy to say but harder to do certainly we've actually amended the mp3 codec to have a side channel for transmitting hypocrisy information it has really bloated the size of our file our you may have noticed this episode took a long time to download that's why yes yeah i i get tired at work a lot and you know what i do what i take a nap because i work from home yeah do you really you've napped in the middle of the day sometimes yeah sometimes i've

tried it's hard for me to fall asleep in the middle of the day i i will like get through with my morning i mean sometimes this isn't like an everyday thing but if if the schedule allows it usually i have this lull when the whatever drug or practice i have done to keep me awake in the morning wears off and then sometimes i'll just go zonk out for like half an hour are you the kind of person that can fall asleep quickly and wake up without being in a complete stupor i think i have developed that skill yes oh so it wasn't like that tired enough you kind of practice that yeah i mean kids like if you're always exhausted then you can fall asleep quickly i think that's part of it i like how you just said but kids it's like oh yeah explains the whole thing gotcha

and not wake up in a complete stupor i think i'm just always in a complete stupor so i don't wake up any less stupid that's that's what's that's the adjective for being in a stupor right yeah i think so than i was before but if you are in an office it is probably frowned upon to curl up underneath your desk yeah underneath your cubicle wasn't there a seinfeld episode about that i don't know there was much seinfeld there was well there was that george costanza realized that he had a job that was completely undemanding and so he decided to go all in on finding ways to sleep at work and he he actually like i think he if i remember right he had a carpenter come to his office and build a sleeping cubby into the bottom of his desk along with a

little alarm clock cubby for it and like a place to put a magazine and book and he would just get in there and sleep so that's one option actually i remember when where this started it was after our first kid was born i think it was during parental leave my wife snored really loudly so i would go into what was then my office but i didn't have like a bed or anything i would just lay down on the ground and fall asleep on the carpet wow and so that made it so that it is easy for me to fall asleep i trained it's like how you lift weights that are really heavy so you can lift less heavy stuff easily i can like fall asleep on the floor huddled like i don't know huddled into a ball like a dog so if there's a couch i'm good so the couch feels like a major upgrade

Yeah, it's great. Huh. Okay. Interesting. There have been a few times, especially working from home, where I've been very tired and I've wanted to go and catch some shut-eye, catch some Zs in the middle of the workday. And I just, I go lay down and I just lay there and stare at the ceiling and think about all the things I need to be doing for work.

Think about all the stuff you should be doing right now. Exactly. And after about 20 minutes of that, I just come back to my desk and start working on those things i was thinking about i actually have i mean this is not at all like this person is in the office so none of this applies but sometimes i put on like a little meditation thing or i don't know and if i'm my mind is racing but i still really need a quick one then i'll i'll do that but i have tried to do it and then just pop back up and say nope i gotta go review these prs whatever now with some of these ai systems you could generate custom meditation tracks that say

things like you could do like an integration with your jira system just have it review the ticket titles fix justification of text on the create modal oh that would be a nightmare the worst mindfulness any advice on how to get through the day yeah this is this is rough and they mentioned getting a coffee i feel like for me at least caffeine is borrowing energy from the future i always end up more tired at like a higher spike of tiredness than i than i where it's kind of smoothed out over a longer period if i don't drink caffeinated stuff which might be okay it's like tech debt you know it's like hey we choose yeah to take a shortcut now and then later this evening i'm absolutely going to be destroyed but at least i won't be at work yeah

yeah then my family gets zonked out laying on the couch and able to move jameson right instead of Instead of my co-workers. Look, my boss needs to get the best of me. And I think that's an important tenet to live by. Yeah. Still very tired. I mean, I'll say two more things that are easy to say and hard to do. But diet and exercise can also affect energy levels.

And again, the hypocrisy. If your computer just froze, it's because it tried to parse gigabytes of hypocrisy feeds. I don't know. But I have in the past eaten well and exercised. And I did, at that time, feel like I had more energy. Oh, okay. That's good. I thought you were just going to double down on the caffeine.

Oh, no. Well, look, I mean, if you can delay the sleepiness crash inevitably by just continuously consuming caffeine, then I don't know. I think you go insane eventually, right? don't you actually literally go go mad if you don't sleep enough if you don't sleep for long enough well you know i have heard it said that sleep is actually more critical to your body than food and water because unlike food and water your body will actually force you to sleep if you go too long and maybe that's just by completely losing touch with reality yeah maybe that can be our very special 500th episode we we stay awake for 72 hours and then record the podcast just

Keep recording? Yeah, just see. It's like a 70-hour podcast. How weird it gets. That could get pretty wild. Gibbering in the corner mindlessly. There'd be a lot of just silence. That would be sleep.

So, okay, it's been long enough that I can admit it on the show. When I worked at a previous job at a megacorp, we had to do these all-nighter shifts during holiday times because it was e-commerce. And so I'd be on this like, I don't know, 10.30 p.m. to 4 a.m. shift just in case something broke because the time it would take to page someone and get them up and then at their computer and get the context could potentially be worth enough that they decided it was worth the human cost to just have people there. And so you were at home. I was at home on a Zoom call, 100% asleep.

There were people that were not asleep and I admire them, but I was counting on those people to yell to wake me up if something you would have like the did you have like headphones in or something so that if it got loud you'd wake up yeah i just i mean i was in my office and it's far enough away that i could turn it up so i just okay again more things that don't help you just if you don't care enough then you can sleep anywhere it sounds like you're partially there with your head dropped down your eyes closed but it says as i work like wait how do you how do you work with your head drooped down and your eyes closed i mean i have very good assistive technologies yeah you know i don't it's all screen readers and there's a talk by rich

hickey called hammock driven development which is all about kind of the the like subconscious downtime that leads to better solutions but if you watch that talk cursorily you could decide that it actually means to literally put a hammock in your office and sleep a lot and then that'll you get more stuff done so you could have your whole team watch that and say we're going all in on this and that's why i have a futon in my cubicle now in my cubicle that's why our open plan office has a little air mattress next to my yeah next to my desk it's so perfect uh it is a tough one though i mean if you if you are struggling to get through the day without falling asleep at your desk. And, and, and personally, I got to say like, for me, that

would take a lot of tiredness because when I'm sitting at my desk, I feel like I am on display on a stage almost. Yeah. And just the, the, the idea that someone could walk by and see me asleep is enough to keep me awake. It's a stimulant in and of itself. So if you, if you're even in that scenario, if you're still falling asleep, I think you probably have a pretty serious problem and you might you might want to go get checked out like i've heard of people going and doing sleep studies i don't know 99 of the time they come home with a c-pap machine i don't know i have noticed that there's a lot of people with c-pap machines these days yeah i i mean i believe that they help some people but i also i just i feel like i would do one and they'd say

yep you're tired we've studied you turns out you're tired no they would never say that what i found is that when you go to a doctor they instead of telling you your symptom they tell you the latin name for your symptom and that's supposed to like make you feel better like oh i have a diagnosis now yeah you go look it up and it's like oh that's just latin for tired Somnus Explosiviosa. That sounds like a Harry Potter spell. That's exactly what I was thinking.

Someone should make a website called Harry Potter or Medical Diagnosis, and you have to guess. That's a good idea. I also saw a video. It was like a YouTube short or something recently where someone says, I'm just so tired all the time. i would give anything to not feel so tired and the other person goes how would you go to sleep eight hours before you're supposed to wake up he's like no no way i would never do that

i mean it's it's a trap because it feels like time free from responsibilities where really you are making future you who has to deal with responsibilities while you're more tired miserable yep but i hate that guy so screw him future me future me sucks me is like a superhero he could do anything yeah yeah actually yeah i'll be smarter i'll be wiser i'll be a little more tired but but i'll make up for it but i will know more about the complete works of the smallville director from reading its wikipedia page all night or whatever i'm doing that will give me the power to get through today it is hard though i mean and and just telling people to go to bed early also doesn't work you know but fortunately there are technical solutions

to this problem that involve being able to obsess over metrics now because you can buy all these smart watches that will tell you exactly how long you spent in different phases of sleep and then you can then you have something else to worry about yeah which is great yeah yeah you gotta yeah you gotta put some kpis on your sleep networks for some people yeah maybe if you're that kind of person all right well have we given enough useless advice to consider this question answered also i'll give one last thing pair programming can help because of the on display pedestal effect that you described dave it's it's hard to fall asleep at your desk if there's someone else typing what you're saying.

And then they just start typing Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, Z. Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, compiler error. Yep. What? Or worse, it works. All right. Okay, should we talk about our sponsor for this episode, Notion? We should.

We should. I love Notion. Do you know what? I use Notion lots of times, but I also use it every Saturday morning because it has the recipe for the waffles I make my kids. and so it's deeply embedded in our in our lives now one of my children has decided that they hate the waffles but that's not notion's fault so maybe you need to ask notion ai yeah how do i make this recipe better so my kids will like it yeah that's a good idea i'll try it and unlike

most ais it's actually nicely integrated into the app so if you did that it could actually amend your notes directly in the app i might actually literally try this right now okay and then we'll do a little bit of this and a little bit of this aha add some flavors add a teaspoon of vanilla extract or a pinch of cinnamon for a hint of sweetness and flavor serve the waffles with their favorite fruits such as sliced strawberries blueberries or bananas drizzle some chocolate syrup or maple syrup way ahead of you there notion ai sprinkle some powdered sugar or whipped cream also way ahead of you there but those first two i have not tried all right nice it worked well it gave me ideas which is it working i don't know

if the ideas worked but that's my job yeah yeah exactly so there you have it actually useful integrated ai this is not just a silly chat bot in the sidebar of the notion app like so many other apps have done i also didn't have to do anything to say like highlight this text and extract it or anything i just like asked it a question in my document and it grabbed the context so that's cool that's awesome notion ai it's great notion is great product i use it all the time their ai features are useful and excellent and you can try it for free when you go to notion.com soft skills yep go to notion.com soft skills try notion ai today okay let's head back to our next question shall we yes dave can you read this one i will but only because you asked so nicely good all right

this is from an anonymous listener who says after seeing hyper growth from 2021 to 2022 our company has become a bureaucratic hellhole rfcs prds adrs reports my manager who's the director of engineering requests these documents but never reads them when someone doesn't like the solution proposed they have the option to say no and the project is blocked but nobody including the manager of the team has the autonomy to say yes and move forward how do you deal with this or is it time to give up and listen to the patented advice and quit my job i have so many thoughts about this the first one is it feels like every small company talks blissfully about how nimble they are and how they're not like other companies and then they all it's like

convergent evolution where everything turns into a crab except everything every company turns into a giant bureaucracy just because it's like the pressures i don't know to get thousands of people working together you need rules and layers and they have negative side effects that make your life worse and the cost the cost of mistakes at that scale are much higher so you have to have protective mechanisms in place yeah yeah my manager requests these documents but never reads them does anyone else read them like is your manager requesting them for other people to to read them are they approving them or is your manager requesting them just to slow you down yeah maybe they're worried about you doing bad stuff if you're not distracted by writing rfcs

and ARDs and, or ADRs and PRDs. We should probably define those. They're actually all three-letter acronyms for the same thing. Yeah. Bureaucracy. BRC. Yeah.

Just kidding. That's actually not true. I actually like a lot of these documents. I've never seen an RFC in an internal document for engineering, though. So I believe RFC stands for request for comment. And there's like a very formal structure for it that is used by some standards,

bodies i don't know if these are that formal it's like the must and shall and should and kind of like yeah shall shall not yeah i've never seen an rfc i mean i've seen tons of rfcs like the itf like a lot of the web is defined with rfcs but i've never seen an rfc process used within a company i've seen one it hasn't i haven't seen one that's been as formal as you literally have to follow there i mean there's a rfc defining the rfc format but you know i interpret this as i want to do this thing what do you think i'm proposing we do this thing and rfc is sort of like i call that a proposal yeah but rfc makes it sound cooler yeah that's true because cool stuff has rfcs you sound smarter so yeah in my mind an rfc is like there's this technical i don't know

architectural change i want to make and i'm gonna get feedback on it prd product requirements document yeah i've usually seen that more in the context of user facing or kind of business facing stuff where yeah we have this need and here's the context for it and how we'll know we did a good job etc what about adr this one was new to me architectural decision record and i need to go back to my company and add some more bureaucracy because i like this soon they will curse this question asker yes yeah this one is more like here's a record of a decision we have a significant decision we've made in the past that we want to keep around so that other people can understand why we made it yeah and not undo it without the respect that it deserves yeah it's like it's

almost like a warning document it's like warning we considered this very carefully here if you've only thought about this for five minutes here are 10 things you probably didn't think of yeah before you go and make a flippant, silly decision that you're going to regret. And in principle, this is an awesome idea because so many dumb technical mistakes I make are coming into a situation without context and saying, I don't get it.

This is probably stupid. And then I rip it all out or change it. And then I realized later, oh, I am stupid. This is not stupid. They did this for a reason. There is something here that is stupid and it's not this. It's me.

but other times there were constraints in place that are in place no longer and and so something made sense because it was path dependent and now i don't know like cdns are a thing or the cost of compute has gotten low enough for something something or or we deprecated a product that was the key motivator for this yeah it's like oh we don't need that anymore yeah the we don't need that anymore is a surprisingly hard question to answer for businesses that are older than like a year you know do we need this i don't know you know how css in javascript became a thing partially to get rid of that problem where there's this problem with css where it's sort of like append only like you end up with these giant css bundles and it's hard to look at them and say for

sure this is not used so i can delete it or change it and so we invented this whole new technology it has a bunch of other trade-offs it feels like a similar thing of like it's hard to look at a stack and say this decision is not load-bearing anymore because the cost of removing it i like that is high if it is like that not load-bearing that's good so yeah this is sort of like making it easier to to knock out vestigial technology choices yes so that's an adr that took a while to explain uh yeah good thing they're so fast to produce and work with oh goodness yeah sounds pretty nightmarish i mean i i like all of these things because i like writing and i like thinking about stuff but they do all take time and they there's there's like a trade-off here where if the

cost of messing up or being unclear is high enough then it's worth the upfront investment because it is a lot of upfront investment to write this thing for whoever's writing it and then probably nobody reads it because that's the default state of every every document written work but if someone does read it then it's a lot more time and then if the team has to talk about it it's even more time so it's a huge time investment potentially and you need a strong case for why it's worth it instead of just going and doing the thing and it sounds like it's not being applied that way in this case that it's more like this is just how we work by default the yeah the situation of nobody has the autonomy to say yes and move forward that's brutal because there is risk in doing a thing right if

you do a thing it could go wrong and if you say yes if you're the one who said yes and it goes wrong then you're sort of at fault and and like right if you have these vague concerns it's not really a cost to you to say i don't know and then like go back to do your other work so i can totally see how stuff gets blocked that's right it's generally very low risk and inexpensive in terms of political capital to simply say no to things. It's not until you actually stick your neck out by saying yes that risk comes to you as a decision maker. And I'm guessing here that the situation of all these documents and processes is really not the root cause of this problem. That is a symptom. I'm also guessing that the hyper growth mentioned in the question is not a coincidence.

This company grew very fast, very large, and now there's actual business pressures. And so whereas during 2021 and 2022, the mantra was get big, now the mantra is probably get fit. And this is a common pathway that I see a lot of companies go through. They're just like, look, number one job is get big, get big fast. Number two job is, okay, now let's get fit. Let's make sure we're actually doing things right. and everyone is hiding because nobody wants to admit that they were actually part of the get big and not a necessary part of it yeah yeah i i've seen two solutions for this one of them

i learned from a co-worker at this giant megacorp i worked at where i fell asleep during the critical on-call shift yes and they taught me the phrase unless anyone objects or i i intend to is another way to put it sort of like nice here's what i'm gonna do like stop me if you care enough but i'm not asking you should i do this thing i'm saying i'm going to do this unless you say no you can't do that and then like we'll talk it's like a question of default like what's gonna happen if people do nothing yeah and in this case for this question asker what happens if people do nothing the answer is nothing happens yeah yeah you might have heard of this called like bias for action in other contexts too like so you're gonna do stuff unless you are stopped and right there

are cases where this is bad just like everything but in a culture like this where everything feels very stagnant and stopped you can kind of inject like it's it's likely you have over corrected and the cost of doing nothing is higher than the cost of doing something even if that something might be wrong so you sort of need to like pull the crank the other direction and say we're gonna to do stuff and maybe it's going to be wrong and if we know ahead of time it's going to be dumb and wrong we'll stop but right do otherwise we're going to learn the hard way yeah and and that was just my i think they actually reported to me they just started doing this and i i loved it and stuff happened that i didn't want to have happen sometimes but it was far outweighed by the

amount of stuff that happened that i didn't have to say go do that thing for right so that's that's one way you can kind of like just grab the autonomy and say don't say can i do this kind of flip it around just say i'm gonna do this unless you stop me so yeah there's a chance yeah i was also like this question asker i was part of a hyper growth organization although a few years ahead of this i i joined an organization in 2016 that had about 800 engineers when i joined it and grew over the next two years to 5,000. It's a huge, yeah, crazy growth. And one of the effects of that growth was that teams, whole teams and organizations constantly felt the need to justify their existence. And what this led to was a lot of documentation. It was like, here's our wiki

homepage. Here's all the team members. Here's our tenants. Here's our charter. Here's our mission statement here's all of our our historical record of all the major design decisions we've made here's all the impact documentation that we have to show you we're doing it see yeah yeah exactly and and i think this was actually this was the effect of a deep-seated fear that one day management was going to wake up and go we're spending how much on five different teams that do essentially the same thing and that you were going to be the four of one of the four teams that had to be let go as a result yeah and this really affected people and that day did come by the way, where I had left the company about two years prior or maybe one year prior.

Yeah. But the day did come, that reckoning. And so I don't know how well all these documents protected people, but probably not very well at all. It's like cargo colting to try to defend your job. So anyway, that's what I think is probably happening here. I'm reading a lot into this comment that says that we were part of a hyper growth phase from 21 to 22, which a lot of companies were. Yeah. I guess this is, I was going to say another thing, which is the same thing as what i already said that i intend to i worked with a boss at a different company who pushed

really hard on the idea of not waiting that if you have a good idea you're not waiting for permission to do it you you can like rally people around it if you need more help to do it but we have so much to do and so much to learn that we can't we can't wait on everyone to agree all the time in order to accomplish things because there's just i mean if you write a bunch of pdrs and rfcs and adrs the people who ostensibly need to read those and comment on them all have other work to do as well like there's they're not full-time document readers so there can be long turnaround times in these processes it can take weeks to get through an rfc if people are kind of distracted or or busy with other stuff or or there's a lot of like asynchronous work around it

going on so don't wait was the the mantra that they were pushing and did it work i'm trying to think i don't know i feel like it kind of worked people did stuff yeah but that was that was like top-down pushing that was that was someone seeing some of this and saying with with like organizational authority saying, I think we should correct this. And that is not the situation you're in. You're kind of bottom up. Well, it's interesting because, yeah, this question asker is not in that position, but I guarantee you the leaders of this company would hate to learn that their middle management and individual contributors are paralyzed by all this bureaucracy. And what I have noticed is that bureaucracy like this and processes and useless

documentation and things, they almost always are generated by the middle layer. Leadership, except in certain exceptional circumstances, like highly regulated industries, like maybe finance or healthcare. Outside of those circumstances, this middle management tends to generate all of this. And it's like the people at the top hate it, the people at the bottom hate it, but the people in the middle live and breathe by it because it keeps their job justified, it keeps them safe. And it's just a terrible incentive system that's been created here. yeah i mean part of the job if you're in the middle too is like push out information about what your teams are doing and this does push out information so i don't think it's all just

self-serving like generate work to make yourself look busy it's sort of like no i mean another thing you could do is so it sounds like you have a anyone can veto a project it's not like a majority there's not a decision maker who decides anyone can object and that feels like it could be ineffective and you can propose moving away from that if people really like bureaucracy good news there's bureaucratic solutions for consensus that are not anyone who doesn't like it gets to block it you can do like fist to five which is uh yeah i i a scale of how much you agree or disagree with the idea a fist is like i hate it and i will block it and a five is i love it and i'm gonna give my life to moving it ahead than any no one ever does one two three

or four yeah i mean it gives a it gives a range for the proposer to collect feedback and if there is someone who is super against it they get to decide i will engage with them and try and understand or not and kind of work through how against the idea people are to see if there's useful feedback because sometimes people see stuff you don't yeah but it it makes it from a binary thing to a to a more more nuanced approval or disapproval that you can do what you will with there's also is it racy what's that framework responsible accountable yeah racy yeah consulted and informed yeah there's a couple other ones that are different acronyms but they they have the similar idea of there are different roles involved in decisions and not everyone is deciding

yes or no on the thing and some people are consulted for their opinion but they do not get to say yes or no they they get to give feedback where some people are responsible for delivering the outcome and they're generally the ones who who decide because they're responsible for the outcome so you can advocate for adopting something like that and saying look it's it's too easy to block stuff we need to do stuff and this this method will allow us to collect feedback but move forward still and someone is ultimately responsible so if it is a if it turns out horribly then they get to deal with the consequences and kind of learn and report back why it happened and what they'll do differently. But the possibility of something

going wrong is not a good reason to not do anything. Right. Absolutely. And that's another thing is that it sounds like this organization may be allergic to risk and everyone just is in protection mode and saying, hey, I just don't want to take risk. And so risk tolerance is kind of a top-down thing. So it'd be hard to influence that, but maybe there have been actions where people got fired because they made bad decisions and it's very easy to fire people right now. Or they were laid off under the guise of cost savings, but everyone knows it's because they made that bad call and they didn't have enough documentation to justify it. So now we need more documentation. So that could be the case here. But I'm telling you, all of these I think are

going to be very, very difficult to implement as an individual contributor at the bottom of this org chart. Yeah, that's fair. So I'm kind of leaning toward quit your job. i don't know like it's gonna here's the thing an organization that's running this way you're gonna get probably laid off soon anyway so you could either just kind of ride it out and and try to find another opportunity while that's happening or you could try to you know just try to go find i don't know i don't even have an either or i'm just like this is just such a painful thing the market sucks for new jobs right now the your current job sucks so you probably need to stick it out to keep your bills paid. But while you're sticking it out, you can probably try

to do everything in your power to be perceived as a valuable contributor who keeps the business running well and isn't just part of this bureaucracy machine. I'm going to give the other soft skills engineering advice, which is talk to your manager. Dave, you mentioned that it's likely that people in leadership are not pumped about this situation. Your manager may or may not be high up enough that they're part of the problem or solution. But I think if you express this genuine concern that it's hard to get stuff done and you want to move faster, I don't imagine they would object. And if you can get them onto your side a little bit more, then it is easier to propose some of these organizational changes around it. I guess if

your manager is part of the cause of it, you could try and see what type of need they're trying to fulfill and see if there's another way to fulfill that need with it. But they just might not perceive how stymied you feel as an individual contributor because of this, because a lot of their job is this kind of thing. It's building consensus and going to different groups and getting feedback. And so like, well, yeah, it just takes a long time, but they might not want all of their teams individually to work this way as well. So I think it'd be worth talking to your manager about. Yeah. And when you have that conversation, you're probably going to want concrete information like, hey, this task should have only taken three days, but it took two weeks

because of the following seven bureaucratic steps that got in the way. I just want you to be aware of the effect of this bureaucracy on my ability to contribute at a level that the company wants. And if you have more than one example, and especially if some of the examples are not a thing that you were proposing that got blocked by this, because it'd be very easy for you to say, i hate this bureaucracy it causes us to be so slowed down and then your manager digs into it and they find out it's actually because your idea that you are passionate about was blocked the bureaucracy is working yeah yeah they might roll their eyes and say like oh yeah of course you don't like it because your pet project was not approved yeah right so bring

objective third-party projects that also got blocked yeah so obviously good really you need to seed the team with a bunch of good ideas that get crushed to strengthen your case. Exactly. All right. Have we answered this question? I think so. Yeah, this is an interesting problem and tough to deal with, but I think you can make some progress on it. All right. Dave, what should people do if they want their own questions answered? Head over to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our form with as much or as little information as you want.

Thank you to everyone who does that every week. We love reading your questions. Keep them coming. Thank you, thank you. We'll catch you next week.