You should really consider letting some plates hit the floor.
Posted by ninetofivedev@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 124 comments
So I need to start off this post with a few full disclosures because apparently if I'm not explicit with some remarks, everyone will focus on the obvious elephants in the room.
Note: All advice is mere suggestion. Nobody knows your situation better than you do. Exercise your best judgement.
Now that we have that out of the way, I want to talk about a trend that I see all too common in our industry.
There is this trend where management / executive leadership makes a decision, like downsizing the company, and the consequences of those decisions often fall on the employees. Now obviously business sometimes have to make hard decisions to stay afloat, like cutting jobs, reducing the workforce, whatever you want to call it.
I'm here to tell you that you don't have to let the stress from those decision drown you.
In fact, I'm here to tell you that you shouldn't. A lot of the time, but not all the time, these decisions are bets. Management is betting they can reduce the workforce and continue to operate as efficiently. Because they're betting that you'll pick up the slack.
But you picking up the slack probably means getting less hours of sleep, spending less time with your family, stressing over the mere mountain of work that you've had to take on.
I'm here to tell you that is not your responsibility. And you need to make sure that management feels that pain.
We should be able to live in a Western society where there are reasonable expectations for core working hours and work/life balance.
So let some plates hit the floor. Don't wake up to that page in the middle of the night. Don't praise others for putting in overtime to deal with something that should have been dealt with at a reasonable time.
You need to let these signals bubble up to the top. Especially if they added this responsibility with no increase in pay (and of course they did).
Wide-Pop6050@reddit
Yep. You have to make things other peoples problems if you want them to be solved. If they don't have a problem, what's there for them to solve?
ohtaninja@reddit
> We should be able to live in a Western society where there are reasonable expectations for core working hours and work/life balance.
This doesn't work for folks on visa
ninetofivedev@reddit (OP)
Well I have other takes on companies exploiting immigrants, but that is a whole other topic.
ohtaninja@reddit
It's not necessarily employer exploiting immigrants.
If visa holders must have visa to stay and market is bad enough to find alternative, they'll overstretch to meet the demands to keep the job
darkhorn@reddit
I have realized this after what I learned from my coisin. He had a collegue in work who worked overtime, withouth extra pay. Then that person was removed. End of the story.
overzealous_dentist@reddit
EM here. I definitely agree that signals need to bubble up to the top, here's my advice:
move slower if quality requires it, and do not work overtime unnecessarily. your capacity is your capacity, and I don't expect you to exceed it. if I need things done that exceed your capacity, that's a management problem with a management solution
if you can't do on-call, say you can't do on-call. that's a capacity problem, so it's a management problem with a management solution. if you DO commit to on-call and then don't respond to a page, I'm firing you, because it's an IC quality problem, not a management problem
if someone else puts in unnecessary overtime, express your concerns to your manager repeatedly until it's solved, and repeatedly (anonymously if possible) complain in the all hands that we're creating a culture of unnecessary over time. give examples of how it's affected your team and the risk it adds
if you have an issue with increased responsibility without pay, tell your manager that your job requirements have changed and your compensation requirements, but be prepared for a "no." it's your responsibility to communicate your needs, but all comp discussions are a negotiation with the business
tl;dr communicate clearly your problems with your manager and the business, but don't drop plates, just spin them slower
ninetofivedev@reddit (OP)
This is one of the areas where a union would help. You're firing me either way if I'm the only guy on a team who won't commit to the on-call schedule because I have a new born and fuck you, I never agreed to this, and fuck you for even thinking this should be a reasonable expectation of anyway.
Seriously, fuck you. (No not you you... but anyone who can't see past the fact they are putting their employees in a shitty situation that they can't really say no to... also it's not a reasonable ask)
overzealous_dentist@reddit
I can definitely see some managers getting upset if you can't commit to on-call, but I think any reasonable EM ("no true scotsman" I guess) would be perfectly fine with a member not being able to commit to on-call
imo on-call is just one more need the business has that can be fulfilled in a variety of creative ways that don't require everyone on a dev team to be on-call
ninetofivedev@reddit (OP)
Please elaborate, because the other leg to this stool is cost, and the point is to squeeze every ounce of work out of people.
Listen, I used to be an EM, and I can tell you're still in the koolaid phase. These people don't care. They want people who will say yes. It's all liars and time thieves all the way down. (or up). When it comes down to it, if the decision is to be a "good EM" or join us on the chopping block, everyone falls in line.
curiouscirrus@reddit
Yep, we had one EM who pushed back against oncall for his team. He was PIP’d and gone pretty quickly. As one of the teams that was oncall, his pushback did seem unfair, but he was sticking up for his team and I can respect him for that. He did pay the price for it though.
curious_corn@reddit
I was fired (contractor, so next to nothing protections) in the Netherlands for not refusing
on-call rotations and the peanut compensation it entailed. It was mostly resistance towards the intermediary who refused my service price offer, but the hiring manager and the sales gal were close
thy_bucket_for_thee@reddit
At least in Europe you have regulations about overtime pay, in the US there are federal regulations that make tech workers not liable for overtime pay.
ninetofivedev@reddit (OP)
You talking about me? Because that exact thing happened to me.
overzealous_dentist@reddit
My company is just not like this, but I understand that others' can be.
ninetofivedev@reddit (OP)
So we can acknowledge that your advice probably doesn't apply to most people and should be taken with the slimmest grain of salt.
overzealous_dentist@reddit
I'll trust you to know how much salt should be applied, but among my peers in a mid-to-large American city my experience is pretty common
karmiccloud@reddit
Fwiw this is my experience as well
Mechakoopa@reddit
Unless the role was listed as having an on-call rotation and you were hired with that expectation, on-call should be opt-in and those who do so should be compensated for it.
Too many times I've been at mid-stage companies that are just realizing they need an on-call rotation because the guy who's been there longer than the furniture can't keep picking up the slack every time the system goes down at 1AM and just decide it's "most fair" if they just arbitrarily decide everyone should be on it.
thy_bucket_for_thee@reddit
Yes, this happens far too often and you're powerless as a single employee. This is why we need collective bargaining. We should also be getting paid time-and-a-half for being on-call too. Paying an engineer an extra $5,000 to $30,000 for overtime work would also incentive management to actually hire and train more workers.
Upstairs-Version-400@reddit
On call is always opt in or agreed on at the contract level when hired, and compensated where I work. And if you are on call, you have a mandatory rest day the following day by law, where you are paid but you do not work. It’s great.
Cherubinooo@reddit
As an IC I think this advice is generally sound. TLDR you should do your job, set boundaries, and communicate clearly about what you expect in return.
Disagree on the bit about asking not to do oncall. Oncall is a team responsibility. If some team members are opting out, it’s unfair to the others and untenable.
What I expect is that oncall should be reasonable, and if it is not, then management gives the team time and space to fix it, and if not, they better be paying more, and if not, I’ll be interviewing.
BlazingThunder30@reddit
Not quite on topic, but you seem to have good answers here:
In our org, management is pushing "go fast using AI, quality be damned (to a certain extent). If it breaks, have AI generate a new, working, version". This is obviously not how it works, but management doesn't care.
How would this apply then? Because the mountain of tech dept is materializing in front of me... And because "our team works too slow and AI will solve it all" (according to management), I am almost forced to work OT just to get stuff done in time, because AI isn't that good and management expectations do reflect on my personal performance. I don't want to get fired by letting these plates hit the floor. After all, they are paying my salary to do this work..
overzealous_dentist@reddit
I am so sorry for this wall of text, I did not expect to write this much.
this is a tough one that depends a lot on how aligned with reality your immediate manager is.
is your EM technical? if so, my thought process looks like...
it is a business decision, not a dev decision, whether velocity matters more than quality
if your business wants velocity, you give them velocity, but they must fully comprehend the costs, which is tech debt, which translates to long-term pain like reduced velocity and higher maintenance costs etc etc.
it is your EM's job to explain these costs to leadership, because the EM is accountable for 1) unblocking their dev teams in accomplishing business goals and 2) creating working, sustainable engineering processes. in this case, the future version of your team will be blocked by tech debt, and engineering will grind to a halt (probably), and you may have a lot of engineering flight risk.
leadership may look at that cost and say "that's ok, we just need to be competitive right now, we can fix it later," and the EM just has to shrug and accept that answer.
leadership may also not be convinced about that cost, or may think devs are not using AI effectively (this is where having a technical EM who sees and understands the AI use and tech debt and can communicate that effectively matters).
finally, leadership may take that cost into consideration and ask the EM for alternatives: "ok, but we need velocity now, so what are our options?" and the EM can suggest some like having alternating tech debt/feature sprints, hiring, 20% time, etc
for you personally, your situation sounds like this, correct me if I'm wrong:
* leadership says implement feature XYZ quickly with AI
* leadership is very interested in improving velocity
* your team process no longer includes developer estimates, and may include hard (impossible without overtime) deadlines
* your team process does not include appropriate time for QA
these signal to me a process and expectations problem that the EM is accountable for solving
here's how I would try to get the EM's attention on solving them:
* Hey EM, I want to run through some tradeoffs I'm experiencing when working on Initiative XYZ, can I book an hour with you
* Here's my extremely detailed prompt or series of TODO items. I've provided the industry standard amount of context for each prompt, I've added my CLAUDE.md which points to relevant docs so the AI can find the relevant context quickly and in isolation (hopefully they understand what that means).
* I've captured every requirement provided by product. It took me about X time to write this out. let's run this together
* ok, it's done, and I'll do some quick QA locally and a PR review. oh, that's broken, leaving this in would cost us down the line, fixing this problem would take 15 minutes, fixing that one would take 1 hour, wow this QA is actually taking really long, there are a lot of problems, huh?
* this represents my past experience too - so much time is spent fixing AI mistakes that it reduces my velocity significantly. can you think of anything I could improve on? (if they're technical, they may have real suggestions, but probably not)
* since we don't plan for this during estimation sessions, I'm concerned leadership may ask for something it thinks is trivial and the work may actually balloon. I'm also concerned that tight deadlines are endangered by this on a regular basis, and we can't make our delivery commitments.
* I would like to propose we start estimation sessions, maybe even using AI during that estimation (this shows you're bought in on AI use, which can alleviate an EM's concern about AI resistance)
* I would also like to dedicate some time cleaning up some tech debt generated every sprint, just to make sure it doesn't balloon. you can see how much tech debt I've highlighted increases with just one task, multiply that by our current velocity
* can you help me set expectations with leadership around this? I'm concerned they're only seeing 30% of the work we're doing for each task.
BlazingThunder30@reddit
That's great advice, thank you. You're mostly right about how it goes here.
My immediate manager is also part of our team and reports to the CTO. CTO see our estimates and ask "why does that take so long?", leading to performance reviews indicating we work too slow for the business. While he is technical, he doesn't really know the minute details of our codebase. We explain it's because several legacy things are holding us back and they then choose the shortcut option that gives us more problems down the line. In their eyes, AI will solve this all magically at some point.
Often, this results in things being more work then we expect, especially so for features that we are on a short deadline for, because sales promised to demo it to a client for an expensive contract in a week. These deadlines are definitely non-negotiable, because the CEO already booked travel and such. As the least senior person in our team (5 years of professional experience, the other two team members have decades in just this company alone), these "quickly build a demo" features are often my responsibility. And they're rarely simple. And rarely estimated.
We are making time to migrate legacy components, so I hope this will be mostly better within a year or two. The above really only applies to things not on the roadmap. Until then we're downsizing the team sadly. A junior dev is leaving and we're not hiring a replacement right now, as C-suite has decided that the productivity improvements that AI have definitely (!) given us is better (=cheaper) than a new engineer.
I've gone way off track typing this. Anyway, thanks for the advice in your reply! I'm going to think on how to apply this to my situation. Hopefully it won't be a case of "this dev is difficult and costing us money"..
alchemyDev@reddit
“If you can’t do on-call, say you can’t”
Respectfully, because you seem reasonable: bullshit. That’s viewed like an employee saying they can’t work Tuesdays and Wednesdays anymore and is almost always met with “that’s part of the job” or “we’ll have to address this next budget”. And even if you’re a manager who would care/try to help it’ll be met with “that’s not fair to the rest of the team”.
The only option a developer actually has is to turn the phone off, and hope they don’t get fired over it while they look to accept another job and quit
Upstairs-Version-400@reddit
I’m guessing you’re American? Because that wouldn’t be an expectation where I live. On call is always opted into when hired or later on when needed, it requires a contract adjustment and som adherence to law (like mandatory rest days when on call)
alchemyDev@reddit
Yep, American with dual citizenship. I’ve seen both sides. We don’t have workers rights over here, the average American worker has no idea how bad they have it. This is a sub for experienced developers so this is one of the best professions, but we still lack some serious protections that the rest of the western world takes for granted.
Upstairs-Version-400@reddit
Sadly the working conditions and healthcare scars are what prevent me from trying to work in the US. I hope it gets better for you all someday but I suspect it won’t. A friend of mine just moved from Norway to NYC with an internal relocation, I wonder how he will find it.
hurley_chisholm@reddit
I bet he’ll love it, at first. Most Scandinavians in America I’ve met love being able to earn money, and more importantly recognition, for their individual efforts instead of being stymied by a tenure-biased work culture. This is what multiple transplants from Sweden, Denmark, and Norway have personally relayed to me.
…And then he’ll have to learn how to file taxes the hard way or find an accountant to do so, he’ll get sick or injured and have to navigate our healthcare system, or (my personal favorite) he won’t be able to buy or lease something without credit history even though he can pay in cash. Finally, he’ll continue to have his perceived worker’s rights violated over and over again, learn those don’t exist in the US, and realize he has no real recourse to rectify the situation other than quit. I have watched and guided a few Scandinavian and Canadian former coworkers through some of this. The incredulity and rage was understandable.
The shine inevitably wears off and some go back home and some feel the advancement opportunities are worth it, but they are usually the ones that manage to leverage themselves into remote 300K+ salaries (not including bonuses/stock) that move to gated communities in Texas.
WellHung67@reddit
Whenever people say it’s not fair to the rest of the team, I want to scream. I don’t give a fuck what’s fair to the rest of the team - I’m not doing the on-call. Unless I’m an SRE and that’s my job. I do not care that others bent over, I didn’t have on-call in my job responsibilities when I was hired. I’ll do it if you give me a preemptive raise
boost2525@reddit
Respectfully, because you seem reasonable: bullshit.
Boss tried to put me into an on call rotation and my response was: "The salary we negotiated was for a 40h week. If you need me on call we need to renegotiate.". That was the end of that noise, and he never asked again. They will push until you push back.
Start pushing back.
lunatuna215@reddit
You miss 100% of the shots you don't take. That is absolutely not one's "only option", unless you decide that and commit to it without even standing up for yourself.
alchemyDev@reddit
It’s the only option after numbers 1 through 4 fail. I’m not talking hypothetically here, I was in that exact situation and received those exact excuses. The entire team quit one by one until they outsourced and now the company is facing bankruptcy. The only actual recourse with a bad employer/manager is to leave, by doing the above you are sticking your neck out “not a team player” and on the chopping block.
My advice to anyone actually dealing with this would be to attempt the above. If it doesn’t work, then STFU up about it, let them think it’s settled, then try to get a better job and quit ASAP.
“It’s a negotiation between the employee and employer” is an implication that ignores the massive power imbalance that is usually present. You negotiate successfully by finding a new role, not convincing your current employer (who put you in this situation to begin with) to change their mind when that change involves spending more money.
overzealous_dentist@reddit
At least at my company, we also have people who don't work Thursday/Fridays (family situations). It's rare, but if the business doesn't need something, it doesn't have to push for it. Employee comp is affected by that, of course.
All of this, on-call and comp and overtime, is just a negotiation between the business needs and the workers able to address those needs. 40 hours/week + minor overtime + on-call is very common, but it's not a hard requirement.
janyk@reddit
What kind of advice is this? Slow down and/or outright refuse to do work, complain repeatedly to management, then ask for a raise?
This is the handbook for getting labeled a problem employee and then outright fired. Jesus Christ
overzealous_dentist@reddit
here are your real options:
do a thing you don't want to do and be unhappy
say you'll do the thing but not do it, and get fired
negotiate a sustainable arrangement so you can be happier
quit
I'm advocating for #3, and I don't think that's very controversial. if you think #1 or #2 are better for your circumstance, go for it
that said, #3 is the industry standard method. good EMs look to devs for evidence that capacity is strained so they can point to quarterly goals that won't get accomplished and say "I need more resources." tech leadership wants to know what fat can and cannot be cut, and ride that line. they certainly don't want to cut muscle, but they are willing to go deep to find out where that line is.
ninetofivedev@reddit (OP)
The problem is you're presenting 3 as if it's an actual option and not just a trap door that leads to the same place as #2.
overzealous_dentist@reddit
#3 is an actual option at many jobs, but I think you know that already
ninetofivedev@reddit (OP)
Yeah, this is straight management facade. What's next? You should talk to the police?
CorrectPeanut5@reddit
yad76@reddit
Not committing to on-call sounds great for places that have voluntary rotations but these days most places have mandatory rotations. There is no ability to NOT commit to it. If you have conflicts, the stock EM response is "work it out among yourselves".
Outside-Storage-1523@reddit
Let me say this -- I'd expect the manager to do on-call, too. Strangely many don't.
overzealous_dentist@reddit
I think this depends on the EM's role at the company. Some are expected to be technical and have the ability to respond to alerts, whether that means restarting a service or investigating logs. Some are specifically expected not to be involved in technical matters and only unblock their teams as needed, focusing instead on what is basically technical project management/department upskilling/people management
That said, I'm on-call (was an engineer on these teams, so I don't mind)
Outside-Storage-1523@reddit
Yeah as long as manager is on-call, that's good for me. My manager is definitely hands-on but he doesn't participate in on-call, so I make sure to slip through a few once for a while to remind him about the pain we have. We were reduced from 8 to 6 and then to 4, doing more work because whatever shit or not are throwing things in our clusters.
trembling_leaf_267@reddit
There's a chicken-and-pig issue there: the chicken is interested in breakfast, but the pig is invested.
If the EM isn't at least inconvenienced when there's an on-call issue, they have less incentive to actually solve the root problem.
At the very least, the EM should be notified every time, rather than brushing it off as other people's problems.
overzealous_dentist@reddit
one creative way to address this without an EM actually being on-call is for the EM to lead the post-mortem (which is truly annoying and distracting)
leetfire666@reddit
How do you balance this and a healthy culture?
overzealous_dentist@reddit
I was also one of these who got bored and worked on weekend nights for fun.
I don't have an answer that will fit every team, because every team has people who are more or less suggestible. On my teams, I just repeatedly say I do not expect overtime except under these conditions (security crises, outages, etc) and hope it sticks. I also don't let devs brag about overtime publicly, though they can brag about it to me if they want.
ninetofivedev@reddit (OP)
I thought your first post was actually well laid out.
But now that you're justifying bad behavior because you spent your free time providing free labor.
Sorry, we can't be friends.
hronikbrent@reddit
I think I agree with everything besides the, "don't wake up to that page in the middle of the night," comment. Being oncall is certainly not fun, but I think it's table stakes in building a culture of trust that when it's your turn to hold the pager your going to act in good faith to answer pages.
(I think it's also expected to then be like, "Hey, I was working on a page for a couple hours last night, I'm going to be on a bit late this morning to catch up on sleep.")
ninetofivedev@reddit (OP)
But this isn't even a reasonable ask. You don't have kids, do you? I sleep between 9pm and 5am because those are the hours I can sleep. If I can't sleep during those hours, I'm not getting sleep. Period.
hronikbrent@reddit
It’s a bummer that you can’t find some other ways to catch up on sleep!
That said, I still think it’s uncool suggesting that people just don’t answer pages if they happen.
couch_crowd_rabbit@reddit
I only let bodies hit the floor
ninetofivedev@reddit (OP)
Something wrong with you?
DeepHorse@reddit
something's got to give...
ninetofivedev@reddit (OP)
This man gets it.
couch_crowd_rabbit@reddit
As in the song / meme...
ninetofivedev@reddit (OP)
My comment was also a play on the lyrics. You failed.
Skittilybop@reddit
I love the part about not praising others for this behavior. When our eager new grad works all weekend on something I never tell him good job. I say you shouldn’t have done that. I tell him you need to teach them your actual pace, unless you wanna do this the rest of your life because it’s never gonna stop.
Strong-Violinist8576@reddit
Depends if you're salaried or not, of course.
I'm a consultant, they pay out the wazoo for me, if I pull a weekend work spree and log hours, everybody wins.
JuliusCeaserBoneHead@reddit
This is very important what you just said, often junior engineers conflate performance to overworking and senior engineers have the duty to explain the difference to them by not encouraging the act in the first place
white_tiger_dream@reddit
It’s tough as a junior employee because you want to make a good impression and you don’t know much yet so you’re trying to make up for that. I definitely got ahead early in my career by volunteering for projects, working overtime, and being available. When layoffs came I was always safe.
Unfortunately without experience it’s hard to know where the line is between “best foot forward” and “taken advantage of”. A good direct manager is crucial. At some point higher ups are just taking advantage so while I agree to “let the plates fall” you have to do that without taking the blame.
I swear managing up is like training a bitey puppy or raising an asshead kid, you gotta find a way to let them deal with the consequences of their actions without rubbing their nose in it.
_Heathcliff_@reddit
Gotta let executives feel the impacts of their bad decisions. Otherwise, they’ll just keep making them.
xelah1@reddit
Essentially, reinforcement learning on a human environment.
Civil-Camera-6284@reddit
I totally get it now, at time we have to let the plates fall
JM0ney@reddit
God forbid they don't get their quarterly bonuses we all sacrifice so much for.
Global-Improvement10@reddit
Your logic is 100% valid. But there is on missing piece: ganance and collective fear.
This doesn't work in practice because your peers will be afraid of loosing jobs and the pressure will come from the sides as well.
Upper management knows that! And they use that.
We need union! This only work on cultures where employees are union members and they have a bare minimum of dignity and "stability".
elliottcable@reddit
What is ganance? I couldn’t find a satisfactory definition; was it a typo?
wherethelakesmeet@reddit
Spot on
Elegant-Avocado-3261@reddit
5 or so years ago I think there would have been no chance, but now with the advent of AI causing companies to aggressively cut headcount we might finally be ripe for a union
ActuallyFullOfShit@reddit
I tell my team this all the time.
thisismyfavoritename@reddit
you're full of shit!
ConsiderationSea1347@reddit
Same. I finally switched to being the only team member who won’t work more than a forty hour week. My last performance review was a blood bath because our jira and flow numbers are compared against one another. But at least I am not working weekends anymore.
TenchiSaWaDa@reddit
Metrics are meaningless between different engineering branches and disciplines. Also easily manipulated.
Metrics should be based on team performance should be compared against individual and only yourself.
Too much stock in Metrics you lose sight in granularity
zshift@reddit
Every company I’ve been a part of has suffered because a few (or more) people are too focused on arbitrary metrics that can be easily gamed.
Outside-Storage-1523@reddit
I think those numbers can be easily inflated. I do it all the time.
Barbacula@reddit
Lol.
PRJCT-124: Set new secret value PRJCT-125: Wire backend to use new secret value PRJCT-126: Update protobuf schema with new field PRJCT-127: Wire backend to use new field PRJCT-128: Expose new field via GraphQL PRJCT-129: Update FE component to show new value PRJCT-130: Consume new GraphQL endpoint and populate FE component.
Each 2-4 story points for ~10 min of work ; )
Outside-Storage-1523@reddit
lol that's a bit too obvious but yeah I get the idea. I usually put a lot of 30 minutes work to 0.5 days. Sometimes I just negotiate to close old tickets and open new ones, because there is a KPI about completion rate.
Barbacula@reddit
Haha I've seen it in the wild many times. Usually when there are dumb incentives like tickets closed.
Makes for nice, granular PRs though
LetsUnderstandIndia@reddit
Hiring people who are currently jobless is the best way to help your community, no job is safe why not help people .. companies don't care about the people, why not return the favor and earn some good will along the way ..
DigmonsDrill@reddit
Let management touch the stove.
sleepypotatomuncher@reddit
Gotta do it together, to start a movement 😊 thank you OP
techno_wizard_lizard@reddit
Well put. In other words they are fu**ing you and expect you to take it.
I’ve let the plates fall down before - it was for different reasons (incompetence from management) but still, same concept. It’s not the end of the world and most likely you won’t be fired unless you literally stop doing the minimum.
Like they say, not your circus, not your monkeys. Let things catch fire and log off at 5. Come up with excuses if confronted. Drag it as much as you can.
xtreampb@reddit
As a sr DevOps engineer ad multiple places, I tell the software and ops teams to not kill yourself to meet deadlines. Occasionally is okay. Should t be 80 hr weeks every week. If the company doesn’t feel the pain, they have no incentive to fix it.
You also need to document all the times you brought up that it wasn’t going to hit the deadline.
Kind-Release8922@reddit
Thats a good point. I especially refuse to participate on the praising that leadership tries to start when someone “went the extra mile” (worked the whole weekend, or till 2am) to do something. My public reaction is always “why couldn’t this be done the day after? Lets make sure we have systems in place to prevent this from happening again”
Economy-Sign-5688@reddit
Amen
sm000ve@reddit
25 years of corporate IT. For the vast majority of the orgs this is the answer. Do your best, work on what is assigned, even put in the occasional overtime to help the team (though most of my extra is for learning new things).
But remember this is a team sport, you can’t fix everything. Kudos and shout outs are great, but you can’t spend them and they are forgotten by the end of the day.
Valuable_Ad9554@reddit
Then their eyes were opened, and they realized
Logical-Silver-272@reddit
I've already had this conversation with my team. I'll forward the post to them.
you've said it all
Tartiflan1@reddit
From the other side of the table on this. I run ops at a small company and when my team quietly absorbs the overflow I literally lose the telemetry I need to do my job. If everything still gets shipped on time, my only dashboard says "the new capacity model works", and the next quarter I'll do it again because nothing told me otherwise.
The part most engineers underweight is that dropping a plate is not passive aggression, it's the bug report on a staffing decision. Sending me an end of sprint note that says "we skipped X, Y, Z to hit the P0, flagging so you can reprioritize or staff up" is worth ten "I'm drowning" venting sessions, because now there's something I can take to the CFO with actual evidence. When it's just vibes and burnout I can hand wave it. When it's a list of dropped deliverables attached to a specific decision, I can't.
The bit about not praising overtime is the one that took me longest to internalize. Every time you high five the person who saved the weekend you're recalibrating the org's definition of normal upward. Rewarding it is how you end up with a culture where picking up the slack is the only path to visibility.
Jmc_da_boss@reddit
Always, it has to break before you can fix it
M_dev20@reddit
Good post.
PureRelative8648@reddit
Are you spying on me or something ? I needed to hear that, thanks.
react_dev@reddit
Yes. Don’t sabotage — but don’t destroy yourself to make up for lost production. You’re just an engine here. Make sure you don’t overheat and drive responsibly and steadily.
ObsessiveAboutCats@reddit
Agree. I'm currently watching management make all kinds of "brave" decisions and I'm sitting back with s'mores supplies for when this inevitably crashes and burns.
spez_eats_nazi_ass@reddit
This reads like ai slop but whatever. I fucked up on a vacation leaving my laptop at tsa. Was wonderful. Whole bunch of stuff shit the bed mostly because other devs were more special and not part of support rotation.
ninetofivedev@reddit (OP)
I'm convinced we're entering a new era of the internet where people think that anything with structure is AI slop.
I'm also convinced that people who hate AI really are starting to struggle because they can't actually tell.
But yeah, typed this all out. Didn't even change windows or tabs while doing it. This is straight from the dome.
spez_eats_nazi_ass@reddit
Because only clankers type that much/put effort into posts on reddit.
ninetofivedev@reddit (OP)
My clanker is writing my code, and I get to respond to comments on reddit while waiting for it.
This is what management wanted.
ButWhatIfPotato@reddit
The only guaranteed way of letting all your plates hit the floor is when you try and spin them all at the same time.
throwaway_0x90@reddit
Perhaps, but here's the thing.
Everyone has different circumstances & priorities in their life. Not everyone prioritizes worklife balance. e.g., when I was young and just finished school, nobody depending on me, I was ready to give that 996 schedule no problem.
ninetofivedev@reddit (OP)
I notice you mentioned when you were young. So you're acknowledging that now that your life presumably has other priorities, if leadership still held you to this standard, you wouldn't like it?
So former you kind of fucked future you, eh?
Also nobody is actually willing to work 996. It's like the 10x engineer. It's hyperbole.
throwaway_0x90@reddit
I was. And actually I had to do it for one month at one company.
ninetofivedev@reddit (OP)
I don't think being forced to work 996 at a company for 1 month meets my definition for "willing"... but sure, we can end that here.
throwaway_0x90@reddit
I could have just "let the plates hit the floor" as you suggest here, but I decided against it.
ninetofivedev@reddit (OP)
I am aware.
tomdaley92@reddit
Couldn't agree more.
honestduane@reddit
As soon as anybody on your team is let go/fired/etc the first thing you do is go to your leadership and say "Your executive duty of Caremark is being violated because you're cutting engineering too aggressively. We were already critically understaffed, now after X is gone we are now critically under the margin of error for the ability to maintain these systems, we cannot run these systems without more engineers, you have made a critical business Continuity mistake And worse it's one that you are personally liable for under your fiduciary duty"
outsider247@reddit
Agreed with all except this.
All they care about is the bonus after showing profits increased after lay off..
honestduane@reddit
Oh no, the law is very clear. They have personal liability if they make mistakes as a director or somebody in Power or Leadership that actively harmed the business continuity this way.. this is one of the great things about the whole corporate thing is that they’ve given that one Court so much power that it has actually settled a few of these disputes through long-standing rules designed to help investors over the business or person hiring or firing. Executives that over-fire or try to go to go too lean absolutely have personal liability and that’s already settled law.
latchkeylessons@reddit
I've been in middle management for about 15 years. Every company gets to this place at some point via mergers, acquisitions, leadership turnover, whatever. You need to let some things fail sometimes to have a narrative to point to. You will burn out otherwise.
Your consequences vary - you may have a terrible manager that will throw you under the bus anyway. You may have poor coworkers that jump in and make you look bad. Most likely, however, things just carry on and expectations are adjusted because that's still the path of least resistance, all things considered.
For the 10% of times you get thrown under the bus and maybe lose a job, it's still worth it. The alternative will always equal extra hours, health consequences, life problems, etc.
dnult@reddit
Someone once told me nobody is going to set boundaries for you. You have to set them for yourself. That doesn't mean being malicious necessarily, but it does mean you need to be candid. The more you give, the greater the expectation, and you can never give enough.
markekt@reddit
I’m SAFE they use the analogy of lowering the water level of a stream and exposing rocks, ie obstacles. If those rocks are inefficiencies in your process, that is what you want to expose. Working more hours or taking on unreasonable working loads is just covering those rocks back up again, when the proper way to address that is higher headcount or more manageable workloads.
TolfdirsAlembic@reddit
While I'd agree with some or most of this,
Would result in a discussion with a manager the first time and disciplinary action if it happens multiple times at previous places I have worked.
I would suggest having this directly impact velocity of how fast you're shipping and not the "something is on fire" button. Just my 2 cents
1One2Twenty2Two@reddit
Only if you previously agreed to be on call and then don't respond. I am not on call. If my manager texts me after working hours, you can be sure that it will wait until the next working day.
TolfdirsAlembic@reddit
Yeah, fair. I assumed "don't answer that page" was implicit with "I'm on call and purposely choosing not to pick the phone up".
MonochromeDinosaur@reddit
Our product team started pushing tighter deadlines because “we have AI now” and refused to include observability/notifications/tracking/infra work.
After about 3 months of the team essentially running around blind trying to diagnose production issues when they happened and saying “we could’ve known about this but X ticket on the backlog was deprioritized” in postmortems we got some leeway to do some infra work.
kevin074@reddit
sounds like parenting :)
Rebel__Scum@reddit
Agreed.
I've worked at a SaaS company long enough to know which plates should hit the floor.
Like if a important client is throwing their weight around and puts us in a tough spot I'll bite the bullet and work extra hours catching a plate for the client relationship. I'll also loudly complain about it to anyone who will listen so they understand the situation.
Generally if I think catching the plate is in the company's long term interests and not covering up internal failures, I'll catch it.
Heavy-Report9931@reddit
yup told my manager this. something you gotta let things fall apart deliberately and strategically so the right people see them at the right time and it gets fixed.
if you keep things operating despite the shitshow it currently is. the bandaids never get removed and the real fix will never be implemented
80hz@reddit
Management goes why do I have to fix an issue when a solution already exists? That solution is "insert person" who's already on payroll so I don't need to do anything today.
Sad-Salt24@reddit
The core idea is valid, after layoffs or downsizing, it’s not your responsibility to silently absorb unlimited extra work. it’s about balance: communicate clearly, document workload, and make trade offs visible rather than just disengaging.
tralfamadorian808@reddit
Completely agree, however I can also empathize with folks who are surrounded by colleagues who subscribe to the workaholic work culture. It can be very difficult to set boundaries in an environment with such social pressures and judgements, but it is absolutely worth doing for what’s most important in life: your time, your health, and your family. Getting laid off of a position like that is likely a blessing in disguise anyways.
-TRlNlTY-@reddit
My European ass agrees wholeheartedly