Re: When you hear the Axe in the dark...
What corporate discipline does not require "reaching a balance between goals
and resources and the willingness to adjust both when needed"?
None, but that doesn't stop some corporate types from coming up with unrealistic goals and not providing the resources to achieve them, does it?
I really do not want to come off sounding derogatory, I might sound a little
harsh because it's late and I am in the middle of doing my taxes, but points
1 and 2 sound a little like rhetoric to me. These comments can be applied
to many situations and not just documentation.
To a certain extent they are rhetoric, to be sure. But if you have a
dictionary, look up the definitions of "rhetoric," not all of them are
necessarily bad.
What I get from reading this is a sense of someone who will not make waves,
who will accept management decisions without question, who wants just enough
support to maintain a middle of the road position, and who will probably
shun an intense increase in workload (or leave the company because of it)
like what often occurs after management fails to properly budget its
resources. The last point of "having these conversations with the
management of some other company" in the event of a lack of management
support sounds threatening and almost inviting the axe.
Depending on what you mean by "not make waves," yes. I'm not of a
mind to do battle with management as an "advocate for the user" to
convince them we should do more documentation than they want, especially if I know they aren't going to commit to the effort necessary to do it. If they tell me what they want, I'll tell them what it's going to take to get it; if they tell me what they can commit
to in resources, I'll tell them what they can get for it.
If management "fails to properly budget its resources" and the result is "an intense increase in workload" I'm not going to just roll over like a good yes man and tell staff to smile, be good worker bees and plan on sleeping in the office til its done. I'll push back to make the necessary adjustments to goals so that they're achievable without working staff to death and push for changes in planning so that it won't happen again. And if it becomes clear to me that it is going to happen again because the company isn't learning from its mistakes and isn't taking my input seriously, I probably will be leaving.
So what exactly did you find disagreeable about that? Do you *prefer* working for yes man slavedriver tech pubs managers
who happily lay all of the company's planning errors on your
shoulders?
Oh, and BTW, the people I had these conversations with? They
hired me.
Gene Kim-Eng
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