My boss Ted Murphy has a phrase that I have grown to absolutely despise. “You’re killing me!”. That phrase appears in emails more than it does verbally and it usually pops up in relation to stuff in development. Ted will look at features that we have in the works and craft an email explaining exactly why the feature is inadequate and somewhere along the way roll out the phrase “You’re killing me!”. And deep inside, a little piece of me dies.
You see, as developers we tend to get embroiled too much in the technical minutiae and occasionally forget the bigger picture. I remember trips to my Dad’s office as a kid and on his wall was a cartoon. It’s caption read
“When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s easy to forget that your initial objective was just to drain the swamp”.
That pretty much sums up how development goes sometimes. Ted, or indeed any business area owner, can look at something on screen and have the big picture in mind constantly. Anything that conflicts with that image jars them to the point that they’ll send emails out asking for change. More often than not the emails are cringe inducing as the sender points out item after glaringly obvious item. But they are only obvious now, in daylight, away from the nitty gritty details of the technical problem that bit us in the ass in the first place. I find myself reading these emails wincing, my inner monologue sighing over and over “You should have seen that. You knew that. You should have spotted that and addressed it. Why didn’t you do that – it’s so obvious you moron”.
But, that’s what CEOs are really supposed to do. In Ted’s case it’s just the yardstick to measure quality. It’s painful because it’s obvious and we should have spotted issues sooner, but that’s just the way it is. It makes a better product ultimately and after a while I notice the developers on my team measuring their peers work against WWTD (What Would Ted Do).
It tickled me this morning to see that Microsoft management get the same cringe worthy emails from Bill Gates every week as well.
You’re right. That’s what managers are supposed to do. They are supposed to know when their subordinates have done a mistake, and they’re supposed to tell it in their face.
If they didn’t do that, or if they didn’t have the ability to spot when a mistake was done, they wouldn’t have been good bosses.
Simple as that.
Comment by Pete — July 5, 2008 @ 8:02 pm |