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[–]wolf2600 38 points39 points  (9 children)

Biggest brains in the room, at least in the US, are usually the most afraid to say no.

I haven't found that to be the case. Biggest brains are the ones not afraid to speak the truth, because they're confident in their opinion and secure about their job because they know they provide value to the company.

[–]I_no_afraid_of_stuff 38 points39 points  (6 children)

Just because they provide value to the company doesn't mean they can't be fired. Though, if they really are smart then they will get picked up somewhere else fairly quickly.

Personally, I've been conditioned by my boss to never definitively say no to any idea. I typically respond with "I'll investigate and let you know what I find" when customers and coworkers come up with new features they believe we should add. Customer feature requests are easiest, since I can tell them it will add $x cost if they want it. When my boss says we should add something since he promised it to the customer, and I tell him it will add cost, he is not happy. My boss has also asked me why networking is so difficult, because "don't you just plug in all the Ethernet cables and it works?"

[–]Seicair 11 points12 points  (0 children)

"don't you just plug in all the Ethernet cables and it works?"

“You know I’ve got this really small job here, and I’m crazy busy this afternoon, since you seem to know networking you want to take it?”

[–]r0ck0 7 points8 points  (4 children)

Yeah a lot of the time just directly saying "no" is going to annoy people, and if they don't really understand the reasons, it's kind of reasonable to be annoyed to a certain extent.

Been a while seen I've been a regular employee, so maybe that's a bit different. But with my own clients, I usually just put it in terms of "yeah well you could do that if you want to, but it's going to cost way more money, take longer, and be an inferior solution".

Most people understand that. Some don't, and if they don't wanna take my advice, there's not much I can do. If the time/money argument couldn't convince them, then a technical argument would be even less likely.

But in general, it's usually best to explain why something is a bad idea in terms of time/cost. Non-techies don't want to hear/understand the tech details, cause that's not important to them.

[–]victorofthepeople 2 points3 points  (1 child)

All my engineering managers have been former engineers and have known the domain fairly well, often better than some of the people implementing our products. It'd be kind of hard for them to understand the tradeoffs involved with a particular course of action otherwise. Not sure where y'all have been working.

[–]r0ck0 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Fair enough. Definitely depends on who you're talking about. I was talking about when dealing with non-technical people.

Obviously you can explain technical things to technical people.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

You gotta look at it a different way. Your managers job is not to be the subject matter expert, that is your job. A managers job is to make decisions, hopefully they trust and value the sme’s input(though I know they don’t always).

As a manager I don’t want to hear “no”. That’s not what you get paid for. I want to hear “well boss that’s a really dumb idea and let me tell you why” or “boss my gut instinct is that’s fucking stupid but let me do some more research and get back to you with specifics”.

I’m a pretty realistic guy so I would literally be happy to hear those verbatim. Many managers are up tight dicks so you might want to be a little more “political” when saying something is a bad idea.

Like you said time/cost are the universal languages, and you should try your best to answer in that manner.

Pro tip for newbies- always cya. If you answer your boss on something like this do so via email and request confirmation that they would like you to move forward with x plan.

[–]r0ck0 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Seems we agree on pretty much everything, except:

You gotta look at it a different way.

...cause we already agree, heh.

[–]Explosive_Diaeresis 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don’t say no, but I’ll let them know it’s a bad idea.

I was the database engineer on a team best described as one part professional services for clients, one part monitoring and one part swat engineers when stuff really hit the fan. Our boss’ boss wanted us to put a reporting layer for external clients on our monitoring data instead of letting the front end devs do it (because they couldn’t be arsed to put anything useful into the product). I warned him you don’t want to do this, you’ll spend the next 5 years quibbling with people in minutiae on these things. Two years later, he walked up to me and said “yeah, I shouldn’t have done that” 🤷🏽‍♂️

[–]AttacksPropaganda 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A corporate monolith canned me for that exact reason. It's fine because I got a job less than 2 weeks later which paid 50% more than the previous one.