I have a silly take on this: to avoid rocking the floating city you throw the rocket overboard, let it re-orient itself upright, then use the main thruster to slow down the fall and then move up.
My workaround for this is to always log in from porn/incognito mode where it doesn't remember cookies. Each time I have to type password and go through 2FA.
> Resist the urge to build walls between people/teams/departments
Do you often have to deal with support staff reaching out directly to developers on Slack to investigate some problem – without going through "normal" process of creating a ticket that gets assigned? Or even asking for features.
Developers generally want to be helpful, but also small requests often turn out to be rabbit holes. And even in best case it distracts from work that was explicitly assigned and scheduled.
I noticed I experience a bit of anxiety every time I'm doing some work that came through backchannels. The way I try to alleviate is create the ticket myself, mention its source and assign it to myself. This way switching context is visible and I can tell myself that "if manager doesn't want me to spend time debugging this now, they can react".
In fairness, it seems the problem in your case is that the "manager" has built up walls between people, trying to own the work, and in that not allowing you the full context that would allow you to make informed decisions around such asks. "The manager not wanting you to spend time debugging this now" should be a false premise. Knock down the walls and you will know yourself that you shouldn't spend time debugging it now.
That makes sense. Either knock down the walls all the way and empower developers to make decisions, or keep the walls and let all requests go through the pipeline.
> failure condition on a computer bus or network in which a malfunctioning node sends data at inappropriate times thus interfering with the communication of the working nodes
1. The cash doesn't have to be withdrawn all at once, it can happen over the course of months
2. The cash can come from earlier cash transactions, not withdrawal
3. Payment can be indirect: CEO donates to a non-profit that hires sheriffs family
4. Instead of kickback the CEO can repay the sheriff with another favor at future time
I hope we're not planning to outlaw cash and implement total invigilation of every transaction just to make corruption slightly more inconvenient.
Thanks to not feeling alone in the world (thanks u/oorza). I mentioned this story at work today. Is autonomy a necessary part of work happiness? I don’t think so.
Being part of a staff that manages successful delivery (in this case of food items) where at peak moments you deliver in concerto 10x average throughout, time after time was just good for morale. Plus the general goofing of teens. I don’t remember the things that I currently associate with cogs in the machine (say, scripted unpaid toilet breaks for call centers, or a lack of ownership). You owned your tiny part of the customer experience and was near all other parts.
The cogs in the machine part is imho unsuccessfully scripted work. You can’t live up to your own expectations of proper customer service because you are forced in a mold that doesn’t fit, but can’t fix the mold.
Then comes the part that I’m still thinking about. What’s easier to achieve? Great processes and happiness via lean / kaizen that treat autonomy as foundational or great scripted processes that deliver satisfaction without autonomy.
Complexity and autonomy are probably related. Higher complexity makes scripted processes that fit all exceptions a lot harder. On the other hand my experience is that so-called experts frown upon standardization and quality suffers. I’ve done standardization for professionals and have hoped to find a sweet spot between autonomy and scripted work (The Checklist Manifesto comes to mind). But I must admit those sweet spots are harder to find the less I’m intimately aware of what people do from minute to minute.
I would say that there is an upside to restaurant work in that, they're very small operations on a site level, and everyone's jobs usually feed into each other. So if you have a good leader and the team gets along, you're basically spending the day with people you know well and get to enjoy a pretty loose dynamic.
My favorite days were when I had my preferred set of team members and and the day barely felt like work at all for us. Working in a bigger org now, days like that aren't nearly as common.
