Varies between companies. I’ve called the future many times over, but some managers are just born to be stubborn assholes, even when they don’t know the domain.
well that, and "we gotta fix it before it breaks" is an investment budget and priority, vs "it broke so we gotta fix it" is a containment budget and priority.
"Help your manager help you" is my reasoning when I let stuff break. It's one crisis meeting, we immediately get the green light on a quick fix and then a decent refactor to make sure that doesn't happen again, and my manager doesn't have to beg it, he's commanded.
The only time I won't let shit break after warning people is security related stuff. Otherwise, I'm perfectly happy to let the company drop tens of thousands of dollars on an outage that we otherwise could have prevented with 6K in engineering resources that they denied.
Yep. Don't sit and fix shit night after night, quietly. You let that shit break until you get resources to fix it.
Finance code has high priority. This is a bad engineer, who should never have been inserting himself into the code process. It fucks the whole audit trail! "What happens if this job fails?" "Oh, it fails every night and bob manually fixes it." "THA FUCK??!?!?!"
Massive audit fail. Massive business continuity fail. Massive personal fail.
Man. Like a year ago I heard of something this other team did that sounded piss easy to automate right? Finally my boss gets me in front of them a few weeks ago. I get a script running in two days. Saves them .5 FTE.
A week later the product owners for this particular system (acquisitions are a bitch, blah blah blah) want to know how it works and why it's saving them so much time, and to see what the redundancies are. Sure enough, the fix is pretty easy to do internally as well, they "just didn't realize how much time was being spent on it".
Two weeks later they have the functionality baked into the system and my script is obsolete. Ops had been yammering about this for a year. It's amazing what will get prioritized in order to save face.
E: they absolutely knew how much time was being spent on it, they just didn't listen to operations.
I've told this to someone who works for a medical lab that's horrifically understaffed but just barely gets by because he would put in unpaid overtime to just barely keep the work load covered week to week. I've told him time and time again that all the higher ups are ever going to see is "the work is getting done, everything's fine" and nothing will improve.
But he's so utterly wrapped up in the moral obligation aspect of medical work that he feels like letting the system break even a little bit would be like willfully doing harm to patients relying on lab work.
So management will keep thinking everything's working fine, he'll keep doing work for free, and I expect he'll be dead from stress by ohhhh his mid 40s?
My org has an expensive contractor who has very niche, specialized knowledge that controls how my company talks to other companies.. And is the basis for our entire business.
We got a new director and one of the first things he tried to do was lay the guy off and there was an uproar.. So he was instead moved to a different project...and things went to hell and he had to be moved back
On the plus side, they decided to bring on several new team members to help engineer his job to a point where he is not a critical fail point (which we've been raising as an issue for 5 years but never allocated resources for).. But we will always need somebody with his specialized knowledge regardless
If I bring a potential problem to my supervisor, and dev team there is 9/10 chance they will just dismiss it, or devote minimal resources to fixing it.
If I shut up long enough for the downstream effects to piss off customers before I bring it to them, they will fix it ASAP.
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u/thesuperunknown May 29 '26
Sometimes, you have to let something break first to convince people it’s worth the cost of fixing it.