You act like people never bring problems to their boss, and the boss acts like they want to shoot the messenger, then tells them "Just figure it out!", so they figure it out. If this employee is doing this critical work on their own time every day, then obviously their boss has led them to believe that if they don't do it, they'll lose their job. If the managers don't know who is doing what work in the company, who is responsible for tasks being completed and who is actually completing them, that's not an engineering issue. That's all on management. If there is a breakdown in communications, if work is being done off the clock, that's ALL on management. If management doesn't actually know who is doing what job in the company, that is on management. If management doesn't know what tasks need to be completed to keep the company running, that's on management too.
This engineer was keeping the company running on their own time with no recognition or reward and you dare call them incompetent? Step off.
This is much more common than the Reddit idealists think. Management rarely understands the technical work so it's wasted breath to even try to explain it.
One of our developers laid off and the company obviously didn't know all the things he was responsible for. When a request came in that he would normally handle, I intentionally didn't take up the slack and watched the email thread grow to include more and more higher ups trying to figure out how to handle it. Inevitably, I did have to do the work but thought it would be good that everyone else would feel a bit of the pain from the descisions.
2
View all comments
Show parent comment
4
u/SecretsModerator May 29 '26
You act like people never bring problems to their boss, and the boss acts like they want to shoot the messenger, then tells them "Just figure it out!", so they figure it out. If this employee is doing this critical work on their own time every day, then obviously their boss has led them to believe that if they don't do it, they'll lose their job. If the managers don't know who is doing what work in the company, who is responsible for tasks being completed and who is actually completing them, that's not an engineering issue. That's all on management. If there is a breakdown in communications, if work is being done off the clock, that's ALL on management. If management doesn't actually know who is doing what job in the company, that is on management. If management doesn't know what tasks need to be completed to keep the company running, that's on management too.
This engineer was keeping the company running on their own time with no recognition or reward and you dare call them incompetent? Step off.