Comment by adamc

6 days ago

I had a boss who used to say that her job was to be a crap umbrella, so that the engineers under her could focus on their actual jobs.

7 comments

adamc

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r-bryan  5 days ago

I once worked with a company that provided IM services to hyper competitive, testosterone poisoned options traders. On the first fine trading day of a January new year, our IM provider rolled out an incompatible "upgrade" to some DLL that we (our software, hence our customers) relied on, that broke our service. Our customers, ahem, let their displeasure be known.

Another developer and I were tasked with fixing it. The Customer Service manager (although one of the most conniving political-destructive assholes I have ever not-quite worked with), actually carried a crap umbrella. Instead of constantly flaming us with how many millions of dollars our outage was costing every minute, he held up that umbrella and diverted the crap. His forbearance let us focus. He discretely approached every 20 minutes, toes not quite into entering office, calmly inquiring how it was going. In just over an hour (between his visits 3 and 4), Nate and I had the diagnosis, the fix, and had rolled it out to production, to the relief of pension funds worldwide.

As much as I dislike the memory of that manager to this day, I praise his wisdom every chance I get.

airblade  6 days ago

At first I thought you meant an umbrella that doesn't work very well.

  • FearNotDaniel  5 days ago

    Ah, the unintentional ambiguity of language, the reason there are so many lawyers in the world and why they are so expensive. The GP's phrasing is not incorrect but your comment made me realize: I only parsed it correctly the first time because I've heard managers use similar phrases so I recognized the metaphor immediately. But for the sake of reducing miscommunication, which sadly tends to trigger so many conflicts, I could offer a couple of disambiguatory alternatives:

    - "her job was to be a crap-umbrella": hyphenate into a compound noun, implies "an umbrella of/for crap" to clarify the intended meaning

    - "her job was to be a crappy umbrella": make the adjective explicit if the intention was instead to describe an umbrella that doesn't work well

louthy  5 days ago

I always say this too. But the real trick is knowing what to let thru. You can’t just shield your team from everything going on in the organisation. You’re all a part of the organisation and should know enough to have an opinion.

A better analogy is you’re there to turn down the noise. The team hears what they need to hear and no more.

Equally, the job of a good manager is to help escalate team concerns. But just as there’s a filter stopping the shit flowing down, you have to know what to flow up too.

dazzawazza  6 days ago

Ideally it's crap umbrellas all the way down. Everyone should be shielding everyone below them from the crap slithering its way down.

  • saghm  5 days ago

    Agreed. Even as a relatively junior engineer at my first job, I realized that a certain amount of the job was not worth exposing interns to (like excessive amounts of Jira ticket wrangling) because it would take parts of their already limited time away from doing things that would benefit them far more. Unless there's quite literally no one "below" you, there's probably _something_ you can do to stop shit from flowing down past you.