Comment by jf22
1 day ago
One of my worst job experiences was when I depended on a colleague who wouldn't deliver. Any feedback or conversations with that colleague mostly resulted in tantrums and empty promises.
The lack of delivery severely harmed the services I provided to the company and to external users, ruined team morale, and was a huge source of stress.
My boss always turned the problem back on me, despite him also being my colleague's boss.
I tried everything I could for 18 months and had extensive documentation of all my attempts, sometimes working in parallel with my boss or using his recommendations.
Still, the problems persisted and every time I brought it up with my boss it was as if he was oblivious to the ongoing saga. I want to HR and over his head about it and he always fed me shit about "empowerment" and "growth."
Yeah, I was empowered to interview with other company's and grew into other new roles.
You're describing one end of an extreme.
The opposite extreme is you have someone on your team who is only able to resolve conflicts by having their boss intervene.
E.g. you leave some critical feedback in a PR review. The author of the PR doesn't like your comments, so they tell your mutual boss, then your boss comes to you to ask why you left the comments in the PR, instead of the author coming to you directly.
Obviously there are cases where it's appropriate for you and a coworker to address a problem directly with each other. And there are cases where it makes more sense for your boss to intervene.
The problem is the culture at some jobs gravitate towards either end of the extreme. The ideal is somewhere in the middle. A good manager will find that balance.
> The opposite extreme is you have someone on your team who is only able to resolve conflicts by having their boss intervene.
What's wrong with that? Resolving conflicts is the boss' job. So long as the team mate is doing their actual job appropriately, that's all that matters.
> E.g. you leave some critical feedback in a PR review. The author of the PR doesn't like your comments, so they tell your mutual boss, then your boss comes to you to ask why you left the comments in the PR, instead of the author coming to you directly.
The author should not be coming to you directly, going through the boss is the appropriate route. If the author's complaints were unreasonable, it should be the boss telling them that, not you. If your boss is coming to you, it means they feel the author's complaints are at least partially valid, and you should be hearing that from your boss, not the author.
It's not necessarily a bad thing if people bypass the manager to settle things directly, so long as both parties are comfortable with that, but it's not a happy medium.
Handling negative feedback on a PR is a necessary skill for a developer. A manager should only get involved if it becomes hostile. Negative is very far from hostile.
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If a manager is handling (almost) all disputes of all sorts, then they will fundamentally lack authority to enforce an outcome on a real dispute. They simply are too involved because resolution requires you to take some sort of side.
If my children won't speak to each other I will refuse to be the go between because I become a proxy for one to the other. If one then punches the other they won't respect my perspective that this was wrong because I've set myself up as the proxy for the others feelings.
If you need a manger to resolve the above example, the org is broken and the engineers are poor engineers.
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There's a good chance he was an executive's nephew or some other protected class.