Comment by jerf
14 hours ago
And when the CEO says "Hey, we really need to make our contact information more visible because I get a lot of customer reports that they can't figure out how to contact us", sure.
When the founders say they want the picture bigger and the logo a bit more purple and can we add underlines to all the menu items and also bold them, probably not.
Which one is more common?
> When the founders say they want the picture bigger and the logo a bit more purple and can we add underlines to all the menu items and also bold them
Simple: they’re trying to give you the solution, and it’s your duty as the responsible designer/developer to find out what problem they see. Here’s a nice set of questions I’m using (from Managing projects, people, and yourself [1] by Nick Toverovskiy):
1. What did you mean by that?
2. Why is it important?
3. How is this related to the purpose of the project?
4. How does this relate to other parts of the system? What else could be affected by this change?
5. Why is it critical to resolve this before the next release / deadline?
This should paint a fairly decent picture of what’s really on your client’s (or manager’s) mind. Then you can propose a solution to the real problem – which might very well be the one that your client has proposed!
(Some questions might sound stupid in context. You can skip them, or just admit it: “I’m gonna ask some questions which might make me sound like an idiot, but that would really help me figure out the problem better. Would that be alright with you?”)
[1]: https://bureau.ru/books/fff-demo/20 (in Russian)
> it’s your duty as the responsible designer/developer to find out what problem they see.
I tried with wildly varying degrees of success to impress this on my fellow developers for decades. In every case it was an utterly new and foreign idea to them, including those who had actually studied computer science at degree level.
My problem with most of these books is they are indirectly trying to solve the real problem. The problem that IME HN is allergic to discussing.
Power Dynamics.
The reason the CEO is nitpicking your job is because he is not a good CEO and doesn't know his place or how to do his job. Almost all these books are about an indirect way of dealing with the fact that, this person is a ID10T and you have to deal with them because they have more power than you. Yet it is literally NEVER discussed.
The books(IDK about this one) really summarizes indirect ways of how to be subservient and not accidentally antagonize your "superiors" which are frequently people just born into a better lot in life than you, without feeling like that is what you are doing.
What is the CEO's primary duties, networking?, Sales, COMMUNICATING yet its your job to read books on how to tiptoe around how to sus out what they cannot COMMUNICATE?
I'm a pretty opinionated engineer but I'll still volunteer that in a majority of "engineering" disputes, I care more about having a coordinated and consistent approach than I do about the absolute tack taken.
Maybe I've just been lucky to mostly work with decent managers, but basically I consider the tie-breaking function to be intrinsically valuable.
With this particular book, the prerequisite is that your client is trying to achieve something, yeah. I think know the type of CEOs and CTOs that you’re talking about, the ones that only want to sound smart and don’t really care about the end result. Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do in this case apart from looking for a workplace where people do care about what they do.
We do it like that with everything. If you consider yourself an artist it is quite simple to say you cant put your name on it if anything changes. You can also explain what you just wrote: Youve hired me, trust me to do it and focus on your tasks. Or: we will be different from otters but in a limited number of ways and your suggestions dont offer enough roi to make the cut.
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