I think it hardly counts, but I was asked to make a rudimentary worker attendance system that would basically track arrival and departure times of my coworkers and store them online so the corporate office could have a record. I immediately thought of several ways I could accomplish this, but instead I insisted it just wasn’t possible.
While I can get frustrated by managers who insist on doing things in the most difficult and time-consuming way possible, it’s sometimes a blessing that they lack the technical skills necessary to make some of their bad ideas come to life.
I had a manager who came up with an incredibly bad idea to track worker performance metrics. I played dumb and told him, “Oh sure, you can easily extract that from the database! It will take you only 5 minutes to set that up and then you can just run the report once a quarter.” The cruelty was that he was incapable of doing any of that and that he was too prideful to admit to that fact.
I’m happy to help out coworkers and managers who are basically decent, and if I can make their work a little easier I’m 100% on board. These are also, not coincidentally, people who will listen if you tell them that their plan may be sub-optimal.
I think it hardly counts, but I was asked to make a rudimentary worker attendance system that would basically track arrival and departure times of my coworkers and store them online so the corporate office could have a record. I immediately thought of several ways I could accomplish this, but instead I insisted it just wasn’t possible.
While I can get frustrated by managers who insist on doing things in the most difficult and time-consuming way possible, it’s sometimes a blessing that they lack the technical skills necessary to make some of their bad ideas come to life.
I had a manager who came up with an incredibly bad idea to track worker performance metrics. I played dumb and told him, “Oh sure, you can easily extract that from the database! It will take you only 5 minutes to set that up and then you can just run the report once a quarter.” The cruelty was that he was incapable of doing any of that and that he was too prideful to admit to that fact.
I’m happy to help out coworkers and managers who are basically decent, and if I can make their work a little easier I’m 100% on board. These are also, not coincidentally, people who will listen if you tell them that their plan may be sub-optimal.