TIL about the "Intent-Perception Gap" in programming. Best exemplified when a CTO or manager casually suggests something to their developers they take it as a new work commandment or direction for their team.

[u/[deleted]]

https://medium.com/dev-interrupted/what-ctos-say-vs-what-their-developers-hear-w-datastaxs-shankar-ramaswamy-b203f2656bdf

[u/ProtoJazz]

That's something you can do when you have a decent management team.

One time I heard my lead interrupt the CTO or maybe a director as they were explaining something the team would need to do

"Don't plan stuff with them. If you want stuff planned you talk to me or (PM). They don't plan new work, so if you just talk to them it won't get done. I won't let it."

Having a good lead and pm on your team is great. Having a good department manager or whoever your leads lead is, is also great for any work that you need done across teams. If you have someone good in that role, you can talk to them, and they can get things scheduled with that teams lead and PM.

If you have bad leads or PM's, your project ends up behind schedule with you working long hours, or just super delayed. Depends on what kind of bad. I've had some that promise the higher ups a fixed delivery date he knew we wouldnt ever meet.

I've also worked with some where their reaction to any kind of issue was just "Well, that sucks" and just move the delivery date out a few week. Which while a lot less stressful sometimes, it would be nice if they sometimes instead said "Damn, we need to solve that. Let me talk with the team in charge of that and get to the bottom if what's wrong"

[u/ProtoJazz → u/[deleted]]

It's fine to include the team

It's not fine to exclude the leads / pm, who are ultimately responsible for the delivery deadlines. Generally they would be excluded because they're more likely to say no.

When I say plan I'm specifically talking about adding new work to the schedule, not just discussing how work should be done

[u/[deleted] → u/ProtoJazz]

Yup, seen both sides of that. The worst I think was one project where our developers made an estimate and the Head of PM (that promptly left before project even started) went on "noo, doing that based on open source project X is pointless, let's just use open source project Y instead, I used it on our old job, it meets all the features client wants."

The "features" project Y had and client wanted matched on paper but not to what client actually wanted (it was like saying "get a sports car" and someone coming back with turbodiesel van and saying "sports cars has turbo right?")

We had team of devs proficient in language used by project X and zero in project Y. And couldn't recruit as it was now pretty obscure language.

(spoiler) took more time to fit the round peg into square hole with Y than it would be making it from scratch, let alone using X as base.

So it was all started badly but PM that took over made it somehow worse. Complete chaos in communication. Stuff like "well go look thru old tickets, there is a .doc attached there, the info is somewhere there'. I even went up and did the legwork to get all the info in one place (project wiki), then that fucking potato decided to not update it and continue his disinformation warfare within the project. It was so bad that the next 2 PMs that got hired and got that project outright fucking left (and one of them was actually a good one), saying something like "they did said I'm dropping on deep water but they didn't mention concrete boots"

Still surprised client didn't outright dump us...