
The damaging effects of unplanned work - kiyanwang
https://hackernoon.com/the-damaging-effects-of-unplanned-work-e28623e06657
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tjpnz
The worst aspect of unplanned work is that often it only serves to make the
person requesting it look good in the eyes of the person they report to. Often
serving no benefit to anyone else and almost always doing damage to the
company's productive output.

If you're interviewing around it really pays to ask a lot of questions of a
company's management structure and whether their EMs have substantive
engineering backgrounds. It won't eliminate this kind of work entirely but it
can make enough of a difference.

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solotronics
Just a single data point but when my org went from an engineering VP who
worked his way up to a manager suit type the amount of "Do X to satisfy Y"
went from almost nothing to a majority. About half of the senior engineers
have left in 2 years since this management change. This is a major section of
a multi-billion dollar company so it has been really interesting to see it
happen first hand. They gave me a big stack of cash upfront to stay for a
certain period then I'm following my colleagues that left.

