
Leave Work Unassigned and See Who Steps Forward - ingve
https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/leave-work-unassigned-and-see-who-steps-forward
======
codeonfire
Ugg. I'm sorry about being negative but here are some protips:

1\. If a manager leaves work unassigned and you pick it up, prepare to have a
LOT more work dumped on you in the future for no reward.

2\. If you pretend to be a manager with hopes of being made a manager, all
that you will accomplish is you are going to end up doing your job AND your
bosses job. Your boss will look like a hero to his/her peers. You'll kill
yourself and won't be made a manager regardless.

A better approach is to be smart about it. Always negotiate the work and what
you're going to get out of it ahead of time. Maybe you just get some political
capital, praise, or a positive review. Don't just blindly do work you weren't
asked to do thinking it will be rewarded.

~~~
kabouseng
If I may, here is some of my protips:

\- The best route up is hitching your wagon to your bosses wagon. So yes doing
some of his work will make him look like a hero, which will get him promoted,
and he'll think who is his most valuable / productive underling, which will
get you promoted. Hopefully you doing some of his work free's up his time to
be more productive in other areas. If your boss is a lazy PHB (Dilbert), get
another job.

\- It is far more difficult to try and get promoted around your boss. Don't
try this, it doesn't work.

\- Reward isn't always immediate. A previous manager of mine's advice was: You
can't keep a good man down. Eventually someone will see the extra effort you
put in and reward you for it, even if it is an ex colleage getting you hired
at another company.

~~~
loopbit
Maybe I've had more than my share of bad bosses, but I don't really agree with
you here. I must say, also, that in my experience, it does depend on the
company size, culture and abilities of said managers more often than not (big,
hierarchical companies tend to be worse at this kind of thing, also, banking
and financial, not sure why).

\- A good manager will notice, and appreciate, your effort. But promote you?
You are one of his best tools, why should he? Usually he'll try everything he
can to keep you where you are. If it's a bad manager, he won't even recognize
your effort.

\- Yes, unless you work with mixed teams or on different projects. In that
case, two managers might end up fighting to get you on their teams and it
might be a good thing for you.

\- Nothing to say here, you are totally right, but depending on how you play
your cards, the reward can come earlier. Only thing I'll point is that I've
seen departments go to hell because managers failed to recognize this.

My tip would be to communicate. If you have free time, don't wait for your
boss to assign you work and ask. If you see something else that you can be
doing (sometimes there are features or bugs that could be worked together),
say so, but always comunicate first and wait for your managers decision.

Of course, all this is IMHO and your results may vary.

~~~
meric
_\- A good manager will notice, and appreciate, your effort. But promote you?
You are one of his best tools, why should he? Usually he 'll try everything he
can to keep you where you are. If it's a bad manager, he won't even recognize
your effort._

Your parent comment:

 _make him look like a hero, which will get him promoted, and he 'll think who
is his most valuable / productive underling, which will get you promoted_

So, your manager got promoted, so in order to keep you around, he'll try
anything, including promoting you, to keep you as one of his best tools.

~~~
loopbit
Again, maybe I've had more bad managers than the average (in my 17 years of
professional experience I've had 2, maybe 3, good managers), but there's no
guarantee that will happen.

Maybe in areas like SV, where good professionals with solid experience have no
problem finding another role and companies are actually trying their best to
keep good employees that happens more often. What I've seen is people skipped
for promotion in favor of the manager's son friend. Or in favor of someone
"recommended" from above. Or many other forms of nepotism.

I've seen wonderful managers-to-be being kept in a lower role because the
company didn't want to cough up the increase in salary. And, as said before,
invariably I've seen these people end up leaving and going somewhere else,
causing the department a few problems (organization, lost know-how...).

BTW, reading my comments on this one might think I'm bitter and maybe I am: I
worked 6 years in Spain and France, where nepotism is the norm and techies are
considered second class citizens. I must say that I don't think I've been
skipped for promotion many times and personally I haven't had many issues
moving up (and down) the ladder in all the places I've worked. But I also know
that one of the reasons for this is that I've never had a problem with getting
up and leaving a company if I wasn't happy.

~~~
eitally
Your comments aren't wrong, but this illustrates why it's important when
interviewing for jobs that you're interviewing them for cultural fit and to
determine whether you'd want to work for your boss-to-be, almost moreso than
them interviewing you.

~~~
loopbit
Yep, and it took me years to learn that lesson :)

------
d23
> Companies don't need to go so far as the well-known Google 20 percent time

A bit of a digression here.

I love that people think the idea that letting employees spend a measly 20% of
their time deciding what they should be working on is somehow an extreme idea.
What portion of your typical day would you honestly say is devoted to solid,
in-the-flow work? After all the meeting, context switches, random
interruptions, lunch, distractions on company chat -- I personally would say a
fraction. Or flow state is simply dead for me at the office.

Recently, my roommate and I came home after work and ended up knocking out a
very useful skunkworks project in about 6 hours over the course of 2 nights.
That completely uninterrupted time mixed with the fact that it was a project
that was freshly conceived and still full of passion in our minds let us get
more work done in that burst than we felt like we had in weeks.

20% time is a joke. We need to ditch this 40 hour, strictly scheduled workweek
in distracting office environments and try some radically different ways of
getting productivity boosts. It just so happens that people also feel a lot
better when they get these boosts to boot. I know after knocking out that
project certainly made me feel awesome.

~~~
j_jochem
Maybe I'm exceptionally lucky, but I work from home most of the time and get
to prioritize my work myself. If I want to spend a day improving test coverage
or build tooling, I am free to do so.

The price I pay for this is earning about 10k€ less a year, but I still think
it's worth it.

~~~
djb_hackernews
Just for fun I wondered what a missed $10k/yr was over time.

[http://www.moneychimp.com/calculator/compound_interest_calcu...](http://www.moneychimp.com/calculator/compound_interest_calculator.htm)

values of 0; 10,000; 20; 4; results in nearly 310k of missed gains.

Increasing that 4% to 8% increases it to nearly a half a million!

At my estimated retirement income requirements, that basically means I could
quit working 10 years earlier if I don't settle for being underpaid.

~~~
markeroon
Eh, you'll save thousands by not having to commute.

~~~
djb_hackernews
Or the other option, work remotely and not get underpaid...

------
happywolf
This practice can easily be abused or/and cause unintented consequences. For
example, once employees know this is a short cut for promotion, they will
focus a lot of their energy and attention to find 'the void' and try to fill
it, or act like they can fill it, thus neglecting the real work that need to
be done.

In fact, this could be a cultural issue where everybody tries to act like
taking a lead (usually by blanket emails including the management team that
say "XXX has been launched!! Contrats Y!!"), however you will find behind the
backdrop, things are just half-baked or down right totally fake, because real
execution is boring and not getting attention. So once an excitement dies
down, people will scramble to find another 'void' to fill. You may argue the
manager can check the work, but in a big cooperation, the middle managers are
most vulnerable, and thus they care much more about their own asses than to
ensure their staff get real work done.

In other words, this tactic is only applicable when the company is small, say,
less than 20 people, and the boss knows everybody and the projects well.

~~~
jackgavigan
I completely agree. Leaving a gap and waiting for someone to fill it is
practically the _opposite_ of management.

 _> ..once employees know this is a short cut for promotion, they will focus a
lot of their energy and attention to find 'the void' and try to fill it, or
act like they can fill it, thus neglecting the real work that need to be
done._

This in particular is really dangerous because it can poison an organisation's
culture. For example, imagine Ben decides to focus on managing upwards in an
effort to get Adam to promote him. Meanwhile, he neglects his duties, forcing
his team-mates to pick up the slack. They start getting annoyed at Ben because
he's not pulling his weight.

It's not uncommon, in my experience (and I'm aware that I'm at risk of stereo-
typing here), for good, smart, conscientious people in technical roles to
focus first on doing the job that they've been assigned and trust that
management will recognise and reward them for doing so (and, conversely,
punish anyone who slacks off), _and_ that one of those rewards is that they
will be considered for any opportunity for promotion that arises.
Unfortunately, that doesn't always happen.

If Adam promotes Ben, his old team-mates are going to be _really_ pissed off.
From their perspective, Ben's bad behaviour has been rewarded, instead of
rectified. Meanwhile, the extra work they've been putting in to make up for
that bad behaviour has been completely ignored.

The end result is an unhappy team, They'll resent both Ben and Adam, their
productivity will probably drop (because whey the hell should they work their
asses off when they're clearly not going to be rewarded for it?), and may well
start looking elsewhere for work.

In that scenario, Adam has _not_ done a good job as a manager, and he's
_definitely_ not a good leader.

There's nothing wrong with identifying a gap and opening a dialogue about how
it can be filled (including asking if anyone's interested in filling it) but
if someone moves to plug a gap, that generally means that they're going to
leave a gap somewhere else. A good manager needs to make sure that they
understand the implications of shifting people around, and explicitly
recognise the indirect contribution that Ben's old team-mates are making to
fill the gap.

Organisations are about teams, not individuals. It's astounding how many
managers fail to grasp that.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Organisations are about politics and status. As a sideline, sometimes useful
work gets done.

>In that scenario, Adam has not done a good job as a manager, and he's
definitely not a good leader.

One difference between good and bad management is that good managers
understand politics, they understand people, and most of all they understand
the consequences of different political options. (I mean effective and
ineffective, not good vs evil.)

Effective managers don't - ever - rule by formula, campfire or sports coach
platitudes, or read-it-in-a-book business mythology.

So if you're dealing with someone who does any of the above as a first choice,
they're unlikely to be making rational choices, or to have any deep
understanding of the team(s) they're managing.

Evil managers can have a good understanding of consequences but their choices
will be designed to increase their own income and status at the expense of
their team/company. So they can appear to be doing stupid counterproductive
things, but in fact they'll likely be promoted because they're gaming the
system. They're a horror to work for, because they'll exploit their team as a
resource and discard it without looking back. (I've seen people boast about
this. It's not hypothetical.)

Good managers have an interest in developing the talent in their team _as well
as_ shipping good things and getting themselves promoted. But they won't be
doing it with platitudes like "Leave space for people to act like managers"
and then punishing anyone who actually does. They'll be more politically adept
than that.

The big problem for employees is that politics and culture are invisible. I've
seen plenty of management books, but I can't remember seeing a useful book
that explains the practical differences between exploitation/support and
good/bad good/evil management. Simple metrics like hours worked are a start,
but a bigger picture with standard examples of management practices and
styles, and supportive/unhealthy team cultures would be very useful.

------
georgeglue1
Sorry for another negative post. As a PM, the example stated seems a bit
absurd and definitely not the environment for me.

A transparent and healthy company culture lets people (briefly) reason and
talk about projects/strengths. There shouldn't be some sort of implicit beauty
contest, rewarding aggressive employee who are underloaded.

There must be better ways to develop talent. The method listed also creates a
lot of weird incentives/strategies if employees know what is going on.

~~~
tboyd47
Agreed. You really hit the nail on the head when you said "aggressive." This
strategy seems like it would create an artificially competitive zero-sum game
within the company where employees who should be working together are
competing to be the golden volunteer for the boss.

I think it would be better to always have fewer tasks than people (not more
tasks, like the author seems to suggest), but establish high-level goals for
the team as a whole. You'll quickly see who is best at understanding the
goals, turning them into work, and recruiting other people to help do that
work, which is real leadership (not just jumping to do extra tasks).

~~~
cpeterso
And if there is important work that has not been staffed with a person, then
was it really important in the first place?

------
mc32
In a world where there is no judging, this could work well, people would do
things out of interest and want, but in this world, I feel this is more
"gamification". This is because people will take these hints because know they
are an explicit vehicle to get noticed and they know that _not_ taking the
hint will cost them. It's playing with (psychologically manipulating) people.

That's to say they do it because in this game it's beneficial to their
career/image not because they sincerely _want_ to. It's making the brownnosing
opportunities explicit, I guess.

It also practically makes people work "on a curve" the baseline is the "best"
worker now, the person who has no other responsibilities, the workaholic,
neurotic, perfectionist, etc. and now everyone else gets (unfavorably)
compared to this one.

It's the difference between going to the toilet and on the other hand,
choosing to eat ice cream. One is a must, the other an option which you may or
may not act on.

~~~
sdoering
Thanks you just expressed perfectly my thoughts on this.

------
quanticle
I think this is one of the arguments for holocracy. The entire purpose of
management is to efficiently assign work to individual contributors. Instead
of leaving a few work items unassigned, holocracy leaves _all_ the work items
unassigned, and then the ones that get done are the ones that are most
important to the team.

I'm not saying I buy the idea, and in fact that the same arguments against
holocracy work against the author's approach.

    
    
        Instead, at the next department meeting, I talked about how impressed I was 
        with what those teams had done, and how it was going to be important for us 
        to spread that good practice to other teams. Without explicitly saying so, I 
        let it be known that this was something people could work on.
    

And what if nobody had stepped up? Would the author have left it at that,
undermining their political power by showing that they could be ignored with
no ill effects? Or would they have then appointed someone to force continuous
integration upon everyone (thus creating resentment due to the false choice
presented)?

If you're going to manage, manage. If you're going to be hands-off, be hands-
off. But this half-and-half nonsense combines the worst of holocracy and
traditional management.

~~~
YZF
If nobody steps up then it's quite likely that work never needed to get done
in the first place. win-win as long as it's a learning experience for all
involved.

It's definitely a problem if you force a team or a person into a certain
pattern and then change the rules without telling. For example you may have
punished someone for taking the initiative in the past and now you try to
intentionally create a vacuum.

In the real world there is always vacuum and always stuff people think needs
to get done that doesn't really need to get done. The illusion is that the
manager is omnipotent and can see all the vacuum and inefficiency. A good
manager works with the team to understand those.

~~~
asgard1024
> If nobody steps up then it's quite likely that work never needed to get done
> in the first place.

Seriously? Consider this: You have all people tied up in work for one month. A
customer issue comes up. Who should step up to take it? Because you're not
seriously suggesting it should rot there one month, do you?

It's a classical coordination problem (and that's why preemptive scheduling
was invented). I, as a developer, have no idea if I should step up. I would
have to asses importance of all the other work that is being done by others,
just to get a boolean value out of it. So everybody has to switch context to
examine the issue, and the everybody's tasks to see where it fits in the grand
scheme of things.

Now you can say, OK, we will have priorities on things, easy. But then you
actually find out that the low priority work doesn't get done at all. OK, so
you start to calculate time slices, fair scheduling, all that jazz. And all of
sudden everybody is forced to execute these overcomplicated scheduling
algorithms and no real work gets done. It's a bureaucratic nightmare (because
people are really bad at executing algorithms correctly, and have high task
switching overhead), and I have seen it. While this could be sanely done by a
single responsible person, project manager, who has an idea about:

(1) what is the priority (and required latency) of each work item

(2) how long things are going to take (estimate)

(3) what are the dependencies

(4) who prefers what kind of work

Furthermore, if he needs any help with these points, he doesn't need to ask
the whole team. Only one person can assess importance of an issue; the others
do not need to care.

~~~
YZF
> A customer issue comes up. Who should step up to take it? Because you're not
> seriously suggesting it should rot there one month, do you?

That's why you talk to each other. Unless the team is huge than figuring out
who works on something shouldn't take a long time.

> the low priority work doesn't get done at all.

That's great. Low priority stuff shouldn't get done ahead of high priority
stuff.

IMO you're over-complicating some things and over-simplifying others. There is
no mythical project manager who can tell your items 1-4 in anything but the
most trivial of projects. That's why almost any complex tech project I've seen
managed by Gantt charts and project managers (and I've seen lots) never meets
their schedule. Once you let go of the illusion that you can actually manage
technology projects that way you'll find things get a lot simpler.

Here's what happens in real life with your items 1-4:

(1) The priority and require latency are often misjudged by the project
manager. In technology project project managers often don't have the right
domain knowledge to be able to judge these. So they may prioritize some
feature ahead of another in a way that makes it more difficult to build the
system.

(2) How long things are going to take is impossible to judge in an R&D
scenario. Only projects that are very similar to ones you've done in the past
can be estimated with any certainty. In practice most project managers will
make an estimate that fits what he's asked to deliver on because he is
anchored to that.

(3) Requires domain knowledge that the project manager doesn't typically have.
Even individuals in the team may not have it. The team as a whole can usually
figure those out by discussion. In real world projects managed by project
managers dependencies are discovered when work is blocked due to them more
often than predicted.

(4) This is also difficult. What tends to happen is the project manager will
have some thoughts about who prefers what kind of work. Sometimes they'll be
wrong. People get upset. People leave. It's easier for people to work on what
they like in a less tightly managed environment.

A lot of this is cultural. In some cultures and for some people being self
managed is extremely difficult. I've worked with people who will stress out if
they're not told what to do. However, I do believe the best teams consist of
people who are more self managed.

------
voids
I've worked at too many places where the vacuums are real, not contrived as
bounty, and NO ONE WANTS YOU TO FILL THEM. They all really, _really_ just want
to spin your wheels, stay on the treadmill, and count paper clips until your
dying day. Everyone.

The real-world dynamic, on the other side of the wall, is more like that of
some kind of 1950's sitcom depiction of a social circle of married couples,
and all the lazy husbands resent the one that buys his wife roses, and makes
them all look bad.

------
asgard1024
While I quite agree with the idea, it rests on the assumption:

"leaders also need to create a culture in which employees do not have every
waking moment of every day committed to project work"

Unfortunately, I am currently in situation where is lot more project work than
people (and I wonder, is it different elsewhere?). In that case, I don't think
the approach the author describes quite works unless you have a dedicated
person who keeps track what needs to be done and prioritizes (i.e. project
manager).

Because when I work on something I want to work on it with highest possible
focus, not being bothered to asses what other work has to be done. So I would
prefer (which is not my current predicament, sadly) some _other_ person
tracking everything and telling me - hey, this thing has higher priority than
what you're doing right now, perhaps you should switch tasks. The point is, he
should make the calculation that I should switch, not me.

(Perhaps this is a reason why preemptive multitasking won over cooperative
multitasking on the OS level?)

~~~
feverishaaron
There are some, who in ambition to lead (or work on highly visible projects),
will step up and take on new things – meanwhile skimping on their core
responsibilities and deliverables.

Are these the people we want to promote into leadership roles?

~~~
Falkon1313
What about people who have a light load during a cycle (due to
specialization), like to tinker with things in their 'spare' time, or would
rather tradeoff their core and do something different?

Seems reasonable for an internal tool or process to help the team - not a
necessity, so if nobody wants to do it, no big deal. If people are excited
about it, it'll get done along with their core responsibilities.

The other case is giving people the opportunity to hand off their normal load
(that may be uninteresting to them) to head up some project or initiative that
would have to be assigned to someone anyway. In the latter case, isn't it
better to have someone who's interested doing it than have that person doing
uninteresting work while an uninterested person heads up the project?

------
chrstphrhrt
Fuck ambition for its own sake. It only causes a race to the bottom and short-
changes users/customers.

I have used this strategic vacuum technique as a manager to great effect
before.

It brings out the best creativity and allows people who are going through
apparent productivity lulls to come out of them in a healthy, smarter way. It
also builds lasting loyalty and a strong team spirit.

Velocity isn't just hours spent butt-in-seat or number of commits or whatever.
It's precious moments of high quality attention. To maximize that you need to
be more like a conductor of an orchestra than a drill sergeant.

CAVEAT: when under a high-pressure situation with a new team it is sometimes
necessary to limit freedom, demand trust, and command things for the purpose
of getting through that situation. Obviously it's dangerous and the wrong kind
of manager can get addicted to this kind of solution easily. These temporary
command-and-control moments can sometimes be used as trust builders for the
managers if, once the situation is resolved, they immediately relinquish the
extraordinary power they had used and return to a more natural/creative
dynamic - the team will see this as honourable since it didn't technically
_have_ to happen that way.

------
solipsism
This idea is based on a premise I don't think is at all obvious: that the
person who volunteers for a job is necessarily the best person for a job.

------
Animats
I've heard this approach mentioned before, but it was in the context of how to
hire hotel maids, as explained by a Four Seasons Hotels executive. They like
people who are a bit obsessive about tidyness, and have a way to test for
that.

This is a good approach to cleaning up a room. It may not be appropriate to
programming.

------
binaryapparatus
I am 100% pro this approach. Of course it won't work for 80% of companies with
rigid control and hierarchy but I never had much interest in working for such
companies.

Maybe I am too old but I remember days of programming being pure fun and maybe
it is not typical but I can choose such jobs even today. If it does not
sparkle there is no amount of money that can make me join the team.

Programming was (and is) the thing of passion and joy. If you don't have fun
you're holding it the wrong way. Having 'fill the gap' tasks is brilliant way
to keep the team engaged the right way. It won't work for sweatshops but why
would one work in such company in the first place? Money is no excuse just to
be clear in advance.

Unless it is thing of love and passion and fun it is not programming in the
first place.

------
d--b
To start acting as a manager is actually not to jump into the vacuums that you
see everywhere as a developper. Acting as a manager is to take a step back,
and help others fill in the vacuums.

------
LinuxBender
Let me take a look at our Jira queues.

Confirmed, leaving work unassigned doesn't get anything accomplished.

------
bpchaps
I don't understand how this would work reliably, honestly. My first impression
is that there are just too many variables involved. I can see this favoring
the "gotta get it now" crowd.

~~~
georgeglue1
Especially if employees know their manager/org does stuff like this, employees
will almost like bidders in a game theoretic auction; trying to keep flexible
schedules, predicting the likelihood/quality of other vacuums coming up,
evaluating how they stack up against their colleagues, etc..

I can imagine unhealthy situations where employees feel obliged to take on a
vacuum, or have to compete for a vacuum they don't actually want.

------
cpeterso
An alternate take on work voids and volunteering:

    
    
      Asking for volunteers (or implicitly relying on volunteers) is one of many 
      structures companies can choose to allocate work. Like many other minimally-
      structured structures, it tends to reinforce and amplify larger cultural
      inequities.
    

[http://sasha.wtf/relying-on-volunteering-is-
unfair/](http://sasha.wtf/relying-on-volunteering-is-unfair/)

------
hwstar
Getting a promotion to a good position requires all of the following:

1\. The company must be growing non-linearly and be strong financially. 2\.
You must have enough value to the company where if you leave you'll be
difficult to replace. 3\. Management prefers to promote from within.

If any one of these is missing, then the positions offered as promotions will
be sub-optimal.

#1 seems to be in short supply across a large swath of industries, and is the
main driver for lack of promotions offered these days.

------
CM30
One issue here; what if the people working in the organisation already have
too many things to work on and there's no one who feels they can take on this
task?

Seems like the article and its title assume that a workplace necessarily has
lulls between tasks (or perhaps more employees than there is work available).
By assigning people tasks, you can at least tell them that their new job is
more important than their current one, at least at this point in time.

------
WalterBright
In my corporate experience, only doing what you're told to by your manager is
the route to mediocre raises and rare promotions. Larger raises and faster
promotions come from identifying problems and solving them, i.e. not needing
to be micro-managed.

~~~
bitL
Large raises and faster promotions come from your perceived value and nowadays
is mostly achieved by networking and politics. Identifying problems and
solving them is often a threat to all levels above you, often managers play
games by introducing inefficiencies and then pretending to solve them slowly,
keeping their perceived utility and visibility high, and you identifying and
solving some of these poses an existential threat to their fiefdoms. If you
can identify/solve problems, start your own business and have your old company
becoming your customer instead.

~~~
WalterBright
In my experience, when layoff times came around, the managers would get rid of
those they didn't want any more, and it was always the deadwood, not the high
performers. I infer they viewed the deadwood as much more of a threat.

~~~
bitL
I've seen grade-A employees being kicked out during layoffs and deadwood
remaining, so YMMV. A lot of it depends on the company culture and on the
personal goals of managers and their ability to sell whatever they intend to
their higher ups.

------
jakobegger
Shouldn't someone ready to be a leader recognise the voids without them being
explicitly pointed out to them?

