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It has been 0 days since I last had this conversation (lemmy.ml)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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Manager: We (meaning you) need to do task A. How long will it take?

Me: Task A will take X days to do.

Manager: That seems awful long.

Me: How long do you think it should take?

Manager: It surely could not take any longer than Y days.

Me: Ok, it seems you have an answer to your question then.

Later:

Manager: It’s been Y days, why isn’t task A done yet?

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[–] 63 points 3 months ago (16 children)

You agreed with their timeline that is why you keep having these conversations.

Stand firm only your timeline and when they push back remind them that you are the engineer doing the work if the wait it done to their timeline then they should hire more people.

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  • [–] 27 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    Brb, hiring more wifes so our baby takes less than nine months to come

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Luckily software development is not pregnancy.

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  • [–] [S] 19 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (9 children)

    Something that was difficult to capture in the post is the sheer level of sarcasm in my tone when I ‘agree’ to their timeline.

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  • [–] 23 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (7 children)

    [Not the original commenter]

    Sarcasm is not a great way to communicate in general, and it's especially not a good look in the workplace.

    I get this is the only glimpse we have of the situation and perhaps your history has taught you that this is the only way to move forward with this person, so dont tahe this to hesrt if so... but from just this post here you are the one contributing most to the poor communication and planning.

    Addition: well, I kinda missed the community you posted in. My bad! Feel free to ignore this unsolicited piece of advice.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago (6 children)

    I deeply dislike sarcasm. It's neither funny nor helpful.

    There was a guy I worked with that was pretty much always sarcastic.[1]. I'd ask him if he'd written the run book yet and he'd say like "Yes, it's written in the style of a sonnet with hand drawn illustrations", and I'd be like "I don't know if that means you wrote it or not". Everything with him took extra steps because his communication was such a swamp of insincerity.

    [1] well, when I asked him to stop being sarcastic he said it wasn't sarcasm. He was merely being ironic. Nonsense.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Just take his word as straight as you can make it. Mail to management that Mr. Sarcasm (in CC) said the document was written with added graphics. Then wait for the inevitable "I didn't mean it like that".

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I have a similar coworker. Tries to be funny with sarcasm but that doesn’t translate well with slack messages, and he ends up sounding like an asshole instead.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago*

    You may be correct but I've seen this work out before. You say you take x days, manager mentions " but that guy says he takes y days!!" in which makes you either slow in comparison or the other guy is a liar or makes stuff sloppy. Then you say " from my experience is x days" in which either the manager says you're wrong or he goes to the other guy to do in y days, and when you look at the thing done in y days has a technical debt equivalent to the height of Niagara falls. And you know you will have to clean this later. At some point I walked away, sometimes managers just want a yes man, and I am straight up not that.

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