A common saying states: "If you want something done right, do it yourself." In other words: "don't trust anyone other than yourself". Have you ever had a boss that didn't trust you to do things right? He probably "checked in" on you every few hours. That's called micro-managing and it happens because your boss doesn't trust you. This is but one example of this bad mentality and we display this distrust in many ways. Instead of doing everything ourselves, we should take responsibility for problems we see. A key part of this is to recognize that the people around us are a resource, not a hindrance. Once we see this, we can more effectively fix problems we face because we have others helping us.
The most powerful moment of Cliff Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg came after he had just spoken to the FBI about a hacker in his system. They refused to do anything about his hacker problem. It was in that moment that he realized it was his responsibility to make sure this guy was caught. The FBI, CIA, and NSA had all refused to do anything. So he took it upon himself. He didn't decide that if the hacker was going to get caught, he had to do it himself. Instead he used the resources at his disposal to make sure the hacker was eventually caught. A key thing he did was pester the FBI to do something. He did this because he knew they could get the guy, they just needed motivation. He didn't do it because he wanted to make sure they did it a certain way. This is in stark contrast to your micro-managing boss.
We will have similar decisions in our lives. If you see a bug in your companies' code, but not in the part you're responsible for, there are three things you can do. You could say, "It's not my problem, someone else will take care of it". Another option is to dive into the code for hours on end until you find it yourself, possibly breaking other things in the process. Or you can research the bug, tell the responsible programmer your findings and then follow up with him until it's fixed. The last option is obviously the best; you took responsibility for the bug, but realized others were more qualified to fix it and sought their help. If we all approach problems in this manner, our companies, relationships, and societies will be better off.
I like this post. We need to take responsibility and not assume that someone else is going to find and fix an issue.
ReplyDeleteMy last boss was a major micro manager. He wondered why we were always over budget. It came from his inability to delegate. As a result people never felt the need to do a good job because the boss would just redo it. Trust plays a crucial role in any company. You need to be able to trust those your work with in order to be efficient in any task.
ReplyDeleteGreat post, trusting others is a very important part of programming that often gets overlooked.
ReplyDeleteI like this post, we can't do everything for ourselves. We need to trust the power company because we can't usually generate our own power, but when our home has an outage we need to follow up until the problem is fixed. That's life, not just in technology.
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