Grumpy Coworker

Category: Productivity

  • Building Fast in the Wrong Direction: An AI Productivity Fairy Tale

    Oh good, another breathless LinkedIn post about how AI just 10x’d someone’s development velocity. Fantastic. You know what else moves fast? A semi truck in the mountains of Tennessee with brakes that have failed. Speed is great until you realize your only hope for survival is a runaway truck ramp.

    Runaway Truck Ramp
    Runaway Truck Ramp image from public domain pictures

    Here’s the thing nobody wants to admit at their AI productivity [ahem… self-congratulatory gathering]: AI doesn’t matter if you don’t have a clue what to build.

    I’ve watched teams use ChatGPT to crank out five different implementations of features nobody wanted in the time it used to take them to build one feature nobody wanted. Congratulations, you’ve quintupled your output of garbage. Your CEO must be so proud. Maybe you can have ChatGPT restyle your resume to look like VS Code or the AWS Console, but it’s not going to change the experience you have listed on it.

    Going fast in the wrong direction gets you to the wrong place faster. But it’s still the wrong place. You’re just confidently incorrect at scale now.

    Agile Saves You From Your Own Stupidity (Sometimes)

    You know why Agile actually works when it works? Not because of the stand-ups or the poker planning or whatever cult ritual your scrum master insists on. It works because it forces you to pause every couple weeks and ask “wait, is this actually the right thing?”

    Short iterations exist to limit the blast radius of your terrible decisions. When you inevitably realize you’ve been building the wrong thing, you’ve only wasted two weeks instead of six months. It’s damage control, not strategy.

    But sure, let’s use AI to speedrun through our sprints so we can discover we built the wrong thing in three days instead of ten. Efficiency!

    Product Strategy: The Thing You Skipped

    Here’s a wild idea: what if you actually figured out what to build before you built it?

    I know, I know. Product strategy and user research are boring. They don’t give you that dopamine hit of shipping code. They require talking to actual users, which is terrifying because they might tell you your brilliant idea is stupid.

    But you know what product strategy and research actually do? They narrow down your options. They give you constraints. They help you make informed bets instead of random guesses.

    Because here’s the math that AI evangelists keep missing: Improving your odds of success by building the right thing will always beat building the wrong things 10 times faster.

    Building the wrong feature in three days instead of two weeks doesn’t make you 5x more productive. It makes you 5x more wrong. You’ve just accelerated your march into irrelevance.

    AI as a Validation Tool, Not a Strategy Replacement

    Now, I’m not saying AI is useless. It’s actually pretty good at helping you validate ideas faster. Rapid prototyping, quick mockups, testing assumptions—yeah, that stuff is genuinely helpful.

    But AI can’t tell you what to validate. It can’t tell you which customer problem is worth solving. It can’t tell you if your market actually exists or if you’re just building another solution in search of a problem.

    That still requires thinking. Remember thinking? That thing we used to do before we decided to outsource our brains to autocomplete?

    The Uncomfortable Truth

    The dirty secret of software development has always been that most of our productivity problems aren’t technical. (See the reprint of the “No Silver Bullet” essay from 1986 in a collection of timeless project managements essays, The Mythical Man-Month) They’re strategic. We build the wrong things, for the wrong reasons, at the wrong time. (Ok, yes, they’re also communication and coordination problems… fortunately, we have Slack for that <insert eye roll emoji here>)

    AI speeds up the building part. Great. But if you’re speeding toward the wrong destination, you’re just failing faster.

    Maybe instead of celebrating how quickly you can ship features, you should figure out which features are worth shipping in the first place. Crazy thought, I know.

    But hey, what do I know? I’m just a grumpy coworker who thinks you should know where you’re going before you hit the gas.

    Now get back to work. And for the love of god, talk to your users and other humans instead of spending all day chatting with a chatbot that declares you a deity when you correct it.

  • Quiet Shitting: The Ancient Art of Paid Porcelain Time

    Look, we’ve seen a lot of workplace terms come and go. “Synergy.” “Agile.” “Growth hacking.” And now everyone’s clutching their pearls over “quiet quitting” like it’s some revolutionary Gen Z invention. Please. These kids discovered setting boundaries and suddenly you think they’re leading a communist revolution. You know what their grandparents invented? Quiet shitting.

    That’s right. For every thinkpiece about “acting your wage” and “doing the bare minimum,” there were three generations before the current one who perfected the art of the 45-minute bathroom break. And let me tell you, they didn’t need a TikTok to figure it out.

    Your grandfather worked in a factory for 32 years. You think he spent eight hours a day riveting widgets with a smile on his face? Hell no. He spent at least 90 minutes of every shift in that bathroom, and not because of the cafeteria meatloaf. He called it “decompression time.” Management called it “concerning.” His union called it “protected.”

    The bathroom break is the original quiet quit. It’s the Switzerland of workplace passive aggression: technically neutral, completely defensible, and occupied by people who just want to be left the hell alone.

    The Golden Age of Bathroom Avoidance

    Boomers love to talk about their work ethic, but nobody could stretch a bio-break like a 1970s middle manager with a newspaper and a grudge. These weren’t quick pit stops. These were expeditions. Lewis and Clark spent less time exploring the Louisiana Purchase than Clark Griswold’s peers spent in Stall 3 avoiding quarterly reviews.

    You’d see someone grab the sports section at 10:15 AM and know you wouldn’t see them again until 11:00. And God help you if you needed something from them. “Oh, Dave? Yeah, he’s in a meeting.” A meeting with his bowels and the crossword puzzle. Also, if you notice a section of the newspaper goes missing and then later reappears, just assume it’s touched the bathroom floor and/or been handled after a wipe.

    Gen X took it to new levels. They brought magazines. Then Game Boys. Then the first smartphones. One thing to watch out for… if they bring a change of shoes, they’re probably moving into that stall like its a studio apartment.


    The Economics of Excretion

    Here’s the math everyone knows but nobody talks about: if you take one 15-minute bathroom break every day beyond your actual biological needs, that’s 65 hours a year. At $25 an hour, you’re paying yourself an extra $1,625 annually to sit on a toilet and scroll through your phone.

    Your great-grandfather knew this. He just did it with a racing form instead of Instagram.

    The difference is, he felt vaguely guilty about it. He’d come back looking sheepish, maybe mention something about the chili from lunch. There was at least a performance of remorse. Now? Now people are writing Medium posts about “reclaiming your time” and “setting bathroom boundaries.”

    The Passive-Aggressive Olympics

    You know what the most passive-aggressive move is? The post-meeting bathroom break. Someone says something annoying in the conference room, and suddenly you need to “freshen up” for 20 minutes. It’s the workplace equivalent of leaving someone on read, except you’re getting paid for it.

    And the beauty is, it’s completely bulletproof. What’s your boss going to do? Install a timer? Monitor stall occupancy? Stand outside with a stopwatch? HR would have a field day. “Yes, officer, my manager was tracking my bowel movements” is one hell of a lawsuit waiting to happen. Yeah, I know that several companies with trillion dollar market caps basically do do this. Heh. “Do do.”


    The Modern Era

    Now we’ve got people working from home, and even that hasn’t stopped the tradition. We’ve been on Zoom calls where someone’s camera goes off and you just know they’re not “stepping away briefly.” They’re taking a full constitutional while technically still clocked in. It’s remote quiet shitting, and honestly, I respect the innovation. Just don’t flush off mu… oh no, Bob, your avatar lit up with that flushing sound.

    The real quiet quitters aren’t the ones doing the bare minimum at their desks. They’re the ones who’ve calculated exactly how long they can disappear without triggering a wellness check. They’re the ones who know which bathroom on which floor has the best cell service. They’re the institutional knowledge holders of strategic bowel timing.

    In Conclusion

    So before anyone tells me about how revolutionary it is to only do what you’re paid for, remember: your ancestors were pioneering workplace disengagement one bathroom break at a time, long before you could hashtag it.

    They just had the decency to pretend they had diarrhea.

  • The “Quick Call” Lie: A Field Guide to Time Theft

    Look, I need to talk about something that’s been grinding my gears since the invention of the telephone, but has reached absolutely apocalyptic levels in the Slack/Teams/Zoom era: the “quick call.”

    You know the one. It starts innocently enough:

    “Hey, got a minute for a quick call?”

    NO. No, I don’t. Because we both know it’s not going to be quick. It’s NEVER quick. It’s a lie we tell ourselves and each other, like “I’ll just have one drink” or “I’ll start going to the gym next Monday.”

    The Anatomy of the “Quick” Call

    Let’s break down what actually happens when someone suggests a “quick call”:

    Minute 0-3: You’re scrambling to find your headphones because they’ve mysteriously teleported to another dimension since you last used them. You finally locate them tangled with your phone charger in a knot that would impress a Boy Scout.

    Minute 3-5: The actual dialing/joining process. Because someone—and let’s be honest, it’s always Greg from Marketing—can’t figure out how to unmute, can’t find the link, or is “having audio issues.” We can land rovers on Mars but Greg can’t click the microphone icon.

    Minute 5-7: The small talk. “How was your weekend?” “Did you see the game?” “Crazy weather we’re having!” Nobody cares. We’re all pretending to care, but we’re actually screaming internally because we KNOW this was supposed to be quick and we’re already seven minutes in WITHOUT DISCUSSING THE ACTUAL TOPIC.

    Minute 7-12: Finally getting to the point, except the point could have been an email. It’s always something that could have been an email. “I just wanted to get your thoughts on this thing that’s not time-sensitive and has seventeen moving parts that I’m now explaining verbally while you frantically try to take notes instead of just READING THE DOCUMENT I COULD HAVE SENT.”

    Minute 12-20: The scope creep. “Oh, and while I have you…” NO. No, you don’t “have me.” You HAD me for a quick call. This is now a medium call approaching long-call territory, and I had things planned. Important things. Like staring blankly at my actual work while contemplating the heat death of the universe.

    Minute 20-25: The ending that won’t end. You’ve said goodbye three times. You’ve wrapped up twice. But someone keeps thinking of “one more thing.” It’s like trying to leave a party at your aunt’s house. The door is RIGHT THERE but somehow you’re still talking about her neighbor’s cat’s surgery.

    Minute 25-30: The post-call recovery period where you try to remember what you were doing before this “quick” call obliterated your flow state like a meteor hitting a sandcastle.

    The Real Problem

    Here’s the thing that really gets me: people who ask for “quick calls” have a fundamental misunderstanding of how human beings work. We’re not CPUs that can context-switch instantaneously. When you pull me out of deep work for your “quick call,” you’re not borrowing 5 minutes—you’re stealing 30-45 minutes of productivity because it takes that long to get back into the zone.

    And don’t even get me started on the “got a sec?” variation. A “sec” is ONE SECOND. If you need one second, send me a YES/NO question in chat. If you need more than that, you need to schedule time like a civilized human being who respects the space-time continuum.

    The Solution

    Schedule. The. Call. Put it on my calendar. Give me context about what we’re discussing. Let me prepare. Let me block the appropriate amount of time. Revolutionary concept, I know.

    And if you MUST have a synchronous conversation RIGHT NOW, at least have the decency to say “Hey, I need 30 minutes to discuss X, Y, and Z—do you have time now or should we schedule it?” Honesty! What a concept!

    The Book You Need

    If you’re the person who keeps asking for “quick calls,” you need to read Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life by Nir Eyal (Amazon affiliate link). It’s about managing distraction and respecting both your time and others’. Maybe it’ll help you realize that every interruption has a cost, and that cost is compounding faster than credit card debt.

    And if you’re the victim of constant “quick calls,” read it anyway. It might give you the tools—and the courage—to push back against this tyranny of stolen time.

    Now if you’ll excuse me, someone just Slacked me “got a minute?” and I need to go update my résumé.

    This rant brought to you by someone who just lost 47 minutes to a “quick sync” about something that was already explained perfectly well in a three-paragraph email.

  • The Micromanagement Death Spiral: How to Turn Your Best People Into Zombies

    This post somewhat inspired by Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter (Amazon affiliate link)

    Look, I get it. You’re a manager. You’re responsible for outcomes. Things need to get done right. But let me tell you what happens when you decide that “managing” means hovering over your senior engineers like a helicopter parent watching their kid cross the street for the first time.

    You know Sarah? The one who shipped three major features last quarter while mentoring two juniors? Yeah, she doesn’t give a shit anymore. And it’s your fault.

    Here’s What You Did

    You hired intelligent, capable people. People with track records. People who’ve been solving complex problems since before you got promoted. Then you proceeded to treat them like they just graduated from a coding bootcamp yesterday.

    Every. Single. Decision. needs your approval now. They can’t choose a library without a meeting. They can’t refactor a function without running it by you first. They can’t take a bathroom break without wondering if you’ll ask why they were gone for seven minutes.

    Congratulations! You’ve invented the least efficient way to run a team since someone thought “let’s make all decisions by committee.”

    The Insult You’re Not Seeing

    When you micromanage senior people, here’s what you’re actually saying:

    “I don’t trust your judgment.”

    “I think you’re going to screw this up.”

    “Despite your years of experience, I know better than you about literally everything.”

    These are smart people. They hear you loud and clear. And you know what smart people do when you tell them they’re not smart enough? They stop trying to be smart.

    Welcome to Learned Helplessness Town, Population: Your Entire Team

    You wanted control? Cool, you got it. Now enjoy fielding 47 questions a day about things your team used to handle themselves.

    • “Should I use a switch statement or if-else?” (They know. They’re asking because last time they didn’t ask, you “had concerns.”)
    • “Which color should this button be?” (They’ve designed 100 interfaces. They’re asking because you changed it last time.)
    • “Can I go ahead and fix this obvious bug?” (It’s a two-line fix. They’re asking because apparently that requires Product sign-off now.)

    You’ve trained them that initiative gets punished. Compliance gets rewarded. So now nobody shows initiative. They’re just waiting for you to tell them what to do, exactly how to do it, and when to breathe during the process.

    This is learned helplessness, and you’re the world’s most effective teacher.

    Your Best People Are Already Gone (Mentally)

    Here’s the thing about talented people: they have options. Lots of them.

    Sarah’s not arguing with you anymore. She’s not pushing back on your “suggestions” (demands). She’s not bringing new ideas to the table. She just nods, says “sure thing,” and does exactly what you asked—nothing more, nothing less.

    She’s quiet-quit on actually caring about the work. She’s doing the bare minimum to keep her job while her resume is out there getting interviews. Every recruiter message on LinkedIn looks more appealing than it used to.

    You think you’re getting compliance. You’re getting malicious compliance at best, and a resignation letter at worst.

    The Really Stupid Part

    The absolute kicker? You hired these people specifically because they could handle complex work independently. That was literally the job description. “Self-starter.” “Takes ownership.” “Minimal supervision required.”

    Then you proceeded to eliminate every condition necessary for those qualities to exist.

    You wanted ownership? You can’t give someone ownership while controlling every decision.

    You wanted innovation? You can’t innovate when every experiment needs a risk assessment and three levels of approval.

    You wanted engagement? People don’t engage with work when they’re just following orders.

    What You Should Do Instead

    Here’s a radical idea: Let people do their jobs.

    Set clear goals. Provide context. Get out of the way. Be available when they need you. Trust that the experienced professionals you hired are, in fact, experienced professionals.

    If someone’s screwing up consistently, address that person. Don’t punish your entire team with process because one person can’t be trusted.

    And for the love of everything holy, stop checking in every two hours. They know you don’t trust them. You’re not subtle.

    The Bottom Line

    Micromanagement isn’t management. It’s abdication of management dressed up as diligence. Real management is about enabling people to do their best work, not ensuring they can’t do anything without you.

    Your best people don’t need a babysitter. They need a leader who trusts them, supports them, and gets the hell out of their way.

    But sure, keep doing what you’re doing. I’m sure the constant turnover and the team of disengaged zombies is exactly what the company had in mind when they promoted you.

    Filed under: things your team is thinking but too professional to say to your face

  • Meeting Reminders Kill Time, Too

    tl;dr: Use 5-minute meeting reminders unless people have more than a five minute walk/travel time to the meeting site.

    The Problem

    Copyright: neyro2008 / 123RF Stock Photo

    Meeting reminders are just as much an impediment to productivity as meetings themselves are. Ok, fine, meetings aren’t always an impediment to productivity, but they do prevent attendees from accomplishing their own individual tasks, etc…

    Anyway… back to meeting reminders. What happens when your Outlook pops up a reminder? One of several things happens:

    • You completely ignore the reminder.
    • You acknowledge the reminder but go back to what you were doing.
    • You dismiss the reminder, hoping that you’ll actually get another for this meeting you’re supposed to attend.
    • You fully acknowledge the reminder, attempt to go back to work until meeting time, but you focused on not missing the meeting.

    As you can see, the only option that gives you a solid chance of making the meeting means that your focus cannot be on something else. Add to this the setup/teardown time involved in switching contexts from your normal tasks and being engaged in the meeting. (This assumes that you are only going to meetings that you actually engage in—I’m sure that’s not an issue for anyone, right?)

    A Solution

    All of this brings me back to the problem of the meeting reminder. Think of the meeting reminder as a part of the meeting as well. If you have a 15-minute and no one has to travel more than a few feet to attend (or just has to boot up GoToMeeting), then don’t make the reminder 15 minutes as well (or worse, AN HOUR before). A five-minute reminder should be enough for a 15-minute meeting. Realistically, five minutes should be adequate for anything that isn’t going to block out a significant portion of the day.

    Actually, no… reserved reminder more than 5 minutes for abnormally early meeting start times. And make them end-of-day reminders for the previous day.

  • Workers Want Recognition!

    I spent a long part of my career working for a company whose CEO was huge on the power of recognition. (He even has a new book out about it. And it’s true; you can’t get very far if you don’t give your workers the recognition for doing a good job. Unfortunately, for knowledge workers, being recognized for stepping up to the plate to hit a home run is the tip of the iceberg. Recognizing someone for doing a good job is nice, but isn’t the expectation that workers will do a good job? For example if you’re renovating a home and want to change floors, getting a Resin Flooring Company is a good option to get good workers.

    Ok, maybe you are recognizing people for doing a “good job” but a great job. You’re still on a hedonic treadmill here. If a “great job” is truly exceptional, then you aren’t rewarding your employees that often. When a “great job” is routine, then why aren’t you shifting your expectations and paying accordingly?

    Spot rewards are nice, but can be demotivating

    There is nothing like found money (or praise), but it generally is spent quickly. (Unless your spot rewards are allowing the employee to take a year off or retire, but that would seem to defeat the purpose.)

    If you’re leaning on spot rewards, then you may be training your employees to set gradually lower expectations, then beat them for rewards. Oh, no raises this year? Well, I can always game the rewards system!

    Invest in people

    Make permanent commitments to the reward you’re giving by delivering a raise and higher expectations. This is excellent, and I would like to see this continue… in expectation of this continued performance, here’s a larger financial commitment from us.

    Give your people whatever tools they need to perform at a higher level. Offer the training. Provide educational resources. Send them to conferences. Allocate time for them to develop themselves. If you can’t afford a 2-5% contribution to potentially improve an employee by 10%, then you may not have any idea what you’re doing with that employee. Maybe you shouldn’t be in the business of employing those people and should find someone else to hire them and pay that company for effective use of those resources.

    Invest in capacity

    Stop skirting by just barely making your commitments. If you don’t have excess capacity, the minute something goes wrong, you’re in trouble. The alternative is depending on heroics from your employees. Heroics are like firefighting: Yes, they put the fire out, but now everything is water-damaged, and your firefighters will get sloppy and exhausted if used too often.

    Invest in figuring out what is reasonable to do

    Yes, you are in competition with everyone else who wants to please your customers, but all those customers you’re gaining are going to bail if your people break down and can’t perform.

    Trust

    You cannot put a price tag on trust.

    Trust your employees to:

    • appreciate the capability you’ve given them.
    • be capable of working wherever.
    • work whenever they need to.

    If you don’t know what results you want or the value of those results, keeping employees in the office from 8 to 5 is an expensive way to hide that fact. If you can’t trust an employee to get things done, then it doesn’t matter where they’re working, they’re going to make a fool of you at some point, and it will probably take you longer to figure it out if your measure of productivity is whether they’re in the seat or not.

    Risk vs Volatility

    As Taleb mentions in Black Swan, there’s a difference between risk and volatility. Trusting your employees seems like a risk, but you’re really lowering volatility of bad experiences near term in exchange for systemic risk of trust issues. So are all these other investments in your employees. Not making the investments may be penny-wise, but they’re pound foolish.

  • Project Math, or How to Double Project Timeline

    Project math really follows its own rules. You don’t get linear benefits from adding to the number of people on a project. Sometimes it seems like throwing four people at a project makes the project span 4 months, when a single person could have completed the work in a couple of weeks.

    Yes, if you have one thousand letters to write, and each worker can write their own letters, this works. That sort of thing might linearly scale.

    But on most projects, your communication lines are O(n^2) (actually, (n^2-n)/2)… 2 -> 1, 3 -> 3, 4 -> 6. If you’re not doing mostly independent pieces, you’re creating an unofficial management position for every 2-3 people you sign up. Realistically, 6 would be 15 units and 12 would be 66 units, so a mere doubling in time is really optimistic unless the 6 extra workers are making sure that project managers and customers don’t bug the workers actually building the car.

    Worse still, usually, the extra 6 workers will need to be brought up to speed mid-project by the other 6 workers on top of introducing the extra ongoing communication complexity.

    In other words, (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

  • Why Isn’t “The Process” Followed?

    “We have a ticketing process for all of these things. Anything you do needs to go through that.”

    The assumption is that, by going through a proper ticketing process, every request will be funneled through some sort of prioritizing and that that will minimize disruption.

    Imagined scenario–total support/development time, 30 minutes:

    • Person needing a change to something files a ticket.
    • Magical “prioritization” takes place.
    • Technical worker executes in perfect order from off the queue.

    Real attempt at following the process, 2 days:

    • Person needing a change contacts a random technical person.
    • Some effort to redirect or funnel through ticketing process is made.
    • Urgency communicated.
    • Another manager included on email chain, all the while missing managers who also need to be involved.
    • Random forwarding of emails to managers who also need to be involved.
    • Restart of the story from the beginning.
    • Someone else is left out of the loop.
    • .
    • .
    • .
    • Something blows up in production and things have to be reset to where they were before.
    • Crisis averted.
    • Technical person tries to remember where they left off.
    • Technical person spends time reorienting to the original task.
    • .
    • .
    • Technical person takes care of what should have been a 30 minute task in the first place.

     

  • How Long Will This Simple Concept Take to Build?

    How long does the business person asking for it think it will take? Double that.

    Is there a model system that it is being compared to? Double your estimate again. Double your estimate again if it’s being compared to more than one system.

    Is it the design going to undergo audits for standards or compliance? Add 50% for each.

    Does Agile mean “work before requirements are figured out in a process that’s really Waterfall”? Add all the effort up until your last new specification to the end of the project timeline.

    Is “concept” or “pilot” being used in the place of “live production product that will be expected to scale and configure from day 1”? Double your estimate again.

    Congratulations! You now have a very conservative estimate for how much effort things will take.

  • One Reason Why a Programmer Falls Behind

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