Good Job

There have been a few instances of managers just regurgitating information, but when I think about it, I guess that’s just how the world is. Someone can report back to their manager and the manager has to trust what they say. Then that manager feeds back to their manager, and so on.  I guess you can’t expect them to verify all the information. That’s why you have a hierarchy and delegate, and get information fed back to you.

It’s quite funny when it reaches Director level, because I’m sure they literally have no idea what certain things mean because they won’t have more than a basic understanding of how software is developed. 

There was a really urgent bug fix, and I volunteered to do it. It wasn’t immediately obvious what the problem was, and I was getting a bit lost trying to debug it. Recreating it was easy, understanding why it wasn’t working was tricky.

Given the urgency, I requested help. I managed to get one of my close colleagues to help. He did point me in the right direction; he pointed out something I had overlooked. Then I came up with the theory of why the bug was occurring, and I was correct. At that point, fixing it was actually trivial.

He had to give feedback to my manager to confirm that he had helped, but he tried to make sure I got credit by saying that I did “a good job”. I know this because he screenshotted the Slack conversation and sent it to me.

I then received a message from my manager stating I had done “a fantastic job”. A day later, the Development Director messages me saying that she understands I have done “a cracking job”.

I love how the adjective basically increased in importance as it went up the chain: good->fantastic->cracking.

I did do a good job from a certain perspective. I did show good decision-making by requesting help to ensure the work was done on time. It definitely worked out for the better. 

Also, another developer should have actually picked this work up, but I detected his reluctance. It was one of those where it was quite late in the week, and we had to fix it with some urgency. He didn’t want the pressure/stress and responsibility. I did step up, and it was a bit more complicated than I initially thought, so I definitely mugged myself off there. 

I’d like to think I would volunteer for things like this anyway, but I am trying to be the centre of attention in order to force my manager to give me that promotion he hinted at. This has worked well, because the Development Director has been told about it.