> When asking questions of your team, it can help to (separately) ask the same question of multiple individuals. The difference in answers can be illuminating. [...] Ask questions of your boss, your peers, stakeholders, and anyone else that might have useful information.
Be careful with this. Something I've seen at least a few times, and it's always gone badly...
1. A manager (or exec) has real experts on their staff telling them one thing.
2. The manager not only doesn't know enough about the domain, but they don't know how good their own people are.
3. The manager goes and consults someone outside who they think is more expert (e.g., someone they know who worked for a company that pays better, or who is, say, a professor of what the manager thinks is the domain).
4. The outside 'expert' makes some small offhand remark without realizing how big a question it was, or shoots off their mouth without having hardly any accurate information about the actual situation. (ProTip: Professional analysis is different thing than casual recreational chattering on HN.)
5. Manager comes back and overrides the team, based on what the outside 'expert' said.
6. Bad decision is implemented, morale is destroyed, the good people leave, and (AFAIK) that manager doesn't get referrals from the people who left.
I once kinda had a variation on "I know, I'll ask the top professor!" happen to me, before I even joined the company.
After doing very well in interviews for a high-profile startup, I got a job offer, to name which engineering role I wanted.
So I said their research-ish group, to work on what I thought was a blind spot in the ambitious thing they were doing.
Someone in the research-ish group declined (which, OK, it's their call), but it soured me on the entire company, so I declined their offer for any other role.
Much later (maybe after the company folded), I heard from one of the execs, that they had actually liked my idea about the blind spot. But they thought they should go get the most expert professor on what they thought was the topic.
But when they brought in what they thought was the world expert, they were very unimpressed.
(On that new frontier topic, I didn't have much public credentials yet in it, but I could've told them that they picked their 'expert' from what might have been the most toxic department of posturing careerist weasels in the entire very broad field. :)
> When asking questions of your team, it can help to (separately) ask the same question of multiple individuals. The difference in answers can be illuminating. [...] Ask questions of your boss, your peers, stakeholders, and anyone else that might have useful information.
Be careful with this. Something I've seen at least a few times, and it's always gone badly...
1. A manager (or exec) has real experts on their staff telling them one thing.
2. The manager not only doesn't know enough about the domain, but they don't know how good their own people are.
3. The manager goes and consults someone outside who they think is more expert (e.g., someone they know who worked for a company that pays better, or who is, say, a professor of what the manager thinks is the domain).
4. The outside 'expert' makes some small offhand remark without realizing how big a question it was, or shoots off their mouth without having hardly any accurate information about the actual situation. (ProTip: Professional analysis is different thing than casual recreational chattering on HN.)
5. Manager comes back and overrides the team, based on what the outside 'expert' said.
6. Bad decision is implemented, morale is destroyed, the good people leave, and (AFAIK) that manager doesn't get referrals from the people who left.
I once kinda had a variation on "I know, I'll ask the top professor!" happen to me, before I even joined the company.
After doing very well in interviews for a high-profile startup, I got a job offer, to name which engineering role I wanted.
So I said their research-ish group, to work on what I thought was a blind spot in the ambitious thing they were doing.
Someone in the research-ish group declined (which, OK, it's their call), but it soured me on the entire company, so I declined their offer for any other role.
Much later (maybe after the company folded), I heard from one of the execs, that they had actually liked my idea about the blind spot. But they thought they should go get the most expert professor on what they thought was the topic.
But when they brought in what they thought was the world expert, they were very unimpressed.
(On that new frontier topic, I didn't have much public credentials yet in it, but I could've told them that they picked their 'expert' from what might have been the most toxic department of posturing careerist weasels in the entire very broad field. :)