Engineers are problem solvers. We are paid to analyze a situation and come up with the best possible solution to achieve the desired outcome. When management hands down a directive without context or justification, it’s toxic. At best, it prevents us from doing our job of understanding and executing. At worst, it causes us to wonder if the decision makers are competent. It erodes our confidence in the future of the company.

Side Slack conversations proliferate.

Why are we being asked to do this? It’s not even possible without totally rebuilding X.

It’s a horrible decision. They have no idea what they are doing.

It’s going to blow up in the company’s face in ten different ways. Management must be completely stupid.

One day we were told that QA and application engineers were going to merge to a single role. Suddenly, senior QA people were expected to be senior java developers, responsible for implementing features and writing clear, scalable code. Senior java developers were now expected to perform QA duties, from UI scripting to black box testing to fuzzing. Two different jobs were smashed together and it was chaotic. Our product defects went up immediately and it took over a year to correct. Turns out the reason for the change was some exec heard that writing tests for your application code was important.

Another time the company decided they were spending too much on the third-party logging solution they were using. It was well-loved by developers and was considered best-in-class. Instead they figured they’d save money by spinning up a team to host a “comparable” open source solution. It was a shit show. Log ingestion was often delayed by an hour or more, which made it useless.

The thing is, most likely management labored over this decision and it was the best one they could come up with given the constraints. Do they explain this to the engineers? Nope. They throw the decision over the wall in the form of a “shut up and do this” order. Guess what that does for morale? Fucks it. What they should do is provide the relevant context behind the decision to the engineers. Explain how the decision came to be. See if the engineers come up with any other solutions that might solve the problem in a better way. After all, in a small boat, everyone needs to pull on the oars in the same direction. If the person at the head of the boat is telling one side to push the oars and the other side to pull, the rowers might wonder what the point of rowing in circles is… when really the task is to turn the boat to the left.

I worked for a post series A startup a while back. We’d just been acquired by a big public company and my team was being leaned on to build out a new front end for our ad-serving platform. Throughout the project, we had a project manager (PM) who was brutal to work with. Her daily routine consisted of walking around the office and “checking in” with everyone. For me and the other people in the dev pit, it was a constant barrage of “Hey, just checking in! How’s that user sign-up flow going?” or “What’s up guys?!? When can I checkout those new dashboards?” or “We need to go speed mode on campaign builder — I promised it’d be done by next sprint.”

We all rolled our eyes, but eventually we learned she was just looking for lip service and played along.

Our new parent company was trying to force our ad server to scale in a way that it wasn’t designed for. As the classic software story goes, engineers were pulled in to “fix” the scaling problems, only to get hastily replaced when they couldn’t make the progress that our hilariously uninformed management expected. The consequence of this was poor ad performance and system stability, which mean customers cancelling their ad subscriptions in droves.

Cue our PM. She walked around the corner and stood in front of our team lead, who was staring at his screen trying to ignore her. “Hey, quick ask! Can you remove the cancel button from a user’s ad dashboard and replace it with a link to our contact page?”

He didn’t even make eye contact with her. “Nope.” He stood up and walked away while she watched him in disbelief.

She looked over at me. “I thought he he was supposed to do what I say.” She seemed thoroughly confused.

“Guess not?” I shrugged. She left.

We had a good laugh about it at lunch later that day. She stopped checking in so much after that and never repeated her ask to remove the cancel button.

UX is sacred.