dp.cx blog

Nobody enjoys being on the receiving end of bad news. That part is obvious. What's less obvious is how much worse bad news gets when the person delivering it optimizes for their own comfort instead of yours.

A feature request came through on my team while I was pulled into another project. The ask was simple - expand notifications so everyone on a team got them, not just people who had directly interacted with the item.

The last post in this series ended with a line I wanted to come back to: managers - especially first-line managers in more hierarchical orgs - are not always empowered to change the systems they're operating in. They're functions of those systems too, and I think that changes how the earlier posts about curiosity and framing land.

The last two posts in this series have been about curiosity - what it looks like when people have it and what happens when the environment kills it. A friend responded to the second one with something I've been thinking about since: the framing issue.

A senior engineer on my team is leaving. Not leaving the company - just moving to another group internally. On paper, it's a lateral move that doesn't change much for the rest of us. In practice, it changes a lot.

I said yes to everything for the first few years. An extra project, a meeting I had no reason to attend, a feature request that didn't fit the system - I'd take it on. I thought that's what being a good teammate looked like - being available, being willing, being the person who doesn't push back.

I started writing this blog in my final days of employment for a company whose name I will mask as "Education Shack" (to protect both the innocent and guilty), reflecting on my 25 month tenure there. I decided to hold off on posting it, until I had time to detox from the negativity that weighed me down.