I Told You Once

I once worked with a software development manager; let's call him Ralph. He was highly placed within the company, not a mere supervisor. Among Ralph's many endearing habits, he would send emails with terse answers to questions.

Want to know where a detailed description of a program was living? "That's in the most recent project ABC functional overview." It's your problem to find where that lives. Off you go to the shared drive. Here is a copy of the project ABC functional overview from five months ago. Is this the most recent? Don't ask Ralph; he just won't reply. In his world, if you look in the right place, which is the place he would put the document, it will be obvious. But don't get it wrong either, because Ralph will let you know how incompetent you are in front of whomever happens to be in the meeting.

Compounding this, he often began sentences with "Again, ..." Everyone in the room felt like he was saying, "Why is it necessary for me to tell you a second time, you blithering idiot?"

Ralph was not just a middle manager, he was also the Lord High Fixer for a lot of the company software. The Lord High Fixer needs an unbroken block of time to concentrate on the nasty problem only he can solve. At the same time, everyone knows to go to the Lord High Fixer to get information, much of which is not publicly available because the Lord High Fixer hoarded it. So the Lord High Fixer develops coping strategies to avoid having his job turn into Chief Answer Person, and making the experience of asking him a question entirely unpleasant is an oft-traveled route (And why, you ask, is a middle manager also doing hands-on work himself? Ah, that's a subject for another post).

Having a software background myself, I can also say there's something appealing about packing as much information into as few words as possible. I have fallen into this error myself, and it drives the Princess of Darkness batshit insane when I do. It really irritates me when an intellegent person, such as Princess, doesn't pick up my meaning. But when you're on the receiving end of this, you feel like you're being told you're stupid. I resolve today to cease this behavior.

Yes, it's tiresome when you are trying to solve a technical problem and you get bombed with requests for information. It is also tiresome when you have a client breathing down your neck for information and some dipwad expects you to parse his statements and retrace all the steps he took to find it rather than just make it easy for you to get the answer.

So how about this compromise: the people asking for information will make a reasonable attempt to look it up before bothering other people, and the person having information will, when asked, be patient and reasonably detailed in giving an answer or a pointer to an answer.

There are enough people outside of the company who can make your workday suck. We don't need co-workers making it worse.