> Now if my manager asks me to do tasks that I believe add no value to the team or business, I’ll politely say no.
This is the wrong lesson to take from this situation.
If you start saying no to tasks assigned by your manager, you are not going to get promoted. You’re going to end up on PIP track for insubordination.
The appropriate response is to communicate. The OP arrived in this situation because they didn’t communicate anything about promotion expectations for two years. Discuss your desire to take on more important tasks in those 1 on 1 meetings and do it early. The fatal mistake in this blog post was waiting two long years before revealing the desire to pursue promotion, then being surprised that past performance did not meet expectations for something that was never discussed. You need to be periodically asking for feedback.
A perfect manager would have brought up the question and asked if promotion was a goal earlier on. However, in my experience this conversation is a lot more contentious than I assumed as some people prefer to be comfortable in their role and interpret unprompted promotion discussions as uninvited pressure or a subtle threat that it’s “up or out”. As an employee, you can’t wait around for your manager to bring up topics you want to discuss. You have to state your goals and ask for alignment.
During a face2face with my n+2, he once told me « manage your manager ».
I discovered later that he had been forced to hire my n+1 but did not like him at all. And that the message was basically: « he is a bozo whereas you a competent engineer. Don’t be fooled by the organization chart. »
So sometimes saying no to your n+1 is totally in line with your n+2 :)
I’ve seen a situation like this. The n+2 changed jobs, leaving the employee reporting to an n+1 who now hated them and no n+w to back them up.
I’m with the other commenter: If you find yourself in a situation this dysfunctional, you’ve already lost. Blowing off your boss to appease your skip level isn’t guaranteed to work out, even if the skip level likes you.
Either way, that’s not relevant to this blog post. The author said they were just going to say “no” to assigned work, which isn’t going to work out.
By the time a company is that dysfunctional, why bother? Just do the minimum to get paid.
I mean it. I want to work for a company where everyone is working towards the common goal of making the company profitable. But there comes a point where the company is overrun by politics and selfish and harmful decisions.
By the time dysfunctional company politics empower a "bozo", why should I stress or put any care into such a company? I'll just do the minimum.
Does anyone have any advice on how to politely say "I like the company, I want to stay, but I don't like my current work and if it doesn't change for the better I'm going to leave in 6-months".
I once tried to say this as politely as possible, but I think I might have been too polite and tactful and they didn't understand. I had a date in mind, and had a conversation 6-months, 3-months, and 1-month before I left. When I announced my departure they tried to get me to stay.
I personally don't think ultimatums are a tool that you should ever employ in an employment situation outside of collective action.
You can just leave off the ultimatum and attempt to improve your situation by communicating it in a way that is directly actionable (I'd like to work on X instead of Y, can you arrange that?). You'll have your own internal deadlines of course, but you shouldn't communicate them.
Sounds like what you are really trying to say is "I want to change teams".
Or maybe "I want to work on ____ new project, and my working this would be beneficial to the business because ____". But you have to have a real case for it and for why you are the right person for it
In a similar boat right now. The org is good. So is the culture. The manager is also good. But the work....! Neither learning something nor finding any alignment. Really confused.
Saying "no" can get you into trouble in a hierarchy. There are many ways leading to no without saying "no", such as:
• I'll look into it
• I'll see what I can do
• I'll review that right away
This isn't me saying "say these things", I'm just pointing out this is an age-old problem, and saying "no" inwardly is different than saying it outwardly. Various ways of inquiring about options are also commonplace.
The solution is to have a conversation with your manager about the work you want to take on, not to play word games where you pretend to take on a task but don’t do it.
If you say you’ll review something or look into it, you still have to follow through on it. Using those phrases to dodge the work isn’t much different than failing to do the work. It will be noticed
If I tell someone to do thing A and they look into it and decide to not do it, the reason better be a whole lot better than I didn’t feel like it or I wouldn’t be promoted if I did that.
> If you start saying no to tasks assigned by your manager, you are not going to get promoted. You’re going to end up on PIP track for insubordination.
I've had a lot of success in asking "are you asking me to do this or telling me", when I've been tasked with something I think is extremely dumb.
If the response is "I'm asking", then I will usually respond with some variation of "can you assign it to someone else, or better yet, throw the task in the garbage".
If the response is "I'm telling you", then I'll go on a spiel about how I think it's incredibly stupid and the people involved in this decision are bad at their jobs, then get on and do it.
But if you're reading this, there is a good chance you are American, so take this advice with a massive grain of salt as I'm not. The culture here in NZ sounds extremely different to almost everything I've read on this forum.
I think it is a wrong take of what he said. There are many cases when you can say no to small tasks or projects if you can prove they are low value and there are better items on the list. I do that all the time and none of my managers had a problem with it, in the past decade most of my managers let me pick what I want to work on because they know I can prioritize better than they can.
I never saw someone saying no without a reason and if there is a reason, then there is a discussion around it, one can be right or wrong about it but it is usually easy to clarify and move on. It is not the "no" or a spoiled 5 year kid, it is the "no" of an experienced professional that values their time and priorities.
In many occasions, if there's a proposal for something very stupid or pointless I've found it's better to just say "yes", knowing full well the thing will never get done. The manager didn't really want the thing. He wanted a good happy meeting and to hear "yes".
> Looking back, I realized I had worked on a lot of low-impact projects — tasks that made no impact on users and no impact on the team, like updating outdated libraries. The old library worked fine without any updates. Updating it took weeks of my time but delivered zero value to the team or business. I did it simply because my manager told me to.
> Early in my career, I said “yes” often. As I got more experience, I learned when to say “no.”
-----
I'd hate to be the one who refused updating the libraries which caused the security breach and significant loss of data, reputation and money.
Then again, this person's job is to focus on their career. Their manager told them
> Because… some lack business value. These tasks aren’t business priorities and had no impact on customers and other teams
So if those "some" include upgrades, then I would say it's rational for the employee to focus on tasks that are going to get them a promotion.
I don't agree with that myself, I agree with you that upgrades are important, but this person is going to get a promotion through doing whatever their manager wants, and that apparently doesn't include upgrades.
The unfortunate reality of “creating impact” is that visible features in product teams will always be measured higher as compared to work that has 2nd or 3rd order effects that are hard to quantify.
What company has ever been seriously harmed by a security breach?
I'm clearly a bit nihilistic, but I've never seen a case where it matters. If a company leaks the information of millions of people there is, at most, a small financial cost and stock prices keeps going up.
Maybe that's true once companies are too big to fail or avoid. But small companies may face existential risk [0]. Even big companies like Sony can lose a lot of money despite recovering in the long term.
> I'd hate to be the one who refused updating the libraries which caused the security breach and significant loss of data, reputation and money.
The trick is to be working on a different project when that happens. Then it's someone else's fault.
Basically, your career advancement can be slow (if you do the technical work that is necessary to prevent problems, but "has no business value" from the perspective of the management) or fast (if you outrun the problems), but there is no medium speed. If you want a career, you need to commit to it fully.
> Looking back, I realized I had worked on a lot of low-impact projects — tasks that made no impact on users and no impact on the team, like updating outdated libraries. The old library worked fine without any updates. Updating it took weeks of my time but delivered zero value to the team or business. I did it simply because my manager told me to.
It's all nice and good until you're stuck with an EOL version of Spring, migrating to something newer is a gargantuan task that's measured in months so ofc nobody does it and as a consequence the project startup is slow and it eats resources, some libraries are incompatible and there are bugs that will not get solved and CVEs just pile up. Whereas if you update things constantly (or at least monthly), the deltas and breakages between any two states of the system and its dependencies will be way easier to manage.
You can prioritize what and who should do what, but I don't think you can categorically describe certain work as below someone, if they're good at it (assuming nothing urgent elsewhere) and it has a positive impact.
> “You’re doing great work,” my manager replied calmly. “But I have to stack-rank the team, and those tasks aren’t staff-level. Because… some lack business value. These tasks aren’t business priorities and had no impact on customers and other teams. Also, at the staff level, you need to work across teams, influence broader decisions, and build visibility beyond just our team.”
At that point:
* if it's not a golden handcuffs situation, might be easier to find another company to prosper in
* if it is, then yeah, you have to play their game if you care about promotions
* or just do good work where you're at, no matter what their myopic incentives say
A lot of words , and not as direct as they could be, to say "work on what is going to advance your personal goals."
If you are a careerist and working on your boss's pet projects is going to advance that, then say yes whether or not they have "business value." (If they aren't though, then work on something else.)
If you are an early employee / significant shareholder, then absolutely do what has "business value" and nothing else. That could be boring library updates or it could be something else.
Seems pretty awful that the manager let him work on software upgrades for two years without telling him that work would not lead to the promotion he was clearly planning on.
> without telling him that work would not lead to the promotion he was clearly planning on.
The way I read it, he waited two years to express his desire to pursue promotion.
The manager saw the topic as a starting point for the promotion discussion and tried to explain what steps to take to get there.
The employee saw the discussion as the end point of his unrevealed promotion quest and was surprised that his history alone was not aligned with promotion exportations.
This all could have been clarified with a simple conversation 1-2 years ago expressing intent to pursue promotion and asking what it would take to get there.
This is how I read it too. What's more, it looks like they're interested in going senior -> staff; at all Large Tech Companies, senior is a perfectly reasonable "terminal" role for a SWE, and many SWEs don't want to get promoted to staff. (Staff SWE is a different job from senior SWE; you might not want want to do that job, and that's typically fine.)
So I think the lesson here is wrong too - when the manager said
> These tasks aren’t business priorities and had no impact on customers and other teams
that didn't mean they were worthless tasks - just that they weren't business priorities and had no impact on customers or other teams. Which is probably true(ish - I would have phrased it very differently if I were their manager).
Improving the release process is great, and helps the team a ton - and indirectly helps customers by enabling the team to ship faster. This is incredibly valuable! And at the right scale, it can be a staff job: at my Large Tech Company, I know several people that have been promoted to staff SWE for this kind of work, but it's for systems that hundreds of SWEs work on. I also know people that have been promoted to senior SWE for this kind of work - these are systems that tens of SWEs work on. It sounds like this example was more like that - this person was doing a good senior SWE job, and the manager didn't see any reason to course correct given that they had given no signal they wanted to get promoted.
Managers should figure out plans with their employees. It is too easy for someone focused on one thing to get lost in something that doesn't matter. It is your manager job to stop from doing that.
note that often preventing problems is not rewarded. Putting out a fire you caused is. Good managers will help you explain why this not obviously useful thing is valuable because of the proplem it prevented.
Nice post, really relatable. It also feels like a management miss. If someone spends years modernizing and only finds out later it “doesn’t count,” that should have been clarified early on.
Tech debt work absolutely adds value, it just rarely gets measured or recognized. Maybe that is one reason so many companies struggle over time, they keep skipping payments on their tech debt interest.
As a manager you may have 10 people reporting to you. Some do more important work, some do less important work, but when you are considering them for promotions there are other factors too. I am not talking about promotions from junior dev to regular or regular to senior, I am talking about promotions to positions where they are responsible for other people. In my almost 30 years working in IT in multiple companies I found that most good technical people are not good managers; similarly most managers are technically bad. Best managers are the ones that Steve Jobs described in one of his famous interviews (I will leave the pleasure of having him tell it, it is worth spending the 3 minutes).
In any case, there may be others doing more important work and there may be others better suited for promotions. It is a zero sum game, the number of people, positions and promotions is always limited so if X is promoted, Y cannot be and if X is a better one for the promotion, Y will have to either wait, move on or keep doing what they do.
> These tasks aren’t business priorities and had no impact on customers and other teams
...the author has reached the wrong conclusion from this. The problem is they weren't able to articulate why the modernization tasks were business priorities, not that the modernization wasn't a business priority in the first place.
If the tech debt is problematic, fixing it will presumably bring a number of benefits (faster development cycles, reduced defect rates, etc). They were doing the wrong work - they were doing a terrible job explaining why that work was necessary.
In many ways, tech debt and modernization is a near guaranteed way to have business impact, in a way product work is not. If you're at Meta and you figure out how to save 1% of total CPU time on the server by fixing some tech debt you can expect to be showered with money.
Readit News
This is the wrong lesson to take from this situation.
If you start saying no to tasks assigned by your manager, you are not going to get promoted. You’re going to end up on PIP track for insubordination.
The appropriate response is to communicate. The OP arrived in this situation because they didn’t communicate anything about promotion expectations for two years. Discuss your desire to take on more important tasks in those 1 on 1 meetings and do it early. The fatal mistake in this blog post was waiting two long years before revealing the desire to pursue promotion, then being surprised that past performance did not meet expectations for something that was never discussed. You need to be periodically asking for feedback.
A perfect manager would have brought up the question and asked if promotion was a goal earlier on. However, in my experience this conversation is a lot more contentious than I assumed as some people prefer to be comfortable in their role and interpret unprompted promotion discussions as uninvited pressure or a subtle threat that it’s “up or out”. As an employee, you can’t wait around for your manager to bring up topics you want to discuss. You have to state your goals and ask for alignment.
So sometimes saying no to your n+1 is totally in line with your n+2 :)
I’m with the other commenter: If you find yourself in a situation this dysfunctional, you’ve already lost. Blowing off your boss to appease your skip level isn’t guaranteed to work out, even if the skip level likes you.
Either way, that’s not relevant to this blog post. The author said they were just going to say “no” to assigned work, which isn’t going to work out.
I mean it. I want to work for a company where everyone is working towards the common goal of making the company profitable. But there comes a point where the company is overrun by politics and selfish and harmful decisions.
By the time dysfunctional company politics empower a "bozo", why should I stress or put any care into such a company? I'll just do the minimum.
Does anyone have any advice on how to politely say "I like the company, I want to stay, but I don't like my current work and if it doesn't change for the better I'm going to leave in 6-months".
I once tried to say this as politely as possible, but I think I might have been too polite and tactful and they didn't understand. I had a date in mind, and had a conversation 6-months, 3-months, and 1-month before I left. When I announced my departure they tried to get me to stay.
You can just leave off the ultimatum and attempt to improve your situation by communicating it in a way that is directly actionable (I'd like to work on X instead of Y, can you arrange that?). You'll have your own internal deadlines of course, but you shouldn't communicate them.
Or maybe "I want to work on ____ new project, and my working this would be beneficial to the business because ____". But you have to have a real case for it and for why you are the right person for it
I try really hard but never understand where does this belief comes that you have to love your work.
• I'll look into it
• I'll see what I can do
• I'll review that right away
This isn't me saying "say these things", I'm just pointing out this is an age-old problem, and saying "no" inwardly is different than saying it outwardly. Various ways of inquiring about options are also commonplace.
If you say you’ll review something or look into it, you still have to follow through on it. Using those phrases to dodge the work isn’t much different than failing to do the work. It will be noticed
I've had a lot of success in asking "are you asking me to do this or telling me", when I've been tasked with something I think is extremely dumb.
If the response is "I'm asking", then I will usually respond with some variation of "can you assign it to someone else, or better yet, throw the task in the garbage".
If the response is "I'm telling you", then I'll go on a spiel about how I think it's incredibly stupid and the people involved in this decision are bad at their jobs, then get on and do it.
But if you're reading this, there is a good chance you are American, so take this advice with a massive grain of salt as I'm not. The culture here in NZ sounds extremely different to almost everything I've read on this forum.
I never saw someone saying no without a reason and if there is a reason, then there is a discussion around it, one can be right or wrong about it but it is usually easy to clarify and move on. It is not the "no" or a spoiled 5 year kid, it is the "no" of an experienced professional that values their time and priorities.
> Early in my career, I said “yes” often. As I got more experience, I learned when to say “no.”
-----
I'd hate to be the one who refused updating the libraries which caused the security breach and significant loss of data, reputation and money.
> Because… some lack business value. These tasks aren’t business priorities and had no impact on customers and other teams
So if those "some" include upgrades, then I would say it's rational for the employee to focus on tasks that are going to get them a promotion.
I don't agree with that myself, I agree with you that upgrades are important, but this person is going to get a promotion through doing whatever their manager wants, and that apparently doesn't include upgrades.
I'm clearly a bit nihilistic, but I've never seen a case where it matters. If a company leaks the information of millions of people there is, at most, a small financial cost and stock prices keeps going up.
[0] https://www.mastercard.com/us/en/news-and-trends/stories/202...
The trick is to be working on a different project when that happens. Then it's someone else's fault.
Basically, your career advancement can be slow (if you do the technical work that is necessary to prevent problems, but "has no business value" from the perspective of the management) or fast (if you outrun the problems), but there is no medium speed. If you want a career, you need to commit to it fully.
[Phone rings]
Employee thinks: “Oh-oh… What should I do?”
Company with a strategy:
Employee says on the phone: “We don’t do that”
— Build a Better Life by Stealing Office Supplies: Dogbert's Big Book of Business, Scott Adams, 1991
It's all nice and good until you're stuck with an EOL version of Spring, migrating to something newer is a gargantuan task that's measured in months so ofc nobody does it and as a consequence the project startup is slow and it eats resources, some libraries are incompatible and there are bugs that will not get solved and CVEs just pile up. Whereas if you update things constantly (or at least monthly), the deltas and breakages between any two states of the system and its dependencies will be way easier to manage.
You can prioritize what and who should do what, but I don't think you can categorically describe certain work as below someone, if they're good at it (assuming nothing urgent elsewhere) and it has a positive impact.
> “You’re doing great work,” my manager replied calmly. “But I have to stack-rank the team, and those tasks aren’t staff-level. Because… some lack business value. These tasks aren’t business priorities and had no impact on customers and other teams. Also, at the staff level, you need to work across teams, influence broader decisions, and build visibility beyond just our team.”
At that point:
If you are a careerist and working on your boss's pet projects is going to advance that, then say yes whether or not they have "business value." (If they aren't though, then work on something else.)
If you are an early employee / significant shareholder, then absolutely do what has "business value" and nothing else. That could be boring library updates or it could be something else.
The way I read it, he waited two years to express his desire to pursue promotion.
The manager saw the topic as a starting point for the promotion discussion and tried to explain what steps to take to get there.
The employee saw the discussion as the end point of his unrevealed promotion quest and was surprised that his history alone was not aligned with promotion exportations.
This all could have been clarified with a simple conversation 1-2 years ago expressing intent to pursue promotion and asking what it would take to get there.
So I think the lesson here is wrong too - when the manager said
> These tasks aren’t business priorities and had no impact on customers and other teams
that didn't mean they were worthless tasks - just that they weren't business priorities and had no impact on customers or other teams. Which is probably true(ish - I would have phrased it very differently if I were their manager).
Improving the release process is great, and helps the team a ton - and indirectly helps customers by enabling the team to ship faster. This is incredibly valuable! And at the right scale, it can be a staff job: at my Large Tech Company, I know several people that have been promoted to staff SWE for this kind of work, but it's for systems that hundreds of SWEs work on. I also know people that have been promoted to senior SWE for this kind of work - these are systems that tens of SWEs work on. It sounds like this example was more like that - this person was doing a good senior SWE job, and the manager didn't see any reason to course correct given that they had given no signal they wanted to get promoted.
note that often preventing problems is not rewarded. Putting out a fire you caused is. Good managers will help you explain why this not obviously useful thing is valuable because of the proplem it prevented.
Tech debt work absolutely adds value, it just rarely gets measured or recognized. Maybe that is one reason so many companies struggle over time, they keep skipping payments on their tech debt interest.
In any case, there may be others doing more important work and there may be others better suited for promotions. It is a zero sum game, the number of people, positions and promotions is always limited so if X is promoted, Y cannot be and if X is a better one for the promotion, Y will have to either wait, move on or keep doing what they do.
...the author has reached the wrong conclusion from this. The problem is they weren't able to articulate why the modernization tasks were business priorities, not that the modernization wasn't a business priority in the first place.
If the tech debt is problematic, fixing it will presumably bring a number of benefits (faster development cycles, reduced defect rates, etc). They were doing the wrong work - they were doing a terrible job explaining why that work was necessary.
In many ways, tech debt and modernization is a near guaranteed way to have business impact, in a way product work is not. If you're at Meta and you figure out how to save 1% of total CPU time on the server by fixing some tech debt you can expect to be showered with money.