alt Hacker NewsReminds me of one of my managers who said, “Sometimes, you have to let people fail.” It does take a lot of energy to keep some people afloat. My hope has always been they learn to swim as it were, but sometimes it’s just effort better spent elsewhere.
I know one project did not have my involvement and couldn’t have succeeded without my knowledge. They were so bad they would work in questions casually to their actual work.
I started avoiding all of them when I found out management had been dumping on my team and praising theirs. It’s just such a slap in the face because they could not have done well and their implementation was horrible.
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When executives fail, unfortunately, they don't blame each other. They do postmortems, then hire consultants to layoff senior engineers.
Letting people fail and letting projects fail seem fairly different to me (at least for large projects).
There have been a bunch of times in my career where I've allowed people under me to "fail". Often times, an individual failing at something is just not that expensive; while being highly educational. Sometimes, it turns out that there approach actually worked, and we as a group gained a new bit of institutional knowledge.
Letting people learn the hard way is a risky endeavour because you have to trust they’re aware of themselves, and they’re not coasting on your support.
Gotta accept that a likely outcome is that they do fail and they don’t learn and you have to let them go. But if you tried to support them beforehand, did what you could, at least you can have a clear conscience.
> Reminds me of one of my managers who said, “Sometimes, you have to let people fail.”
Yup -- I've learned a lot from my failures. Far be it for me to deny others that experience. Assuming their failures won't result in the company imploding or other serious harm, of course.
> Reminds me of one of my managers who said, “Sometimes, you have to let people fail.”
I often say "Sometimes, you have to let the manager fail."
Some managers don't like being told their ideas won't work. If you refuse or argue, you are seen as the reason his idea failed. I've found what works best with them is to proceed with the work, but keep them informed very frequently, so they can see how things evolve, and will be able to see the failure you had anticipated a long time ago before it is too late.
Then you're seen in a positive light, and he'll separate you from the project failure.