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kottke_org_feedWhy Japan Has Such Good Railways. “Their system excels because of good public policy: business structure, land use rules, driving rules, superior models for privatization, and sound regulation.” Other countries can follow their lead.
askamanager_feedA reader writes:
For the last five years, I’ve worked at a nonprofit with around 80 employees. Up until about six months ago, I was full-time and the two primary roles I had during that time were in middle management. Now I’m part-time (10 hours/week), not in any management/leadership position, and in a different department.
Our organization serves victims of power-based interpersonal violence, so there are several practices/policies in place to try to maintain client and staff safety. One is that our building is at a confidential location and staff have fobs to get in. It’s common to hold the door for a coworker to get inside or let a coworker in if they forgot their fob. If there isn’t someone to let you in, there’s a callbox and the person who answers can electronically unlock the door.
For as long as I can remember, when a staff member has left the agency, our HR director sends an all staff email informing us. A month ago, during my department’s weekly team meeting, my supervisor (our department’s director) informed us that leadership had decided to discontinue this. She said some staff in other departments who were feeling “traumatized” by the number of emails about staff departures. I asked what the updated procedure would be for knowing if someone is no longer employed here so they aren’t inadvertently let into the building. My supervisor said that she expressed a similar concern, but that it had been decided it would be up to each department director to choose whether and how to inform their own teams of staff departures. I trust my director and find her communication to be consistent and open, so after this I pretty much forgot about it despite my concerns. I think I assumed she would notify us of all staff departures once she’d received the update herself.
Fast forward to yesterday, a coworker casually texted me that her supervisor told her that someone who had been hired recently as a manager in a different department had “left.” I mentioned the change to the departure announcement process, and she didn’t even know that change had happened. There has been no all-staff announcement about that and apparently her director hadn’t told her. The day came and went with no update about this former staff member from my director.
I decided to try to approach this as a group concern because I know, based on conversations I’ve had, that I’m not the only one with concerns about this. Inadvertently allowing someone into the building who shouldn’t be there is one concern. Another is inadvertently following up with a team member about a client concern and creating a confidentiality violation, not realizing they no longer work there. Some supervisors are more up to speed on the work and collaboration their teams are doing than others. There’s also the general equity issue that can arise when there isn’t transparency regarding trends around demographics of staff being fired or quitting, although that’s another can of worms.
After some thought, I sent an email to my coworkers, minus the directors/leadership team, with a letter I had drafted asking our leadership team to revisit this process. I expressed concerns regarding transparency and the increased safety and confidentiality risk. I asked in my email for those who agree with my concerns to just sign their name.
A few hours after my email went out, our HR director sent an all-staff email to “clarify” how staff should approach “raising concerns or providing feedback” about decisions, including HR processes. She said she had been informed of an email that was sent out requesting signatures related to an HR change. She said that people need to go to their supervisor or another member of the leadership team first to avoid “unintentionally preventing productive discussion” and “confusion.” She made statements regarding the value of transparency and staff voices while simultaneously basically shutting down what I was trying to do. Several coworkers have reached out to me thanking me for my advocacy. One person told me they would sign on but they’re afraid of being fired. Someone in middle management referenced an ongoing fear of retaliation.
There has not been a direct response to me, nor has there been any acknowledgement of the concern I was raising in the first place. The only form of follow-up so far has been my supervisor sending an email to only our department acknowledging HR’s email and inviting people to talk to her for support or with questions. She added that she’d be approaching her supervisor regarding the current policy and confirmed that the employee I previously mentioned was indeed no longer working for the agency and her plan had been to address that during our next weekly department meeting.
For additional context, as a result of some of my own experiences with our team of directors, as well as what I’ve heard from coworkers, I have little trust in our leadership team and have been disappointed and frustrated by a variety of decisions they’ve made and how they navigate feedback from staff. Complaints of transparency and lack of accountability and follow-up are not new. It seems that most of us tend to just bite our tongues, and then those who do speak up become more frustrated and/or shut down, if not sometimes encounter some retaliation (that’s some speculation on my part though).
What should I have done differently for this to have been maybe more successful? Was I out of line and/or is our HR’s response as misplaced as I’m thinking it is? Do you have any suggestions regarding what I do next?
Yeah, a petition is rarely the way to go at work.
When I talk about pushing back as a group, it’s about conversation with people — talking to colleagues individually or in groups to share your concerns and see if others agree with you, and then talking through what you might be able to do about it as a group.
As a general rule, petitions tend to immediately get managers’ defenses up. Partly that’s because it immediately makes whatever you’re trying to do feel more adversarial. And partly that is because it feels more one-sided; you’re not having a conversation, just presenting a statement. Partly, too, it’s that management — particularly in a small organization like yours — tends to like to think of themselves as approachable (whether or not they actually are), so the idea of people resorting to this method rather than a normal conversation is likely to feel out of sync with how they want to think communication should work in their organization. And frankly, in this case they’re probably not entirely wrong — it was a Big Move to go straight to recruiting people to sign a letter on this when you hadn’t done any of the lower-drama steps you could have taken first, like talking to your manager. It likely felt to them like you’d skipped some obvious steps you should have tried first.
Overall, rightly or wrongly, asking people to sign on to a written statement is a medium that just isn’t used much at work, so if you try it, it’s likely to come across as a much bigger/more dramatic move than if you just talked as a group.
I do see how you got there, though. It’s logical to think, “If a bunch of us have these concerns, why not write them down and have people sign on, so it’s clear it’s a lot of us and not just one or two people? It’s the most streamlined way of doing it.” And in a vacuum, in a situation where we didn’t have decades of established norms about how things do and don’t typically get done at work, it would be logical and efficient! It’s just that you’re not in that vacuum, so it didn’t go over the way you thought it would, for all the reasons above.
All that said, it’s a bit ridiculous that HR, in its “here’s how you should raise concerns” response, didn’t address the substance of what you said! At a minimum they should have said they’ve heard the concerns and will consider and respond to them separately. But you also already knew that you’re working somewhere with problems around transparency and follow-up, so that’s not surprising.
As for what to do next, following up with your manager is a good idea. It sounds like she shares your concerns about the policy change and is talking to her own boss about it, so she’s not a hostile audience on this topic. You and your other colleagues who are worried should all talk to your managers about it (not via written statement, but just through regular conversation).
But bigger picture, it sounds like there’s a pretty serious culture problem there, and that goes beyond this one incident.
The post I tried to address an issue as a group and got shut down by management appeared first on Ask a Manager.
kottke_org_feedRebecca Solnit: “The United States is being murdered, and it’s an inside job. Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled.”
kottke_org_feedHungarian Opposition Ousts Viktor Orbán After 16 Years in Power. “Magyar…pledged to repair Hungary’s strained relationship with the EU, crack down on corruption and funnel funds towards long-neglected public services.”
kottke_org_feedInterviews with five novelists (Jesmyn Ward, Joyce Carol Oates, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ottessa Moshfegh, Margaret Atwood) on writing something true with fiction. Oates: “If you could read Toni Morrison, why would you read AI?”
unsung_feedA fun 24-minute video from Technology Connections about designed sounds in real life: elevator dings, airplane chimes, railway crossing dings, and so on.
While I am sympathetic to the notion that sound pollution is a thing we need to be concerned with, the choice between silence and sound pollution is a false choice. There’s a lot of those happening these days, probably because we’re so stuck in binary thinking. But as airplanes show us, we can design sounds which aren’t obtrusive, but which are helpful. And when you get yourself out of binary thinking, you can do things like make your most obnoxious apps be silent while your important ones make themselves known, and in ways which are meaningful to you and pleasant to everyone else.
It is an interesting parallel to the post about syntax highlighting from a while back, and one of the posts about cartography design I shared recently; they all explore how you can create a richer space capable of conveying more information without overwhelming people, by being intentional about the design.
opinionatedgamers_feedbasicinstructions_feed
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askamanager_feedIt’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. My manager and coworker are fighting and I’m stuck in the middle
My manager, Rose, is not good at her job. She routinely forgets things, does a terrible job advocating for the department, plays favorites, and isn’t proactive at solving problems. My coworker, Donna, is also not good at her job, but in a personal sense. She’s horrifically burnt out but isn’t taking steps to address it, holds grudges over slights that happened 5+ years ago, and goes from 0 to 100 in her moods. Adding fuel to the fire, Rose is conflict-averse, Donna is conflict-prone. As I’m the newest person in the office without the 10 years of beef these two have, both Rose and Donna have complained about the other to me before.
There have been multiple occasions where Rose and Donna got into a verbal fight. Recently, Rose gave Donna a poor performance review and all hell has broken loose. I only know about this secondhand, from Donna, so I have no idea what the review actually said — Donna feels that Rose is out to get her, though in my opinion parts of the poor review were probably justified. Donna’s been complaining about Rose at every opportunity, while Rose is actively avoiding Donna.
I’m sick and tired of this. Ideally, I’d like to tell both of them to stop bitching, nut up, and just do their damn jobs, but I can’t do that to Rose as she’s my manager and if I do that to Donna, she’ll view it as a personal slight. Donna and I work closely together and I won’t be able to do my job if she’s fighting with me the same way she’s fighting with Rose. How do I navigate this minefield of personal drama that I don’t want to be a part of?
To Donna when she complains about Rose: “I’m sorry you’re having a tough time. Please know I care but it’s affecting my focus so much that I just can’t be your sounding board for it anymore — I’m sorry.” If she views that as a personal slight … well, it sounds like she views a lot of things as a personal slight and that’s probably going to happen between the two of you at some point anyway (if not with this, then with something else). When someone is that volatile, you can never tiptoe around them so perfectly that you never set them off, so do yourself the favor of setting a reasonable boundary. If her reaction prevents you from doing your job, you’d need to take that to Rose — who, yes, sucks at solving problems, but it would still be hers to deal with. If she doesn’t and Donna is truly obstructing you from doing your job, you could escalate it. But if Donna is just visibly upset with you, let that be okay, as long as she’s not openly hostile.
If Rose complains about Donna: “I should stay out of this, since I have to work closely with her.”
Ultimately, Rose is the bigger problem because she should be managing this entire situation and isn’t — but the day-to-day quality of life stuff is coming from Donna and you have more control over that piece, so focus there.
Related:
my coworker complains all day long
2. I thought I was taking a leadership job — it turned out to be entry-level
I recently left a leadership position at a statewide nonprofit to join the national staff of a much larger nonprofit. I interviewed for this position believing it would be part of one of the major departments’ leadership teams. Titles are pretty standardized across our field, and the title and job description gave the impression that this would be a major internal consultant position, working with multiple chapters nationwide to help them develop metrics, assist with long- and short-term planning, and provide overall guidance. The pay was also commensurate with a leadership position and was far, far more than I was making in my then-position.
During the interview process, which was quite long, I was never interviewed by the same people twice, and in many instances, I was interviewed by people who were quite unfamiliar with the position. When I would inquire about job specifics, I was given the impression that the vagueness was due to the fluidity of the position; the main priority is what the chapters need, and it’s different for each state. I need to emphasize that throughout the process, they mentioned assisting “chapters,” always plural. I talked about broad national programs for the organization and how “strategies I used in X state might work in states Y and Z,” and no one corrected me.
When I started, however, it became clear that I was actually one of multiple “consultants” being hired, and I would be assigned to a single state. It also became clear that much of the “consulting” was grunt work, and that overall this position was an entry-level job for individual chapters embedded in the national organization. All doubts were cleared up when I was given access to some planning documents created last year, in which the original title of the position reflected its entry-level nature. I’m pretty sure they changed the title to attract more qualified candidates.
On the one hand, I am humiliated. I thought I was getting a huge promotion into an exciting and challenging new role on the national level that would launch my career to new heights and provide me with invaluable experience! On the other hand, the money and benefits are fantastic; I have almost doubled my past salary. And while the work is entry-level, the title on my resume would not give that impression. I also am not burdened by managerial responsibilities. When I talked to my wife about this, she was totally surprised that I was upset, because “you are getting paid way more to do far less,” and she does have a point.
What should I do, and how should I be feeling about all this? I feel like I’ve been lied to, and I am not getting the job I thought I was. On the other hand, this is a job I can do with my eyes closed, so should I just ride this out for a while?
Here’s what I’d think about and what I think your wife’s response overlooks: are you bored or likely to become bored in the near- to medium-term future? Are your skills going to stagnate? When you decide you do want to leave this job, will you have accomplishments for your resume that will help you get the job you’ll want after this one? Are you happy to have this break in responsibility or frustrated by the limitations of the role? What’s going on in the organization that caused them to so misrepresent the nature of the job, and is that symptomatic of other frustrations that will be heading your way?
I can’t answer those for you, but those are the questions I’d reflect on in your shoes. And regardless of your answers to them, it’s possible that given the state of the job market and the world right now, you might decide you’re happy to hunker down here for a while and make this work. Or you might decide that while it’s not so bad for right now, the longer you stay, the harder it will be to move on to the sort of job you do want once you’re looking again. There’s no easy answer — but “be happy you’re being paid more to do less” is an oversimplification.
Related:
should I stay in my well-paid job even though I have nothing to do?
3. How should I have handled a recommendation I didn’t want?
Something that happened to me some time ago that I didn’t know how to handle. I’d gone in for an interview for an internship that perfectly aligned with what I wanted to do with my degree. During the interview stage, I ran into a classmate, their current intern. About a week later, she told me she had recommended me for the internship and that she loved my work and how good of a job I’d do at this company.
This would have been great, if I didn’t know that the quality of her work was bad, and that she’d gotten drunk at that company’s Christmas party! (I knew that her work quality was bad due to having a TA-esque role in a class she took, where she did extraordinarily badly.)
I don’t know if that’s the reason I never heard back, but should I have followed up with the manager after finding out she’d recommended me saying that I’m not affiliated with her? Should I have handled the interaction during the interview differently?
Nope, there was nothing you needed to do. First, doing badly in one class doesn’t mean that someone will do badly in an internship. (If what you observed was something like that she had no grasp of foundational concepts, then it’s more likely — but even then, she could have gotten better later. And for all we know, she had other stuff going on that semester that got in her way, but that doesn’t mean she could never do well.)
But even if you knew for sure that her work quality was still bad, there wasn’t anything you needed to do here. Low performers don’t really impact someone else’s chances by recommending them; the employer might not give any weight to her opinion, but they’d be unlikely to hold it against you if you’d made your own good impression. (And really, there’s a good chance they wouldn’t have given much weight to a good intern’s opinion either.)
4. Can you ask to have a vacation day become a sick day if you get sick on your trip?
My family is having a disagreement about work norms, and I’m wondering if I was an overly permissive manager or if my sister-in-law works in a strict environment. (Or somewhere in between. It’s usually somewhere in between!)
My sister-in-law came to visit for a week, and got a really nasty cold the day after she arrived. I’m not talking just feeling icky, she had a fever of 102F, didn’t eat for two days because food didn’t stay down, and basically couldn’t leave her room from sheer exhaustion.
I asked if she was going to reclassify her vacation (or even just the worst couple days) as sick time, because if she had been at home she absolutely would have not been going in. Both she and my spouse looked at me like I was crazy, and I said it didn’t happen often, but I was happy to make the change for my reports if people got really unlucky. Sometimes it happens!
But their response (and she asked a coworker too) make me reconsider how obvious I find the situation. So what’s normal?
It’s a completely acceptable thing to ask about! Some companies will do it and some companies won’t, but there’s nothing outrageous about inquiring to find out. Among companies that do, the idea is that you need real downtime to fully recharge, with all the benefits that brings your employer, and if you’re sick you’re not really recharging.
5. Does my boss not think I can do work I did in a previous job?
I work for government with a boss who is typically very relaxed and flexible with the entire team. I previously worked in higher education doing very difficult stakeholder meeting facilitation for multiple groups every week. My boss knows this and has acknowledged that I have previous years of experience before he hired me.
We were all at a meeting to discuss if we wanted to hire a contractor to do stakeholder meeting facilitation or if we could do it ourselves (it’s way more difficult than just reading off a PowerPoint!). I said that I had done this in a previous job but that it was very hard. This startled everyone on the team (physical reactions) but most people quickly agreed. Then my boss said he’s sure some of us could handle it, while gesturing to my male coworker and looking at him, not me, then said he thinks the stakeholders would want a contractor.
Should I have kept my mouth shut and not said that I did this before? The gesturing at my coworker and looking at him instead of me after what I immediately just said seems like my boss doesn’t believe I could handle it, right?
It sounds more likely that your boss took what you said to indicate that you weren’t enthusiastic about doing it (unless you were explicit that that’s not what you meant). If you want to clear it up, you could follow up with your boss now to clarify (“If we do decide to facilitate the meetings ourselves, it’s something I have experience in and would be interested in doing”), which might be worth doing even if he’s leaning toward a contractor anyway.
The post my manager and coworker are fighting, a recommendation I didn’t want, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.
scalziwhatever_feed
I’ve been to Hungary twice, most recently a couple of years ago when I was the guest of honor at the Budapest International Book Festival. Both times I was there I (and when she visited with me, Krissy), were made to feel welcome by nearly everyone we met there. It’s fair to say I have an attachment to the country.
Today, with a turnout of over 77%, the voters of Hungary voted out the autocratic government of Viktor Orban, whose 16-year rule saw the country become less free, less tolerant and more corrupt. Getting back from all of that won’t be easy and won’t be fast — but it all has to start somewhere, and now Hungary can start.
To which I can say: Lord, I see what you have done for others and want it for myself, and hopefully, soon.
In the meantime: Congratulations to my friends in Hungary. I hope what you have is catching. And I hope to visit you again, in this new era of yours.
— JS
512pixels_feedThe Artemis era well and truly began Friday evening when a shiny spacecraft that had traveled 700,000 miles around the Moon, carrying four astronauts, splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California.
For NASA, for its international partners, and for all of humanity the successful conclusion of the Artemis II mission marked a return to deep space by our species after more than half a century.
It was a spectacular achievement, and NASA deserves credit for making something what is very difficult look relatively easy. But it also raises an important question: What comes next?
unsung_feedOne of the casualties of Apple’s otherwise brilliantly executed transition to retina pixels has been the mouse pointer, which remains aligned to what “traditional pixels” used to be, rather than the retina/physical/smaller pixels.
Turn on the zoom gesture from a few weeks ago, and you can see the challenge. The gridlines are ½ logical pixel and 1 physical pixel wide:
This limitation is inherited by most tools: Photoshop, Affinity, xScope, even the built-in Digital Color Meter. It’s not the end of the world, of course, but it can be maddening if you are trying to sample a color from a “half pixel” and the cursor stubbornly skips it no matter how delicately you move. Here it is in Figma:
Of the few tools I tested, only Pixelmator allows to sample at the correct, precise level:
I was curious how would a truly precise cursor feel in general – would there be any disadvantages? – so I built a little simulator that allows a regular arrow cursor to be aligned to “half pixels” or “retina pixels.”
In the process, I discovered that both Chrome and Firefox already receive sub-traditional-pixel measurements for mousing events, so this was even easier to build than I expected. Now, precise targeting in Chrome and Firefox becomes possible:
I don’t personally see any big difference in terms of either upsides or downsides, and I’m curious if you do. iPadOS and its Safari already seems to support the precise mouse pointer, too. That makes me curious: why isn’t it available in macOS? I imagine you could even turn it on by default for apps – or, if you want to be more conservative, make it opt-in.
Pixelmator also shows that the apps can do it without waiting for macOS as the data is already there; they would just need to render the cursor on their own with more precision.
daringfireball_feedThe New York Times:
In a surprisingly early and gracious concession speech in Budapest, Mr. Orban congratulated the opposition saying, “The responsibility and opportunity to govern were not given to us.” But, he also made a vow: “We are not giving up. Never, never, never.”
His defeat paves the way for Peter Magyar, a former Orban loyalist and the leader of the main opposition party, to take over as Hungary’s prime minister once the newly elected Parliament meets.
Orban said the “election results, although not complete, are understandable and clear. They are painful for us but unequivocal.”
There we have it: Viktor Orban — a MAGA star and general anti-democratic corrupt dirtbag — is a better and bigger man than Donald Trump, who still refuses to concede the 2020 election that he unequivocally lost to Joe Biden.
