how do I stop getting diverted into low-impact legacy projects at work?
November 15, 2019 12:43 AM Subscribe
I'm noticing a trend recently of getting assigned to maintain old, weird, bad projects. Someone has to do it, but it's been me repeatedly. I am spending a lot of time fighting fires and fixing other people's mistakes and neglect, rather than making progress on my main projects. I'm also concerned about becoming the guy into whose portfolio you dump your junk. I am a minority, employed at will in the U.S. How can I discuss this with my manager?
For context, I've been at the company going on a decade and with this team for a few years now. I have received positive reviews backed up by real raises year after year. I've had a couple of projects where I'm implicitly (or explicitly, for interns) the adult supervision for a less experienced person. If they're trying to shuffle me off into a corner where I can't do any damage, they're being very polite about it.
And yet, here's my portfolio right now:
Nominally, I'm on the team that maintains the Widget and the Gadget, two widely used and valued tools. I built a couple of Gadget attachments, which mostly chug along unattended now.
Possibly as a result of these successes, I inherited a third Gadget attachment, the Bad-get. Besides several years of neglect, the Bad-get is marred by a few early design decisions that we've since learned to stop doing. I was told it was not a priority and to do the minimum to keep it going. A year and some increasingly expensive emergencies later, I'm finally fixing some of it, unexpectedly and urgently.
I have some ideas about how to re-do the Bad-get with a design more like my more successful Gadget attachments, and my boss is in theory on board, but I'm increasingly concerned I won't get time to do them.
I've also been roped into maintaining the Sprocket, because I used it in one of my Gadget attachments. Now my portfolio has another long-neglected, utterly undocumented thing I've never seen before, full of strange design decisions and non-standard or recalled parts.
Unrelated to the Bad-get and the Sprocket, I'm supposed to adopt a collection of Bits that all do the same thing in subtly different ways, understand what makes each one special, and improve one of the Bits to be the official Bit for everyone. In the short term, this looks mostly like adopting a series of rusty old Bits and keeping them usable until I can replace them.
Earlier this year, I got to work on a shiny new tool, the Wrench! People from multiple teams have told me how much want the Wrench, and asked me to build special Sockets for the Wrench. Also, wrenches are an unfamiliar area where I'd like to learn more. But work is proceeding slowly because I abandon it for weeks at a time when the Bad-get lights itself on fire.
So my ideal work allocation for the next year would be, build the Wrench and lots of Sockets, replace the Bad-get, have nothing to do with the Sprocket.
Instead, I fear I'm going to spend all my time patching up the Bad-get and the Sprocket and maybe even some Bits while other people get interesting, valued work on the Gadget and the Widget.
I want to be clear that I don't mind doing some scutwork. Someone has to, and I do get paid for it. But this feels like more than my fair share, and too much for me to do more than slapdash patches between emergencies.
I'm also concerned with this trend where my new projects are increasingly to clean up other people's messes. I don't want to be the guy into whose portfolio you dump low-priority junk for him to nurse along.
Probably relevant, though not something I can say out loud: my boss and his boss and almost all my coworkers including Sprocket guy are white. I am of a racial minority stereotyped as smart, diligent worker bees, but not as pioneers or visionaries. We don't blaze the trails; we follow behind laying the track.
So, hive mind: what can I say to my boss, and how should I say it, without sounding like a glory hound unwilling to dirty his hands with necessary but unglamorous work?
For context, I've been at the company going on a decade and with this team for a few years now. I have received positive reviews backed up by real raises year after year. I've had a couple of projects where I'm implicitly (or explicitly, for interns) the adult supervision for a less experienced person. If they're trying to shuffle me off into a corner where I can't do any damage, they're being very polite about it.
And yet, here's my portfolio right now:
Nominally, I'm on the team that maintains the Widget and the Gadget, two widely used and valued tools. I built a couple of Gadget attachments, which mostly chug along unattended now.
Possibly as a result of these successes, I inherited a third Gadget attachment, the Bad-get. Besides several years of neglect, the Bad-get is marred by a few early design decisions that we've since learned to stop doing. I was told it was not a priority and to do the minimum to keep it going. A year and some increasingly expensive emergencies later, I'm finally fixing some of it, unexpectedly and urgently.
I have some ideas about how to re-do the Bad-get with a design more like my more successful Gadget attachments, and my boss is in theory on board, but I'm increasingly concerned I won't get time to do them.
I've also been roped into maintaining the Sprocket, because I used it in one of my Gadget attachments. Now my portfolio has another long-neglected, utterly undocumented thing I've never seen before, full of strange design decisions and non-standard or recalled parts.
Unrelated to the Bad-get and the Sprocket, I'm supposed to adopt a collection of Bits that all do the same thing in subtly different ways, understand what makes each one special, and improve one of the Bits to be the official Bit for everyone. In the short term, this looks mostly like adopting a series of rusty old Bits and keeping them usable until I can replace them.
Earlier this year, I got to work on a shiny new tool, the Wrench! People from multiple teams have told me how much want the Wrench, and asked me to build special Sockets for the Wrench. Also, wrenches are an unfamiliar area where I'd like to learn more. But work is proceeding slowly because I abandon it for weeks at a time when the Bad-get lights itself on fire.
So my ideal work allocation for the next year would be, build the Wrench and lots of Sockets, replace the Bad-get, have nothing to do with the Sprocket.
Instead, I fear I'm going to spend all my time patching up the Bad-get and the Sprocket and maybe even some Bits while other people get interesting, valued work on the Gadget and the Widget.
I want to be clear that I don't mind doing some scutwork. Someone has to, and I do get paid for it. But this feels like more than my fair share, and too much for me to do more than slapdash patches between emergencies.
I'm also concerned with this trend where my new projects are increasingly to clean up other people's messes. I don't want to be the guy into whose portfolio you dump low-priority junk for him to nurse along.
Probably relevant, though not something I can say out loud: my boss and his boss and almost all my coworkers including Sprocket guy are white. I am of a racial minority stereotyped as smart, diligent worker bees, but not as pioneers or visionaries. We don't blaze the trails; we follow behind laying the track.
So, hive mind: what can I say to my boss, and how should I say it, without sounding like a glory hound unwilling to dirty his hands with necessary but unglamorous work?
I would just be upfront in saying that you have too much on your plate and that you’d like to offload some of it. Suggest whatever your biggest legacy time sink is. Offer to train up your replacement.
Even if you end up having to keep what you have it should dissuade your manager from dumping new stuff on you.
One of the most annoying things about working for a company long term is the cruft you accumulate, often because you’re the only person who has been around long enough to know anything about it. I never found a solution to that, I just changed companies. :-)
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 1:23 AM on November 15, 2019 [4 favorites]
Even if you end up having to keep what you have it should dissuade your manager from dumping new stuff on you.
One of the most annoying things about working for a company long term is the cruft you accumulate, often because you’re the only person who has been around long enough to know anything about it. I never found a solution to that, I just changed companies. :-)
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 1:23 AM on November 15, 2019 [4 favorites]
I apologise that I can't speak to the minority-stereotyping aspect of your question. But I have a couple of ideas about the work content.
Based on your experience of being rewarded with pay rises & specifically requested to take on difficult & possibly thankless projects, I guess that the reason why you're singled out to own these old products is because you have earnedthe reputation that you can get this work done effectively. You're being asked to do again a thing that you've successfully delivered in the past.
One (bad) way to respond to this is by screwing up. If you do a shit job, you won't be asked to do that thing again. Conversely, if you want to be asked to do a thing again, you should make sure you do a great job on it. Some people use that knowledge strategically, by messing stuff up that they don't want to be associated with in the longer term. Others, of course, mess stuff up because they even don't have the option of doing it well.
So given that you have it in your nature & your abilities to do a great job on this stuff, a better (because: more mature, more professional, more self-aware) way of approaching it is going to be to go to your boss & specifically own the fact that you want to see a great job being done to fix up these old tools, but that you don't want to get sucked into maintaining them full-time. Lay that out explicitly for your boss - you don't want to be the bottleneck or the single-point-of-failure. You want to achieve a balance in your own work between the necessary & the interesting.
You've been explicitly handed the responsibility to supervise teams before, right? Seems like what you need right now is a little team of your own. Is there a less-experienced person or two to whom you could assign the day-to-day donkey work of maintaining & improving the Bad-get & the Sprocket? To designs that you create for them? You still own the outcomes, maybe, but with someone else's labour available for you?
On preview: yeah, pretty much what the others said.
posted by rd45 at 1:28 AM on November 15, 2019 [3 favorites]
Based on your experience of being rewarded with pay rises & specifically requested to take on difficult & possibly thankless projects, I guess that the reason why you're singled out to own these old products is because you have earnedthe reputation that you can get this work done effectively. You're being asked to do again a thing that you've successfully delivered in the past.
One (bad) way to respond to this is by screwing up. If you do a shit job, you won't be asked to do that thing again. Conversely, if you want to be asked to do a thing again, you should make sure you do a great job on it. Some people use that knowledge strategically, by messing stuff up that they don't want to be associated with in the longer term. Others, of course, mess stuff up because they even don't have the option of doing it well.
So given that you have it in your nature & your abilities to do a great job on this stuff, a better (because: more mature, more professional, more self-aware) way of approaching it is going to be to go to your boss & specifically own the fact that you want to see a great job being done to fix up these old tools, but that you don't want to get sucked into maintaining them full-time. Lay that out explicitly for your boss - you don't want to be the bottleneck or the single-point-of-failure. You want to achieve a balance in your own work between the necessary & the interesting.
You've been explicitly handed the responsibility to supervise teams before, right? Seems like what you need right now is a little team of your own. Is there a less-experienced person or two to whom you could assign the day-to-day donkey work of maintaining & improving the Bad-get & the Sprocket? To designs that you create for them? You still own the outcomes, maybe, but with someone else's labour available for you?
On preview: yeah, pretty much what the others said.
posted by rd45 at 1:28 AM on November 15, 2019 [3 favorites]
Would you be willing to lead work on all of this? I'm wondering if you could say that you need more direct reports or more people assigned to your team.
I agree that you could just directly say that you have a lot on your plate and would it be possible to find someone else to maintain Sprocket and collect the Bits. Also, you might think about how to keep them excited about the optional fun stuff (the Wrench) and having you play a key role, lest they suggest you set that aside to do endless maintenance on the things that are essential but super-boring.
posted by salvia at 2:04 AM on November 15, 2019
I agree that you could just directly say that you have a lot on your plate and would it be possible to find someone else to maintain Sprocket and collect the Bits. Also, you might think about how to keep them excited about the optional fun stuff (the Wrench) and having you play a key role, lest they suggest you set that aside to do endless maintenance on the things that are essential but super-boring.
posted by salvia at 2:04 AM on November 15, 2019
One of the lesser appreciated aspects of being really, really good at what you do, is you often become the go-to person to fix someone else's masterful foul-up. Basically, everyone trusts that you actually know what you're doing and will fix the problem the right way.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:06 AM on November 15, 2019 [7 favorites]
posted by Thorzdad at 3:06 AM on November 15, 2019 [7 favorites]
Like Thorzdad said, I feel like this may be getting damned by competence. You've managed to keep this stuff going, you've been around forever, therefore everyone looks to you to wrangle whatever decrepit thing they've just realised is vitally important. I'm in a similar boat at work. Reading between the lines, I'm assuming you're also a software developer. One way to to pitch this as a problem for the company and not just your happiness/productivity (though those are also problems for the company!) is to talk about being a single point of failure. If you get hit by a bus* they're screwed. It'll take a long time for anyone else to figure out how the heck this stuff works. (Also, as great a developer (or whatever) as you are, having been there for 10 years means that you may be blind to some goofiness that might stand out to someone just coming into the older codebases.)
I'm white, so have limited insight into the particular role race is playing in this, but I have noticed a gendered trend to this in my workplaces--the people who aren't cis men are the ones who step up to do the vital but underappreciated things and it becomes a vicious cycle, where cis men get to go make new messes. But the world is not so one-dimensional--you have a lifetime of experience telling you your ethnicity is probably playing a role here and you're surely right.
*My dad was hit by a taxi. It's a totally plausible scenario if you live in a city.
posted by hoyland at 4:35 AM on November 15, 2019 [6 favorites]
I'm white, so have limited insight into the particular role race is playing in this, but I have noticed a gendered trend to this in my workplaces--the people who aren't cis men are the ones who step up to do the vital but underappreciated things and it becomes a vicious cycle, where cis men get to go make new messes. But the world is not so one-dimensional--you have a lifetime of experience telling you your ethnicity is probably playing a role here and you're surely right.
*My dad was hit by a taxi. It's a totally plausible scenario if you live in a city.
posted by hoyland at 4:35 AM on November 15, 2019 [6 favorites]
I am a woman with a job in a small office without a dedicated admin. When I agreed to take on admin stuff I made a point of having a conversation with my boss about how the admin work is both critical and undervalued by society. I told him that I was only willing to do the admin stuff if I felt appropriately valued for it. Overall, things have worked out okay, though five years in, I think a tune up and some tweaking is in the near future. Anyway, I wonder if you could have a similar conversation, where you bring your boss’s attention to the fact that the legacy projects are important to the company but they also have both less perceived value and hold your interest less. You could also explain that if things feel too unbalanced for you it would likely push you to look for. Different work. Then you can finish with something about how you like the company/coworkers/work generally and you are hoping that you and boss can work out a plan to keep things balanced so you can continue to be a valued member of the team.
posted by ElizaMain at 6:19 AM on November 15, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by ElizaMain at 6:19 AM on November 15, 2019 [2 favorites]
I am not in your business and I am a middle-aged white man. I read your post and immediately thought they were complimenting you with the assignments. They clearly trust you to fix the problem. That view could be a view unique to older white men, I do not know. Your boss(es) may not even realize how their assignments are appearing to you..
The two thoughts that come to mind are, one, I assume bonus time is coming up. How they treat you with a year-end bonus will tell you a lot. If you get a good bonus they like you and don't know you do not want to do the legacy/shit work. If you get a not good bonus, time to look for another job.
Either way, I would talk to your boss about the assignments and how to prioritize them. What do you have to lose? Except I would wait until after the yearly bonus is announced.
posted by AugustWest at 6:56 AM on November 15, 2019
The two thoughts that come to mind are, one, I assume bonus time is coming up. How they treat you with a year-end bonus will tell you a lot. If you get a good bonus they like you and don't know you do not want to do the legacy/shit work. If you get a not good bonus, time to look for another job.
Either way, I would talk to your boss about the assignments and how to prioritize them. What do you have to lose? Except I would wait until after the yearly bonus is announced.
posted by AugustWest at 6:56 AM on November 15, 2019
I'm that guy. Our company is a wonderful collection of new and shiny mixed with old and busted (state-of-the-art test equipment mated to 50-year old tech), and there are lots and lots of things that need tweaking to keep moving. The way I handle it is to disclaim any responsibility for anything that isn't my specific purview; if it's not one of my product lines, sorry, I've got to stay in my lane. If it's my product, I'll put out the fire, take a look at the situation, figure out the best way to fireproof the process and build up whatever tools necessary to keep shit from spreading, and then document everything. When possible, I'll write a formal work instruction and have it released through our normal procedures. When that's not politically possible, I'll send an email to the department lead or other appropriate person with the steps to follow in the future. Then, when the shit hits the fan, I walk people through those steps as many times as possible.
My primary job is to fix the problem, not do other people's jobs. I'll be happy to explain what I've written time and time again. In that respect, I'm hourly, bro. But I won't do Production's job for them, and I won't deal with the same problem in other people's product lines, even though the solutions are god damn identical. I'm sure this has cost me promotions, but it's saved my sanity, and it leaves me enough time to work on my development projects.
posted by disconnect at 7:00 AM on November 15, 2019 [2 favorites]
My primary job is to fix the problem, not do other people's jobs. I'll be happy to explain what I've written time and time again. In that respect, I'm hourly, bro. But I won't do Production's job for them, and I won't deal with the same problem in other people's product lines, even though the solutions are god damn identical. I'm sure this has cost me promotions, but it's saved my sanity, and it leaves me enough time to work on my development projects.
posted by disconnect at 7:00 AM on November 15, 2019 [2 favorites]
I am not currently that guy but, like disconnect is, I have been that guy before.
One of the things I did not realize at the time was how much power being the person in that advocate role gives you. It’s not always glamorous and it can make it easier to be overlooked when remuneration scales are backed by lousy metrics.
That being said - you’ve effectively been given responsibility for the institutional memory. And you have visibly demonstrated vision for visionary tooling that will be the future. These things don’t happen together by happenstance. This is power.
And personal planning conversation with your direct report should make it clear that you know you are valuable. You have a proven track record fixing dilapidated crap and your time and expertise is in demand with regard to the new shiny. You probably have a better idea how to manage your time than most do and you have experience managing other people’s time.
So if your plate has too much on it to reliably deliver the new shiny and keep the old cruft working profitable and excercise taste and judgment picking bits for everyone..... then the clear answer is having more oversight and ownership over the delegation of your workload.
No one ever gets paid twice as much for doing twice as much. Even if they did time doesn’t scale. Responsibility does though and it is visible and high impact.
posted by mce at 1:42 PM on November 15, 2019 [3 favorites]
One of the things I did not realize at the time was how much power being the person in that advocate role gives you. It’s not always glamorous and it can make it easier to be overlooked when remuneration scales are backed by lousy metrics.
That being said - you’ve effectively been given responsibility for the institutional memory. And you have visibly demonstrated vision for visionary tooling that will be the future. These things don’t happen together by happenstance. This is power.
And personal planning conversation with your direct report should make it clear that you know you are valuable. You have a proven track record fixing dilapidated crap and your time and expertise is in demand with regard to the new shiny. You probably have a better idea how to manage your time than most do and you have experience managing other people’s time.
So if your plate has too much on it to reliably deliver the new shiny and keep the old cruft working profitable and excercise taste and judgment picking bits for everyone..... then the clear answer is having more oversight and ownership over the delegation of your workload.
No one ever gets paid twice as much for doing twice as much. Even if they did time doesn’t scale. Responsibility does though and it is visible and high impact.
posted by mce at 1:42 PM on November 15, 2019 [3 favorites]
By the way, as a general rule you should deal in whole projects on/off your plate, and not percentages of your time. No one has ever actually worked 30% time on anything.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:32 PM on November 16, 2019
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:32 PM on November 16, 2019
This thread is closed to new comments.
If your personal satisfaction is not a big consideration for your manager then you have to think about why what you want to do aligns with what the company needs and how you can solve their problem for them. For instance you could try to say that it's a risk having all the maintenance projects tied to one person so why don't they give you a person or two to train up on the badget and sprocket work so they can become the first line fire-fighters there while you deliver the wrench, which teams are crying out for.
posted by crocomancer at 1:11 AM on November 15, 2019 [1 favorite]