Ok so, somehow I ended up being a manager at work. Mostly I just don’t bother anyone and protect them from the bosses when I can. However, I’m a software dev and they had me make a bunch of scripts and such to measure productivity. I didn’t really want to because fuck that, but as I was working on it I realized none of the bosses will ever look at this code or question the output.
I ended up padding the stats quite a bit in “honest” ways by doing things like excluding weekends and holidays. I also round everything up to the nearest whole number. But then I decided to just add extra values here and there as well. Instead of starting the count at 0, I start at 1.
The bosses asked for a monthly report, so I give them 28 days (and don’t count the weekends). I drop the lowest count days if there are more than 28 days in the month and present all of the stats as monthly.
Anyway, just remember there are lots of ways to help your coworkers and you don’t actually have to do any managing if everyone understands what’s up. Just be really careful and try to always give yourself plausible deniability. LLMs are a great excuse to shift blame right now even if you aren’t using one
Anyone else have ideas or things they’ve done?
Blaming it on an LLM is such a brilliant 2 birds with one stone idea, I will definitely be doing that
heroultrarare based manager
Should have had it add numbers slowly over time to a limit. Making it look like you started out low and got more productive.
We actually already kinda did this. We got this new boss and we weren’t really keeping up with work, so she made us do that. At first we just lowballed everything and now I dig into every single issue and split it into as many parts as I can. We use points to measure workload and the way I’m splitting it up is like 5 points becomes two 3 pointers. Our system doesn’t allow 2.5, so I’m really just following the rules.
Over the last six months or so it looks like we almost doubled our output and that new boss is so happy about it that she leaves us alone most of the time now. They’re so easy to trick it’s almost sad
This is the move if you do story pointing. There are two types of work that should be in your backlog: 1s and 3s. Every 5 a team ever pointed was really two 3s they were sheepish about. Every 8 a team ever pointed was too poorly defined to actually be workable and is guaranteed to turn into a month of work and weeks of rework.
Yeah, as soon as they put me in charge of it I started doing this. We have me and another dev who has been around a while go through and put points on everything now. We don’t do it as a group anymore because everyone hates that process and we’re in 4 diff time zones so timing is rough. I’m enforcing scope so hard they’re starting to get mad at me, but it’s for their own good.
I’m kind of having fun unleashing my autism on this ancient fucking app. I get to decide so much shit now and almost everything I’m doing is to make it easier for devs to produce so we can work less. This team doesn’t have any support, no UI/UX or devops or anything beyond bullshit managers and devs doing 3 jobs at a time
I too recently was promoted to a management role in retail (shit sucks never do this if it’s avoidable) and I’ve been doing the same kinda shit balancing tills and tweaking things to avoid writeups for my coworkers & make things easier when I can. It helps I’m the lowest/newest manager so I’m not involved in stuff like hiring/firing (basically doing my normal job with some additional responsibilities) so I just do my best to make things easier for my coworkers until the inevitable moment I have to choose between the company and my coworkers (100% certain it’ll happen and 100% certain I’ll quit before I side with the company).
Some days I regret taking it but I’ve also had to deal with truely shitty managers & didn’t want to risk that happening if they hired some rando who might be a prick.
Yeah, I took it because I was pretty sure they’d lay me off if I didn’t. I kinda hate this job, but it’s fully remote and I can actually afford rent and groceries now so I’m starting to understand why people are class traitors
