Whoa. This is downright eerie.

[cjsmith]

Last night I was explaining a bit of my new job to rfrench. I said "They're going to have me do Thing A first, but I'm not sure I understand why yet. It seems to me I should do Thing B first instead. Having Thing B first will give us more capabilities and [bla bla bla lots of good stuff]. And hey, I don't know how to do either one yet, so it's not like changing the plan will slow me down."

I mentioned it to the CEO, Acting VPE and Product Manager, and Chief Architect. Chief Architect said hey, that might be right. Other two said waitaminit, we're not so sure, let's think about it. We all sat in a conference room for twenty minutes.

I'm doing Thing B first.

It is so weird to work at a job where my input is even considered and discussed, much less gets chosen. I am waiting for the other (the first?) shoe to drop.

Comments

[jcgbigler.livejournal.com]

That was one of the things I valued most about my boss at Advanced Magnetics, the company I worked for right after college. He would say "I want you to do foo." I'd say "If I do bar, it's the same amount of effort as foo, and it gives us all the data we'd get from foo, plus all this other useful data." And he'd always say, "Sounds great. Go ahead." (Except for one time during the five years I worked for him, when he said "I agree with you, but the FDA wants to see foo, and if we do bar, we'll have to explain why. So you actually need to do foo.")

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I think that's excellent. There's a lot to be said for hiring good people and then letting them be good people, f'rex by giving you good input. After all, that's one of the big benefits of having knowledgeable and intelligent people on the team.

It must take some rare form of courage, though. If I'm the boss I might be tempted to worry that I'm being shown up, or worry that bar really isn't as good as foo and trusting my team member's word could lead me into a mistake, or worry that my authority is eroding, or any of a number of things. I'm totally guessing. There are reasons I've rarely been a boss of any kind. :-)