Ask for no, don't ask for yes (2022)

> You can very well state "I'm going to do XYZ because of [REASONS]. I'm going to do XYZ on [DAY N]. If anyone objects or has any reservations, please reach out to me."

Love this phrasing.

As other comments have mentioned, you probably don't want to go into the full depths of reasons in the email. Rather have a high level summary with a link to a long form doc or RFC. And of course, the appropriate level of detail depends on how big and wide reaching the action is.

I really dislike this approach as well. You basically light a fuse on a bomb and place the responsibility on others.

Saying "I will do things my way unless someone manages to convince me to do otherwise this within x days" is toxic and places a ton of pressure on your coworkers.

What about:

- If I don’t hear back from you in [N] days, I am not going to do XYZ, considering you don't deem it to be important.

>this cargo cult behavior of citing Amazon's leadership principles

Technical principles too: microservices. Firm size follow a Zipf distribution, thus in most case the decision was made it wasn't necessary and actually slowed down development.

> For example, the reason why "bias for action" works at Amazon is survivorship bias: those who unilaterally take action which results in a failure will ultimately be scapegoated and fired.

I think this is missing something. If everything works in exactly the way you just described, that can still be a strategy that Amazon intentionally implements and derives benefits from. We could rephrase it as "hire people who make good decisions, and then don't weigh them down".

It doesn't look obvious to me that this is a bad strategy, or that the success we see people achieve by using it is illusionary. It's a strategy that many people/companies might find difficult to implement, but that's most strategies and essentially all good ones.

It depends on the context. My boss is so busy that he rarely answers to my emails, he is available to talk very rarely (once every few months) so I write him what I plan to do then I do it. He never answered "no". Even for vacations, I just let him know when I go and for how long, if it is up to a week. I am responsible of my own work and he is just around.

My former manager used to do the same. He is a 40 year veteran, retiring in the next few months and for the past 6 years since I met him he wrote many emails telling people what he plans to do and just did it. It works for us very well.

Good point. But either way, you can’t decide much in a bigco because most decisions are bounded to money and therefore the CFO.

And so you can say what you will, but if the CFO does not approve, your stuff is not happening.

This is absolutely the way to go.

That's a bit long.

"We're planning on defragging the thingamajig on March 1st unless objections are raised. Please send objections to manager@my.division.com"

Honestly, I've been doing this for decades with legal stuff: "Please confirm that my next pickup date for $CHILD is March 1st." often resulted in the other party just remaining silent and, when complaints against her not allowing the child out were made, she responded with "I never objected to that specific visit".

Using "Unless objections are received, I will fetch $CHILD on March 1st" stopped her from using that excuse.

It's a great way to deal with a difficult party who just wants to have as much creative misunderstandings as possible.

Our team currently relies on thingamajig's responsiveness and cannot tolerate a change in performance. We will setup a temporary replica of thingamajig. Can you please hold off until our thingamajig replica is stable. My team expects this to be done by March 8th.

If I don't hear back from you by lunchtime, I WILL eat your leftovers.

Hey, we need to do XYZ by April 1st. Let me know if you think that's a problem.

That seems like a much more diplomatic (and work-appropriate) way of framing it rather than just saying "hey, if I don't hear from you by x date i'm gonna do something"

I am also wondering this , how can we do this without being confrontational and also not being too wordy that you lose interest

[flagged]

Have been doing all my life and it has never backfired.

It’s not about breaking rules. It’s that I already know what you want.

If I buy you ice cream without asking you for the flavor, it’s because I already know what you want because I pay attention to you.

And it doesn’t matter when I get it wrong because you appreciated the 500 other times I cared about you.

> “I’m going to do X in 5 days if you don’t respond” gives you absolutely no recourse if you do something that can result in reprimand.

Surely you wouldn't use this for any action that could result in a reprimand?

"Unless we receive objections, we're dropping the domain $X on March 1st and switching to the domain $Y instead" is not something you'd do.

OTOH, "Unless we receive objections from you, we're proceeding with (the current mocked-up UI|the last discussed tech-stack|deployment date|refactor|)" is not going to result in a reprimand.

this is a silver bullet for something that needs to be done on a specific timeframe, otherwise it'll be bad. Since the "Boss x do not give approval for it" won't cut in as a reason, and boss x needs to know this before you're doing it.

Of course criticality matters. The more critical it is, the more required for you to do a more personal message with said boss, like slack, dms, up to meeting face to face for approval.

Well, definitely don't phrase it exactly like that.

Most decisions that would be made in the context where this is a useful technique are irrelevant and/or obvious. They should be made by someone lower down the chain, but organizational dysfunction requires tricks like this to get anything done.

> About the only place where this works is violating some internal design decisions that are irrelevant to the business.

I don’t know why you feel the need to put “design” in there, but what you are describing seems like all rules governing how teams work together in any organization.

if it is possible to do anything that causes irreversible damage as a single engineer, then the fault for any damage is shared with whoever gave a single engineer that much power.

This strategy should only be used for things that are "required". i.e _not_ doing it will cause you / your team / division more harm than attempting but failing or running into issues.

The only other acceptable situation is for things that are low risk, high reward but can be important: like clean up, refactoring, whatever..

> if you do something that can result in reprimand.

If it's not obvious if your actions can result in a reprimand, then you can't do the thing, simple as that. Either you have the ownership and can take responsibility, or your boss needs to step up.

> I'm trying to imagine the scene where you "show the paper trail" to achieve victory over your angry colleagues! That's when my bullshit detector is all up in the red zone.

The scene is someone sitting at a computer replying to a chiding email with a blurb about having previously sent a notice and said notice attached. It's not really that theatrical or hard to imagine.

One of the good things with process frameworks like ITIL is the way to keep track of who needs to know what. You basically are required to inform everyone if no one protest to you or some manager you can do whatever.

It is alot better when you have someone who keeps track of these changes and says no if needed. As always a drama free work environment makes this easier.

Objection! You don’t have Ace Attorney style court hearings at work where you can ”show the paper trail” as evidence?

You generally reserve this tactic for people who act as blockers for everything, or for people who aren't critical to the project/action but still need to be notified.

The problem with busy tech whatevers is they will quite often not reply nor give a reasonable timeliness on which something can be done.

This method forces them to lay out the timeline they can adhere to, and it works as a CYA as it shows you/your group is ready to act and is being blocked by others.

It's up to upper management at that point to deconflict blockers.

Glad I searched for UNODIR before making this comment!

And that'd be a useful code to include in the subject line of the email, e.g.:

To: Boss

From: Me

Subj: UNODIR by [DATE], upgrading the production database

One thing I've eventually managed to learn after failing at it many, many times is that in the vast majority of cases an email can only say one thing; if you try to ask multiple questions, or give multiple pieces of information, best case people will actually read one of them. Worst case it'll overwhelm and they'll ignore the whole thing.

It's obviously different if you know the recipient and that they're able to handle more, but my default assumption is that people will read the first 1-3 sentences of an email, so I do my best to keep it to that, and if I have more to say I'll make a note to myself for once they reply.

lol. Same. And from same example of this dinner night I described started with my wife sharing 3 restaurant options with the group and a few texts flying around that I 1) didn’t get ahead of and 2) was late to the convo on but even by the time I got onto it all the messages were “they all look great” “oh I just can’t choose” “you choose we can’t!” and I just get to it and see this has been going on/off 6 hours with no decision and say “X would be my pick” and every quickly agrees to it.

Idk if it’s a men vs women thing or me specifically, but I just like to have a bias for action and make quick decisions with efficiency in communication. I think saying that briefly online in a comment probably makes sound like a bossy jerk but there’s a lot of nuance and skill to hone with this style of communication that is more difficult to elaborate on here, but the key is doing it without rubbing people the wrong way.

A manager that organized their team so that each team member makes concrete thought-out proposals with all details covered, so that it's their only job left is to give approvals and do nothing else? I'd say that's a brilliant manager

While I doubt most people have sufficient "objective statistics" to truly remove ego from the equation, there's a middleground here.

Write up your detailed proposal as typical, but before you click send, put an "executive summary" at the top, with maybe two sentences. One to describe the problem and one to describe the solution. You can put all the detail you want in the rest of the document. But the onus remains on you the engineer to make a recommendation, not just list options. If you genuinely believe yourself to be a probabilities it should be easy!

That's a great point. There needs to be trust between the person doing this and the boss. That trust is earned.

You also need to pick the right scope of problems--not too big. If you are one month into a new job and use this technique, but the problem you are trying to solve is deep rooted and you don't understand it, you'll burn effort and credibility.

It also makes sense to respond to feedback from your manager, as you suggest above. Some managers may hate this (see other comments, including one that would fire anyone using this technique). In fact, you could even explicitly ask how a manager wants to weigh in on decisions that you feel are in your purview but that they might have feedback on. (Drawing out a manager's readme, as it were.)

> It really depends on the culture of your organisation and how effective management is. If there is nobody that can act like this at your org it shows that your leadership team suffers from failure to delegate.

I think it's more than just that - upthread I posted that I used this technique for over a decade against a difficult party.

This approach is, briefly, for CYA: It's for when you are in the following situation:

You have to do something and will be punished if you don't, but a stakeholder is being difficult and/or hostile. They can delay you or outright sabotage you just by silence and/or bike-shedding.

Or it's a regulated industry

The key insight is that the concept of “allowed” is flawed. Most of us are responsible for outcomes, not actions.

If you communicate well that an action is necessary for the outcome you are responsible for, that’s enough. Obviously with notice, and with a genuine effort to get acknowledgement, but ultimately it’s not about what you’re allowed to do, it’s about what you’re expected to achieve.

Now, if you’re wrong, or capricious, or disingenuous… well all bets are off. But done responsibly this is a completely appropriate and defensible approach.

Honestly it's not my boss I worry about, more like a sibling team or service client that would have a stake in the decision but is known to drag their feet.

This would have worked fine in a Scandinavian company where managers are expected to delegate (some/most) technical responsibility. If boss was off, and couldn’t react in time, their eventual reaction would depend entirely on the outcome. If you were successful, they’ll appreciate that you didn’t hold up the decision by asking them.

Works fine in my British company that is almost as old as America, it’s called “out of office”. If they aren’t in the decisions are delegated to someone else.

It's just a matter of phrasing. "Hi, I wanted to give you a heads up that XYZ needs doing, and I'll be doing it on Wednesday. Let me know if that doesn't work."

I'd tone it down a little via:

“I'm planning on migrating the build system on Wednesday (26th); please let me know if you have any concerns.”

The original wording makes it sound like it's already been settled, so nobody will bother responding. But by saying planning, you might get some feedback.

For what it’s worth, this seems like the fatal flaw in the OP to me. If you need input on whether something is good to do, it’s very easy for someone to reply “yes” or “sounds good,” so just ask for input. If you don’t need input, just send an FYI instead of the weird asymmetric asking-for-objections-but-not-approval.

Author here. It's a deadline for feedback, which is why I used the word. Other comments have called it an ultimatum.

Both of those might be unnecessarily aggressive terms, but I'm not sure what another one-word term for "time something is going to get done unless you object" is.

A lot of times you have to set a “deadline” when interacting with other teams/orgs, or they will just never get back to you.