Knowing Your Limits

Filed Under Personal

It really annoys me when some people forces me to explain (usually repeated after a couple of days) the details of what I plan to do with a particular task to the extent of asking the technical info, the actual coding approach and other unnecessary details. It’s fine with me if the person is a technical person who can easily understand technical jargons, design and inner workings of a system. But if a person is on a business side, I think it would be better if that person concentrate on what the business needs, the business process and the required output from the system. It’s like drawing the line between being a marketing guy and an engineer. In the several companies I worked with-including the current company I’m working in- you’ll find this kind of scenario. This is a typical marketing man versus engineers. I hate it but it’s a reality. Although I do not discount the capacity of the business person to do such a technical task, I think it is always better to let the subject matter experts(SME) do the job.

Cases like these leads to greater problems as usually, the marketing guy tends to make baseless conclusions and worst, dangerous assumptions. We all know that ‘assumption is always the cause of fuck-ups’. Actually, it annoys me if I see a business persons making technical decisions without consulting his/her SME. Same thing goes for a technical person trying to make business decisions without discussing with the marketing guy. I’m not trying to be self-righteous but as much as possible, I keep away from things that involves management as I am not trained to be one. That’s another person’s job, anyways. Whenever there’s a need to haggle/negotiate something, I let my supervisors decide and haggle.

The problem lies on people who can’t wait to get to the top of the ladder but are basically inequipped with the necessary skills and competencies even just for their current position.
We must understand that in a large multi-national corporation, even our small decisions can be worth thousands of dollars, sometimes even millions. As ‘ChowKing’ has taught us before, “always make a calculated risk”. A person with a Messiah Complex is the last person you’d want to team with.

Actually, this problem can be easily solved. All we need to do is communicate. Let the person know what you feel and discuss things constructively. The bottomline is, everybody must know where he/she is standing.