Yeah yeah whatever

Today I'm thankful for ...

... being able to see through a personnel issue we're having right now at work. The problem is that I feel like I'm being micromanaged by someone who isn't even my boss. He's literally dictating my work schedule and trying to withhold information from me that he deems not necessary. It's really frustrating working with this individual because he seems to believe he has the correct answers and is in charge of the roadmap. I've been doing a lot of thinking about how to solve this problem because clearly I'm never going to be able to shout louder than him---he'll find a way to out-speak, out-volume, out-maneuver me. It's tricky. So I think I'm going to try a different approach.

I have been trying to analyze the psychology behind his motivations and I'm fairly convinced that he perceives me as being inferior in a number of ways. He may be smarter, true, but that does not give him the right to try to control me. Firstly, we have two totally different roles---he's more of a developer and I'm more of a designer. Secondly, we have a very different range of experiences---he's into very structured programming, I'm into flexibility to accommodate rapid design iterations. Thirdly, we have different working styles---he always works from high priority to low, I work mostly in that order but if I need to take a "break" I'll pick off some low-hanging fruit.

I've boiled it down to an issue of trust. It is my current belief that he doesn't trust me to do the job right or to do the highest priority items first. However, if he would just stop and examine my track record I think he'll find that I always get the job done, on time, and with better results than originally expected. Just because I don't do everything in his manner does not mean I don't have validity. In fact, many of the misunderstandings lately have come as a result of 1) his lack of proper documentation, 2) difficult-to-decipher logic that is overly complex, 3) his lack of visibility into my current task list which includes items not currently in our bug tracking system.

It is now my goal to try to get him to see my perspective so we can work together. I'm composing a very point-by-point based e-mail (which is how he thinks, not how I usually think) to address very specific issues. I'm hoping he'll at least give it a chance.

This has turned out to be a little more of a rant than a mini blog entry but I'm sure that there will be a number of future entries related to this one.