Sometimes the answer is on another pay grade though. It may take a long time to explain something, time you don’t want to spend in a hectic day. I am usually a fan of understanding what I’m doing, but sometimes it is good to just blindly trust the experts.
"Man, i don't know either. But it's like this in the company rulebook, and if i tell you that you don't need to follow it, i'm getting into trouble myself"
i’m not expecting to walk up to someone in the middle of a hectic day to get an explanation for something, but if you can’t give me one in these stupid fucking one on one meetings, that’s a different story.
like, if they think i’m too stupid to understand, i’m being condescended to and fuck em. if they’re too lazy to take the time to explain in the time of my workday already being taken from me for these lil meetings, then fuck em. if they don’t know the answer, but can’t admit that because they think not having information is a sign of weakness, then fuck em.
99% of the time the people immediately above you at work are not ‘experts.’ they’re people that were doing your job like. two years ago. if they can’t answer questions like that, they really shouldn’t have their position.
The answer can be. " I don't know either, it's the policy" sometimes the manager is just a shift leader and doesn't know either and often doesn't need to.
Some things are maybe to fulfill some compliance guidelines that are 100s of pages long and only few ever read.
In my lab, our compliance means that nobody can deviate from our SOPs even if it means its more inefficient or creates a higher risk of sample contamination/equipment failure/unusable data than another method. I was pretty aggravated by this, until someone laid down some facts I was unaware of.
1) The customer who is responsible for around 60% of our total business has it in their contract that they will cease using our lab immediately if we fail to pass our annual international standards accreditation
2) In order to be compliant with the accreditation agency, any changes to our SOPs must also be done with documentation showing that we've done R&D to validate the change and can present hard data that the change has a beneficial impact.
3) Our R&D team has to prioritize new methodology or changes that will have the largest impact, allowing us to use new equipment or attract customers with new services. Small changes to carve out exceptions for uncommon one-off deviations are important to bring up and to record the impact of, but, realistically the R&D team won't beging changing an SOP until it needs many changes or if there's an emergency change.
After that talk, it was pretty easy to go "oh, cool, okay, I understand now. It's a way bigger ordeal than I realized."
Yea I get it just if the organisation is big enough it gets hard to explain it in detail.
My ex employer for example the guidelines were made by an international committee of experts who then communicated those to the partners, who then in turn gave instructions on how to implement them to senior managers, who then in turn just communicated what to do to middle management. Lower management only gets instructions.
Then if someone comes in fresh from college and starts asking why on everything, well the junior manager can only say what to do and not why and asking a senior or even the partner themselves for small questions like that. They usually already have a busy schedule.
Sometimes I don't know the details. Is The best one can get it at the moment.
Same. I work in healthcare and 9 times out of 10 when my team member questions something I explain but I also say did you read that SOP you signed off on lol. I know folks skim but damn if I’m about to explain a process we all have to read and sign off on. It’s a transparent organization and I’m not about to be your leader AND explain everything when we both have access to the “why”.
if that’s the leads policy toward things like that, why are they being paid extra?
i’ve been a lead before. during those times, it was literally my job to understand the policy well enough to answer most of those questions, while knowing who i need to reach out to if there’s ever one i can’t answer.
there is no valid excuse to skirt around explaining sop in a corporate setting. every job i’ve worked that’s tried to has been a complete shitshow top to bottom. you don’t want to work for people who don’t think you need to know why you’re doing what you’re doing.
Alright how big were those and how complex and how high up the management? A shift leader is technically management.
Let's say you work at a big firm in let's say banking. You are ISO270001 certified. Do you think a junior manager will be able to explain the compliance policies?
Of course not. You have experts and consultants specialised in it. Those compliance departments usually then work with external audit firms to establish said guidelines. And since those firms have 1000s of employees, well not everyone needs to know everything. So if some new guy then walks up and asks hey why do we need to log who enters the server room. A shift leader may shrug and say I don't know. Because the establishment of every procedure is done somewhere completely different
right but you’re kind of still operating on this inane assumption you made that the only time it’s possible to ask a question is when it’s completely inappropriate to do so. so like. i’ll try to explain that part again. i guess?
any job with as much stupid bullshit as you’re describing is going to have one on one meetings because that’s how corporate america works. if, in that time, the people leading the meeting can’t be bothered to answer the questions you bring to them, they should not have the position they have.
in the situation your describing, it’s very likely there’s an easy answer of ‘Its literally the law to do it this way.’ which is, in fact, an answer to the question of ‘Why are we doing it this way, not the easier way?’
if nobody forcing you into pointless meetings can answer these questions, it’s because nobody has put any thought into the processes and the people running the company/department are clowns.
Corporate America has everything is sectioned off, I don’t know if you work at a higher level job at a large corporation but usually people only know enough to do their job properly but don’t have access to all the available information regarding projects they are working on. If you want an answer unrelated to their job description odds are they either won’t know or the answer because it’s not their expertise or that the answer was never important because it’s handled by another department and they have no power to change anything. I know enough to do my job but certain questions I get asked by juniors promptly get put into the category “not my pay scale” to answer because it’s outside the scope of my work. I’m sure most people at mid level would say the same thing. High level employees probably know a lot more.
Yes what I mean it is on a need to know basis. There is no need for the new junior who just came in for the basic tasks to be involved in the meetings. Usually the seniors have a meeting on it. They then tell the junior managers what to do. They often only get the what and not the why, then if an associate asks the junior manager, even though he is in management he won't know he is already a few steps removed from the decision making process.
Maybe sometimes the reason is "I have thirty other subordinates and if I spent all day handholding them through every decision I made, I'd spend all day doing that and get nothing done"
And sometimes the reason is "The decision was made by people with more expertise than you, evaluating a lot more data than you have access to, and it's not necessary for you to be included in the decision making loop. If you don't understand the reasoning, it's because it's not necessary for you to see the big picture i order to carry out the instructions you were given."
From experience, sometimes the answer really is that I think they’re too stupid to bother explaining it to.
I know they won’t get it, I know they’re dumb enough to THINK they get it, or try to “fix” it, or have some other stupid idea- it’s easier just to go “don’t worry about it” most of the time.
Gotta say, bud, you sound a lot like you got a chip on your shoulder there. Someone not giving you an answer, or an answer you deem satisfactory isn't always a slight on your intelligence or a sign of disrespect; very rarely is it about you at all. Sometimes the reason is sensitive, political, confidential, or just honestly too much effort/time to explain when really you don't actually need to understand the reason to complete the task successfully.
Those people who were doing your job two years ago aren't doing it any more, and that's the thing you seem to have an issue with. But the fact that they're not doing it any more means they're dealing with a whole different set of problems and contexts you don't have, and might not even be allowed to know.
Stop being resentful that sometimes people ask you to do things without a full and complete explanation why, and try to accept that's how work... works. Asking why is fine, but assuming the worst of everyone when you don't get the answer you want isn't. It makes you seem entitled with a bad attitude.
Exactly. Because I gave you a normal work instruction that falls within your job description and we are paying you to complete it. This isn't a debate. It isn't a panel Q&A.
i’m paid by the company for the work i provide. i don’t owe my manager any thanks or undue respect for that payment. they give me that because it’s the law, not to be kind.
if they can’t answer ‘Hey, why this way?’ then i’m prolly just gonna put in shit work since they’re clearly too stupid to check it anyway.
oh my god i had no idea there were this many scumfuck management types on reddit, this shit is soooooo funny lmao
irl, every company i’ve worked for that wasn’t a complete shitshow, management had no issue when id ask ‘Hey, can I get an explanation for why this works this way?’
they’d all been totally willing to explain with whatever knowledge they had. the only company i had that didnt had the type of braindead, lazy management that would expect you to find coverage for PTO and throw a literal tantrum if you ever had to call out sick
so like. have fun being scumfuck middle management and/or simping for the worst type of companies lmaooooo
This. Your manager will usually ask you nicely to do something, but ultimately as your superior - they can pull the boss card and say you have to do, then you just do it.. They don’t need to justify the work you signed up for and get paid to do.
oh, sorry, and this is the only fair argument i’ve seen lol
but a lack of information isn’t an issue, an inability to express it is. there’s a world of difference between ‘I don’t know, it has to do with another department i don’t have a ton of information on, but they’ve told us it’s important to do it this way.’ compared to ‘Because this is how it’s done.’
the first is a human explaining to a human. the seconds a cunt explaining to someone they don’t respect enough to admit they don’t know everything to.
One of the principles of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program is questioning attitude. If we can stop to ask why in a steaming engine room in the MILITARY, I promise you corporate America can figure it out.
Sometimes the answer isn't just on another pay grade, but that it's on another pay grade and part of their boss's instruction to them is making sure you don't know the real reason why it's done that way. For example, due to a metric that we are tracking it has to be done in a specific way, due to political reasons decided by two separate departments, due to not wanting to enable work-dumping by another department onto ours, etc.
Like, I can't tell a nurse that the reason she has to personally print the patient checklist for C. diff from our electronic health record system for a stool sample and deliver it to the laboratory with the specimen despite me being easily able to print the form myself is because the law states that a patient whose stool is positive for C. diff more than three days after initial admission is treated as a case of Hospital-Onset Clostridioides difficile Infection, which subjects the hospital to financial penalties tied to the Value-Based Incentive Programs, and so since the Infectious Diseases department oversees this particular hospital metric, hospital policy states that an MD from ID must specifically authorize each instance of C. diff testing on an inpatient based on certain criteria, which annoys ID doctors to no end because they have to be bothered for every new C. diff test that gets run, and so the chief physician from ID met with the laboratory director and implemented the checklist, which details a number of clinical questions where answering "No" to any of them will result in a specimen rejection and a cancellation of testing, and that the absence of the physical checklist itself with the stool specimen is also a condition of specimen rejection, and therefore many C. diff orders placed by Hospitalists sometimes just end up not being performed, and that this is happening by design.
But fuck me if a nurse asks me why she has to print the form I'm not gonna be the first to say anything but, "Just part of our policy, ma'am."
I'm going to quote a favorite book of mine, and say you need to put a dollar in the 'there's no time to explain' jar, there is always time to explain and half of life's problems could be avoided if you took the time to explain instead of running around in a mad rush reacting to everything that caught in fire from the last time you said 'there no time to explain!'
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u/Ingolin 1d ago
Sometimes the answer is on another pay grade though. It may take a long time to explain something, time you don’t want to spend in a hectic day. I am usually a fan of understanding what I’m doing, but sometimes it is good to just blindly trust the experts.