Say No

by wyclif • 12 years ago

336 91 12 years ago

In my experience Muskovitz was probably three weeks to three months too late in saying no. It's a really hard thing, culturally, socially shutting down people face to face like that is something we are all wired not to do, on top of which he probably derived a lot of personal identity and kudos from being the goto guy - hard to turn off.

But the pressure had to be immense to react like that - and one suspects that it's only because of good well balanced people around that they could take the social shutdown and come back to work still focused instead of suddenly fostering a poisonous atmosphere - something that can easily happen if the no was taken as "no I don't value you" instead of "no we have to find new ways of working"

Would be interesting to hear others views of this formative time.

xpto123• 12 years ago

A lot of this is culture dependent I believe, but i am under the impression that at least on western countries you cannot do this a lot of times without a high cost, specially if you re not a manager.

If someone comes to your desk directly, you are supposed to stop what you are doing and give your attention to that person, even if you are working on something really urgent.

Refusing meeting requests is also not well seen unless you have another appointment, meetnaping happens all the time.

A lot has to do also with open space offices, where everybody is just sitting there and makes it even more awkward, and you are right there available to be interrupted.

Interruptions from persons on your own team are to be taken with even more priority, the modern open office is just a high-interruption environment and there is nothing to be done about it.

In the end it might be really a good thing, because if a person is blocked it walks to the desk of someone else and sometimes can be unblocked and the company as a whole goes forward.

Doing what his boss did of cutting another person off with a 'not now' is not something that his boss can get away with a lot of times, even if he is under pressure: its demoralizing, it just ends up creating a weird atmosphere.

One solution might be: one or two days of remote work a week for everybody.

goshx2• 12 years ago

Your suggested solution makes sense to me. I find myself doing this more and more. The place where I get the least amount of work (at least my work) done is the office, so I tend to work at nights or sometimes simply work from home the entire day.

Some people get personally offended if you don't stop what you are doing to talk to them. I have a feeling that this is harder for people that work for IT departments, because people in other departments don't understand the cost associated to an interruption like that.

This cartoon says it all: http://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt-...

nostrademons2• 12 years ago

It's industry, role, and company dependent more than country dependent.

A lot depends upon what you are paid to deliver. If you're a software engineer, you are paid to deliver working software. You can deliver that software more efficiently if you do not let yourself be interrupted; hence, most good bosses will be okay with a "Shhh, not right now, send me an e-mail" if it's clear you're in the zone on a hard problem. And if you have a bad boss that cares more about attention than results, you should look for a new job anyway.

Same goes for traders, fund managers, and quants in finance - you are paid to make money, and it doesn't matter how rude you are as long as you deliver that.

It most certainly won't work for an administrative assistant, where you are paid to save time for your executive. It won't work for an advertising or marketing exec or salesperson, where you are paid for collaborative, face-to-face interactions. It probably won't even work for a lawyer or investment banking associate, where you are paid to be a partner's bitch.

jemfinch• 12 years ago

If you're a software engineer, you are paid to deliver working software.

No, you're paid to deliver solutions. Often the best way to get the solution you need is to make sure the N engineers around you are being productive.

udev3• 12 years ago

I agree with the above.

Forgive me for being cynical about the whole premise.

Saying no like this can also be used by people that fake being busy. The same way they always walk with a notepad and pens, and other such tricks.

So Dustin said "Not now!", and the author extrapolated this to a parable about how people at Facebook are so dedicated and productive that they are willing to be borderline rude to serve the company.

Dustin said "Not now", and that's it. It does not mean much.

general_failure• 12 years ago

Behind every moral and lesson is an extrapolated story

dionidium• 12 years ago

In summary: I'd love to say "no", but the person who hired and can fire me demands I say "yes"

eru2• 12 years ago

There's two sides to that: you can always quit.

bigtunacan• 12 years ago

This is company dependent rather than country. When I was early in my career as a software dev I felt like I could never say no. I would continue to take on additional work which translated to more hours.

Eventually my manager at the time did the best thing he could for me. He asked me into his office for a "talk". Then he told me that he didn't want to lose me because I burned out. He said, "Look, you have to learn to say no to people. If you aren't comfortable doing that then tell them to run it by me; and then I'll say no."

saturdayplace• 12 years ago

This is the solution. Your manager understood his job, and its impact on yours. Everyone should be so lucky. So far, I have been! At my first job, my boss told me right off not to let everyone who comes by add work to my pile. It's hard to do at first. After all, your first reaction is to be helpful. But after a while you see the benefit of being able to to deflect things to your manager and have him prioritize the workload.

nnnnni• 12 years ago

It's not even company dependent.

Where I work, the entire culture changed from "let's work together to make everything better" to "you drop everything RIGHT NOW if the boss decides that they have a personal project" when a new one took over.

...and so I will be starting my new job in a couple of weeks.

nativexer• 12 years ago

He said "no" because it is normal to assume that what the author was about to say had no contribution toward his priorities. Had it been important enough, he would've know about it. This is a sign that the person say "no" is a great time and resource manager.

calinet6• 12 years ago

Even though it might be difficult, it is some extremely useful and accurate advice.

The overarching point is that you need to focus on what's truly important.

This does not mean you need to be rude or outright say "no" in a blunt or un-tactful way. You can come up with any way you like to manage those interruptions and distractions. The point is that people who truly get things completed usually keep their focus and know how to say no to things that aren't truly important.

It's extremely useful to me at this point in my career, and I can think of others who have the same issue, being constantly busy with less important "now" items and being unable to focus on what I believe is really important. Part of it is the company, the people, and that I'm able to do many things; but most of the problem is in how I manage those inputs, and what I train people to do. It's my responsibility to manage my own time to reach the greatest impact, and in doing that, the company will improve; even for the people who think they needed my time urgently.

I'm a huge systems thinker and I generally try not to blame individuals for problems, but this is something I recognize as being almost totally on me.

hvidgaard2• 12 years ago

It doesn't have to be demoralizing. I oftentimes say not now, shoot me an email, Skype or ask me after lunch. It has created a culture where they interrupt me only if it is urgent enough to warrent I get out of my workflow and have to restart it.

I believe this is what the article is all about.

nowarninglabel• 12 years ago

This is also a good reason to make explicit if your "go-to" person in your organization is on the management track or the technical track. This is something I think we struggled with for awhile at Kiva where we didn't make explicit that you could remain technical and still get promoted, so people would become Engineering Mangers only to then expect to still stay in their corner plugging away on code in the zone without interruptions. But when you are the guy tasked to train others and generally help people clear roadblocks (as managers generally are designated to do), then it hurts everyone when you instead try to hang on to a "coder only" mentality. You get frustrated cause you are getting interrupted and the people interrupting you get frustrated by getting brushed off or feeling like they are wasting your time.

Fortunately, we eventually made it clear that you can move up in title, but remain focused on engineering instead of management. This helped tremendously to set it up so we have a set of people who have time set aside specifically for talking about problems, and you can chat with them in order to solve problems while leaving the folks solving code problems alone so they can maintain their productivity.

Animats• 12 years ago

That's Facebook's culture. They're building a new HQ building. It has one of the world's largest bullpens. Almost everybody is in one huge room.

(Floor plan: http://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2012/08/dezeen_Frank-Gehry-...)

Apple is at the other extreme - they keep their groups isolated, often behind locked doors. Microsoft used to run recruiting ads for programmers pointing out that their programmers get offices with doors. Google tends to have medium-sized bullpens surrounded by many small glass conference rooms.

joezydeco2• 12 years ago

That floorplan has got to be what Hell looks like. Holy crap.

vonmoltke• 12 years ago

Looks like some of Raytheon's and Boeing's large facilities, minus the cube walls.

stevesearer• 12 years ago

From what I've learned of the Gehry-designed FB building, workers will not be able to see from one side of the building to the other because of the conference spaces, pantries, and other various non-workstation zones. The overhead view looks quite a bit more daunting than it actually mat be.

I am thinking of it like some sort of weird combination of the desk arrangements of their old Palo Alto office on the scale of their new Menlo Park campus, only all indoors without the myriad of hallways and walls.

Untit1ed• 12 years ago

Apart from what appears to be a slippery slide in the top left :/.

lclarkmichalek• 12 years ago

Hope their architectural team has some acoustic engineers on it.

placebo• 12 years ago

While I agree it's important to learn how to say no sometimes in order to keep priorities and deadlines, I feel though that what is missing in this advice is that you should also learn how to say no in a manner that doesn't generate negativity and a tense atmosphere. It really doesn't take that much to add a sincere smile and say you're busy right now, perhaps a bit later.

thisisboz3• 12 years ago

I agree!

princip3• 12 years ago

That's just rude. A short and polite "I'm a little busy, can we talk later" would require no more effort or concentration than just saying no.

Preseed2• 12 years ago

We don't quite agree. It is upon the person who is taking it wrongly - that is negative on their part. Everyone should practice saying 'no' without having to explain themselves.

famousactress2• 12 years ago

Unlearning your advice is probably the single most beneficial thing I've done during my career as a programmer. While I at my core tend to think exactly the way you do about this, it's a righteous stance that only did me a disservice before I decided to take more responsibility for how I'm heard.

As the person delivering information, you by definition have more context than the person or people you're delivering it to. Asking the world to figure-it-out and expecting them to do so correctly is a path that I think is likely to net-cost you.

DanBC2• 12 years ago

In an ideal world you're right. We don't live in an ideal world.

http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Staff%20Meetings

danielweber• 12 years ago

No, because that's a question, inviting a discussion.

If you want a more polite version, "I'm sorry not right now."

udev3• 12 years ago

Yep.

That's rude, and doesn't actually mean that the refusing party was being productive/busy at the time.

It just means "not now". There could be 100 reasons why.

ereyes01• 12 years ago

This article has inspired me to say no to Hacker News for the rest of day... :-)

chuckcode3• 12 years ago

I wish I had a little LED at my desk that would sync with my IM status to show people when I was busy or available to chat online or in person. One of the earliest usability features in the online world but still not replicated in the real world.

test1235• 12 years ago

In my case, that LED is my headphones :)

chuckcode3• 12 years ago

LED on the headphones would be awesome... And possibly programmable through the cord, thanks!

Dewie• 12 years ago

What if I want to listen to music, but I don't mind someone talking to me if they need something? What if I want to concentrate with no interruptions, including no noise/music from headphones?

Preseed2• 12 years ago

This is a great idea - got me giddy for a second. Would be an awesome crowd funding project. Kudos!

xeromal2• 12 years ago

My ex-company uses those. They would sync up with our Lync clients and you could even set the color for each status. If anyone is interested I'll ask my old contact there.

DanBC2• 12 years ago

These?

http://www.blynclight.com/

nmolo• 12 years ago

For MS shops who rely on Lync (I mean Skype for business) can get these http://www.blynclight.com/

famousactress2• 12 years ago

That's funny you mention this. I've been remote full time for over four years now and one of the upsides I didn't expect was that I find it much easier to manage my own distractions than I did in an office. Lots of credit goes to things like the IM status and the ability to hold a reasonable SLA on communications (can you imagine silently waiting 5-10 minutes to turn around and answer a question someone asked you in person?).

jfernandez• 12 years ago

This project just came out https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/flic-the-wireless-smart-b...

Among other products like this there's definitely a way!

tlrobinson• 12 years ago

Wearing headphones is the unwritten rule at a lot of places.

Not great if you don't like wearing headphones though.

cerberusss• 12 years ago

Exactly, that is what we do.

chipsy• 12 years ago

It never worked that well in the online world, IME. People used their away status message for the equivalent of Weird Twitter; there was little incentive to proclaim yourself "available." Likewise, there's always the person who goes "ping", "ping" at you, and then you say "what," and then they finally ask a question that you can answer in one sentence.

Better, I find, is just talking at someone with a cultural expectation of high latency in their response, which is true of a lot of IRC channels. In many previous HN threads people have mentioned the chat room format being crucial for their work discussion; you can direct a question at someone, while allowing it to be publicly visible too so that someone else can step in.

qq66• 12 years ago

Microsoft employees have these.

thisisboz3• 12 years ago

We tend to use headphones for this purpose at Facebook

angersock• 12 years ago

Notice that if your development team uses chat or ticketing or email or some async communication mechanism a lot of these issues go away.

goshx2• 12 years ago

Not always. If the people don't understand that someone can't give them immediate attention they are going to email you, send a chat message to say that they emailed you and if you don't reply in 2 minutes they will call you. If you don't answer they walk to your desk, and this was for something that could wait. I have experienced that issue quite a few times already.

yth• 12 years ago

nice!

elwell• 12 years ago

they would simply edit files live on the Harvard server and shout out what file they were changing to avoid conflicts

That's awesome.

Scalar• 12 years ago

I'm willing to give Dustin some sympathy, I don't think any company could ever relate to the amount of rapid growth that was experienced within Facebook back then and is still continuing today. I was put in a similar situation to a much smaller extent and as the team grew it honestly felt like the majority of my job was babysitting rather than accomplishing what I had set out to do.

At the same time it's important to understand that for every no there should also be a yes, and it's just as easy to gently put people down rather than say something that could be construed as rude.

kin• 12 years ago

It depends on the situation but I pretty much agree. For example, sometimes coworkers will come up to me to discuss or ask something that'll take less than a minute. These minutes can add up to suck all the productivity out of your day, especially with the context switching.

On the other hand, something that could take a minute for me to answer could take someone an hour to figure out, thus thwarting productivity on the other end.

enraged_camel• 12 years ago

My previous employer refused to make this culture shift. This was terrible for us engineers because we were supposed to "make ourselves available" to everyone in the company, especially the sales team, when they had questions about the product. The upper management's rationale was that if one of our Account Managers was talking to a prospective customer on the phone and they had a technical question (e.g. "can your solution integrate with Software X?"), being able to answer that question then and there (even if it meant IM'ing one of us engineers) was better for conversion because it gave the customer the impression of competence. On top of that, it was an open-office setup, so there was continuous chatter all the time.

After fighting this culture for years, I couldn't handle the constant interruptions anymore and quit. I have a home office now and I control all the variables in it. I couldn't be happier.

umurkontaci• 12 years ago

This is actually pretty important, and actually you can do this (probably in a more polite way) to your manager as well. Not wanting to be interrupted = focused. focused = more progress in development.

If you are interrupted in while working on a very complicated subject, going back to the same focus level takes up to 30 minutes for me. The time I could spent on fixing stuff.

I am happy that most of my employers / managers understood and appreciated this.

You can explain them with this comic as well: http://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt-...

darklajid• 12 years ago

I learned this the hard way. Joined a company and was on-site in a different country, for 5 days a week, 8 month and we were doing overtime every. single. day. I'm talking 8am to 1am 3 out of 5 days and the rest wasn't that much better.

I quit. Did something else.

8 years ago I joined that very same company again. I'm still a 'corporate drone', a random developer, but I learned to decline and to say no. Both to your managers and to your coworkers. That single word saved my sanity and allows me to stay with that company to this very day.

I don't agree that it's a matter of culture (at least not in the culture I am roughly familiar with) if you can pull this of. It certainly might be a matter of culture how you need to phrase it.

Fortunately my employer is rather blunt and open internally, so 'No, I really have no patience for that right now' is - while not the friendliest possible answer - acceptable and possible.

Now I need to learn how to walk the fine line between 'saying no' and 'being old and grumpy' :)

jsmeaton• 12 years ago

Now I need to learn how to walk the fine line between 'saying no' and 'being old and grumpy' :)

That's the difficult part in my experience. I say no a lot. Some people have the impression that I'm lazy or privileged because they feel they can't say no. They certainly can, but they don't want to feel like they're upsetting anyone.

But sometimes when I say no, I say it in the wrong way, or don't provide enough context for why "no" is right. This doesn't help me at other times, even when I've (mostly) effectively communicated that no is the right decision for the person that's asking me to do something.

pikachu_is_cool• 12 years ago

Not right now, I'm going to hit this blunt and hang out with my girlfriend instead of mercilessly chasing the dollar via software ventures.

PeterisP• 12 years ago

The todo-"avoid at all costs"-list is an extension of this same concept (recent post at http://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffett-productivity-t...).

In essence, whatever is at #6 or #10 at your priority list is not something that's somewhat important and should be tackled from time to time - it's the very thing that's stealing your time and attention away from your #1 and #2 things, a dangerous distraction that you should consciously limit and either avoid or schedule to a specific time.

You don't have to worry about priority #1001 taking your time - you don't want to do it and so you won't; but things that are seemingly good often lead to "yak-shaving" at the cost of what's truly important for you.

moonlighter• 12 years ago

"Say No to things that are urgent but not important."

This captures the essence of the post, and is almost universally applicable.

fwn• 12 years ago

Yep. If the article would have been linked under this sentence instead of the clickbaity "Say No" I would've saved time and energy today by not reading about this annoyingly simple notion.

applecore• 12 years ago

Look back on your past week and assemble an honest accounting of your attention. Does the time you spent in each area mirror the importance of that area? This exercise is the true test of your ability to prioritize.

And when you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

mb_72• 12 years ago

I work from home now, but in my days in an office I adopted the following system - a small box on my desk with a green tick on one side and a red cross on the other. Green tick = I can be interrupted at any time, red cross = please interrupt me only for critical emergencies.

In both the old office and my home office I made / make a real effort to set the box to an appropriate value, i.e. don't have the red cross showing all the time or it loses it's meaning. These days it's only my wife who is looking to interrupt me, fortunately, but this system works well. And, hell, one of the benefits of working from home is having your wife 'insist' on taking you away from a 'red cross' task once in a while, heh-heh.

free2rhyme214• 12 years ago

Dan Kennedy already summed up time management in several of his books. Saying no is another way of staying focused but I can tell you it's much harder to implement in real life if you don't have the right habits in place to do so.

misiti3780• 12 years ago

"People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things." - Steve Jobs

thisisboz3• 12 years ago

For what it is worth, I do think Dustin could have been a little more gracious in how he approached it and I mention in my note that it isn't meant to be an excuse to be rude. I actually think it was fine for him to do this to me not because he was my boss but because we had a good relationship. Still, when this happens to me, I usually say something like "I'm in the middle of X right now, can this wait until Y?" -- this tells them what I am doing (and thus allows them to say assert that their topic really is more important) and also gives them a time to follow up.

As a manager of a large organization, I have more respect for people on my team who say no and assert stronger ownership over their time, ideally by being transparent about their priorities. At the end of the day, we just look at impact and managing ones own time is a good sign that someone is focused on impact. Still, I'm sure that isn't the case with every manager in every company (or even every manager in my company)

The open space aspect of the FB offices is usually navigated by people putting headphones on to indicate they are heads down. I do it often even though I'm rarely listening to anything. I agree it isn't for everyone though.

softdev12• 12 years ago

I had a similar thing happen to me, where I was on the receiving end of "not now". The colleague was on a phone with their backed turned and head down and I couldn't see that they were on the phone. And they responded with a mean "not now". There's just no excuse for it. Even if it's the end-of-world, you can still just say "not now" without any malice.

I'm sure he didn't mean any harm and was under pressure. People make mistakes. And compensation is called compensation for a reason - (stock) compensation for being yelled at, I'm sure makes it feel better - especially when it's early facebook stock.

hvidgaard2• 12 years ago

It helps having a manager that helps you do this. I can (and do) say 'a' isn't a prioty right now, I'm working on 'r'. If it is urgent take it up with >managers name< and we can reprioritize if he agrees. After all I have given him a promise that something will be done, and he is the one to make the decision to postpone it, not me.

thecynic• 12 years ago

I have a different theory of what was going on in the early days of FB in regards to the author's claims.

Dustin probably started saying "No" not so much because his time was being monopolized by technical issues, but because other engineers (including the author) were trying to curry favor with him as they saw the status of the social network start to rise.

mkramlich• 12 years ago

Learning to say No and learning better about what to say No to is definitely a helpful life strategy, in my experience.

For example, saying no to PHP -- whatever it's merits -- means being able to say yes to Java, Python, C, Go, Clojure, whatever. Saying no to Windows means being able to say yes, more, to Linux. Saying no to meetings means saying yes to writing a new feature or fixing a bug. Saying no to interruptions means saying yes to focus. And so on.

You have only so much time in the day, week, year, rest of your life. It's not that there's no value, benefit or use to the thing you're saying no to, it's that the alternative will often give you more of those things, or otherwise help make your life better in some strategic long-term way, or in some non-tangible way like making you happier.

blazespin• 12 years ago

This is why scrum masters were invented. It's there job to say yes, while everyone else says no.

pjlegato• 12 years ago

As an east coast transplant, I am still utterly amazed that this sort of thing actually is normal on the west coast: someone is seriously shocked and hurt because someone else "shut you down" by saying "not right now" when you want to interrupt them to draw their attention to yourself.

Not that they don't want to talk to you at all, they just want you to wait till they finish what they're doing first. This is apparently considered "socially awkward" in California.

Not only that, this person then went off and introspected on the broader meaning of this "watershed moment," and concluded that "socially awkward" things like occasionally saying no to someone are sometimes actually OK and good...

methodover• 12 years ago

I'm rather surprised at some of the responses here.

For many people, especially when they're working on difficult or complex tasks, an interruption will cause them to feel a bit angry or frustrated. This is completely 100% normal.

They don't mean to hurt your feelings. They just need some space to focus. Give them a bit of space, and think nothing else of it.

wh-uws• 12 years ago

I learned how to say know early on. I've been freelancing since high school. Nothing will teach you to say no when you are over extended faster than failing to deliver well for a client.

RoboTeddy• 12 years ago

I like this:

Look back on your past week and assemble an honest accounting of your attention. Does the time you spent in each area mirror the importance of that area? This exercise is the true test of your ability to prioritize. It will tell you whether you are able to maintain focus on the important or whether you get distracted by the urgent.

overgard• 12 years ago

I think a corollary is that, it's surprising how much you can say no to (if you're polite about it). I notice the dynamics are different in a really big company versus a small one though. Like if you're in a large company, meetings tend to cast a wide net and usually it's impossible to get 100% attendance anyway, so it's a lot easier to hide (metaphorically). Especially if you've sort of built a mystique of having a lot of fish on the fryer. On the other hand, in a small organization people are pretty aware of each others business, so it's a lot harder to pull the "gosh I wanted to attend but I had this other thing come up..." card. Then you have to be a little bit more direct with the "I have things to do and this isn't that important' deal.

If I were to wear my slightly evil hat though, I would say it's useful to occasionally decline meetings. It doesn't hurt to remind people your time is of value.

thallukrish• 12 years ago

I wonder how you say 'no' to HN.

illicium• 12 years ago

You can't say 'no' on HM without being downvoted by the hivemind for not having an agreeable opinion.

Then the "why is everyone being so negative and critical?" comment rises to the top.

minusSeven• 12 years ago

In my company we have exactly the opposite. We have a rule called "there are no stupid questions". If you get stuck at what you are doing you should ask for help(this goes for senior resources too).

In fact if you had got stuck but didn't ask for help and for some reason the work got delayed this will get escalated and you will be blamed for not asking for help. I just think thats the way it should be.

pokedotjon• 12 years ago

Isn't this Covey's quadrants all over again?!

http://www.eitanbirshan.com/blog/time-management-covey%E2%80...

LatencyKills• 12 years ago

At Microsoft we called this "Red Time / Green Time". I had a card on my door that I could flip to either color. If the card was set to the red side people wouldn't interrupt me. If it was green it was fine to just walk in and start talking. We were required to have a certain amount of green time each day.

Say No

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