Fools, according to beliefs, learn from their own mistakes. If they don’t learn at all but repeat them over and over again, then they are either doubly a fool, or mistakes are not mistakes at all, but, let’s say, painful feedback.

It so happened that in my life the process of taking my lumps (hitting bumps in Russian idiom) and going through thorns is repeated occasionally and regularly. I wouldn’t say I enjoy it. Moreover, I will be glad to unload the accumulated rubble of life experience and ease karma. It exists, I believe.

But the problem is that there is no need to try to understand the specifics of the project, to find the reason why this is done this way, and this is done differently. You just need to act according to the algorithm. Scrum, Agile, and PMBOK are written to be used. Scrumbut – do you smell something unhealthy?? Yes, by the way, over the years I have come more and more to the idea that the ideal project manager is a woodpecker.

Let’s look at an example. Programmer Alex created a cacophony. Or let’s say gov.. in general, you understand. The cacophony went unnoticed. Six months later, traces of it were discovered at the production site. Vasya urgently found it and fixed it. Is Alex a hero? The correct answer is no, Alex needs to be punished for the bug he missed six months ago, as well as those QA who didn’t find it. The manager who was then the head of Alex’s team and did not raise the question of the normality of work in the quick and dirty mode and in production should also receive a hat. By the way, it was me. I hope you understand, that there are no extra hands, there is no budget, and everything, as always, is needed yesterday and, as a last resort, today. Well, here we are, the customer was happy that the development cost little, but now the cost of the error far exceeded the cost of testing at that time.

Another example. There is a good person on the project, and the work is working, but very slowly. I wasn’t the one who hired him, and I can’t fire him either, I have no moral right, and he’ll laugh at me in response to the threat of dismissal and get a job at Yandex the next day. How to live and be friends further? So you go and ask him to do something, and he does it as if it were some kind of favor. But it’s all simple: cut off a diseased branch and a healthy one will grow back!

But this is completely a classic of the genre. There is a junior working on the project, who was sold as a middle, and a middle, who on paper is a senior and a dozen more of the same victims of successful salesmen. No one living today has seen that paper, but the client remembers that he was assigned a team of the very best, and internal indignation is brewing in his soul, how can such professionals screw up like that. And conflict and misunderstanding are brewing. But what is simpler, telling the truth is easy and pleasant, as Yeshua said.

You also don’t have to read the letters they send you. You hope they are read, but you don’t! Mail is a means of non-guaranteed delivery. And there is no means of guaranteed reading at all, unless matches are inserted into the eyes so that they do not close, and every negative signal is reinforced with a stun gun. You can call a person, but this is not a guarantee of success. By the way, it has long been a known fact that information is distorted when transmitted between people, but I’m not even talking about transmission here, but simply about receiving information. Here you are, a bottle man, you have a neck, but the watering can doesn’t fit in there to pour in new words, it’s too narrow and that’s it. But you wrote it!

In general, what am I talking about? It is very convenient to believe in the Sovereign Father in different guises, be it an independent developer, an all-understanding boss, or HR who knows exactly what kind of people are needed on your project. This faith allows you to spend some more time in procrastination, but alas, that’s what people are for to do impossible things with a captivating smile. Do you remember how with a dumb smile one president of an atomic state answered the question of what was wrong with the sank U-boat? So, don’t let yourself follow after her.