Sometimes showing your manager how hard you work can really go a long way!

This guy shares how his manager thought his job was easy and how he made the manager realized the real difficulty of the job.

Check out the full story.

You keep halving my time estimates? You’re right, my estimates should be more reliable

A couple of decades ago, I was working as the only technical writer in a fairly large team of developers.

Our manager was Cambridge educated, liked to cut estimates, and was particularly convinced that my job was easy and quick – and that I was lazy and terrible at estimates.

That’s INSANE!

He’d point out that the worst typist could type a page of text in an hour, so I should be getting through at least eight pages of user manual a day.

When he halved my time estimates and gave me the new deadlines, I – like the doofus I was – slaved away, worked unpaid overtime, and squeaked on over the line.

And then usually ended up taking a couple of days sick leave to recover. That eventually got me called into HR for being ‘unreliable’. HMPH.

He knew he had to do something about this!

Something in me snapped at that point.

The next project, the same scenario played out. I gave my (quite good) time estimates, he pooh-poohed them and halved them, I shrugged and accepted his pronouncement.

He pointed out that I really needed to get better at estimating my time. MC time.

He played his game!

Two weeks before the end of the 2-month project, he asked for an update.

“Oh, I’m a bit over a third of the way through the documentation,” I said calmly, as though there wasn’t a deadline staring me in the face.

He blinked and asked for an explanation.

He knew what to do!

“Well, I told you it would take four months to do the amount of documentation you asked for, and it looks as though if I don’t do any overtime, it’s actually pretty close to correct, based on my progress so far.” I beamed at him as though I was completely unaware that he had managers and a CTO who were expecting my documentation based on the information he gave them – along with the product it’s describing, of course.

Much to my surprise, it didn’t even seem to occur to him to yell at me – the sheer confidence with which I’d delivered the devastating news had utterly confused him.

It gets interesting…

He ended up helping me to cut down the requirements and then finish completing the documentation to meet the deadline. I worked my usual hours, and if he asked me to do overtime, played dumb and said, “No, sorry – I get sick if I do that, so I don’t anymore.”

He worked a lot of overtime. I would walk past his office to see him staring at his computer monitor, biting his fingernails, and looking very, very worried.

Things got better!

He wrote a lot of substandard documentation, and being a perfectionist, that really upset him. He didn’t see his family much for two weeks.

I spent a lot of my time at work trying not to cackle like a warlock who’s had one too many pep pills.

Finally the cherry on top!

Once he had some time to recover, he called me into his office to discuss new ways of estimating time for documentation, and carefully suggested that maybe half a page to a page of documentation a day was a fair general estimate?

Maybe?

And perhaps at some point we should look at hiring a second tech writer.

GEEZ! That sounds dramatic!

Why would they treat a hardworking employee like that?

Let’s find out what folks on Reddit think about this one.

This user is happy that the manager changed!

This writer loves this story!

This user knows it is a good thing that the manager finally admitted his mistake!

Exactly! This user knows writing is no easy job!

This user knows the manager isn’t a bad guy!

Someone’s being helpful here!

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