Great Expectations and how to manage them

Ever have this problem with expectations? Unreasonable, illogical expectations, to be exact.

It's almost inevitable if you are a developer working for non-tech people. Having little to no experience with the process of software development, they have no idea what constitutes a reasonable expectation, and let their imagination fill in the blanks. With amusing, and sometimes nightmarish, results. An (admittedly extreme) example would be the employer assuming you can fix the microwave simply because you know how to write software.

Fix this!

That's not to say experienced tech people don't have unreasonable expectations either. Their expectations tend to be a little less fanciful, but no less impractical when it comes right down to it. An example would be the employer expecting you, as an employee, to match his devotion to the company he created.

Then there are the in-betweeners. The ones who know a bit of programming, just enough to be problematic, but aren't exactly technical. Because they know how to code, they have expectations of how quickly code can be churned out. Unfortunately, they do not have experience with the less fun aspects of software development, such as best practices, testing and optimization. Therefore those expectations, too, can be divorced from reality.

People are like animals, in the sense that they need to be trained. Some might argue that humans have intelligence superior to animals. Well, that's great. That just makes it easier to train them. Make no mistake; where you are concerned, how people treat you is ultimately how you train them to treat you.

This kind of training tends to take two forms.

Don't give them what they want

And by that, I also mean stop being so obliging. When you satisfy an unreasonable request, it sets a new bar for expectations. And then it becomes the norm. This ultimately means that you're setting yourself up for increasing and unnecessary hardship.

If you get texts at night long after you're supposed to be off for the day, do not respond until the next day. Or at least, don't respond every single time. Or make them wait. Either way, make them expect that if they contact you at a certain time, they're not going to get a response right away, if at all.

If you're tasked to do something that is radically out of your job scope, make them expect you to fail. Sometimes spectacularly.

I've been known to work on weekends and public holidays. However, if my employers explicitly tell me that they expect me to use my weekends for work, I make damn sure I'll be doing something else during the weekend. It's the principle of the thing. It's not that I have a problem with working on weekends; I just have a problem with it being my employer's expectation. And, as an employee, I consider it my ethical responsibility to disabuse my employers, either in word or deed, of such expectations.

Gone fishing.

If the expectation is impossible, don't bust your ass trying to do it. Make sure you do the job that you're paid to do, and then maybe work on the impossible requirement. This sets the tone; you fulfil your professional obligations - no two ways about it, that's your first and foremost priority - and prevents expectations from getting too high. Once people see that they're not going to get what they asked for, but they are absolutely getting what they paid for, expectations get realigned. This, of course, assumes that you're dealing with reasonable people. In the corporate world, you don't always have that luxury. An alarming percentage of the time, you might end up looking for a new job.

Also, can't stress this enough, communication. Don't just say "yes" and then not do it - that's passive-aggressive bullshit and you should hold yourself to higher standards. Let them know it can't be done, why it can't be done, and what would have to give in order for you to carry it out.

Give them exactly what they want

Or what they say they want. People tend to tell you what they want without thinking it through. In order to be helpful, we should at least give them fair warning that what they want comes with a whole lot of caveats. And if that doesn't work, give them a preview of what fulfilling their wishes looks like.

And if that's still not enough, let them have it.

Now, just to be clear, I'm not advocating Malicious Compliance. It's one of the top fantasies of the average disgruntled employee (and understandably so!) but we're professionals. And as professionals, it is our duty to point out the pitfalls and advise accordingly. However, while we may be professionals, we're not superheroes. We can't save people from themselves. Thus, if an ill-advised route is insisted upon, short of it being illegal, give them what they want, and let the cards fall where they may.

They insist on not encrypting passwords and storing them in cleartext? Hey, go for it. But make sure the decision is reversible.

They insist on adding a new software feature that would compromise the functionality of existing features? Knock yourself out. Again, make sure you have a backup.

But if you go this route, document your objections. Obsessively. There may come a day when you need it. Also, plan your exit. People generally don't like being reminded of their failure, and your continued presence may be just such a reminder.

Here's a personal example. There was a time Mom had this unfortunate habit of calling me, and when I was otherwise occupied and didn't pick up, she would leave a string of missed calls on my phone. And then when I finally called her back, I would get an earful for not calling back right away. The kicker was, the body of her message was never anything that required immediate attention, such as an emergency. Like the house being on fire, or someone being sent to the hospital. No, the message would be something alone the lines of reminding me that Dad's birthday was next week, or asking if my refrigerator had any space for some extra apples she had picked up.

Missed calls.

Now, I love apples, but that's neither here nor there. I had to get her off this expectation that I had to be instantly responsive at all times regardless of the situation. The next time she called, I was walking alongside a busy road, and I had an idea. I picked up, and let her hear the blaring horns of irate road-users. She asked what the hell was going on there, and I innocently replied that I'd been in the process of crossing the road, and inquired what was the matter. In effect, I had given her a preview of just what could happen if she got what she wanted.

I wouldn't go so far as to say she never called me on my phone again, but each time she called, she had to weigh the contents of her message against the possibility of me getting run over by traffic just because I mindlessly picked up the phone as she demanded. The result was that she got into the habit of leaving messages on WhatsApp instead. You may think I'm a real asshole for scaring my own mother like that, but there was no lie in anything I did. There was a real possibility of something horrible happening if she got her way, and this was not a message that could be effectively delivered by me just telling her, since Asian parents, y'know, tend not to take their kids seriously.

On the flip side...

All this only works if you're competent at what you do, and you deliver what you're actually paid to do. It doesn't mean that just because you're bad at what you do, unreasonable requests become any less unreasonable. But being good at your actual job would help your case a lot more.

Expecting your response,
T___T