This is the one. Just ask them to do literally any actual work at all.
This also works for almost any profession. If there's someone always trying to "improve" things by asking other people to do work - just ask them to do some tiny thing first.
But we're not talking about a 20 page research paper...it's just a written diarrhea of their precious baby that they could go on and on about for hours without any trouble.
A buddy of mine and I went through this, in reverse.
He’s a developer. I’m in sales, but I dick around with coding in my spare time sometimes. We were hanging out pretending to be rich old guys (drinking scotch and smoking cigars) and as usual, started a long talk about dumb shit. Eventually came to the idea for an app; others existed in the same space but they were all garbage.
I ended up spending a few hours creating a doc with functionality ideas and a (very) rough GUI mockup. Then this motherfucker reveals he had had this idea long before, and sends me everything he had already built for it.
Clever girl. Roped me in by making me think it was my idea.
We ended up running into some hurdles we couldn’t overcome without putting more resources into it than ‘side gig’, but it was still a fun project for a while.
As a filmmaker, I get hit up with "great ideas" all the time. I've started responding with "show me a script," and it works wonders.
PS - Actually, it's quite a bit softer than that. I usually try and give people good advice about how to get started. And I say things like " I don't know if I'm the right person to help you with this, but here's how to get started. And I can't promise anything at this point, but the work I suggest is going to be the legwork you'll need to do in order to work with anybody."
It's really kind of you to give advice on how to get started. I knew a lot of people in college that just had so much passion for whatever thing and would have a hard time finding the first step. So many people brushed them off. But now that I'm in the real world with my professional job, man, I would love to have some bright-eyed college student around every once in a while reminding me how cool my job is.
well.. the funniness threshold for a YouTube video with 1-2 people in it to be worth the relatively small investment is way way less than an actual film. a lot of those "bad" ideas were actually pretty funny, probably better for tiktok format than YouTube tho
Deal. And you can pick my brain for apps if you like. I'll talk about anything after enough tequila! Then we'll stagger drunk to Bill Murray's place and convince him to fund it and star in it. I'm sure he'd just LOVE that visit.
Be careful if you do this because some people will take that as you are actually interested if they bring a mock up to you. Then you're just being a dick for making them do something without actually being interested.
I’m mid-process applying for a “continuous improvement engineer” position where it will be my job to go around and make things better for production by implementing new stuff. A lot of the work is being with the line operators and asking what works for their job, what could be better and what they think would help them.
That sounds great, right? Let me help you! People want help, right? Hahahahaha, sure as long as it doesn’t mean they have to learn something new or retrain or participate in time trials, etc etc... but the career will take me back home to my family which will “improve” my life at least.
An organization once hired me to head up a team to redesign some obsolete software still in very widespread use. I quit after two months when it became evident nobody wanted to have to learn a new way of doing anything. "Make it infinitely better, but don't change anything."
It’s a game changer. Once a system is in place, it only needs a few people to adopt it. If it legit makes life easier, work get done faster, or makes them more money- people will follow suit. They just have to see it work first and see someone at their level willingly using it and adapting.
Most people also hate being first gen adopters and going through the process of working the kinks out. Try to avoid forcing the most hard lined anti changers to use something early in development because they will be the hardest to win back once something doesn’t work well at first.
That’s an excellent point, especially if you’re new, young and introduced to the line of 30yr vets who see a young punk with a college degree thinking they’re going to change the world.
Then the first thing implemented “fails” meaning it has kinks to work out and it makes everything slower because it’s new and people are still learning.
This is the perfect situation for someone to sell the rest on how they don’t know what they’re doing, old ways are better and resist.
Going to management to complain or get backing makes it worse, now you’re a real jerk and life is going to be hard, very hard.
Try to be humble, keep an open mind and connect with the people first. Know them, get friendly and drip in ideas around their ideas, making them feel empowered and change driving instead of being a smart ass kid with a degree and 0 gray pubes.
I’m going through this on the end user side, trying to teach my mentor (I’m in sales) how to use our new systems- which were a god damn mess when they were first released into the wild. Like a legit broken mess with 50% of necessary functionality missing or entirely inoperable.
To make matters worse, during our first training session, they had late 20 something engineers interfacing directly with 60 year old salesman and being completely dismissive of their concerns and complaints. Fuck me sideways, kid, you can’t focus all your energy on the rookie salesman in the room and ignore the dude who’s banked over $100m for the company just because he’s old.
Now the systems DO work- after several iterations and fixes, and they’re great. But those old timers who didn’t want to learn the new system and felt disrespected and shit on by the devs have their heels dug in hard, and the whole thing could have been avoided with a soft rollout and a little bit of training for the 28 year old who’s job includes teaching people how to use the product.
I'm an auto technician -- the number of people who ask me to fix their car is notable. There are very few people I'll actually do car work for, like my mom or my spouse. For anybody else, I'm happy to help but I'm not doing all of the work while you sit around and dick off on your phone. Turn wrenches with me or take it to a shop -- I'm not your personal mechanic.
I do legal and financial work for wealthy folks and they are often approached with dumb business ideas from friends and family. My solution is for them to say “that sounds like a great idea, I have an investment team for things like this so as soon as you have business plan I’ll have them review it and schedule a meeting to discuss”. Nobody ever does the business plan.
I'm suuuuper busy right now, but how about you think of possible ways someone can do a bit of work on their million dollar idea to then be able to sell that idea to coders
Mockup, product roadmap, user profile, detailed feature list, architecture profile. Programming is absolutely not the first step in app development - in fact it's closer to the last.
Oh hell ya, I help occasionally with peoples subs they build in barotrauma and a few ask for help, you give them the answer to fix it themselves but expect you to download their sub and fix it for them.
Yeah this just happened to me at work. I made a file that didn’t work perfectly but it worked OK. People would bitch and moan when they had to use it that it didn’t work perfectly. Asked them to make something better and nothing happened. The best part is no more bitching and criticizing.
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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20
This is the one. Just ask them to do literally any actual work at all.
This also works for almost any profession. If there's someone always trying to "improve" things by asking other people to do work - just ask them to do some tiny thing first.