Two Masters

I worked at a company called Postal Innovations for several years. At that company I learned a lot about how NOT to manage a company. One of the things that used to drive me through the wall was different managers/owners would come to me and task me with something as a 'high priority' and then when I switched over to work on that another one would wonder why their 'high priority' wasn't being completed. I made the mistake that management actually communicated and had some grand plan instead of making shit up as they went along.

Where I work now we are starting to fall into a somewhat similar situation, although different. I have a boss on whose team I work and we get a long well. We both have a boss that is responsible for laying out the requirements for the projects my boss's team works on. So at least in this case rather than having multiple people coming to tell me what to do with equal priority we have one guy that calls the shots. Great, right?

Well, it should be. Except this guy doesn't talk to the engineers/architects that actually setup the systems that we need to work on. He has this abstract notion on the way this stuff should work but doesn't really have a good handle on it. As a result, we end up in these situations where we get direction from the main boss guy but then in talking to the architect/engineer people we get 'No, you can't do it that way, you have to do this'.

So, I'm at a position now where I don't talk to the engineer people if I can help it. I decided the only person that can make my life miserable is the main boss guy, not the engineers despite how correct they probably are. What needs to happen is that main boss guy needs to have it out with the engineer people and everyone to get on the same page. I'm not going to be a proxy for their war.