just curious about how you guys handle office politics when logic and data completely fail. I once had a manager who refused to cancel a failing $50k software contract just because he personally picked the vendor. showing him spreadsheets of our lost productivity just made him angry, and he kept blaming the team for “not adapting to the learning curve.” I eventually had to manipulate the situation and convince him that cancelling the tool would make him look like a “bold leader” who protects the team’s agility. I basically had to stroke his ego just to get a logical business decision made. It worked, but honestly it felt exhausting. what’s your best/worst story of dealing with irrational corporate logic? did you find a psychological trick to bypass their ego, or did you just give up and quit?
We had an IT director for a few years who decided we were spending too much time defining requirements, testing, and writing things down because “There is always something that has to be fixed in Production”. He could not acknowledge that doing things right resulted in far fewer problems in Production or that it saved time in the long run. Instead he praised the people who spent most of their time pushing out shit code and fixing it constsntly because it was more noticeable than something that went out and just worked.
There was no solution, had to wait for him to leave.