4 Ways To Say No, Elegantly and Effectively
In my early days at Netflix, my inability to say no led me into unpleasant terrain. Here's how I evolved to navigate these situations more fluidly.
Intro
Push to Prod or Die Trying, Lesson 2.1 is: Avoid People Who Dump Work on You.
It is heavily informed by an experience at Netflix where a hideous problem was dumped on my lap and I lacked the skills to navigate my way out of it.
Today, I’ll share a story inspired by that experience and describe how I evolved to avoid similar situations in the future.
NOTE: Neurafilm is a fictional company used to abstract and simplify some of my personal experiences.
Proxying Problems
At Neurafilm we used a 3rd-party proxy called Proxinator to route edge traffic.
Among other things, we used it to route traffic to our NorAm (North American) or LatAm (Latin American) clusters, based on the geolocation of the client:
( MMS was our Movie Metadata Service. I’ll talk about it another time.
Also, this was a simpler situation than the US vs. EU routing that I discussed in a previous post since all clusters were within the same AWS region. )
It was a Thursday afternoon, and a colleague of mine appeared in my cube.
He reported that LatAm routing wasn’t working for a key device, and it was blocking the approval of the latest app version.
The engineer who typically would have handled this problem was on vacation. If we didn’t act quickly, the launch could be delayed.
him: Can you fix it?
me: (slackjawed, blank stare for 5+ seconds)
me: Sure, I’ll take a look.
My colleague immediately updated a thread:
him: Matt is fixing it. He’ll provide updates from here.
Then he disappeared for the day.
I’d been hustled. There was nothing I could do now but solve the problem.
Digging Out of the Rubble
The next few hours involved possibly the worst debugging session of my life. Proxinator’s UI was a horror beyond imagination.
We eventually wrote our own edge proxy as a replacement. I’ll talk about it another time.
Eventually, with the assistance of a kind-hearted, large-brained colleague and a variety of spirits that we prayed to, we fixed the issue and moved on with our lives.
One thing I always return to when I remember this story is how the work originally fell into my lap.
An opportunistic colleague influenced me to take on the work, redirected all of his stakeholders to me, and then vanished.
It was criminal, but I’m sure thousands of people today experienced a similar thing. This is just the way work changes hands in certain types of organizations.
So we only have 2 practical options:
Suffer and complain, indefinitely
Learn how to fight back
You want to fight back, right? Good. Let’s talk about it.
The Elegant Language of No
Corporate language is deflective, indirect, soft, and slippery. The reasons for this vary, but the result is often that the speaker says a bunch of words, and the listener gets a sense that some information was conveyed but isn’t really sure what the information was.
This can be valuable in many situations, but not this one.
Zooming out, when saying no to a colleague, we typically have 2 goals:
Make them understand that you are not going to do what they are asking
Make them stop trying to persuade you otherwise
If you achieve the first goal but not the second, you can end up in a very long, very uncomfortable interaction where they keep asking you to do something in a variety of ways.
On a long enough timeline, they will win, if only because the pain of talking to them often surpasses the pain of doing what they are asking you to do.
Leverage is everything, and our adversaries create leverage by presenting us with options more painful than the one they want us to choose.
So we can’t simply sit back and listen. We have to actively shift the conversation in a direction that favors us.
Option 1
Sorry, I’ve got to focus on something else.
Overall, this is the approach that has the best success rate for me. Maybe you can also drop words like “deadline” or “high-priority”, but the message is clear: if I spend time helping you, I won’t be spending time doing this other important thing that people are depending on me for.
Option 2
Sorry, I don’t know anything about that.
Whether it’s true or not, you’re conveying that you don’t have the knowledge or skills to help. One problem is that in some ugly debugging scenarios, nobody has relevant knowledge or skills, so the lack of them doesn’t make you a worse candidate than anyone else. But usually, if you present yourself as non-helpful, they’ll move on.
Option 3
Sorry, I don’t know anything about that. I think $innocent_victim does, though.
This is a permutation of the last choice that may be more effective since it gives your colleague another candidate to pursue. This one’s a bit dirty, so I never use it. But if it’s an absolute emergency, I won’t judge you if you do.
Option 4
I can help you, but I can’t take ownership.
This means that your colleague still owns the problem and has to update relevant parties, deploy fixes, and such. This is a good compromise if you are one or more of these things:
Fond of the person who is asking for help
Feeling especially generous that day
Genuinely interested in the problem
This is also an interesting filter to see if the person is actually looking for help or just looking to dump the problem on someone and disappear, as happened to me earlier in the post.
Less Elegant Options
Option 5
Talk to $oncall_engineer and they will help you.
This is why we have an on-call rotation, right? So one person can suffer while others can focus.
In an ideal world, this is the only option you’d need. However, I’ve found that regardless of the on-call situation, people can become personally attached to you helping them. In those situations, this isn’t enough to shake them.
Option 6
Sorry, I can’t help you — please talk to my manager.
In most places I’ve worked, speaking like this is a sign of inexperience, so I try to avoid it. But sometimes, the amount of cross-team stealth tasking grows to an unacceptable level, and you simply have to get the managers involved.
Proactive Defense
Let me get out in front of a few concerns you may have.
Doesn’t Acting This Way Make You a Bad Teammate?
No, I don’t think so. Looking at the other side of it, the guy who dumped the Proxinator problem on me wasn’t a bad teammate. He was just an extremely productive engineer who was laser-focused on his own goals.
Many people benefited from his achieving his goals: his manager, his team, his internal partners, and possibly the entire company.
Years later, my manager specifically praised me for “staying focused” and “avoiding distractions” when working on a long, cumbersome project. What did this mean? It meant I said yes to the most important things and no to everything else.
Engineers are very good at getting distracted — the ability to focus is a skill that differentiates you.
Also, I’m not suggesting you say no to everything. I certainly don’t. We build the skill so we can pick and choose where and when to use it.
Suggesting We Say “Sorry, I’m Busy” instead of “No” Doesn’t Seem Like Insightful Advice
It’s possible that it’s not insightful, and if so, I apologize for wasting your time. But I suffered from this problem for years, and once I started using some of these techniques, my career slowly started to shift.
It’s a gradual shift, as it’s one thing to avoid getting pulled into a production incident unnecessarily and another thing to position yourself as an engineer who is critical to the success of key projects and thus shouldn’t be bothered with random mundane day-to-day tasks.
Finding your way to the work that interests you is a much larger topic. This is just one small part of it.
For now, let’s conclude.
Blessings Remain
The Proxinator problem being dumped on me was a blessing, as it allowed me to see that I was operating in an untenable manner.
I had to find a way to say no more often, or else I would find myself exclusively solving other people’s problems instead of my own.
I imagine that all of us would enjoy pursuing our own goals instead of absorbing random toil so that others can pursue theirs. Learning a variety of ways to say no serves as a sharp weapon to defend you as you journey down that path.
I hope that this post improves your ability to wield the language of no — elegantly, effectively, with passion and purpose.