The ticket says improve the performance of the import. Or tidy up the reporting page. You read it four times, and under the reading is a thought you would not say out loud: everybody else would know what this means, and I do not, which is probably the thing that will eventually give me away.
Here is what is actually true. Nobody knows. That ticket was written in about four minutes by somebody holding half the context, in between two meetings, and the definition of finished does not exist anywhere. It has to be made by somebody, and there is no reason it cannot be you.
The instinct is to go and ask what exactly they want. Try it once and you will often get a vague answer back, because they have not thought it through either and the question hands the whole problem to them unchanged.
So bring a proposal instead of a question. Three lines, in writing. Here is what I am taking finished to mean, I think the import should handle a hundred thousand rows without a timeout. Here is what I am deliberately not doing, I am not touching the export side. Here is when you will see it, Thursday. And then the sentence that does the work: I will start on this in the morning unless you tell me otherwise.
You have turned an open question into a yes or no, and a yes or no is something a busy person can actually answer in fifteen seconds. If they correct you, that is the cheapest correction available, and it has happened now rather than at the demo in front of six people.
The confidence part is simply permission. Deciding what a vague request means feels presumptuous when you are newer, as though you are claiming an authority nobody gave you. But that is precisely what the people you are comparing yourself to are doing all day. A great deal of what reads as seniority is being willing to write down an interpretation and put your name on it.
And if it turns out your version of finished was wrong, you have not failed at anything. You did the expensive part early and cheaply, which is the whole trick.
– Asael Shinder
