[NFBCS] Unrealistic expectations of team leaders and supervisors on the job

Tue Dec 1 18:28:01 UTC 2020

Here are my two cents.

The most important thing you need to figure out is whether your manager 
is still supporting you, and just wants you to work harder/deliver more, 
or if she wants to get rid of you by specifically assigning you tasks 
that she knows you cannot perform. I saw other people were offering you 
some generic advice, but I feel that this question needs to be answered 
first, because what you need to do next depends on the answer. You gave 
us very little detail on your situation, which is understandable, since 
it is hard to share such details with the public. But now, since you are 
mentioning that you have been asked to develop interfaces that require 
dragging and dropping, I am starting to suspect that your manager is 
working against you. Others might say that blind people can do drag and 
drop, which is true, but I hope no one would argue that this is 
something that blind people are not good at, and this is the kind of 
task that blind people are an order of magnitude less efficient at 
compared to sighted colleagues. Therefore any reasonable manager would 
assign dragging and dropping to sighted colleagues, and assign mroe 
suitable task to you. Why did your manager assign a task that requires 
dragging and dropping to you? It could be miscommunication - maybe 
indeed she doesn't quite understand that it is very hard for you. In 
this case as others have pointed out it is your job to explain things to 
her, like that it is an order of magnitude harder for you and this is 
not the best way for her to use you as an employee effectively. But 
again, based on scarce information that I observe here, it looks like 
your manager just wants to get rid of you. It is your call to decide 
which one of these two are true, since there is too little information 
for me or anyone else to come to a definitive conclusion.

If your manager wants to get rid of you - it is hard to do anything 
about that. I mean you can try to fight back, and it would help if you 
have a supporting skip manager, or anyone else in your organization. But 
it is hard and it requires a lot of experience in corporate politics, 
and if you knew how to do that you probably wouldn't be asking for 
advice here. So the next best option would be to start looking for a new 
team or a new job, with a more supportive manager and perhaps with less 
tasks that are not accessible.

Feel free to reach out to me privately if you want - I can try my best 
to debug your situation more accurately.

Best

--Tony

On 12/1/2020 12:11 AM, Michael Walker via NFBCS wrote:
> Thank you for all of your responses. It sounds like I am following the right path with regard to looking for alternative ways to do things, if the main stream way is not accessible. I typically Google, or ask on mailing lists, until I figure it out. Have any of you ever worked with asp.net web forms? How did you go about that? That involves drag and drop programming.
>
>> On Nov 30, 2020, at 2:40 PM, Bryan Schulz via NFBCS <nfbcs at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Well said as usual.
>> It's hard to be sympathetic when nobody talks about those who take college
>> courses for a long time and never landed IT jobs.
>> Bryan
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: NFBCS <nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Gary Wunder via NFBCS
>> Sent: Monday, November 30, 2020 11:41 AM
>> To: 'NFB in Computer Science Mailing List' <nfbcs at nfbnet.org>
>> Cc: Gary Wunder <gwunder at earthlink.net>
>> Subject: Re: [NFBCS] Unrealistic expectations of team leaders and
>> supervisors on the job
>>
>> As usual, what Steve has written is a masterpiece. It isn't a comfortable
>> piece, and it doesn't have a lot of firm rights and wrongs. What is
>> reasonable accommodation? If a thing as a functional part of your job, the
>> ADA doesn't protect you. Anything I couldn't do made more work for the
>> manager, so I had to figure out a way to put as little on his or her plate
>> as I could. I also had to figure out what I was going to do in lieu of the
>> things that I couldn't.
>>
>> I think working is stressful, but I think that as blind people we make a
>> mistake when we believe that work is only stressful for us. The things that
>> cause us stress are usually unique, but everyone has a hill to climb.
>> Working a forty hour week was never something I heard any of my colleagues
>> brag about doing. As salaried employees, sometimes we work sixty hour weeks.
>> Those weeks may have given us a little bit of flexibility to go to the
>> dentist, but forty hours was just an expected minimum.
>>
>> When I was looking at becoming a computer programmer, I went to see a man in
>> Virginia who used a braille computer terminal. The device cost $15,000, and
>> that was in 1970 dollars. It was a big investment, and the programmer told
>> me that in no uncertain terms I should be prepared to work beyond 8 to 5.
>> Figuring out my own alternatives, dealing with a computer terminal that
>> could print 120 characters a second versus a computer screen that displayed
>> at 960 characters a second had to be made up for in some way. I didn't have
>> to pledge myself to be a workaholic, but I couldn't be a clock watcher and
>> expect to succeed.
>>
>> I think these are things that we should talk through openly so that people
>> aren't surprised when they approach the work world.
>>
>> Warmly,
>>
>> Gary
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: NFBCS <nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Steve Jacobson via NFBCS
>> Sent: Sunday, November 29, 2020 5:03 PM
>> To: NFB in Computer Science Mailing List <nfbcs at nfbnet.org>
>> Cc: Steve Jacobson <steve.jacobson at outlook.com>
>> Subject: Re: [NFBCS] Unrealistic expectations of team leaders and
>> supervisors on the job
>>
>> Michael,
>>
>> I've been thinking about this question some which is why I have not written
>> sooner.  A question like yours is usually not as simple as you have stated
>> it, so I would like to explore it some.  Like Tracy, I've been in the IT
>> field for a long time and have had to think about this very question often.
>> I don't know much about your background, so please forgive me if I make any
>> incorrect assumptions.  I'm not one to claim that my experience has given me
>> all of the answers.  Rather, my experience has made me want to try to help
>> others avoid some of the mistakes I made.  Of course, I hope something here
>> is helpful.
>>
>> First, remember that your team leader is likely having to deal with
>> unrealistic expectations of his or her manager for the entire team.  It
>> means that perhaps for different reasons, your co-workers are sometimes
>> being expected to produce more or meet rigid time lines that they can't meet
>> reasonably.  It is unlikely that any of your co-workers are only doing what
>> they feel they can do.  They are not likely only working 8:00-4:30.
>> Therefore, you have to try to separate out this part of your team leaders
>> expectations from this question.  Some of what you may be feeling might well
>> be felt to some degree by most of your co-workers.
>>
>> Second, if you are relatively new at your job, there are going to be things
>> you don't think you can do that in five or ten years you will be doing
>> routinely.  Some things you may do differently as a blind person, but you
>> will almost certainly be doing things you did not think you can do.  While
>> your situation is different, all employees find that they are pushed beyond
>> their comfort zones as part of their jobs.  When I was new, I would consider
>> calling in sick when I was expected to talk to customers within my company
>> about a new project.  How would I communicate with them as a blind person?
>> What if they don't know I am blind?  Will they take me seriously.
>> Fortunately, I figured out that calling in sick would just delay the
>> inevitable, so I never did that.  Later, I developed an enjoyment for that
>> part of my job.  A good team leader is going to try to stretch everybody on
>> the team as a way to find out who is good at what.  Therefore, sometimes the
>> same will happen to you as well.
>>
>> Third, remember why you were hired.  You were likely hired to fill a
>> specific position to do a particular job.  You likely came to your employer
>> telling them why you could do the job they were offering.  My assumption is
>> likely that you are paid similarly to your co-workers, at least with those
>> having the same background.  The expectation is therefore that your employer
>> will get from you, one way or another, the same results from you that they
>> get from other employees.  They are not likely paying you less because they
>> think they will get less from you as a blind person.  In fact, they probably
>> couldn't pay you less even if they wanted to without violating the law.  So
>> to some degree, your management does have to figure out what you are best at
>> so they can get what they need from you.  However, a bigger part of the
>> responsibility to figure out what you can do is on your shoulders.  The
>> reason for that is simple.  If your management finds they can't get what
>> they are paying for from you, they will get somebody else to do the job and
>> you will be out looking again.  Getting paid equal to your co-workers do
>> only do the parts of the job you are comfortable doing will only work if you
>> are so good at that portion of your job that it makes up for the areas where
>> you don't feel you can perform well.  Most of us are not that good at what
>> we do, at least at the starting point.  Therefore, most of us have had to
>> try to find ways of doing those parts of our jobs that we may not be real
>> good at doing.
>>
>> So what do we do to fit into such an environment?  Please note that some of
>> what I describe here has nothing to do with what is necessarily legal.
>> Various laws don't apply equally across all jobs for one thing, and
>> sometimes one has to pick their battles.
>>
>> First, we must learn as much as we can about what is expected of our
>> co-workers.  How much are they working outside of normal work hours to get
>> their tasks done.  What tools are they expected to use.
>>
>> Next, we need to think about which of the tasks can we do in the same way as
>> our co-workers.  What might we need to learn that would make it possible for
>> us to complete those tasks as quickly and efficiently as we can. In many
>> cases, being very good at using Word or Excel or something else like Google
>> Docs is important.  You will be able to do what your co-workers do, but you
>> will have to use keyboard commands with which they won't be familiar.
>> Learning how a co-worker does a given thing can be useful, though, because
>> it might make it easier to find a keyboard shortcut to accomplish the same
>> tasks.  This can mean that you will have to do some extra studying and
>> investigating, and maybe even reach out to others on this list.  Also, while
>> your employer likely allows everybody some time for personal development,
>> they are not paying you to find out how you can do something as a blind
>> person that your co-workers are already doing.  You may need to do some of
>> this on your own time.
>>
>> Finally, what is it that your co-workers do that you can't do?  Getting a
>> handle on those tasks is important.  In some cases, there might be
>> alternative ways to accomplish the same task.  People on this list might be
>> able to make suggestions.  Remember that your Team Leader does not likely
>> know much about how blind people do things.  In some cases, you will find
>> things that you don't know how to do but other blind people may have found
>> answers.  It could be that you find a way to accomplish a given task in a
>> way that is different than your co-workers.  In the end, if you make an
>> honest effort to figure things out, your team leader will likely recognize
>> that you are making an effort and will probably be willing to be more
>> flexible.  Keep in mind, though, that employment is different from being a
>> student.  If you fail to meet an important deadline, the opportunity is gone
>> and it is on your record,  You can't just retake the course.  You will find
>> that sometimes there is flexibility in deadlines because things can change.
>> As much as possible, though, you don't want to be the reason your team
>> misses a deadline.
>>
>> Now, more than ever, a lot of pressure is placed upon Information Technology
>> to produce results.  In that sense, it is not always the most pleasant
>> career path to follow.  However, if one likes working with computers and has
>> an aptitude for it, a career in Information Technology can be rewarding.
>> There is no doubt, though, that figuring out how best to match one's skills
>> to the job at hand can be a challenge.
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> Steve Jacobson
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: NFBCS <nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Michael Walker via NFBCS
>> Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2020 7:19 PM
>> To: nfbcs at nfbnet.org
>> Cc: Michael Walker <michael.walker199014 at gmail.com>
>> Subject: [NFBCS] Unrealistic expectations of team leaders and supervisors on
>> the job
>>
>> Good evening,
>>
>> How do you cope with determining whether expectations of a team leader or
>> supervisor are realistic? Suppose expectations are not realistic, or there
>> are misconceptions about what you can do on the job in this field. How do
>> you approach that? Tell me some stories where you have faced that, and what
>> you did about it. I am completely blind. I am currently experiencing some
>> conflict with my team leader on this subject. She sometimes has beliefs
>> about what I am not able to do, or may have unrealistic expectations about
>> what I can do, regarding possibly frontend development.
>>
>> Thank you,
>> Mike
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