Supervisors often prefer rule breakers, up to a point

Here's the dangerous way I put it that I only tell senior people: understand why rules were made and make sure the people who made them would be happy.

> Here's the dangerous way I put it that I only tell senior people: understand why rules were made and make sure the people who made them would be happy.

If you aren't absolutely sure those senior people know what they're doing, the this is a great way to end up with originalism.

Frankly, most corporations do not last long enough for this to be a problem. Governments are their own issue, but without the political inertia and staying power of a nation-state, your organization will likely be long dead (or at least irrelevant and dying) before interpretations will drift that far. Most of the time, for most engineers, at least some of the people who made these rules in the first place are still around -- which helps ensure that nothing drifts too too far.

Of course there are exceptions, probably even upwards of 20% of the time, but we're talking generalities.

I saw this put really, really well not too long ago:

> A lot of us got the message earlier in life that we had to wait for other's permission or encouragement to do things, when in fact, all you need is the ability to understand the situation and deal with the consequences

So fun to see other variations of this. I have for a while said

> You never need permission to do a good job.

But of course, it takes the experience to understand the nuances of what a good job is in the domain at hand, in the organisation and society at hand.

> You never need permission to do a good job.

If you don't mind, I will steal this one.

The one I'm familiar with is:

> It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

Of course this can be used to justify all sorts of terrible things, but I've mainly seen it as pretty innocent in work environments when applying common sense.

Love the irony of this post.

I’m sure there’s a flashy way to say it, but yours reminds me of this one:

> Only ask for permission if you want to be told “no”

As a manager the way I approach rules with my reports is I always tell them to understand the "chesterton's fence" behind any rule. I looks at rules like business logic in code, the "logic" was added there for a reason but there are often edge cases where that logic does not apply. I don't tell my reports to either break or follow any particular rule, but to understand why that rule is there before they decide if they need to either follow or break it.

And from personal experience i find that when you give people that level of autonomy, they will almost always approach what I told them about rule breaking in good faith.