In Defense of Dishonest Reporting

I'm realizing that there's a lot that gets lost in translation between programmer and layman.

I've had a number of times when giving too many details to a boss/manager has burned me. In the past, I've tried to be thorough and supply all the necessary details:

Well, it's not totally successful, because there's x problem and y bug...

The problem is, this usually leads to panic and questioning. I can almost hear them saying, "Don't you know what you're doing?" or "Don't you realize by this deadline we needed to see good results?"

I'm not advocating lying, but I think the bigger issue here is that ultimately nobody else knows my workflow as well as me, and thus giving too many details often does more harm than good.

If I get too wordy and try to explain why it's not a total success (but I knew x bug was going to show up and it's not a big issue), I often get a deer-in-the-headlights response. All they heard was:

There's a problem; it doesn't work.

If I instead say that things work, and I just need more time to do some bugfixing & cleanup, suddenly it's a very different response.

Konur, you've done it again! You are a scholar and a gentleman!

Well, maybe that's a bit of wishful thinking.

I wish that was what I heard every time.

Anyway... I'm finding it's best to supply few details upfront, and be very clear and articulate if prompted for more info.

Spooking managers with false positives (or negatives? since it's bad?) isn't beneficial for anyone. Sometimes people just need to hear "yep, everything works" even if things are still somewhat in disarray behind the scenes.

I think there's a happy medium between the two extremes.

In unrelated news, everything with my website works great.