[Ws32ok]

I've been assigned tasks and simply essentially ignored them after any of my initial questions were ignored by those who assigned the task. Reasons include: task not assigned by my supervisor. No funding. No resources in general. No consultation. Person who assigned tasks has no authority to do so. These are similar and all have happened to me more than once.

I get why the status update lying part offends but I'd also say the project manager who tolerates this isn't really project managing. Setting traps isn't the height of high performance I'd be aiming for.

But let's say you assigned a task and know the magic key is required. And the magic key is never accessed or acquired. You as project manager have failed. Did you reveal this dependency as a requirement? Are you sure that dependency is real? And why did you wait so long?

I've got a project in my history where I was expected to use a corporate credit card to purchase server time on AWS but didn't. When asked why I said I'd found better internal resources that worked at higher performance for the time needed. Imagine my surprise when I got criticised by immediate manegemenr for not spending 30k but praised by upper management for saving 30k and delivering ahead of schedule.

The real reason was that someone had 30k they wanted burnt before financial end of year but didn't state this as a goal. The project instead simply optimised for real cost and schedule instead, offending the management that wanted the money burnt.

By the way, the canaries in the coal mines usually died. I feel that tech in general should remember details like this and not create delicate metaphors for real events that had gruesome realities. Something is only a canary when the messenger died during delivery of that message. Just my $0.02 worth.