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Employees: looking for “the great boss who cares about their development”

gallup.com

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Re: Employees: looking for “the great boss who cares about their development”

#61

Post by busterarm »

switch007 wrote: post #36

I company I worked at contracted a company to do "scientific" questionnaires of staff, so management knew which kind of personalities people had, what they wanted out of a job etc. We had to sit through an hour presentation, being told what makes us happy. Everyone was forced to do the questionnaire and afterwards we had an opportunity to discuss the results with the company and our managers. All through the process,…

I've worked for this company! Recently even.

We also had those wonderful quarterly AND yearly reviews that don't accomplish anything other than give management a way to fire.

Re: Employees: looking for “the great boss who cares about their development”

#62

Post by collyw »

dozzie wrote: post #32
vfc1 wrote: post #27

This is great stuff. Problem is there is the work the company needs you to do, and the work you want to do. Both of these change overtime, for example in software development when the lifecycle of the project advances. As the project reaches maintenance mode, you can no longer design the architecture and implement things from scratch, its already done. So the work the company needs you to do now is very different. Th…

> So the work you want to do and the one the company wants you to do will probably only overlap for a short period of time. Similarly, there's only short period of overlapping of the work you want to do and the work doing which you would grow. I see too often programmers jumping around abandoning their half-written application or library once it is somewhat working, never learning what semantic versioning is about, w…

I have just inherited a relatively poorly written application in a new job. I am going to take pride in optimizing it so the pages load in less than a second (some are timing out when there are other users on the system), clean up the crappy bits and make it more maintainable.

Sure its no as nice as getting to architect a whole application from the ground up. But the database seems well designed, so it shouldn't bee to much problem to make it faster and prettier and cleaner code.

Re: Employees: looking for “the great boss who cares about their development”

#63

Post by afterburner »

vinceguidry wrote: post #31
crimsonalucard wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I firmly believe that anybody can grow at any job. It's nice when the company can help you do that, but your own growth is your responsibility, and nobody else's. I'm not talking about personal growth. I'm talking about growth in benefits, like salary or working environment. People leave companies or learn new skills to get more benefits. The company needs to provide better benefits, continuously, or the employee le…

> The company needs to provide better benefits, continuously, or the employee leaves. This smacks of entitlement. The employee won't necessarily leave, there are many reasons why they wouldn't. There's a whole world of jobs out there that aren't tech, these fields don't have the luxury of an expanding industry propping up salaries, providing a social ladder. Even in tech, I don't see anything wrong with the decision…

"keep the same compensation"

Not even inflation? Sounds like you're driving the benefits down. Or at least want to.

Re: Employees: looking for “the great boss who cares about their development”

#64

Post by philipov »

jetcata wrote: post #50
philipov wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if you're a novice, it should be your first thought. If it isn't, I consider that a failure of education. Jumping into writing something from scratch when you're not part of the target user group or know the target industry already is a great way to produce horrible code that you (or someone else) will hate to maintain. This is why it's so important to grill your interviewers about the reality of working at t…

I'd love to hear which questions you ask in interviews to get this information out of the interviewers!

Ask them the questions you'd want to know answers to if you were hiring them, to determine their own merits. Insist on talking with the people you'll actually be working with. You want to know their opinions on programming paradigms, and design patterns. Ask about operational details like version control, code review, and releases. Ask about the history of the code base, who wrote it, where are they now. Ask how documentation is created. There are so many things you can ask.

Good code is surrounded by good processes. Ask about the processes that lead to good code. This not only susses out what the situation is on the ground, but also demonstrates your own quality.

Re: Employees: looking for “the great boss who cares about their development”

#65

Post by DonaldFisk »

danieltillett wrote: post #10
js8 wrote: post #4

I think employees want control of their own life, more share in decision-making. Essentially, they want democracy, even if they can't articulate it. But in capitalist society, where the ownership of capital decides, this cannot happen. There are attempts to tiptoe around this problem with holacracies and Agile methodologies and similar concepts, but the main problem still remains.

In theory workers co-operatives are this, but they have a habit of not doing so well in the real world. It is a really interesting question why this is the case. Why should a business owned by a capitalist for their own benefit be able to outcompete a workers co-operative?

John Lewis Partnership (http://www.johnlewispartnership.co.uk/) is a worker's cooperative in the UK and is doing pretty well. There are also successful consumer cooperatives (e.g. the Co-operative Group and mutual organizations/building societies (e.g. The Nationwide).

Re: Employees: looking for “the great boss who cares about their development”

#66

Post by jdmichal »

js8 wrote: post #4

I think employees want control of their own life, more share in decision-making. Essentially, they want democracy, even if they can't articulate it. But in capitalist society, where the ownership of capital decides, this cannot happen. There are attempts to tiptoe around this problem with holacracies and Agile methodologies and similar concepts, but the main problem still remains.

Actually, as an employee I want a strong vision with clear, achievable goals. It makes it easy to tell what I should be doing to be successful, and that is what lets me control my career. Interestingly enough, these properties are usually enhanced with smaller decision making groups, because values are less spread across the spectrum. If I have 50 decision makers, I have 50 different value functions to attempt to meet. [0] If I have one decision maker, I only have one value function to meet.

[0] In reality, I would have to spend some time trimming down the list of 50 based on influence. Which is not always an easy signal to find.

Re: Employees: looking for “the great boss who cares about their development”

#68

Post by yummyfajitas »

js8 wrote: post #4

I think employees want control of their own life, more share in decision-making. Essentially, they want democracy, even if they can't articulate it. But in capitalist society, where the ownership of capital decides, this cannot happen. There are attempts to tiptoe around this problem with holacracies and Agile methodologies and similar concepts, but the main problem still remains.

How does democracy give employees "control of their own life"? In any organization of appreciable size, your vote doesn't matter.

Capitalism gives employees control; your life has changed immediately after you exercise your option to exit. Voting simply doesn't.

It's also potentially very harmful, due to the principal/agent problem. Every agent (employee) has the incentive to loot the company, build empires, and protect their job. But such things are of course very bad for organizations.

This is made worse by democracy, because not only do voters have no incentive to do what's best for the organization, they can do whatever makes them feel good (since their vote doesn't matter).

(As an example of the principal/agent problem, witness Marisa Mayer vs Starboard. She wants to keep her job and build her empire at Yahoo. Shareholders want to avoid paying taxes on Alibaba, which will destroy far more value than the Yahoo empire could ever plausibly be worth.)

Re: Employees: looking for “the great boss who cares about their development”

#69

Post by vinceguidry »

afterburner wrote: post #63
vinceguidry wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The company needs to provide better benefits, continuously, or the employee leaves. This smacks of entitlement. The employee won't necessarily leave, there are many reasons why they wouldn't. There's a whole world of jobs out there that aren't tech, these fields don't have the luxury of an expanding industry propping up salaries, providing a social ladder. Even in tech, I don't see anything wrong with the decision…

"keep the same compensation" Not even inflation? Sounds like you're driving the benefits down. Or at least want to.

That's the nature of a growth-fueled economy. Everybody has to keep up, or they fall behind. The same work, the same roles, get less valuable over time.

Re: Employees: looking for “the great boss who cares about their development”

#70

Post by JustSomeNobody »

dozzie wrote: post #32
vfc1 wrote: post #27

This is great stuff. Problem is there is the work the company needs you to do, and the work you want to do. Both of these change overtime, for example in software development when the lifecycle of the project advances. As the project reaches maintenance mode, you can no longer design the architecture and implement things from scratch, its already done. So the work the company needs you to do now is very different. Th…

> So the work you want to do and the one the company wants you to do will probably only overlap for a short period of time. Similarly, there's only short period of overlapping of the work you want to do and the work doing which you would grow. I see too often programmers jumping around abandoning their half-written application or library once it is somewhat working, never learning what semantic versioning is about, w…

>I've seen people proud of having an opportunity to maintain (note: not to develop, just to maintain) big products. Such product was doing amazing things and was well-written, of course, but would you think you could take pride of maintaining somebody else's work?

Most developers wouldn't. There's a stigma against maintenance. Most developers want to be Software Architects! (Said with the pigs in space voice).

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