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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”

#71

Post by jdmichal »

taneq wrote: post #12
mbrock wrote: post #5

On the other hand, I don't want to be condescended to by managers that invite me to meetings about improving me , assessing my personality, helping me "grow." I want to help improve the product , and the most fundamental way to engage me with that is to ask me for input and take my ideas & concerns seriously. Just coffee and a chat every now and then is a great setting for that. No need for made-up agendas and bullet…

On the third hand, if you have some kind of career goals, then you probably want to be making some kind of progress towards them. While it's not always possible to discuss such goals with your employer (eg. if your goal is "become the CTO" and your immediate manager's goal is also "become the CTO" then discussing this with them is likely to end poorly), it's important to at least let them know which direction you wan…

> At my last job, I was the primary fire-putter-outer on a number of fronts, and it was very disheartening watching new projects (that I'd put my hand up for) get handed off to others while I was busy fixing up the previous efforts of said others.

I've seen this happen at an even bigger scale. The site I was part of was very successful, and was therefore completely unable to get any time or capital to do independent (non-contract) projects. And some of the projects we wanted to do were to improve our IP holdings within the space we were working! Meanwhile, the entire site that lost two contracts to rebids all got put on cool, independent, green-field projects. Completely bananas, and a symptom of a much larger problem of not rewarding success that eventually caused me to leave.

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

#72

Post by benzofuran »

blfr wrote: post #13

All I want is work organization that doesn't get in the way of doing things that actually make money. It's truly unbelievable how even small companies adopted systems that impede sales and engineering, or worse make customers jump through hoops, because it makes life easier for some bean counter. That other stuff sounds like completely optional nice-to-haves.

Having been through a similar knee-jerk of late, the important thing to remember (not that it helps) is that a publicly-traded company is a machine to make money. Not to make sales, not to make designs / widgets, but make money for the investors / owners.

Once I wrapped my head around that it helped somewhat.

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

#73

Post by mfoy_ »

feld wrote: post #54
officemonkey wrote: post #11

I'd believe Gallup if they weren't hacks and crooks. Five to ten years ago they had a big program that they peddled to organizations about Employee Engagement. They ended up paying the Justice Department 10.5 million dollars for crimes associated with contracting irregularities (aka bribes.) Looks like they're going to turn their "survey experience" to another part of employee training. It's really sad about Gallup.…

I worked for them for a short time due to an acquisition. They're crazy. They think they're solving the world's problems with polling data and they force you to be psycho-analyzed and have a plaque at your desk displaying your traits. Nuttier than squirrel turds.

Is your psycho-pass looking a bit cloudy today?

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

#74

Post by Mikerad1979 »

distracted828 wrote: post #56
quaffapint wrote: post #35

I want to write and learn good coding for myself. While the boss would be just as happy with crappy code as good code, as long as he sees that project percentage increase, it just makes me happier to do it right as much as possible, even if I spend my own time on it.

Here is something I don't understand: How does one effectively deliver on a project while writing crappy code? Doesn't trying to do that result in the codebase becoming so confusing that you don't know how to add things to it without breaking other things?

When writing crappy code you are either not thinking long term at all, or you are just "kicking the can down the road", in that you'll pay for it later when there isn't a time crunch.

Not that I've ever done something like that...

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

#75

Post by collyw »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #26
lhnz wrote: post #23

People want to be happy, it doesn't really matter how. Often they don't really know themselves. But they're quite sure it'll happen if only they were able to become more impressive. They will be happy once they are promoted, treated with respect, and given more money. A great boss feels like an ally, and often it's not the outcome that makes you happy but the hope of a better future. I think there are many people in…

People are also designed to never stay happy for long. We will always need more to be happy.

Where do you get that idea from?

(There is more evidence for people evolving rather than being designed).

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

#76

Post by [deleted] »

distracted828 wrote: post #52
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…

> failure teaches you which mistakes to avoid next time As a recent grad who has been fired from two jobs, I would be afraid to join a poorly written project because I would worry that I would fail and then be fired. Learning how to be successful is pretty important and teaches you things you cannot learn from lurching from failure to failure.

[deleted]

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

#77

Post by wwweston »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #70
dozzie wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

As someone who's been doing mostly maintenance recently, it's pretty clear why:

1) reading a pile of code and trying to figure out how it works and being constrained by someone else's solutions is considerably less fun for most developers than writing something new and making decisions about how the system will be put together

2) It's much harder to point to what you did or talk up your accomplishments. Particularly to management.

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

#78

Post by crimsonalucard »

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…

>This smacks of entitlement.

Employees should feel entitled. They generate 99% of our GDP while 50% of that GDP goes to the top 1% of the population. The capitalist employer / employee relationship is designed to screw over the employee. The word "entitlement" is a classic guilt tripping technique used by either employee or employer. Ignore it, because as an employee you will never get a high enough salary that can tip the scales. With 50% of the worlds wealth in the hands of the 1% (aka the employers), the metrics say one thing and one thing only: you are always entitled to more.

>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.

If the employee isn't leaving and their isn't any growth, than the employee stays out of desperation or fear. The employee is essentially too afraid to take the risk to create growth. This is not the definition of employee satisfaction. Many employees are in this situation and many employees aren't satisfied because of it. It is very rare for a man to feel 100% satisfied without any continuous growth. Additionally, I am not talking about whether this situation is wrong or right, I am talking about what an employer needs to do to satisfy an employee. Whether the employer wants to do that is a different issue.

>It would be wonderful to have the benefits of industry growth along with the security of one job for life, but we don't live in that world.

Sure. I never said anything to the contrary. We don't live in an ideal world. But the context for my comment is "How to satisfy an employee" and I answer the question with what is required.

The conversation is sidetracking from my initial comment about the true nature of employment satisfaction into a technical argument on why such an idealist endeavor isn't executed. So what? Do you agree with me on what makes an employee satisfied or do you have evidence/logic to falsify my reasoning?

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

#79

Post by distracted828 »

jschwartzi wrote: post #59
distracted828 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> failure teaches you which mistakes to avoid next time As a recent grad who has been fired from two jobs, I would be afraid to join a poorly written project because I would worry that I would fail and then be fired. Learning how to be successful is pretty important and teaches you things you cannot learn from lurching from failure to failure.

Even the jobs with poorly-written codebases teach you a lot. Only they're teaching you through experience what is or isn't maintainable.

Sure, but at a certain point, you need to learn a method to writing a maintainable codebase. Otherwise you never become capable of building a successful project.

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

#80

Post by crimsonalucard »

collyw wrote: post #75
crimsonalucard wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are also designed to never stay happy for long. We will always need more to be happy.

Where do you get that idea from? (There is more evidence for people evolving rather than being designed).

Designed by natural selection. People are naturally selected to never stay happy for long.

To be satisfied and satiated means you no longer feel the drive to compete. There is no evolutionary advantage in a creature that does not want to compete.

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