It's pretty simple: If they don't care about me, why should I care about their product? I'll still come in and do the job, but why should I put in extra effort?
Employees: looking for “the great boss who cares about their development”
121–130 of 170 posts
Re: Employees: looking for “the great boss who cares about their development”
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
Not to mention that all of the praise for the project has already been given out. All that there is left is angry users yelling that something isn't working now. It's a pretty thankless job.
Re: Employees: looking for “the great boss who cares about their development”
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mee…
Why can't you vote on the strong vision? Voting will aggregate the value functions and solve your problem. Democratic cooperative doesn't mean that everything has to be voted on. It can have hierarchy, if employees find such arrangement useful; the point is that you have a (collective) right to overrule it.
Strong visions can be arrived at collectively -- but it requires trust, not voting. If I have 10 people, and 7 vote A and 3 vote B, then A should be the collective "strong vision". The thing is, those three people that voted for B still think that B was the best approach, because nothing has worked to change their mind post-vote. It's exactly equivalent to your boss coming and telling you to take out the trash, when you hate taking out the trash. You do it anyway, but you definitely don't put your full effort into it, and you might even implement small sabotages. If the trash bag is leaking, maybe you just let it leak as you take it out, instead of rewrapping it to prevent the leak. So now you have an ideological split that will manifest itself throughout implementation of the vision.
The way to fix this is to have honest, open discussion to collectively arrive at a vision. That way, there is no cognitive dissonance between the vision and the team members. The problem is, this is hard and requires a lot of trust. I'd recommend reading The Five Dysfunctions of a Team [0] if you really want to dig into this philosophy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Dysfunctions_of_a_Tea...
Re: Employees: looking for “the great boss who cares about their development”
#124I'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.…
That's some grade-A Hacker News skepticism, mate.
Re: Employees: looking for “the great boss who cares about their development”
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Now I think I work here. $BIG_CORP_FEMALE_CEO_UNDER_FIRE?
It's probably happened at lots of large corporations.
Re: Employees: looking for “the great boss who cares about their development”
#126I think this touches the odd phenomenon of our hedonic preferences. In a given moment there are probably a majority of people in corporate, public ("money making machines" as I believe someone referred to them as) who would state that they desire the increased vacation, provided meals, ping pong table version of happiness at work and truly believe that would make them better off. And it likely would to some degree, but as has been shown in economics over and over, outside of basic needs we have a remarkable ability to normalize our happiness back to a baseline level despite increases in material access (but we still crave). Thus this may put an employer in an odd dilemma if deciding where to place their "happiness" efforts for their employees. Employees would support "perks" and "perks" are easy. But to sustainably become a motivating and development-focused employer you need a ton of buy-in from likely apathetic managers, you need a top-down level of emotional maturity and management skill that is rarely seen in companies of scale, and you need to have the ability to operate in a longer term horizon (because payoffs and results take time) which few companies and leaders do. I guess the 'so what' from this is that we should take it upon ourselves to move beyond visceral preferences to act in our (and others') real best self-interest.
Re: Employees: looking for “the great boss who cares about their development”
#127I 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 prot…
"This is made worse by democracy, because not only do voters have no incentive to do what's best for the organization"
I fail to see how this is any different than in any other job, at least for non top level management.
Re: Employees: looking for “the great boss who cares about their development”
#128Funny thing missing from this thread: Money. Doesn't anyone work for money anymore? You know, that stuff that allows you to survive day to day? I guess it just sounds better to say that you go to work to "change the world" or "fulfill a lifelong passion" or "grow your career". Saying you're in it for money is crass. If I want personal fulfillment or engaging projects or ping pong, I can do that outside of work, AND I…
Because after a while, more money doesn't motivate. Most of us are making levels of money where an extra $10k or so isn't really going to make as much of a difference in your day to day life as some of these other things.
Re: Employees: looking for “the great boss who cares about their development”
#129I 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 prot…
hey, do you know any good blogs or articles or studies about this sort of 'empire building?'
Re: Employees: looking for “the great boss who cares about their development”
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
1: it can actually be a lot of fun if you look at it as a sort of digital archeology. You are exploring an ancient world! I enjoy it.
2: write reams of documentation for every function and module and service you decode, check them off on a checklist, and point out how you generated x pages of new docs and analyzed y% of a previously mysterious codebase. Then when you refactor, you get to point out how many thousands of lines of obsolete PL/SQL code you replaced with 10 lines of Ruby.