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This post was great.. when I read it 2 months ago
What do you mean? You think it should not be mentioned ever again?
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/370/r... (it's the prologue if you want to listen)
the story was about an experiment that was done to test the effects of these same three personality types on a working environment (although they called the flake the slacker, and the heretic was a bit different ,as the depressive)
To do this they repeatedly inserted an actor who would display one of these behaviors into a working group and study the outcome - and groups with any kind of disruptive co worker ended up doing considerably worse on their projects. Also interesting, the other members of the group took on the traits of the actor... When he was acting a jerk, the others in the group became rude not only to the jerk but to each other. When he was the slacker, everyone else started slacking more also. And when he was the depressive everyone else became more depressed.
The only time the actor did not effect the groups performance was in one team where a particularly charismatic member was able to diffuse all situations where he was being a jerk.
Here's the previous conversation about this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2065416
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is very true. I've seen it at all levels of BigCo. Loyalty is the single most important quality in a bigCo and it works (unfortunately).
The reasons I won't be an exec at a bigCo- - I don't watch or care to talk sports. - I don't / won't hunt wildlife. - I don't discuss female anatomy freely. I live in Houston, so most big employers are energy related. It is still somewhat of a good ol boy network and even though I'm now at a small company I see all 3 in equal parts quite often.
..in Texas
"Being effective in a company also means working hard, being reliable, and being an excellent member of the team."
Translation: keep your head down, don't rock the boat and don't have any passion for what you do. This is the recipe for 'success' (i.e. continued employment) at big companies.
"As a result, a company needs lots of smart, super engaged employees who can identify its particular weaknesses and help it improve them. However, sometimes really smart employees develop agendas other than improving the company."
No. These so called 'agendas' don't just mysteriously appear. What happens is that the big company goes to great lengths to hire smart people, and then even greater lengths to ignore them. At this point, the smart employee has two options (1) stay or (2) leave.
From sarahmccrum's comment in this thread: "I saw that most of the clever people who were around left, often when they were most needed"
That's the second scenario, the smart person says "screw it" and leaves. Sometimes that is the most mature decision. If some behaviour that is bad for the company is deeply engrained, is it really worth the futile tilting at windmills quest to get it changed? Perhaps they have gone on such crusades before only to get burnt (at the stake).
In the first scenario, where they stay, what are they going to do? They can (a) decide to ignore the thing that is bad for the company, (b) decide to keep banging their head against the wall in the same way, (c) escalate - by trying to change the way that they communicate the seriousness of the problem or the audience (brass didn't listen, maybe the grass(roots) will?).
(a) shows low levels of motivation or commitment to the company (but hey, apparently that is a good thing so long as you hide it (sarcasm)), additionally, it can be genuinely difficult for smart people to ignore situations that are sub-optimal. If you're a programmer and your job basically boils down to 'fix things' ... it is very hard to draw the line and not try to fix a broken process. It is that itch that needs to be scratched.
(b) is just going to continue to get them ignored, or perhaps labelled as 'not a team player'. Way to go corporate culture. Eventually they'll get fired or tired and switch to a different strategy.
(c) is the 'problem'. Smart people aren't always good sales people. And it is fundamentally a sales problem, where they need to identify the right people to make the change, and then sell them on the idea (by convincing them they will save money, and that it was their idea in the first place). Now the geeks with low social skills is a common cliché, lets ignore that tired and played out meme...
...consider if you will the problem of identifying exactly who the people are to get on board with the change. Power flows in strange ways in big companies, it isn't always just a linear thing directly from the top to the bottom. In my experience it is almost never linear.
Identifying the true power structure in a corporation (for a particular change that is required) is enormously difficult. Moreover, the underlying power structure can change depending on what the problem is, or over time, or any of many different variables can effect what the true power structure is on day X for problem Y. Becoming a better communicator is practically trivial compared to the problem of identifying the correct power structure to address the problem.
So you might think the moral of the story is that geeks need to become better communicators. But NO! Certainly not! Becoming a better communicator is the path to either management or architecture, neither of which is a fate that I would wish on anybody.
For the smart person stuck in a stupid situation, the smart thing is just to move on. It doesn't matter that you are not loyal to the company, you gave it a good shot. Try to leave on good terms (itself a marketing problem (blah blah professional development etc)). Loyalty doesn't matter, because the company has zero loyalty to you. And true loyalty must be bi-directional.
I took that one a bit personally myself as I could relate to it. Let me tell you how that went down with me. Went to work for a company, gave it my all. Did in 3 days what took other employees six months, and with fewer bugs and faster performance. The company rode me hard, demanded I worked more and more. Soon I was responsible for nearly all the critical projects. I was working 16 hours a day 7 days a week. My boss refused to let me even take Sundays off because of the crisis. Yet my salary was based on 40 hrs a week, no overtime, so when I figured my effective hourly rate if I was a hourly worker, it was less than I could make in fast food. Finally after a year of this I cracked and got very sick, suffering total exhaustion. I could not come in to work. The work then fired me. I later hear them tell people they suspected I had a drug problem.
So yeah, maybe I was even the guy he is talking about. Who knows. There were no drugs though.
That was the first couple jobs out of college. After that I wised up and started setting boundaries. But eventually I had to strike out on my own because too many companies will take advantage of diligent workers.
Looking back at it all I see it like a rich guy that buys an expensive race horse and then runs the horse in every race he can find without rests between until the race horse collapses, and then he sends the horse off to the glue factory with no loyalty to what the horse won him. Another example is the spoiled trust fund kid that buys a ferrari and drives it around and never changes the oil and after a year the engine freezes up, a total loss. This is just stupidity and failure to manage your investment properly. There are a lot of managers out there like this. Any company that routinely requires overtime is a company that has failed and is run by incompetent management. When the overtime is required of employees who don't even get paid overtime it makes the whole thing just that more abusive and exploitative. This all is especially absurd for those of us that produce at 10-30 times the rate and quality of the average developers. I always would find it infuriating to be told I must work 112 hours in a week during which I would write some 8,500 lines of complex code and there is another guy paid the same who writes 13 lines in the same week and goes home after 40 hours because his contributions aren't all that important anyway so no point in keeping him late.
Anyone in this situation do as I did. Leave and start your own company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is very true. I've seen it at all levels of BigCo. Loyalty is the single most important quality in a bigCo and it works (unfortunately).
The reasons I won't be an exec at a bigCo- - I don't watch or care to talk sports. - I don't / won't hunt wildlife. - I don't discuss female anatomy freely. I live in Houston, so most big employers are energy related. It is still somewhat of a good ol boy network and even though I'm now at a small company I see all 3 in equal parts quite often.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reasons I won't be an exec at a bigCo- - I don't watch or care to talk sports. - I don't / won't hunt wildlife. - I don't discuss female anatomy freely. I live in Houston, so most big employers are energy related. It is still somewhat of a good ol boy network and even though I'm now at a small company I see all 3 in equal parts quite often.
>The reasons I won't be an exec at a bigCo- ..in Texas
S_A_P's generalizations aren't fair at all.
That exec I met had a Harvard MBA, 20 years experience at his company (where he started out entry-level), extensive market knowledge/expertise, integrity, strong character, etc. Qualities that actually matter when billions of dollars are on the line.
Not sure why I even bothered to chime in.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haha, I used to be an employee like that. You know those methodologies like DDD, that say: 'understand the business problem before coding'. Well when I was doing it managers would go crazy and say I should not create confusion, but start working. Once to find 6 months later that a 15 men team hasn't done anything useful ... In all cases I can remember thinking and asking at the beginning was/would have been worth the…
The difference here was that the guy liked to try to be specifically obtuse and difficult. It wasn't a matter of thinking through a problem before hand - it was an exercise in proving/looking smart. Spending 5+ minutes consternating over the type of screws that came with the shelf is not "thinking ahead" :)
If you didn't want this level of analysis, why the hell would you take a $150/hr engineer and have him screwing in shelves rather than call in the $12/hr maintenance man?
I know the answer already. Your company thinks it is saving money by not having janitorial or secretarial staff and just have the engineers do all the menial cleaning and shelving tasks.