Employees: looking for “the great boss who cares about their development” • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by hencq » Wed, Feb 24, 2016, 5:53 PM UTC

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.

One of my professors in college stated (perhaps wishfully) that one day we'll look back at today as a time where employees had the strange habit of coming into work in the morning and first thing they did was remove their brain and leave it with their jackets on the coat rack because they wouldn't need it the rest of the day.

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

#112

Post by datr » Wed, Feb 24, 2016, 5:56 PM UTC

6stringmerc wrote: post #101

The term "Glass Ceiling" was created to help discuss the difficulties for advancement by women and minority / upwardly mobile individuals in the workplace. I'd venture a guess HN is likely stratified to a predominately middle-aged or younger demographic (US), albeit with a significant number of professionals with decades of longevity with technology. So, not the primary target of the concept, but a group that definit…

The Hays Journal has a piece about this [1]. The article starts on page 34.

[1] http://www.hays-journal.com/issue8/

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

#113

Post by pacala » Wed, Feb 24, 2016, 5:57 PM UTC

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).

I would gladly maintain the code I wrote in the past 6 years. I would love to maintain the codebase of at least one of Google's internal projects I had the fortune to work with. Thanks Google, their thorough review process and their focus on readability.

I would not touch with a ten foot pole the code churned out by AgileSprints(TM) held by computer-illiterate management to hit some arbitrary deadline.

The stigma is on shoddy code, which, alas, seems the norm in large swaths of our industry.

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

#114

Post by pasquinelli » Wed, Feb 24, 2016, 6:03 PM UTC

i totally agree that the work you do is the most important factor in your satisfaction with the work you do, and that free lunches and other perks are superficial. that said, there're some interesting thoughts formulated in this.

"What they want most is a great boss who cares about their development, and a company that focuses on and develops their strengths."

what people care about is their own development, the boss and the company are beside the point. the boss and the company are how the worker makes their money, the worker is how the boss and company make theirs. of course, if their interests align in other ways the situation will be more attractive.

"A kind gesture by a camper ruins the natural instincts and therefore the lives of these cool bears."

this metaphor... i'm not sure about this metaphor. i see that workers are bears and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are free lunches and vacations, but i'm not sure i see what the workers' natural instincts are. making their boss money? and if they no longer make their bosses money, their cool lives are ruined? wouldn't it be the bosses' nice situation that's been ruined then?

"But what is the right culture? More importantly: What is a winning culture?"

winning's more important that rightness. interesting.

"Human beings are not looking for company-bought goodies -- they are looking for meaningful, fulfilling work."

yes, this, completely. i agree with that, but i don't think what he thinks that means is what i would think that means.

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

#115

Post by JustSomeNobody » Wed, Feb 24, 2016, 6:04 PM UTC

wwweston wrote: post #77

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #70

Earlier 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…

Re 1. I think it's actually quite fun to take a piece of code, understand it and change it to meet new requirements. There's a good healthy challenge in that. I think a big part of the reason devs hate it is because they can't read code well. They can write it, but not read it. (I realize I'm generalizing, but it is based on some experiences.)

Re 2. This is very true.

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

#116

Post by js8 » Wed, Feb 24, 2016, 6:09 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #68

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 prot…

Democracy is not just voting, it also gives you possibly to put forward proposals and candidate for leading roles.

As other commenter said, you can always exit. But democracy gives you explicit right to change things (albeit no bigger than to other people in the organization), which is actually a more efficient method of introducing change than fatalistically wait until the dysfunctional organization dies.

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

#117

Post by mavelikara » Wed, Feb 24, 2016, 6:11 PM UTC

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?

> In theory workers co-operatives are this, but they have a habit of not doing so well in the real world.

Is the fraction of co-operatives that fail larger than the fraction of failures in alternative structures?

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

#118

Post by praneshp » Wed, Feb 24, 2016, 6:12 PM UTC

busterarm wrote: post #61

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.

Now I think I work here. $BIG_CORP_FEMALE_CEO_UNDER_FIRE?

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

#119

Post by js8 » Wed, Feb 24, 2016, 6:14 PM UTC

jdmichal wrote: post #66

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 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.

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

#120

Post by praveenster » Wed, Feb 24, 2016, 6:23 PM UTC

VikingCoder wrote: post #58

kabdib wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh. Beats having the company hire a psychologist to talk to each staff member. They wanted to know why morale was so low. I was polite and kept to topics involving work. I left about two months after that for a much better environment.

What would ya say ya do here?

Meet Bob and Bob.