Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to kill a company's morale in one easy memo

technocrat.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 135 posts

Re: How to kill a company's morale in one easy memo

#111

Post by mfukar »

borism wrote: post #63
barrkel wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but you didn't present evidence that he didn't hurt his company. You presented evidence that he didn't hurt the company so badly that it didn't grow, but not that he didn't hurt the company.

in past 10 years the stock has grown at an annualized rate of 19%, weathered 2008 crash extremely well and has doubled since crash. The guy is also still at the helm at the age of 60. He might be the worse a*hole possible, but whatever he's doing seems to be working pretty well.

Without intimate knowledge of the company's workings, plans and actions in those past 10 years, that logic is post hoc ergo propter hoc. The only thing we can say for sure is his jackassery didn't hurt the company as much as a rational person would think it might.

Re: How to kill a company's morale in one easy memo

#112

Post by mfukar »

wazoox wrote: post #36
antidaily wrote: post #26

In April of 2010, Forbes magazine named Patterson fourth on their annual list of "America's Best-Performing Bosses" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Patterson

Doesn't excuse being an horrible asshole.

Depends on your point of view. It certainly is excused if you're a Cerner stockholder, right?

Re: How to kill a company's morale in one easy memo

#113

Post by ido »

captaink wrote: post #106
gruseom wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what would you say are the best ways to measure productivity?

I would say the best way is by the outcomes, by the results. By productivity - be it units produced, share price, value added... Productivity is not = hours worked.

Yeah but that gets pretty vague pretty fast.

How do you measure a programmer's productivity when you can't estimate exactly (and sometimes not even close) how much work something should take?

Re: How to kill a company's morale in one easy memo

#114

Post by loewenskind »

robryan wrote: post #102
Periodic wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a case of misplaced metrics. I can't find the name of the paper or the researcher, but I believe it's been shown that when you try to reward/punish some metric of productivity, invariably the employees will begin to maximize that metric, perhaps at the expense of productivity. Measuring number of hours in the office is not a direct measurement of productivity, and these employees were meeting the metric, but onl…

This effect is a lot less pronounced in physical labour based jobs, it's harder to portray that your doing things in these jobs. Sure overall your productivity may be down over long hours but the extra time worked makes up for this. To take this to the extreme I'd say the place you get most value for pushing extra hours is a production line where an employee is repeatedly preforming one simple task.

Actually I would say this is core to the whole issue. Management is still largely stuck in the mindset of a physical labor world. With physical labor if you force people to work 12 hour days you really will get close to 12 hours of work because as long as the body can swing a pick it can... swing a pick.

The brain doesn't work like this, you can't push the brain past a certain point consistently.

Management needs to catch up to the times. We don't pay CEO's millions of dollars to over see a bunch of people swinging picks.

Re: How to kill a company's morale in one easy memo

#115

Post by ido »

j_baker wrote: post #53
dionidium wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you're right, but that's a pretty high standard to hold him to. You'd have to say the same thing about CEOs who behave in a way you support, too. ("Yeah, their stock improved after he started treating employees with respect, but how do you know they couldn't have done better without that change in behavior?")

I think the moral of the story is that stock prices are a pretty bad way to gauge employee morale.

And the CEO in question probably has optimizing stock prices at a higher priority than optimizing employee morale.

Re: How to kill a company's morale in one easy memo

#116

Post by mchouza »

Periodic wrote: post #41
abstractbill wrote: post #4

From the comments: My sister used to work for a large multinational that pressured people to come in on Saturdays. The employees would come in but they would work on personal tasks like paying bills and balancing their checkbooks. It was all for appearance and it just pissed off the employees. She left the company after this pressure started. Part of her Saturday "work" was looking for a new job. In my experience thi…

It's a case of misplaced metrics. I can't find the name of the paper or the researcher, but I believe it's been shown that when you try to reward/punish some metric of productivity, invariably the employees will begin to maximize that metric, perhaps at the expense of productivity. Measuring number of hours in the office is not a direct measurement of productivity, and these employees were meeting the metric, but onl…

I believe it's known as Campbell's Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_Law

Re: How to kill a company's morale in one easy memo

#117

Post by neeleshs »

ido wrote: post #113
captaink wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say the best way is by the outcomes, by the results. By productivity - be it units produced, share price, value added... Productivity is not = hours worked.

Yeah but that gets pretty vague pretty fast. How do you measure a programmer's productivity when you can't estimate exactly (and sometimes not even close) how much work something should take?

I have not seen a software project where there is not enough work for somebody.

What I've found useful, and which worked reasonably well for teams which have been working over a period of time together is to collectively estimate complexity of tasks that must be completed.Say on a scale of 1-5. That gives you a reasonably agreeable scale of measurement (not a universal scale, but the one that the team accepts). As time progresses, you see how many such tasks are completed by any person in a given time frame.

Not that this is foolproof, or that it works right from the beginning of a project, but over a period of time, you tend to get a good sense of how productive each member is.

[Edit: Typo fixed]

Re: How to kill a company's morale in one easy memo

#118

Post by ScotterC »

JoachimSchipper wrote: post #72
ScotterC wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More talking about actual history such as 19th century Europe. However this memo is dated as August '06 so we can assume that it happened sometime earlier that summer. From this google finance chart: http://bit.ly/ar1PSo it shows the massive dip the company took in July of the same year. Aside from all that, actions like this will bite you in the ass in one form another. I doubt many visitors to hacker news hold CEO…

Actually, other comments mention 2001.

Guess I need to re think my argument then eh?

Re: How to kill a company's morale in one easy memo

#119

Post by ido »

neeleshs wrote: post #117
ido wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but that gets pretty vague pretty fast. How do you measure a programmer's productivity when you can't estimate exactly (and sometimes not even close) how much work something should take?

I have not seen a software project where there is not enough work for somebody. What I've found useful, and which worked reasonably well for teams which have been working over a period of time together is to collectively estimate complexity of tasks that must be completed.Say on a scale of 1-5. That gives you a reasonably agreeable scale of measurement (not a universal scale, but the one that the team accepts). As ti…

Sounds pretty decent, although there is still the problem that it doesn't tell you if someone is slacking off or is simply not very fast.

Re: How to kill a company's morale in one easy memo

#120

Post by Silhouette »

jemfinch wrote: post #86
Silhouette wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't encourage them! Car parks have proven to be one of the most reliable indicators of whether I want to work at a company. On arrival for interview, I take a look around. If there are lots of nice cars, it's a good sign that the company is doing well and compensates its staff accordingly. If there are lots of older cars, it's probably a geek-friendly start-up atmosphere, not making much money yet, but everyone's i…

> If people start doing things like car pooling, this almost perfect way to avoid wasting several hours in an interview for a job I'm never going to accept anyway will be spoiled, and I'll have to find some other obvious prejudice to use! :-) What do you do? Get to the parking lot, look at it, and then just call them and say, "I've decided not to interview with you"?

I've never actually done that, but all the evidence suggests that if I ever interview for an employee position again, I should...
Post reply on HN