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The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

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Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#111

Post by zer00eyz »

diob wrote: post #97
zer00eyz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you get cut cause "we need a number" and you're expensive? Were you the growth guy when they need run the busies blood and guts people? Did they save 2 people in some other department who matter more with some horse trading? You can go and be a clock puncher. It's perfectly fine to do so. I know plenty of them, some got laid off recently and cant seem to find jobs. The high achiever's the go the extra mile types…

Might want to think a bit about survivorship bias and see how it might apply.

Thats the point.

Who survives in a down turn?

It's not the folks who are "pragmatic" its not the folks who give up...

You work with two people, Bob who punches the clock and Bill who puts in the time to get the extra work done. You move on to a new job and your boss says "we need someone new on your team, Bob and Bill are here".

You're not picking Bob, Bill gets your vote.

Dont be an asshlole be known as at the hard worker, be helpful (maybe have to do some extra work)... your going to get picked when people are looking. Your old boss is part of your network, and so are your peers (who might end up your boss)...

All those people who are survivors, who put in extra work, have strong networks who know that they are strong hires in a tight market.

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#112

Post by ryandrake »

WalterBright wrote: post #79
dakiol wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just give me some JIRA ticket and let me read books while I get my job done in 1-2 hours a day. Aren't we all (normal and decent people) doing this already?

> Aren't we all (normal and decent people) doing this already? I've known many such in my career. They weren't fooling anybody. Everybody knew who they were. When they'd get laid off or were passed over for a raise they were always baffled and outraged.

I think this highly depends on the manager. Some know (Manager A), and either work to correct it, or get their ducks in a row to fire them. Plenty of managers, though, (Manager B) have no idea what a reasonable amount of work output is, and can be easily convinced that what took 1-2 hours to do constituted an entire 40 hour week. You get some developer who's good at "managing upward" and they'll bullshit/charm and walk all over that manager. Often these managers are themselves "managing upward" to their directors, and so on up the chain, resulting in an entire reporting line successfully doing nothing.

It doesn't matter that the slacker's peers know exactly what is going on. They're too busy doing their own work, and if they complain about it to Manager B, they won't be believed.

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#113

Post by erikerikson »

hinkley wrote: post #101
erikerikson wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A co-op only attenuates to employees. There are better options. Example: FairShares Commons

Don’t you have the same problem illustrated by this author? My perspective is the “untapped” people get diminished rewards for their inputs because they are being outplayed by politicos who inflate their importance to the process at the expense of others. For some people it is less work to make the system unfair than to excel on a fair system.

I agree that this structure has incentive problems and have so far avoided it. That said, I think it does better than a co-op. This fits the saying "the opposite of stupid is not smart". Standard corporations [frequently] used to serve only owners have a problematic incentive structure for everyone else. A co-op that serves only employees has a different bad incentive structure. Of course there are instances of improvements over the base incentive. The FairShares Commons attempts to be explicit about the balance between the stakeholders of the corporation. You can read more on Boyd's site [0] but really chapters 15 and 16 of his book Rebuild that seems to be linked there.

[0] https://graham-boyd.biz/fairshare-commons/

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#114

Post by rixthefox »

hinkley wrote: post #100
Rustwerks wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a legal thing. If you do a layoff it's for business reasons and you can avoid all of the PIP and such. But if you do it that way you can't select based upon performance.

Isn’t this why some people are so into performative work? In a layoff the people they suspect might be underperforming go onto the list. They keep the people who look good on paper, the ones who play the game. Not the “untapped” people the author is talking about.

That's exactly it. The untapped people are actually getting bunched into the "underperforming" category because in the eyes of the beancounter they are not meeting some benign performance metric that the company wants to see.

Say I'm a phone support company. I have a script I want my employees to follow and the average support time per phone call should be anywhere between 15-30 minutes. Sally Sue is on the phone for the full 8 hours and handles 16 calls a day. Billy Brass is on the phone for 4 hours of the day but handles double the amount of calls a day.

To the bean counters Billy is underperforming because he only spends 4 hours time on the phone and the company only makes money for the amount of time they can keep people on the phone. In this example it doesn't matter that Billy is an all-star because he completed more calls, he's underperforming because he's not following the script that should keep people on the phone for as long as possible.

The point is that Billy will feel resentful because even though he's able to help more people in less time he's getting penalized so Billy has less incentive to go above and beyond and in fact needs to degrade his workflow to fit someone else's metrics. So Billy becomes "untapped" because the company has restricted his autonomy. He "CAN" do more but that's not what the company wants from him so he will choose not to do it even if it's to the benefit of the company.

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#115

Post by szundi »

luisgvv wrote: post #7

I began as a junior dev and climbed up the ranks til the point where I became the SME in some areas of the product. Got laid off because sales goals were not met while they retained people which I think were incompetent in their work. Even some guys which I think were better and more critical to the projects were dumped. I'm not climbing that ladder by being proactive and "pragmatic" again... Call me a paycheck steal…

What about not fucking up your life and find a good comany to work for?

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#116

Post by OkayPhysicist »

switchbak wrote: post #24
dakiol wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just give me some JIRA ticket and let me read books while I get my job done in 1-2 hours a day. Aren't we all (normal and decent people) doing this already?

No. Many of us are working hard, trying to get real work done. And spending 20-40 mins a day checking Hacker News :) Seriously though, don’t you feel bad by not pulling your weight? Someone has to get your work done.

You're applying emotion to the cold calculus of economics. I'm supplying an acceptable amount of labor to my boss (evident by the fact that my boss hasn't fired/complained to me) in exchange for an acceptable amount of money (evident by the fact that I haven't quit).

We're all on salary. Unless whatever I'm working on is going to boost my options enough to make it worth my while (it won't), there's no reason to break my back.

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#117

Post by ryandrake »

lucianbr wrote: post #103
NateEag wrote: post #63

This is an appealing narrative without evidence. How does the author know Marias make up the majority of most companies? Where's the data supporting that claim? It may be true - it sounds plausible to those of us who've been a Maria in the salt mines of a dysfunctional company. It appeals to us to think we're the hidden gems the company needs to invest in. Something being appealing doesn't make it true, though, even…

There's some useful insight here even if the percents are wrong. Whatever the numbers, even if 10% are Marias, they're still an untapped resource, if not "the biggest". And the fact that some of us have been this person proves the percentage is not zero. Feels like you found a small inaccuracy in the text, and jumped up "Aha! Everything you said is wrong!". Also an appealing narrative.

Yea, everyone is nit-picking the numbers... Where's the evidence? Where's the citations? Not everything is a paper in an academic publication. The quadrants themselves hold up and anecdotally match my experiences over decades of work. I can easily remember people I've worked with in each quadrant, and yes, the lower-right (whatever percent they are) are totally underutilized and mostly invisible.

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#118

Post by linhns »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #29
switchbak wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Many of us are working hard, trying to get real work done. And spending 20-40 mins a day checking Hacker News :) Seriously though, don’t you feel bad by not pulling your weight? Someone has to get your work done.

Its not your work unless you own the company

Then there will be no company

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#119

Post by gopher_space »

rybosworld wrote: post #47
Seb-C wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who cares about his work, has strong professional ethics and wisely chooses his employers to not end-up in such environments, no I don't. The worst places for me are precisely those where you can get by with 1~2h of work a day because no one cares and the company's culture does not value the time and skills of his workers.

> wisely chooses his employers to not end-up in such environments This is a pretty common attitude. That is, "I'm able to pick better workplaces than you are". It implies you have control over the other people that work at the company. And unless you're the CEO, you don't. You cannot with any certainty tell what a work environment is like in the interview stage. You can job hop a half dozen times until you find a goo…

> This is a pretty common attitude. That is, "I'm able to pick better workplaces than you are".

It's more about not applying to certain jobs, or cancelling the process after the first red flag.

> You cannot with any certainty tell what a work environment is like in the interview stage.

Sure I can. But I might have been at it for a decade or two longer than you have. Folks on HN talk about the warning signs and red flags in interviews all the time, and from my perspective they're mostly right.

edit: removed unfinished sentence

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#120

Post by KittenInABox »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #77
rybosworld wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wisely chooses his employers to not end-up in such environments This is a pretty common attitude. That is, "I'm able to pick better workplaces than you are". It implies you have control over the other people that work at the company. And unless you're the CEO, you don't. You cannot with any certainty tell what a work environment is like in the interview stage. You can job hop a half dozen times until you find a goo…

> This is a pretty common attitude. That is, "I'm able to pick better workplaces than you are". Not necessarily. It's "I'm less willing to stay at a bad workplace than you are". Maybe it was bad when I picked it. Maybe it became bad after I was there for a decade. Maybe it became bad quickly; maybe slowly. Whatever. When I realize that it's become a bad place to work, I'm not "quiet quitting", I'm putting my resume o…

This is harder and harder the more senior you get. It looks suspicious if you're hopping after 1.5-2 yrs.
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