241–250 of 274 posts
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Q: Is wanting to succeed considered a bad thing?
If we are talking NHL level exceptations at my dayjob, ye, it is a bad thing. Especially as there are no way of rating programmers as fairly as sportsmen.
I would love to work in an extremely competitive environment where slackers are punished.
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> When designing a game, "The game is fun," is a shitty razor because it doesn't tell you how to prioritize or make trade-offs coming from countless hours of playing games and near zero hours making them, I'm curious why "this game is fun" doesn't help you make tradeoffs. I feel like concentrating on the game being fun would help avoid repetitive mechanics that would be tiresome or tedious (inventory management), fre…
From countless hours making games, it is because games can be fun in many different ways yet it is hard to make a fun game. One of the most common way projects fail is that they are trying to be fun in a variety of ways but not achieving player enjoyment in any of them. I used to work with a great designer who used to say the goal was to take the un-fun out. That actually is a more actionable goal.
One thing people seem to forget regarding tradeoffs is that it's possible to do objectively bad ones: It's possible to have neither a bias for action nor curiosity. Mentioning both values is a reminder to be on the efficient frontier. Further, you probably dont want to pick an extreme tradeoff. Getting a drop more action at the cost of huge learnings is a mistake as is getting very irrelevant knowledge at a huge cost…
Yes, it's possible to have suboptimal situations. But no, communicating feel-good meaningless statements (like asking for people to both act fast without waiting for the details and to know the details about the consequence of their actions) is an infallible way to create apathy and move away from the Pareto frontier, not towards it.
Meanwhile staying curious isn't necessarily about researching decisions in particular. It involves for instance ongoing tech education.
So if you think about it ongoing education is totally compatible with making occasional snap decisions.
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Why does it matter to you whether your peers are more productive than you because they are smarter than you, or because they work more? Is the former OK, but the latter "toxic"?
It matters because someone has to decide what A- and B-List performance means. And the performance ceiling will shift if people put in 60 hours constantly. They will get more stuff done (assuming all else being equal) and soon your 40 hour A-List performance will have degraded to B level and now you’re either pressured in also doing the unrecorded overtime to get as much stuff done, or you are fired (you’re B-List no…
If I'm a manager and I notice someone is consistently underperforming (compared to his peers) - it does not matter if the rest of the team is working overtime, or is smarter, or more experienced - I don't care. I will ask the underperformer to step it up (again, don't care if this means working harder, or smarter), and if no improvement after a set period, I will be looking for a replacement. I'm paying top dollar for top performance.
This situation is normal and expected in professional sports. I don't remember hearing about "bad work/life balance", or "being pressured into doing overtime" in conversations about elite athletes' performance. Should we treat elite SWEs differently?
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"Don't be evil" is a dreadful credo. Allows a ridiculous amount of wiggle room. The fact that these very smart people formulated their beliefs in such a self-consciously childish manner should have been taken as a warning.
I don't think you are giving them enough credit. Choosing "don't be evil" as a credo deliberately encourages others to view the company through a moral lens. It is an invitation to judge the company according to a higher standard than most businesses would hold themselves to. It makes explicit that the company takes responsibility for the moral implications of what they do instead of pretending to live in an amoral v…
> “Learn and Be Curious” - what might that cost us? Maybe focus (because it’s ok to go down rabbit holes in order to learn something). So how about “Optimise learning over focus”? Maybe, maybe not. A couple of the values pulled out here are from the Amazon Leadership Principles. So there's actually an answer to this question! The opposite of "Learn and Be Curious" is "Bias for Action" and "Deliver Results". The Amazo…
Do the LPs themselves make it clear when they're supposed to be applied?
Most teams also have a set of tenets they embrace that are more team-local refinements of what you stand for and how you work. The group I was in had “Bias for Action” and “Earn Trust” as the things to prioritise. Make customers happy, increase their trust in you along the way, deliver results, and do it quickly… it made for a simple framework for decisions and left a lot of autonomy for working out your own plans for execution. You don’t need to reach consensus on _how_ you’re going to do it. Just do it.
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It matters because someone has to decide what A- and B-List performance means. And the performance ceiling will shift if people put in 60 hours constantly. They will get more stuff done (assuming all else being equal) and soon your 40 hour A-List performance will have degraded to B level and now you’re either pressured in also doing the unrecorded overtime to get as much stuff done, or you are fired (you’re B-List no…
First of all, you can't assume "all else being equal". People are different, and this is especially true for star performers. If I'm a manager and I notice someone is consistently underperforming (compared to his peers) - it does not matter if the rest of the team is working overtime, or is smarter, or more experienced - I don't care. I will ask the underperformer to step it up (again, don't care if this means workin…
If they're open about expectations, assuming I'm at a point in my life where the trade-off makes sense, then if the compensation is good, that's fantastic. Nothing toxic about that. Not that different from some US manufacturing workers getting paid hourly wages, who make the same kind of trade-off all the time, making damn good money for 60 hours of peak performance a week. Sure, they might end up paying for it by ruining their bodies and drop dead from a heart attack or stroke within a year of retirement if they make it that long, but the risks are no secret.
> This situation is normal and expected in professional sports.
Let's google. The NFL seems topical around this time of year.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/01/heres-what-the-average-nfl-p...
> The minimum annual salary for a rookie active roster player with a one-year contract is $480,000 . . . A player with three years’ experience would command a salary equal to at least $705,000, while players with seven to nine years on the field must be paid at least $915,000 . . . the average NFL salary was only about $2.7 million in 2017 . . . That’s less than three-quarters of the average $4 million earnings of a major league baseball player and less than half the typical wage of NBA players, who earn about $7.1 million on average.
I take everything back! Let's not treat SWEs any differently. For that kind of money, I will gladly put in 80 hours a week.
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"Completed their tasks in a timely manner when asked" sounds good enough to me.
The real problem is Netflix rally refuse to hire merely competent staff for boring work? Do they really need 10,000 major innovations every year? Even pro sports teams have paid support staff working with the "players".
There is a cultural aspect to this. American often try to be pro-stuff. French are always anti-stuff (pro life in the US, anti abortion in France, etc)
Does that actually result in any meaningful differences between these countries in the debate?
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First of all, you can't assume "all else being equal". People are different, and this is especially true for star performers. If I'm a manager and I notice someone is consistently underperforming (compared to his peers) - it does not matter if the rest of the team is working overtime, or is smarter, or more experienced - I don't care. I will ask the underperformer to step it up (again, don't care if this means workin…
Remember, this is in the context of companies stating they value impact over effort, the sort of places that brag about their work/life balance. If I'm accepting an offer from such an employer and taking this into account during salary negotiations, I will be rightly pissed off to find out the standard is secretly 60-80 hours a week. If they're open about expectations, assuming I'm at a point in my life where the tra…
So yeah, it seems like we are in agreement :)