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Leave Work Unassigned and See Who Steps Forward

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Re: Leave Work Unassigned and See Who Steps Forward

#61

Post by eitally »

loopbit wrote: post #55
meric wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- A good manager will notice, and appreciate, your effort. But promote you? You are one of his best tools, why should he? Usually he'll try everything he can to keep you where you are. If it's a bad manager, he won't even recognize your effort. Your parent comment: make him look like a hero, which will get him promoted, and he'll think who is his most valuable / productive underling, which will get you promoted So, y…

Again, maybe I've had more bad managers than the average (in my 17 years of professional experience I've had 2, maybe 3, good managers), but there's no guarantee that will happen. Maybe in areas like SV, where good professionals with solid experience have no problem finding another role and companies are actually trying their best to keep good employees that happens more often. What I've seen is people skipped for pr…

Your comments aren't wrong, but this illustrates why it's important when interviewing for jobs that you're interviewing them for cultural fit and to determine whether you'd want to work for your boss-to-be, almost moreso than them interviewing you.

Re: Leave Work Unassigned and See Who Steps Forward

#62

Post by eitally »

michaelt wrote: post #32
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most. For most employers, an employee is a cost / benefit thing (see also: capitalism). The more work an employee does for the least amount of money, the better value that employee is to the employer. Relevant to HN, this is common in SV; fixed working hours / contracts (i.e. 40 hr workweeks) - which unions have fought hard for to achieve - are frowned upon, working overtime, evenings, weekends, and odd hours are enc…

At least where I work, there are annual raises where junior managers recommend which of their employees should receive small/medium/large raises; and only giving small raises does not produce any rewards or benefits for the manager. If someone is doing great work, why wouldn't a manager recommend they get a large raise? They want to retain good performers, after all.

Outside of the highly profitable sectors (tech, finance, insurance, pharma), annual raises mostly went the way of the dodo back in 2007-2008... and didn't come back.

Re: Leave Work Unassigned and See Who Steps Forward

#63

Post by draw_down »

WalterBright wrote: post #49

In my corporate experience, only doing what you're told to by your manager is the route to mediocre raises and rare promotions. Larger raises and faster promotions come from identifying problems and solving them, i.e. not needing to be micro-managed.

Get your raise going out the door, relying on the ones your company gives you is the route to mediocre raises.

Re: Leave Work Unassigned and See Who Steps Forward

#64

Post by eitally »

d23 wrote: post #20

> Companies don't need to go so far as the well-known Google 20 percent time A bit of a digression here. I love that people think the idea that letting employees spend a measly 20% of their time deciding what they should be working on is somehow an extreme idea. What portion of your typical day would you honestly say is devoted to solid, in-the-flow work? After all the meeting, context switches, random interruptions,…

You're not wrong, but you don't quite understand how 20% time works in practice. It's a formal way to recruit part-time help on unrelated projects, and it's recruited for and tracked in exactly the same way using the same systems as normal jobs & normal performance management. It's a fantastic way for people at Google to seek out learning opportunities or places to participate outside their normal team/group/dept/BU.

Most companies look at 20% time as a super-informal way for people to volunteer "spare time" to work on non-core stuff, but that isn't how it works at Google, at all.

That said, your central point is 100% accurate ... but at least within tech, I think that "40 hour, strictly scheduled workweek" has been gone for several years now.

Re: Leave Work Unassigned and See Who Steps Forward

#65

Post by eitally »

YZF wrote: post #12
quanticle wrote: post #2

I think this is one of the arguments for holocracy. The entire purpose of management is to efficiently assign work to individual contributors. Instead of leaving a few work items unassigned, holocracy leaves all the work items unassigned, and then the ones that get done are the ones that are most important to the team. I'm not saying I buy the idea, and in fact that the same arguments against holocracy work against t…

If nobody steps up then it's quite likely that work never needed to get done in the first place. win-win as long as it's a learning experience for all involved. It's definitely a problem if you force a team or a person into a certain pattern and then change the rules without telling. For example you may have punished someone for taking the initiative in the past and now you try to intentionally create a vacuum. In th…

As a reasonably experienced manager, I think holocracy can sort of work in the context of largely repeatable units of work, and areas that don't require a lot of focused independent thinking by single individuals. But if you're working on a biz dev strategy, for example, that's just not something a random employee can successfully do and by definition that means it has a dependency on the person/people who can. There are loads of functions at all medium++ sized companies like that.

Re: Leave Work Unassigned and See Who Steps Forward

#66

Post by markeroon »

djb_hackernews wrote: post #60
j_jochem wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm exceptionally lucky, but I work from home most of the time and get to prioritize my work myself. If I want to spend a day improving test coverage or build tooling, I am free to do so. The price I pay for this is earning about 10k€ less a year, but I still think it's worth it.

Just for fun I wondered what a missed $10k/yr was over time. http://www.moneychimp.com/calculator/compound_interest_calcu... values of 0; 10,000; 20; 4; results in nearly 310k of missed gains. Increasing that 4% to 8% increases it to nearly a half a million! At my estimated retirement income requirements, that basically means I could quit working 10 years earlier if I don't settle for being underpaid.

Eh, you'll save thousands by not having to commute.

Re: Leave Work Unassigned and See Who Steps Forward

#67

Post by chrstphrhrt »

Fuck ambition for its own sake. It only causes a race to the bottom and short-changes users/customers.

I have used this strategic vacuum technique as a manager to great effect before.

It brings out the best creativity and allows people who are going through apparent productivity lulls to come out of them in a healthy, smarter way. It also builds lasting loyalty and a strong team spirit.

Velocity isn't just hours spent butt-in-seat or number of commits or whatever. It's precious moments of high quality attention. To maximize that you need to be more like a conductor of an orchestra than a drill sergeant.

CAVEAT: when under a high-pressure situation with a new team it is sometimes necessary to limit freedom, demand trust, and command things for the purpose of getting through that situation. Obviously it's dangerous and the wrong kind of manager can get addicted to this kind of solution easily. These temporary command-and-control moments can sometimes be used as trust builders for the managers if, once the situation is resolved, they immediately relinquish the extraordinary power they had used and return to a more natural/creative dynamic - the team will see this as honourable since it didn't technically _have_ to happen that way.

Re: Leave Work Unassigned and See Who Steps Forward

#69

Post by djb_hackernews »

markeroon wrote: post #66
djb_hackernews wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for fun I wondered what a missed $10k/yr was over time. http://www.moneychimp.com/calculator/compound_interest_calcu... values of 0; 10,000; 20; 4; results in nearly 310k of missed gains. Increasing that 4% to 8% increases it to nearly a half a million! At my estimated retirement income requirements, that basically means I could quit working 10 years earlier if I don't settle for being underpaid.

Eh, you'll save thousands by not having to commute.

Or the other option, work remotely and not get underpaid...

Re: Leave Work Unassigned and See Who Steps Forward

#70

Post by loopbit »

eitally wrote: post #61
loopbit wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, maybe I've had more bad managers than the average (in my 17 years of professional experience I've had 2, maybe 3, good managers), but there's no guarantee that will happen. Maybe in areas like SV, where good professionals with solid experience have no problem finding another role and companies are actually trying their best to keep good employees that happens more often. What I've seen is people skipped for pr…

Your comments aren't wrong, but this illustrates why it's important when interviewing for jobs that you're interviewing them for cultural fit and to determine whether you'd want to work for your boss-to-be, almost moreso than them interviewing you.

Yep, and it took me years to learn that lesson :)
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