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Bored People Quit

randsinrepose.com

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Re: Bored People Quit

#71

Post by georgieporgie »

bricestacey wrote: post #63
georgieporgie wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Managers and leads aren't all-powerful. They answer to their managers and, in some sense, to their peers.

That's half his point. As a manager you should have full control of your direct reports. You shouldn't even need to ask permission to rearrange focus within your team. He shouldn't have even asked in the first place, though this is probably a sign of weakness in the manager and not so much the upper management of a company (if you have to ask, your peers will automatically play devil's advocate. The status quo, while…

The individual in question may not have actually been under the sole control of the poster, for whatever reason. It doesn't necessarily mean that he needs to jump ship because he's being used as a pawn.

Re: Bored People Quit

#72

Post by cema »

Lewisham wrote: post #52
andrewcooke wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(1) joking aside, please don't monitor logs like this. instead, treat your employees like real human beings and understand what they feel. not only is it more efficient than trying to reduce complex humans to a few "metrics", but it will allow you to detect more than just "boredom". (2) if you're thinking "how can they be bored when everything is so busy and there's so much to do?" maybe you are one of those over-man…

I worked for a 30 person database consultancy for my first job out of uni. Their Intranet home page contained a large and prominent link to "Internet access by user", which listed the amount of bandwidth being consumed by each person through their HTTP proxy. I have no idea who instituted that policy, but I instantly disliked the company . You could download large binaries for only so long to cover your tracks, so I…

  as a result of my departure,
  they would no longer hire graduates with A grades.
  They would look for B or C grades from now on.
Wow! What an amazing... company. I am at a loss for words, really. They must be very -- what's the opposite of proud? -- of themselves.

Re: Bored People Quit

#73

Post by mmaunder »

I think one of the problems is bad hiring. If you hire someone who wants to be a Ruby developer writing new code to maintain a PHP site, you're going to see boredom.

Marc Andreessen talks about using hiring and interviews as a filtering process e.g. "In this company we all do yoga for an hour at 2pm. Do you like Yoga? Are you going to have fun doing yoga for a hour every day?". [Real example of a yoga startup IIRC]

Here's the podcast, and it's probably ecorner's best ever if you haven't already heard it:

http://www.stanford.edu/group/edcorner/uploads/podcast/andre...

Re: Bored People Quit

#74

Post by ikarous »

Rands makes some very insightful points. I became very bored at my old job. What struck me as odd about the experience in hindsight is that at the time, I didn't even realize that I was bored. I simply became sarcastic, sullen, and generally somewhat less than the person I knew myself to be.

Perhaps it is an artifact of my youth, or perhaps it is because the situation of boredom can arise very gradually, but I strongly suspect that many people who find themselves unhappy with their employment without being able to articulate the reasons for their unhappiness are, in fact, simply bored with their work.

Directly asking employees about it is situational at best, though. Some folks might misinterpret such a query's intent and say "yes" regardless of how they really feel. I've often given thought to Google's 20% policy, where employees are allowed to work on work-related projects of their choosing. While I doubt that this policy is practical in all situations, it does seem to be a very clever way of preventing boredom and encouraging innovation simultaneously.

Re: Bored People Quit

#75

Post by rcfox »

Lewisham wrote: post #65
paulbaumgart wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

./data_mining_job && growlnotify -m "Success!" || growlnotify -m "Failure :-(" (season with while , read and grep to taste)

Hah, if only it was so simple! The integrity of the job is the problem. It's been coded to failover problems (as the original data integrity its mining from isn't good), so it will happily do something stupid for hours. That's why I have to watch it, and make sure its not doing something stupid. Unit tests would ensure stupidity was not a possibility, and regressions could be tracked. Too late for that, unfortunately…

Couldn't you write unit tests while you wait?

Re: Bored People Quit

#76

Post by bartonfink »

F_J_H wrote: post #69

Disclaimer: The following is not related to the topic but is instead a rant inspired by reading the article. A good article, but it is unfortunate that it starts by categorically slamming all authors who write about employee motivation and retention: It’s written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don’t have a clue about the daily necessity of keeping your team professionally…

I think Rands is railing against reactive HR departments who wait for problems (e.g. bored employees) to come to a head before trying to deal with them. It's too late to salvage a bad situation once an employee is fed up enough with a job to give notice. Even if you manage to keep her on in the short term, she's always going to have the stigma of "quitter" and you're just prolonging the inevitable. The HR directors, etc. who get brought in to circumvent policy and get these people the raises or transfers they were really after are missing the point - set things up so that things don't get so bad people need to quit to make themselves heard.

It's the same problem that gets brought up with software. The hero isn't the engineer who looks ahead and avoids problems, the hero is the guy who stays late to fix a problem after putting everyone in a bad position. Reaction is an anti-pattern no matter where it occurs.

Re: Bored People Quit

#77

Post by rcfox »

1337p337 wrote: post #49

I had a boss that took the opposite approach. Whenever I started to lose productivity, he'd put me on work he knew I'd hate, telling me I'd get to do more interesting things when I showed him I could be productive. So I started working on side projects at the office just to keep my mind from going and became less and less productive until I quit. He was a talented engineer himself and a good friend. We ended up worki…

Sounds a lot like, "The beatings will stop when morale improves."

Re: Bored People Quit

#78

Post by praptak »

Lewisham wrote: post #52
andrewcooke wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(1) joking aside, please don't monitor logs like this. instead, treat your employees like real human beings and understand what they feel. not only is it more efficient than trying to reduce complex humans to a few "metrics", but it will allow you to detect more than just "boredom". (2) if you're thinking "how can they be bored when everything is so busy and there's so much to do?" maybe you are one of those over-man…

I worked for a 30 person database consultancy for my first job out of uni. Their Intranet home page contained a large and prominent link to "Internet access by user", which listed the amount of bandwidth being consumed by each person through their HTTP proxy. I have no idea who instituted that policy, but I instantly disliked the company . You could download large binaries for only so long to cover your tracks, so I…

"The last I heard of the company was that as a result of my departure, they would no longer hire graduates with A grades."

This reminds me of a Feynman story. After he had found and demonstrated a security hole in a particular type of lock used by the military they "fixed" the issue by ordering everyone not to let Feynman anywhere near the locks :-)

Re: Bored People Quit

#79

Post by ZoFreX »

lambda_cube wrote: post #60
georgieporgie wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Managers and leads aren't all-powerful. They answer to their managers and, in some sense, to their peers.

Sure, all managers answer to another manager, except the CEO. But it's also normal to delegate responsibility when it comes to hiring and working assignments in projects. If you're sufficiently high up in the manager hierarchy (which shouldn't be that high up IMO), you should have the power to make decisions like that.

But by your own admission, some levels of management shouldn't have that power - so what should we call them if not managers?

Imo, if you are managing a team of people, you're a manager whether or not you have total hiring / firing power.

Re: Bored People Quit

#80

Post by munin »

georgieporgie wrote: post #51
munin wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

quit immediately. if you have a job where you have a "lead" or "manager" title but have to ask someone else before making personnel/project decisions, you are not a lead or manager of anything, just a scapegoat.

Managers and leads aren't all-powerful. They answer to their managers and, in some sense, to their peers.

precisely. and ultimately we all answer to the market / your customers / the giant space ants.

however, how i should answer to my boss is in the form of "why was this late". if my management wants to question decisions i make, they can have my job.

you could argue "well, micromanagement is just being proactive". you know what? if you don't trust me, fire me and replace me with someone you trust to get the job done.

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