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 stealer, quiet quitter etc.
Just give me some JIRA ticket and let me read books while I get my job done in 1-2 hours a day.
I’ll be you ten bucks they got rid of people who bring up bad news and kept the yes-men. A company that doesn’t know what’s broken is doomed to mediocrity.
But some people want to play music while the ship sinks. So they arrange for the most pleasant rest of the voyage they can, instead of saving as many people as they can.
> I’ll be you ten bucks they got rid of people who bring up bad news and kept the yes-men
I’m pretty cynical and assumed this was how layoffs worked but at least in faang and even smaller (maybe 500 people) SV companies, I actually don’t think this is the case anymore. Most I’ve seen have been extremely random – it seems like they cut teams/orgs very differently but on an individual level it seems random. I got the impression it’s some lawsuit thing, because they never leak the info beforehand so managers and other seniors can chime in, so it appears they’re cutting blindly from the exec level. There’s probably some politics going on in the higher echelons and maybe they force individuals out but with managers (including decorated ones) and regular employees it has not looked like a surgical political - not performance - play. From what I’ve seen.
That’s how salesforce did it. One way you can tell how terribly uninformed the layoff choices were is that there were people who were actually rehired immediately.
When I got laid off at SFDC, I found out that they wanted to get rid of certain localities. Heroku was always a remote friendly place, which apparently irritated some of the new Microsoft-derived management; the story I heard was they wanted to consolidate Canada's talent in my branch in Toronto and Vancouver.
I'm glad I left as I got a large pay raise and didn't have to move to Toronto; but I wouldn't say it was random, just based on metrics unrelated to the individual's contribution.
> but I wouldn't say it was random, just based on metrics unrelated to the individual's contribution.
You're right, it could have been based on the number of letters in their name, or the last digit on the clock when their name came up for a decision. It could have been every employee who hit a certain ratio of salary/years of experience. For the purposes of many employees being laid off, it was completely random. We had a lot of farewell drinks in Seattle, but the offices there aren't going anywhere.
I can see how it could be seen as random after reading that. It certainly wasn't a "fair" layoff in that there was literally nothing an employee could do to keep their current job from a performance standpoint.
Incidentally, did they do the "2 months to find a new job" thing for you too? I remember the whole process of looking for internal jobs to have been a bit chaotic and not very well planned at all. In retrospect, it made more sense to not apply anywhere, and just take it as a vacation, since they didn't pay out my vacation days. (I wonder if that wound up as an extra boat for someone)
-edit- I have absolutely no idea why your post is being downvoted, and I have started seeing this random downvoting everywhere.
I didn't actually get laid off, I was one of the people still there trying to figure out who was gone. Part of what makes the random nature so memorable is the refusal to tell us who had been laid off, so everyone spent days pinging others and building lists (when someone tried sharing a list of laid-off people in a public slack channel they were told to take it down). I got the bonus bizarre experience of eventually hearing that my direct manager was gone.
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.
That's how I see it as well. In a layoff, the role is being eliminated as opposed to a person being fired. So they cut entire teams working on "unprofitable" products or certain roles deemed "redundant" within the product. You typically have the option to take a severance or apply for another role internally.
This is my understanding based purely on my experience getting laid off once - so take it with a huge grain of salt. The product I was working on was shutdown. I got paid a retainer to stay until the product can be properly wound down. Then got hired into a different role in a different team with a pay bump within a month. I got to keep the retainer as well - as long as I support the wind down efforts.
I wrote a comment on some other thread but there's just a lot of wrong place/wrong time at an individual level. If a company is doing a substantial layoff there just isn't the time, energy, or resources to train and fit people who may be generically "better" at some level into roles that already have people presumably doing adequate jobs filling them.
People are not fungible. Someone can be in a role where they're really valuable. But the company evolves and roles evolve and the needs are different. Sure, they might be able to excel in a new role eventually--but maybe it's not optimal to try to make them fit especially at a senior level.
Ok then why do we still have recruiters and HR? If their job is impossible why do we pay them to pretend otherwise? If people aren’t fungible why do we force them into fungible roles?
If the reality is that people are fungible and leadership is just out of touch and made bad decisions then they’re the ones that should be canned.
Hiring people is expensive. Firing people is expensive. Reorganizing people requires competent leadership.
"Ok then why do we still have recruiters and HR? If their job is impossible why do we pay them to pretend otherwise?"
The same reason many devs exist - people convinced them it's better or more convenient to have an expert. The number of systems that could be an excel sheet...
And even if you mostly just have temps and contractors, you still need some HR/recruiters at any sort of scale. And you do still have costs associated with, especially, onboarding new people.
You're cutting a division. You're cutting a project. Yeah, if you were hiring into a new position, you might hire some of the people you're cutting. But you probably aren't. So, yeah, you might try to retain some specific people but you mostly aren't interested in doing a large-scal rewizzle which will probably disrupt things even more than the layoff is already going to do.
That's the case with many roles in many industries. Films are largely made on a project basis today rather than stars being tied to a studio.
In US tech, companies today generally prefer some degree of continuity/culture of employees and many employees prefer some degree of stability but it's hard to argue that there isn't less of both than in the past.
The part I'm confused at is it doesn't seem that they are doomed, and end up being very successful companies. But I think this is likely due to lack of competition.
I recently did an internship at one of these big companies, doing ML. I'm a researcher but had a production role. Coming in everything was really weird to me from how they setup their machines to training and evaluation. I brought up that the way they were measuring their performance was wrong and could tell they overfit their data. They didn't believe me. But then it came to be affecting my role. So I fixed it, showed them, and then they were like "oh thanks, but we're moving on to transformers now." Main part of what I did is actually make their model robust and actually work on their customer data! (I constantly hear that "industry is better because we have customers so it has to work" but I'm waiting to see things work like promised...) Of course, their transformer model took way more to train and had all the same problems, but were hidden a few levels deeper due to them dramatically scaling data and model size.
I knew the ML research community had been overly focused on benchmarks but didn't realize how much worse it was in production environments. It just seems that metric hacking is the explicitly stated goal here. But I can't trust anyone to make ML models that themselves are metric hackers. The part that got me though is that I've always been told by industry people that if I added value to the company and made products better that the work (and thus I) would be valued. I did in an uncontestable manner, and I did not in an uncontestable way. I just thought we could make cool products AND make money at the same time. Didn't realize there was far more weight to the latter than the former. I know, I'm naive.
Yeah this is part of the issue with that particular product, the other is the initial capital. But also, the project itself was a bit too authoritarian style creepy so I'd rather not. But I've seen the exact same issues in MANY other products (I mean I could have told you rabbit or humane pin would be shit. In fact, I believe I even stated that on HN if not joked about it in person. I happily shit on plenty of papers too, and do so here)
I think what a lot of people don't understand is that there's criticism and dismissing. I'm an ML researcher, I criticize works because I want our field to be better and because I believe in ML, not because I'm against it. I think people confuse this. I'll criticize GPT all day, while also using it every day.
Mostly capital? Honestly, I have no idea how to get initial capital. Yeah, I know what site we're on lol. But I'm not from a top university and honestly I'd like to focus on actual AGI not this LLM stuff (LLMs are great, but lol they won't scale to AGI). Which arguably, if someone is wanting to compete in that space, why throw more money at a method that is prolific and so many have a head start? But they're momentum limited, throw me a few million and we can try new things. Don't even need half of what some of these companies are getting to produce shit that we all should know is shit and going to be shit from the get go.
> I'll be you ten bucks they got rid of people who bring up bad news and kept the yes-men. A company that doesn’t know what’s broken is doomed to mediocrity.
I used to have that attitude, but since then I've grown to learn that people who bring back news are also creating the problems without providing any solution whereas the "yes-men" excuse is a coping mechanism to rationalize why those who try to actually tackle problems and are smart enough to not raise them before they actually exist ir have solutions are indeed an asset to the team.
No one wants to deal with a pain-in-the-ass who creates problems for everyone out of thin air. That's what gets you fired. Everyone has to deal with real problems, and they don't need the distraction of having to deal with artificial ones.
Unless they are given meaningful equity, it's not their ship, and regardless of whether it is or isn't, unlike the shareholders and creditors, they won't be sinking with it.
If you want worker interests to be even a little aligned with owner interests, the correct corporate structure is not an S corp, or a C corp, it is some flavor of worker co-op.
People get invested in their work. And there are a lot of software people who make their work part of their identity, and so when they are accused of doing bad work they take is as a personal attack.
Getting invested doesn’t mean your interests align. What’s best for your or the product can be different than what’s good for your boss, your company, your customers, or your teammates.
I used to document things in a way that would quickly get people up to speed, but was generally useless to current team members. Very useful if you where new or hadn’t touched the project in 3+ years, but no so helpful if you’ve been working on it for the last few months.
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.
I'm sorry that I don't have a good index or personal awareness to share. Boyd's book linked in a peer response is a source but otherwise I can only offer that B-Corps [0] or Benefit Corps are the formally/legally recognized entry into space. A structure like the FairShares Common is a sophistication, based on the articles of incorporation above and beyond establishing legal obligations to a purpose (as is part of B-Corp incorporation). It is, itself, based on the FairShares [1] and Commons ideas [2].
Peoplw conceptualize businesses likr some super organism that should try to maximize the quality of its products.
In reality, it most.often maximizes its executives lives while minimizing all other forms of frictions.
Everyone whose worked with small businesses will rscognize this pattern easily. Uts only when you get a few e?tra executives that the equation itself gets comolicated, but its still typically about maximizing the executives livlihood.
I have been doing this for years and I think it's the best output per hour worked strategy if you have a clear exit plan outside scaling the so-called ladder
> if you have a clear exit plan outside scaling the so-called ladder
Exit plan is FIRE. Everything else is circus and performance art. Others can play status games, I prefer wealth games: wealth is options and options are freedom.
Pragmatic, smart, skilled people are extracted from unless lucky and in a position to see outsized returns from their effort. Better to know what enough is, collect enough freedom coins, and enjoy the one go you get at life.
(n=1, ymmv, "show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcome")
You don’t need a ton of options. You can’t live fifty different lives.
Aggressive FIRE makes a ton of sense for the few people that know early what they want out of life. If you want to spend your life surfing by all means, work the system to the hilt (leetcode, job hopping, etc.) and retire by 30.
But a lot of people that go down that road get to 30 and find that they have no clue what makes them happy to begin with. Fairy tales for upper middle class young adults notwithstanding, travel doesn’t magically impart this or any other wisdom either.
Non-financial goals are way way harder to achieve than FIRE: the biggest issue is selecting your non-financial goals. Money is a simple goal and it isn't impossible to achieve - then what?
Deciding that money should be your primary focus overoptimises for financial wealth against non-financial wealth.
For example, life satisfaction: do you know people doing jobs they love? People that would continue their calling even if it didn't pay them? Try to understand their wealth even if they don't have the financial freedom a successful business can give you. The main problem is most of those jobs are not in businesses and it is hard to understand things we haven't experienced. Jobs are a very poor example but you get the idea.
I've retired early: for me personally, financial wealth is not enough.
One limited resource that we are approximately all given the same amount of is time - you get fifty years between 20 and 70 to use the best you can. I think most people don't use their limited resource very well (even those that optimise their time well seem to use it poorly on bad meta-goals).
>One limited resource that we are approximately all given the same amount of is time
True, but I believe also its important to factor in that those in lower socioeconomic classes effectively have their time stolen from them in many ways.
ex: I don't enjoy fixing the vast majority of things I have to fix, (although there can be a sense of satisfaction in it sometimes), but I have to 1st learn to do so and then do it because I absolutely need it fixed, but don't have the funds to pay to have it done. To compound the loss of time, financially wealthy people can afford to buy new things, like automobiles, which dont break down or require nearly as much maintenance.
Many other things are also outsourced by people because their time is too valuable to do otherwise this outsourcing is just not an option for others.
> lower socioeconomic classes effectively have their time stolen
Personally I find the words “stolen” and “theft” is usually just political signalling when applied to time. The metaphor has some sense, but so does pirating as theft of copyrighted movies…
One significant waste of our precious “resource” is often paid for in money regardless of our socioeconomic status - the 40 hours doing shit we wouldn’t do if we didn’t get paid for it - and then often using the money to win regretful prizes. Capitalism deeply sucks but it sucks less than some other things humans have tried.
a huge amount of wasted time in wealthy countries is under our control: the classic example of TV. Or working harder to buy a bigger house we don’t really need. My poorer friends choose to waste their time as much as my richer friends do.
My path to discovering this was costly and fraught with suffering. I hope by sharing, your experience is less so. The sooner you learn, the sooner you can modify your trajectory for a more favorable outcome. I wish you freedom.
I think that is a great plan and good advice, but you may find as you continue in your career that you enjoy work more. When I was starting out I was always tired, anxious and frustrated. Now I would never even get hired for those kinds of jobs (or take them). You may get to a point where you have a lot more power and discretion at work and enjoy it. There's a lot to be said for working at jobs you enjoy.
I hope to one day find meaningful work I am compensated for, or have accumulated enough wealth such that compensation is no longer relevant. Thanks for the reply.
I was layed off after being burnt out on exactly what you're describing. The organization lost 5 years of deep institutional knowledge into their systems that I designed because i couldn't get buy in on what I thought was important.
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 good fit. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. But framing it as: "I pick better work environments than you" is an attitude I'd really like to see disappear. It ignores just how much of a role luck plays.
> 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 on the street. I'm not desperately taking the first offer - I'm trying to find something better, not just something different - but as soon as I have a good offer, I'm gone.
Unless you want to get into a pure management position, the most senior (pay) technical resource is almost always a consultant. And you can give yourself the promotion to consultant any time you want. And when you're a consultant, job hopping is the expectation.
I have a friend who can only bear to work at places that provide meaningful work and aren't toxic environments. He finds "bullshit jobs" psychological corrosive and he will quicky become depressed if he finds himself at one. He will go six months to a year between jobs, and will leave a job quickly if it turns out it doesn't meet his criteria.
On the flip side when he finds something he likes he works 60+ weeks and never less than everything he can to the job. He burns bright and generally leaves after two years, repeating the process.
Most people aren't like this. They will work just enough at a job that is just good enough. It's not about being better, it's about taking a different approach to finding and retaining a job.
> 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.
If I'm rolling the dice then we've moved from d00 to d20 and saved a ton of time. Here are a few general examples of things I'll look at:
- Can I tell what the actual point of the job is from the job description? Does it describe what their services are in service to?
- How many non-technical, non-domain experts will I speak with before I'm talking engineer to engineer?
- How jazzed are the interviewers about speaking with me, in the moment? Are they interested in the details of earlier projects? Are they curious about me, or just running down a list of questions?
- Do they use leetcode or similar? There are a lot of really good reasons for a company to use leetcode in their hiring process, but none of those reasons are particularly good for me, as an employee.
- Do their interview questions make sense, given their context? E.g are they quizzing me on recursion from an environment where recursion wouldn't be a particularly great idea?
By that definition, nothing is a choice because nothing is 100% certain in life.
Even for something as simple as deciding to "go shopping" tomorrow, there is some probability that it does not happen. But it is still my decision to do so.
The only way to never fail is to never try. But it means you will never win either.
There is always an aspect of luck in everything. Also, the kinds of social skills which help you weed out bad potential employers and bad potential employees (when hiring) are likely learnable.
You named the solution. Switch jobs until the right one. That’s how you pick better. You can even formalize it. “Hey I would love to consult for 90 days; let’s skip the bulk of the interview process”
You can ask. Don’t tell me it’s impossible if you haven’t even tried
You seem to be projecting a lot of insecurities. Some people prefer not to work in such an environment, and that is okay. Those people just switch jobs until they're satisfied, there is no "controlling other people" or whatever nonsense you dreamed up.
Do you agree that a work environment/culture is defined by the people who are a part of it?
Do you think that during the interview stage, an employer can characterize the work environment as different than it is in reality?
If you say yes to both of these, then I don't understand the disconnect.
Maybe I can summarize another way:
- It's not possible to really know what a work environment is like until you actually start working there. To deny this is to deny that other people at the company play a role in the work environment. Since you don't have control over other people, you don't have control over the work environment.
- Therefore, characterizing a decision to accept employment at a particular employer, as evidence of one's own superior ability to predict what the work environment is like is... misguided?
Job hopping until you find a work environment that fits is a good idea. But this is trial and error. It's not the result of a superior ability to sniff out work cultures before accepting employment.
My last question is: how did this line of reasoning offend you so deeply to suggest that I'm projecting insecurity?
Do you think you can't choose a different place of employment after saying "yes" to one? Do you think you're stuck there forever? Do you not realize you can choose a different employer, even after you already started working there?
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.
Exactly. If my boss is happy with my output, and work is still getting done on time, why does it matter how many hours I actually work? I don’t get paid more for going above and beyond. The only reward for busting your ass in corporate America is more work. It’s a depressing reality but it’s the truth.
Why should I bust my ass, just to get an extra percentage point on my yearly raise? I can work 30 hours a week and get 4%, or 60 hours and get 5%. The math just doesn’t make sense unless you’re working for a company you either founded, have significant equity in, or there’s some kind of profit sharing mechanism that actually results in a substantial amount of money.
There's a ton of "fake work" in corporate america. This is basically busy work that isn't used by any real customer, external or internal. That work doesn't need to be done, but shows up because someone committed to it for political reasons (or because they were clueless.) Someone needs a box checked, but didn't check if the box needed to be there in the first place.
True, though often that sort of work "feels" different from the more traditional fake work. It's at least built with the intent / belief that a customer will actually use it.
And a lot of people can question these decisions and make and impact if they cared enough. I get tired of people, especially those with “senior” in their title complaining “they’re doing it wrong”, instead of participating in the planning and feedback and escalation process.
You falsely assume the only 'work' to be done is that immediately aligned with sprint velocity rather than all that done to make someone a valuable contributor in the first place (what your employer is actually paying for). The person who spends ~2 hours a day 'working' and the rest of their day on research, self-education, or more theoretical domains will become exponentially more valuable over time compared the most endurant hamster wheel runner as a function of qualitatively superior capabilities. Smart engineers realize this growth curve and alter their trajectory, benefitting both themselves and their employer long-term.
this mindset only makes sense when the mission of the company is noble and appreciated by the greater community. otherwise you are a fool for having this attitude
Exactly. We're adults making fair exchanges for compensation (assuming you've entered into a fair agreement).
There's so many angsty takes in this thread, I'm actually pretty shocked.
Working "hard" is an investment in yourself. You don't always have to be soley running on the SCRUM treadmill - you can learn other things that are valuable to the business. Ideally you'll also be smart and chose wisely for things that set you up better career-wise too.
But the idea that one would treat their employer as some kind of chump that deserves the minimal possible output they can extract from you? That sounds like a great way to pigeonhole yourself into a lacklustre and short career. Not to mention a really unfulfilling life. You spend so much time at work, why not try to find work you enjoy for an employer that isn't crap? I get that many jobs are soulless - but we're still in the drivers seat and we typically have a lot of choices (especially these days).
You get the work done that the position requires. If you can do that in a couple of hours, I see no incentive whatsoever for most employees to increase productivity beyond the requirement for the position plus maybe some minor stuff that won’t be enough to encourage additional responsibilities.
If they want more than that, employers should pay significantly more than their competitors for those services, or significant stock bonuses tied to departmental efficiency, or some other add-on compensation that incentivises increased productivity.
I can't rightly comprehend the kind of mindset that would lead to such a conclusion.
If you're that productive, why not charge by the hour at a very high rate? "work done that the position requires" is a very low bar of performance, to me it sounds like you're not honouring your part of your employment agreement.
I'm not suggesting you have to have your butt in a seat for $X hours a day, but if you're really that disenchanted with your job - why would you not pursue some other line of work that you find more rewarding?
A lot of promotion and salary increases comes from demonstrating your growing and operating towards the next level. Doing the minimum isn’t doing yourself any favors if you have any aspirations at all.
That’s fine for those who knowingly make that decision, but there are consequences.
This simply isn’t the case in the vast majority of companies, and honestly just seems kind of naive. Corporate America is a game of politics. Yeah working hard always looks good, but the guy who gets the promotion is the guy your boss plays golf with, not the guy who works 60 hours a week out of some idealistic obligation.
But first I’m not suggesting 60 hours I have never worked a 60 in my life. But a solid 30-45 goes a long way, which shouldn’t be radical but some people here are advocating for 5-10 hour weeks…
There maybe a certain type of job (“middle management”?) where “golf” gives you an edge, but for companies with engineering tracks to the top, you need to demonstrate performance and be able to deliver and show impact. Some of that takes “politics” but you also can’t play politics in 5-10 hours either.
> 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.
The negative value is the worst. I was working on a project with someone. I'd check in periodically. After a couple weeks, he fesses up and tells me he hasn't been able to get very far, but things are "mostly done", I "just" need to test it for him and integrate it with the rest of the system. By mostly done, he meant the code had no tests and was never even run manually. In fact, the code would not even execute due to syntax errors.
I had to spend another week and a half reworking things. I got it to work well enough, but it would've gone smoother if he hadn't been involved at all. The result was crap.
I'm sure there are a surprising number of Brillant Paula Beans[1] still employed in software roles. No idea how you can pass a technical screen and multi-day interview loop without knowing anything about writing code, but it keeps happening.
I can tell you why. The CEO wanted to "hire quickly" for a project that did not even go live until 3 months after the original fake deadline. He ignored any suggestions that we keep looking at other candidates, then left for a different job several months later.
I've been a manager and an employee and I've talked to many managers. They know who the slackers are, but there can be reasons why they take no action. When an opportunity arises to get rid of them, they do.
Yep. I've seen it happen. If you have too many clueless people at the top, the tail will wag the dog, so to speak. The slacker's peers often don't care as long as the slacking doesn't cause more work them. It's a "don't ask, don't tell" situation all around.
Uh huh. The more common case is they get promotion and raises like everyone else while sometimes producing -ve value. Even if there's a comeuppance one day, this can go on for years before there are any consequences.
No. I feel ownership and collaboration over what my team does. We prioritize, design, review, and build together (not endorsing a methodology, just a culture). It has been this way since I was a junior engineer. I want to understand and solve problems. I want to learn and build bigger and better tithings.
Punching in premade tickets for 2 hours a day sounds like you’re already dead.
I've never felt secure enough to check out like this, even when my position was effectively locked in. I always want to improve and attain something bigger, so I look for problems beyond my scope when the work isn't coming to me. I feel comfort thinking I know how to take an idea through the full execution cycle due to my practice in seeking and solving problems. But it is hard for me to relax and let go.
Ignoring the amount of time spend working for a moment. I would be miserable if all I got to do during that time was work on Jira tickets others created.
Sounds similar to me. I didn't get laid off though, and my climb was only one actual promotion even though I was filling a tech lead position. I managed to switch teams right before the layoff/outsourcing. I tried hard on the next team and again achieved a great reputation in the department. But it meant nothing and I got nowhere. I even had a few people in the department ask why I was taking a demotion out of the group - I wasn't, they all just thought I was a higher level than I actually was... fuck the system.
I'm in this trap right now a little bit. After a particularly egregious instance of feeling passed over for a promo, how can I trust that the next jerkoff won't do the same thing?
It's a pretty strong signal that your opinion of the value you're providing is not shared by those who are making the decisions. Regardless of if it's their own ignorance or not they aren't going to suddenly change their feelings about it.
People aren’t all the same. It’s easy to forget this.
And it totally makes sense to be wary! That will help you pick a better place next time.
Although, to be fair, the average place probably closer to what you describe, meaning there is a limited supply of high quality places at the top end of the distribution.
> That will help you pick a better place next time.
I'm convinced there is no means available to an employee to "picking a better place". Last time I job hopped, I tried to do that — and largely, I think I succeeded. But company leadership changed, my good boss left and was replaced by a terrible new boss (who has since also left, and been replaced by a less terrible boss) … so what I evaluated when I joined is no more.
And that assumes I can even truly do a good job of evaluating a time of joining … I tend to believe I got more lucky than anything else there.
> how can I trust that the next jerkoff won't do the same thing
You 100% can trust that they will do the exact same thing, accept that you are always rolling the dice and progress at the irrational whim of some higher power in the organisation.
You make think that you're hiding this attitude in your professional life, but you're not. The reason it keeps happening to you is you've created a self-fulling prophecy.
I'm a manager and it's odd that you think 1. we don't care for and push really hard to progress the people we manage, and 2. somehow we're so different that we're not in the same situation.
it's tough, but you should put some explicit thought in to what you expect, and what it's worth to you. You'll probably have to "give some of it away for free" to prove you've got something of value; the hard part is deciding when you've given enough and can leave or deliver an ultimatum. Define something you really want to do that demonstrates your value. Tell your boss explicitly what you want and how you're going to earn it. Do the thing. Ideally you'll get the reward but if not ask. Follow through on your convictions.
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 who are LIKED (dont be an asshole) are all working already.
Down vote me all you want. I was here for the first (2000) tech flop. The people who went the extra mile and some safe and secure corporates were the ones who made it. Coming out the other side (the ad tech, Web 2.0 boom) there were a lot of talented, ambitious, hard working people around. Any one who wasnt that ended up in another field that made them happy.
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.
In the layoffs I've been through, it's just as often that it is Bob who gets the vote.
Not for any reason, it's just random. Bill rolled a 1 somewhere, in that layoff. Better luck next time … if there is a next time.
Nobody is picking. Nobody is choosing, or making rational decisions. Just one day, hey, this entire subtree of the org is just simply laid off — individual performance had nothing to do with it. Or other versions of this that are just equally as obviously random.
Yes, the survivors might have put in the extra work. But what the person above you is saying is that that wasn't why they survived.
The comment you're replying to isn't talking about the layoff round. It's talking about what happens next, when someone from the team gets hired elsewhere and the boss says "we need more people". Who gets brought in?
This is a very common scenario in our line of work.
Oh, a bit, the parent comment is a bit malformed at that point (why is the new boss talking about my old coworkers? how?), and yeah, I think your interpretation is probably correct.
… that's not really a situation that occurs, for one reason or another. Good people tend to be able to line up "next job" somewhat quickly and even if not, "my job" being a match isn't going to happen on a timescale after a layoff. I.e., we're laid off, time passes, I recover with a job, more time must pass before I'm going to be in the "we need more [good] people" and by that point there's basically no way they've not found work. Even then, getting a recruiting team to articulate a pitch in this industry is rending blood from a stone.
Been there. Done that. Doing the work of five people because I was the survivor and the others got a severance package was no fun. I could only pull it off for six months before being burned out.
It's all well and good to include a disclaimer about downvotes. But, it is somewhat irrelevant, as the reason you are most likely to be downvoted is not because you are touching on a sensitive subject. They are downvoting you because your argument makes it very clear you actually haven't read the article.
If it so happens that that company was wrong in what they did, you run the risk of optimizing for the wrong things based on one bad observation. The company doesn’t care. The negatives only affect your career.
And in the end, the terrible people won. Because you stopped caring seeming about anything, you're likely living a worse more jaded life, and your next company isn't getting a good employee.
Learning an important lesson isn't about flushing your aspirations down the toilet. That's just cementing your destiny as someone who will never achieve moderate success. If that's your goal, shrugs?
> the terrible people won ... you're likely living a worse more jaded life
Respectfully, I think this is rather judgemental (I realize the irony that I am judging you, too :)
It doesn't have to be a battle, there doesn't have to be a winner. Everybody is free to explore their limits and boundaries, and put energy into the areas of life that they find most fruitful.
Maybe OP really does want a kick-in-the-pants "get back in there and fight!" pep talk — in which case, ignore me. But maybe they just decided that it was not their particular hill to die on. It takes all kinds.
When that dynamic takes hold, it is more that the good people failed. There is an extremely real subset of the population that gets a thrill out of telling other people what to do and damn the technical consequences of their orders. If people who are uncomfortable being in charge don't figure out a way to get over their own reservations; then guess who will hold all the positions of power? People who really want to. And not necessarily because they are nice or capable people, but because they'll say or do anything.
The part that frustrates me is that technically competent people often get brutally attacked because they lack charisma. It is wildly counterproductive.
My life exactly. I used to dream of a kind of high drive team, did more than I should, on obvious metrics (velocity, onboarding, performance, ..) .. but the average politics in all human groups makes it too rare and you end up suffering too much absurdities. It's a lesson in statistics and relativism.
Some people don’t care about the grindset or putting in 50hr weeks. As long as work gets done and you’re reasonably keeping your skills up to date, what does it matter?
If anything it’s more of a win by gaining hours of your life back that would’ve been spent people-pleasing.
You can write whatever you want on a resume and nobody can tell if you burned out on both ends or phoned it in for 1-2 hours. So, no, holding a position for X years, when presented in a reasonable manner at the next interview, cannot possibly fuck your life up.
That's a hard pill to swallow after years and years of the same routine 'unsuccesses' , and it relies on the personal belief that A decent life cannot be lead without success in finance and business; I believe that's simply not the case.
Yep. After being laid off, I decided that I am best working with the diligence of a Boeing QA engineer. Do the bare minimum and use overemployment to flee the work world as fast as possible.
This puts the cart before the horse. In reality, the biggest source of untapped potential, at least anecdotally as an engineer, is that corporations tend to give grease to squeaky wheels. So, the upper quadrants in the article.
If you have even a few years of industry experience, modulo being intentionally naive, you've noticed that work begets work. The 'skilled pragmatists' quietly do their jobs well. Their reward is even more work to do, without much recognition.
It's analogous to software quality. It's fleetingly rare that a consumer of software writes in to let you know how great, zippy and bug-free it is. You only ever hear about how terrible things are. When things are 'good' -- that's just the expected status quo. So no reward for steadily doing good things.
I'm also sure after a few years in industry you've also noticed that the Do-Nothing (TM) guy who sprints around with their head on fire gets managerial recognition, promotions, bonuses.
You know the kind. They wander from meeting to meeting, initiative to initiative, never actually accomplishing anything concrete, but showing their face to management and saying a lot of nice words.
Eventually, the skilled pragmatist notices this dichotomy and mentally clocks out. I've heard this anecdote many times, both in online circles and IRL.
Very true. As an added detail, I see it comes in waves. New CTO/CIO brings in his trusted lieutenants who then bring in their trusted people. They may excel at XYZ but at your company those skills are irrelevant. Some folks who are already on staff hitch their wagon to the new powers that be. These johnny-come-latelys are also insufferable. The game continues until the CTO/CIO is let go and another house cleaning begins. During the meantime, you wonder how any real work gets done.
I don't know if this is related, but growing up there were certain values instilled in me that went something like "don't toot your own horn," "it's better to be seen and not heard," "keep your head down," etc. The main gist being that I should just do my job quietly, competently, and stay out of the way.
In practice, this resulted in me being effectively invisible to management, even when I was out-performing everyone else on the team. The guys who were loud and boisterous and constantly cawing about their achievements got all the raises and promotions, even though I was consistently doing more and better work. This came to a head when someone with far less seniority was promoted over me. I brought it up with my boss who said something like "I don't even know what you do all day. I never hear from you." The guy who was promoted would literally spend twice as much time boasting about what he was doing that actually doing it. I was objectively more productive, as in, there were metrics showing my productivity was significantly higher, but since I wasn't talking about what I was doing, I was unseen.
I obviously don't know enough about your particular situation to be an informed judge, but... it really sounds like the management team is operating in a reactive mode, rather than a proactive one, and as a result, they don't understand what's really going on inside the company. It doesn't bode well for their understanding of what's going on outside the company either. This kind of disconnect is often costly, sometimes fatal.
Congrats you don’t have a micromanager. But the flip side of that is you need to check in with them. That’s both of your fault, but you can only control you. You should at least have a “win/impact” document where you track what you’ve done and share with your manager.
I also try to work effectively but quietly, but an epiphany I had after working on a couple of technically interesting problems I thought were a big deal but were met with "k, thanks, bye" after being finished was the question: "if you don't talk to people about what you're working on, how do you even know it is desired by the org?"
On the other hand I have worked with team mates that just don't communicate what they are doing.
I always got the feeling that they either don't do anything at all or work on things that are completely irrelevant.
Over time I tend to develop a poor opinion of these people.
Communicate what your accomplishments are and why they are important for the business and you will be fine.
> This is an appealing narrative without evidence.
I had the same thought, but I’m grateful to the author for putting their opinions out for us to see.
It is an interesting quandary - getting “more” from someone, pragmatic or otherwise, raises questions. Is the premise that they aren’t providing value on a level with salary? Or, is it that the business has a right/obligation to extract more? The latter is offensive, fundamentally because “value” may be arbitrarily (perhaps capriciously) determined.
On the other hand, I find the folks suggesting that doing an hours work a day is fine. It’s not. That’s equally offensive.
Labor relations are intrinsically adversarial. The employer wants to pay as little as they can get away with for as much work as possible, the employee wants to be paid as much as possible for as little work as they can get away with.
This article is written for the employer's side, trying to optimize their game. The employees trying to normalize working approximately nothing are optimizing their side.
Many employees are trying to minimize their work. (Do we really need to fill out 10 TPS reports that no one reads?) Often the ones who are doing the most menial tasks would definitely want to do something else more meaningful
Not everyone wants to work less. Many want a path to make an impact to the organization, but don't see how. They'd rather just be quiet engineers/accountants/office workers/etc.
As an employer/owner/investor I’m not trying to minimize expenses I’m trying to maximize growth/value. Abusing people is not a path to success by that metric.
I don’t know how to out this “correctly”. But some of these developer complains remind me of the whole “incel” situation, where people rather complain about how the world works instead of improving themselves or learning how to excel in it.
Sure some people are conflict adverse, but some conflict aversion is healthy (there shouldn’t be physical or verbal fights at work) while some is being introverted or on the spectrum or lazy to a degree that the rest of the world shouldn’t be expected to bend to.
The way the author puts it I’m not even sure what the untapped potential even is. They describe these 75% as “doing what they can”. Okay so they’re just worker bees. That’s fine. What’s the problem?
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.
> 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.
All very fair and good points.
The author does make a strong claim, though, and I'm asking if there's evidence to back it up.
I probably wouldn't if they'd written "Some people are underused by their companies because they're Marias," which is a much smaller claim but still a perfectly fine basis for moving on to a discussion of how to get more value from those employees.
> Feels like you found a small inaccuracy in the text, and jumped up "Aha! Everything you said is wrong!". Also an appealing narrative.
Would you show me where you see this? I reread what I wrote and I'm not finding that, but maybe I'm just missing it.
I left a comment elsewhere on this thread, but here's an interesting quote by General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, an anti-Nazi WWII general.
"I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage."
So according to him, most people seem to fall into the bucket of being lazy and stupid, which is closer to reality. "Skilled pragmatists" seem to map into what he terms "clever and lazy".
I don’t think I can agree that 75% of the workforce falls into one quadrant. Particularly this one.
If I’m very lucky the semi space contains 60% of my coworkers, if I’m unlucky (or arrive after the writing is on the wall) it’s more like 1/3.
I suspect part of the confusion is that there are some people with enough political acumen to appear like frustrated agents of change without actually having the drive or skill to do so. If you create opportunities for these people to show up, you may be shocked to find them making excuses for why they still can’t.
And truthfully the industry is not full of untapped brilliant people. It isn’t even “full” of brilliant people period. maybe 1/4 of the human population could be counted as very smart, and we get a disproportionate share of them for sure, but it’s definitely not more than half.
I agree: It's not 75%. But you're suddenly substituting the word "brilliant" for "pragmatic" and that's kinda questionable. It might be that you define brilliant differently than some others, so that IQ is much less significant than pragmatism itself in your equation of brilliance; but if you think IQ -> pragmatic, I disagree. I think they're orthogonal.
Yeah that might have been a poor word choice or projection on my part.
As I replied elsewhere, I feel I am in this quadrant and I often actively look for sympathetic people among bosses and peers to talk to about it. If there are more than ten people I have someone to talk to, but it’s never been anywhere near 75%. And one time I got a very rude awakening when I discovered several of those people were all sizzle and no sausage.
Okay, good. As authentic "pragmatism" goes, the author conveys a sense of cynical pragmatist-in-waiting rather than activist pragmatist-in-action; I would do the pragmatic thing, and yes, I'm smart enough, but not if there's risk. So, you're surrounded by invisible pragmatists, but these are the kind of pragmatists who sometimes burn you for profit outright, but mostly just look the other way while someone else does it - if that's where the money is. Well, yeah, but what else is new?
> The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists.
Nothing about brilliant there. Just skilled and pragmatic.
You’re trying to cool head/cold shower the idea but you’re just substituing the narrative for HN’s favorite pastime of talking about high IQ/brilliance for the sake of it.
Yeah agree, I have worked with tons of smart people, talented people, people whose parents had them coding in elementary school, but only one person I would consider brilliant.
It was jarring how he instantly understood any line of reasoning I was going down. There was no need for context or lengthy background explanations, he would just see what you were doing. That was in most areas also, politics, programming, philosophy, etc.
It was refreshing because conveying information to him was effortless, he needed like 20% of the info that is usually required when explaining something to another person. I don't know how one could achieve that other than just being gifted at absorbing and processing information.
Hypervigilance is more of a trait of anxious attachment style. You have not seen hypervigilence until you’ve seen an anxiously attached HSP. But securely attached HSP are some of the most successful people in the world.
There’s a lot of power in seeing patterns other people miss. Particularly when dealing with a person who is trying to hide that they are upset
It's real, but the umbrella term is very much hokie. You can sometimes see it in ADHD or autism: hyperawareness of stimulus and a nervous system that pattern matches quickly.
I have something similar. Very easy to burnout, when you're constantly being flooded by information of which you see the long-term consequences of, know how to orient and navigate to avoid, but do not have the resources to handle (e.g. time, money, energy, etc.).
Or being hyperaware of everyone's micro-expressions and what they're feeling. Too much info, and I don't have any care to spare to deal with it (even though that I want to).
To be clear, I feel the author is describing me, and the loneliness and alienation I have felt too often at work tells me he’s using a lot of hyperbole.
If we form a lunch group to complain about our frustrations, it’s never been more than about four people, even in a team of dozens or more. Three is more common.
That said, he may be telling the truth with lies - this sort of untapped resource can have outsized impacts on a business, for good or ill.
I don't even think Pragmatists are "smart", or if they are it shows it self in the non-book ways. I'd be more inclined to describe them as "clever". If you've heard the "Smart, and gets stuff done" ideal, they're more of the latter.
Maybe 75% of the people who interact with the kind of person who blogs about institutional efficiency for the HN audience hate conflict but love their craft. Maybe on a good day.
The top 3 jobs in the US are home health care, retail sales and fast food. Not to denigrate any of those roles but I can't imagine 75% of them saying "X is her passion, but she's not about to burn a lot of social capital by rocking the boat". (I'm skipping over the "skilled" part, but substitute accountants & project managers and I still don't see getting to 75%)
This reads as a cynical description by someone who identifies as a "skilled pragmatist" (as I do, incidentally), but it doesn't seem to have a useful point of view. For example, "playing the system" and "making waves" have other names -- "driving initiatives" and "cross-team collaboration". They seem like "mushy" phrases because they are not well-defined sets of tasks like "deliver feature A" can become.
Are skilled pragmatists undervalued? Maybe, but this article doesn't do an good job of making me believe that.
it's recognition from the individual's perspective. think love languages. one person's recognition might be salary because they make $35,000/yr and another's isn't financial. they are doing this because retirement is boring.
in practice it is often a combination with different ratios.
as an employee it is advantageous to think about what makes you feel recognized and work with your manager on it. if it's monetary and they're stingy then your values won't align and you will be frustrated.
I think the root cause of why managers reward flashy employees over useful ones is because managers are clueless about the work itself. The more a manager understands the work, on a micro level, the more they'll be able to judge it accurately. Note that it doesn't mean micromanagement: you must understand the details, but stop yourself from second-guessing the employees on these details. And it doesn't mean you can't delegate: as long as you have intimate understanding of the details, you're free to delegate and be as hands-off as you want. In fact the best way to delegate is to learn to do the thing well yourself, then delegate it to someone and do occasional spot checks on them.
Very recently two other engineers had a long debate on a PR of mine that really had no material impact one way or another. My approach rang true with the article: "they can sort it out."
I do enjoy a certain degree of challenge at work, though, to be more precise less anti-challenge (high friction, high ceremony work). I will invent work, especially if I'm experiencing paper-cuts: e.g. I spend a stupid amount of time improving CI speed. It's thankless and invisible, but makes the mundane more bearable (nothing is worse than trying to push mundane work through flaky CI).
Edit: this entire perspective comes from having given a huge damn at one point. The one-sided relationship with an employer taught me the inevitable, and very hard, lesson. Barry is one acquisition away from becoming Maria.
I strongly buy the premise of this article, and it goes beyond people who try to fly under the radar and blend in because of toxic politics. Even in companies without toxic politics, a lot of managers subconsciously overestimate the abilities of engineers who regularly propose ambitious, complex solutions, and underestimate the abilities of engineers who are more leery of complexity. This not only leads to unnecessary boondoggle projects, it also results in managers not assigning challenging work to engineers who are quite capable of doing it, which is the waste the article describes.
I was fortunate early in my career to have managers who had strong technical judgment themselves and rewarded it in their engineers, managers who spent their innovation tokens but spent them very carefully, so later in my career I was able to recognize when I had managers who relied on crude heuristics like assuming the engineers who proposed the most complex projects had the best judgment and the best ability to execute.
One simple hack I use all the time, regardless of my manager's personality, is to say, "It would be fun." As in, "It would be fun to handle this with an event-driven system using Kafka. We could build an incredibly scalable and resilient system that way. I'd love to tackle a project like that, but I don't think we can justify it, because it would take more time and more engineers to build and be more expensive to operate, and I think our existing system only needs a few tweaks to what we need, even if we execute on our entire product roadmap and exceed our sales goals. I think we should take a careful look at tweaking the existing system, and if that won't get us what we need, we might have to build the more expensive solution."
This lets me advertise my awareness of a fancier architectural solution, as well as my ability and willingness to execute on it, without actually saying that it's a good idea.
To me, pragmatism is set of knives by which I decide what to leave on the cutting room floor. The biggest one I have is that there are only so many hours in a day but more issues on the board than can fit into it. The second one is that my time billable, and anything that doesnt count towards my utilization is de facto not valued by the company.
The overrunning theme seems to be 'how do we get more from a pragmatist' but my response is you can look at my todo list and rearrange it whenever you want. I am happy with my work, the metrics are on target, the feedback I get from clients is great and they ask for me on their future projects. Only one person is unahppy and its the guy who squints at spreadsheets all day. I think he is the one who is wrong.
This took me a while to appreciate, but it tracks perfectly with what I’ve observed from veteran ICs who actually seem content with their careers.
Fresh out of school it was almost frustrating to have a senior colleague say “hold off on that” in response to my attempts to go above and beyond (on items not specified or prioritized by leadership). I wanted to build great systems and was constantly looking for challenges that would align with the team/customer outcomes, so why wouldn’t they just let me “flourish” and show the team how much value I can deliver?!
After going remote, with nobody to physically see me donating my time and energy to an unworthy cause, did I get to finally learn this the hard way. Bailing out incompetent leaders and weaker engineers to get deliverables across the finish line, which they were happy to claim as personal achievements, and to forget the many late nights they pleaded for help to salvage another unholy mess they had created while flying completely blind in the modern tech world.
I’ll need to keep some sound bites from your comment close to the heart, as I work to set better boundaries and use that extra energy toward outcomes that are even 5% worth the effort.
Insanely spot on, for once (most of organizational analyses are not).
Another fun thing pointed out in the article is the obsession over weeding out poor performers, ie the lazy ones. My theory is that it’s done solely to scare everyone else to work harder, whatever that means exactly. It’s about creating a culture of constant busyness which is only really a good proxy for work in domains that don’t require long term thinking. For engineers, it’s detrimental.
If you wanna go after the ones who are contributing the least value, why obsess over the lazy? There are sooo many examples of people who added huge negative value, from the rockstars who create an unmaintainable mess to some product manager that re-steers the ship and changes something that was completely fine the way it was. Especially when they leave the mess behind which opportunists often do. Dead weight is nothing compared to the whales that swim towards the bottom and drag the rest of them down.
If you think ownership is just mushy words, you've never given someone ownership. Giving someone ownership isn't just mush. It's real, and can have real impact. Of course, this also literally means giving them some actual, real, legal ownership in that project and it's results.
This is especially hypocritical when paired with an "actual example"
> The intended outcome is to increase the rate at which we create value for customers, facilitate easier troubleshooting, decrease downtime, enable more developers to work across different code bases seamlessly and improve developer morale.
Talk about mush. That's just one part of a completely mushy "behavioral statement" that just reeks of insincerity and mush. This is also covered under specifics, and the entire thing lacks ANY specifics.
Give them ownership. Real ownership, not this fake "ownership" that clearly comes from someone who doesn't know what the word means. Give them power to drive direction and results, and reward them for that.
There are more things that could be said about this, but honestly, reading that, it just screamed hypocrisy.
Ownership becomes mushy word, when you get to own duty and lack the power to make decisions.
Manager: you need to take ownership, meaning that you figure out requirements (and get the blame when requirements changes), you make the product and project decision (and get the blame, when for outcomes), you find all the people needed to figure out deploy details and no, you can't make decision about what we're using in production.
Employee: I'm better figure out how to cover my butt...
That line you cherry-picked is in the context of what someone else wants:
> Here is an example I worked out with a real person, imagining what they hoped the Marias on their team would do more often. In their mind, this is what "going above and beyond" looks like.
I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the author also thinks the statement in your second pull quote is mushy. It sounds about as mushy as the "fake ownership" stuff.
I disagree with you. I spent most of my career in a great company that is privately owned (famous billionaire.) The company pays extremely well but does not provide any sort of "legal ownership" as you describe.
Still, I felt massive ownership of stuff I've .. well .. "owned" and I benefited financially and emotionally from it. I am no longer at the company but I have pride in what I've built there and the fact that it still exists and generates tremendous value.
On the financial side of things, people (leadership) think of certain people as owning/driving certain things, because we do. So even though I am not the legal owner of platform X, you go get to have some good reviews for having created and nurtured that thing which is now creating goodness.
After I left the company, my wife and I were in the south of Argentina on an ice trek. Started talking to a fellow trekker, who turns out what in finance. I told him that I used to be in finance and had built systems X and Y - and he was like "you're the guy?! I use those things every day, they are game changing in our industry." That felt very good.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to have a chunk of equity in that company but it doesn't matter - I am still very happy in how "ownership mentality" worked out in terms of $ and pride.
To be clear it takes two to tango. I'd never operate like this in a place that didn't reward me for operating this way.
>>I told him that I used to be in [z] and had built systems X and Y - and he was like "you're the guy?! I use those things every day, they are game changing in our industry." That felt very good.
It is taken a bit for granted, developers' massive ability to impact the workflow, and thus morale, for a significant amount of people; for better or for worse.
Knowing my 15 minute coffee HTML exercise can save 500+ people 10+ minutes daily, with a near instant feedback loop, was about as resolved as I could had been.
It plays into the need to be needed, the inverse of the fear of being replaced, the most basic innate thought in our psyche's.
The stuff you quoted as “mush” can be continuously quantified as part of normal ongoing business.
Legal ownership can’t be quantified in that way. You’d need to go to court and have a judge decide who really owns the product and liability, and then evaluate that person / entity’s job performance.
To use an aviation analogy, you’re proposing replacing randomly spot checking of assemblies for properly tightened bolts, etc., with the legal shell game that Boeing currently uses.
The spot checks would have been less expensive upfront, and also alerted them to their current issues 5-10 years earlier. At that point it would have been trivial to fix.
"I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent — their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy — they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent — he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief."
Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord
This is an interesting quote from a WWII General. So "skilled pragmatists" seems to map to what Kurt terms as clever and lazy. But it also means that most people are lazy and stupid.
I'm more interested in figuring out what kind of knowledge base most reliably turns a junior dev into a "skilled pragmatist".
My guess is the highest ROI thing one can do in software engineering is take your command line environment and OS internals seriously to heart. This can be either bash/Unix or PowerShell/Windows, depending on your career goals, although having gotten reasonably good with both sets I'd recommend the former. Wherever you go, you'll have that ultra portable knowledge to rely on, and do in 10 lol minutes what might take your coworkers 20 or 30.
shaving 20 minutes off a task is useless unless it's something that happens constantly. The real differentiator will be, do you know you can do something, that others in your org think is impossible? Can you turn a 6 month project into a half day script and move on?
Also there isn't "A knowledge base" that turns a junior dev into a "skilled pragmatist". It comes from being a part of delivering value all the way up and down the stack. There unfortunately isn't a book that can really teach you that. You gotta build that in yourself on your own through experience.
Interesting model. Reminds me of all the methods of breaking down game players (e.g. honers vs. innovators, Jimmys vs. Timmys, etc.). I'm very lucky to work at a small shop that can't afford the other three sectors; there are too few of us, each of us needs to impactfully improve our part of the product stack. In fact, we each basically have full ownership of our part of the product stack. Yes, I know, bus factor. But when we're a team of 7 with a fair number of software components all connected together, each one needs a clear vision. Also luckily, we do team interviews; it's fairly easy for us to suss out BS and identify matching competent people who fit the pragmatist mold.
This post is an introduction to the idea and then as a Part 2 for actions to take. For anyone who hasn't continued into Part 2, it goes into first steps on listening to different performers in your company and basically doing research on what makes everyone tick. There will be a follow-up Part 3. Just want to say that's an interesting way to blog, but a little unsatisfying since I'm not sure if I'll keep coming back for new updates every week.
Interesting topic though! I consider myself both self-motivated and a little lazy at heart so I think I fall into the skilled pragmatist. For me personally it was that realization that I wasn't going to be the 4.0 student, but that I could still get a great 3.5 by doing a lot less work. Sometimes I crank out tons of extra work that helps various people by the simple virtue that its interesting to me. So I think this is hitting a chord with me somewhere.
I find myself in management these days, and the people I manage are all great and talented and as far as I can tell no one is upset with my laissez-faire management style. But I'm always wanting to find how to make the job more interesting for them. The roadmap can often be kind of boring work. When we have interesting projects the work just flies by and you can see the satisfaction on everyone's faces. Would love to just have more of that.
> This post is an introduction to the idea and then as a Part 2 for actions to take.
Thanks for mentioning it, I missed the link to part 2.
I don't think I can see the connection between the two parts though. Part 1 places people on two axis "cares" and "conflicts", with the largest number high on "cares" and low on "conflict". It seemed high on "cares" is desirable, and that getting more people to voice their oppinions (higher on "conflict") would be an improvement.
Part 2 puts people on a single axis of how likely they are going to embed clean-up changes in their PRs. This is unlikely to be the "conflict" axis from part 1. If it is the "cares" axis, 75% would already show the desired behavior, with not much untapped potential remaining.
Part 2 then continues by asking people about their oppinions. With most people on the lower half of the part 1 "conflict" axis it is surprising that everyone does even have an oppinion.
I'll place myself high on the "conflict" axis with this: Clean-up should not be hidden in other PRs. It increases time needed for review and risk for collisions. It also increases the effort required for an analysis of the history in a distant future. Separate PRs for clean-up.
I can't give my boss any work they don't want to do.
If I find a problem in another team's domain, I can try to interest them in it, and failing that, I can try to interest my boss in it, but if no one gets interested enough to fix the thing, what am I going to do? Work around the problem and sulk.
Part of me feels like the untapped potential is just one of many symptoms of all of the dysfunction going on, and if you can fix some of the dysfunction, then you'd not only unleash some of that potential but fix a bunch of other problems at the same time.
This is assuming that the skilled pragmatists are even employed to begin with. What I'm seeing is that they've been steadily getting pushed out of the industry. There have been many highly skilled open source devs who left the industry because they can't deal with the bureaucracy and nonsense anymore.
The dispassionate, status-oriented bureaucrat seems to have the upper hand; and they appear to have the majority necessary to get their way in the centers of power.
We have a bad case of the blind leading the visionaries.
I’d add that this breakdown needs to include the naive. I found most overworkers never thought about questioning the purpose to tasks or working long hours.
It feels like a common institutional problem is the people who push more of their identity into the institution get disproportionately rewarded over time for their (sometimes ill-considered) sacrifice, which causes them to seek out other people like them, which causes the org to select for that over time. And other people see this, respond with, “I don’t want that,” and put up boundaries like you see discussed here.
Orgs love to say they like results, and they do — to a certain extent. There’s a ceiling on it that isn’t there if you are coded by other people as One Of Us. This is wholly different from being a yes-man, of course. It can’t be too obvious you’re playing this game or people don’t like it…probably because it reminds some people of the gamble they’re making there. I’ll wager that some people are honest enough to say, “well how else should we treat loyalty?” And others would say, “well that’s what they chose for their life, so they should be rewarded.” Both answers really just serve to entrench no-life-ism, though.
IMO, hovering on the border of engagement/disengagement is not a problem. People tend to oscillate back and forth there naturally. Work is fundamentally a transactional relationship that can sometimes confer meaning, intellectual stimulation, social connections, and structure. And sometimes it fails at some or all of those.
Expecting it to always provide those things is delusional. Keeping the transactional nature in mind without being a jerk keeps expectations grounded. We should be far more suspicious of those who are constantly parading their love of work on social media.
I'd categorize myself as a "Barry" - which he seems to define in part II of this blog post as someone who is willing to take great personal and career risks to rock the boat, and will even risk getting fired to get their job done - it has usually cost me a lot in whatever organization I end up in. I think these people eventually become skilled pragmatists when burnt out, but I'm not sure he has any insight in these posts about how people become a "Maria."
IMO it's when Barry's finally realize that working their ass off and taking risk for the betterment of a company or leadership team that will not hesitate to take advantage of a Barry and/or ruthlessly cut him down when convenient. I guess by author's definition if a Barry became a Maria, he was never a Barry to begin with, but I do think this happens a lot. I see it in my own career path, with myself and some of my peers.
I enjoyed part 1 of the article and began reading part 2 where it mentions Barry a few times, but when I read and re-read part 1 I see no mention of Barry.
FWIW I think that Barry becoming a Maria is entirely possible and consistent with the age old "5 Monkeys" office fax meme.
This might accurately describe me, although I am very challenged in what I do.
I guess I find the intersection between what I do, and other people, to be a waste of time.
Whenever I try to bring other people into the mix, they tend to misunderstand, and I spend so much time correcting them, it's hard to get value out of the process.
I do get value out of the process (did today), but it often feels like I am increasing my effort exponentially for very little.
I've seen this firsthand...I think it is less of an issue at smaller companies where taking initiative and leaning into their intelligence is less politically restricted. At large organizations, often it requires too much energy for them navigate the bureaucracy and tap into their potential.
I can appreciate the some of the frustrations many here raise with corporate work culture. However, in reality, you need to sell the value you bring. If you see more junior folk or good folk who don’t highlight their own value, help bring visibility. If you don’t highlight your value and peers you appreciate, you risk it not being recognized. Don’t let the good people lose out in the game. Help get good people promoted and into positions of power.
Putting "cut-throat bureaucrats" in the "do not care for impact" side of the axis seems unnatural to me: I think these people do care for impact, and that's why they are so decided about imposing their ways. But their definition of impact is "doing things the right way", which corrupts their want for improvement into a pile of processes.
Many companies are afraid of being sued or "ruining their reputation" through too many firings. Instead, they waste much more on wasted salaries and ruin their reputation internally by keeping useless people around.
Honestly if that guy was my manager, I'd quit no matter what. I'm already selling 1/3 of my lifetime just to be able to eat, so no freaking way I'd contribute to someone already robbing me of the most valuable resource one can have.
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 stealer, quiet quitter etc.
Just give me some JIRA ticket and let me read books while I get my job done in 1-2 hours a day.
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