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Organizational culture matters here. There is little benefit to fixing things if you have a culture where speed matters above everything else and people are rew

Organizational culture matters here. There is little benefit to fixing things if you have a culture where speed matters above everything else and people are rewarded on how quickly they can do things. I still remember the time I spent weeks working with a giant mess of undocumented (or, worse, documented incorrectly) code to get my job done as the first engineer at a startup. We had a new hire coming (and lots more coming after that), so I took the time to clean everything up and document all the fixes, then trained the person instead of leaving them to figure it all out. Result: they got up and running within a few days instead of a couple of weeks. Of course, when review time came, I was told that the new hire had gotten up to speed much faster than I did, which was why they were being promoted over me...

milesvp 8y ago
Ouch. I learned that this was a management anti-pattern when I was younger from fiction of all places. I loved reading Piers Anthony, and I think it was in his Apprentice Adept series, there was a series of tests that a person had to take to become a citizen, and some of them were competitive. Of course, at one point the main character made the mistake of giving pointers to a competitor, and the competitor only got better as a result when they played a duet. It blew my mind as a teenager when the main character won the competition because his opponent played better when the two of them played together. It was such a foreign concept to me, that someone could act as a sort of force multiplier, and also be rewarded for it. After that, I don't think I ever hesitated to help bring people up. Even in college when grading curves meant others doing better could only hurt me, I'd still often try to explain things to people before a test. It's a shame how many people never learned this lesson. Or maybe it's just a testament to how many bad managers there are that these are common things people get passed over for. Though, truthfully, if I were a manager, I'm a little afraid that I'd still be susceptible to this bias as well.

milesvp 8y ago

Ouch. I learned that this was a management anti-pattern when I was younger from fiction of all places. I loved reading Piers Anthony, and I think it was in his Apprentice Adept series, there was a series of tests that a person had to take to become a citizen, and some of them were competitive. Of course, at one point the main character made the mistake of giving pointers to a competitor, and the competitor only got better as a result when they played a duet. It blew my mind as a teenager when the main character won the competition because his opponent played better when the two of them played together. It was such a foreign concept to me, that someone could act as a sort of force multiplier, and also be rewarded for it. After that, I don't think I ever hesitated to help bring people up. Even in college when grading curves meant others doing better could only hurt me, I'd still often try to explain things to people before a test. It's a shame how many people never learned this lesson. Or maybe it's just a testament to how many bad managers there are that these are common things people get passed over for. Though, truthfully, if I were a manager, I'm a little afraid that I'd still be susceptible to this bias as well.