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Its a little known secret that managers deliberately promote anxiety driven development because it keeps workers at "peak productivity". A couple of the major
by nautilus12 6y ago
Its a little known secret that managers deliberately promote anxiety driven development because it keeps workers at "peak productivity". A couple of the major things i've seen companies do in the past over and over again to myself and to others I worked with:
1. Ambiguous or no deadlines, frequent check ins, "crunches" when their deliberately poor planning doens't work, keeping an air of uncertainty around everything.
2. Giving the same tasks to multiple groups and deliberately pitting them against one another in a kind of unhealthy competition. Constant fear of obsoletion.
3. Little or no positive feedback, only give feedback when things are wrong. Deliberately vague about future career prospects or growth, holding the carrot out but with no promise to deliver.
The problem is that each of these are tied into natural "sources" of anxiety that are likely to happen with or without the company actively promoting it, but the company promoting it can make people work even more frantically. The problem is they don't realize people produce their "best" work when they have creative freedom from anxiety.
- thorin 6y ago1. They don't keep an air of uncertainty on purpose most of the time, generally it's because a lot of businesses are uncertain and a lot of the time product/project managers don't have a good idea of what's going on! 2. Again this could be incompetence rather than cunning 3. Most great bosses and a lot of rubbish ones aren't great with positive feedback. Have you read Steve Job's biographies or Shoe Dog? Not much praise there. One guy I really respected once told me I wasn't a great programmer, but I got the job done and that was probably the nicest thing he said about anyone...I was pretty happy with that! I agree with all of your points, but maybe not your reasoning behind them.
- nautilus12 6y agoNo I actually agree with you on all these points, Hanlon's razor applies to all of these which is why I made the last statement. However, I DO think there are managers and I've certainly run across them, that deliberately push on all these natural stressors to try to juice productivity.
- thorin 6y agoYeah, I had one of those, he was either a dick or a megalomaniac. Fortunately he emigrated so I'm unlikely to see him again!
- kulig 6y agoAre you implying steve jobs was a great boss? He was an insane narcissist.
- asdfman123 6y agoThey're wrong though. It keeps their developers at peak churn, not peak productivity. They fill a great amount of tickets, and make a great amount of critical mistakes that become fires to put out later because everyone's focused on covering their own butts than making a great product. Key developers leave the project for greener pastures, and business people wonder how the project failed despite the fact everyone was working so hard.
- mikegioia 6y agoI agree with this a lot, but I would add one thing. I don't think it's deliberate, I think they're just bad managers.