14 ms·

If you want teams to think for themselves you need to provide an incentive. Independent thought requires effort, if I am going to use my energy in pursuit of th

If you want teams to think for themselves you need to provide an incentive. Independent thought requires effort, if I am going to use my energy in pursuit of the company goals, what is in it for me? You can't just expect people to go above and beyond because you encourage them to and pat them on the back for it. Sooner or later it will dawn on them that this is not a reciprocal arrangement. You need to offer genuine promotion opportunities. Real financial incentives. Real autonomy, which means freedom from the quarterly demand for metrics. I've worked at precisely 0 companies in my time that have offered career opportunities that offer the kind of incentive that I would need to go all in and give a job all my attention.

thedevilslawyer 5y ago
> if I am going to use my energy in pursuit of the company goals, what is in it for me? Salary? Isn't the above definition of employment?
- nicklarsennz 5y ago
  They all offer a Salary, so what makes me stick around (and want _this_ company to do better)?
  - falcor84 5y ago
    A sense of belonging to a social group. With anything from families, to local sports teams, to nation states, humans have a natural (and quite rational) desire for their own (current) group to succeed. This desire for belonging, and often 'identity', is quite powerful and it typically requires some really bad circumstances for a person to decide to switch groups.
    - hn8788 5y ago
      Not everyone sees their company as their group. Companies like to talk about how they treat their employees like family, but it's just a way to manipulate them into doing extra work. Once you see it for what it is, it's easy to start thinking of jobs as something you just do for a paycheck, not something you do because you care about what happens to the company.
      - falcor84 5y ago
        But even if you don't care about the company as an entity, isn't it nicer to work for a company whose mission you care about and with peers why care about the same?
        tharkun__ 5y ago
        I would agree with it written like you just did but not like written before. What I mean is that I really don't think of my co workers as family at all and any company actively trying to promote that is going to find me very annoyed with that. It's not my family. Don't force me into parties and such. What I am looking for though is peers that care about doing a good job. I'm tired of working with people that don't know how to do their job. That don't care about clean code. That follow the letter of agile practices but not the spirit. I couldn't care less about the mission. Every company I've been at so far has had a completely different domain and many of them I couldn't have cared less about.
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      I am not clear how does this logic work. I belong to a social group that does barbeque and goes for beers. What would group succeed at if I go "above an beyond"? Local sports groups dont win championships, most of the time they don't even compete. I struggle to find an example where this analogie hold.
      - falcor84 5y ago
        >I belong to a social group that does barbeque and goes for beers. What would group succeed at if I go "above an beyond"? Well, I suppose this would mean that instead of just being a passive participant, you go out of your way to look for that cool new pub that your friends might enjoy, or a way to make the hamburgers more juicy. You'd take some pride in your ability to provide this value to the group and enjoy the improved social standing of being 'the one who really knows this stuff', and of course just enjoying a better culinary experience overall.
gambiting 5y ago
I'd like to introduce you to the games industry where the incentive is frequently just "millions of people will get to play the thing that you made". At least where I work there is a huge amount of autonomy ready and that's exactly what drives people (as a simple example - senior rendering programmers just suggesting and implementing new features and techniques for no reason other than the fact that they want to be proud of the product they are building)
- watwut 5y ago
  Games industry have massive turnover.
  - gambiting 5y ago
    At junior/intermediate level, sure. At Senior/Expert/Lead, not so much, people do stay very long time. I certainly work surrounded by people who have been at the same company for 10,15,20, 25+ years(I have a guy on my team who has been here for 27 years!).
hn8788 5y ago
Yep, I've been burned by that. Spent a lot of time going above and beyond because I wanted our product to be the best it could be, but when it came time to downsize, they still laid me off instead of the employees who barely did anything, but went out for beers during lunch with the boss.
- godfreyantonell 5y ago
  Beers with the boss is where it's at.
chrisweekly 5y ago
Please take this in the constructive way it's intended. You might want to consider that your stance of withholding your full effort is very probably the reason you've never experienced a healthy relationship with your employers.
- plutonorm 5y ago
  I worked my bum off for 10 years. Saw that it had no effect on my career prospects and then gave up. Wiser employees gave up way before then. I've not seen a single promotion out of development in nearly 20 years in the industry. It's a simple fact at least in the UK, that one does not progress out of software development. Senior/lead developer is easy but after that there is no progression. Development manager roles are hard to come by and require growing into the role. Moving sideways into project manager or scrum master roles is generally very difficult to engineer as well. The simple fact is that engineers are seen as line workers. Line workers are not managers and are not suited to the role.
  - zelos 5y ago
    It's not that bad is it? Lead developer puts you on a similar salary to senior doctors or lawyers, generally with a significantly less stressful work environment and shorter working hours. I've seen several developers work towards management roles, make the switch and then end up moving back to IC roles after realising the grass isn't always greener.
    - apercu 5y ago
      > similar salary to senior doctors or lawyers, with a significantly less stressful work environment and shorter working hours. There's so much to unpack here. Some doctors make 400k. Some make 700k. Some make 300k. Some are stressed and work a lot of hours. Others aren't and don't. Some lawyers want to be on partner track at a big firm. They might be stressed and working a lot of hours so that they can make 400k or 500k or $1,000,000 annually. Some make $100k and don't work much, aren't stressed. Most software developers make less than $150k. Most software developers I know are stress balls until they check out and then start working 24-30 hours a week and the rest of the office time is bullshit. On the west coast of the US and in Fintech in NY some developers make 300-400k.
koonsolo 5y ago
There is only 1 way out of this: start your own company.
- plutonorm 5y ago
  Indeed, I am currently doing so.
marcinzm 5y ago
>I've worked at precisely 0 companies in my time that have offered career opportunities that offer the kind of incentive that I would need to go all in and give a job all my attention. You miss all the shots you don't take. I tend to put effort into my jobs and I've gotten very large promotions or bonuses multiple times now at jobs. Other driven people I know at both large tech companies and startups have had similar experiences.
- plutonorm 5y ago
  Then you have been very lucky or have been working in a different environment to me.
  - marcinzm 5y ago
    In my experience it's a self full-filling prophecy. If you don't come off as driven then companies that want and reward driven individuals won't hire you. That also extend to networking where previous co-workers won't recommend you for companies that look for and reward driven individuals. Moreover you won't know how to filter for companies that do want and reward driven individuals.
    - plutonorm 5y ago
      No. I was extremely driven for the first half of my career.
      - marcinzm 5y ago
        Maybe you got unlucky. Your original post did mention "freedom from the quarterly demand for metrics" which I don't see as driven from a company perspective. Companies and teams have complex sets of overlapping goals and generally you want to align what you do with those goals. Many of those goals are disjointed from what one would consider necessary for company success. If your boss wants quarterly metrics to go up for their own promotion then you're not going to get promoted by not making those metrics go up.
wpietri 5y ago
You do not in fact need that. It can work, of course. Financial traders and salespeople, for example, often work in situations with strong extrinsic motivation. But I've spent years in both startup and non-profit contexts, and I think intrinsic motivation is much more powerful, especially for work that requires creativity. The best people I've worked with, even in startup contexts, weren't focused on the money. They liked making things and solving problems. And I don't think it's just my experience. McConnell's Rapid Development has data from surveys of developers; they were much more motivated by things like responsibility and challenge than they were by cash.
- plutonorm 5y ago
  Thats great for them - but I'm an extrinsically motivated person and so are many others
  - nsp 5y ago
    Then go work in sales or another extrinsically motivated profession
    - wpietri 5y ago
      Exactly. I'm hiring right now for 3 developer jobs at a mission-driven organization. I user-tested the job posting and found that mission-driven people loved it and more mercenary people were put off by it. Which is exactly the effect I wanted. If you have smart people aligned on the same mission, you get higher productivity with much lower managerial effort. I don't think it's impossible for cash-maximizers to be good developers, but I do think it's hard. A lot of software is essentially a long-term investment, so the short-term thinking of people hustling for a buck works against it. More than once I've had to clean up code bases put together by contractors who were clearly in it for the money and it showed in their work. There might be some theoretical way to bridge the long-term needs via a complicated short-term incentive structure, but I doubt it. It's too prone to things like the "code me a new minivan" problem: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/488178/what-does-it-mean-writing-a-minivan/514909 https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/488178/what-does...

thedevilslawyer 5y ago

> if I am going to use my energy in pursuit of the company goals, what is in it for me? Salary? Isn't the above definition of employment?

nicklarsennz 5y ago
They all offer a Salary, so what makes me stick around (and want _this_ company to do better)?
- falcor84 5y ago
  A sense of belonging to a social group. With anything from families, to local sports teams, to nation states, humans have a natural (and quite rational) desire for their own (current) group to succeed. This desire for belonging, and often 'identity', is quite powerful and it typically requires some really bad circumstances for a person to decide to switch groups.
  - hn8788 5y ago
    Not everyone sees their company as their group. Companies like to talk about how they treat their employees like family, but it's just a way to manipulate them into doing extra work. Once you see it for what it is, it's easy to start thinking of jobs as something you just do for a paycheck, not something you do because you care about what happens to the company.
    - falcor84 5y ago
      But even if you don't care about the company as an entity, isn't it nicer to work for a company whose mission you care about and with peers why care about the same?
      - tharkun__ 5y ago
        I would agree with it written like you just did but not like written before. What I mean is that I really don't think of my co workers as family at all and any company actively trying to promote that is going to find me very annoyed with that. It's not my family. Don't force me into parties and such. What I am looking for though is peers that care about doing a good job. I'm tired of working with people that don't know how to do their job. That don't care about clean code. That follow the letter of agile practices but not the spirit. I couldn't care less about the mission. Every company I've been at so far has had a completely different domain and many of them I couldn't have cared less about.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    I am not clear how does this logic work. I belong to a social group that does barbeque and goes for beers. What would group succeed at if I go "above an beyond"? Local sports groups dont win championships, most of the time they don't even compete. I struggle to find an example where this analogie hold.
    - falcor84 5y ago
      >I belong to a social group that does barbeque and goes for beers. What would group succeed at if I go "above an beyond"? Well, I suppose this would mean that instead of just being a passive participant, you go out of your way to look for that cool new pub that your friends might enjoy, or a way to make the hamburgers more juicy. You'd take some pride in your ability to provide this value to the group and enjoy the improved social standing of being 'the one who really knows this stuff', and of course just enjoying a better culinary experience overall.

gambiting 5y ago

I'd like to introduce you to the games industry where the incentive is frequently just "millions of people will get to play the thing that you made". At least where I work there is a huge amount of autonomy ready and that's exactly what drives people (as a simple example - senior rendering programmers just suggesting and implementing new features and techniques for no reason other than the fact that they want to be proud of the product they are building)

watwut 5y ago
Games industry have massive turnover.
- gambiting 5y ago
  At junior/intermediate level, sure. At Senior/Expert/Lead, not so much, people do stay very long time. I certainly work surrounded by people who have been at the same company for 10,15,20, 25+ years(I have a guy on my team who has been here for 27 years!).

hn8788 5y ago

Yep, I've been burned by that. Spent a lot of time going above and beyond because I wanted our product to be the best it could be, but when it came time to downsize, they still laid me off instead of the employees who barely did anything, but went out for beers during lunch with the boss.

godfreyantonell 5y ago
Beers with the boss is where it's at.

chrisweekly 5y ago

Please take this in the constructive way it's intended. You might want to consider that your stance of withholding your full effort is very probably the reason you've never experienced a healthy relationship with your employers.

plutonorm 5y ago
I worked my bum off for 10 years. Saw that it had no effect on my career prospects and then gave up. Wiser employees gave up way before then. I've not seen a single promotion out of development in nearly 20 years in the industry. It's a simple fact at least in the UK, that one does not progress out of software development. Senior/lead developer is easy but after that there is no progression. Development manager roles are hard to come by and require growing into the role. Moving sideways into project manager or scrum master roles is generally very difficult to engineer as well. The simple fact is that engineers are seen as line workers. Line workers are not managers and are not suited to the role.
- zelos 5y ago
  It's not that bad is it? Lead developer puts you on a similar salary to senior doctors or lawyers, generally with a significantly less stressful work environment and shorter working hours. I've seen several developers work towards management roles, make the switch and then end up moving back to IC roles after realising the grass isn't always greener.
  - apercu 5y ago
    > similar salary to senior doctors or lawyers, with a significantly less stressful work environment and shorter working hours. There's so much to unpack here. Some doctors make 400k. Some make 700k. Some make 300k. Some are stressed and work a lot of hours. Others aren't and don't. Some lawyers want to be on partner track at a big firm. They might be stressed and working a lot of hours so that they can make 400k or 500k or $1,000,000 annually. Some make $100k and don't work much, aren't stressed. Most software developers make less than $150k. Most software developers I know are stress balls until they check out and then start working 24-30 hours a week and the rest of the office time is bullshit. On the west coast of the US and in Fintech in NY some developers make 300-400k.

koonsolo 5y ago

There is only 1 way out of this: start your own company.

plutonorm 5y ago
Indeed, I am currently doing so.

marcinzm 5y ago

>I've worked at precisely 0 companies in my time that have offered career opportunities that offer the kind of incentive that I would need to go all in and give a job all my attention. You miss all the shots you don't take. I tend to put effort into my jobs and I've gotten very large promotions or bonuses multiple times now at jobs. Other driven people I know at both large tech companies and startups have had similar experiences.

plutonorm 5y ago
Then you have been very lucky or have been working in a different environment to me.
- marcinzm 5y ago
  In my experience it's a self full-filling prophecy. If you don't come off as driven then companies that want and reward driven individuals won't hire you. That also extend to networking where previous co-workers won't recommend you for companies that look for and reward driven individuals. Moreover you won't know how to filter for companies that do want and reward driven individuals.
  - plutonorm 5y ago
    No. I was extremely driven for the first half of my career.
    - marcinzm 5y ago
      Maybe you got unlucky. Your original post did mention "freedom from the quarterly demand for metrics" which I don't see as driven from a company perspective. Companies and teams have complex sets of overlapping goals and generally you want to align what you do with those goals. Many of those goals are disjointed from what one would consider necessary for company success. If your boss wants quarterly metrics to go up for their own promotion then you're not going to get promoted by not making those metrics go up.

wpietri 5y ago

You do not in fact need that. It can work, of course. Financial traders and salespeople, for example, often work in situations with strong extrinsic motivation. But I've spent years in both startup and non-profit contexts, and I think intrinsic motivation is much more powerful, especially for work that requires creativity. The best people I've worked with, even in startup contexts, weren't focused on the money. They liked making things and solving problems. And I don't think it's just my experience. McConnell's Rapid Development has data from surveys of developers; they were much more motivated by things like responsibility and challenge than they were by cash.

plutonorm 5y ago
Thats great for them - but I'm an extrinsically motivated person and so are many others
- nsp 5y ago
  Then go work in sales or another extrinsically motivated profession
  - wpietri 5y ago
    Exactly. I'm hiring right now for 3 developer jobs at a mission-driven organization. I user-tested the job posting and found that mission-driven people loved it and more mercenary people were put off by it. Which is exactly the effect I wanted. If you have smart people aligned on the same mission, you get higher productivity with much lower managerial effort. I don't think it's impossible for cash-maximizers to be good developers, but I do think it's hard. A lot of software is essentially a long-term investment, so the short-term thinking of people hustling for a buck works against it. More than once I've had to clean up code bases put together by contractors who were clearly in it for the money and it showed in their work. There might be some theoretical way to bridge the long-term needs via a complicated short-term incentive structure, but I doubt it. It's too prone to things like the "code me a new minivan" problem: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/488178/what-does-it-mean-writing-a-minivan/514909 https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/488178/what-does...