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Many years ago, I had a colleague (in tech - dev and some ops) in a company of around 70 people... I wasn't working there, we just would share our experiences
by lowercased 5y ago
Many years ago, I had a colleague (in tech - dev and some ops) in a company of around 70 people... I wasn't working there, we just would share our experiences regularly. He worked with... a lot of subpar folks - they seemed to be the majority on the tech side. It was 'established', and the lights were on, but... - example - someone spent weeks writing a 'data importer' to bring in data. The data importer took 24-26 hours to bring in, say... 5000 records. "OK, it works" - first production customer had 27000 records - which wasn't unusual at all for the industry. "Oh, is that going to be normal? We'll have to tell people it will take a week".
My colleague regaled me with this, and how he'd rewritten it after learning how slow it was. Got it down to, IIRC, probably 15 minutes - all data imported, cleaned, logged, etc. This was normal, basic SQL stuff - nothing fancy. It was regarded as black magic, and "this can't be right, you're missing something, etc" that went on for more weeks.
This was one of a dozen stories like this. BUT... the company was established, and with enough people "doing" stuff, they would still grow (if only by brute force and adding people).
I suggested "perhaps if people had more motivation to improve their skills - like... maybe some profit sharing?"
"THEY HAVE THAT ALREADY!" he laughed back. It caused a lot of friction between the 2-3 competent engineers and the ... ~10-12 others - because the competent ones all just looked at the 'profits' being wasted by the others on the team. And, FWIW, it wasn't a lot anyway. I think an average 'profit sharing' for most rank and file was perhaps... $2-$3k/year. Might have been more had they been able to execute faster and grow market share with faster turnaround time, but... even $5k 'bonus' - it's nice, but for someone already making $80k+, this isn't really going to move the needle enough to motivate people to get remarkably better at their jobs.
It may (and possibly) does work in some situations, but that was the most recent one I had some connection with. It seemed a de-motivator for the few competent people on the team.
- taneq 5y agoI think the phenomenon you're describing is a little tangential to motivation and to the profit sharing suggestion. Personal gain is a good motivator but it's far from sufficient motivation to proactively go and learn a new thing for most people. In my experience, initiative in even its most short-sighted forms (such as 'encounter problem, see straightforward way to prevent problem from recurring, take action to implement this solution') is quite unusual. True 'long range' initiative, where someone spontaneously identifies desirable but as-yet unreached goals and invents and implements non-obvious plans to attain them, is incredibly rare. No matter how you try to incentivize it most people just don't work like that. What companies need to do (IMHO) is to recognize this aptitude when it does show up, and give these individuals the freedom to implement their improvements. This will matter more to them than any normal amount of money.
- lowercased 5y ago"Personal gain is a good motivator but it's far from sufficient motivation to proactively go and learn a new thing for most people." This was really sort of spread around the org. The PM in charge could have clarified up front "average workload is 30k records, and expected turnaround time is 4hr". The dev(s) involved could have recognized there was missing clarity, and asked. This is less about "you have to go learn SQL" specifically, and more just recognizing communication gaps in general, and working to address. My colleague who implemented the "faster ingest" process was viewed by PM and others as interfering and threatening to others. He'd only been there 18 months, how could he possibly know better than DevX, who's been with the company 5 years, and knows the problem space so well?? With respect to the 'rare' part, it feels relatively natural to me, and to some others I know. It's at least partially the nature of doing 'problem solving' across multiple disciplines for decades. Having the political ability to get those 'long range' fixes/changes past the vetting of others, who will end up having some of their plans challenged, is the much harder part. But... I've not had a good fit in traditional/normal corporate orgs for many years either.
- 908B64B197 5y ago> My colleague who implemented the "faster ingest" process was viewed by PM and others as interfering and threatening to others. He'd only been there 18 months, how could he possibly know better than DevX, who's been with the company 5 years, and knows the problem space so well?? Profit sharing won't achieve anything if you are bad at filtering bad hires. The point of profit sharing/stock comp is to get a better pipeline of applicants. It's them up to the company to filter adequately (remember: everyone whose mother told them they were "good at computers" because they play videogames all day applied at Google). A company that doesn't do stock comp is not serious in my book. "A players hire A players, B players hire C players. Do you get it?" [0] [0] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=How_to_Hire_Insanely_Great_Employees.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=How_to_Hire_Insa...