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The question I have is how did incentives get so misaligned that this person feels that doubling the productivity of all their peers is unlikely to be worth the

The question I have is how did incentives get so misaligned that this person feels that doubling the productivity of all their peers is unlikely to be worth the effort of presenting a tool.

runevault 5y ago
Because making it work the way YOU want can be far easier than making it work the way 50, 100, 200 people want. And once they see you as a supplier of thing they'll expect you to give them what they want, because that is how people are.
- pkdpic 5y ago
  Exactly, a classic 95:95 scenario. You can build 95% of the functionality for yourself pretty quickly but getting it to work for 20+ people will end up constituting 95% of the total labor if you choose to do it. There has to be a serious reason to take that on. If nobody's asking for it it doesn't feel like a smart use of company time or personal energy. Thats been my approach at my current company and it's kept me in a pretty positive / non-toxic place with the rest of our staff so far. That said the original comment doesn't seem to be coming at this purely from an angle of practicality.
  - runevault 5y ago
    That is a fair counterpoint. For me it was pointing out there are reasons not to do it that isn't simply being selfish. If a company wants to invest in tooling (a smart thing to do, one of the appeals of Google beyond their comp is they invest in state of the art in house tooling) they should pay staff who's primary job is in the creation and maintenance of tools to increase developer productivity/satisfaction/etc.
shock 5y ago
I think it's a side effect of Milton Friedman's Shareholder Primacy Theory, which people interpret in different ways, sometimes, resulting in very skewed incentives.
notreallyserio 5y ago
I could see not wanting to support a tool. I've written tools that automate processes in useful ways but the interfaces aren't perfect and you need some base knowledge to understand how they work. I don't want to spend my time improving and supporting those tools. I wrote them to reduce the amount of work I have to do, not add yet another responsibility. I've also made the mistake of sharing my tools only to find criticism but no offer to help make improvements. Fuck em, wasting my time.
- willcipriano 5y ago
  If the incentives are right, that effort is worth it. By incentives I'm not talking about a $15 TGIFridays gift card and a mention at the company meeting, I mean a meaningful portion of the value generated, rewarded quickly not "maybe next annual review". Many organizations punish the members who work hard with more uncompensated work like you have described.
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    Oh for sure. If they offered stock or options I'd take them up on it. Cash? I already make a good salary. Kudos? lol.
    - Cullinet 5y ago
      I don't think it's lol worthy despite having been the other side of the situation for most of my career. A patent you'd want credit for. A journal paper co-authorship likewise. I'm very much in favour - especially for non contract LOB works - journalling moral copyrights formally. Of course we've Github and the similar now, which is amazing, if you use it for such. I am currently working on a possibility to open source a range of advertising trading middleware (dates me, huh?) with the establishment of a Community Company* copyright holding structure that rewards individual contribution regardless of origin, weighted by calling / execution paths / additional necessary weighting as necessary, enforced by statutory articles of association bound in incorporation. * Industrial and Provident Society : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_and_provident_society https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_and_provident_soc... articles of association bind the company members to the terms of their articles which are imbued with the same statutory powers of Companies Act, which has 400+ statutory summary criminal offenses adjudicable in the Companies Court. Companies Court, like Ecclesiastical, isn't very well known to even exist, even among the legal profession. However, very much unlike claims heard in the Chancery Division (which must be for greater than fifty thousand British pounds or go hence to the County Courts which exist for extension of the High Court originally for handling the volume property claims, and before which I won't give the most robust tort better than a bitten nickel worth chance.) edit was unfinished, mea : unlike in Chancery, claims in Companies Court go quickly, because the weight is summary and summary findings of breaches of Companies Act are Criminal offenses, and therefore will shape the further claims evaluation considerably. It's almost a British Delaware system, and in keeping with the theme of this discussion, I was reluctant to write this, lest case load spoil the advantages!
SuoDuanDao 5y ago
I don't know the particulars of the situation of course - I imagine there's a big bump in work involved between making a tool useful for its creator and making it idiot-proof for one - but I have observed that as organisations get larger predictable performance becomes much more valuable relative to outstanding performance.
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
Nobody cares about 'the company' - "In US the average share holding lasts just 22 seconds" Management can break the law, leave with their bonuses, and years down the line 'the company' gets fined. Employees are the ones that might be there for decades, but the anglosphere shareholder model allocated 0% stake to employees. TThere are alternatives: Codetermination in Germany is a concept that involves the right of workers to participate in management of the companies they work for.
- Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
  > Codetermination in Germany For some reason, at first, I read this as "Code termination" (not co-determination) and thought it was a mistranslation of some German compound noun, and I was confused.
  - visarga 5y ago
    TTS on Mac also reads it as "code termination"
- gleenn 5y ago
  The average is probably horribly misrepresented. There are a ton of super long holders, which hold for decades, and a crazy high number of HFTs running that hold for microseconds. I bet nobody is actually close to the average, 22 seconds is extremely slow for software trading and extremely fast for a human. If you're using the holding duration as a proxy for people caring about companies, I think you are probably including a massive amount of HFT timing which it's clear isn't representing company loyalty. Also, what if an HFT buys and sells the same stock 1M times. The average time would likely be very short, but the "loyalty" could be 100%. Bad metric.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    Very, very few people hold stocks for multiple years, so they have no reason to care about the company's long term future: "There are different ways of slicing it, but Reuters calculations based on New York stock exchange data show the average holding period for U.S. shares was 5-1/2 months in June, versus 8-1/2 months at end-2019."
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
It's remarkable how dysfunctional some organisations can be, especially larger enterprises. Then you have the problem that the reward for good work is almost always more work.
- hallway_monitor 5y ago
  Exactly. So give them great work maybe a little bit faster than everyone else and they will just think you're working really hard!
wccrawford 5y ago
It's simple: What's the company's response to the tool? Is it a percentage of the money saved? Absolutely not. Is it a raise? Unlikely. Is it a pat on the back? Maybe. Is it more work, and a lot of pain supporting the tool in ways it was never meant to be used? Absolutely. And it'll also mean a larger workload and more stress now that the company knows how much easier the job is now. With that outlook, why would they share it? It makes their life better and easier as it is, and releasing the tool is all or mostly negative.
- popcube 5y ago
  and maybe let colleagues get fired because they do not need anymore worker...
- boringg 5y ago
  And maybe once they find out how long you've had such tools you now get a lot of grief and blowback for not sharing sooner even given that list you just wrote. Could easily be a fraught situation.
hluska 5y ago
Have you ever tried to get something you built deployed into a company where you work?? I didn’t learn the lesson the first time so I’ve tried it twice. If it goes badly, get ready for a fight. Some cats gain psychological comfort out of knowing everyone is doing exactly as they’ve been told. If you have one of those in your leadership chain, they’ll start questioning every single thing you have ever done. If it goes down this path, you’re fucked. You either shouldn’t have used it at all or you should have told them six months ago. It doesn’t matter if you only built it three months ago. If it goes well, you get to go through “code reviews” so it can be rolled out to everyone. But these aren’t the kinds of code reviews that help, they’re the kinds that demonstrate precisely why the company wasn’t capable of building it themselves. If you pass that stage, you’re the maintainer but since you built it on your own time, you can support it on your own time too. If you make it through that stage, that’s when the feature requests start rolling in. No matter what you built, it will become a time/productivity tracker. That’s around when you start losing relationships with coworkers. You’re management’s bitch but they don’t see that. Instead, you’re the dude whose ‘simple’ tool got shoved down their throats because you want to be VP Eng when you grow up. Humans are fucking weird. If you ever want confirmation, try to help…:)
BatteryMountain 5y ago
Another small issue is that the company I'm at is kind of risk averse and try not to use custom tools built by individual devs. They've done it once and now they are stuck with that one tool(also a kind of custom compiler like mine)but the dev is long gone. So unless it becomes an official feature of our systems and some team (not an individual) can support it and there is a clear tech/business benefit, they would most likely deny the dependency. And to be honest, it has kept things sane/boring. It's good stewardship in my mind so I'm at peace with their apprehensions.

The question I have is how did incentives get so misaligned that this person feels that doubling the productivity of all their peers is unlikely to be worth the effort of presenting a tool.

runevault 5y ago

Because making it work the way YOU want can be far easier than making it work the way 50, 100, 200 people want. And once they see you as a supplier of thing they'll expect you to give them what they want, because that is how people are.

pkdpic 5y ago
Exactly, a classic 95:95 scenario. You can build 95% of the functionality for yourself pretty quickly but getting it to work for 20+ people will end up constituting 95% of the total labor if you choose to do it. There has to be a serious reason to take that on. If nobody's asking for it it doesn't feel like a smart use of company time or personal energy. Thats been my approach at my current company and it's kept me in a pretty positive / non-toxic place with the rest of our staff so far. That said the original comment doesn't seem to be coming at this purely from an angle of practicality.
- runevault 5y ago
  That is a fair counterpoint. For me it was pointing out there are reasons not to do it that isn't simply being selfish. If a company wants to invest in tooling (a smart thing to do, one of the appeals of Google beyond their comp is they invest in state of the art in house tooling) they should pay staff who's primary job is in the creation and maintenance of tools to increase developer productivity/satisfaction/etc.

shock 5y ago

I think it's a side effect of Milton Friedman's Shareholder Primacy Theory, which people interpret in different ways, sometimes, resulting in very skewed incentives.

notreallyserio 5y ago

I could see not wanting to support a tool. I've written tools that automate processes in useful ways but the interfaces aren't perfect and you need some base knowledge to understand how they work. I don't want to spend my time improving and supporting those tools. I wrote them to reduce the amount of work I have to do, not add yet another responsibility. I've also made the mistake of sharing my tools only to find criticism but no offer to help make improvements. Fuck em, wasting my time.

willcipriano 5y ago
If the incentives are right, that effort is worth it. By incentives I'm not talking about a $15 TGIFridays gift card and a mention at the company meeting, I mean a meaningful portion of the value generated, rewarded quickly not "maybe next annual review". Many organizations punish the members who work hard with more uncompensated work like you have described.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  Oh for sure. If they offered stock or options I'd take them up on it. Cash? I already make a good salary. Kudos? lol.
  - Cullinet 5y ago
    I don't think it's lol worthy despite having been the other side of the situation for most of my career. A patent you'd want credit for. A journal paper co-authorship likewise. I'm very much in favour - especially for non contract LOB works - journalling moral copyrights formally. Of course we've Github and the similar now, which is amazing, if you use it for such. I am currently working on a possibility to open source a range of advertising trading middleware (dates me, huh?) with the establishment of a Community Company* copyright holding structure that rewards individual contribution regardless of origin, weighted by calling / execution paths / additional necessary weighting as necessary, enforced by statutory articles of association bound in incorporation. * Industrial and Provident Society : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_and_provident_society https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_and_provident_soc... articles of association bind the company members to the terms of their articles which are imbued with the same statutory powers of Companies Act, which has 400+ statutory summary criminal offenses adjudicable in the Companies Court. Companies Court, like Ecclesiastical, isn't very well known to even exist, even among the legal profession. However, very much unlike claims heard in the Chancery Division (which must be for greater than fifty thousand British pounds or go hence to the County Courts which exist for extension of the High Court originally for handling the volume property claims, and before which I won't give the most robust tort better than a bitten nickel worth chance.) edit was unfinished, mea : unlike in Chancery, claims in Companies Court go quickly, because the weight is summary and summary findings of breaches of Companies Act are Criminal offenses, and therefore will shape the further claims evaluation considerably. It's almost a British Delaware system, and in keeping with the theme of this discussion, I was reluctant to write this, lest case load spoil the advantages!

SuoDuanDao 5y ago

I don't know the particulars of the situation of course - I imagine there's a big bump in work involved between making a tool useful for its creator and making it idiot-proof for one - but I have observed that as organisations get larger predictable performance becomes much more valuable relative to outstanding performance.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

Nobody cares about 'the company' - "In US the average share holding lasts just 22 seconds" Management can break the law, leave with their bonuses, and years down the line 'the company' gets fined. Employees are the ones that might be there for decades, but the anglosphere shareholder model allocated 0% stake to employees. TThere are alternatives: Codetermination in Germany is a concept that involves the right of workers to participate in management of the companies they work for.

Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
> Codetermination in Germany For some reason, at first, I read this as "Code termination" (not co-determination) and thought it was a mistranslation of some German compound noun, and I was confused.
- visarga 5y ago
  TTS on Mac also reads it as "code termination"
gleenn 5y ago
The average is probably horribly misrepresented. There are a ton of super long holders, which hold for decades, and a crazy high number of HFTs running that hold for microseconds. I bet nobody is actually close to the average, 22 seconds is extremely slow for software trading and extremely fast for a human. If you're using the holding duration as a proxy for people caring about companies, I think you are probably including a massive amount of HFT timing which it's clear isn't representing company loyalty. Also, what if an HFT buys and sells the same stock 1M times. The average time would likely be very short, but the "loyalty" could be 100%. Bad metric.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  Very, very few people hold stocks for multiple years, so they have no reason to care about the company's long term future: "There are different ways of slicing it, but Reuters calculations based on New York stock exchange data show the average holding period for U.S. shares was 5-1/2 months in June, versus 8-1/2 months at end-2019."

tonyedgecombe 5y ago

It's remarkable how dysfunctional some organisations can be, especially larger enterprises. Then you have the problem that the reward for good work is almost always more work.

hallway_monitor 5y ago
Exactly. So give them great work maybe a little bit faster than everyone else and they will just think you're working really hard!

wccrawford 5y ago

It's simple: What's the company's response to the tool? Is it a percentage of the money saved? Absolutely not. Is it a raise? Unlikely. Is it a pat on the back? Maybe. Is it more work, and a lot of pain supporting the tool in ways it was never meant to be used? Absolutely. And it'll also mean a larger workload and more stress now that the company knows how much easier the job is now. With that outlook, why would they share it? It makes their life better and easier as it is, and releasing the tool is all or mostly negative.

popcube 5y ago
and maybe let colleagues get fired because they do not need anymore worker...
boringg 5y ago
And maybe once they find out how long you've had such tools you now get a lot of grief and blowback for not sharing sooner even given that list you just wrote. Could easily be a fraught situation.

hluska 5y ago

Have you ever tried to get something you built deployed into a company where you work?? I didn’t learn the lesson the first time so I’ve tried it twice. If it goes badly, get ready for a fight. Some cats gain psychological comfort out of knowing everyone is doing exactly as they’ve been told. If you have one of those in your leadership chain, they’ll start questioning every single thing you have ever done. If it goes down this path, you’re fucked. You either shouldn’t have used it at all or you should have told them six months ago. It doesn’t matter if you only built it three months ago. If it goes well, you get to go through “code reviews” so it can be rolled out to everyone. But these aren’t the kinds of code reviews that help, they’re the kinds that demonstrate precisely why the company wasn’t capable of building it themselves. If you pass that stage, you’re the maintainer but since you built it on your own time, you can support it on your own time too. If you make it through that stage, that’s when the feature requests start rolling in. No matter what you built, it will become a time/productivity tracker. That’s around when you start losing relationships with coworkers. You’re management’s bitch but they don’t see that. Instead, you’re the dude whose ‘simple’ tool got shoved down their throats because you want to be VP Eng when you grow up. Humans are fucking weird. If you ever want confirmation, try to help…:)

BatteryMountain 5y ago

Another small issue is that the company I'm at is kind of risk averse and try not to use custom tools built by individual devs. They've done it once and now they are stuck with that one tool(also a kind of custom compiler like mine)but the dev is long gone. So unless it becomes an official feature of our systems and some team (not an individual) can support it and there is a clear tech/business benefit, they would most likely deny the dependency. And to be honest, it has kept things sane/boring. It's good stewardship in my mind so I'm at peace with their apprehensions.