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> For a lot of people their career is just a way to get paid. As long as they don't get fired that's enough for them. This was one of my hardest earned lessons

> For a lot of people their career is just a way to get paid. As long as they don't get fired that's enough for them. This was one of my hardest earned lessons when I became a manager. Previously I had worked my way into high-performing teams where everybody really cared about doing a good job. I was so surrounded by people with that mindset that I assumed that’s just how everybody in tech operated. Only later did I realize that I was surrounded by those people because my managers actively selected for those hires and carefully weeded out the people who weren’t interested in anything other than doing the bare minimum to collect a paycheck. As a hiring manager, the opposite selection bias occurs: The candidate pool is heavily biased toward people who have lost their jobs or are being pushed out as part of a PiP. You end up interviewing a lot of people who really just want to collect a paycheck and be bothered as little as possible with actual work. Poke around Reddit or even HN and this work minimization mindset is even celebrated by a lot of people. If you’ve been surrounded by high achievers and motivated people who would have chosen programming jobs because that’s what they like to do every day, it can be a shock to work with people who really just hate doing anything that resembles work. Yet they’re out there, in surprisingly large numbers.

organicpotato 5y ago
Curious what steps you took to get the most out of your team when some teammates aren't intrinsically motivated? Did you build a sort of incentive structure?
- eru 5y ago
  Reading the comment carefully, they seem to suggest a heavy use of culling. But I'd also be interested in what other steps work and don't work.
  - lostcolony 5y ago
    Hate to sound trite, but it often is the culture. If people feel siloed it's really easy to fall into not caring very much if you're not intrinsically motivated to succeed. However, on a closely knit team, where you put in the effort to get them included and owning things and be supported by the rest of the team in it, many start performing better (even if that starts by just asking for help earlier) simply because they don't want to let the team down. Not always, perhaps, but I'm not convinced that "poor employees" are innately reflective of the individual, so much as the individual + environment. Certainly, I personally have been in environments where I was a rockstar...and environments where I mentally checked very quickly (and sought to leave as such). And the former were the higher output environments, I might add; it wasn't just me being "out of my depth" in terms of skills or similar, but rather me not doing well when I was set up without any real empowerment or support structure and still expected to at least put on a show of trying.
    - eru 5y ago
      I agree about culture being a big part. Though no clue how you can improve that in your team as a manager? I worked for a company where my team was fine, and individual people from other teams seemed perfectly smart and capable when talking to them, but looking at their team's output, they might as well have been idiots. I image for many of them, if they had worked at a more functional organization like Google, they would have done good work. (Even if not to the standards that Google has. But certainly better than at their then current employer.)
      - lostcolony 5y ago
        As a manager, the big ones are making sure that everyone understands what is going on, and feels responsible for it. So if you see a silo developing, you intentionally break it, and explain to the team why you're asking someone who knows nothing about a particular domain to own the task (and also call on the silo to make themselves available to help teach the domain and answer questions and such). It means that task will take longer, but the long term health and effectiveness of the team will be increased. That also includes manager context; ideally, even things that a manager usually does, the team starts stepping up to do. So working with product to define requirements? Manager should include the team with that and look to have them start taking ownership of it over time. Prioritization? Team sport, until it becomes as natural as breathing, and people are better able to prioritize their own time as emergents come in. Etc. This not only helps avoid the -manager- becoming a bottleneck that slows everyone down, but it helps individuals to grow really quickly and feel more empowered.
    - DJJJ09oiujhb 5y ago
      It's not trite and I wish people didn't need to feel like apologizing for it. This has been central to my life the last several years, this culture and person-fit issue. I've seen it play out with friends and family and it's surprising to me it isn't recognized as such. A close friend went from almost literally rockstar status at one place, and moved for reasons that had nothing to do with him or where he was at. He completely fell apart performance-wise at the new place because he didn't fit in to the same extent, went back, and now is doing great again. I don't think the new place was bad, or him, it was just this poor person-culture fit issue. My spouse was somewhere she was treated like dirt, never quite welcomed into the team (she wasn't the only one, but it was the case nevertheless), and then treated her like a failing employee when she wasn't acting the way they wanted her to (however that was). She left, and now is bringing in more money for the new company than any other employee, in large part in my opinion just because they actually let her be part of the team (this second place is actually a much larger company). The experience of being siloed is awful, and even if you are intrinsically motivated, can be completely demotivating, because if it's bad enough, it leads to this feeling of complete loss of control where you're at. There's also all these little things that even if you're super competent, you might need help with, just as a function of being a human being as part of a larger organization. I could go on with stories like this, but suffice to say I think in a lot of places management often doesn't look inward enough. I think the churn continues because for whatever reason the culture change is more painful for them to contemplate and implement than whatever losses are incurred by high turnover in a given position. The last place I was at had entire key units just resign completely together en masse, and the response after they left was "well I guess we're not good at [key function] so we'll just go on without that." In an important sense they had to narrow the scope of what they offer because of culture problems. And yet we end up having these discussions of displaced employees not being "intrinsically motivated" enough, as if that happens in a vacuum.
- machiaweliczny 5y ago
  You give em boring work
Firmwarrior 5y ago
Man, that's a really screwed up outlook I got piped out of Microsoft and Amazon, both cases after years of excellence on my part because my VP lost a fight with another VP. In my case, I knew that I was a five star engineer in a 3 star company and landed on my feet easily both times. The experience was awful, though, and anyone with an ounce of humility or respect for authority could have been crushed by it easily. Yet here you come, just assuming everyone you come across is a sad loser. IMO, you and every salaried engineer are someone who's willing to settle for donating 90% of the profits from their labor to shareholders in exchange for a little bit of comfort and an illusion of safety.
- eru 5y ago
  You sound a bit bitter? You should re-read the comment you replied to carefully. PragmaticPulp doesn't imply that everyone on a PiP is bad a person and should feel bad. For PragmaticPulp's argument it is more than enough that people on the job market skew towards being worse employees. Similarly, people on a PiP skew towards being lower achievers. > IMO, you and every salaried engineer are someone who's willing to settle for donating 90% of the profits from their labor to shareholders in exchange for a little bit of comfort and an illusion of safety. Where do you get the 90% figure from? In general, it's really, really easy to start a company that makes use of programmer labour. Barriers to entry in the buy-side of the market for programmers are low. Especially with the more globalised labour market we got out of the pandemic. So colour me suspicious of the notion that it's trivial to 'exploit' programmers and steal their lunch like you suggest. Keep in mind that that most software projects in most companies are delayed or fail outright.
  - Firmwarrior 5y ago
    Haha, yeah, I got kinda bitter after learning the hard way that Dilbert wasn't a parody You make good points, about that 90% figure and that I shouldn't imply salaried life as exploitation. There's a reasonably healthy free market and the means of production (a laptop) can be fished out of a trash can I came at 90% since Google had 135k employees in 2020, and $209B in revenue. That's $1.5M per person, and then my mental math went off the rails.. obviously revenue isn't profit, and who knows if $150k/year/employee on average would be enough to provide the same benefits/take home pay on average. There are economies of scale at work too PragmaticPulp has a fundamental belief deep in his soul that some people are good engineers, and others are "people who really just hate doing anything that resembles work". That, in my opinion, is wrong and leads to bad things*. I believe that anyone can succeed in the right environment. * like Amazon/Microsoft giving hundreds of good employees the "unregretted attrition" axe because it's easier for upper management to do it that way
tayo42 5y ago
> Poke around Reddit or even HN and this work minimization mindset is even celebrated by a lot of people. If you’ve been surrounded by high achievers and motivated people who would have chosen programming jobs because that’s what they like to do every day, it can be a shock to work with people who really just hate doing anything that resembles work. Yet they’re out there, in surprisingly large numbers. You say this like its a bad thing? Even still, wanting to work less but taking pride in your work aren't mutually exclusive ideas. Id prefer to work as little as possible, I always do the best I can though and take care to be thoughtful and do things right. Im just not going to bend over backwards for a corporation.
- MonaroVXR 5y ago
  I'm not sure if you are assuming it correctly.
MonaroVXR 5y ago
>Only later did I realize that I was surrounded by those people because my managers actively selected for those hires and carefully weeded out the people who weren’t interested in anything other than doing the bare minimum to collect a paycheck. I'm going to counter it, I did always my best. But I got shot. But.......... I'm again back with more power as a front-ens developer. (Not searching for work at the moment.)
birdyrooster 5y ago
Teams like the one you are talking about are so rare I don't even count them anymore.
lelanthran 5y ago
> If you’ve been surrounded by high achievers and motivated people who would have chosen programming jobs because that’s what they like to do every day, it can be a shock to work with people who really just hate doing anything that resembles work. That's a false dichotomy[1] [1] If I am reading you correctly, you're saying that there's two extremes 1. Programmers who enjoy it. 2. Programmers who hate doing anything that resembles work. But, honestly, those two classes can't be the extreme ends of the spectrum. "People who enjoy programming" overlap significantly with "people who hate doing the work assigned to them". You make it sound like people who hate doing the work you assigned to them must be people who hate programming. IME, it's almost the opposite - people who love programming aren't going to be the least bit excited about mindless CRUD duties on an over-engineered stack that has 27 levels of indirection before it even hits the database record. > Yet they’re out there, in surprisingly large numbers. It appears that way to you because you are drawing wrong conclusions from your observations. You're looking at devs who hate working on your stack, for your team and extrapolating that to "These devs hate working as a programmer". IOW, your observations that people hate working is accurate, your conclusion that it must be because they hate programming is not.
- Clubber 5y ago
  >aren't going to be the least bit excited about mindless CRUD duties on an over-engineered stack that has 27 levels of indirection before it even hits the database record. Yes, this is really the issue isn't it? Most problems have been solved and made into a library. The public internet is coming on its 30th year. Mobile apps are coming to their 15th year. Nothing really on the horizon. Most of what's left is the same drudge work over and over again. Drudge work is fun the first time you do it, but gets boring fast. It's like any artist forced to paint walls for a living. You'll have to excuse them if they aren't overly excited about their 30th year of wall painting. So, how do you improve? 1. Try to make your wall painting more interesting. Carve out interesting stuff from time to time, even if it's a POC that will probably never get released. This is where you have to be creative/good as a manager and not just a whip cracker. What are different people interested in? Some like automation engines, some like ML, some like experimenting with new frameworks and languages. Experimentation like this used to be pretty common. 2. Give people some real vacation. Developers tend to be on call 24/7. Take it easy with the whip every once in a while. A good month would really relieve the burnout, but to most US companies/managers, this is akin to poison. Both of us know this probably isn't going to happen, so be comfortable in the bed we've made for ourselves.

organicpotato 5y ago

Curious what steps you took to get the most out of your team when some teammates aren't intrinsically motivated? Did you build a sort of incentive structure?

eru 5y ago
Reading the comment carefully, they seem to suggest a heavy use of culling. But I'd also be interested in what other steps work and don't work.
- lostcolony 5y ago
  Hate to sound trite, but it often is the culture. If people feel siloed it's really easy to fall into not caring very much if you're not intrinsically motivated to succeed. However, on a closely knit team, where you put in the effort to get them included and owning things and be supported by the rest of the team in it, many start performing better (even if that starts by just asking for help earlier) simply because they don't want to let the team down. Not always, perhaps, but I'm not convinced that "poor employees" are innately reflective of the individual, so much as the individual + environment. Certainly, I personally have been in environments where I was a rockstar...and environments where I mentally checked very quickly (and sought to leave as such). And the former were the higher output environments, I might add; it wasn't just me being "out of my depth" in terms of skills or similar, but rather me not doing well when I was set up without any real empowerment or support structure and still expected to at least put on a show of trying.
  - eru 5y ago
    I agree about culture being a big part. Though no clue how you can improve that in your team as a manager? I worked for a company where my team was fine, and individual people from other teams seemed perfectly smart and capable when talking to them, but looking at their team's output, they might as well have been idiots. I image for many of them, if they had worked at a more functional organization like Google, they would have done good work. (Even if not to the standards that Google has. But certainly better than at their then current employer.)
    - lostcolony 5y ago
      As a manager, the big ones are making sure that everyone understands what is going on, and feels responsible for it. So if you see a silo developing, you intentionally break it, and explain to the team why you're asking someone who knows nothing about a particular domain to own the task (and also call on the silo to make themselves available to help teach the domain and answer questions and such). It means that task will take longer, but the long term health and effectiveness of the team will be increased. That also includes manager context; ideally, even things that a manager usually does, the team starts stepping up to do. So working with product to define requirements? Manager should include the team with that and look to have them start taking ownership of it over time. Prioritization? Team sport, until it becomes as natural as breathing, and people are better able to prioritize their own time as emergents come in. Etc. This not only helps avoid the -manager- becoming a bottleneck that slows everyone down, but it helps individuals to grow really quickly and feel more empowered.
  - DJJJ09oiujhb 5y ago
    It's not trite and I wish people didn't need to feel like apologizing for it. This has been central to my life the last several years, this culture and person-fit issue. I've seen it play out with friends and family and it's surprising to me it isn't recognized as such. A close friend went from almost literally rockstar status at one place, and moved for reasons that had nothing to do with him or where he was at. He completely fell apart performance-wise at the new place because he didn't fit in to the same extent, went back, and now is doing great again. I don't think the new place was bad, or him, it was just this poor person-culture fit issue. My spouse was somewhere she was treated like dirt, never quite welcomed into the team (she wasn't the only one, but it was the case nevertheless), and then treated her like a failing employee when she wasn't acting the way they wanted her to (however that was). She left, and now is bringing in more money for the new company than any other employee, in large part in my opinion just because they actually let her be part of the team (this second place is actually a much larger company). The experience of being siloed is awful, and even if you are intrinsically motivated, can be completely demotivating, because if it's bad enough, it leads to this feeling of complete loss of control where you're at. There's also all these little things that even if you're super competent, you might need help with, just as a function of being a human being as part of a larger organization. I could go on with stories like this, but suffice to say I think in a lot of places management often doesn't look inward enough. I think the churn continues because for whatever reason the culture change is more painful for them to contemplate and implement than whatever losses are incurred by high turnover in a given position. The last place I was at had entire key units just resign completely together en masse, and the response after they left was "well I guess we're not good at [key function] so we'll just go on without that." In an important sense they had to narrow the scope of what they offer because of culture problems. And yet we end up having these discussions of displaced employees not being "intrinsically motivated" enough, as if that happens in a vacuum.
machiaweliczny 5y ago
You give em boring work

Firmwarrior 5y ago

Man, that's a really screwed up outlook I got piped out of Microsoft and Amazon, both cases after years of excellence on my part because my VP lost a fight with another VP. In my case, I knew that I was a five star engineer in a 3 star company and landed on my feet easily both times. The experience was awful, though, and anyone with an ounce of humility or respect for authority could have been crushed by it easily. Yet here you come, just assuming everyone you come across is a sad loser. IMO, you and every salaried engineer are someone who's willing to settle for donating 90% of the profits from their labor to shareholders in exchange for a little bit of comfort and an illusion of safety.

eru 5y ago
You sound a bit bitter? You should re-read the comment you replied to carefully. PragmaticPulp doesn't imply that everyone on a PiP is bad a person and should feel bad. For PragmaticPulp's argument it is more than enough that people on the job market skew towards being worse employees. Similarly, people on a PiP skew towards being lower achievers. > IMO, you and every salaried engineer are someone who's willing to settle for donating 90% of the profits from their labor to shareholders in exchange for a little bit of comfort and an illusion of safety. Where do you get the 90% figure from? In general, it's really, really easy to start a company that makes use of programmer labour. Barriers to entry in the buy-side of the market for programmers are low. Especially with the more globalised labour market we got out of the pandemic. So colour me suspicious of the notion that it's trivial to 'exploit' programmers and steal their lunch like you suggest. Keep in mind that that most software projects in most companies are delayed or fail outright.
- Firmwarrior 5y ago
  Haha, yeah, I got kinda bitter after learning the hard way that Dilbert wasn't a parody You make good points, about that 90% figure and that I shouldn't imply salaried life as exploitation. There's a reasonably healthy free market and the means of production (a laptop) can be fished out of a trash can I came at 90% since Google had 135k employees in 2020, and $209B in revenue. That's $1.5M per person, and then my mental math went off the rails.. obviously revenue isn't profit, and who knows if $150k/year/employee on average would be enough to provide the same benefits/take home pay on average. There are economies of scale at work too PragmaticPulp has a fundamental belief deep in his soul that some people are good engineers, and others are "people who really just hate doing anything that resembles work". That, in my opinion, is wrong and leads to bad things*. I believe that anyone can succeed in the right environment. * like Amazon/Microsoft giving hundreds of good employees the "unregretted attrition" axe because it's easier for upper management to do it that way

tayo42 5y ago

> Poke around Reddit or even HN and this work minimization mindset is even celebrated by a lot of people. If you’ve been surrounded by high achievers and motivated people who would have chosen programming jobs because that’s what they like to do every day, it can be a shock to work with people who really just hate doing anything that resembles work. Yet they’re out there, in surprisingly large numbers. You say this like its a bad thing? Even still, wanting to work less but taking pride in your work aren't mutually exclusive ideas. Id prefer to work as little as possible, I always do the best I can though and take care to be thoughtful and do things right. Im just not going to bend over backwards for a corporation.

MonaroVXR 5y ago
I'm not sure if you are assuming it correctly.

MonaroVXR 5y ago

>Only later did I realize that I was surrounded by those people because my managers actively selected for those hires and carefully weeded out the people who weren’t interested in anything other than doing the bare minimum to collect a paycheck. I'm going to counter it, I did always my best. But I got shot. But.......... I'm again back with more power as a front-ens developer. (Not searching for work at the moment.)

birdyrooster 5y ago

Teams like the one you are talking about are so rare I don't even count them anymore.

lelanthran 5y ago

> If you’ve been surrounded by high achievers and motivated people who would have chosen programming jobs because that’s what they like to do every day, it can be a shock to work with people who really just hate doing anything that resembles work. That's a false dichotomy[1] [1] If I am reading you correctly, you're saying that there's two extremes 1. Programmers who enjoy it. 2. Programmers who hate doing anything that resembles work. But, honestly, those two classes can't be the extreme ends of the spectrum. "People who enjoy programming" overlap significantly with "people who hate doing the work assigned to them". You make it sound like people who hate doing the work you assigned to them must be people who hate programming. IME, it's almost the opposite - people who love programming aren't going to be the least bit excited about mindless CRUD duties on an over-engineered stack that has 27 levels of indirection before it even hits the database record. > Yet they’re out there, in surprisingly large numbers. It appears that way to you because you are drawing wrong conclusions from your observations. You're looking at devs who hate working on your stack, for your team and extrapolating that to "These devs hate working as a programmer". IOW, your observations that people hate working is accurate, your conclusion that it must be because they hate programming is not.

Clubber 5y ago
>aren't going to be the least bit excited about mindless CRUD duties on an over-engineered stack that has 27 levels of indirection before it even hits the database record. Yes, this is really the issue isn't it? Most problems have been solved and made into a library. The public internet is coming on its 30th year. Mobile apps are coming to their 15th year. Nothing really on the horizon. Most of what's left is the same drudge work over and over again. Drudge work is fun the first time you do it, but gets boring fast. It's like any artist forced to paint walls for a living. You'll have to excuse them if they aren't overly excited about their 30th year of wall painting. So, how do you improve? 1. Try to make your wall painting more interesting. Carve out interesting stuff from time to time, even if it's a POC that will probably never get released. This is where you have to be creative/good as a manager and not just a whip cracker. What are different people interested in? Some like automation engines, some like ML, some like experimenting with new frameworks and languages. Experimentation like this used to be pretty common. 2. Give people some real vacation. Developers tend to be on call 24/7. Take it easy with the whip every once in a while. A good month would really relieve the burnout, but to most US companies/managers, this is akin to poison. Both of us know this probably isn't going to happen, so be comfortable in the bed we've made for ourselves.