3 ms·

In an age where loyalty between employer and employee is long in rear window (if it wasn't just a useful fable from the get-go), all you are left with are the g

In an age where loyalty between employer and employee is long in rear window (if it wasn't just a useful fable from the get-go), all you are left with are the grim permutations of game theory, all wary glances and knife edges barely concealed. Being indispensable is the closest thing you have to security, and as for "stopping learning," well, most companies want you to do that in your off-time, anyway. Throwing that away to become just another Pac-man gobbling tickets in a maze for the sake of being Agile or whatever reminds me of "...the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother" in its joy at self-abnegation. Reams could be and have been written about estrangement in society, the reduction of human relationships to mere transactionality, but being The Person Who Is Expert At This Thing in your little Dunbar's Number sized company (give or take) beats being some plastic gear, designed to be replaced as a sacrificial component, if you are interested in stability, continuity, or even something as antiquated as pride in your work. I sort of get it -- at an early job, we had a lot of clientele. I inadvertently memorized, well, everything about them: faces, names, various ID numbers, and so on, and instead of the handy lookups provided, employees would just call me and ask. This got annoying. But I was also twenty-four and managed to push back enough to say, "You have the ability to look all of this up." Being bothered with dumb questions if you have all of this documentation and a wiki or whatever, yes, that is not acceptable, but I think there's a middle ground at least between being the Turing-complaint helpbot and just bolting out of there so you don't have to be The Guy in the Know.

hinkley 5y ago
There is something to be said for being indispensible for novel problems, instead of for known problems. Some of the worst behavior I've seen in both myself and others has come when you can hold your company hostage by refusing to do something. Even when you are using it for 'the greater good', that's not a good look and not a great feeling. You shouldn't have to go with the nuclear option to get something done, even if 5/8ths of your coworkers all feel it's the right thing to do. And many people use it because they can, through some mix of hubris and/or burnout. When people say things like, "first, fire all the heroes" it's situations like this that they are thinking of, among others.
- at_a_remove 5y ago
  Oh, fire all the heroes, I have worked at one of those places. The people in the know were let go, as some kind of pre-emptive strike of just that nature. Heaven forfend that anyone but the organization have leverage. This was managed before I had a chance to get a Chesterson's Fence view of the processes. The result was not good: deciphering the how of things was bad enough, but the why, the contexts of the decisions was utterly gone. Nobody could say why things were done, and so it was either the old joke about the five monkeys or the Second System Effect. Glorious chaos, the confidence of our clients eroded, terror at making changes that might affect the way things had been, dread of not making changes to cope with extant problems. Thanks, but I'll take the M.A.D. that results from the threat of the nuclear option over someone getting to yank out my heartplug ala Lynch's Dune.
  - hinkley 5y ago
    Yeah I'm not sure that's meant to be taken literally, anymore than I think "If you meet Buddha upon the road, kill him," is an incitement to homicide. The people who have reverence for the heroes are as much or more of a problem as the actual heroes, and they need to be shaken severely. It's going to be ugly any way you slice it because like so many things in software, you're in a position where someone should have yelled "stop" years before and instead things just kept going, far past unreasonable into a first-rate dystopia. If you fire one belligerent hero as an example to the others, you might be able to make it work. But if you have one 'database guy' or 'backend person', odds are very good that they're going to go exactly as fast as they want to go and smile and say 'no' when people ask for major changes that would break up a logjam. If they aren't particularly articulate about why things are the way they are it's easy to get the impression they are running things instead of the titular managers.
    - at_a_remove 5y ago
      Color me a little confused, but I think I kind of would lean toward letting the database person make the decisions about database rather than the titular managers. Haven't we all been through enough "management heard X technology is hot so we are gonna use that" fiascos? Management's job is not to make decisions about databases for the database person, but to communicate about problems and priorities, and so on. Don't get me wrong, the dark hilarity of malicious compliance can be great when someone commands you, like they are some bumpkin who just rubbed a lamp and acquired a genie, to do something that is gonna bring down production at noon, cutting off your about-to-be-voiced objection, but let the managers manage and let the experts be experts.
goodpoint 5y ago
> loyalty between employer and employee is long in rear window "between"? Loyalty towards employees almost never existed in some societies.
kubanczyk 5y ago
You do write beautiful prose here, at least comparing to an average HN comment.

hinkley 5y ago

There is something to be said for being indispensible for novel problems, instead of for known problems. Some of the worst behavior I've seen in both myself and others has come when you can hold your company hostage by refusing to do something. Even when you are using it for 'the greater good', that's not a good look and not a great feeling. You shouldn't have to go with the nuclear option to get something done, even if 5/8ths of your coworkers all feel it's the right thing to do. And many people use it because they can, through some mix of hubris and/or burnout. When people say things like, "first, fire all the heroes" it's situations like this that they are thinking of, among others.

at_a_remove 5y ago
Oh, fire all the heroes, I have worked at one of those places. The people in the know were let go, as some kind of pre-emptive strike of just that nature. Heaven forfend that anyone but the organization have leverage. This was managed before I had a chance to get a Chesterson's Fence view of the processes. The result was not good: deciphering the how of things was bad enough, but the why, the contexts of the decisions was utterly gone. Nobody could say why things were done, and so it was either the old joke about the five monkeys or the Second System Effect. Glorious chaos, the confidence of our clients eroded, terror at making changes that might affect the way things had been, dread of not making changes to cope with extant problems. Thanks, but I'll take the M.A.D. that results from the threat of the nuclear option over someone getting to yank out my heartplug ala Lynch's Dune.
- hinkley 5y ago
  Yeah I'm not sure that's meant to be taken literally, anymore than I think "If you meet Buddha upon the road, kill him," is an incitement to homicide. The people who have reverence for the heroes are as much or more of a problem as the actual heroes, and they need to be shaken severely. It's going to be ugly any way you slice it because like so many things in software, you're in a position where someone should have yelled "stop" years before and instead things just kept going, far past unreasonable into a first-rate dystopia. If you fire one belligerent hero as an example to the others, you might be able to make it work. But if you have one 'database guy' or 'backend person', odds are very good that they're going to go exactly as fast as they want to go and smile and say 'no' when people ask for major changes that would break up a logjam. If they aren't particularly articulate about why things are the way they are it's easy to get the impression they are running things instead of the titular managers.
  - at_a_remove 5y ago
    Color me a little confused, but I think I kind of would lean toward letting the database person make the decisions about database rather than the titular managers. Haven't we all been through enough "management heard X technology is hot so we are gonna use that" fiascos? Management's job is not to make decisions about databases for the database person, but to communicate about problems and priorities, and so on. Don't get me wrong, the dark hilarity of malicious compliance can be great when someone commands you, like they are some bumpkin who just rubbed a lamp and acquired a genie, to do something that is gonna bring down production at noon, cutting off your about-to-be-voiced objection, but let the managers manage and let the experts be experts.

goodpoint 5y ago

> loyalty between employer and employee is long in rear window "between"? Loyalty towards employees almost never existed in some societies.

kubanczyk 5y ago

You do write beautiful prose here, at least comparing to an average HN comment.