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Oh if only it was just free loading at large companies! The reality is much more complicated. I worked with some great people at a huge company, a lot of them
by bh42222 15y ago
Oh if only it was just free loading at large companies!
The reality is much more complicated. I worked with some great people at a huge company, a lot of them had families, one had a child with very severe asthma, and one time only a helicopter could get to the hospital fast enough.
Others had perfectly healthy children... in college, and a huge mortgage on the family home.
They all engaged in counter productive job preservation strategies. The easiest of which is simply to not aggressively share knowledge. At very large companies you really have to actively push your knowledge onto people or a shared knowledge repo.
The next level is to put a very small bit of effort into actively avoiding the sharing of knowledge. Give less than the best answers you can give when asked for information. You don't have to lie or hide, just don't be quite as eloquent as you could be.
At yet another level are things like writing custom wrappers around things that didn't need wrappers, or that already were wrappers themselves.
People were doing this because if they lost their jobs they would lose their homes, the children's heath insurance which can pay for things like helicopters, etc.
Then there's personality conflicts. At very large companies you work with a lot of people and this increases the probability you'll meet your worst match. That is the personality that just happens to clash with your personality. The most common I've seen is very confrontational vs. very passive. The very passive then often becomes as passive aggressive as the other is openly aggressive. And boy can smart people like hackers be incredibly good at passive aggression.
The point here is that either of those people would be good on their own. It's the combination that's toxic for them and anyone caught up with them.
And then there's anything other than stellar management. Organizing any large group of people so that communication is effective is not easy. If that large group is programmers and the information is highly complex... you don't have to be bad to mess it up, just not being a great manager is enough.
And there's even more, I could write a large book about this.
- Splines 15y agoThe easiest of which is simply to not aggressively share knowledge. When you're stack ranked against your peers, I wonder if people ask themselves, "why should I help you, when all I'm doing is making it harder for myself to get a bonus next year"?. I don't indulge in such behaviour, but I've wondered if others have thought and acted upon it.
- andywood 15y agoThis probably depends on the local culture. When I was at Microsoft, in the groups I worked in, we were explicitly evaluated on criteria such as "makes others better". My reviews actually stated that actively mentoring and going out of my way to be genuinely helpful to others contributed to my score, and I ranked on top almost every year. When I think of other colleagues who I know ranked highly, the people who come to mind are the ones who had both the ability and willingness to help a lot of other people do their jobs better.
- bh42222 15y agoThis probably depends on the local culture. Yep, and what I've heard (and only heard, never worked there myself) is that Microsoft has some of the most programmer friendly corporate culture around. A lot (if not most) big companies are not like that. The reason Joel's writing on company culture is so popular is because such simple things are still quite rare in the world.
- sliverstorm 15y agoMicrosoft has some of the most programmer friendly corporate culture around I figure this is part of what has kept them around, and is fueling what seems to me to be a come-back in spite of everything going against them. I don't have a great depth of knowledge on them, but I did interview with their Xbox team, and everyone was just really enthused to be there.
- MartinCron 15y agoIf you were to design something to sabotage team effectiveness, I can't think of anything more effective than stack ranking that wouldn't be a criminal offense.
- tomjen3 15y agoBeing passive aggressive is something smart people have to learn -- we can't go up against the bully, but we can make him fall into a trap the next day. And you shouldn't allow confrontational people on your team anyways -- they can't be in a group (but would properly be awesome on their own).
- bh42222 15y agoAnd you shouldn't allow confrontational people on your team anyways A lot of great hackers are very confrontation, it comes from love of truth. Look at Linux and Linus Torvalds, Linus freely calls himself an asshole, because well, he is one. Many hackers are. You can't just magically decide not to work with confrontational people when you're in the software business. Not unless you have infinite amounts of money to hire whomever you want.
- Helianthus 15y agoYou have to earn the right to be an asshole. Disrespectful confrontation out of some arrogant "love of truth" (arrogant because it implies one has some special relationship with truth) is just dickery that's going to poison a team.