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Every company I've worked for has had some core group of people who cared about doing good work and doing the right thing. No company can maintain that dynamic

Every company I've worked for has had some core group of people who cared about doing good work and doing the right thing. No company can maintain that dynamic at scale, though. As you grow, you accumulate people who are good at presenting an image of doing the good work, but they're actually operating adversarially in a way that collects the most rewards with the least effort. It's not just managers. A lot of ICs treat the workplace like a min-max game, where they are trying to maximize their compensation and minimize the work they do. Every time I mention this, there are comments about how that's actually a good thing because companies have the same strategy, but the people who do this usually screw their teammates more than the company. Big companies don't suffer if random people are slacking off and refusing to do their work, but their teammates who want to get a promotion or build their skillsets are going to suffer the consequences of deadbeat coworkers. Small companies aren't immune from these problems, but it's so much easier to identify and remove the dead weight in a small company. When you have 20 people in a company, it's clearly obvious when someone isn't pulling their weight. But when you have 100,000 people in a company, a large number of people are going to find ways to settle into obscure roles where their output is hard to measure and they'll coast as much as they can.

zcw100 4y ago
I think I'm on number four... > Posting this just never gets old... > > It must have been a couple of months because... > >> I keep this link sitting around and enjoy dusting it off every couple of > >> months or so > >> https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
8note 4y ago
Doing the right things tends to also not align with promotions either. The thing that helps your team mates us ignoring the business needs and min/maxing the promotion game. That's less fun than doing the right things, and more work than min/maxing your quality of life
- ravenstine 4y ago
  That also means being willing to take risks for the sake of innovation, and bigger companies are less tolerant or accepting of their employees failing at an effort intended to benefit the business. That is one big reason why i stopped caring about the employees taking the clandestine adversarial approach to their relationship with employers. It's one thing to put in low effort at a scrappy startup, but another when the company discourages excellence.
petra 4y ago
What now? People are supposed to choose their career strategy and on the job behaviour so that their teammates(not friends, teammates) can optimize their own career strategy ?
- paganel 4y ago
  It's complicated, because by slacking off you're indirectly pulling your teammates down (as explained by the OP), which means less work-related opportunities for them, which can mean lots of not ok things: less money to send their kids to college, less money for retirement, less money for lots of other things. A similar thing, but with much higher stakes, happens on the front-lines during a war. Confronted with a much superior enemy your individual optimal decision would be to desert, or, at least, to retreat, no matter what the high-command located at the back of the front has to say about it. They're not the ones who are going to die. But, in doing that, you're weakening the flanks of the other brigades/platoon from your side with which you're sharing the front-line, and in so doing you're drastically decreasing the chances for them to see their kids and their wives back home.
  - harshalizee 4y ago
    I totally understand the point you're making about team cohesion. This is the thing about the HN crowd and the remote only dogma that is constantly thrown around that is perplexing. The HN demo loudly proclaims that the workplace is not the place for you to build friendships and personal relationships and to go do it on your own time. The natural effect of this is ambitious employees are going to min-max their career trajectory for their benefit and maybe the company's. Why would anyone truly care about faceless Zoom rectangle team members that they're never going to see after x months/years? In this case, they're not fighting a war, so the stakes are drastically low and payoff substantially better. And yet HN looks down on this as bad behavior. This is just the emergent property of the current tech culture that we've established.
    - cudgy 4y ago
      So replacing “Zoom rectangle team members” with retinal image team members makes that much of a difference? Magically they become actual people once you see them with your own eyes, resulting in increased effectiveness and no resentment from wasted time commuting and forced interpersonal relationships with people they find annoying.
fredrikholm 4y ago
> Every company I've worked for has had some core group of people who cared about doing good work and doing the right thing... but they're actually operating adversarially in a way that collects the most rewards with the least effort. Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy! The people who game the system eventually move to further enforce the system (for their own benefit), at the expense of the purpose the for which the system was first put in place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_la...
- dgb23 4y ago
  Great find! It seems like this is related to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law And this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle It's almost as if you mix those two things together, you get Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
- gardenhedge 4y ago
  I wonder if this correlates to when the OG founders leave or are kicked out
birdyrooster 4y ago
Let’s talk about teams with where you have one person doing everything. They are creating deadbeats. Does it never cross anyone’s mind that the way to fix this is to move that person off of the team? Often they are sucking the oxygen out of the room with a strong personality or dogmatism for some personal ideal of quality. The manager lets them run with it because the work is getting done but that manager is bad because his team is languishing. I’ve seen this so many times where engineers get pushed out of the way by a new lead engineer and their workloads drop significantly. These leads who want to run everything don’t have the energy to convince people well, instead they just write so much complicated code as fast as possible to beat anyone else to the space. It’s not just ego it’s a matter of avoiding a hostile work environment being hostage to this one persons gatekeeping. They dedicate their lives to work and spend insane hours so that no one else has the fitness to compete with them. They see that their team is getting left behind and continue full steam ahead. It’s sad for everyone involved.
- yCombLinks 4y ago
  I had a guy like that did something like this. He jumped on any new project and did all the interesting pieces as quickly as possible. He also built it with very non-idiomatic code. Despised working with his stuff, even though if he was the only person on the project it was fine, he was very productive.
- trieste92 4y ago
  > I’ve seen this so many times where engineers get pushed out of the way by a new lead engineer and their workloads drop significantly From my experience whenever this happens the people who get "pushed out of the way" were useless to begin with
  - MonkeyClub 4y ago
    > were useless to begin with Or useless with office politics, and didn’t manage to market themselves well with the new lead. It’s never been clean-cut in my experience.
  - cudgy 4y ago
trieste92 4y ago
> but the people who do this usually screw their teammates more than the company They screw themselves more than anyone else by spurning opportunities for bettering themselves
- away271828 4y ago
  Did it occur to you that they're getting paid and possibly "bettering themselves" and enjoying family/friends in ways that have nothing to do with the company?
pydry 4y ago
>The people who do this usually screw their teammates more than the company. Big companies don't suffer if random people are slacking off and refusing to do their work, but their teammates who want to get a promotion or build their skillsets are going to suffer the consequences of deadbeat coworkers. ??? You've got it exactly reversed. Slacking coworkers are the company's problem, not yours. I've never seen any company decide not to give a promotion to somebody because their coworker was useless. Hell, sometimes the useless coworker helps because it makes them look better by comparison.
- linster 4y ago
  I’ve worked at such a company.
- michaelt 4y ago
  > I've never seen any company decide not to give a promotion to somebody because their coworker was useless. Ah, but have you ever seen a company give raises promotions to the people on projects that were successfully delivered?
- grugagag 4y ago
  If one rushes through, decisions and implementation that are most likely to become a debt on the company don’t become apparent until later. Their endevour immediately renders everybody else as slackers too but most likely than not they’re no longer there when the debt comes to roost.

zcw100 4y ago

I think I'm on number four... > Posting this just never gets old... > > It must have been a couple of months because... > >> I keep this link sitting around and enjoy dusting it off every couple of > >> months or so > >> https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

8note 4y ago

Doing the right things tends to also not align with promotions either. The thing that helps your team mates us ignoring the business needs and min/maxing the promotion game. That's less fun than doing the right things, and more work than min/maxing your quality of life

ravenstine 4y ago
That also means being willing to take risks for the sake of innovation, and bigger companies are less tolerant or accepting of their employees failing at an effort intended to benefit the business. That is one big reason why i stopped caring about the employees taking the clandestine adversarial approach to their relationship with employers. It's one thing to put in low effort at a scrappy startup, but another when the company discourages excellence.

petra 4y ago

What now? People are supposed to choose their career strategy and on the job behaviour so that their teammates(not friends, teammates) can optimize their own career strategy ?

paganel 4y ago
It's complicated, because by slacking off you're indirectly pulling your teammates down (as explained by the OP), which means less work-related opportunities for them, which can mean lots of not ok things: less money to send their kids to college, less money for retirement, less money for lots of other things. A similar thing, but with much higher stakes, happens on the front-lines during a war. Confronted with a much superior enemy your individual optimal decision would be to desert, or, at least, to retreat, no matter what the high-command located at the back of the front has to say about it. They're not the ones who are going to die. But, in doing that, you're weakening the flanks of the other brigades/platoon from your side with which you're sharing the front-line, and in so doing you're drastically decreasing the chances for them to see their kids and their wives back home.
- harshalizee 4y ago
  I totally understand the point you're making about team cohesion. This is the thing about the HN crowd and the remote only dogma that is constantly thrown around that is perplexing. The HN demo loudly proclaims that the workplace is not the place for you to build friendships and personal relationships and to go do it on your own time. The natural effect of this is ambitious employees are going to min-max their career trajectory for their benefit and maybe the company's. Why would anyone truly care about faceless Zoom rectangle team members that they're never going to see after x months/years? In this case, they're not fighting a war, so the stakes are drastically low and payoff substantially better. And yet HN looks down on this as bad behavior. This is just the emergent property of the current tech culture that we've established.
  - cudgy 4y ago
    So replacing “Zoom rectangle team members” with retinal image team members makes that much of a difference? Magically they become actual people once you see them with your own eyes, resulting in increased effectiveness and no resentment from wasted time commuting and forced interpersonal relationships with people they find annoying.

fredrikholm 4y ago

> Every company I've worked for has had some core group of people who cared about doing good work and doing the right thing... but they're actually operating adversarially in a way that collects the most rewards with the least effort. Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy! The people who game the system eventually move to further enforce the system (for their own benefit), at the expense of the purpose the for which the system was first put in place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_la...

dgb23 4y ago
Great find! It seems like this is related to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law And this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle It's almost as if you mix those two things together, you get Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
gardenhedge 4y ago
I wonder if this correlates to when the OG founders leave or are kicked out

birdyrooster 4y ago

Let’s talk about teams with where you have one person doing everything. They are creating deadbeats. Does it never cross anyone’s mind that the way to fix this is to move that person off of the team? Often they are sucking the oxygen out of the room with a strong personality or dogmatism for some personal ideal of quality. The manager lets them run with it because the work is getting done but that manager is bad because his team is languishing. I’ve seen this so many times where engineers get pushed out of the way by a new lead engineer and their workloads drop significantly. These leads who want to run everything don’t have the energy to convince people well, instead they just write so much complicated code as fast as possible to beat anyone else to the space. It’s not just ego it’s a matter of avoiding a hostile work environment being hostage to this one persons gatekeeping. They dedicate their lives to work and spend insane hours so that no one else has the fitness to compete with them. They see that their team is getting left behind and continue full steam ahead. It’s sad for everyone involved.

yCombLinks 4y ago
I had a guy like that did something like this. He jumped on any new project and did all the interesting pieces as quickly as possible. He also built it with very non-idiomatic code. Despised working with his stuff, even though if he was the only person on the project it was fine, he was very productive.
trieste92 4y ago
> I’ve seen this so many times where engineers get pushed out of the way by a new lead engineer and their workloads drop significantly From my experience whenever this happens the people who get "pushed out of the way" were useless to begin with
- MonkeyClub 4y ago
  > were useless to begin with Or useless with office politics, and didn’t manage to market themselves well with the new lead. It’s never been clean-cut in my experience.
- cudgy 4y ago

trieste92 4y ago

> but the people who do this usually screw their teammates more than the company They screw themselves more than anyone else by spurning opportunities for bettering themselves

away271828 4y ago
Did it occur to you that they're getting paid and possibly "bettering themselves" and enjoying family/friends in ways that have nothing to do with the company?

pydry 4y ago

>The people who do this usually screw their teammates more than the company. Big companies don't suffer if random people are slacking off and refusing to do their work, but their teammates who want to get a promotion or build their skillsets are going to suffer the consequences of deadbeat coworkers. ??? You've got it exactly reversed. Slacking coworkers are the company's problem, not yours. I've never seen any company decide not to give a promotion to somebody because their coworker was useless. Hell, sometimes the useless coworker helps because it makes them look better by comparison.

linster 4y ago
I’ve worked at such a company.
michaelt 4y ago
> I've never seen any company decide not to give a promotion to somebody because their coworker was useless. Ah, but have you ever seen a company give raises promotions to the people on projects that were successfully delivered?
grugagag 4y ago
If one rushes through, decisions and implementation that are most likely to become a debt on the company don’t become apparent until later. Their endevour immediately renders everybody else as slackers too but most likely than not they’re no longer there when the debt comes to roost.