7 ms·

The psychology of how being told what to do impacts our productivity

79 points by sherm8n 14y ago

mvkel 14y ago
This is the exact philosophy that businesses use to promote perfectly good specialists to "management." Some people _need_ structure. Some people don't want to define the plan because they take it personally and any minor failure is, to them, a personal catastrophe. Not wanting to be "the boss" is a perfectly acceptable way to be productive. Some of the brightest developers in the world are the most productive when you let them sit in front of their workstation and code on something that flexes their brain. The key is identifying how each individual is wired and what their motivating needs are. Not everyone wants to be promoted to tell people what to do, or have more control.
- UK-AL 14y ago
  A lot of developers only want to get promoted because it gives them more creative control over a project.
- sherm8n 14y ago
  Would you want a developer who needs to be told exactly what to do? Or would you rather have a developer can define what to build in the product and then build it. I don't understand why you want to promote people so they can tell other people what to do. As a manager, it's more beneficial to have an employee who can tell me what they want to do.
  - onemorepassword 14y ago
    There's a middle ground: developers that need to be told what problem to work on, but who are smart enough to take it from there. It's very useful to have a few of those on the team, because as a manager it allows you to ensure certain priorities are met, whilst giving those that thrive on freedom the space they need. So, to answer your question: I'd rather have both.
    - sherm8n 14y ago
      This is why it's so hard to hire right now. The people who can and are willing to do both can work anywhere they want.
leepowers 14y ago
The key thing when working with engineers is to give them a problem to solve - but don't tell them how to solve it. As a programmer I relish the challenge of problem solving. But I hate being told how to think. In this case I was part of a scrum team at a large company. Some product manager/project manager/engineering manager already broke things up into user stories. Those user stories were further broken down into tasks. The tasks were then evenly divided amongst all the engineers. Each engineer didn’t have much of a say in it. This is definitely a management mistake that I've been on both sides of. Getting everyone involved during with architectural process accomplishes several things: 1) Everyone comes away with a bird's-eye view of the project. 2) Everyone has input into the decision making process. When done properly no one feels out of the loop or under another's direct control. Some might call this slave work. It was the most unproductive time of my life. I spent an hour at the gym every day. Another hour eating lunch. Several hours surfing the internet. I was really bored sitting under the fluorescent lighting. It felt like a chore to write code. I can understand this attitude, but only up to a point - as a professional programmer you should be able to handle an assigned problem, figure it out and complete it. Instead of taking a long lunch take a few minutes to talk to your boss and voice your concerns. There's no excuse for half-assing it.
- sherm8n 14y ago
  I never said I was slacking off. In fact I got more done than anyone else on the team. It just felt like I was there only to work. I openly told everyone how I felt. That's when I decided I didn't want to be a professional programmer anymore. I talked to boss man and we mutually agreed that there was no way for me to be happy being a cog in the wheel.
  - greghinch 14y ago
    You can be a "professional programmer" without being a "cog in the wheel" so directly. At the end of the day though, we're all cogs in the great machine of society. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you can be happy in your work
    - 14y ago
crazygringo 14y ago
> Some product manager/project manager/engineering manager already broke things up into user stories. Those user stories were further broken down into tasks. The tasks were then evenly divided amongst all the engineers. Each engineer didn’t have much of a say in it. Some might call this slave work. It was the most unproductive time of my life. This is one of the central dilemmas. To some people, it sucks -- they'd rather be programming rockstars, solving big problems in a way that's interesting to them. But in most of the real world, when you've got various stakeholders, a big project, lots of programmers whose work needs to be coordinated, with standards, and you can't get bogged down in n-to-n communication, this is just how it often has to be. Face it, most work in this world is "slave work", if that's how you want to call it (although I think that sounds rather insulting, when you think about how an unfulfilling office job you're free to quit is a million times better than actual slave work). And part of being a professional and mature programmer is realizing that, look, that's life. Sometimes you will get a job with a big say in how things are done, be super-independent, and it will be amazing. And sometimes you'll look back five years later and realize how it was a great learning experience for you, but you over-engineered it in a language or with a library that nobody could use afterwards, the whole system was replaced a year later, and you effectively wasted a lot of time and money of the company's. But at the same time, sometimes you do need rockstar programmers, who are talented enough to be given free reign, and they'll produce amazing results, as long as you don't micromanage them, or even barely manage them at all. Different projets are different. And different employees are different, too.
- sherm8n 14y ago
  But this is also hacker news -- where people don't settle on normal work. They're bold enough seek out only meaningful work. Either by starting their own company or joining one where they can make a huge impact without the typical fluff.
  - onemorepassword 14y ago
    That doesn't mean they don't need structure in their daily work. If it wasn't for those kind of people, those who are neither entrepreneurs nor risk-averse worker drones, start-ups wouldn't be able to get any development staff because "less meaningful" usually pays better.
vacri 14y ago
This is highly contextual. If the US were to go to war with China, can anyone imagining the USN being more productive by saying to its sailors "Choose what you want to do and how you want to do it". Or on a smaller scale, professional sporting teams are much more effective when they're able to work to a common plan than just being a bunch of individual stars. The teams of individual stars may feel better because they each get to behave the way they want to, but overall they're less productive.
- sherm8n 14y ago
  I was speaking on behalf of personal productivity. Not team productivity. But there are definitely failures in professional sports too. When one player doesn't feel like he's not being included enough then communication breakdowns ensue.
  - vacri 14y ago
    Much of this debate centres around whether you define 'being productive' as 'enjoying your work' or 'providing value'. I've certainly done work which was enjoyable and progressed quickly in it due to that fact, but in the overall scheme of things had negligible value for the company - that's not productive work, in the sense that most people would use.
    - sherm8n 14y ago
      Well, which is more important for you personally?
      - vacri 14y ago
        Having fun, obviously, but that's not the title of your article.
        sherm8n 14y ago
        Neither is providing value.
jedmeyers 14y ago
When I hear stories about how someone successfully broke into the highly competitive <insert name> industry without any previous experience the quote from IT Crowd comes to mind: "When i started Renholm Industries I had just 2 things in my possession. A dream and 6 million pounds."
dschiptsov 14y ago
So, If I write a blog post about Framing Effect I will get lots of karma points too?)
- sherm8n 14y ago
  If you're not going to do it I will. People frame things in a different way to make it sound good all the time. "If you can crank out this code by EOD you're going to be a hero." versus "If you can crank out this code by EOD you still won't get a raise until next year."
kamakazizuru 14y ago
i think its a lot more to do with how you're told to do something. Additionally - this effect strongly varies from person to person - you might be better off titling your post "the pysch....impacts MY productivity". Working in the corporate world and on startups I've seen 3 types of people -all equally productive (mind you im not talking about how happy they were or how much fun they had - but since your point is productivity lets stick with that). Type 1 - entrpreneurs/intrapreneurs - these were the kinds who figured out their way within organizations to make their own niche - do whatever they truly felt like doing - and people typically let them do their own thing - because they delivered results. Of course they had to play the occasional bit of politics - but that is a part of any job or field, and you're never working in a vaccuum where this wont affect you. Type 2 - the 50/50s - these are people who can overtime become Type 1s - they like beign given some goal or target and a genera framework / project to work on - and then take it from there - checking in every now and then but mostly figuring their way out - and being allowed to figure their way out. Type 3 - the TaskRabbits - these are the folks that make up i'd say 60-80% of a company (depending on the industry and company culture it can vary.. a creative agency might have a lower percentage as opposed to say ..a bank). They work with strictly defined rules, have goals and targets defined for them. They usually (atleast the non mediocre ones) try had to get their goals met within that time frame - and wouldn´t be able to perform as well without having all that structure set up for them.
- sherm8n 14y ago
  The productivity impact is common enough where it didn't happen to only me.
  - kamakazizuru 14y ago
    what?
    - sherm8n 14y ago
      The article resonated with a majority of those who read it.
cpressey 14y ago
If you're an engineer doing scrum, and the product owners are "telling you what to do", imo you're doing scrum wrong. Engineers should be involved in turning user stories into tasks. Even outside scrum, even in a traditional workplace, good managers don't "tell you what to do", because they know it's demotivational. Good managers explain to you why something needs to be done, that is, how it will benefit the enterprise, and let you do it.
- sherm8n 14y ago
  There's already a barrier if a manager has to tell you why something needs to be done. Usually that means you disagree. Naturally you don't want to do it anymore.
- gruseom 14y ago
  I was once in the room when one of the guys who wrote the book on Scrum described how many companies implement it. For those who don't know, Scrum says that team members should answer three questions each working day: 1. What have you done in the last day? 2. What are you doing today? 3. Are you experiencing any impediments to your work? Here is how he said these questions get implemented: 1. Did you do what I told you to yesterday? 2. Here's what I want you to do today. 3. Fuck the third question.
  - sherm8n 14y ago
    Haha, so true. Especially when engineering managers are the scrum masters. They repurpose scrum to get status updates.
goldfeld 14y ago
Wow, psychological reactance.. there's a name for my illness! I thought I was the only freak who procrastinated immensely on a task just because someone ordered me to do it--especially if I was just about to do it anyways. Since I was a kid I would get bummed because if I did as ordered, the person would think I was only doing it because I was told, and self motivation has always been my biggest driver. Luckily I love my day job exactly for the lack of direct pressure from superiors.
- sherm8n 14y ago
  I thought it was only me too. I didn't understand why I hated being told what to do. I would purposely start new skunkworks projects instead of doing what I was supposed to.

79 points by sherm8n 14y ago

mvkel 14y ago

This is the exact philosophy that businesses use to promote perfectly good specialists to "management." Some people _need_ structure. Some people don't want to define the plan because they take it personally and any minor failure is, to them, a personal catastrophe. Not wanting to be "the boss" is a perfectly acceptable way to be productive. Some of the brightest developers in the world are the most productive when you let them sit in front of their workstation and code on something that flexes their brain. The key is identifying how each individual is wired and what their motivating needs are. Not everyone wants to be promoted to tell people what to do, or have more control.

UK-AL 14y ago
A lot of developers only want to get promoted because it gives them more creative control over a project.
sherm8n 14y ago
Would you want a developer who needs to be told exactly what to do? Or would you rather have a developer can define what to build in the product and then build it. I don't understand why you want to promote people so they can tell other people what to do. As a manager, it's more beneficial to have an employee who can tell me what they want to do.
- onemorepassword 14y ago
  There's a middle ground: developers that need to be told what problem to work on, but who are smart enough to take it from there. It's very useful to have a few of those on the team, because as a manager it allows you to ensure certain priorities are met, whilst giving those that thrive on freedom the space they need. So, to answer your question: I'd rather have both.
  - sherm8n 14y ago
    This is why it's so hard to hire right now. The people who can and are willing to do both can work anywhere they want.

leepowers 14y ago

The key thing when working with engineers is to give them a problem to solve - but don't tell them how to solve it. As a programmer I relish the challenge of problem solving. But I hate being told how to think. In this case I was part of a scrum team at a large company. Some product manager/project manager/engineering manager already broke things up into user stories. Those user stories were further broken down into tasks. The tasks were then evenly divided amongst all the engineers. Each engineer didn’t have much of a say in it. This is definitely a management mistake that I've been on both sides of. Getting everyone involved during with architectural process accomplishes several things: 1) Everyone comes away with a bird's-eye view of the project. 2) Everyone has input into the decision making process. When done properly no one feels out of the loop or under another's direct control. Some might call this slave work. It was the most unproductive time of my life. I spent an hour at the gym every day. Another hour eating lunch. Several hours surfing the internet. I was really bored sitting under the fluorescent lighting. It felt like a chore to write code. I can understand this attitude, but only up to a point - as a professional programmer you should be able to handle an assigned problem, figure it out and complete it. Instead of taking a long lunch take a few minutes to talk to your boss and voice your concerns. There's no excuse for half-assing it.

sherm8n 14y ago
I never said I was slacking off. In fact I got more done than anyone else on the team. It just felt like I was there only to work. I openly told everyone how I felt. That's when I decided I didn't want to be a professional programmer anymore. I talked to boss man and we mutually agreed that there was no way for me to be happy being a cog in the wheel.
- greghinch 14y ago
  You can be a "professional programmer" without being a "cog in the wheel" so directly. At the end of the day though, we're all cogs in the great machine of society. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you can be happy in your work
  - 14y ago

crazygringo 14y ago

> Some product manager/project manager/engineering manager already broke things up into user stories. Those user stories were further broken down into tasks. The tasks were then evenly divided amongst all the engineers. Each engineer didn’t have much of a say in it. Some might call this slave work. It was the most unproductive time of my life. This is one of the central dilemmas. To some people, it sucks -- they'd rather be programming rockstars, solving big problems in a way that's interesting to them. But in most of the real world, when you've got various stakeholders, a big project, lots of programmers whose work needs to be coordinated, with standards, and you can't get bogged down in n-to-n communication, this is just how it often has to be. Face it, most work in this world is "slave work", if that's how you want to call it (although I think that sounds rather insulting, when you think about how an unfulfilling office job you're free to quit is a million times better than actual slave work). And part of being a professional and mature programmer is realizing that, look, that's life. Sometimes you will get a job with a big say in how things are done, be super-independent, and it will be amazing. And sometimes you'll look back five years later and realize how it was a great learning experience for you, but you over-engineered it in a language or with a library that nobody could use afterwards, the whole system was replaced a year later, and you effectively wasted a lot of time and money of the company's. But at the same time, sometimes you do need rockstar programmers, who are talented enough to be given free reign, and they'll produce amazing results, as long as you don't micromanage them, or even barely manage them at all. Different projets are different. And different employees are different, too.

sherm8n 14y ago
But this is also hacker news -- where people don't settle on normal work. They're bold enough seek out only meaningful work. Either by starting their own company or joining one where they can make a huge impact without the typical fluff.
- onemorepassword 14y ago
  That doesn't mean they don't need structure in their daily work. If it wasn't for those kind of people, those who are neither entrepreneurs nor risk-averse worker drones, start-ups wouldn't be able to get any development staff because "less meaningful" usually pays better.

vacri 14y ago

This is highly contextual. If the US were to go to war with China, can anyone imagining the USN being more productive by saying to its sailors "Choose what you want to do and how you want to do it". Or on a smaller scale, professional sporting teams are much more effective when they're able to work to a common plan than just being a bunch of individual stars. The teams of individual stars may feel better because they each get to behave the way they want to, but overall they're less productive.

sherm8n 14y ago
I was speaking on behalf of personal productivity. Not team productivity. But there are definitely failures in professional sports too. When one player doesn't feel like he's not being included enough then communication breakdowns ensue.
- vacri 14y ago
  Much of this debate centres around whether you define 'being productive' as 'enjoying your work' or 'providing value'. I've certainly done work which was enjoyable and progressed quickly in it due to that fact, but in the overall scheme of things had negligible value for the company - that's not productive work, in the sense that most people would use.
  - sherm8n 14y ago
    Well, which is more important for you personally?
    - vacri 14y ago
      Having fun, obviously, but that's not the title of your article.
      - sherm8n 14y ago
        Neither is providing value.

jedmeyers 14y ago

When I hear stories about how someone successfully broke into the highly competitive <insert name> industry without any previous experience the quote from IT Crowd comes to mind: "When i started Renholm Industries I had just 2 things in my possession. A dream and 6 million pounds."

dschiptsov 14y ago

So, If I write a blog post about Framing Effect I will get lots of karma points too?)

sherm8n 14y ago
If you're not going to do it I will. People frame things in a different way to make it sound good all the time. "If you can crank out this code by EOD you're going to be a hero." versus "If you can crank out this code by EOD you still won't get a raise until next year."

kamakazizuru 14y ago

i think its a lot more to do with how you're told to do something. Additionally - this effect strongly varies from person to person - you might be better off titling your post "the pysch....impacts MY productivity". Working in the corporate world and on startups I've seen 3 types of people -all equally productive (mind you im not talking about how happy they were or how much fun they had - but since your point is productivity lets stick with that). Type 1 - entrpreneurs/intrapreneurs - these were the kinds who figured out their way within organizations to make their own niche - do whatever they truly felt like doing - and people typically let them do their own thing - because they delivered results. Of course they had to play the occasional bit of politics - but that is a part of any job or field, and you're never working in a vaccuum where this wont affect you. Type 2 - the 50/50s - these are people who can overtime become Type 1s - they like beign given some goal or target and a genera framework / project to work on - and then take it from there - checking in every now and then but mostly figuring their way out - and being allowed to figure their way out. Type 3 - the TaskRabbits - these are the folks that make up i'd say 60-80% of a company (depending on the industry and company culture it can vary.. a creative agency might have a lower percentage as opposed to say ..a bank). They work with strictly defined rules, have goals and targets defined for them. They usually (atleast the non mediocre ones) try had to get their goals met within that time frame - and wouldn´t be able to perform as well without having all that structure set up for them.

sherm8n 14y ago
The productivity impact is common enough where it didn't happen to only me.
- kamakazizuru 14y ago
  what?
  - sherm8n 14y ago
    The article resonated with a majority of those who read it.

cpressey 14y ago

If you're an engineer doing scrum, and the product owners are "telling you what to do", imo you're doing scrum wrong. Engineers should be involved in turning user stories into tasks. Even outside scrum, even in a traditional workplace, good managers don't "tell you what to do", because they know it's demotivational. Good managers explain to you why something needs to be done, that is, how it will benefit the enterprise, and let you do it.

sherm8n 14y ago
There's already a barrier if a manager has to tell you why something needs to be done. Usually that means you disagree. Naturally you don't want to do it anymore.
gruseom 14y ago
I was once in the room when one of the guys who wrote the book on Scrum described how many companies implement it. For those who don't know, Scrum says that team members should answer three questions each working day: 1. What have you done in the last day? 2. What are you doing today? 3. Are you experiencing any impediments to your work? Here is how he said these questions get implemented: 1. Did you do what I told you to yesterday? 2. Here's what I want you to do today. 3. Fuck the third question.
- sherm8n 14y ago
  Haha, so true. Especially when engineering managers are the scrum masters. They repurpose scrum to get status updates.

goldfeld 14y ago

Wow, psychological reactance.. there's a name for my illness! I thought I was the only freak who procrastinated immensely on a task just because someone ordered me to do it--especially if I was just about to do it anyways. Since I was a kid I would get bummed because if I did as ordered, the person would think I was only doing it because I was told, and self motivation has always been my biggest driver. Luckily I love my day job exactly for the lack of direct pressure from superiors.

sherm8n 14y ago
I thought it was only me too. I didn't understand why I hated being told what to do. I would purposely start new skunkworks projects instead of doing what I was supposed to.