When Smart People are Bad Employees(bhorowitz.com)
bhorowitz.com
When Smart People are Bad Employees
http://bhorowitz.com/2011/01/04/when-smart-people-are-bad-employees/
13 comments
With regards to "identifying the true power structure in a corporation" I've found this post from Rands on the "Culture Chart" to be helpful:
http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2008/10/12/the_culture...
The linked post is recycled as a chapter in his book Being Geek which I also find fabulously useful.
http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2008/10/12/the_culture...
The linked post is recycled as a chapter in his book Being Geek which I also find fabulously useful.
It is really sad how relevant and spot on your analysis is. I have moved from a small typical 10-15 guys IT shop to a well established national player in private banking and it is unbelievable how crippling and exhausting work is there - but I am working much fewer hours for a much better pay. The attrition of daily 9-5 not-project work, all "serious business" and no "play" is horrible for even a mildly creative person in a typical "knowledge work" position...
And I love how even big corporations are usually presented as if they were making clear cut, sensible and rational decisions based on facts. This could not further from the truth.
Too bad you only find out about that once you actually start working a real job - nobody gives you that truth in university.
And I love how even big corporations are usually presented as if they were making clear cut, sensible and rational decisions based on facts. This could not further from the truth.
Too bad you only find out about that once you actually start working a real job - nobody gives you that truth in university.
True... and consider your self lucky. Joining an operation like this at a later stage usually makes it easier to leave it behind when it is really due, compared to the situation where you accompany it from its beginning and wake up at some point in time entangled into "serious business" / "enterprise" setup ... unable to leave it behind due to some irrational connection to some people or some of your knowledge work done there... humans are so well suited to get exploited due to their irrational traits which the "enterprise" world still ignores still so profoundly.
(part 1 of my 2000 word essay) (sorry, my bad)
I know several people who have worked for 20 or more years at the same large organisation (government or corporate) and it blows my mind.
I have a friend who works at a local retail business whose boss is universally despised. Every time I think I have some sob story about the stupid architects and their dazzlingly defunct Ant file - I just need to swap stories with him to be quickly humbled and realise that perhaps things are not so bad for me after all. This boss of his is a guy who can throw a party, invite everyone and have an open bar (literally free as in beer)... and yet not have anyone turn up. This guy is such a colossal spoon that he can't even give away free alcohol. The mind boggles.
I really don't know how my friend and these 20 year veterans of corporate bungling manage to stick it out. I think that it is, in a way, a triumph of grit and determination and character under severe and prolonged stress. I think perhaps there is something in them that instead of getting more and more frustrated with each new offense to common sense, they are able to let last weeks insanity go. They've found some way to continually 'build a bridge and get over it', or perhaps they've seen so much insanity that they have built up an immunity to it, I don't know.
The sprinter may go faster, but the marathon runner goes further.
At the other end of the 'lifer' spectrum, are the people who stick it out because of fear. They take enormous abuse because they fear something worse than their current job. So they get bullied mercilessly. I knew one chap who was so scared of job interviews that he wouldn't even consider looking for work elsewhere. The people who live in constant fear are the one I pity the most. I genuinely feel bad for them.
----
But I suppose if I were to turn it around and look at us from their point of view I would see other things. Perhaps they would see the incredible psychological pressure of financial uncertainty. Being the first ones to get shot in a revolution, I mean recession. Not knowing where your next contract or next big customer is going to come from.
------
Specifically for the situation you mention, large financial institutions there are a number of things to master:
The first of these is regime change. Every couple of years (or perhaps more frequently) you will get new boss, or a new layer of bosses. They might for instance hire an ex-consultant at high level who 'mysteriously' somehow ends up bringing in his old firm to replace everyone or brings in a bunch of his old cronies to work under him, who bring in their buddies (etc). This can be quite a sudden thing, and you have to be genuinely nimble to survive (somehow running along on top of the avalanche).
The second thing is that many projects are going to fail, and even if you did the majority of the work and almost got it across the line all by yourself and the rest of the team of 20 did less combined than you, you can still end up getting blamed for failure. The blame game is very important and there are some strategies you can use to avoid being 'it', such as documenting the instructions you've been given, and not burning bridges, and cultivating friendships outside of your group (so that when (or preferably before) the project burns down, you teleport to safety in another project). Personally I don't do so well at this. I get far too attached to the imaginary win condition of the project succeeding, and so I force it across the line even if it means pissing off a lot of other people. If I could somehow find it within me to let projects fail I would probably have done better in banking.
(HN spat the dummy at my patented wall of text (tm), so I have to break this up into multiple posts, apologies in advance, hope you find it useful)
I know several people who have worked for 20 or more years at the same large organisation (government or corporate) and it blows my mind.
I have a friend who works at a local retail business whose boss is universally despised. Every time I think I have some sob story about the stupid architects and their dazzlingly defunct Ant file - I just need to swap stories with him to be quickly humbled and realise that perhaps things are not so bad for me after all. This boss of his is a guy who can throw a party, invite everyone and have an open bar (literally free as in beer)... and yet not have anyone turn up. This guy is such a colossal spoon that he can't even give away free alcohol. The mind boggles.
I really don't know how my friend and these 20 year veterans of corporate bungling manage to stick it out. I think that it is, in a way, a triumph of grit and determination and character under severe and prolonged stress. I think perhaps there is something in them that instead of getting more and more frustrated with each new offense to common sense, they are able to let last weeks insanity go. They've found some way to continually 'build a bridge and get over it', or perhaps they've seen so much insanity that they have built up an immunity to it, I don't know.
The sprinter may go faster, but the marathon runner goes further.
At the other end of the 'lifer' spectrum, are the people who stick it out because of fear. They take enormous abuse because they fear something worse than their current job. So they get bullied mercilessly. I knew one chap who was so scared of job interviews that he wouldn't even consider looking for work elsewhere. The people who live in constant fear are the one I pity the most. I genuinely feel bad for them.
----
But I suppose if I were to turn it around and look at us from their point of view I would see other things. Perhaps they would see the incredible psychological pressure of financial uncertainty. Being the first ones to get shot in a revolution, I mean recession. Not knowing where your next contract or next big customer is going to come from.
------
Specifically for the situation you mention, large financial institutions there are a number of things to master:
The first of these is regime change. Every couple of years (or perhaps more frequently) you will get new boss, or a new layer of bosses. They might for instance hire an ex-consultant at high level who 'mysteriously' somehow ends up bringing in his old firm to replace everyone or brings in a bunch of his old cronies to work under him, who bring in their buddies (etc). This can be quite a sudden thing, and you have to be genuinely nimble to survive (somehow running along on top of the avalanche).
The second thing is that many projects are going to fail, and even if you did the majority of the work and almost got it across the line all by yourself and the rest of the team of 20 did less combined than you, you can still end up getting blamed for failure. The blame game is very important and there are some strategies you can use to avoid being 'it', such as documenting the instructions you've been given, and not burning bridges, and cultivating friendships outside of your group (so that when (or preferably before) the project burns down, you teleport to safety in another project). Personally I don't do so well at this. I get far too attached to the imaginary win condition of the project succeeding, and so I force it across the line even if it means pissing off a lot of other people. If I could somehow find it within me to let projects fail I would probably have done better in banking.
(HN spat the dummy at my patented wall of text (tm), so I have to break this up into multiple posts, apologies in advance, hope you find it useful)
(this is part 2, should have posted it first, D'oh!)
Large organizations can breed certain kinds of psychotic behaviour, such as out and out lying. Your boss (or someone else with power) may order you to do one thing, and then next week demand to know why you haven't done some other thing. You say "because you told me to do X" and they tell you they never said such a thing. Never ever ever trust that person again. Never leave yourself vulnerable. Never take anything they say at face value. But... here's the rub, they are in a position of power, so don't piss them off. I think there's an old saying - something about being wise as serpents yet gentle as doves, and that definitely applies here. As a non-pyschotic behaviour, this might arise because there are multiple people giving contradictory orders, I believe there are other old saying about the difficulty of pleasing all the people all of the time.
One of the reasons that banking projects frequently fail, and this boggles the mind, is that, no matter how important your project is to the organization, within the company there are people who are actively trying to kill your project. They will oppose you at every turn, they will fight you tooth and nail, they will (seemingly arbitrarily) deny you of perfectly reasonable requests for resources.
As an aside: working at large banks is the reason I bought my own white board marker, it lives in my bag, and I take it home with me every night.
So I considered this behaviour. Now I choose to believe that for most people they don't get up every morning, look themselves in the mirror and ask themselves how they can do the most damage to the company they work for, how they can be the most evil, how they can maximise suffering in the world. Most people aren't like that. So why then, are all these people trying to kill my projects? After a long period of contemplation I came to the understanding that the reason they act that way is usually because the company incentivises them to do so. Their role, for instance, may be to minimise costs. Projects are a cost. Therefore your project is directly in their gun-sights. This is just one example, large corporations are really good at creating and incentivising infighting. They might decide to engage in a silo based re-org. And then afterwards, none of the silos want to pay for essential projects, because they hope that someone else will be forced to stump up the bill. Now the organization didn't set out to create that outcome, but it is just basic game theory (prisoner's dilemma) that defecting is the best (short term) outcome for individuals (whereas co-operation is the best outcome for groups).
Make friends with the people who have good people skills, they will protect you in times of trouble. It doesn't matter how crap the business analysts are (and most are worse than useless) if you can be bothered to put in a minimal amount of effort to be nice to them, and they like you, you can often get enough warning to dodge a bullet or to get passed a teleport token at the last minute.
You'll run across some people who are genuinely bad at their jobs. (see also business analysts (caveat: a good business analyst is worth their weight in gold, treat them with the same care and respect you would a national treasure)) Try not to make them look bad. At one large bank I ran into a DBA and she was complaining that the queries were running too slowly. So I (tongue firmly in cheek) suggested that if all the data was bought into one really huge table the query would run really fast because there wouldn't be any joins... and she thought this was great advice. I freaked out. I ended up begging her not to do this. It turns out she'd never even heard of normalisation because it was her first job as a DBA and she'd never been given any training. //twitch// Don't make the little people look bad if you can avoid it. Don't stomp on the ants.
Things move at a certain pace, try not to get impatient. Try to find something to do that looks like work, that you can justify as work but that you enjoy doing. I always like doing design and testing, I give my code an absolute beating before I let anyone else near it, no abuse they throw at it will come close to the torture I put it through. Unfortunately, in the long run this means I end up finishing much faster than most of my co-workers (whoops). So I often end up helping out other programmers. That might be debugging or if they're stuck on some task that they hate (examples: UI or persistence) then I ask them what they like doing, and if I have something like that on my task list I can swap with them.
For the keeping yourself busy: develop an appreciation for doing the impossible, whether by sneaky solutions, your astounding application of some obscure API or comp-sci algorithm, or just outright cheating. Volunteer for stuff. Banks have lots of old code that needs the occassional fix. Put your hand up even if the code that needs fixing is in some obsolete dead language that nobody speaks anymore (exception: Cobol, just don't go there. Besides, the old timers need the work anyway). Document your achievements and then squirrel away the document. At your annual performance review print them all out and walk into your bosses office with a dead tree's worth of work you did over and above the call of duty.
If you're good at fixing bugs, keep track of how many you fixed compared to everyone else. Same goes for anything else you are really good at that can be tracked. If you think you're really good at something, and it turns out there is someone out there who is better than you, make friends with them and (subtly) get mentoring from them. Yes, they may be hyper-intelligent, but often it will turn out that they just know more tricks than you.
Programming is fundamentally both a social phenomenon and simultaneously a solo activity. Your non-programmer boss is never really going to appreciate your amazing algorithms, because he has no baseline to compare it to. Talking to other programmers and swapping war stories is really important to their and your motivation. Most programmers who don't get this are starved of attention and feel unloved. You need to realise that the attention you crave comes not from above, but from your peers, and the best praise is from programmers that are better than you.
Most importantly about making friends with programmers that are better than you, is that maybe at some point you'll get the opportunity to work on a startup as a low digit employee, because they know you, they know they can trust you, and they know you get things done.
Large organizations can breed certain kinds of psychotic behaviour, such as out and out lying. Your boss (or someone else with power) may order you to do one thing, and then next week demand to know why you haven't done some other thing. You say "because you told me to do X" and they tell you they never said such a thing. Never ever ever trust that person again. Never leave yourself vulnerable. Never take anything they say at face value. But... here's the rub, they are in a position of power, so don't piss them off. I think there's an old saying - something about being wise as serpents yet gentle as doves, and that definitely applies here. As a non-pyschotic behaviour, this might arise because there are multiple people giving contradictory orders, I believe there are other old saying about the difficulty of pleasing all the people all of the time.
One of the reasons that banking projects frequently fail, and this boggles the mind, is that, no matter how important your project is to the organization, within the company there are people who are actively trying to kill your project. They will oppose you at every turn, they will fight you tooth and nail, they will (seemingly arbitrarily) deny you of perfectly reasonable requests for resources.
As an aside: working at large banks is the reason I bought my own white board marker, it lives in my bag, and I take it home with me every night.
So I considered this behaviour. Now I choose to believe that for most people they don't get up every morning, look themselves in the mirror and ask themselves how they can do the most damage to the company they work for, how they can be the most evil, how they can maximise suffering in the world. Most people aren't like that. So why then, are all these people trying to kill my projects? After a long period of contemplation I came to the understanding that the reason they act that way is usually because the company incentivises them to do so. Their role, for instance, may be to minimise costs. Projects are a cost. Therefore your project is directly in their gun-sights. This is just one example, large corporations are really good at creating and incentivising infighting. They might decide to engage in a silo based re-org. And then afterwards, none of the silos want to pay for essential projects, because they hope that someone else will be forced to stump up the bill. Now the organization didn't set out to create that outcome, but it is just basic game theory (prisoner's dilemma) that defecting is the best (short term) outcome for individuals (whereas co-operation is the best outcome for groups).
Make friends with the people who have good people skills, they will protect you in times of trouble. It doesn't matter how crap the business analysts are (and most are worse than useless) if you can be bothered to put in a minimal amount of effort to be nice to them, and they like you, you can often get enough warning to dodge a bullet or to get passed a teleport token at the last minute.
You'll run across some people who are genuinely bad at their jobs. (see also business analysts (caveat: a good business analyst is worth their weight in gold, treat them with the same care and respect you would a national treasure)) Try not to make them look bad. At one large bank I ran into a DBA and she was complaining that the queries were running too slowly. So I (tongue firmly in cheek) suggested that if all the data was bought into one really huge table the query would run really fast because there wouldn't be any joins... and she thought this was great advice. I freaked out. I ended up begging her not to do this. It turns out she'd never even heard of normalisation because it was her first job as a DBA and she'd never been given any training. //twitch// Don't make the little people look bad if you can avoid it. Don't stomp on the ants.
Things move at a certain pace, try not to get impatient. Try to find something to do that looks like work, that you can justify as work but that you enjoy doing. I always like doing design and testing, I give my code an absolute beating before I let anyone else near it, no abuse they throw at it will come close to the torture I put it through. Unfortunately, in the long run this means I end up finishing much faster than most of my co-workers (whoops). So I often end up helping out other programmers. That might be debugging or if they're stuck on some task that they hate (examples: UI or persistence) then I ask them what they like doing, and if I have something like that on my task list I can swap with them.
For the keeping yourself busy: develop an appreciation for doing the impossible, whether by sneaky solutions, your astounding application of some obscure API or comp-sci algorithm, or just outright cheating. Volunteer for stuff. Banks have lots of old code that needs the occassional fix. Put your hand up even if the code that needs fixing is in some obsolete dead language that nobody speaks anymore (exception: Cobol, just don't go there. Besides, the old timers need the work anyway). Document your achievements and then squirrel away the document. At your annual performance review print them all out and walk into your bosses office with a dead tree's worth of work you did over and above the call of duty.
If you're good at fixing bugs, keep track of how many you fixed compared to everyone else. Same goes for anything else you are really good at that can be tracked. If you think you're really good at something, and it turns out there is someone out there who is better than you, make friends with them and (subtly) get mentoring from them. Yes, they may be hyper-intelligent, but often it will turn out that they just know more tricks than you.
Programming is fundamentally both a social phenomenon and simultaneously a solo activity. Your non-programmer boss is never really going to appreciate your amazing algorithms, because he has no baseline to compare it to. Talking to other programmers and swapping war stories is really important to their and your motivation. Most programmers who don't get this are starved of attention and feel unloved. You need to realise that the attention you crave comes not from above, but from your peers, and the best praise is from programmers that are better than you.
Most importantly about making friends with programmers that are better than you, is that maybe at some point you'll get the opportunity to work on a startup as a low digit employee, because they know you, they know they can trust you, and they know you get things done.
Great and valuable read! Is that from your blog or did you write a book? Would love to see more!
Now here is where that last part is really funny in my situation: most everyone of my peers could easily be my mom or dad, they are all way older than me, got family and kids, so there are no after work activities at all, there is no typical coffee room or balcony for smokers where you would "naturally" meet and talk to people, we do deal with different departments as our customers but 95% of them are in that "way older" group too.
Don't get me wrong, I am not one of those young whippersnappers ragging on "old people"; far from it, I am well approaching my 30s faster than I shall like and there are "older than me" people who can really open your eyes with some fascinating stories or experiences! I just find them here all unnaturally passionless, whining and downright boring somehow... not a lot of professional expertise where you could actually LEARN something. More times than not, it is me (from the outside) giving them an idea or suggestion based on technical knowledge. And I have just been here for maybe 3 or 4 years now... most everyone else has been here 10-20+ years.
And I'm the "expert" in my small little local kingdom so, sadly, what I say just goes and there really honestly is practically no one I could get mentoring from, even I don't consider myself that "good" at all, I still am the go-to guy and have always been that everywhere I worked at.
I know my weakness, I know I don't really excel and come up with incredibly creative, sweet solutions.. I guess I am just good enough to know how bad I am and still manage to do well enough.
Now here is where that last part is really funny in my situation: most everyone of my peers could easily be my mom or dad, they are all way older than me, got family and kids, so there are no after work activities at all, there is no typical coffee room or balcony for smokers where you would "naturally" meet and talk to people, we do deal with different departments as our customers but 95% of them are in that "way older" group too.
Don't get me wrong, I am not one of those young whippersnappers ragging on "old people"; far from it, I am well approaching my 30s faster than I shall like and there are "older than me" people who can really open your eyes with some fascinating stories or experiences! I just find them here all unnaturally passionless, whining and downright boring somehow... not a lot of professional expertise where you could actually LEARN something. More times than not, it is me (from the outside) giving them an idea or suggestion based on technical knowledge. And I have just been here for maybe 3 or 4 years now... most everyone else has been here 10-20+ years.
And I'm the "expert" in my small little local kingdom so, sadly, what I say just goes and there really honestly is practically no one I could get mentoring from, even I don't consider myself that "good" at all, I still am the go-to guy and have always been that everywhere I worked at.
I know my weakness, I know I don't really excel and come up with incredibly creative, sweet solutions.. I guess I am just good enough to know how bad I am and still manage to do well enough.
"The Heretic: Specifically, he builds his case that the company is hopeless and run by a bunch of morons."
Statistically speaking, the employee is probably right. But at most companies, building a case for this is an exercise in tautology. Maybe take him seriously and at least make it look like you are being proactive about his issues.
"The Flake: ... he completed the project in 72 hours." He did two weeks of coding in 3 days. If he doesn't show up for the next two weeks, and the product had no major flaws, who cares?
Drug addiction and mental disorder are a separate issue, in my opinion. If he is really as good as it seemed, it would have behooved the employer to get him into rehab/psychological treatment.
"The Jerk: ...sounds like House M.D." WHY did you put someone with no people skills in a management position? (Senior management to boot). It makes very little sense. Someone who is a jerk isn't going to be good at managing people. A jerk could be a great individual contributor, as long as the jerk does his work correctly.
I feel like it is more about making the right concessions given the individual, and making sure you don't put people into positions where their faults are amplified.
An analogy to this post would be finding that a puzzle piece doesn't go where you want to put it, and therefore declaring that it is a bad puzzle piece (even though it fits somewhere else just fine).
Statistically speaking, the employee is probably right. But at most companies, building a case for this is an exercise in tautology. Maybe take him seriously and at least make it look like you are being proactive about his issues.
"The Flake: ... he completed the project in 72 hours." He did two weeks of coding in 3 days. If he doesn't show up for the next two weeks, and the product had no major flaws, who cares?
Drug addiction and mental disorder are a separate issue, in my opinion. If he is really as good as it seemed, it would have behooved the employer to get him into rehab/psychological treatment.
"The Jerk: ...sounds like House M.D." WHY did you put someone with no people skills in a management position? (Senior management to boot). It makes very little sense. Someone who is a jerk isn't going to be good at managing people. A jerk could be a great individual contributor, as long as the jerk does his work correctly.
I feel like it is more about making the right concessions given the individual, and making sure you don't put people into positions where their faults are amplified.
An analogy to this post would be finding that a puzzle piece doesn't go where you want to put it, and therefore declaring that it is a bad puzzle piece (even though it fits somewhere else just fine).
You know, I bet the cocaine fiend guy wasn't even on cocaine. How would the company know this? If they had insurance coverage and he went into rehab it would be seriously violation of medical privacy for this to be revealed to the company. If he did go into rehab, the article author would have mentioned it given that he claims to know all about the guy's cocaine habit as well as his mental health history, which he is now disclosing in public. Boy I would hate to have a former employer get on the internet and post articles about how they think I have a cocaine addiction. I suspect it was all speculation, and probably wrong. Though when cornered, to save face, the author would likely deny all this and claim to have proof.
I took that one a bit personally myself as I could relate to it. Let me tell you how that went down with me. Went to work for a company, gave it my all. Did in 3 days what took other employees six months, and with fewer bugs and faster performance. The company rode me hard, demanded I worked more and more. Soon I was responsible for nearly all the critical projects. I was working 16 hours a day 7 days a week. My boss refused to let me even take Sundays off because of the crisis. Yet my salary was based on 40 hrs a week, no overtime, so when I figured my effective hourly rate if I was a hourly worker, it was less than I could make in fast food. Finally after a year of this I cracked and got very sick, suffering total exhaustion. I could not come in to work. The work then fired me. I later hear them tell people they suspected I had a drug problem.
So yeah, maybe I was even the guy he is talking about. Who knows. There were no drugs though.
That was the first couple jobs out of college. After that I wised up and started setting boundaries. But eventually I had to strike out on my own because too many companies will take advantage of diligent workers.
Looking back at it all I see it like a rich guy that buys an expensive race horse and then runs the horse in every race he can find without rests between until the race horse collapses, and then he sends the horse off to the glue factory with no loyalty to what the horse won him. Another example is the spoiled trust fund kid that buys a ferrari and drives it around and never changes the oil and after a year the engine freezes up, a total loss. This is just stupidity and failure to manage your investment properly. There are a lot of managers out there like this. Any company that routinely requires overtime is a company that has failed and is run by incompetent management. When the overtime is required of employees who don't even get paid overtime it makes the whole thing just that more abusive and exploitative. This all is especially absurd for those of us that produce at 10-30 times the rate and quality of the average developers. I always would find it infuriating to be told I must work 112 hours in a week during which I would write some 8,500 lines of complex code and there is another guy paid the same who writes 13 lines in the same week and goes home after 40 hours because his contributions aren't all that important anyway so no point in keeping him late.
Anyone in this situation do as I did. Leave and start your own company.
I took that one a bit personally myself as I could relate to it. Let me tell you how that went down with me. Went to work for a company, gave it my all. Did in 3 days what took other employees six months, and with fewer bugs and faster performance. The company rode me hard, demanded I worked more and more. Soon I was responsible for nearly all the critical projects. I was working 16 hours a day 7 days a week. My boss refused to let me even take Sundays off because of the crisis. Yet my salary was based on 40 hrs a week, no overtime, so when I figured my effective hourly rate if I was a hourly worker, it was less than I could make in fast food. Finally after a year of this I cracked and got very sick, suffering total exhaustion. I could not come in to work. The work then fired me. I later hear them tell people they suspected I had a drug problem.
So yeah, maybe I was even the guy he is talking about. Who knows. There were no drugs though.
That was the first couple jobs out of college. After that I wised up and started setting boundaries. But eventually I had to strike out on my own because too many companies will take advantage of diligent workers.
Looking back at it all I see it like a rich guy that buys an expensive race horse and then runs the horse in every race he can find without rests between until the race horse collapses, and then he sends the horse off to the glue factory with no loyalty to what the horse won him. Another example is the spoiled trust fund kid that buys a ferrari and drives it around and never changes the oil and after a year the engine freezes up, a total loss. This is just stupidity and failure to manage your investment properly. There are a lot of managers out there like this. Any company that routinely requires overtime is a company that has failed and is run by incompetent management. When the overtime is required of employees who don't even get paid overtime it makes the whole thing just that more abusive and exploitative. This all is especially absurd for those of us that produce at 10-30 times the rate and quality of the average developers. I always would find it infuriating to be told I must work 112 hours in a week during which I would write some 8,500 lines of complex code and there is another guy paid the same who writes 13 lines in the same week and goes home after 40 hours because his contributions aren't all that important anyway so no point in keeping him late.
Anyone in this situation do as I did. Leave and start your own company.
Sounds like you established the baseline of "3 days what took other employees six months". Work is not a sprint, it's a marathon and you have to know how to pace yourself.
I once had an employer who seemed (to me) to prefer people who were (in my opinion) pretty inappropriate for their jobs because they had so little ability to do them. I found it very difficult to understand at the time, because I generally like to have people around who are better than me at most things, so I can concentrate on what I do best.
It was interesting over the years, though, to see what happened. That particular employer was a great believer that anyone can learn anything, and she was incredibly patient with some people who really were not gifted at all in their area of work.
Above all she valued loyalty (and in key areas, such as finance, she preferred absolute stupidity). I learned a lot from her. I saw that most of the clever people who were around left, often when they were most needed, whereas the slower, more loyal people were still there getting the job done. I also learned that loyalty and commitment are more valuable than brilliance. I saw that she liked stupid people in sensitive areas because then they couldn't mess up in any serious way. They made lots of small mistakes but they didn't have the ability to make big mistakes and they always asked whenever they didn't understand what they were doing.
Personally I think there is a balance here. I would find it hard to go as far as she did, but it certainly caused me to look at people decisions in a different way, which I would never have come up with if I hadn't seen her in action.
It was interesting over the years, though, to see what happened. That particular employer was a great believer that anyone can learn anything, and she was incredibly patient with some people who really were not gifted at all in their area of work.
Above all she valued loyalty (and in key areas, such as finance, she preferred absolute stupidity). I learned a lot from her. I saw that most of the clever people who were around left, often when they were most needed, whereas the slower, more loyal people were still there getting the job done. I also learned that loyalty and commitment are more valuable than brilliance. I saw that she liked stupid people in sensitive areas because then they couldn't mess up in any serious way. They made lots of small mistakes but they didn't have the ability to make big mistakes and they always asked whenever they didn't understand what they were doing.
Personally I think there is a balance here. I would find it hard to go as far as she did, but it certainly caused me to look at people decisions in a different way, which I would never have come up with if I hadn't seen her in action.
This is very true. I've seen it at all levels of BigCo.
Loyalty is the single most important quality in a bigCo and it works (unfortunately).
Loyalty is the single most important quality in a bigCo and it works (unfortunately).
The reasons I won't be an exec at a bigCo-
- I don't watch or care to talk sports. - I don't / won't hunt wildlife. - I don't discuss female anatomy freely.
I live in Houston, so most big employers are energy related. It is still somewhat of a good ol boy network and even though I'm now at a small company I see all 3 in equal parts quite often.
- I don't watch or care to talk sports. - I don't / won't hunt wildlife. - I don't discuss female anatomy freely.
I live in Houston, so most big employers are energy related. It is still somewhat of a good ol boy network and even though I'm now at a small company I see all 3 in equal parts quite often.
Seriously? If you really believe this bullshit, surely you can pull together a decent round of golf since apparently it's the only thing standing between you and your big promotion... Not to get meta, but why do you have 9 upvotes?
>The reasons I won't be an exec at a bigCo-
..in Texas
..in Texas
I've worked in Texas oil, have many friends who still do, and have even visited extensively with a very successful oil exec in Houston...
S_A_P's generalizations aren't fair at all.
That exec I met had a Harvard MBA, 20 years experience at his company (where he started out entry-level), extensive market knowledge/expertise, integrity, strong character, etc. Qualities that actually matter when billions of dollars are on the line.
Not sure why I even bothered to chime in.
S_A_P's generalizations aren't fair at all.
That exec I met had a Harvard MBA, 20 years experience at his company (where he started out entry-level), extensive market knowledge/expertise, integrity, strong character, etc. Qualities that actually matter when billions of dollars are on the line.
Not sure why I even bothered to chime in.
...also learned that loyalty and commitment are more valuable than brilliance
While this was true in your circumstances, and some degree of loyalty and commitment are important, I don't agree that they are "more valueable" in general. For example for technical jobs, not everyone can learn them (or at least be good at them). It seems important to have people in the right places, that have already some vision and experience in their area.
While this was true in your circumstances, and some degree of loyalty and commitment are important, I don't agree that they are "more valueable" in general. For example for technical jobs, not everyone can learn them (or at least be good at them). It seems important to have people in the right places, that have already some vision and experience in their area.
There's a phrase that goes something along the lines of, "The worst employees are the most loyal." While it's interesting to see how things worked out with that employer, I can't help but wonder whether it was really intentional, or whether she was as bad as hiring people as they were at doing their jobs.
There is another important example that the author didn't mention. The inquisitor. Anyone who's been in the workforce long enough knows the guy who can't ever accept the directions he gets without questioning every aspect of the decision. Also, this person tends to have a problem with authority and will always test his or her boundaries. That said they tend to be among the most creative thinkers in the entire company and for that reason they can be an important member of the staff.
I would consider that a valuable trait, especially if the employee could communicate potential snags he sees. He is likely to be able to handle larger or longer projects that require planning, and he is also more likely to have trouble with frequent small mundane projects. There are many people to fill the later.
Many managers want employees to fit an exact role, even if they have a square peg and a round hole. One of the best managers I had the pleasure of working with was a former private investigator. He would see the trait of the employee that is causing friction, see how it could be used as an asset, and adapt the position or funnel the right work to that employee. I now manage in this way, myself.
Many managers want employees to fit an exact role, even if they have a square peg and a round hole. One of the best managers I had the pleasure of working with was a former private investigator. He would see the trait of the employee that is causing friction, see how it could be used as an asset, and adapt the position or funnel the right work to that employee. I now manage in this way, myself.
I'd say many more people have the opposite problem, where they won't take the initiative to clarify stuff they don't understand, either because they don't anticipate miscommunications, don't care, or are too intimidated.
This kind of guy usually needs to lead or he is probably smarter than everyone else in the room.
Quite so. The project manager comes to you with an underoptimized set of step-by-step instructions; you help him to give you a minimal set of defensible business goals instead.
Next step: meet those goals in the most effective way you know how.
Next step: meet those goals in the most effective way you know how.
Heh. I know that type well. A guy that I had hired as an intern many years ago was that type - to such a degree that once when asked to erect a shelf that we got for the IT lab was asking why it was using the type of screws that it came with and stopping and pondering this for several minutes.
He is now a senior sys ad in the valley - and very very smart - but his challenges to authority and propensity to ask questions just to be obtuse grew tiresome.
He is now a senior sys ad in the valley - and very very smart - but his challenges to authority and propensity to ask questions just to be obtuse grew tiresome.
Haha, I used to be an employee like that. You know those methodologies like DDD, that say: 'understand the business problem before coding'. Well when I was doing it managers would go crazy and say I should not create confusion, but start working. Once to find 6 months later that a 15 men team hasn't done anything useful ... In all cases I can remember thinking and asking at the beginning was/would have been worth the time.
The difference here was that the guy liked to try to be specifically obtuse and difficult.
It wasn't a matter of thinking through a problem before hand - it was an exercise in proving/looking smart.
Spending 5+ minutes consternating over the type of screws that came with the shelf is not "thinking ahead" :)
It wasn't a matter of thinking through a problem before hand - it was an exercise in proving/looking smart.
Spending 5+ minutes consternating over the type of screws that came with the shelf is not "thinking ahead" :)
Sounds like he was a conscientious designer with an intuition for usability. I can relate to him, I also analyze screws and designs of trivial things. Is this really the optimal screw for this sort of task?
If you didn't want this level of analysis, why the hell would you take a $150/hr engineer and have him screwing in shelves rather than call in the $12/hr maintenance man?
I know the answer already. Your company thinks it is saving money by not having janitorial or secretarial staff and just have the engineers do all the menial cleaning and shelving tasks.
If you didn't want this level of analysis, why the hell would you take a $150/hr engineer and have him screwing in shelves rather than call in the $12/hr maintenance man?
I know the answer already. Your company thinks it is saving money by not having janitorial or secretarial staff and just have the engineers do all the menial cleaning and shelving tasks.
> If you didn't want this level of analysis, why the hell would you take a $150/hr engineer and have him screwing in shelves rather than call in the $12/hr maintenance man?
At the time of the incident with the screws, the guy was an intern...
At the time of the incident with the screws, the guy was an intern...
I think this entry could just as easily be renamed "When People are Bad Employees." I've encountered people that fit these profiles and wouldn't classify them as particularly clever.
This is interesting. I just finished listening to an old episode of This American Life about this same subject.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/370/r... (it's the prologue if you want to listen)
the story was about an experiment that was done to test the effects of these same three personality types on a working environment (although they called the flake the slacker, and the heretic was a bit different ,as the depressive)
To do this they repeatedly inserted an actor who would display one of these behaviors into a working group and study the outcome - and groups with any kind of disruptive co worker ended up doing considerably worse on their projects. Also interesting, the other members of the group took on the traits of the actor... When he was acting a jerk, the others in the group became rude not only to the jerk but to each other. When he was the slacker, everyone else started slacking more also. And when he was the depressive everyone else became more depressed.
The only time the actor did not effect the groups performance was in one team where a particularly charismatic member was able to diffuse all situations where he was being a jerk.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/370/r... (it's the prologue if you want to listen)
the story was about an experiment that was done to test the effects of these same three personality types on a working environment (although they called the flake the slacker, and the heretic was a bit different ,as the depressive)
To do this they repeatedly inserted an actor who would display one of these behaviors into a working group and study the outcome - and groups with any kind of disruptive co worker ended up doing considerably worse on their projects. Also interesting, the other members of the group took on the traits of the actor... When he was acting a jerk, the others in the group became rude not only to the jerk but to each other. When he was the slacker, everyone else started slacking more also. And when he was the depressive everyone else became more depressed.
The only time the actor did not effect the groups performance was in one team where a particularly charismatic member was able to diffuse all situations where he was being a jerk.
This post was great.. when I read it 2 months ago
What do you mean? You think it should not be mentioned ever again?
I wish there were a way to bring topics back and still retain the link to the previous discussion. Maybe years later, there would be new insight into this topic, but for a lot of stuff, the comments of 2 months ago are just as valid as anything you'd say today.
searchyc is great, but no one really finds new comments buried on old posts now. For topics which have lasting value (vs "what will apple release tomorrow"), some kind of curated repository of interesting articles would be great.
searchyc is great, but no one really finds new comments buried on old posts now. For topics which have lasting value (vs "what will apple release tomorrow"), some kind of curated repository of interesting articles would be great.
Would it make sense for HN to do something like the following?
Pull link out of submission and check database to see if that link has already been submitted. If it has, either automatically insert a comment containing links to the older discussion(s) OR append those links to the post itself?
It's going to be fairly brittle, because you're only comparing the addresses and not the values stored, but it seems like it wouldn't need too much work. Anyone have any thoughts?
Pull link out of submission and check database to see if that link has already been submitted. If it has, either automatically insert a comment containing links to the older discussion(s) OR append those links to the post itself?
It's going to be fairly brittle, because you're only comparing the addresses and not the values stored, but it seems like it wouldn't need too much work. Anyone have any thoughts?
I think he's indicating that the value of the information has decayed over time - it seems that less and less people are employees now, as the robots have been steadily taking over.
Here's the previous conversation about this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2065416
This was becoming way too Déjà vu for me. I thought I was loosing it. Thanks for the link to the previous conversation.
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(c) is the 'problem'. Smart people aren't always good sales people. And it is fundamentally a sales problem, where they need to identify the right people to make the change, and then sell them on the idea (by convincing them they will save money, and that it was their idea in the first place). Now the geeks with low social skills is a common cliché, lets ignore that tired and played out meme...
>>I used to be in sales . I have made millions for companies. Sales was easy since I was helping people with pain they already knew and were looking to remove it. I also wanted them to feel good about the company so they would tell all their friends. Referral are sweet!
It always frustrated me that I could not sell management many of my ideas. Part of the problem was they saw no problem. Lying to customers. No problem. Screwing up services. No problem. Etc.
I got tired of it. That is why I now program.
>>I used to be in sales . I have made millions for companies. Sales was easy since I was helping people with pain they already knew and were looking to remove it. I also wanted them to feel good about the company so they would tell all their friends. Referral are sweet!
It always frustrated me that I could not sell management many of my ideas. Part of the problem was they saw no problem. Lying to customers. No problem. Screwing up services. No problem. Etc.
I got tired of it. That is why I now program.
"Being effective in a company also means working hard, being reliable, and being an excellent member of the team."
Translation: keep your head down, don't rock the boat and don't have any passion for what you do. This is the recipe for 'success' (i.e. continued employment) at big companies.
"As a result, a company needs lots of smart, super engaged employees who can identify its particular weaknesses and help it improve them. However, sometimes really smart employees develop agendas other than improving the company."
No. These so called 'agendas' don't just mysteriously appear. What happens is that the big company goes to great lengths to hire smart people, and then even greater lengths to ignore them. At this point, the smart employee has two options (1) stay or (2) leave.
From sarahmccrum's comment in this thread: "I saw that most of the clever people who were around left, often when they were most needed"
That's the second scenario, the smart person says "screw it" and leaves. Sometimes that is the most mature decision. If some behaviour that is bad for the company is deeply engrained, is it really worth the futile tilting at windmills quest to get it changed? Perhaps they have gone on such crusades before only to get burnt (at the stake).
In the first scenario, where they stay, what are they going to do? They can (a) decide to ignore the thing that is bad for the company, (b) decide to keep banging their head against the wall in the same way, (c) escalate - by trying to change the way that they communicate the seriousness of the problem or the audience (brass didn't listen, maybe the grass(roots) will?).
(a) shows low levels of motivation or commitment to the company (but hey, apparently that is a good thing so long as you hide it (sarcasm)), additionally, it can be genuinely difficult for smart people to ignore situations that are sub-optimal. If you're a programmer and your job basically boils down to 'fix things' ... it is very hard to draw the line and not try to fix a broken process. It is that itch that needs to be scratched.
(b) is just going to continue to get them ignored, or perhaps labelled as 'not a team player'. Way to go corporate culture. Eventually they'll get fired or tired and switch to a different strategy.
(c) is the 'problem'. Smart people aren't always good sales people. And it is fundamentally a sales problem, where they need to identify the right people to make the change, and then sell them on the idea (by convincing them they will save money, and that it was their idea in the first place). Now the geeks with low social skills is a common cliché, lets ignore that tired and played out meme...
...consider if you will the problem of identifying exactly who the people are to get on board with the change. Power flows in strange ways in big companies, it isn't always just a linear thing directly from the top to the bottom. In my experience it is almost never linear.
Identifying the true power structure in a corporation (for a particular change that is required) is enormously difficult. Moreover, the underlying power structure can change depending on what the problem is, or over time, or any of many different variables can effect what the true power structure is on day X for problem Y. Becoming a better communicator is practically trivial compared to the problem of identifying the correct power structure to address the problem.
So you might think the moral of the story is that geeks need to become better communicators. But NO! Certainly not! Becoming a better communicator is the path to either management or architecture, neither of which is a fate that I would wish on anybody.
For the smart person stuck in a stupid situation, the smart thing is just to move on. It doesn't matter that you are not loyal to the company, you gave it a good shot. Try to leave on good terms (itself a marketing problem (blah blah professional development etc)). Loyalty doesn't matter, because the company has zero loyalty to you. And true loyalty must be bi-directional.