10 ms·

The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

294 points by jpn 2y ago

DylanDmitri 2y ago
Breaks down to: (1) build trust with your people, then (2) give them autonomy to guide their own work. The inverse of "Seeing Like a State".
- mlhpdx 2y ago
  That’s the magic. I’m not sure why so many fight this simple, reliable approach.
seporterfield 2y ago
Real
jasonlotito 2y ago
This is from part 2, but wow... > Do not use mushy words like ... ownership, If you think ownership is just mushy words, you've never given someone ownership. Giving someone ownership isn't just mush. It's real, and can have real impact. Of course, this also literally means giving them some actual, real, legal ownership in that project and it's results. This is especially hypocritical when paired with an "actual example" > The intended outcome is to increase the rate at which we create value for customers, facilitate easier troubleshooting, decrease downtime, enable more developers to work across different code bases seamlessly and improve developer morale. Talk about mush. That's just one part of a completely mushy "behavioral statement" that just reeks of insincerity and mush. This is also covered under specifics, and the entire thing lacks ANY specifics. Give them ownership. Real ownership, not this fake "ownership" that clearly comes from someone who doesn't know what the word means. Give them power to drive direction and results, and reward them for that. There are more things that could be said about this, but honestly, reading that, it just screamed hypocrisy.
- xyzelement 2y ago
  I disagree with you. I spent most of my career in a great company that is privately owned (famous billionaire.) The company pays extremely well but does not provide any sort of "legal ownership" as you describe. Still, I felt massive ownership of stuff I've .. well .. "owned" and I benefited financially and emotionally from it. I am no longer at the company but I have pride in what I've built there and the fact that it still exists and generates tremendous value. On the financial side of things, people (leadership) think of certain people as owning/driving certain things, because we do. So even though I am not the legal owner of platform X, you go get to have some good reviews for having created and nurtured that thing which is now creating goodness. After I left the company, my wife and I were in the south of Argentina on an ice trek. Started talking to a fellow trekker, who turns out what in finance. I told him that I used to be in finance and had built systems X and Y - and he was like "you're the guy?! I use those things every day, they are game changing in our industry." That felt very good. Don't get me wrong, I would love to have a chunk of equity in that company but it doesn't matter - I am still very happy in how "ownership mentality" worked out in terms of $ and pride. To be clear it takes two to tango. I'd never operate like this in a place that didn't reward me for operating this way.
  - Jerrrry 2y ago
    >>I told him that I used to be in [z] and had built systems X and Y - and he was like "you're the guy?! I use those things every day, they are game changing in our industry." That felt very good. It is taken a bit for granted, developers' massive ability to impact the workflow, and thus morale, for a significant amount of people; for better or for worse. Knowing my 15 minute coffee HTML exercise can save 500+ people 10+ minutes daily, with a near instant feedback loop, was about as resolved as I could had been. It plays into the need to be needed, the inverse of the fear of being replaced, the most basic innate thought in our psyche's.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
  That line you cherry-picked is in the context of what someone else wants: > Here is an example I worked out with a real person, imagining what they hoped the Marias on their team would do more often. In their mind, this is what "going above and beyond" looks like. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the author also thinks the statement in your second pull quote is mushy. It sounds about as mushy as the "fake ownership" stuff.
bilsbie 2y ago
I’d add that this breakdown needs to include the naive. I found most overworkers never thought about questioning the purpose to tasks or working long hours.
luisgvv 2y ago
I began as a junior dev and climbed up the ranks til the point where I became the SME in some areas of the product. Got laid off because sales goals were not met while they retained people which I think were incompetent in their work. Even some guys which I think were better and more critical to the projects were dumped. I'm not climbing that ladder by being proactive and "pragmatic" again... Call me a paycheck stealer, quiet quitter etc. Just give me some JIRA ticket and let me read books while I get my job done in 1-2 hours a day.
- swader999 2y ago
  You'd do better to go work hard for their competitors or create one.
- sneak 2y ago
  To assume all organizations reward or value expertise the same way is to cap your maximum lifetime earnings, methinks.
  - sevagh 2y ago
    I'm in this trap right now a little bit. After a particularly egregious instance of feeling passed over for a promo, how can I trust that the next jerkoff won't do the same thing?
    - autoexecbat 2y ago
      It's a pretty strong signal that your opinion of the value you're providing is not shared by those who are making the decisions. Regardless of if it's their own ignorance or not they aren't going to suddenly change their feelings about it.
      - sevagh 2y ago
        Oh yeah, agreed; I quit the moment it happened. What I mean is now I'm sort of wary of the same situation re-occurring at the next place I work.
deleted 2y ago
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cyberbender 2y ago
I've seen this firsthand...I think it is less of an issue at smaller companies where taking initiative and leaning into their intelligence is less politically restricted. At large organizations, often it requires too much energy for them navigate the bureaucracy and tap into their potential.
clintonc 2y ago
This reads as a cynical description by someone who identifies as a "skilled pragmatist" (as I do, incidentally), but it doesn't seem to have a useful point of view. For example, "playing the system" and "making waves" have other names -- "driving initiatives" and "cross-team collaboration". They seem like "mushy" phrases because they are not well-defined sets of tasks like "deliver feature A" can become. Are skilled pragmatists undervalued? Maybe, but this article doesn't do an good job of making me believe that.
- bloodyplonker22 2y ago
  As much as I dislike politics, honestly, it sounds like he was out-maneuvered by someone who works less hard. Think Frank Grimes.
hinkley 2y ago
I don’t think I can agree that 75% of the workforce falls into one quadrant. Particularly this one. If I’m very lucky the semi space contains 60% of my coworkers, if I’m unlucky (or arrive after the writing is on the wall) it’s more like 1/3. I suspect part of the confusion is that there are some people with enough political acumen to appear like frustrated agents of change without actually having the drive or skill to do so. If you create opportunities for these people to show up, you may be shocked to find them making excuses for why they still can’t. And truthfully the industry is not full of untapped brilliant people. It isn’t even “full” of brilliant people period. maybe 1/4 of the human population could be counted as very smart, and we get a disproportionate share of them for sure, but it’s definitely not more than half.
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  Even that's a very high estimate. Maybe there are 8 million bonafide geniuses on Earth, and maybe 80 million very smart people, at max. And being very generous to the US, maybe a tenth of them are full time residents somewhere in the 50 states plus DC. Claims that a meaningfully large portion of them are being 'wasted', are hard to believe since there aren't that many to begin with.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    To be clear, I feel the author is describing me, and the loneliness and alienation I have felt too often at work tells me he’s using a lot of hyperbole. If we form a lunch group to complain about our frustrations, it’s never been more than about four people, even in a team of dozens or more. Three is more common. That said, he may be telling the truth with lies - this sort of untapped resource can have outsized impacts on a business, for good or ill.
- bjornsing 2y ago
  > maybe 1/4 of the human population could be counted as very smart That’s a very generous assessment. To me someone who’s “brilliant” is more like 1/1000.
  - deleted 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
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jabroni_salad 2y ago
To me, pragmatism is set of knives by which I decide what to leave on the cutting room floor. The biggest one I have is that there are only so many hours in a day but more issues on the board than can fit into it. The second one is that my time billable, and anything that doesnt count towards my utilization is de facto not valued by the company. The overrunning theme seems to be 'how do we get more from a pragmatist' but my response is you can look at my todo list and rearrange it whenever you want. I am happy with my work, the metrics are on target, the feedback I get from clients is great and they ask for me on their future projects. Only one person is unahppy and its the guy who squints at spreadsheets all day. I think he is the one who is wrong.
- frank_nitti 2y ago
  This took me a while to appreciate, but it tracks perfectly with what I’ve observed from veteran ICs who actually seem content with their careers. Fresh out of school it was almost frustrating to have a senior colleague say “hold off on that” in response to my attempts to go above and beyond (on items not specified or prioritized by leadership). I wanted to build great systems and was constantly looking for challenges that would align with the team/customer outcomes, so why wouldn’t they just let me “flourish” and show the team how much value I can deliver?! After going remote, with nobody to physically see me donating my time and energy to an unworthy cause, did I get to finally learn this the hard way. Bailing out incompetent leaders and weaker engineers to get deliverables across the finish line, which they were happy to claim as personal achievements, and to forget the many late nights they pleaded for help to salvage another unholy mess they had created while flying completely blind in the modern tech world. I’ll need to keep some sound bites from your comment close to the heart, as I work to set better boundaries and use that extra energy toward outcomes that are even 5% worth the effort.
netbioserror 2y ago
Interesting model. Reminds me of all the methods of breaking down game players (e.g. honers vs. innovators, Jimmys vs. Timmys, etc.). I'm very lucky to work at a small shop that can't afford the other three sectors; there are too few of us, each of us needs to impactfully improve our part of the product stack. In fact, we each basically have full ownership of our part of the product stack. Yes, I know, bus factor. But when we're a team of 7 with a fair number of software components all connected together, each one needs a clear vision. Also luckily, we do team interviews; it's fairly easy for us to suss out BS and identify matching competent people who fit the pragmatist mold.
klabb3 2y ago
Insanely spot on, for once (most of organizational analyses are not). Another fun thing pointed out in the article is the obsession over weeding out poor performers, ie the lazy ones. My theory is that it’s done solely to scare everyone else to work harder, whatever that means exactly. It’s about creating a culture of constant busyness which is only really a good proxy for work in domains that don’t require long term thinking. For engineers, it’s detrimental. If you wanna go after the ones who are contributing the least value, why obsess over the lazy? There are sooo many examples of people who added huge negative value, from the rockstars who create an unmaintainable mess to some product manager that re-steers the ship and changes something that was completely fine the way it was. Especially when they leave the mess behind which opportunists often do. Dead weight is nothing compared to the whales that swim towards the bottom and drag the rest of them down.
zamalek 2y ago
Very recently two other engineers had a long debate on a PR of mine that really had no material impact one way or another. My approach rang true with the article: "they can sort it out." I do enjoy a certain degree of challenge at work, though, to be more precise less anti-challenge (high friction, high ceremony work). I will invent work, especially if I'm experiencing paper-cuts: e.g. I spend a stupid amount of time improving CI speed. It's thankless and invisible, but makes the mundane more bearable (nothing is worse than trying to push mundane work through flaky CI). Edit: this entire perspective comes from having given a huge damn at one point. The one-sided relationship with an employer taught me the inevitable, and very hard, lesson. Barry is one acquisition away from becoming Maria.
mattgreenrocks 2y ago
It feels like a common institutional problem is the people who push more of their identity into the institution get disproportionately rewarded over time for their (sometimes ill-considered) sacrifice, which causes them to seek out other people like them, which causes the org to select for that over time. And other people see this, respond with, “I don’t want that,” and put up boundaries like you see discussed here. Orgs love to say they like results, and they do — to a certain extent. There’s a ceiling on it that isn’t there if you are coded by other people as One Of Us. This is wholly different from being a yes-man, of course. It can’t be too obvious you’re playing this game or people don’t like it…probably because it reminds some people of the gamble they’re making there. I’ll wager that some people are honest enough to say, “well how else should we treat loyalty?” And others would say, “well that’s what they chose for their life, so they should be rewarded.” Both answers really just serve to entrench no-life-ism, though. IMO, hovering on the border of engagement/disengagement is not a problem. People tend to oscillate back and forth there naturally. Work is fundamentally a transactional relationship that can sometimes confer meaning, intellectual stimulation, social connections, and structure. And sometimes it fails at some or all of those. Expecting it to always provide those things is delusional. Keeping the transactional nature in mind without being a jerk keeps expectations grounded. We should be far more suspicious of those who are constantly parading their love of work on social media.
TheGRS 2y ago
This post is an introduction to the idea and then as a Part 2 for actions to take. For anyone who hasn't continued into Part 2, it goes into first steps on listening to different performers in your company and basically doing research on what makes everyone tick. There will be a follow-up Part 3. Just want to say that's an interesting way to blog, but a little unsatisfying since I'm not sure if I'll keep coming back for new updates every week. Interesting topic though! I consider myself both self-motivated and a little lazy at heart so I think I fall into the skilled pragmatist. For me personally it was that realization that I wasn't going to be the 4.0 student, but that I could still get a great 3.5 by doing a lot less work. Sometimes I crank out tons of extra work that helps various people by the simple virtue that its interesting to me. So I think this is hitting a chord with me somewhere. I find myself in management these days, and the people I manage are all great and talented and as far as I can tell no one is upset with my laissez-faire management style. But I'm always wanting to find how to make the job more interesting for them. The roadmap can often be kind of boring work. When we have interesting projects the work just flies by and you can see the satisfaction on everyone's faces. Would love to just have more of that.
- almostnormal 2y ago
  > This post is an introduction to the idea and then as a Part 2 for actions to take. Thanks for mentioning it, I missed the link to part 2. I don't think I can see the connection between the two parts though. Part 1 places people on two axis "cares" and "conflicts", with the largest number high on "cares" and low on "conflict". It seemed high on "cares" is desirable, and that getting more people to voice their oppinions (higher on "conflict") would be an improvement. Part 2 puts people on a single axis of how likely they are going to embed clean-up changes in their PRs. This is unlikely to be the "conflict" axis from part 1. If it is the "cares" axis, 75% would already show the desired behavior, with not much untapped potential remaining. Part 2 then continues by asking people about their oppinions. With most people on the lower half of the part 1 "conflict" axis it is surprising that everyone does even have an oppinion. I'll place myself high on the "conflict" axis with this: Clean-up should not be hidden in other PRs. It increases time needed for review and risk for collisions. It also increases the effort required for an analysis of the history in a distant future. Separate PRs for clean-up.
JohnMakin 2y ago
I'd categorize myself as a "Barry" - which he seems to define in part II of this blog post as someone who is willing to take great personal and career risks to rock the boat, and will even risk getting fired to get their job done - it has usually cost me a lot in whatever organization I end up in. I think these people eventually become skilled pragmatists when burnt out, but I'm not sure he has any insight in these posts about how people become a "Maria." IMO it's when Barry's finally realize that working their ass off and taking risk for the betterment of a company or leadership team that will not hesitate to take advantage of a Barry and/or ruthlessly cut him down when convenient. I guess by author's definition if a Barry became a Maria, he was never a Barry to begin with, but I do think this happens a lot. I see it in my own career path, with myself and some of my peers.
- 22c 2y ago
  I enjoyed part 1 of the article and began reading part 2 where it mentions Barry a few times, but when I read and re-read part 1 I see no mention of Barry. FWIW I think that Barry becoming a Maria is entirely possible and consistent with the age old "5 Monkeys" office fax meme. https://i.snipboard.io/kdu77.jpg https://i.snipboard.io/kdu77.jpg
swagasaurus-rex 2y ago
Enployees need three things to avoid becoming an uninspired cog: 1) Control 2) Responsibility 3) Recognition Control and responsibility of a project but no recognition will demotivate quickly Responsibility and recognition with no control means they’re a scapegoat for when things bad Recognition and control with no responsibility is like a third party who will take credit but has no reason to ensure success All three need to happen for an employee to care. If an employee is missing one or two of the three, they’ll feel it in their work
- UncleOxidant 2y ago
  But the greatest of these things is Control.
- __experiment__ 2y ago
  there are different people who value different things. some value more control some value more responsibility some value more recognition
- sevagh 2y ago
  Do you count financial reward under recognition? Lot of places are generous with non-financial recognition but stingy with the monetary recognition.
  - dier 2y ago
    short answer: yes it's recognition from the individual's perspective. think love languages. one person's recognition might be salary because they make $35,000/yr and another's isn't financial. they are doing this because retirement is boring. in practice it is often a combination with different ratios. as an employee it is advantageous to think about what makes you feel recognized and work with your manager on it. if it's monetary and they're stingy then your values won't align and you will be frustrated.
tuckerpo 2y ago
This puts the cart before the horse. In reality, the biggest source of untapped potential, at least anecdotally as an engineer, is that corporations tend to give grease to squeaky wheels. So, the upper quadrants in the article. If you have even a few years of industry experience, modulo being intentionally naive, you've noticed that work begets work. The 'skilled pragmatists' quietly do their jobs well. Their reward is even more work to do, without much recognition. It's analogous to software quality. It's fleetingly rare that a consumer of software writes in to let you know how great, zippy and bug-free it is. You only ever hear about how terrible things are. When things are 'good' -- that's just the expected status quo. So no reward for steadily doing good things. I'm also sure after a few years in industry you've also noticed that the Do-Nothing (TM) guy who sprints around with their head on fire gets managerial recognition, promotions, bonuses. You know the kind. They wander from meeting to meeting, initiative to initiative, never actually accomplishing anything concrete, but showing their face to management and saying a lot of nice words. Eventually, the skilled pragmatist notices this dichotomy and mentally clocks out. I've heard this anecdote many times, both in online circles and IRL.
- rawgabbit 2y ago
  Very true. As an added detail, I see it comes in waves. New CTO/CIO brings in his trusted lieutenants who then bring in their trusted people. They may excel at XYZ but at your company those skills are irrelevant. Some folks who are already on staff hitch their wagon to the new powers that be. These johnny-come-latelys are also insufferable. The game continues until the CTO/CIO is let go and another house cleaning begins. During the meantime, you wonder how any real work gets done.
- pnathan 2y ago
  Competence and promotions are two different skillsets, sometimes they intersect. I've been swept up into some of the promo-optimized guys' orbits, and it was deeply unpleasant. Lots of smoke and mirrors to execs... Good leadership optimizes for looking at ground truths, rather than yes-men. Some places succeed at that more than others...
dbrueck 2y ago
Part of me feels like the untapped potential is just one of many symptoms of all of the dysfunction going on, and if you can fix some of the dysfunction, then you'd not only unleash some of that potential but fix a bunch of other problems at the same time.
NateEag 2y ago
This is an appealing narrative without evidence. How does the author know Marias make up the majority of most companies? Where's the data supporting that claim? It may be true - it sounds plausible to those of us who've been a Maria in the salt mines of a dysfunctional company. It appeals to us to think we're the hidden gems the company needs to invest in. Something being appealing doesn't make it true, though, even if you can tell a just-so story about it.
- mlhpdx 2y ago
  > This is an appealing narrative without evidence. I had the same thought, but I’m grateful to the author for putting their opinions out for us to see. It is an interesting quandary - getting “more” from someone, pragmatic or otherwise, raises questions. Is the premise that they aren’t providing value on a level with salary? Or, is it that the business has a right/obligation to extract more? The latter is offensive, fundamentally because “value” may be arbitrarily (perhaps capriciously) determined. On the other hand, I find the folks suggesting that doing an hours work a day is fine. It’s not. That’s equally offensive.
  - OkayPhysicist 2y ago
    Labor relations are intrinsically adversarial. The employer wants to pay as little as they can get away with for as much work as possible, the employee wants to be paid as much as possible for as little work as they can get away with. This article is written for the employer's side, trying to optimize their game. The employees trying to normalize working approximately nothing are optimizing their side. It's not offensive, it's just economics.
    - bb88 2y ago
      Many employees are trying to minimize their work. (Do we really need to fill out 10 TPS reports that no one reads?) Often the ones who are doing the most menial tasks would definitely want to do something else more meaningful Not everyone wants to work less. Many want a path to make an impact to the organization, but don't see how. They'd rather just be quiet engineers/accountants/office workers/etc.
imzadi 2y ago
I don't know if this is related, but growing up there were certain values instilled in me that went something like "don't toot your own horn," "it's better to be seen and not heard," "keep your head down," etc. The main gist being that I should just do my job quietly, competently, and stay out of the way. In practice, this resulted in me being effectively invisible to management, even when I was out-performing everyone else on the team. The guys who were loud and boisterous and constantly cawing about their achievements got all the raises and promotions, even though I was consistently doing more and better work. This came to a head when someone with far less seniority was promoted over me. I brought it up with my boss who said something like "I don't even know what you do all day. I never hear from you." The guy who was promoted would literally spend twice as much time boasting about what he was doing that actually doing it. I was objectively more productive, as in, there were metrics showing my productivity was significantly higher, but since I wasn't talking about what I was doing, I was unseen.
- therealdrag0 2y ago
  Congrats you don’t have a micromanager. But the flip side of that is you need to check in with them. That’s both of your fault, but you can only control you. You should at least have a “win/impact” document where you track what you’ve done and share with your manager.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- nickff 2y ago
  I obviously don't know enough about your particular situation to be an informed judge, but... it really sounds like the management team is operating in a reactive mode, rather than a proactive one, and as a result, they don't understand what's really going on inside the company. It doesn't bode well for their understanding of what's going on outside the company either. This kind of disconnect is often costly, sometimes fatal.
- Lacerda69 2y ago
  On the other hand I have worked with team mates that just don't communicate what they are doing. I always got the feeling that they either don't do anything at all or work on things that are completely irrelevant. Over time I tend to develop a poor opinion of these people. Communicate what your accomplishments are and why they are important for the business and you will be fine. Everything else is kindergarten.
meowAJ16 2y ago
There is no way 80% of people care about craft and impact. There are books on creating impact even when employees don't care about impact. It's hard to find people who care about their craft.
dkarl 2y ago
I strongly buy the premise of this article, and it goes beyond people who try to fly under the radar and blend in because of toxic politics. Even in companies without toxic politics, a lot of managers subconsciously overestimate the abilities of engineers who regularly propose ambitious, complex solutions, and underestimate the abilities of engineers who are more leery of complexity. This not only leads to unnecessary boondoggle projects, it also results in managers not assigning challenging work to engineers who are quite capable of doing it, which is the waste the article describes. I was fortunate early in my career to have managers who had strong technical judgment themselves and rewarded it in their engineers, managers who spent their innovation tokens but spent them very carefully, so later in my career I was able to recognize when I had managers who relied on crude heuristics like assuming the engineers who proposed the most complex projects had the best judgment and the best ability to execute. One simple hack I use all the time, regardless of my manager's personality, is to say, "It would be fun." As in, "It would be fun to handle this with an event-driven system using Kafka. We could build an incredibly scalable and resilient system that way. I'd love to tackle a project like that, but I don't think we can justify it, because it would take more time and more engineers to build and be more expensive to operate, and I think our existing system only needs a few tweaks to what we need, even if we execute on our entire product roadmap and exceed our sales goals. I think we should take a careful look at tweaking the existing system, and if that won't get us what we need, we might have to build the more expensive solution." This lets me advertise my awareness of a fancier architectural solution, as well as my ability and willingness to execute on it, without actually saying that it's a good idea.
billtsedong 2y ago
Honestly if that guy was my manager, I'd quit no matter what. I'm already selling 1/3 of my lifetime just to be able to eat, so no freaking way I'd contribute to someone already robbing me of the most valuable resource one can have.
chrisgd 2y ago
It’s crazy we still hire so slowly and fire so quickly when it should be the exact opposite.
- icedchai 2y ago
  Many companies are afraid of being sued or "ruining their reputation" through too many firings. Instead, they waste much more on wasted salaries and ruin their reputation internally by keeping useless people around.
hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
I'm more interested in figuring out what kind of knowledge base most reliably turns a junior dev into a "skilled pragmatist". My guess is the highest ROI thing one can do in software engineering is take your command line environment and OS internals seriously to heart. This can be either bash/Unix or PowerShell/Windows, depending on your career goals, although having gotten reasonably good with both sets I'd recommend the former. Wherever you go, you'll have that ultra portable knowledge to rely on, and do in 10 lol minutes what might take your coworkers 20 or 30.
- from-nibly 2y ago
  shaving 20 minutes off a task is useless unless it's something that happens constantly. The real differentiator will be, do you know you can do something, that others in your org think is impossible? Can you turn a 6 month project into a half day script and move on? Also there isn't "A knowledge base" that turns a junior dev into a "skilled pragmatist". It comes from being a part of delivering value all the way up and down the stack. There unfortunately isn't a book that can really teach you that. You gotta build that in yourself on your own through experience.
schaefer 2y ago
There are many assertions of facts in this blog article, for example: 75% skilled pragmatists. Do any of these facts have citations? Even if the author were to directly state they are his observations as a developer, it would have more value than absolutely no citation. As written, these facts are giving me a very made up or "story time" vibe.
namuol 2y ago
The article’s thesis is based on the assumption that most contributors care a good deal about the business and/or their craft. I just don’t see that.
bb88 2y ago
As the saying goes: "If you stick your head up above the cube wall, prepare to have it decapitated."
cousin_it 2y ago
I think the root cause of why managers reward flashy employees over useful ones is because managers are clueless about the work itself. The more a manager understands the work, on a micro level, the more they'll be able to judge it accurately. Note that it doesn't mean micromanagement: you must understand the details, but stop yourself from second-guessing the employees on these details. And it doesn't mean you can't delegate: as long as you have intimate understanding of the details, you're free to delegate and be as hands-off as you want. In fact the best way to delegate is to learn to do the thing well yourself, then delegate it to someone and do occasional spot checks on them.
fotran0922 2y ago
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csours 2y ago
I can't give my boss any work they don't want to do. If I find a problem in another team's domain, I can try to interest them in it, and failing that, I can try to interest my boss in it, but if no one gets interested enough to fix the thing, what am I going to do? Work around the problem and sulk. See Also: Glue Work https://noidea.dog/glue https://noidea.dog/glue
mtreis86 2y ago
Biggest waste I see is people arguing over equally good options. Flip a coin and go.
aubanel 2y ago
Putting "cut-throat bureaucrats" in the "do not care for impact" side of the axis seems unnatural to me: I think these people do care for impact, and that's why they are so decided about imposing their ways. But their definition of impact is "doing things the right way", which corrupts their want for improvement into a pile of processes.
gr4vityWall 2y ago
I fail to see how trying to get more out of Maria would make any thing better for Maria herself.
- analog31 2y ago
  ... And she knows it.
xyst 2y ago
I have found that Fortune 500 companies are usually the worst when it comes to this. If you want to get shit done, don’t work at a soulless corporation. These are glorified retirement homes for people. Have had the unfortunate experience with having to hand hold what’s been described as “20+ YoE industry veterans” through the fucking basics of oauth.
chatmasta 2y ago
Why are all four quadrants bad contributors? Surely that’s a bit cynical?
fortani 2y ago
"I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent — their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy — they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent — he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief." Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord This is an interesting quote from a WWII General. So "skilled pragmatists" seems to map to what Kurt terms as clever and lazy. But it also means that most people are lazy and stupid.
jongjong 2y ago
This is assuming that the skilled pragmatists are even employed to begin with. What I'm seeing is that they've been steadily getting pushed out of the industry. There have been many highly skilled open source devs who left the industry because they can't deal with the bureaucracy and nonsense anymore. The dispassionate, status-oriented bureaucrat seems to have the upper hand; and they appear to have the majority necessary to get their way in the centers of power. We have a bad case of the blind leading the visionaries.
khana 2y ago
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cebert 2y ago
I can appreciate the some of the frustrations many here raise with corporate work culture. However, in reality, you need to sell the value you bring. If you see more junior folk or good folk who don’t highlight their own value, help bring visibility. If you don’t highlight your value and peers you appreciate, you risk it not being recognized. Don’t let the good people lose out in the game. Help get good people promoted and into positions of power.
AndyNemmity 2y ago
This might accurately describe me, although I am very challenged in what I do. I guess I find the intersection between what I do, and other people, to be a waste of time. Whenever I try to bring other people into the mix, they tend to misunderstand, and I spend so much time correcting them, it's hard to get value out of the process. I do get value out of the process (did today), but it often feels like I am increasing my effort exponentially for very little.
fuzzfactor 2y ago
From the final paragraph of Part 2: >Instead of “getting more out of” people, think about “achieve more together, and for each other.” You can't herd cats without being an integral part of the herd.

294 points by jpn 2y ago

Breaks down to: (1) build trust with your people, then (2) give them autonomy to guide their own work. The inverse of "Seeing Like a State".

mlhpdx 2y ago
That’s the magic. I’m not sure why so many fight this simple, reliable approach.

seporterfield 2y ago

Real

jasonlotito 2y ago

This is from part 2, but wow... > Do not use mushy words like ... ownership, If you think ownership is just mushy words, you've never given someone ownership. Giving someone ownership isn't just mush. It's real, and can have real impact. Of course, this also literally means giving them some actual, real, legal ownership in that project and it's results. This is especially hypocritical when paired with an "actual example" > The intended outcome is to increase the rate at which we create value for customers, facilitate easier troubleshooting, decrease downtime, enable more developers to work across different code bases seamlessly and improve developer morale. Talk about mush. That's just one part of a completely mushy "behavioral statement" that just reeks of insincerity and mush. This is also covered under specifics, and the entire thing lacks ANY specifics. Give them ownership. Real ownership, not this fake "ownership" that clearly comes from someone who doesn't know what the word means. Give them power to drive direction and results, and reward them for that. There are more things that could be said about this, but honestly, reading that, it just screamed hypocrisy.

xyzelement 2y ago
I disagree with you. I spent most of my career in a great company that is privately owned (famous billionaire.) The company pays extremely well but does not provide any sort of "legal ownership" as you describe. Still, I felt massive ownership of stuff I've .. well .. "owned" and I benefited financially and emotionally from it. I am no longer at the company but I have pride in what I've built there and the fact that it still exists and generates tremendous value. On the financial side of things, people (leadership) think of certain people as owning/driving certain things, because we do. So even though I am not the legal owner of platform X, you go get to have some good reviews for having created and nurtured that thing which is now creating goodness. After I left the company, my wife and I were in the south of Argentina on an ice trek. Started talking to a fellow trekker, who turns out what in finance. I told him that I used to be in finance and had built systems X and Y - and he was like "you're the guy?! I use those things every day, they are game changing in our industry." That felt very good. Don't get me wrong, I would love to have a chunk of equity in that company but it doesn't matter - I am still very happy in how "ownership mentality" worked out in terms of $ and pride. To be clear it takes two to tango. I'd never operate like this in a place that didn't reward me for operating this way.
- Jerrrry 2y ago
  >>I told him that I used to be in [z] and had built systems X and Y - and he was like "you're the guy?! I use those things every day, they are game changing in our industry." That felt very good. It is taken a bit for granted, developers' massive ability to impact the workflow, and thus morale, for a significant amount of people; for better or for worse. Knowing my 15 minute coffee HTML exercise can save 500+ people 10+ minutes daily, with a near instant feedback loop, was about as resolved as I could had been. It plays into the need to be needed, the inverse of the fear of being replaced, the most basic innate thought in our psyche's.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
That line you cherry-picked is in the context of what someone else wants: > Here is an example I worked out with a real person, imagining what they hoped the Marias on their team would do more often. In their mind, this is what "going above and beyond" looks like. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the author also thinks the statement in your second pull quote is mushy. It sounds about as mushy as the "fake ownership" stuff.

bilsbie 2y ago

I’d add that this breakdown needs to include the naive. I found most overworkers never thought about questioning the purpose to tasks or working long hours.

luisgvv 2y ago

I began as a junior dev and climbed up the ranks til the point where I became the SME in some areas of the product. Got laid off because sales goals were not met while they retained people which I think were incompetent in their work. Even some guys which I think were better and more critical to the projects were dumped. I'm not climbing that ladder by being proactive and "pragmatic" again... Call me a paycheck stealer, quiet quitter etc. Just give me some JIRA ticket and let me read books while I get my job done in 1-2 hours a day.

swader999 2y ago
You'd do better to go work hard for their competitors or create one.
sneak 2y ago
To assume all organizations reward or value expertise the same way is to cap your maximum lifetime earnings, methinks.
- sevagh 2y ago
  I'm in this trap right now a little bit. After a particularly egregious instance of feeling passed over for a promo, how can I trust that the next jerkoff won't do the same thing?
  - autoexecbat 2y ago
    It's a pretty strong signal that your opinion of the value you're providing is not shared by those who are making the decisions. Regardless of if it's their own ignorance or not they aren't going to suddenly change their feelings about it.
    - sevagh 2y ago
      Oh yeah, agreed; I quit the moment it happened. What I mean is now I'm sort of wary of the same situation re-occurring at the next place I work.

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cyberbender 2y ago

I've seen this firsthand...I think it is less of an issue at smaller companies where taking initiative and leaning into their intelligence is less politically restricted. At large organizations, often it requires too much energy for them navigate the bureaucracy and tap into their potential.

clintonc 2y ago

This reads as a cynical description by someone who identifies as a "skilled pragmatist" (as I do, incidentally), but it doesn't seem to have a useful point of view. For example, "playing the system" and "making waves" have other names -- "driving initiatives" and "cross-team collaboration". They seem like "mushy" phrases because they are not well-defined sets of tasks like "deliver feature A" can become. Are skilled pragmatists undervalued? Maybe, but this article doesn't do an good job of making me believe that.

bloodyplonker22 2y ago
As much as I dislike politics, honestly, it sounds like he was out-maneuvered by someone who works less hard. Think Frank Grimes.

hinkley 2y ago

I don’t think I can agree that 75% of the workforce falls into one quadrant. Particularly this one. If I’m very lucky the semi space contains 60% of my coworkers, if I’m unlucky (or arrive after the writing is on the wall) it’s more like 1/3. I suspect part of the confusion is that there are some people with enough political acumen to appear like frustrated agents of change without actually having the drive or skill to do so. If you create opportunities for these people to show up, you may be shocked to find them making excuses for why they still can’t. And truthfully the industry is not full of untapped brilliant people. It isn’t even “full” of brilliant people period. maybe 1/4 of the human population could be counted as very smart, and we get a disproportionate share of them for sure, but it’s definitely not more than half.

MichaelZuo 2y ago
Even that's a very high estimate. Maybe there are 8 million bonafide geniuses on Earth, and maybe 80 million very smart people, at max. And being very generous to the US, maybe a tenth of them are full time residents somewhere in the 50 states plus DC. Claims that a meaningfully large portion of them are being 'wasted', are hard to believe since there aren't that many to begin with.
- hinkley 2y ago
  To be clear, I feel the author is describing me, and the loneliness and alienation I have felt too often at work tells me he’s using a lot of hyperbole. If we form a lunch group to complain about our frustrations, it’s never been more than about four people, even in a team of dozens or more. Three is more common. That said, he may be telling the truth with lies - this sort of untapped resource can have outsized impacts on a business, for good or ill.
bjornsing 2y ago
> maybe 1/4 of the human population could be counted as very smart That’s a very generous assessment. To me someone who’s “brilliant” is more like 1/1000.
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jabroni_salad 2y ago

To me, pragmatism is set of knives by which I decide what to leave on the cutting room floor. The biggest one I have is that there are only so many hours in a day but more issues on the board than can fit into it. The second one is that my time billable, and anything that doesnt count towards my utilization is de facto not valued by the company. The overrunning theme seems to be 'how do we get more from a pragmatist' but my response is you can look at my todo list and rearrange it whenever you want. I am happy with my work, the metrics are on target, the feedback I get from clients is great and they ask for me on their future projects. Only one person is unahppy and its the guy who squints at spreadsheets all day. I think he is the one who is wrong.

frank_nitti 2y ago
This took me a while to appreciate, but it tracks perfectly with what I’ve observed from veteran ICs who actually seem content with their careers. Fresh out of school it was almost frustrating to have a senior colleague say “hold off on that” in response to my attempts to go above and beyond (on items not specified or prioritized by leadership). I wanted to build great systems and was constantly looking for challenges that would align with the team/customer outcomes, so why wouldn’t they just let me “flourish” and show the team how much value I can deliver?! After going remote, with nobody to physically see me donating my time and energy to an unworthy cause, did I get to finally learn this the hard way. Bailing out incompetent leaders and weaker engineers to get deliverables across the finish line, which they were happy to claim as personal achievements, and to forget the many late nights they pleaded for help to salvage another unholy mess they had created while flying completely blind in the modern tech world. I’ll need to keep some sound bites from your comment close to the heart, as I work to set better boundaries and use that extra energy toward outcomes that are even 5% worth the effort.

netbioserror 2y ago

Interesting model. Reminds me of all the methods of breaking down game players (e.g. honers vs. innovators, Jimmys vs. Timmys, etc.). I'm very lucky to work at a small shop that can't afford the other three sectors; there are too few of us, each of us needs to impactfully improve our part of the product stack. In fact, we each basically have full ownership of our part of the product stack. Yes, I know, bus factor. But when we're a team of 7 with a fair number of software components all connected together, each one needs a clear vision. Also luckily, we do team interviews; it's fairly easy for us to suss out BS and identify matching competent people who fit the pragmatist mold.

klabb3 2y ago

Insanely spot on, for once (most of organizational analyses are not). Another fun thing pointed out in the article is the obsession over weeding out poor performers, ie the lazy ones. My theory is that it’s done solely to scare everyone else to work harder, whatever that means exactly. It’s about creating a culture of constant busyness which is only really a good proxy for work in domains that don’t require long term thinking. For engineers, it’s detrimental. If you wanna go after the ones who are contributing the least value, why obsess over the lazy? There are sooo many examples of people who added huge negative value, from the rockstars who create an unmaintainable mess to some product manager that re-steers the ship and changes something that was completely fine the way it was. Especially when they leave the mess behind which opportunists often do. Dead weight is nothing compared to the whales that swim towards the bottom and drag the rest of them down.

zamalek 2y ago

Very recently two other engineers had a long debate on a PR of mine that really had no material impact one way or another. My approach rang true with the article: "they can sort it out." I do enjoy a certain degree of challenge at work, though, to be more precise less anti-challenge (high friction, high ceremony work). I will invent work, especially if I'm experiencing paper-cuts: e.g. I spend a stupid amount of time improving CI speed. It's thankless and invisible, but makes the mundane more bearable (nothing is worse than trying to push mundane work through flaky CI). Edit: this entire perspective comes from having given a huge damn at one point. The one-sided relationship with an employer taught me the inevitable, and very hard, lesson. Barry is one acquisition away from becoming Maria.

mattgreenrocks 2y ago

It feels like a common institutional problem is the people who push more of their identity into the institution get disproportionately rewarded over time for their (sometimes ill-considered) sacrifice, which causes them to seek out other people like them, which causes the org to select for that over time. And other people see this, respond with, “I don’t want that,” and put up boundaries like you see discussed here. Orgs love to say they like results, and they do — to a certain extent. There’s a ceiling on it that isn’t there if you are coded by other people as One Of Us. This is wholly different from being a yes-man, of course. It can’t be too obvious you’re playing this game or people don’t like it…probably because it reminds some people of the gamble they’re making there. I’ll wager that some people are honest enough to say, “well how else should we treat loyalty?” And others would say, “well that’s what they chose for their life, so they should be rewarded.” Both answers really just serve to entrench no-life-ism, though. IMO, hovering on the border of engagement/disengagement is not a problem. People tend to oscillate back and forth there naturally. Work is fundamentally a transactional relationship that can sometimes confer meaning, intellectual stimulation, social connections, and structure. And sometimes it fails at some or all of those. Expecting it to always provide those things is delusional. Keeping the transactional nature in mind without being a jerk keeps expectations grounded. We should be far more suspicious of those who are constantly parading their love of work on social media.

TheGRS 2y ago

This post is an introduction to the idea and then as a Part 2 for actions to take. For anyone who hasn't continued into Part 2, it goes into first steps on listening to different performers in your company and basically doing research on what makes everyone tick. There will be a follow-up Part 3. Just want to say that's an interesting way to blog, but a little unsatisfying since I'm not sure if I'll keep coming back for new updates every week. Interesting topic though! I consider myself both self-motivated and a little lazy at heart so I think I fall into the skilled pragmatist. For me personally it was that realization that I wasn't going to be the 4.0 student, but that I could still get a great 3.5 by doing a lot less work. Sometimes I crank out tons of extra work that helps various people by the simple virtue that its interesting to me. So I think this is hitting a chord with me somewhere. I find myself in management these days, and the people I manage are all great and talented and as far as I can tell no one is upset with my laissez-faire management style. But I'm always wanting to find how to make the job more interesting for them. The roadmap can often be kind of boring work. When we have interesting projects the work just flies by and you can see the satisfaction on everyone's faces. Would love to just have more of that.

almostnormal 2y ago
> This post is an introduction to the idea and then as a Part 2 for actions to take. Thanks for mentioning it, I missed the link to part 2. I don't think I can see the connection between the two parts though. Part 1 places people on two axis "cares" and "conflicts", with the largest number high on "cares" and low on "conflict". It seemed high on "cares" is desirable, and that getting more people to voice their oppinions (higher on "conflict") would be an improvement. Part 2 puts people on a single axis of how likely they are going to embed clean-up changes in their PRs. This is unlikely to be the "conflict" axis from part 1. If it is the "cares" axis, 75% would already show the desired behavior, with not much untapped potential remaining. Part 2 then continues by asking people about their oppinions. With most people on the lower half of the part 1 "conflict" axis it is surprising that everyone does even have an oppinion. I'll place myself high on the "conflict" axis with this: Clean-up should not be hidden in other PRs. It increases time needed for review and risk for collisions. It also increases the effort required for an analysis of the history in a distant future. Separate PRs for clean-up.

JohnMakin 2y ago

I'd categorize myself as a "Barry" - which he seems to define in part II of this blog post as someone who is willing to take great personal and career risks to rock the boat, and will even risk getting fired to get their job done - it has usually cost me a lot in whatever organization I end up in. I think these people eventually become skilled pragmatists when burnt out, but I'm not sure he has any insight in these posts about how people become a "Maria." IMO it's when Barry's finally realize that working their ass off and taking risk for the betterment of a company or leadership team that will not hesitate to take advantage of a Barry and/or ruthlessly cut him down when convenient. I guess by author's definition if a Barry became a Maria, he was never a Barry to begin with, but I do think this happens a lot. I see it in my own career path, with myself and some of my peers.

22c 2y ago
I enjoyed part 1 of the article and began reading part 2 where it mentions Barry a few times, but when I read and re-read part 1 I see no mention of Barry. FWIW I think that Barry becoming a Maria is entirely possible and consistent with the age old "5 Monkeys" office fax meme. https://i.snipboard.io/kdu77.jpg https://i.snipboard.io/kdu77.jpg

swagasaurus-rex 2y ago

Enployees need three things to avoid becoming an uninspired cog: 1) Control 2) Responsibility 3) Recognition Control and responsibility of a project but no recognition will demotivate quickly Responsibility and recognition with no control means they’re a scapegoat for when things bad Recognition and control with no responsibility is like a third party who will take credit but has no reason to ensure success All three need to happen for an employee to care. If an employee is missing one or two of the three, they’ll feel it in their work

UncleOxidant 2y ago
But the greatest of these things is Control.
__experiment__ 2y ago
there are different people who value different things. some value more control some value more responsibility some value more recognition
sevagh 2y ago
Do you count financial reward under recognition? Lot of places are generous with non-financial recognition but stingy with the monetary recognition.
- dier 2y ago
  short answer: yes it's recognition from the individual's perspective. think love languages. one person's recognition might be salary because they make $35,000/yr and another's isn't financial. they are doing this because retirement is boring. in practice it is often a combination with different ratios. as an employee it is advantageous to think about what makes you feel recognized and work with your manager on it. if it's monetary and they're stingy then your values won't align and you will be frustrated.

tuckerpo 2y ago

This puts the cart before the horse. In reality, the biggest source of untapped potential, at least anecdotally as an engineer, is that corporations tend to give grease to squeaky wheels. So, the upper quadrants in the article. If you have even a few years of industry experience, modulo being intentionally naive, you've noticed that work begets work. The 'skilled pragmatists' quietly do their jobs well. Their reward is even more work to do, without much recognition. It's analogous to software quality. It's fleetingly rare that a consumer of software writes in to let you know how great, zippy and bug-free it is. You only ever hear about how terrible things are. When things are 'good' -- that's just the expected status quo. So no reward for steadily doing good things. I'm also sure after a few years in industry you've also noticed that the Do-Nothing (TM) guy who sprints around with their head on fire gets managerial recognition, promotions, bonuses. You know the kind. They wander from meeting to meeting, initiative to initiative, never actually accomplishing anything concrete, but showing their face to management and saying a lot of nice words. Eventually, the skilled pragmatist notices this dichotomy and mentally clocks out. I've heard this anecdote many times, both in online circles and IRL.

rawgabbit 2y ago
Very true. As an added detail, I see it comes in waves. New CTO/CIO brings in his trusted lieutenants who then bring in their trusted people. They may excel at XYZ but at your company those skills are irrelevant. Some folks who are already on staff hitch their wagon to the new powers that be. These johnny-come-latelys are also insufferable. The game continues until the CTO/CIO is let go and another house cleaning begins. During the meantime, you wonder how any real work gets done.
pnathan 2y ago
Competence and promotions are two different skillsets, sometimes they intersect. I've been swept up into some of the promo-optimized guys' orbits, and it was deeply unpleasant. Lots of smoke and mirrors to execs... Good leadership optimizes for looking at ground truths, rather than yes-men. Some places succeed at that more than others...

dbrueck 2y ago

Part of me feels like the untapped potential is just one of many symptoms of all of the dysfunction going on, and if you can fix some of the dysfunction, then you'd not only unleash some of that potential but fix a bunch of other problems at the same time.

NateEag 2y ago

This is an appealing narrative without evidence. How does the author know Marias make up the majority of most companies? Where's the data supporting that claim? It may be true - it sounds plausible to those of us who've been a Maria in the salt mines of a dysfunctional company. It appeals to us to think we're the hidden gems the company needs to invest in. Something being appealing doesn't make it true, though, even if you can tell a just-so story about it.

mlhpdx 2y ago
> This is an appealing narrative without evidence. I had the same thought, but I’m grateful to the author for putting their opinions out for us to see. It is an interesting quandary - getting “more” from someone, pragmatic or otherwise, raises questions. Is the premise that they aren’t providing value on a level with salary? Or, is it that the business has a right/obligation to extract more? The latter is offensive, fundamentally because “value” may be arbitrarily (perhaps capriciously) determined. On the other hand, I find the folks suggesting that doing an hours work a day is fine. It’s not. That’s equally offensive.
- OkayPhysicist 2y ago
  Labor relations are intrinsically adversarial. The employer wants to pay as little as they can get away with for as much work as possible, the employee wants to be paid as much as possible for as little work as they can get away with. This article is written for the employer's side, trying to optimize their game. The employees trying to normalize working approximately nothing are optimizing their side. It's not offensive, it's just economics.
  - bb88 2y ago
    Many employees are trying to minimize their work. (Do we really need to fill out 10 TPS reports that no one reads?) Often the ones who are doing the most menial tasks would definitely want to do something else more meaningful Not everyone wants to work less. Many want a path to make an impact to the organization, but don't see how. They'd rather just be quiet engineers/accountants/office workers/etc.

imzadi 2y ago

I don't know if this is related, but growing up there were certain values instilled in me that went something like "don't toot your own horn," "it's better to be seen and not heard," "keep your head down," etc. The main gist being that I should just do my job quietly, competently, and stay out of the way. In practice, this resulted in me being effectively invisible to management, even when I was out-performing everyone else on the team. The guys who were loud and boisterous and constantly cawing about their achievements got all the raises and promotions, even though I was consistently doing more and better work. This came to a head when someone with far less seniority was promoted over me. I brought it up with my boss who said something like "I don't even know what you do all day. I never hear from you." The guy who was promoted would literally spend twice as much time boasting about what he was doing that actually doing it. I was objectively more productive, as in, there were metrics showing my productivity was significantly higher, but since I wasn't talking about what I was doing, I was unseen.

therealdrag0 2y ago
Congrats you don’t have a micromanager. But the flip side of that is you need to check in with them. That’s both of your fault, but you can only control you. You should at least have a “win/impact” document where you track what you’ve done and share with your manager.
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nickff 2y ago
I obviously don't know enough about your particular situation to be an informed judge, but... it really sounds like the management team is operating in a reactive mode, rather than a proactive one, and as a result, they don't understand what's really going on inside the company. It doesn't bode well for their understanding of what's going on outside the company either. This kind of disconnect is often costly, sometimes fatal.
Lacerda69 2y ago
On the other hand I have worked with team mates that just don't communicate what they are doing. I always got the feeling that they either don't do anything at all or work on things that are completely irrelevant. Over time I tend to develop a poor opinion of these people. Communicate what your accomplishments are and why they are important for the business and you will be fine. Everything else is kindergarten.

meowAJ16 2y ago

There is no way 80% of people care about craft and impact. There are books on creating impact even when employees don't care about impact. It's hard to find people who care about their craft.

dkarl 2y ago

I strongly buy the premise of this article, and it goes beyond people who try to fly under the radar and blend in because of toxic politics. Even in companies without toxic politics, a lot of managers subconsciously overestimate the abilities of engineers who regularly propose ambitious, complex solutions, and underestimate the abilities of engineers who are more leery of complexity. This not only leads to unnecessary boondoggle projects, it also results in managers not assigning challenging work to engineers who are quite capable of doing it, which is the waste the article describes. I was fortunate early in my career to have managers who had strong technical judgment themselves and rewarded it in their engineers, managers who spent their innovation tokens but spent them very carefully, so later in my career I was able to recognize when I had managers who relied on crude heuristics like assuming the engineers who proposed the most complex projects had the best judgment and the best ability to execute. One simple hack I use all the time, regardless of my manager's personality, is to say, "It would be fun." As in, "It would be fun to handle this with an event-driven system using Kafka. We could build an incredibly scalable and resilient system that way. I'd love to tackle a project like that, but I don't think we can justify it, because it would take more time and more engineers to build and be more expensive to operate, and I think our existing system only needs a few tweaks to what we need, even if we execute on our entire product roadmap and exceed our sales goals. I think we should take a careful look at tweaking the existing system, and if that won't get us what we need, we might have to build the more expensive solution." This lets me advertise my awareness of a fancier architectural solution, as well as my ability and willingness to execute on it, without actually saying that it's a good idea.

billtsedong 2y ago

Honestly if that guy was my manager, I'd quit no matter what. I'm already selling 1/3 of my lifetime just to be able to eat, so no freaking way I'd contribute to someone already robbing me of the most valuable resource one can have.

chrisgd 2y ago

It’s crazy we still hire so slowly and fire so quickly when it should be the exact opposite.

icedchai 2y ago
Many companies are afraid of being sued or "ruining their reputation" through too many firings. Instead, they waste much more on wasted salaries and ruin their reputation internally by keeping useless people around.

hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago

I'm more interested in figuring out what kind of knowledge base most reliably turns a junior dev into a "skilled pragmatist". My guess is the highest ROI thing one can do in software engineering is take your command line environment and OS internals seriously to heart. This can be either bash/Unix or PowerShell/Windows, depending on your career goals, although having gotten reasonably good with both sets I'd recommend the former. Wherever you go, you'll have that ultra portable knowledge to rely on, and do in 10 lol minutes what might take your coworkers 20 or 30.

from-nibly 2y ago
shaving 20 minutes off a task is useless unless it's something that happens constantly. The real differentiator will be, do you know you can do something, that others in your org think is impossible? Can you turn a 6 month project into a half day script and move on? Also there isn't "A knowledge base" that turns a junior dev into a "skilled pragmatist". It comes from being a part of delivering value all the way up and down the stack. There unfortunately isn't a book that can really teach you that. You gotta build that in yourself on your own through experience.

schaefer 2y ago

There are many assertions of facts in this blog article, for example: 75% skilled pragmatists. Do any of these facts have citations? Even if the author were to directly state they are his observations as a developer, it would have more value than absolutely no citation. As written, these facts are giving me a very made up or "story time" vibe.

namuol 2y ago

The article’s thesis is based on the assumption that most contributors care a good deal about the business and/or their craft. I just don’t see that.

bb88 2y ago

As the saying goes: "If you stick your head up above the cube wall, prepare to have it decapitated."

cousin_it 2y ago

I think the root cause of why managers reward flashy employees over useful ones is because managers are clueless about the work itself. The more a manager understands the work, on a micro level, the more they'll be able to judge it accurately. Note that it doesn't mean micromanagement: you must understand the details, but stop yourself from second-guessing the employees on these details. And it doesn't mean you can't delegate: as long as you have intimate understanding of the details, you're free to delegate and be as hands-off as you want. In fact the best way to delegate is to learn to do the thing well yourself, then delegate it to someone and do occasional spot checks on them.

fotran0922 2y ago

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csours 2y ago

I can't give my boss any work they don't want to do. If I find a problem in another team's domain, I can try to interest them in it, and failing that, I can try to interest my boss in it, but if no one gets interested enough to fix the thing, what am I going to do? Work around the problem and sulk. See Also: Glue Work https://noidea.dog/glue https://noidea.dog/glue

mtreis86 2y ago

Biggest waste I see is people arguing over equally good options. Flip a coin and go.

aubanel 2y ago

Putting "cut-throat bureaucrats" in the "do not care for impact" side of the axis seems unnatural to me: I think these people do care for impact, and that's why they are so decided about imposing their ways. But their definition of impact is "doing things the right way", which corrupts their want for improvement into a pile of processes.

gr4vityWall 2y ago

I fail to see how trying to get more out of Maria would make any thing better for Maria herself.

analog31 2y ago
... And she knows it.

xyst 2y ago

I have found that Fortune 500 companies are usually the worst when it comes to this. If you want to get shit done, don’t work at a soulless corporation. These are glorified retirement homes for people. Have had the unfortunate experience with having to hand hold what’s been described as “20+ YoE industry veterans” through the fucking basics of oauth.

chatmasta 2y ago

Why are all four quadrants bad contributors? Surely that’s a bit cynical?

fortani 2y ago

"I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent — their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy — they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent — he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief." Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord This is an interesting quote from a WWII General. So "skilled pragmatists" seems to map to what Kurt terms as clever and lazy. But it also means that most people are lazy and stupid.

jongjong 2y ago

This is assuming that the skilled pragmatists are even employed to begin with. What I'm seeing is that they've been steadily getting pushed out of the industry. There have been many highly skilled open source devs who left the industry because they can't deal with the bureaucracy and nonsense anymore. The dispassionate, status-oriented bureaucrat seems to have the upper hand; and they appear to have the majority necessary to get their way in the centers of power. We have a bad case of the blind leading the visionaries.

khana 2y ago

[dead]

cebert 2y ago

I can appreciate the some of the frustrations many here raise with corporate work culture. However, in reality, you need to sell the value you bring. If you see more junior folk or good folk who don’t highlight their own value, help bring visibility. If you don’t highlight your value and peers you appreciate, you risk it not being recognized. Don’t let the good people lose out in the game. Help get good people promoted and into positions of power.

AndyNemmity 2y ago

This might accurately describe me, although I am very challenged in what I do. I guess I find the intersection between what I do, and other people, to be a waste of time. Whenever I try to bring other people into the mix, they tend to misunderstand, and I spend so much time correcting them, it's hard to get value out of the process. I do get value out of the process (did today), but it often feels like I am increasing my effort exponentially for very little.

fuzzfactor 2y ago

From the final paragraph of Part 2: >Instead of “getting more out of” people, think about “achieve more together, and for each other.” You can't herd cats without being an integral part of the herd.