I think this is one of the arguments for holocracy. The entire purpose of management is to efficiently assign work to individual contributors. Instead of leaving a few work items unassigned, holocracy leaves all the work items unassigned, and then the ones that get done are the ones that are most important to the team.
I'm not saying I buy the idea, and in fact that the same arguments against holocracy work against the author's approach.
Instead, at the next department meeting, I talked about how impressed I was
with what those teams had done, and how it was going to be important for us
to spread that good practice to other teams. Without explicitly saying so, I
let it be known that this was something people could work on.
And what if nobody had stepped up? Would the author have left it at that, undermining their political power by showing that they could be ignored with no ill effects? Or would they have then appointed someone to force continuous integration upon everyone (thus creating resentment due to the false choice presented)?
If you're going to manage, manage. If you're going to be hands-off, be hands-off. But this half-and-half nonsense combines the worst of holocracy and traditional management.
One option would be to pitch it again in a different method and at a later time. Iterate on approach and message. If it truly is an important project and if prospective volunteers had the time to commit, surely someone would emerge.
Put another way, assignments represent opportunities.
>One option would be to pitch it again in a different method and at a later time.
Right, but the fact that you pitched it once, and failed, undermines your credibility the next time you pitch the same idea. In the worst-case, you can get known as "that guy who is always advocating for <x>" and your interlocutor dismisses you even before taking the time to listen to your new argument.
I wouldn't be concerned with work not getting done as long as you're thoughtful in where you leave the vacuums.
The example he uses is a pretty good one. Teams were building software without the aid of CI, some teams had found benefit in it, but not yet all of the teams. You might be right, forcing CI may have created resentment, it might not have been the right thing to do at the time. If no one steps up, that's a signal worth thinking about.
If nobody steps up then it's quite likely that work never needed to get done in the first place. win-win as long as it's a learning experience for all involved.
It's definitely a problem if you force a team or a person into a certain pattern and then change the rules without telling. For example you may have punished someone for taking the initiative in the past and now you try to intentionally create a vacuum.
In the real world there is always vacuum and always stuff people think needs to get done that doesn't really need to get done. The illusion is that the manager is omnipotent and can see all the vacuum and inefficiency. A good manager works with the team to understand those.
> If nobody steps up then it's quite likely that work never needed to get done in the first place.
Seriously? Consider this: You have all people tied up in work for one month. A customer issue comes up. Who should step up to take it? Because you're not seriously suggesting it should rot there one month, do you?
It's a classical coordination problem (and that's why preemptive scheduling was invented). I, as a developer, have no idea if I should step up. I would have to asses importance of all the other work that is being done by others, just to get a boolean value out of it. So everybody has to switch context to examine the issue, and the everybody's tasks to see where it fits in the grand scheme of things.
Now you can say, OK, we will have priorities on things, easy. But then you actually find out that the low priority work doesn't get done at all. OK, so you start to calculate time slices, fair scheduling, all that jazz. And all of sudden everybody is forced to execute these overcomplicated scheduling algorithms and no real work gets done. It's a bureaucratic nightmare (because people are really bad at executing algorithms correctly, and have high task switching overhead), and I have seen it. While this could be sanely done by a single responsible person, project manager, who has an idea about:
(1) what is the priority (and required latency) of each work item
(2) how long things are going to take (estimate)
(3) what are the dependencies
(4) who prefers what kind of work
Furthermore, if he needs any help with these points, he doesn't need to ask the whole team. Only one person can assess importance of an issue; the others do not need to care.
> A customer issue comes up. Who should step up to take it? Because you're not seriously suggesting it should rot there one month, do you?
That's why you talk to each other. Unless the team is huge than figuring out who works on something shouldn't take a long time.
> the low priority work doesn't get done at all.
That's great. Low priority stuff shouldn't get done ahead of high priority stuff.
IMO you're over-complicating some things and over-simplifying others. There is no mythical project manager who can tell your items 1-4 in anything but the most trivial of projects. That's why almost any complex tech project I've seen managed by Gantt charts and project managers (and I've seen lots) never meets their schedule. Once you let go of the illusion that you can actually manage technology projects that way you'll find things get a lot simpler.
Here's what happens in real life with your items 1-4:
(1) The priority and require latency are often misjudged by the project manager. In technology project project managers often don't have the right domain knowledge to be able to judge these. So they may prioritize some feature ahead of another in a way that makes it more difficult to build the system.
(2) How long things are going to take is impossible to judge in an R&D scenario. Only projects that are very similar to ones you've done in the past can be estimated with any certainty. In practice most project managers will make an estimate that fits what he's asked to deliver on because he is anchored to that.
(3) Requires domain knowledge that the project manager doesn't typically have. Even individuals in the team may not have it. The team as a whole can usually figure those out by discussion. In real world projects managed by project managers dependencies are discovered when work is blocked due to them more often than predicted.
(4) This is also difficult. What tends to happen is the project manager will have some thoughts about who prefers what kind of work. Sometimes they'll be wrong. People get upset. People leave. It's easier for people to work on what they like in a less tightly managed environment.
A lot of this is cultural. In some cultures and for some people being self managed is extremely difficult. I've worked with people who will stress out if they're not told what to do. However, I do believe the best teams consist of people who are more self managed.
> If nobody steps up then it's quite likely that work never needed to get done in the first place.
Or it's a really grotty compliance issue, requiring tedious reworking of existing code against a deadline imposed by an external authority under threat of penalty.
No-one wants to work on those issues. If you screw it up, the company is fined and you're probably on a shortlist for the next RIF. If you manage to do it right under pressure and stress, the company isn't fined and you're back looking at a list of upcoming work items.
Why take that on as an employee if there's an option to dodge it?
As a reasonably experienced manager, I think holocracy can sort of work in the context of largely repeatable units of work, and areas that don't require a lot of focused independent thinking by single individuals. But if you're working on a biz dev strategy, for example, that's just not something a random employee can successfully do and by definition that means it has a dependency on the person/people who can. There are loads of functions at all medium++ sized companies like that.
I don't understand how this would work reliably, honestly. My first impression is that there are just too many variables involved. I can see this favoring the "gotta get it now" crowd.
Especially if employees know their manager/org does stuff like this, employees will almost like bidders in a game theoretic auction; trying to keep flexible schedules, predicting the likelihood/quality of other vacuums coming up, evaluating how they stack up against their colleagues, etc..
I can imagine unhealthy situations where employees feel obliged to take on a vacuum, or have to compete for a vacuum they don't actually want.
In a world where there is no judging, this could work well, people would do things out of interest and want, but in this world, I feel this is more "gamification". This is because people will take these hints because know they are an explicit vehicle to get noticed and they know that _not_ taking the hint will cost them. It's playing with (psychologically manipulating) people.
That's to say they do it because in this game it's beneficial to their career/image not because they sincerely _want_ to. It's making the brownnosing opportunities explicit, I guess.
It also practically makes people work "on a curve" the baseline is the "best" worker now, the person who has no other responsibilities, the workaholic, neurotic, perfectionist, etc. and now everyone else gets (unfavorably) compared to this one.
It's the difference between going to the toilet and on the other hand, choosing to eat ice cream. One is a must, the other an option which you may or may not act on.
While I quite agree with the idea, it rests on the assumption:
"leaders also need to create a culture in which employees do not have every waking moment of every day committed to project work"
Unfortunately, I am currently in situation where is lot more project work than people (and I wonder, is it different elsewhere?). In that case, I don't think the approach the author describes quite works unless you have a dedicated person who keeps track what needs to be done and prioritizes (i.e. project manager).
Because when I work on something I want to work on it with highest possible focus, not being bothered to asses what other work has to be done. So I would prefer (which is not my current predicament, sadly) some other person tracking everything and telling me - hey, this thing has higher priority than what you're doing right now, perhaps you should switch tasks. The point is, he should make the calculation that I should switch, not me.
(Perhaps this is a reason why preemptive multitasking won over cooperative multitasking on the OS level?)
There are some, who in ambition to lead (or work on highly visible projects), will step up and take on new things – meanwhile skimping on their core responsibilities and deliverables.
Are these the people we want to promote into leadership roles?
Not sure why are you replying to me, it's entirely different question.
I don't have a problem with people working on new things. The question of leadership - I think it's a little fuzzy. OS kernel decides what process gets to run and what not, but it's not like you can call it a "leader". He just does it on basis of processes' priorities, which may well be set by individual processes themselves or something else entirely. (And I am actually fan of direct democracy - where the leader designation is pointless, but that doesn't mean - in such system - you can't have project manager telling you what you should work on, as is obvious from the OS analogy.)
What about people who have a light load during a cycle (due to specialization), like to tinker with things in their 'spare' time, or would rather tradeoff their core and do something different?
Seems reasonable for an internal tool or process to help the team - not a necessity, so if nobody wants to do it, no big deal. If people are excited about it, it'll get done along with their core responsibilities.
The other case is giving people the opportunity to hand off their normal load (that may be uninteresting to them) to head up some project or initiative that would have to be assigned to someone anyway. In the latter case, isn't it better to have someone who's interested doing it than have that person doing uninteresting work while an uninterested person heads up the project?
I've worked at too many places where the vacuums are real, not contrived as bounty, and NO ONE WANTS YOU TO FILL THEM. They all really, really just want to spin your wheels, stay on the treadmill, and count paper clips until your dying day. Everyone.
The real-world dynamic, on the other side of the wall, is more like that of some kind of 1950's sitcom depiction of a social circle of married couples, and all the lazy husbands resent the one that buys his wife roses, and makes them all look bad.
I've heard this approach mentioned before, but it was in the context of how to hire hotel maids, as explained by a Four Seasons Hotels executive. They like people who are a bit obsessive about tidyness, and have a way to test for that.
This is a good approach to cleaning up a room. It may not be appropriate to programming.
Ugg. I'm sorry about being negative but here are some protips:
1. If a manager leaves work unassigned and you pick it up, prepare to have a LOT more work dumped on you in the future for no reward.
2. If you pretend to be a manager with hopes of being made a manager, all that you will accomplish is you are going to end up doing your job AND your bosses job. Your boss will look like a hero to his/her peers. You'll kill yourself and won't be made a manager regardless.
A better approach is to be smart about it. Always negotiate the work and what you're going to get out of it ahead of time. Maybe you just get some political capital, praise, or a positive review. Don't just blindly do work you weren't asked to do thinking it will be rewarded.
This really depends on the organization you're working for. If you're in a competitive corporate environment with lots of pusing and shoving, your interpretation is probably correct. If you work in a place that has flat hierarchies and lots of employee autonomy, the original blog author is probably right.
- The best route up is hitching your wagon to your bosses wagon. So yes doing some of his work will make him look like a hero, which will get him promoted, and he'll think who is his most valuable / productive underling, which will get you promoted. Hopefully you doing some of his work free's up his time to be more productive in other areas. If your boss is a lazy PHB (Dilbert), get another job.
- It is far more difficult to try and get promoted around your boss. Don't try this, it doesn't work.
- Reward isn't always immediate. A previous manager of mine's advice was: You can't keep a good man down. Eventually someone will see the extra effort you put in and reward you for it, even if it is an ex colleage getting you hired at another company.
It is for sure one way, but you have no idea how long it will take till somebody "picks you up". It might take few months or 5 years (or more), draining you of a lot of energy and time that you could spent actually having a life. Plus some people see good performers around as competition, depends how company is structured (ie if your manager is on same position/level you will be once promoted).
My example - I have colleague like that didn't do proper research before interview and agreed on ridiculously low salary for job&area. I started 1 year after him, negotiated properly (when you don't care that much if you get it or not, it's amazing position for negotiation). He works hard and is clever, right now he is my line manager and guess what - gradually he reached same salary as me. Since nowadays any of us could be fired anytime (or not, big multinational corp, you never know, people are fired frequently). So result - he puts 50% more effort, does endless meetings/documents and presentations that nobody enjoys doing, looks completely drained from energy. I do the same +-fun dev work that I enjoy with gradually more responsibilities, and am earning the same.
this all depends a lot on specific company, hierarchy, promotion processes, your specific boss etc. in good company for example, you discuss with your manager your desire for promotion, set objectives/expectations you should fulfill in incoming months, and unless there is promotional freeze (or you screw up), you'll get there.
you have no idea how long it will take till somebody "picks you up".
This is exactly right. It's also exactly why you don't wait for someone to guide your career: you do it yourself. If you want to work for someone specific, why not just go to them and say so?
Maybe I've had more than my share of bad bosses, but I don't really agree with you here. I must say, also, that in my experience, it does depend on the company size, culture and abilities of said managers more often than not (big, hierarchical companies tend to be worse at this kind of thing, also, banking and financial, not sure why).
- A good manager will notice, and appreciate, your effort. But promote you? You are one of his best tools, why should he? Usually he'll try everything he can to keep you where you are. If it's a bad manager, he won't even recognize your effort.
- Yes, unless you work with mixed teams or on different projects. In that case, two managers might end up fighting to get you on their teams and it might be a good thing for you.
- Nothing to say here, you are totally right, but depending on how you play your cards, the reward can come earlier. Only thing I'll point is that I've seen departments go to hell because managers failed to recognize this.
My tip would be to communicate. If you have free time, don't wait for your boss to assign you work and ask. If you see something else that you can be doing (sometimes there are features or bugs that could be worked together), say so, but always comunicate first and wait for your managers decision.
Of course, all this is IMHO and your results may vary.
- A good manager will notice, and appreciate, your effort. But promote you? You are one of his best tools, why should he? Usually he'll try everything he can to keep you where you are. If it's a bad manager, he won't even recognize your effort.
Your parent comment:
make him look like a hero, which will get him promoted, and he'll think who is his most valuable / productive underling, which will get you promoted
So, your manager got promoted, so in order to keep you around, he'll try anything, including promoting you, to keep you as one of his best tools.
Again, maybe I've had more bad managers than the average (in my 17 years of professional experience I've had 2, maybe 3, good managers), but there's no guarantee that will happen.
Maybe in areas like SV, where good professionals with solid experience have no problem finding another role and companies are actually trying their best to keep good employees that happens more often. What I've seen is people skipped for promotion in favor of the manager's son friend. Or in favor of someone "recommended" from above. Or many other forms of nepotism.
I've seen wonderful managers-to-be being kept in a lower role because the company didn't want to cough up the increase in salary. And, as said before, invariably I've seen these people end up leaving and going somewhere else, causing the department a few problems (organization, lost know-how...).
BTW, reading my comments on this one might think I'm bitter and maybe I am: I worked 6 years in Spain and France, where nepotism is the norm and techies are considered second class citizens. I must say that I don't think I've been skipped for promotion many times and personally I haven't had many issues moving up (and down) the ladder in all the places I've worked. But I also know that one of the reasons for this is that I've never had a problem with getting up and leaving a company if I wasn't happy.
Your comments aren't wrong, but this illustrates why it's important when interviewing for jobs that you're interviewing them for cultural fit and to determine whether you'd want to work for your boss-to-be, almost moreso than them interviewing you.
In the words of a good manager I used to know: "I want us (the company)to win. Whether you work for me or someone else here, I don't care. I just don't want you working for the competition."
This. So much this. The actual work, while important, is of less importance than your manager. Yes, find interesting work, but prioritize them, and consider outright declining them, if the manager does not seem like someone you can work with and can trust to be dealt fairly by.
Agreed. There was a crazy study that showed that 75% of American workers identify their boss as the worst and most stressful part of their job and that 60% of US workers would take a new boss over a pay raise.
But you're at such a disadvantage when interviewing -- how do you vet your potential manager? And when your financial welfare is on the line, would you really pass up an opportunity on this count alone?
Yeah, it's hard. But it's worth keeping in the forefront of your mind. When interviewing, make sure you've met everyone above you you'll actually have to interact with. When contemplating a job change, keep that in the forefront of your mind, and make decisions accordingly. I know I could have avoided one disastrous job I took had I done so (while missing out on none of the good ones)
> The best route up is hitching your wagon to your bosses wagon. So yes doing some of his work will make him look like a hero, which will get him promoted, and he'll think who is his most valuable / productive underling, which will get you promoted. Hopefully you doing some of his work free's up his time to be more productive in other areas. If your boss is a lazy PHB (Dilbert), get another job.
This is called loyalty, and it only really works in certain kinds of endeavors, and then only certain organizations doing them. TV shows depict loyalty a lot, the thing I notice about these shows is that the stories are always set in "meat-grinder" sorts of fields, and then at the tops of those fields. Suits, set in a high-powered corporate law firm. Entourage, set in Hollywood. Loyalty as a major theme to a show isn't interesting to watch otherwise.
Everywhere else, an interested ladder-climber will always find that it's way easier and cheaper to change jobs than it is to move up in one. Hence the perennial advice to move to a city, where landing jobs is like shooting fish in a barrel for the ambitious. When you run out of steam at one company, get a fresh start somewhere else. Rinse and repeat until you're tired of moving around, then you can start the loyalty path.
It's important to note that the skills you need to convince someone else that you can do a job are way different than the skills you need to convince a power broker to bequeath you with additional responsibilities and the commensurate titles and prestige. It so happens that years of experience working in organizations gives you those skills largely through osmosis.
I like where I am now, so I investigated the possibility of sticking around and trying to move up rather than jump to another company. Even talked to my boss about it. But unless you're at a rapidly growing company, the opportunities for advancement just aren't going to be there and you might be waiting years for your turn. My boss specifically used the words, "you're comfortable" to describe my head space when he said he'd go around and ask if anyone else needed anything to do.
You and everyone else can have the best of intentions, but opportunity is limited and it's hard to make more of it. There's only ever a limited amount of money and perks to go around, and its often politically unfeasible to start rocking a boat by democratizing something that was previously held feudally.
Making the decision to stay at a company is giving up easy access to opportunity in exchange for security and stability. You can always unmake that decision by leaving, often times you can even unmake it the other way, companies will take people that leave back if they like them enough, but you and only you can decide what you want more out of your time on Earth.
Most. For most employers, an employee is a cost / benefit thing (see also: capitalism). The more work an employee does for the least amount of money, the better value that employee is to the employer.
Relevant to HN, this is common in SV; fixed working hours / contracts (i.e. 40 hr workweeks) - which unions have fought hard for to achieve - are frowned upon, working overtime, evenings, weekends, and odd hours are encouraged, and people are expected to be available for work pretty much 24/7, and to be doing something work / profession-related outside of work too (think hackathons, meetups, hobby / OS projects, etc).
Mind you my sweeping generalisation may not be accurate, I don't live / work there.
At least where I work, there are annual raises where junior managers recommend which of their employees should receive small/medium/large raises; and only giving small raises does not produce any rewards or benefits for the manager.
If someone is doing great work, why wouldn't a manager recommend they get a large raise? They want to retain good performers, after all.
Outside of the highly profitable sectors (tech, finance, insurance, pharma), annual raises mostly went the way of the dodo back in 2007-2008... and didn't come back.
I personally take on jobs I'm not assigned. But I think believing someone owes you a promotion for working hard is bs. Instead, work on the things you find valuable in whatever way you want it to be.
Tbh though I actually agree with your comment 100% but there is a positive way to spin it
mikekchar's rule of strategic incompetence: Never be really, really good at something that your don't want to do. Otherwise people will keep asking you to do it.
Corollary (and the useful bit): If you show yourself to be really, really good at something people will keep asking you to do it. If it's something you like, then you will be happy in your job.
In any job there are 1000's of things that need to get done that nobody is doing right now. It is a good investment to do some of the things that you enjoy and get really, really good at it. Over time you will find that it will become your job.
> Never be really, really good at something that your don't want to do. Otherwise people will keep asking you to do it.
This is how I was able to avoid getting roped into the IT help desk role. I did that job for a year at another company, I'm really good at it. But when someone comes around looking for help and the guy they hired isn't there, I do not offer to help. No way am I going back to that, I didn't develop Rails skills for nothing.
That's kind of a managerial antipattern. True, if someone goes an extra mile and does something outside her direct responsibilities, it is tempting to reward that person with more of the similar tasks in the future. But in the long run this only leads to resentment and curbing of initiative. More experienced managers will find ways to reward this kind of contributions.
Also true that employees need to be smart about it. No need to volunteer for unglamorous drudge work, better do something that is perceived to be valuable.
I would not call it trying to be a "manager", that is a narrow role with a formal place in the org chart. Let's call it "taking responsibility".
I agree that you should be smart about it, and not blindly do unassigned work. In the worst case you can be reprimanded because you did not follow process and you might step on someones toes that had other plans and ideas.
But don't just do what you are told or only what fits your job description, but do what is needed most and what you care about. That does not have to mean you can't first discuss it with your formal manager or team, but only that you take the initiative and show that you care.
When other people recognise that you care about some topic, surly you will get more work regarding that topic. But that is a good thing because you now get to do more work _that you care about_ and that is important. In a sensible organisation that will also mean you can leave some other work to other people, not that you have to increase your hours.
Sometimes doing the right thing in your mind means going against leadership and culture that are ingrained in the heart of the company. Taking this route may actually be the right thing to do, but it might not be in your long-term career's best interest. This goes for everything from filling vacuums to taking charge to fix things gone wrong.
In my experience, if you find that your values are at odds with the company culture, you should think very carefully about leaving.
Unless you're at/near the top of the organisation, trying to challenge an ingrained culture is difficult, and you risk being perceived as "difficult", "obstructive", "not a team player", etc. and, from personal experience, it can be stressful and depressing.
I'm not really disagreeing. Setting expectation is always a good thing.
However, speaking as a manager...if one of my team members is always stepping up and getting things done in a reliable way without me having to constantly direct them....that person is going to be first in line for promotion and raises.
On the flip side, the team members whom I have to micro manage because they are unable to think for themselves will be the first to be culled.
I'm going to say that it depends on the manager. What I've found is that volunteering to take on unassigned work usually resulted in me having first choice at new tasks so I ended up generally working only on stuff I found interesting.
Now, I will admit that I had a very good manager at the time, but I've seen the same thing play out similarly elsewhere.
One issue here; what if the people working in the organisation already have too many things to work on and there's no one who feels they can take on this task?
Seems like the article and its title assume that a workplace necessarily has lulls between tasks (or perhaps more employees than there is work available). By assigning people tasks, you can at least tell them that their new job is more important than their current one, at least at this point in time.
> Companies don't need to go so far as the well-known Google 20 percent time
A bit of a digression here.
I love that people think the idea that letting employees spend a measly 20% of their time deciding what they should be working on is somehow an extreme idea. What portion of your typical day would you honestly say is devoted to solid, in-the-flow work? After all the meeting, context switches, random interruptions, lunch, distractions on company chat -- I personally would say a fraction. Or flow state is simply dead for me at the office.
Recently, my roommate and I came home after work and ended up knocking out a very useful skunkworks project in about 6 hours over the course of 2 nights. That completely uninterrupted time mixed with the fact that it was a project that was freshly conceived and still full of passion in our minds let us get more work done in that burst than we felt like we had in weeks.
20% time is a joke. We need to ditch this 40 hour, strictly scheduled workweek in distracting office environments and try some radically different ways of getting productivity boosts. It just so happens that people also feel a lot better when they get these boosts to boot. I know after knocking out that project certainly made me feel awesome.
Maybe I'm exceptionally lucky, but I work from home most of the time and get to prioritize my work myself. If I want to spend a day improving test coverage or build tooling, I am free to do so.
The price I pay for this is earning about 10k€ less a year, but I still think it's worth it.
I think that's a very important point that the article misses - some people will use spare work time to improve things they see could be done better rather than volunteering to do what their manager thinks needs to be done.
If you're a creative developer, or you have a passion for a specific area, then it's easy to ignore "unassigned work" in favour of doing things that you want to do instead. There can be a great deal of value in that that any manager needs to recognise. Someone who isn't voluntarily picking up unassigned work isn't (necessarily) failing to show leadership - they might be leading in an area where work isn't being created, whether it's assigned or not.
$120k in SF or 40k€ where I currently live get me both the same standard of living. I don't think comparing absolute wages/salaries has ever been meaningful.
By the same logic you could say if only I'd done X I'd earn an extra $15k, $20k or even $50k a year but would you have followed a path in life that was balanced and happy? Not every decision can be reduced to a number
You're not wrong, but you don't quite understand how 20% time works in practice. It's a formal way to recruit part-time help on unrelated projects, and it's recruited for and tracked in exactly the same way using the same systems as normal jobs & normal performance management. It's a fantastic way for people at Google to seek out learning opportunities or places to participate outside their normal team/group/dept/BU.
Most companies look at 20% time as a super-informal way for people to volunteer "spare time" to work on non-core stuff, but that isn't how it works at Google, at all.
That said, your central point is 100% accurate ... but at least within tech, I think that "40 hour, strictly scheduled workweek" has been gone for several years now.
I haven't worked at a software development company where they didn't have an expectation of 40 hours and a set of "core hours" where you had to be in the office or available.
Sadly, I think we have to accept that the appearance of productivity (butt in chair, open office visibility) is more important than actual productivity most of the time.
Ugh. Google's idea of "normal performance management" is what the civilized world calls "fascistic". It's pretty disgusting that, in the 21st century, execs are OK with a performance review system in which rape slang (threats like "take you into the Perf room" and people with sub 3.0 scores being called "pillow biters") is the norm.
If little hobby skunkworks 6 hour projects actually made much money then that would be the norm.
The reality is that the things that people and companies are willing to pay for often take a great deal more time and dedication. Also, they often involve work that's a hell of a lot less interesting. Even the projects that are fun to start often become boring drudgery during the long haul of making a product that someone is willing to pay you for.
The point was that conventional work structure, in offices, with lots of meetings and other distractions that are mostly irrelevant are a huge productivity killer.
I don't disagree that there is a lot of inefficiency and counterproductivity in a conventional office - but the gp was offering up an example of how his hack session with his roommate proved something about how we "should" be working.
Like many complicated systems, it's easy to criticize the conventional office and offer microcosm-scale anecdotal counter-examples - but quite another thing to create something effectively comparable.
I love thinking about new ways to work. I work remotely and am always experimenting with ways to be effective from a distance... but I find that getting people's butts in chairs in the same office, and coordinating with a few boring meetings is surprisingly necessary.
Sorry for another negative post. As a PM, the example stated seems a bit absurd and definitely not the environment for me.
A transparent and healthy company culture lets people (briefly) reason and talk about projects/strengths. There shouldn't be some sort of implicit beauty contest, rewarding aggressive employee who are underloaded.
There must be better ways to develop talent. The method listed also creates a lot of weird incentives/strategies if employees know what is going on.
Agreed. You really hit the nail on the head when you said "aggressive." This strategy seems like it would create an artificially competitive zero-sum game within the company where employees who should be working together are competing to be the golden volunteer for the boss.
I think it would be better to always have fewer tasks than people (not more tasks, like the author seems to suggest), but establish high-level goals for the team as a whole. You'll quickly see who is best at understanding the goals, turning them into work, and recruiting other people to help do that work, which is real leadership (not just jumping to do extra tasks).
This practice can easily be abused or/and cause unintented consequences. For example, once employees know this is a short cut for promotion, they will focus a lot of their energy and attention to find 'the void' and try to fill it, or act like they can fill it, thus neglecting the real work that need to be done.
In fact, this could be a cultural issue where everybody tries to act like taking a lead (usually by blanket emails including the management team that say "XXX has been launched!! Contrats Y!!"), however you will find behind the backdrop, things are just half-baked or down right totally fake, because real execution is boring and not getting attention. So once an excitement dies down, people will scramble to find another 'void' to fill. You may argue the manager can check the work, but in a big cooperation, the middle managers are most vulnerable, and thus they care much more about their own asses than to ensure their staff get real work done.
In other words, this tactic is only applicable when the company is small, say, less than 20 people, and the boss knows everybody and the projects well.
You're highlighting this taken extreme levels where people are able to chop between what they are doing, which what Enron used to do to pretty disastrous effects.
This reads much more about people remaining in their teams, on their projects but not being micromanaged. It should tie nicely into Scrum retrospectives (as an example) where people bring things up versus just staying silent.
It's a really good example that leadership is something that everyone has an opportunity to exercise, not just management, and that in most companies leadership is very rarely exercised merely a job title.
Scrum retrospectives will no doubt help to address voids in work flow, product, or technology. However this seldom make one as manager.
In fact, very likely once good programmers done all the work, some jokers (within the team or otherwise) will jump out and grab the credits by sending out emails, then the joker is promoted.
This is the initial stage of what I described in my previous post. Again, you need technical strong managers to see through the mist, but sadly, these managers are rare (at least in my industry).
I completely agree. Leaving a gap and waiting for someone to fill it is practically the opposite of management.
> ..once employees know this is a short cut for promotion, they will focus a lot of their energy and attention to find 'the void' and try to fill it, or act like they can fill it, thus neglecting the real work that need to be done.
This in particular is really dangerous because it can poison an organisation's culture. For example, imagine Ben decides to focus on managing upwards in an effort to get Adam to promote him. Meanwhile, he neglects his duties, forcing his team-mates to pick up the slack. They start getting annoyed at Ben because he's not pulling his weight.
It's not uncommon, in my experience (and I'm aware that I'm at risk of stereo-typing here), for good, smart, conscientious people in technical roles to focus first on doing the job that they've been assigned and trust that management will recognise and reward them for doing so (and, conversely, punish anyone who slacks off), and that one of those rewards is that they will be considered for any opportunity for promotion that arises. Unfortunately, that doesn't always happen.
If Adam promotes Ben, his old team-mates are going to be really pissed off. From their perspective, Ben's bad behaviour has been rewarded, instead of rectified. Meanwhile, the extra work they've been putting in to make up for that bad behaviour has been completely ignored.
The end result is an unhappy team, They'll resent both Ben and Adam, their productivity will probably drop (because whey the hell should they work their asses off when they're clearly not going to be rewarded for it?), and may well start looking elsewhere for work.
In that scenario, Adam has not done a good job as a manager, and he's definitely not a good leader.
There's nothing wrong with identifying a gap and opening a dialogue about how it can be filled (including asking if anyone's interested in filling it) but if someone moves to plug a gap, that generally means that they're going to leave a gap somewhere else. A good manager needs to make sure that they understand the implications of shifting people around, and explicitly recognise the indirect contribution that Ben's old team-mates are making to fill the gap.
Organisations are about teams, not individuals. It's astounding how many managers fail to grasp that.
Organisations are about politics and status. As a sideline, sometimes useful work gets done.
>In that scenario, Adam has not done a good job as a manager, and he's definitely not a good leader.
One difference between good and bad management is that good managers understand politics, they understand people, and most of all they understand the consequences of different political options. (I mean effective and ineffective, not good vs evil.)
Effective managers don't - ever - rule by formula, campfire or sports coach platitudes, or read-it-in-a-book business mythology.
So if you're dealing with someone who does any of the above as a first choice, they're unlikely to be making rational choices, or to have any deep understanding of the team(s) they're managing.
Evil managers can have a good understanding of consequences but their choices will be designed to increase their own income and status at the expense of their team/company. So they can appear to be doing stupid counterproductive things, but in fact they'll likely be promoted because they're gaming the system. They're a horror to work for, because they'll exploit their team as a resource and discard it without looking back. (I've seen people boast about this. It's not hypothetical.)
Good managers have an interest in developing the talent in their team as well as shipping good things and getting themselves promoted. But they won't be doing it with platitudes like "Leave space for people to act like managers" and then punishing anyone who actually does. They'll be more politically adept than that.
The big problem for employees is that politics and culture are invisible. I've seen plenty of management books, but I can't remember seeing a useful book that explains the practical differences between exploitation/support and good/bad good/evil management. Simple metrics like hours worked are a start, but a bigger picture with standard examples of management practices and styles, and supportive/unhealthy team cultures would be very useful.
If you watch some of those "Unscripted" shows where everyone is being judged for their leadership, what do you find? Everyone acting like a full-on sociopathic Type A personality, fighting over who steers the car while nobody builds the car.
It's great entertainment, and perhaps it works for selecting leaders in small doses on completely made-up projects like selling bottles of water with the Cult-of-Personality leader's face on the label.
But it's a terrible way to actually run your core business.
I see this all the time, and I call it "organizational priority inversion."
Not only is the real execution/critical work boring, but management often doesn't really understand it or how to measure the effectiveness and contributions of people that are spending their time on it, so they make a blanket assumption that everyone is performing at a satisfactory level ("we only hire the best") and turn to other metrics that are simpler to understand and measure. It's much easier to count how many "organizational initiatives" Bob helped to launch, how many informational lunchtime talks he gave and the number of important meetings he made an influential remark at than it is to judge how much wasted time and aggravation his poor designs and implementations generated, and as a result, the work that Bob was actually hired to do (quickly dismissed as his "day job" by his manager during performance reviews) becomes the worst use of his time. As Bob realizes this, his reputation improves even more because he spends less time on his work - obviously someone putting his thumbprint on so many initiatives and decisions must be a key player, and it would be a waste to have such a person spending his time "in the trenches."
In an organization that conflates influence with effectiveness, it doesn't matter what you're influencing others to do, only that you do it often and well.
I am 100% pro this approach. Of course it won't work for 80% of companies with rigid control and hierarchy but I never had much interest in working for such companies.
Maybe I am too old but I remember days of programming being pure fun and maybe it is not typical but I can choose such jobs even today. If it does not sparkle there is no amount of money that can make me join the team.
Programming was (and is) the thing of passion and joy. If you don't have fun you're holding it the wrong way. Having 'fill the gap' tasks is brilliant way to keep the team engaged the right way. It won't work for sweatshops but why would one work in such company in the first place? Money is no excuse just to be clear in advance.
Unless it is thing of love and passion and fun it is not programming in the first place.
To start acting as a manager is actually not to jump into the vacuums that you see everywhere as a developper. Acting as a manager is to take a step back, and help others fill in the vacuums.
In my corporate experience, only doing what you're told to by your manager is the route to mediocre raises and rare promotions. Larger raises and faster promotions come from identifying problems and solving them, i.e. not needing to be micro-managed.
Large raises and faster promotions come from your perceived value and nowadays is mostly achieved by networking and politics. Identifying problems and solving them is often a threat to all levels above you, often managers play games by introducing inefficiencies and then pretending to solve them slowly, keeping their perceived utility and visibility high, and you identifying and solving some of these poses an existential threat to their fiefdoms. If you can identify/solve problems, start your own business and have your old company becoming your customer instead.
In my experience, when layoff times came around, the managers would get rid of those they didn't want any more, and it was always the deadwood, not the high performers. I infer they viewed the deadwood as much more of a threat.
I've seen grade-A employees being kicked out during layoffs and deadwood remaining, so YMMV. A lot of it depends on the company culture and on the personal goals of managers and their ability to sell whatever they intend to their higher ups.
In my corporate experience, it depends on the problem. Identifying problems and solving them is great until the problems you identify are in the realm of your manager's responsibility.
Don't show too much initiative. It threatens the hierarchy.
Fuck ambition for its own sake. It only causes a race to the bottom and short-changes users/customers.
I have used this strategic vacuum technique as a manager to great effect before.
It brings out the best creativity and allows people who are going through apparent productivity lulls to come out of them in a healthy, smarter way. It also builds lasting loyalty and a strong team spirit.
Velocity isn't just hours spent butt-in-seat or number of commits or whatever. It's precious moments of high quality attention. To maximize that you need to be more like a conductor of an orchestra than a drill sergeant.
CAVEAT: when under a high-pressure situation with a new team it is sometimes necessary to limit freedom, demand trust, and command things for the purpose of getting through that situation. Obviously it's dangerous and the wrong kind of manager can get addicted to this kind of solution easily. These temporary command-and-control moments can sometimes be used as trust builders for the managers if, once the situation is resolved, they immediately relinquish the extraordinary power they had used and return to a more natural/creative dynamic - the team will see this as honourable since it didn't technically _have_ to happen that way.
Asking for volunteers (or implicitly relying on volunteers) is one of many
structures companies can choose to allocate work. Like many other minimally-
structured structures, it tends to reinforce and amplify larger cultural
inequities.
Getting a promotion to a good position requires all of the following:
1. The company must be growing non-linearly and be strong financially.
2. You must have enough value to the company where if you leave you'll be difficult to replace.
3. Management prefers to promote from within.
If any one of these is missing, then the positions offered as promotions will be sub-optimal.
#1 seems to be in short supply across a large swath of industries, and is the main driver for lack of promotions offered these days.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadI'm not saying I buy the idea, and in fact that the same arguments against holocracy work against the author's approach.
And what if nobody had stepped up? Would the author have left it at that, undermining their political power by showing that they could be ignored with no ill effects? Or would they have then appointed someone to force continuous integration upon everyone (thus creating resentment due to the false choice presented)?If you're going to manage, manage. If you're going to be hands-off, be hands-off. But this half-and-half nonsense combines the worst of holocracy and traditional management.
One option would be to pitch it again in a different method and at a later time. Iterate on approach and message. If it truly is an important project and if prospective volunteers had the time to commit, surely someone would emerge.
Put another way, assignments represent opportunities.
Right, but the fact that you pitched it once, and failed, undermines your credibility the next time you pitch the same idea. In the worst-case, you can get known as "that guy who is always advocating for <x>" and your interlocutor dismisses you even before taking the time to listen to your new argument.
The example he uses is a pretty good one. Teams were building software without the aid of CI, some teams had found benefit in it, but not yet all of the teams. You might be right, forcing CI may have created resentment, it might not have been the right thing to do at the time. If no one steps up, that's a signal worth thinking about.
It's definitely a problem if you force a team or a person into a certain pattern and then change the rules without telling. For example you may have punished someone for taking the initiative in the past and now you try to intentionally create a vacuum.
In the real world there is always vacuum and always stuff people think needs to get done that doesn't really need to get done. The illusion is that the manager is omnipotent and can see all the vacuum and inefficiency. A good manager works with the team to understand those.
Seriously? Consider this: You have all people tied up in work for one month. A customer issue comes up. Who should step up to take it? Because you're not seriously suggesting it should rot there one month, do you?
It's a classical coordination problem (and that's why preemptive scheduling was invented). I, as a developer, have no idea if I should step up. I would have to asses importance of all the other work that is being done by others, just to get a boolean value out of it. So everybody has to switch context to examine the issue, and the everybody's tasks to see where it fits in the grand scheme of things.
Now you can say, OK, we will have priorities on things, easy. But then you actually find out that the low priority work doesn't get done at all. OK, so you start to calculate time slices, fair scheduling, all that jazz. And all of sudden everybody is forced to execute these overcomplicated scheduling algorithms and no real work gets done. It's a bureaucratic nightmare (because people are really bad at executing algorithms correctly, and have high task switching overhead), and I have seen it. While this could be sanely done by a single responsible person, project manager, who has an idea about:
(1) what is the priority (and required latency) of each work item
(2) how long things are going to take (estimate)
(3) what are the dependencies
(4) who prefers what kind of work
Furthermore, if he needs any help with these points, he doesn't need to ask the whole team. Only one person can assess importance of an issue; the others do not need to care.
That's why you talk to each other. Unless the team is huge than figuring out who works on something shouldn't take a long time.
> the low priority work doesn't get done at all.
That's great. Low priority stuff shouldn't get done ahead of high priority stuff.
IMO you're over-complicating some things and over-simplifying others. There is no mythical project manager who can tell your items 1-4 in anything but the most trivial of projects. That's why almost any complex tech project I've seen managed by Gantt charts and project managers (and I've seen lots) never meets their schedule. Once you let go of the illusion that you can actually manage technology projects that way you'll find things get a lot simpler.
Here's what happens in real life with your items 1-4:
(1) The priority and require latency are often misjudged by the project manager. In technology project project managers often don't have the right domain knowledge to be able to judge these. So they may prioritize some feature ahead of another in a way that makes it more difficult to build the system.
(2) How long things are going to take is impossible to judge in an R&D scenario. Only projects that are very similar to ones you've done in the past can be estimated with any certainty. In practice most project managers will make an estimate that fits what he's asked to deliver on because he is anchored to that.
(3) Requires domain knowledge that the project manager doesn't typically have. Even individuals in the team may not have it. The team as a whole can usually figure those out by discussion. In real world projects managed by project managers dependencies are discovered when work is blocked due to them more often than predicted.
(4) This is also difficult. What tends to happen is the project manager will have some thoughts about who prefers what kind of work. Sometimes they'll be wrong. People get upset. People leave. It's easier for people to work on what they like in a less tightly managed environment.
A lot of this is cultural. In some cultures and for some people being self managed is extremely difficult. I've worked with people who will stress out if they're not told what to do. However, I do believe the best teams consist of people who are more self managed.
Or it's a really grotty compliance issue, requiring tedious reworking of existing code against a deadline imposed by an external authority under threat of penalty.
No-one wants to work on those issues. If you screw it up, the company is fined and you're probably on a shortlist for the next RIF. If you manage to do it right under pressure and stress, the company isn't fined and you're back looking at a list of upcoming work items.
Why take that on as an employee if there's an option to dodge it?
I can imagine unhealthy situations where employees feel obliged to take on a vacuum, or have to compete for a vacuum they don't actually want.
That's to say they do it because in this game it's beneficial to their career/image not because they sincerely _want_ to. It's making the brownnosing opportunities explicit, I guess.
It also practically makes people work "on a curve" the baseline is the "best" worker now, the person who has no other responsibilities, the workaholic, neurotic, perfectionist, etc. and now everyone else gets (unfavorably) compared to this one.
It's the difference between going to the toilet and on the other hand, choosing to eat ice cream. One is a must, the other an option which you may or may not act on.
"leaders also need to create a culture in which employees do not have every waking moment of every day committed to project work"
Unfortunately, I am currently in situation where is lot more project work than people (and I wonder, is it different elsewhere?). In that case, I don't think the approach the author describes quite works unless you have a dedicated person who keeps track what needs to be done and prioritizes (i.e. project manager).
Because when I work on something I want to work on it with highest possible focus, not being bothered to asses what other work has to be done. So I would prefer (which is not my current predicament, sadly) some other person tracking everything and telling me - hey, this thing has higher priority than what you're doing right now, perhaps you should switch tasks. The point is, he should make the calculation that I should switch, not me.
(Perhaps this is a reason why preemptive multitasking won over cooperative multitasking on the OS level?)
Are these the people we want to promote into leadership roles?
I don't have a problem with people working on new things. The question of leadership - I think it's a little fuzzy. OS kernel decides what process gets to run and what not, but it's not like you can call it a "leader". He just does it on basis of processes' priorities, which may well be set by individual processes themselves or something else entirely. (And I am actually fan of direct democracy - where the leader designation is pointless, but that doesn't mean - in such system - you can't have project manager telling you what you should work on, as is obvious from the OS analogy.)
Seems reasonable for an internal tool or process to help the team - not a necessity, so if nobody wants to do it, no big deal. If people are excited about it, it'll get done along with their core responsibilities.
The other case is giving people the opportunity to hand off their normal load (that may be uninteresting to them) to head up some project or initiative that would have to be assigned to someone anyway. In the latter case, isn't it better to have someone who's interested doing it than have that person doing uninteresting work while an uninterested person heads up the project?
The real-world dynamic, on the other side of the wall, is more like that of some kind of 1950's sitcom depiction of a social circle of married couples, and all the lazy husbands resent the one that buys his wife roses, and makes them all look bad.
This is a good approach to cleaning up a room. It may not be appropriate to programming.
1. If a manager leaves work unassigned and you pick it up, prepare to have a LOT more work dumped on you in the future for no reward.
2. If you pretend to be a manager with hopes of being made a manager, all that you will accomplish is you are going to end up doing your job AND your bosses job. Your boss will look like a hero to his/her peers. You'll kill yourself and won't be made a manager regardless.
A better approach is to be smart about it. Always negotiate the work and what you're going to get out of it ahead of time. Maybe you just get some political capital, praise, or a positive review. Don't just blindly do work you weren't asked to do thinking it will be rewarded.
- The best route up is hitching your wagon to your bosses wagon. So yes doing some of his work will make him look like a hero, which will get him promoted, and he'll think who is his most valuable / productive underling, which will get you promoted. Hopefully you doing some of his work free's up his time to be more productive in other areas. If your boss is a lazy PHB (Dilbert), get another job.
- It is far more difficult to try and get promoted around your boss. Don't try this, it doesn't work.
- Reward isn't always immediate. A previous manager of mine's advice was: You can't keep a good man down. Eventually someone will see the extra effort you put in and reward you for it, even if it is an ex colleage getting you hired at another company.
My example - I have colleague like that didn't do proper research before interview and agreed on ridiculously low salary for job&area. I started 1 year after him, negotiated properly (when you don't care that much if you get it or not, it's amazing position for negotiation). He works hard and is clever, right now he is my line manager and guess what - gradually he reached same salary as me. Since nowadays any of us could be fired anytime (or not, big multinational corp, you never know, people are fired frequently). So result - he puts 50% more effort, does endless meetings/documents and presentations that nobody enjoys doing, looks completely drained from energy. I do the same +-fun dev work that I enjoy with gradually more responsibilities, and am earning the same.
this all depends a lot on specific company, hierarchy, promotion processes, your specific boss etc. in good company for example, you discuss with your manager your desire for promotion, set objectives/expectations you should fulfill in incoming months, and unless there is promotional freeze (or you screw up), you'll get there.
This is exactly right. It's also exactly why you don't wait for someone to guide your career: you do it yourself. If you want to work for someone specific, why not just go to them and say so?
- A good manager will notice, and appreciate, your effort. But promote you? You are one of his best tools, why should he? Usually he'll try everything he can to keep you where you are. If it's a bad manager, he won't even recognize your effort.
- Yes, unless you work with mixed teams or on different projects. In that case, two managers might end up fighting to get you on their teams and it might be a good thing for you.
- Nothing to say here, you are totally right, but depending on how you play your cards, the reward can come earlier. Only thing I'll point is that I've seen departments go to hell because managers failed to recognize this.
My tip would be to communicate. If you have free time, don't wait for your boss to assign you work and ask. If you see something else that you can be doing (sometimes there are features or bugs that could be worked together), say so, but always comunicate first and wait for your managers decision.
Of course, all this is IMHO and your results may vary.
Your parent comment:
make him look like a hero, which will get him promoted, and he'll think who is his most valuable / productive underling, which will get you promoted
So, your manager got promoted, so in order to keep you around, he'll try anything, including promoting you, to keep you as one of his best tools.
Maybe in areas like SV, where good professionals with solid experience have no problem finding another role and companies are actually trying their best to keep good employees that happens more often. What I've seen is people skipped for promotion in favor of the manager's son friend. Or in favor of someone "recommended" from above. Or many other forms of nepotism.
I've seen wonderful managers-to-be being kept in a lower role because the company didn't want to cough up the increase in salary. And, as said before, invariably I've seen these people end up leaving and going somewhere else, causing the department a few problems (organization, lost know-how...).
BTW, reading my comments on this one might think I'm bitter and maybe I am: I worked 6 years in Spain and France, where nepotism is the norm and techies are considered second class citizens. I must say that I don't think I've been skipped for promotion many times and personally I haven't had many issues moving up (and down) the ladder in all the places I've worked. But I also know that one of the reasons for this is that I've never had a problem with getting up and leaving a company if I wasn't happy.
One thing I would add is to make sure you love working for your boss. If you don't love working for your boss, get a new boss.
But you're at such a disadvantage when interviewing -- how do you vet your potential manager? And when your financial welfare is on the line, would you really pass up an opportunity on this count alone?
This is called loyalty, and it only really works in certain kinds of endeavors, and then only certain organizations doing them. TV shows depict loyalty a lot, the thing I notice about these shows is that the stories are always set in "meat-grinder" sorts of fields, and then at the tops of those fields. Suits, set in a high-powered corporate law firm. Entourage, set in Hollywood. Loyalty as a major theme to a show isn't interesting to watch otherwise.
Everywhere else, an interested ladder-climber will always find that it's way easier and cheaper to change jobs than it is to move up in one. Hence the perennial advice to move to a city, where landing jobs is like shooting fish in a barrel for the ambitious. When you run out of steam at one company, get a fresh start somewhere else. Rinse and repeat until you're tired of moving around, then you can start the loyalty path.
It's important to note that the skills you need to convince someone else that you can do a job are way different than the skills you need to convince a power broker to bequeath you with additional responsibilities and the commensurate titles and prestige. It so happens that years of experience working in organizations gives you those skills largely through osmosis.
I like where I am now, so I investigated the possibility of sticking around and trying to move up rather than jump to another company. Even talked to my boss about it. But unless you're at a rapidly growing company, the opportunities for advancement just aren't going to be there and you might be waiting years for your turn. My boss specifically used the words, "you're comfortable" to describe my head space when he said he'd go around and ask if anyone else needed anything to do.
You and everyone else can have the best of intentions, but opportunity is limited and it's hard to make more of it. There's only ever a limited amount of money and perks to go around, and its often politically unfeasible to start rocking a boat by democratizing something that was previously held feudally.
Making the decision to stay at a company is giving up easy access to opportunity in exchange for security and stability. You can always unmake that decision by leaving, often times you can even unmake it the other way, companies will take people that leave back if they like them enough, but you and only you can decide what you want more out of your time on Earth.
Why do you assume "no reward"? What kind of company/manager wouldn't reward an employee who goes that extra mile?
Relevant to HN, this is common in SV; fixed working hours / contracts (i.e. 40 hr workweeks) - which unions have fought hard for to achieve - are frowned upon, working overtime, evenings, weekends, and odd hours are encouraged, and people are expected to be available for work pretty much 24/7, and to be doing something work / profession-related outside of work too (think hackathons, meetups, hobby / OS projects, etc).
Mind you my sweeping generalisation may not be accurate, I don't live / work there.
If someone is doing great work, why wouldn't a manager recommend they get a large raise? They want to retain good performers, after all.
Tbh though I actually agree with your comment 100% but there is a positive way to spin it
Instead of or in addition to your normal duties? Or do you find that your normal duties don't fill a normal work week?
Corollary (and the useful bit): If you show yourself to be really, really good at something people will keep asking you to do it. If it's something you like, then you will be happy in your job.
In any job there are 1000's of things that need to get done that nobody is doing right now. It is a good investment to do some of the things that you enjoy and get really, really good at it. Over time you will find that it will become your job.
This is how I was able to avoid getting roped into the IT help desk role. I did that job for a year at another company, I'm really good at it. But when someone comes around looking for help and the guy they hired isn't there, I do not offer to help. No way am I going back to that, I didn't develop Rails skills for nothing.
Also true that employees need to be smart about it. No need to volunteer for unglamorous drudge work, better do something that is perceived to be valuable.
While at my company the same dress code applies to all, the managers certainly dress more business-like than the programmers.
I agree that you should be smart about it, and not blindly do unassigned work. In the worst case you can be reprimanded because you did not follow process and you might step on someones toes that had other plans and ideas.
But don't just do what you are told or only what fits your job description, but do what is needed most and what you care about. That does not have to mean you can't first discuss it with your formal manager or team, but only that you take the initiative and show that you care.
When other people recognise that you care about some topic, surly you will get more work regarding that topic. But that is a good thing because you now get to do more work _that you care about_ and that is important. In a sensible organisation that will also mean you can leave some other work to other people, not that you have to increase your hours.
Sometimes doing the right thing in your mind means going against leadership and culture that are ingrained in the heart of the company. Taking this route may actually be the right thing to do, but it might not be in your long-term career's best interest. This goes for everything from filling vacuums to taking charge to fix things gone wrong.
Unless you're at/near the top of the organisation, trying to challenge an ingrained culture is difficult, and you risk being perceived as "difficult", "obstructive", "not a team player", etc. and, from personal experience, it can be stressful and depressing.
However, speaking as a manager...if one of my team members is always stepping up and getting things done in a reliable way without me having to constantly direct them....that person is going to be first in line for promotion and raises.
On the flip side, the team members whom I have to micro manage because they are unable to think for themselves will be the first to be culled.
Now, I will admit that I had a very good manager at the time, but I've seen the same thing play out similarly elsewhere.
Seems like the article and its title assume that a workplace necessarily has lulls between tasks (or perhaps more employees than there is work available). By assigning people tasks, you can at least tell them that their new job is more important than their current one, at least at this point in time.
A bit of a digression here.
I love that people think the idea that letting employees spend a measly 20% of their time deciding what they should be working on is somehow an extreme idea. What portion of your typical day would you honestly say is devoted to solid, in-the-flow work? After all the meeting, context switches, random interruptions, lunch, distractions on company chat -- I personally would say a fraction. Or flow state is simply dead for me at the office.
Recently, my roommate and I came home after work and ended up knocking out a very useful skunkworks project in about 6 hours over the course of 2 nights. That completely uninterrupted time mixed with the fact that it was a project that was freshly conceived and still full of passion in our minds let us get more work done in that burst than we felt like we had in weeks.
20% time is a joke. We need to ditch this 40 hour, strictly scheduled workweek in distracting office environments and try some radically different ways of getting productivity boosts. It just so happens that people also feel a lot better when they get these boosts to boot. I know after knocking out that project certainly made me feel awesome.
The price I pay for this is earning about 10k€ less a year, but I still think it's worth it.
If you're a creative developer, or you have a passion for a specific area, then it's easy to ignore "unassigned work" in favour of doing things that you want to do instead. There can be a great deal of value in that that any manager needs to recognise. Someone who isn't voluntarily picking up unassigned work isn't (necessarily) failing to show leadership - they might be leading in an area where work isn't being created, whether it's assigned or not.
http://www.moneychimp.com/calculator/compound_interest_calcu...
values of 0; 10,000; 20; 4; results in nearly 310k of missed gains.
Increasing that 4% to 8% increases it to nearly a half a million!
At my estimated retirement income requirements, that basically means I could quit working 10 years earlier if I don't settle for being underpaid.
Most companies look at 20% time as a super-informal way for people to volunteer "spare time" to work on non-core stuff, but that isn't how it works at Google, at all.
That said, your central point is 100% accurate ... but at least within tech, I think that "40 hour, strictly scheduled workweek" has been gone for several years now.
Sounds like you have never worked for a government contractor.
Sadly, I think we have to accept that the appearance of productivity (butt in chair, open office visibility) is more important than actual productivity most of the time.
The reality is that the things that people and companies are willing to pay for often take a great deal more time and dedication. Also, they often involve work that's a hell of a lot less interesting. Even the projects that are fun to start often become boring drudgery during the long haul of making a product that someone is willing to pay you for.
Like many complicated systems, it's easy to criticize the conventional office and offer microcosm-scale anecdotal counter-examples - but quite another thing to create something effectively comparable.
I love thinking about new ways to work. I work remotely and am always experimenting with ways to be effective from a distance... but I find that getting people's butts in chairs in the same office, and coordinating with a few boring meetings is surprisingly necessary.
A transparent and healthy company culture lets people (briefly) reason and talk about projects/strengths. There shouldn't be some sort of implicit beauty contest, rewarding aggressive employee who are underloaded.
There must be better ways to develop talent. The method listed also creates a lot of weird incentives/strategies if employees know what is going on.
I think it would be better to always have fewer tasks than people (not more tasks, like the author seems to suggest), but establish high-level goals for the team as a whole. You'll quickly see who is best at understanding the goals, turning them into work, and recruiting other people to help do that work, which is real leadership (not just jumping to do extra tasks).
In fact, this could be a cultural issue where everybody tries to act like taking a lead (usually by blanket emails including the management team that say "XXX has been launched!! Contrats Y!!"), however you will find behind the backdrop, things are just half-baked or down right totally fake, because real execution is boring and not getting attention. So once an excitement dies down, people will scramble to find another 'void' to fill. You may argue the manager can check the work, but in a big cooperation, the middle managers are most vulnerable, and thus they care much more about their own asses than to ensure their staff get real work done.
In other words, this tactic is only applicable when the company is small, say, less than 20 people, and the boss knows everybody and the projects well.
It's a really good example that leadership is something that everyone has an opportunity to exercise, not just management, and that in most companies leadership is very rarely exercised merely a job title.
In fact, very likely once good programmers done all the work, some jokers (within the team or otherwise) will jump out and grab the credits by sending out emails, then the joker is promoted.
This is the initial stage of what I described in my previous post. Again, you need technical strong managers to see through the mist, but sadly, these managers are rare (at least in my industry).
> ..once employees know this is a short cut for promotion, they will focus a lot of their energy and attention to find 'the void' and try to fill it, or act like they can fill it, thus neglecting the real work that need to be done.
This in particular is really dangerous because it can poison an organisation's culture. For example, imagine Ben decides to focus on managing upwards in an effort to get Adam to promote him. Meanwhile, he neglects his duties, forcing his team-mates to pick up the slack. They start getting annoyed at Ben because he's not pulling his weight.
It's not uncommon, in my experience (and I'm aware that I'm at risk of stereo-typing here), for good, smart, conscientious people in technical roles to focus first on doing the job that they've been assigned and trust that management will recognise and reward them for doing so (and, conversely, punish anyone who slacks off), and that one of those rewards is that they will be considered for any opportunity for promotion that arises. Unfortunately, that doesn't always happen.
If Adam promotes Ben, his old team-mates are going to be really pissed off. From their perspective, Ben's bad behaviour has been rewarded, instead of rectified. Meanwhile, the extra work they've been putting in to make up for that bad behaviour has been completely ignored.
The end result is an unhappy team, They'll resent both Ben and Adam, their productivity will probably drop (because whey the hell should they work their asses off when they're clearly not going to be rewarded for it?), and may well start looking elsewhere for work.
In that scenario, Adam has not done a good job as a manager, and he's definitely not a good leader.
There's nothing wrong with identifying a gap and opening a dialogue about how it can be filled (including asking if anyone's interested in filling it) but if someone moves to plug a gap, that generally means that they're going to leave a gap somewhere else. A good manager needs to make sure that they understand the implications of shifting people around, and explicitly recognise the indirect contribution that Ben's old team-mates are making to fill the gap.
Organisations are about teams, not individuals. It's astounding how many managers fail to grasp that.
>In that scenario, Adam has not done a good job as a manager, and he's definitely not a good leader.
One difference between good and bad management is that good managers understand politics, they understand people, and most of all they understand the consequences of different political options. (I mean effective and ineffective, not good vs evil.)
Effective managers don't - ever - rule by formula, campfire or sports coach platitudes, or read-it-in-a-book business mythology.
So if you're dealing with someone who does any of the above as a first choice, they're unlikely to be making rational choices, or to have any deep understanding of the team(s) they're managing.
Evil managers can have a good understanding of consequences but their choices will be designed to increase their own income and status at the expense of their team/company. So they can appear to be doing stupid counterproductive things, but in fact they'll likely be promoted because they're gaming the system. They're a horror to work for, because they'll exploit their team as a resource and discard it without looking back. (I've seen people boast about this. It's not hypothetical.)
Good managers have an interest in developing the talent in their team as well as shipping good things and getting themselves promoted. But they won't be doing it with platitudes like "Leave space for people to act like managers" and then punishing anyone who actually does. They'll be more politically adept than that.
The big problem for employees is that politics and culture are invisible. I've seen plenty of management books, but I can't remember seeing a useful book that explains the practical differences between exploitation/support and good/bad good/evil management. Simple metrics like hours worked are a start, but a bigger picture with standard examples of management practices and styles, and supportive/unhealthy team cultures would be very useful.
If you watch some of those "Unscripted" shows where everyone is being judged for their leadership, what do you find? Everyone acting like a full-on sociopathic Type A personality, fighting over who steers the car while nobody builds the car.
It's great entertainment, and perhaps it works for selecting leaders in small doses on completely made-up projects like selling bottles of water with the Cult-of-Personality leader's face on the label.
But it's a terrible way to actually run your core business.
Not only is the real execution/critical work boring, but management often doesn't really understand it or how to measure the effectiveness and contributions of people that are spending their time on it, so they make a blanket assumption that everyone is performing at a satisfactory level ("we only hire the best") and turn to other metrics that are simpler to understand and measure. It's much easier to count how many "organizational initiatives" Bob helped to launch, how many informational lunchtime talks he gave and the number of important meetings he made an influential remark at than it is to judge how much wasted time and aggravation his poor designs and implementations generated, and as a result, the work that Bob was actually hired to do (quickly dismissed as his "day job" by his manager during performance reviews) becomes the worst use of his time. As Bob realizes this, his reputation improves even more because he spends less time on his work - obviously someone putting his thumbprint on so many initiatives and decisions must be a key player, and it would be a waste to have such a person spending his time "in the trenches."
In an organization that conflates influence with effectiveness, it doesn't matter what you're influencing others to do, only that you do it often and well.
Maybe I am too old but I remember days of programming being pure fun and maybe it is not typical but I can choose such jobs even today. If it does not sparkle there is no amount of money that can make me join the team.
Programming was (and is) the thing of passion and joy. If you don't have fun you're holding it the wrong way. Having 'fill the gap' tasks is brilliant way to keep the team engaged the right way. It won't work for sweatshops but why would one work in such company in the first place? Money is no excuse just to be clear in advance.
Unless it is thing of love and passion and fun it is not programming in the first place.
Don't show too much initiative. It threatens the hierarchy.
I have used this strategic vacuum technique as a manager to great effect before.
It brings out the best creativity and allows people who are going through apparent productivity lulls to come out of them in a healthy, smarter way. It also builds lasting loyalty and a strong team spirit.
Velocity isn't just hours spent butt-in-seat or number of commits or whatever. It's precious moments of high quality attention. To maximize that you need to be more like a conductor of an orchestra than a drill sergeant.
CAVEAT: when under a high-pressure situation with a new team it is sometimes necessary to limit freedom, demand trust, and command things for the purpose of getting through that situation. Obviously it's dangerous and the wrong kind of manager can get addicted to this kind of solution easily. These temporary command-and-control moments can sometimes be used as trust builders for the managers if, once the situation is resolved, they immediately relinquish the extraordinary power they had used and return to a more natural/creative dynamic - the team will see this as honourable since it didn't technically _have_ to happen that way.
Confirmed, leaving work unassigned doesn't get anything accomplished.
1. The company must be growing non-linearly and be strong financially. 2. You must have enough value to the company where if you leave you'll be difficult to replace. 3. Management prefers to promote from within.
If any one of these is missing, then the positions offered as promotions will be sub-optimal.
#1 seems to be in short supply across a large swath of industries, and is the main driver for lack of promotions offered these days.