Totally agree, the hard problem in all of this isn't people analytics or people ops, it's people. Dealing with them is hard because we're all so different.
I think employees want control of their own life, more share in decision-making. Essentially, they want democracy, even if they can't articulate it. But in capitalist society, where the ownership of capital decides, this cannot happen.
There are attempts to tiptoe around this problem with holacracies and Agile methodologies and similar concepts, but the main problem still remains.
Well, "the ownership of capital", in a lot of public companies, is basically an absentee landlord. So it's not entirely about ownership, but rather about management. You can have cooperatives that are de-facto feudal/tyrannical structures, and private companies that are de-facto democracies.
I was talking about democracy with respect to employees. Even then, an important aspect of democracy is one person one vote (equality of access to power), which is untrue in public companies.
In theory workers co-operatives are this, but they have a habit of not doing so well in the real world. It is a really interesting question why this is the case. Why should a business owned by a capitalist for their own benefit be able to outcompete a workers co-operative?
Too many cooks spoil the broth? A single /small group of owners is more likely to reach a consensus quicker (no guarentee it'll be a good one, just quicker) than a larger group whose ideas/goals will be more diverse between each member, and more likely to be a compromise.
>It is a really interesting question why this is the case. Why should a business owned by a capitalist for their own benefit be able to outcompete a workers co-operative?
Because 99.9% of typical workers don't have the money to build the business.
Take for example, Google Inc. origins in 1998. Both L Page and S Brin came from upper middle class families but neither of their bank accounts nor their parents' bank accounts had $25 million to spend on a business. It's also doubtful if either family could have been approved for a $25m unsecured business loan from a bank. Likewise, Google's first 100 employeees also didn't collectively have $25 million. On the other hand, VCs like Sequioa and KPCB did have $25 million to invest. Later on, more investors bought IPO shares totaling $1.9 billion. There is no union of workers that can pool together that kind of cash.
Since a co-op by definition must be owned by the workers, the question is no longer "interesting" with a mysterious answer. Instead, it's tautological. If you look at the typical workers' modest savings as the ceiling for funding a business, it's obvious why they can't compete with businesses built by investors/capitalists money. While WorkersOwnedSearchEngine Inc scrapes together $30,000 from their owners-workers' savings accounts to buy a 5th rack server from dell.com, Google Inc. can use a fraction of its $2 billion war chest to buy an entire data center and also break ground on a brand new one.
That (access to capital) is the big issue for coops. I used to be a member of a UK coop in the technical space (poptel) and we did do some work with VC funding.
As long as the coop members have 50% +1 that ok but it can go wrong (thank you very much ICANN) as we found at poptel.
The other problem is the coop movement in general is very old fashioned and isn't really embracing technical changes. Which is a pity as if poptel had been brought out by the main uk coop we woudl have all had a very nice 6 figure payday.
1. Cooperatives don't have strong incentives to grow, because growing typically means more people and that means sharing of power, accordingly. Their growth is probably limited by trust.
2. When someone has the ability to start the company, they won't probably want to do it as a cooperative. It's harder to start a good cooperative than just a company. This is a corollary of 1.
3. It's much harder to raise capital for a cooperative because of possibly misaligned incentives. Even though capitalist's companies suffer from principal agent problem too, this is enough to dissuade many potential investors. Since cooperatives are not very common, this is a chicken-egg problem.
4. As someone else mentioned, democracies tend to be pretty conservative. This can be good in the long term, but makes them vulnerable to well-planned short term attacks from the outside.
John Lewis Partnership (http://www.johnlewispartnership.co.uk/) is a worker's cooperative in the UK and is doing pretty well. There are also successful consumer cooperatives (e.g. the Co-operative Group and mutual organizations/building societies (e.g. The Nationwide).
Workers cooperatives have a lot of difficulty growing into a large organizations because they would have to be federated if they did (workers cooperatives as usually organized in the US rely on the bonds that can be formed by a small group of member-owners to function effectively). A franchise model can be effective for retail/service coops. Arizmendi/Cheeseboard in the Bay Area is one of the most successful, with 6 locations.
Workers' coops also have limited access to capital and business expertise which can make them difficult to get started, but the reason they don't grow large is the reason above.
However, it is totally fine for workers coops to remain small businesses for their entire existence, all that would mean for is that we need more of them to be started.
Actually, as an employee I want a strong vision with clear, achievable goals. It makes it easy to tell what I should be doing to be successful, and that is what lets me control my career. Interestingly enough, these properties are usually enhanced with smaller decision making groups, because values are less spread across the spectrum. If I have 50 decision makers, I have 50 different value functions to attempt to meet. [0] If I have one decision maker, I only have one value function to meet.
[0] In reality, I would have to spend some time trimming down the list of 50 based on influence. Which is not always an easy signal to find.
> I want a strong vision with clear, achievable goals
I cannot stress enough how awful the opposite of this is. Coming into work every day and wondering why any of this is going on as if we're in some WWI mindless-war hell, why we are even doing this in the first place after all of the legitimate and serious objections were flat out trashed, "process du jour" being a very real thing for extended periods of time.
... and all this at not a startup but at established top-tier companies.
Clear decisions, common direction, and stated intentions are wonderful.
Why can't you vote on the strong vision? Voting will aggregate the value functions and solve your problem.
Democratic cooperative doesn't mean that everything has to be voted on. It can have hierarchy, if employees find such arrangement useful; the point is that you have a (collective) right to overrule it.
Strong visions can be arrived at collectively -- but it requires trust, not voting. If I have 10 people, and 7 vote A and 3 vote B, then A should be the collective "strong vision". The thing is, those three people that voted for B still think that B was the best approach, because nothing has worked to change their mind post-vote. It's exactly equivalent to your boss coming and telling you to take out the trash, when you hate taking out the trash. You do it anyway, but you definitely don't put your full effort into it, and you might even implement small sabotages. If the trash bag is leaking, maybe you just let it leak as you take it out, instead of rewrapping it to prevent the leak. So now you have an ideological split that will manifest itself throughout implementation of the vision.
The way to fix this is to have honest, open discussion to collectively arrive at a vision. That way, there is no cognitive dissonance between the vision and the team members. The problem is, this is hard and requires a lot of trust. I'd recommend reading The Five Dysfunctions of a Team [0] if you really want to dig into this philosophy.
But then how is that different from a new boss coming in, having a strong, but different, vision than you?
I don't disagree, but now you seem to claim something else. Originally you just wanted a strong vision with goals, regardless whether the employees agree. Now you want buy-in too.
And there is also principle of subsidiarity. If people strongly disagree on the vision, they can come to some compromise where they realize each vision in their own domains. (As John Carmack put it: "if you are not sure, explore both solutions".)
> But then how is that different from a new boss coming in, having a strong, but different, vision than you?
I don't understand the perspective you are asking this question from. But, my responsibility would be to follow my boss' vision. If it has clear and achievable goals, then it's easy for me to figure out what to do. Visions which are too broadly scoped won't have clear and achievable goals. Visions which are too narrowly scoped is micromanagement.
I might not always agree, but in those cases I will voice my ideas / concerns. After I know I've been heard out, I will defer because it's my boss' decision to make, not mine. As long as my concerns are heard and integrated into the decision, then I should be content.
> I don't disagree, but now you seem to claim something else. Originally you just wanted a strong vision with goals, regardless whether the employees agree. Now you want buy-in too.
There's a clear delineation between leadership -- aka, vision-creation -- and implementation. My original opening of "as an employee" was meant to frame the remainder of my comment as from the perspective of someone responsible for implementing a vision. The remainder of the discussion has been about the leadership side, or how to create a vision in the first place. If you are creating a vision with a group, you need buy-in from the entire group. If you don't, then individual leadership will walk away with differing interpretations and goals, which is what leads to dysfunction. These separate visions will then be pushed down the line, and you will have implementers working at cross-purposes, political infighting, etc.
This ~~synchronicity~~ synchronization on the leadership side is the important part. If a unified vision is being clearly pushed to all the implementers, then the collective action will result in a singular vector towards the vision. If unclear or even competing visions are being pushed, then you won't get collective movement because all the individual actions will be moving towards different results.
> And there is also principle of subsidiarity. If people strongly disagree on the vision, they can come to some compromise where they realize each vision in their own domains.
It's one thing to acknowledge that there are two potential solutions, and as a group decide that both will be explored. It's a completely different situation to have two groups that can't come to terms and are therefore competing against each other.
How does democracy give employees "control of their own life"? In any organization of appreciable size, your vote doesn't matter.
Capitalism gives employees control; your life has changed immediately after you exercise your option to exit. Voting simply doesn't.
It's also potentially very harmful, due to the principal/agent problem. Every agent (employee) has the incentive to loot the company, build empires, and protect their job. But such things are of course very bad for organizations.
This is made worse by democracy, because not only do voters have no incentive to do what's best for the organization, they can do whatever makes them feel good (since their vote doesn't matter).
(As an example of the principal/agent problem, witness Marisa Mayer vs Starboard. She wants to keep her job and build her empire at Yahoo. Shareholders want to avoid paying taxes on Alibaba, which will destroy far more value than the Yahoo empire could ever plausibly be worth.)
> But such things are of course very bad for organizations.
I'd say the ideals of a worker cooperative is that the workers _are_ the organization. The organization is a means to an end for all workers benefit. Not the other way around as is usually the case in a totalitarian capitalistic one.
And yes you're right, Capitalism gives you as much control giving as any totalitarian system, quitting/exile.
As the goal of worker cooperatives is usually not to become multi-nationals I'm not sure how low your bar is for when ones vote become absolutely futile.
When P(vote affects outcome) x (Value of outcome A - value of outcome B) < emotional_benefit_of_doing_whatever_you_want.
You observe this effect in national politics all the time - for instance, the emotional benefit of voting for a cool guy like Trump drastically exceeds P(vote effects outcome) x (Delta in outcomes). Last time I checked, I had to approximate P(vote effects outcome) by hand because it was too small to represent with double precision floating point numbers.
Democracy is not just voting, it also gives you possibly to put forward proposals and candidate for leading roles.
As other commenter said, you can always exit. But democracy gives you explicit right to change things (albeit no bigger than to other people in the organization), which is actually a more efficient method of introducing change than fatalistically wait until the dysfunctional organization dies.
One of my professors in college stated (perhaps wishfully) that one day we'll look back at today as a time where employees had the strange habit of coming into work in the morning and first thing they did was remove their brain and leave it with their jackets on the coat rack because they wouldn't need it the rest of the day.
On the other hand, I don't want to be condescended to by managers that invite me to meetings about improving me, assessing my personality, helping me "grow."
I want to help improve the product, and the most fundamental way to engage me with that is to ask me for input and take my ideas & concerns seriously.
Just coffee and a chat every now and then is a great setting for that. No need for made-up agendas and bullet point lists and awkward quizzes.
On the third hand, if you have some kind of career goals, then you probably want to be making some kind of progress towards them. While it's not always possible to discuss such goals with your employer (eg. if your goal is "become the CTO" and your immediate manager's goal is also "become the CTO" then discussing this with them is likely to end poorly), it's important to at least let them know which direction you want to go in.
At my last job, I was the primary fire-putter-outer on a number of fronts, and it was very disheartening watching new projects (that I'd put my hand up for) get handed off to others while I was busy fixing up the previous efforts of said others.
> At my last job, I was the primary fire-putter-outer on a number of fronts, and it was very disheartening watching new projects (that I'd put my hand up for) get handed off to others while I was busy fixing up the previous efforts of said others.
I've seen this happen at an even bigger scale. The site I was part of was very successful, and was therefore completely unable to get any time or capital to do independent (non-contract) projects. And some of the projects we wanted to do were to improve our IP holdings within the space we were working! Meanwhile, the entire site that lost two contracts to rebids all got put on cool, independent, green-field projects. Completely bananas, and a symptom of a much larger problem of not rewarding success that eventually caused me to leave.
I feel your pain. :( It's the Dilbert Principle in action, except that rather than less effective people/groups being deliberately selected for advancement, those groups are selected by default because they're sitting around doing nothing important. The most effective people/groups are too busy getting the critical work done to risk letting them change roles.
I've seen similar behavior and the theory I came up with is that managers are engaged/rewarded by being associated with successful projects and technical people that report to them are engaged/rewarded by new projects and challenges.
I speculated that from their perspective someone tied down to maintaining a very successful project (that continues to make succeed or make money) is in a great position politically and those getting the new green-field projects are being exposed to risk.
It reminds me of meetings–managers don't realize that they are a drain on the people performing the work because that's of course how they work and accomplish things.
The underlying problem for you and mbrock is that managers are rarely rewarded for doing these things.
Mbrock is essentially asking for a one on one that isn't filled with Status Updates and platitudes. One that fosters genuine conversation and values their input.
You're talking about real growth and whether it's a specific title or new skills, that's also a huge motivator.
Unfortunately, in most companies, managers are not rewarded for doing either of those things, nor punished for failing to do them.
The only company I know that even measures it is Google, who uses something called the "Upward Feedback Survey" to gauge it and found correlation between scores on the survey and quality of managers (team output, turnover, etc). More on the survey and some of the research behind it here: https://getlighthouse.com/blog/google-management/
At my first job, the only one-on-one I ever had with my manager was a yearly scheduled "performance review" (in Swedish, the word used is the same as that used in grade school), during which we assessed my competence.
When a higher level manager wanted to know why the product development wasn't as good as it could be, an external consultant came in to observe for a couple of weeks. He actually did talk one-on-one with each employee. He asked me what I thought really needed to be done, in a genuine way.
He produced some kind of report. We asked for several months to see the report, but it never surfaced. Then I left to join a small startup...
Sounds about right. So many undervalue tapping into the ideas and feedback from their teams and it's a massive missed opportunity. Unfortunately, I bet even at the small startup, as you grew these kinds of problems re-emerged unless the company had one on ones and good management habits.
Toyota actually even brought this to their blue collar workers with their "Total Product System" which allowed anyone to stop the assembly line if they caught a problem and engaged them in feedback to find solutions. (More here: http://hbr.org/2004/05/learning-to-lead-at-toyota/ar/1)
Not to mention that aforesaid quizzes, often based on faulty "science", can brand one in a manner that may not be advantageous to one's future. A previous employer in the early 2000s got the MBTI religion and everyone had to be evaluated. Fortunately, they gave people a chance to opt out of sharing their results, which I gladly took. The idea of someone dismissing my opinion because I might be too "judge-y" or "feely" raised my hackles.
Good article, thanks. Employees want to feel fulfilled, and engaged in their work. A huge part of that starts with leaders, NOT managers. The world doesn't need managers, they need leaders.
Consider an expedition making its way through a jungle. There are a bunch of people hacking out a path with machetes. The manager makes sure the machetes are sharp, that everybody has enough food and water, and generally ensures that hacking continues unimpeded. The leader climbs a tree and makes sure the hacking is taking place in the right place.
Back to your point - yes, you're partly right, but at its root it's an agency issue -
Shareholder (owner) cannot or doesn't want to run the company, and so employs someone (an agent) to do it on his/her behalf. These agents are leadership roles (typically CEO, CFO, COO and CTO roles).
However, where these appointed leaders don't have a large-enough financial stake in the organisation, they will do things to better their own financial interests, rather than the interests of the shareholders.
That disconnect is called agency cost. A side effect is that these leaders become managers because bettering your own interests requires finesse (aka management). Sh*t, of course, flows downwards, and needs more managers.
I'd believe Gallup if they weren't hacks and crooks.
Five to ten years ago they had a big program that they peddled to organizations about Employee Engagement.
They ended up paying the Justice Department 10.5 million dollars for crimes associated with contracting irregularities (aka bribes.)
Looks like they're going to turn their "survey experience" to another part of employee training.
It's really sad about Gallup. They've been riding on their good name that they developed 60 years ago. They're bad pollsters (they predicted McCain would win in 2008) and they're pretty blatantly partisan. Oh, as as mentioned above, crooked.
That being said, yes, I'm sure that employees want "a great boss who cares about their development." I knew that years ago. I also know that this "story" is a puff piece to sell Gallup consulting services.
I worked for them for a short time due to an acquisition. They're crazy. They think they're solving the world's problems with polling data and they force you to be psycho-analyzed and have a plaque at your desk displaying your traits.
It spreads too with things like http://www.strengthsfinder.com/ which are amazingly short-sighted. You mention you like solving some math-like problems and then surprise your strengths are analysis and math-related things!
Small correction, they predicted Romney would win in 2012, not McCain in 2008; they actually predicted Obama would do better than he did in 2008 (tied for the highest overestimated prediction). Their results have been poor indeed.
All I want is work organization that doesn't get in the way of doing things that actually make money. It's truly unbelievable how even small companies adopted systems that impede sales and engineering, or worse make customers jump through hoops, because it makes life easier for some bean counter.
That other stuff sounds like completely optional nice-to-haves.
Having been through a similar knee-jerk of late, the important thing to remember (not that it helps) is that a publicly-traded company is a machine to make money. Not to make sales, not to make designs / widgets, but make money for the investors / owners.
Once I wrapped my head around that it helped somewhat.
These aren't public companies and it's definitely costing owners money. But this isn't the point. The OP is about employees' satisfaction and inefficiencies like an inflexible invoicing, warehouse or order management system are incredibly frustrating and demotivating.
This article is wrong. Why is it wrong? It talks about fulfilling work and a great boss as if it's the ONLY thing that employees look for. BY common sense what employees look for is a huge multitude of factors combined together part of which includes "Free lunches, more vacation time, latte machines --- and don't forget a ping pong table." It is stupid to discard all of these things as inconsequential when the employee himself states that these are things he wants.
Engaging work is ONLY one factor out of many things that Employees declare that they want.
What this article is trying and failing to address is the fact that most employees become dissatisfied with their work EVEN when employers try to satisfy all these needs and wants. It hints at the fact that there is something that the employee wants that he isn't fully aware of. What is this thing that he wants?
Simple. The answer is: Career Growth. As humans our needs and wants are unlimited. It doesn't matter how many needs and wants are satisfied, the employee will eventually want more. Employees are looking for a continuous improvement in their well-being keyword being "continuous." The company that provides the employee with the fastest rate of unlimited growth is the company that retains the employee.
The reality is, nothing can satisfy an employee if his wants and needs are unlimited. We all fight for this plateau of ultimate satisfaction that we will never reach. If you want to retain employees you must give employees the constant illusion that they are making progress towards this nonexistent plateau.
Not all jobs can offer growth. It's in everybody's best interests if you just move on from such jobs once you outgrow them.
I spent two and a half years at my current job maintaining a legacy codebase. I looked for, and explored, growth opportunities at that job. In the end, I had to find them myself. Nobody at the company could really put in the effort it would have taken to keep me fulfilled, so I did it myself. I did lots of reading, experimenting, diving deep into fundamentals.
I am a much, much better programmer than I was when I started the job. The company did not give that to me, it couldn't have given it to me.
I eventually convinced the company to move off of the old legacy platform, that it was holding them back. I wanted to build them a new platform, but they decided to go with Magento. They're giving me a pretty sweet severance deal while I go out looking for a job.
I firmly believe that anybody can grow at any job. It's nice when the company can help you do that, but your own growth is your responsibility, and nobody else's.
>I firmly believe that anybody can grow at any job. It's nice when the company can help you do that, but your own growth is your responsibility, and nobody else's.
I'm not talking about personal growth.
I'm talking about growth in benefits, like salary or working environment. People leave companies or learn new skills to get more benefits. The company needs to provide better benefits, continuously, or the employee leaves. Simply buying a ping pong table or giving an employee "engaging work" isn't enough.
> The company needs to provide better benefits, continuously, or the employee leaves.
This smacks of entitlement.
The employee won't necessarily leave, there are many reasons why they wouldn't. There's a whole world of jobs out there that aren't tech, these fields don't have the luxury of an expanding industry propping up salaries, providing a social ladder.
Even in tech, I don't see anything wrong with the decision to keep the same compensation, and turn over staff every few years. This only contributes to a thriving job market, and means more opportunity for people at the bottom to make their way into the field. More people coming in at the bottom means more demand for services, meaning more opportunity at the top for organizing and directing.
It would be wonderful to have the benefits of industry growth along with the security of one job for life, but we don't live in that world.
That's the nature of a growth-fueled economy. Everybody has to keep up, or they fall behind. The same work, the same roles, get less valuable over time.
Employees should feel entitled. They generate 99% of our GDP while 50% of that GDP goes to the top 1% of the population. The capitalist employer / employee relationship is designed to screw over the employee. The word "entitlement" is a classic guilt tripping technique used by either employee or employer. Ignore it, because as an employee you will never get a high enough salary that can tip the scales. With 50% of the worlds wealth in the hands of the 1% (aka the employers), the metrics say one thing and one thing only: you are always entitled to more.
>The employee won't necessarily leave, there are many reasons why they wouldn't. There's a whole world of jobs out there that aren't tech, these fields don't have the luxury of an expanding industry propping up salaries, providing a social ladder.
If the employee isn't leaving and their isn't any growth, than the employee stays out of desperation or fear. The employee is essentially too afraid to take the risk to create growth. This is not the definition of employee satisfaction. Many employees are in this situation and many employees aren't satisfied because of it. It is very rare for a man to feel 100% satisfied without any continuous growth. Additionally, I am not talking about whether this situation is wrong or right, I am talking about what an employer needs to do to satisfy an employee. Whether the employer wants to do that is a different issue.
>It would be wonderful to have the benefits of industry growth along with the security of one job for life, but we don't live in that world.
Sure. I never said anything to the contrary. We don't live in an ideal world. But the context for my comment is "How to satisfy an employee" and I answer the question with what is required.
The conversation is sidetracking from my initial comment about the true nature of employment satisfaction into a technical argument on why such an idealist endeavor isn't executed. So what? Do you agree with me on what makes an employee satisfied or do you have evidence/logic to falsify my reasoning?
You know what keeps real employees satisfied at their jobs, not just the entitled ones that expect the good life to just come to them?
A sense of purpose. The feeling that what you do matters. The feeling that at the end of the day, you've accomplished something. Something worth giving 1/3 of your life towards.
You're hiding your greed behind classist nonsense. You don't want a sense of purpose, you just want that paycheck to keep getting bigger. You are very probably already in the 1% of top income earners in the world. Being that that cutoff is $34,000/year, it's not hard.
You should be focused less on fighting those with more than you, and more on working with them to do things that matter.
Classist nonsense? Greed? "Smacks of Entitlement"? Your language has been negative and insulting and I am highly offended. Your attitude is against HN rules.
>A sense of purpose. The feeling that what you do matters. The feeling that at the end of the day, you've accomplished something. Something worth giving 1/3 of your life towards.
You truly think that's all people want? Most people with jobs do not work on something they consider meaningful. To do so means they ARE LUCKY. If that's the case why are they working? What is the factor that is satiating them when the job provides Zero meaning? Salary. You're essentially claiming most employees aren't "real" because they work for money instead of meaningful work.
You know those quants at wall street who spend their days building algorithms that trade meaningless paper stocks that contribute nothing to GDP? They do it for half a million dollars annual salary, not for a job that matters.
>You're hiding your greed behind classist nonsense. You don't want a sense of purpose, you just want that paycheck to keep getting bigger.
I'm not even really hiding anything. All people want more money, including me. You're trying to paint me as some "greedy" person because I want more money when wanting more money is NORMAL. We are all imperfect creatures and we all want more money. To openly deny this desire means you are a creature of utter moral perfection and I question your honesty and the existence of such a creature.
What I really want is this: More money AND a sense of purpose. Isn't that what everyone wants? All you want is a sense of purpose and minimum wage. Ok, good for you.
>You are very probably already in the 1% of top income earners in the world. Being that that cutoff is $34,000/year, it's not hard.
>You should be focused less on fighting those with more than you, and more on working with them to do things that matter.
Who are you to tell me what I should do or what I want? You do not control what satisfies an employee. Majority consensus defines this concept not you telling me what I should do.
Also note that no employee ever really works "with" the employer as you put it. To do so means you get an equal piece of the pie. Hence the usual term is "Employees work FOR employers."
>> The company needs to provide better benefits, continuously, or the employee leaves.
>This smacks of entitlement.
No, it doesn't. To say so is to ignore reality. Business is constantly demanding more growth, more revenue, more profit. Is it honestly that surprising that those who are making that happen be expected to share in that when it does happen? And is it honestly a problem that the employee goes and finds someone who is willing to give them those things if their current employer won't?
>There's a whole world of jobs out there that aren't tech, these fields don't have the luxury of an expanding industry propping up salaries, providing a social ladder.
Good for them. I'm in tech, and I do have that, so I will take advantage of it. To not do so would be foolish.
>Even in tech, I don't see anything wrong with the decision to keep the same compensation, and turn over staff every few years.
"Not all jobs can offer growth. It's in everybody's best interests if you just move on from such jobs once you outgrow them."
Problem is, no one offering those jobs is willing to say so up front. There are plenty of people who would have no problem taking such a job, knowing it's only for a few years, and then moving on.
I think plenty of people are content with a secure job with OK pay, interesting work, enough vacation and be treated as adults with respect. They don't want ultimate satisfaction. That goal is very attainable.
I have never heard people demanding a ping pong table.
People who haven't attained "ultimate satisfaction" aren't ultimately satisfied. Who is someone that isn't ultimately satisfied?: A person that is ultimately unsatisfied. Thus you are referring to people who are unsatisfied, ultimately speaking.
I agree, to be unsatisfied is a goal that is very attainable. Many people stay in certain job roles because they made a compromise: job security over satisfaction.
People want to be happy, it doesn't really matter how.
Often they don't really know themselves. But they're quite sure it'll happen if only they were able to become more impressive. They will be happy once they are promoted, treated with respect, and given more money.
A great boss feels like an ally, and often it's not the outcome that makes you happy but the hope of a better future.
I think there are many people in an organisation that can alleviate this desire. It's not just managers offering personal development or leaders inspiring people to be bold, sometimes it is your friends that make you see a better perspective on how your life already is. I think it's important to think about how you can make others feel good, and not just how you feel about your own position.
Designed by natural selection. People are naturally selected to never stay happy for long.
To be satisfied and satiated means you no longer feel the drive to compete. There is no evolutionary advantage in a creature that does not want to compete.
otherwise known as evolution. Design implies some kind of thought process before creation.
There are plenty of counterintuitive examples of traits that have been selected by evolution. Dogs seems happy all the time and they have not been made extinct yet.
>otherwise known as evolution. Design implies some kind of thought process before creation.
I apologize profusely for offending you with the word "Design." I accidentally implied the existence of a god which is a totally off-topic conversation and therefore must commit seppuku.
>There are plenty of counterintuitive examples of traits that have been selected by evolution. Dogs seems happy all the time and they have not been made extinct yet.
Sure, but for the specific case of humanity it is highly likely that the reason we do not stay happy is due to natural selection.
Dogs are a domestic animal and therefore a product of artificial selection. We as benevolent caretakers have have selected the dogs that are happy all the time and euthanized the dogs that are angry all the time. The evolutionary strategy dogs employ is a parasitic strategy and less common than the standard strategy most competitive animals follow. Dogs hijack our paternal and maternal instincts and cause us to give them resources, this caused them to evolve non-standard traits that make them happy all the time and unable to survive in the wild. The evolutionary strategy humans follow is more standard and thus we display more malevolent and competitive traits.
This is great stuff. Problem is there is the work the company needs you to do, and the work you want to do.
Both of these change overtime, for example in software development when the lifecycle of the project advances. As the project reaches maintenance mode, you can no longer design the architecture and implement things from scratch, its already done.
So the work the company needs you to do now is very different.
Then there is your personal preferences that change over time.
So the work you want to do and the one the company wants you to do will probably only overlap for a short period of time.
> So the work you want to do and the one the company wants you to do will probably only overlap for a short period of time.
Similarly, there's only short period of overlapping of the work you want to do
and the work doing which you would grow. I see too often programmers jumping
around abandoning their half-written application or library once it is
somewhat working, never learning what semantic versioning is about, what it
takes to write good documentation, or how architecture works.
I've seen people proud of having an opportunity to maintain (note: not to
develop, just to maintain) big products. Such product was doing amazing
things and was well-written, of course, but would you think you could take
pride of maintaining somebody else's work?
I can easily imagine taking pride in maintaining a well-written project doing amazing things. I believe most people unhappy with maintaining someone else's work are dealing with neither, and are furthermore discouraged from doing anything to make it better. Just complete the tickets as quickly as possible, and keep your head low.
Yes, but you wouldn't know in advance that this codebase you're going to be
assigned to is well-written, or that it does amazing things (unless you're in
its target users group or know the target industry already).
If somebody offered you a job to merely maintain an old, gigantic codebase,
I don't think your first thought would be "wow, I'm going to learn so much
from this!", and there probably wouldn't be any way you could assess the
codebase quality before accepting the offer so you could end up thinking that
eventually. This is how things that you want and that could help you grow can
be vastly different.
I mean, if you're a novice, it should be your first thought. If it isn't, I consider that a failure of education. Jumping into writing something from scratch when you're not part of the target user group or know the target industry already is a great way to produce horrible code that you (or someone else) will hate to maintain.
This is why it's so important to grill your interviewers about the reality of working at the company, although I'll admit that I learned which questions to ask from bad experience. Asking those questions also happens to serve as excellent signalling to your technical interviewers, much more effective than being able to solve some silly logic puzzle.
And to be perfectly fair, you do learn so much from working on poorly written projects that are a horror to maintain. Failure teaches you which mistakes to avoid next time.
Ask them the questions you'd want to know answers to if you were hiring them, to determine their own merits. Insist on talking with the people you'll actually be working with. You want to know their opinions on programming paradigms, and design patterns. Ask about operational details like version control, code review, and releases. Ask about the history of the code base, who wrote it, where are they now. Ask how documentation is created. There are so many things you can ask.
Good code is surrounded by good processes. Ask about the processes that lead to good code. This not only susses out what the situation is on the ground, but also demonstrates your own quality.
> failure teaches you which mistakes to avoid next time
As a recent grad who has been fired from two jobs, I would be afraid to join a poorly written project because I would worry that I would fail and then be fired.
Learning how to be successful is pretty important and teaches you things you cannot learn from lurching from failure to failure.
Sure, but at a certain point, you need to learn a method to writing a maintainable codebase. Otherwise you never become capable of building a successful project.
Maintenance isn't that significantly different from development from scratch. The differences are only in how it's paid for and how you evaluate risks.
Development from scratch means much more ... "sales" overhead. Meetings and (ultimately) disposable documentation.
I have just inherited a relatively poorly written application in a new job. I am going to take pride in optimizing it so the pages load in less than a second (some are timing out when there are other users on the system), clean up the crappy bits and make it more maintainable.
Sure its no as nice as getting to architect a whole application from the ground up. But the database seems well designed, so it shouldn't bee to much problem to make it faster and prettier and cleaner code.
>I've seen people proud of having an opportunity to maintain (note: not to develop, just to maintain) big products. Such product was doing amazing things and was well-written, of course, but would you think you could take pride of maintaining somebody else's work?
Most developers wouldn't. There's a stigma against maintenance. Most developers want to be Software Architects! (Said with the pigs in space voice).
As someone who's been doing mostly maintenance recently, it's pretty clear why:
1) reading a pile of code and trying to figure out how it works and being constrained by someone else's solutions is considerably less fun for most developers than writing something new and making decisions about how the system will be put together
2) It's much harder to point to what you did or talk up your accomplishments. Particularly to management.
Re 1. I think it's actually quite fun to take a piece of code, understand it and change it to meet new requirements. There's a good healthy challenge in that. I think a big part of the reason devs hate it is because they can't read code well. They can write it, but not read it. (I realize I'm generalizing, but it is based on some experiences.)
Not to mention that all of the praise for the project has already been given out. All that there is left is angry users yelling that something isn't working now. It's a pretty thankless job.
1: it can actually be a lot of fun if you look at it as a sort of digital archeology. You are exploring an ancient world! I enjoy it.
2: write reams of documentation for every function and module and service you decode, check them off on a checklist, and point out how you generated x pages of new docs and analyzed y% of a previously mysterious codebase. Then when you refactor, you get to point out how many thousands of lines of obsolete PL/SQL code you replaced with 10 lines of Ruby.
I would gladly maintain the code I wrote in the past 6 years. I would love to maintain the codebase of at least one of Google's internal projects I had the fortune to work with. Thanks Google, their thorough review process and their focus on readability.
I would not touch with a ten foot pole the code churned out by AgileSprints(TM) held by computer-illiterate management to hit some arbitrary deadline.
The stigma is on shoddy code, which, alas, seems the norm in large swaths of our industry.
I currently work for a small company in Denmark. The moment I decided to sign a contract with the firm, all my friends look at me and wondered: why? The answer was simple: I chose a boss, not an employer.
Otherwise you end up with someone who has their entire identity wrapped up in their work, which can be stressful no matter how much they "care about professional development"
While the boss would be just as happy with crappy code as good code, as long as he sees that project percentage increase, it just makes me happier to do it right as much as possible, even if I spend my own time on it.
Here is something I don't understand: How does one effectively deliver on a project while writing crappy code? Doesn't trying to do that result in the codebase becoming so confusing that you don't know how to add things to it without breaking other things?
When writing crappy code you are either not thinking long term at all, or you are just "kicking the can down the road", in that you'll pay for it later when there isn't a time crunch.
You write crappy code to meet unrealistic deadlines, you get promoted, hand off shitty code to someone else who is viewed as a low performer because they were too busy writing good code.
It's not actually that clear cut (it's more like an average performers who write shitty code quickly will be rewarded over an average performer writing solid code less quickly), but code quality isn't legible to management and HR, who control resource allocation. Even a line manager knowledgeable about the code base has incentives to lead a team that produces shitty code now instead of good code later.
Bah. That's later on. Right now, we're delivering at a speedy pace. The time we save now can be used later. Hell, I might not even be here later, so I won't have to care.
I company I worked at contracted a company to do "scientific" questionnaires of staff, so management knew which kind of personalities people had, what they wanted out of a job etc. We had to sit through an hour presentation, being told what makes us happy.
Everyone was forced to do the questionnaire and afterwards we had an opportunity to discuss the results with the company and our managers. All through the process, management stressed how much they were interested in how we can grow, how we can do better in the organisation and so on.
I asked: why don't just sit down with people over a coffee and ask them? I got blank stares. You could tell they thought we were all too stupid to know what we wanted and that nothing valuable could come out of that process. Completely idiotic.
I honestly tried to turn down a $30k raise because of how frustrated I am with it some days. I only gave in because I was going through a hard time with a death in the family which killed any desire to mix that with looking for a new job.
I frequently questioned the sense of having to do a separate quarterly and yearly review at the same time, especially when we were told repeatedly that quarterly reviews did not matter and were just practice for successful yearly reviews.
I'm glad I no longer work there, but at the same time I mostly worked with really great people.
My theory is that it seems so much easier to "delegate" and buy one's responsibility out of the problem when one's budget is awash with investor cash, particularly for public companies. In some ways it is often refreshing to work for early-stage/cash-starved companies because blatant waste such as this is not that easy to achieve. A darker variant of this theory tries to determine whether the principals of the firm being contracted have any relationship with the people hiring them.
I think there may be some confusion between satisfaction through perks with satisfaction through doing great work. I require certain perks - sufficient time off with my family, time to educate myself further, a reasonably stocked cafeteria, quiet spaces - but I also need to feel satisfied by knowing the work I do is important - and what is "important" to me may not be important to anyone else and what is important to me now was not important ten years ago and will not be important ten years from now.
Operationally "satisfaction" is an all encompassing term, that doesn't really relate to specific factors. So while you might be "satisfied" with your bank manager, you may not want to
marry her.
Engagement speaks of something more: A satisfaction (if you will) derived specifically from doing your work.
As an interesting aside, engagement is theoretically the other side of the coin of "burnout" and is physiologically thought to operate on the same mechanisms as "stress" (or "eustress" to distinguish it positively).
A "satisfied" state relates more to a relaxed, unstressed, disengaged mentality.
Favourite example from one of my textbooks was a lion chasing a gazelle: Both are physiologically experiencing the same thing, but the gazelle is "stressed" whereas the lion is "engaged".
Actually you could in fact take this a step further into behavioral theory, if you consider workplace satisfaction derived from doing work versus other sources (football tables etc). It could be said that too much satisfaction from the "other" sources "extinguishes" (or overrides) the satisfaction derived from doing the work.
Kind of like that classic experiment of the rat who is given a regular dosage of cocaine and soon starts to neglect any other activities beyond the consumption of cocaine.
You hit on something that researchers discovered in the 60s.
Turns out some things you need to be ok, but they don't make you happy. If you don't have them, they make you unhappy. They're called "Hygiene Factors".
Then there's a whole set of things that if you have them, they make you happy, but the absence doesn't make you unhappy. These are called "Motivators".
Well, I didn't use the original title because my belief is that it is misleading. Employee satisfaction does matter, but it depends how you define it - that was my take from the story.
Imho quoting an actual fact resulting from their study was the objective solution compared to a debatable title meant to attract eyeballs.
I agree with the point, and appreciate the article stating in words what I've felt.
If a recruiter tries to push the 'game room and free snacks' angle, I immediately grow concerned that the employer is out of touch with employees and thinks that this leads to happiness.
Everyone really wants to feel their work is appreciated.
I'd just like to note that this article has given us a fine new phrase to put on the shelf of useful business culture metaphors, right next to bike-shedding and dog-fooding.
Funny thing missing from this thread: Money. Doesn't anyone work for money anymore? You know, that stuff that allows you to survive day to day? I guess it just sounds better to say that you go to work to "change the world" or "fulfill a lifelong passion" or "grow your career". Saying you're in it for money is crass. If I want personal fulfillment or engaging projects or ping pong, I can do that outside of work, AND I get to pick and choose what I want to do. Would you really do what you do for 1/3 of your life if you didn't receive compensation for that time?
Because after a while, more money doesn't motivate. Most of us are making levels of money where an extra $10k or so isn't really going to make as much of a difference in your day to day life as some of these other things.
"Most" of us? Maybe if most of us are execs and senior VPs. For the rest of us $10K is a big chunk of change--a significant percentage of compensation. $10K is about $500/mo after taxes, which could, for example, mean being able to afford to live in a much better neighborhood or send your kids to a better school.
There's a lot of studies that show that money is a poor motivator long term once you pass the essentials for life (which admittedly in the Valley is higher than many other places). As important, some of those studies show that especially in roles requiring creativity (like engineering, design, etc) it actually negatively effects motivation and output.
See Dan Pink's Drive for a good summary of many of this research, which has led to his Autonomy - Mastery - Purpose framework that is part of his more well-known TED Talk on the subject: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation
Coincidentally, those 3 pieces of his framework hit on many of the aspects of this thread and especially the Gallup research on the desire for goals and growth.
This response has always seemed meaningless to the point of insult; and the conspiracy theorist in me wonders how much of "they don't REALLY want/need money" is motivated by the people who have to pay out.
(sorry, this comes off as very blunt, please take it as only a comment on the argument and not you, but I needed to use strong words to express the strength of what it makes me feel)
As you say, "essentials for life" are different in the valley, but are also different per-person. My essentials were MUCH simpler when I was living alone. When I got a fiancee in industry, my essentials became easier to support Now that she went into academia, it suddenly became a struggle.
Combine this with area of living, and what do you see? That the "essentials" are far more dynamic than your argument typically lets on, not only in terms of material differences like spousal compensation/how many children you're supporting, but psychological/learned response, e.g. "I have to get my used car repaired every year or so because I can't afford a new one off the lot".
Is that essential? Different people could probably make different arguments. Does it hurt when you have that thought pulling in next to someone driving a Porsche? You better damn well bet it does.
So to bring this back to the root: VERY LONG TERM maybe I could agree with you, but life isn't just a very long term calculation, the dominating thoughts day to day are (at least for the less zen of us) very now-focused, and expose many situations in which a little more money (as a parent comment said) would drastically increase the quality of life.
But what are you willing to trade for it? Keep in mind that I'm not talking about people who are just above making ends meet; I'm talking about people who are already making 6 figures. I would imagine that most of us, the additional money, unless it is a very significant sum, like a 30% raise, would rather not have the additional stress and the additional responsibilities, and instead be able to use that time and energy on things that we want to do, like hobbies or being with family.
I am rather well paid. I push very hard in my job, to try and aim for monetary promotions. I live in such a high cost of living area, however, that even on my salary it is difficult to afford a house. and start a family, ESPECIALLY competing with double income households.
This leaves me with three options. Rent forever, at increasing rates. (not a feasible option). Buy a house now, ride the constant increasing prices like everyone already in the market, be glad I'm not a buyer any more. (trying, but very hard to compete when 10% above listing is common.) Save up and move the hell out.
In any of these situations, a 5%, hell, a 1% raise compounded over a decade, makes a _meaningful_ difference in how long you'd be able to sustain living in a better cost of living area (e.g. if I moved out into the country somewhere), if not also on how much I can put out as a down-payment or as a lifeline to keeping up with increasing rent.
Perhaps it's a sign of what would have in the past been comfortably middle class being more and more stretched, but every little bit counts; it's an oddly similar feeling to when I used to be far less well off a few decades back.
Except for maybe some Buddhist monks who have given up all material things, everyone would like another dollar. However, there's also fulfillment at work.
Go take the absolute highest paying offer the next time you interview for jobs, and if you do that a series of times, I think you'll find you won't be as happy as taking the best overall offer that takes into account things like:
- Role/responsibility
- How interesting the work is
- Whether you're excited to work with your future peers
There's a reason people leave finance despite the high pay. There's more to life than money.
Yes. You are right it's dynamic and does change. Certainly as more people are in your family (single->married->children) your cost structure that makes you happy definitely changes.
Issues tied to financial stability certainly will drive you to want to get a higher salary, especially with how impossible home ownership is in places like Silicon Valley.
With that being said, if you aren't having to stare at your bank balance every morning and sweat your salary, then what makes you happiest at work is those other factors of things like Pink's framework of Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. It's also the lack of those 3 areas that will make a job that pays sufficiently pretty damn miserable leading you to seek a more fulfilling job if you can find one that meets your salary needs. I bet there's a limit to what you'd put up with at work even if they paid you $1 million per year.
Having worked in a number of early stage startups I have talked to a number of older members of teams I've been on who have forgone as much as $50-60k in salary to move from a giant company to a mid-size startup. That definitely affected their quality of life to do it, but it was worth it to wake up happy, despite perhaps making some sacrifices. As they told me, they had to make some adjustments in their lifestyle but then got used to it and it was okay.
The other important factor that I would encourage you to look at Pink's research for is that it turns out if you use financial incentives to tie to creative tasks (like an engineer shipping features) it actually has been found in psychology studies to lower the quality of the work and the motivation of the person. This means bonuses are often a really bad idea. The good thing about a salary is that it is disconnected from a specific creative task.
Yes, most of us. I'd be willing to say that many of us are probably making enough to live in good neighborhoods with good schools already. And remember, that extra $10k doesn't come free; you'll have to work harder, with more stress, and possibly more hours. I'd be willing to wager that most of us are being paid enough to where that's not really a winning proposition.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadPersonally I am of the belief that work is work. Pay for what you expect and expect what you pay for.
There are attempts to tiptoe around this problem with holacracies and Agile methodologies and similar concepts, but the main problem still remains.
Well, "the ownership of capital", in a lot of public companies, is basically an absentee landlord. So it's not entirely about ownership, but rather about management. You can have cooperatives that are de-facto feudal/tyrannical structures, and private companies that are de-facto democracies.
I'll take a monarchy over 5-hour meetings where nothing is decided and the room hates each other any day.
And you do get into silly arguments over exactly which version of STV you use ;-)
Because 99.9% of typical workers don't have the money to build the business.
Take for example, Google Inc. origins in 1998. Both L Page and S Brin came from upper middle class families but neither of their bank accounts nor their parents' bank accounts had $25 million to spend on a business. It's also doubtful if either family could have been approved for a $25m unsecured business loan from a bank. Likewise, Google's first 100 employeees also didn't collectively have $25 million. On the other hand, VCs like Sequioa and KPCB did have $25 million to invest. Later on, more investors bought IPO shares totaling $1.9 billion. There is no union of workers that can pool together that kind of cash.
Since a co-op by definition must be owned by the workers, the question is no longer "interesting" with a mysterious answer. Instead, it's tautological. If you look at the typical workers' modest savings as the ceiling for funding a business, it's obvious why they can't compete with businesses built by investors/capitalists money. While WorkersOwnedSearchEngine Inc scrapes together $30,000 from their owners-workers' savings accounts to buy a 5th rack server from dell.com, Google Inc. can use a fraction of its $2 billion war chest to buy an entire data center and also break ground on a brand new one.
As long as the coop members have 50% +1 that ok but it can go wrong (thank you very much ICANN) as we found at poptel.
The other problem is the coop movement in general is very old fashioned and isn't really embracing technical changes. Which is a pity as if poptel had been brought out by the main uk coop we woudl have all had a very nice 6 figure payday.
1. Cooperatives don't have strong incentives to grow, because growing typically means more people and that means sharing of power, accordingly. Their growth is probably limited by trust.
2. When someone has the ability to start the company, they won't probably want to do it as a cooperative. It's harder to start a good cooperative than just a company. This is a corollary of 1.
3. It's much harder to raise capital for a cooperative because of possibly misaligned incentives. Even though capitalist's companies suffer from principal agent problem too, this is enough to dissuade many potential investors. Since cooperatives are not very common, this is a chicken-egg problem.
4. As someone else mentioned, democracies tend to be pretty conservative. This can be good in the long term, but makes them vulnerable to well-planned short term attacks from the outside.
Workers' coops also have limited access to capital and business expertise which can make them difficult to get started, but the reason they don't grow large is the reason above.
However, it is totally fine for workers coops to remain small businesses for their entire existence, all that would mean for is that we need more of them to be started.
Is the fraction of co-operatives that fail larger than the fraction of failures in alternative structures?
[0] In reality, I would have to spend some time trimming down the list of 50 based on influence. Which is not always an easy signal to find.
I cannot stress enough how awful the opposite of this is. Coming into work every day and wondering why any of this is going on as if we're in some WWI mindless-war hell, why we are even doing this in the first place after all of the legitimate and serious objections were flat out trashed, "process du jour" being a very real thing for extended periods of time.
... and all this at not a startup but at established top-tier companies.
Clear decisions, common direction, and stated intentions are wonderful.
Democratic cooperative doesn't mean that everything has to be voted on. It can have hierarchy, if employees find such arrangement useful; the point is that you have a (collective) right to overrule it.
The way to fix this is to have honest, open discussion to collectively arrive at a vision. That way, there is no cognitive dissonance between the vision and the team members. The problem is, this is hard and requires a lot of trust. I'd recommend reading The Five Dysfunctions of a Team [0] if you really want to dig into this philosophy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Dysfunctions_of_a_Tea...
I don't disagree, but now you seem to claim something else. Originally you just wanted a strong vision with goals, regardless whether the employees agree. Now you want buy-in too.
And there is also principle of subsidiarity. If people strongly disagree on the vision, they can come to some compromise where they realize each vision in their own domains. (As John Carmack put it: "if you are not sure, explore both solutions".)
I don't understand the perspective you are asking this question from. But, my responsibility would be to follow my boss' vision. If it has clear and achievable goals, then it's easy for me to figure out what to do. Visions which are too broadly scoped won't have clear and achievable goals. Visions which are too narrowly scoped is micromanagement.
I might not always agree, but in those cases I will voice my ideas / concerns. After I know I've been heard out, I will defer because it's my boss' decision to make, not mine. As long as my concerns are heard and integrated into the decision, then I should be content.
> I don't disagree, but now you seem to claim something else. Originally you just wanted a strong vision with goals, regardless whether the employees agree. Now you want buy-in too.
There's a clear delineation between leadership -- aka, vision-creation -- and implementation. My original opening of "as an employee" was meant to frame the remainder of my comment as from the perspective of someone responsible for implementing a vision. The remainder of the discussion has been about the leadership side, or how to create a vision in the first place. If you are creating a vision with a group, you need buy-in from the entire group. If you don't, then individual leadership will walk away with differing interpretations and goals, which is what leads to dysfunction. These separate visions will then be pushed down the line, and you will have implementers working at cross-purposes, political infighting, etc.
This ~~synchronicity~~ synchronization on the leadership side is the important part. If a unified vision is being clearly pushed to all the implementers, then the collective action will result in a singular vector towards the vision. If unclear or even competing visions are being pushed, then you won't get collective movement because all the individual actions will be moving towards different results.
> And there is also principle of subsidiarity. If people strongly disagree on the vision, they can come to some compromise where they realize each vision in their own domains.
It's one thing to acknowledge that there are two potential solutions, and as a group decide that both will be explored. It's a completely different situation to have two groups that can't come to terms and are therefore competing against each other.
EDIT: Big words are hard. Let's go shopping.
Capitalism gives employees control; your life has changed immediately after you exercise your option to exit. Voting simply doesn't.
It's also potentially very harmful, due to the principal/agent problem. Every agent (employee) has the incentive to loot the company, build empires, and protect their job. But such things are of course very bad for organizations.
This is made worse by democracy, because not only do voters have no incentive to do what's best for the organization, they can do whatever makes them feel good (since their vote doesn't matter).
(As an example of the principal/agent problem, witness Marisa Mayer vs Starboard. She wants to keep her job and build her empire at Yahoo. Shareholders want to avoid paying taxes on Alibaba, which will destroy far more value than the Yahoo empire could ever plausibly be worth.)
I'd say the ideals of a worker cooperative is that the workers _are_ the organization. The organization is a means to an end for all workers benefit. Not the other way around as is usually the case in a totalitarian capitalistic one.
And yes you're right, Capitalism gives you as much control giving as any totalitarian system, quitting/exile.
As the goal of worker cooperatives is usually not to become multi-nationals I'm not sure how low your bar is for when ones vote become absolutely futile.
You observe this effect in national politics all the time - for instance, the emotional benefit of voting for a cool guy like Trump drastically exceeds P(vote effects outcome) x (Delta in outcomes). Last time I checked, I had to approximate P(vote effects outcome) by hand because it was too small to represent with double precision floating point numbers.
As other commenter said, you can always exit. But democracy gives you explicit right to change things (albeit no bigger than to other people in the organization), which is actually a more efficient method of introducing change than fatalistically wait until the dysfunctional organization dies.
I fail to see how this is any different than in any other job, at least for non top level management.
I want to help improve the product, and the most fundamental way to engage me with that is to ask me for input and take my ideas & concerns seriously.
Just coffee and a chat every now and then is a great setting for that. No need for made-up agendas and bullet point lists and awkward quizzes.
At my last job, I was the primary fire-putter-outer on a number of fronts, and it was very disheartening watching new projects (that I'd put my hand up for) get handed off to others while I was busy fixing up the previous efforts of said others.
I've seen this happen at an even bigger scale. The site I was part of was very successful, and was therefore completely unable to get any time or capital to do independent (non-contract) projects. And some of the projects we wanted to do were to improve our IP holdings within the space we were working! Meanwhile, the entire site that lost two contracts to rebids all got put on cool, independent, green-field projects. Completely bananas, and a symptom of a much larger problem of not rewarding success that eventually caused me to leave.
If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted.
I speculated that from their perspective someone tied down to maintaining a very successful project (that continues to make succeed or make money) is in a great position politically and those getting the new green-field projects are being exposed to risk.
It reminds me of meetings–managers don't realize that they are a drain on the people performing the work because that's of course how they work and accomplish things.
Mbrock is essentially asking for a one on one that isn't filled with Status Updates and platitudes. One that fosters genuine conversation and values their input.
You're talking about real growth and whether it's a specific title or new skills, that's also a huge motivator.
Unfortunately, in most companies, managers are not rewarded for doing either of those things, nor punished for failing to do them.
The only company I know that even measures it is Google, who uses something called the "Upward Feedback Survey" to gauge it and found correlation between scores on the survey and quality of managers (team output, turnover, etc). More on the survey and some of the research behind it here: https://getlighthouse.com/blog/google-management/
When a higher level manager wanted to know why the product development wasn't as good as it could be, an external consultant came in to observe for a couple of weeks. He actually did talk one-on-one with each employee. He asked me what I thought really needed to be done, in a genuine way.
He produced some kind of report. We asked for several months to see the report, but it never surfaced. Then I left to join a small startup...
Toyota actually even brought this to their blue collar workers with their "Total Product System" which allowed anyone to stop the assembly line if they caught a problem and engaged them in feedback to find solutions. (More here: http://hbr.org/2004/05/learning-to-lead-at-toyota/ar/1)
Consider an expedition making its way through a jungle. There are a bunch of people hacking out a path with machetes. The manager makes sure the machetes are sharp, that everybody has enough food and water, and generally ensures that hacking continues unimpeded. The leader climbs a tree and makes sure the hacking is taking place in the right place.
Back to your point - yes, you're partly right, but at its root it's an agency issue -
Shareholder (owner) cannot or doesn't want to run the company, and so employs someone (an agent) to do it on his/her behalf. These agents are leadership roles (typically CEO, CFO, COO and CTO roles).
However, where these appointed leaders don't have a large-enough financial stake in the organisation, they will do things to better their own financial interests, rather than the interests of the shareholders.
That disconnect is called agency cost. A side effect is that these leaders become managers because bettering your own interests requires finesse (aka management). Sh*t, of course, flows downwards, and needs more managers.
Five to ten years ago they had a big program that they peddled to organizations about Employee Engagement.
They ended up paying the Justice Department 10.5 million dollars for crimes associated with contracting irregularities (aka bribes.)
Looks like they're going to turn their "survey experience" to another part of employee training.
It's really sad about Gallup. They've been riding on their good name that they developed 60 years ago. They're bad pollsters (they predicted McCain would win in 2008) and they're pretty blatantly partisan. Oh, as as mentioned above, crooked.
That being said, yes, I'm sure that employees want "a great boss who cares about their development." I knew that years ago. I also know that this "story" is a puff piece to sell Gallup consulting services.
Nuttier than squirrel turds.
FWIW my Psycho-Pass is pretty clear today. Can't wait for the english version of the movie to finally get released by Funimation.
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/which-po...
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/gallup-v...
That other stuff sounds like completely optional nice-to-haves.
Once I wrapped my head around that it helped somewhat.
Engaging work is ONLY one factor out of many things that Employees declare that they want.
What this article is trying and failing to address is the fact that most employees become dissatisfied with their work EVEN when employers try to satisfy all these needs and wants. It hints at the fact that there is something that the employee wants that he isn't fully aware of. What is this thing that he wants?
Simple. The answer is: Career Growth. As humans our needs and wants are unlimited. It doesn't matter how many needs and wants are satisfied, the employee will eventually want more. Employees are looking for a continuous improvement in their well-being keyword being "continuous." The company that provides the employee with the fastest rate of unlimited growth is the company that retains the employee.
The reality is, nothing can satisfy an employee if his wants and needs are unlimited. We all fight for this plateau of ultimate satisfaction that we will never reach. If you want to retain employees you must give employees the constant illusion that they are making progress towards this nonexistent plateau.
I spent two and a half years at my current job maintaining a legacy codebase. I looked for, and explored, growth opportunities at that job. In the end, I had to find them myself. Nobody at the company could really put in the effort it would have taken to keep me fulfilled, so I did it myself. I did lots of reading, experimenting, diving deep into fundamentals.
I am a much, much better programmer than I was when I started the job. The company did not give that to me, it couldn't have given it to me.
I eventually convinced the company to move off of the old legacy platform, that it was holding them back. I wanted to build them a new platform, but they decided to go with Magento. They're giving me a pretty sweet severance deal while I go out looking for a job.
I firmly believe that anybody can grow at any job. It's nice when the company can help you do that, but your own growth is your responsibility, and nobody else's.
I'm not talking about personal growth.
I'm talking about growth in benefits, like salary or working environment. People leave companies or learn new skills to get more benefits. The company needs to provide better benefits, continuously, or the employee leaves. Simply buying a ping pong table or giving an employee "engaging work" isn't enough.
This smacks of entitlement.
The employee won't necessarily leave, there are many reasons why they wouldn't. There's a whole world of jobs out there that aren't tech, these fields don't have the luxury of an expanding industry propping up salaries, providing a social ladder.
Even in tech, I don't see anything wrong with the decision to keep the same compensation, and turn over staff every few years. This only contributes to a thriving job market, and means more opportunity for people at the bottom to make their way into the field. More people coming in at the bottom means more demand for services, meaning more opportunity at the top for organizing and directing.
It would be wonderful to have the benefits of industry growth along with the security of one job for life, but we don't live in that world.
Not even inflation? Sounds like you're driving the benefits down. Or at least want to.
Employees should feel entitled. They generate 99% of our GDP while 50% of that GDP goes to the top 1% of the population. The capitalist employer / employee relationship is designed to screw over the employee. The word "entitlement" is a classic guilt tripping technique used by either employee or employer. Ignore it, because as an employee you will never get a high enough salary that can tip the scales. With 50% of the worlds wealth in the hands of the 1% (aka the employers), the metrics say one thing and one thing only: you are always entitled to more.
>The employee won't necessarily leave, there are many reasons why they wouldn't. There's a whole world of jobs out there that aren't tech, these fields don't have the luxury of an expanding industry propping up salaries, providing a social ladder.
If the employee isn't leaving and their isn't any growth, than the employee stays out of desperation or fear. The employee is essentially too afraid to take the risk to create growth. This is not the definition of employee satisfaction. Many employees are in this situation and many employees aren't satisfied because of it. It is very rare for a man to feel 100% satisfied without any continuous growth. Additionally, I am not talking about whether this situation is wrong or right, I am talking about what an employer needs to do to satisfy an employee. Whether the employer wants to do that is a different issue.
>It would be wonderful to have the benefits of industry growth along with the security of one job for life, but we don't live in that world.
Sure. I never said anything to the contrary. We don't live in an ideal world. But the context for my comment is "How to satisfy an employee" and I answer the question with what is required.
The conversation is sidetracking from my initial comment about the true nature of employment satisfaction into a technical argument on why such an idealist endeavor isn't executed. So what? Do you agree with me on what makes an employee satisfied or do you have evidence/logic to falsify my reasoning?
A sense of purpose. The feeling that what you do matters. The feeling that at the end of the day, you've accomplished something. Something worth giving 1/3 of your life towards.
You're hiding your greed behind classist nonsense. You don't want a sense of purpose, you just want that paycheck to keep getting bigger. You are very probably already in the 1% of top income earners in the world. Being that that cutoff is $34,000/year, it's not hard.
You should be focused less on fighting those with more than you, and more on working with them to do things that matter.
>A sense of purpose. The feeling that what you do matters. The feeling that at the end of the day, you've accomplished something. Something worth giving 1/3 of your life towards.
You truly think that's all people want? Most people with jobs do not work on something they consider meaningful. To do so means they ARE LUCKY. If that's the case why are they working? What is the factor that is satiating them when the job provides Zero meaning? Salary. You're essentially claiming most employees aren't "real" because they work for money instead of meaningful work.
You know those quants at wall street who spend their days building algorithms that trade meaningless paper stocks that contribute nothing to GDP? They do it for half a million dollars annual salary, not for a job that matters.
>You're hiding your greed behind classist nonsense. You don't want a sense of purpose, you just want that paycheck to keep getting bigger.
I'm not even really hiding anything. All people want more money, including me. You're trying to paint me as some "greedy" person because I want more money when wanting more money is NORMAL. We are all imperfect creatures and we all want more money. To openly deny this desire means you are a creature of utter moral perfection and I question your honesty and the existence of such a creature.
What I really want is this: More money AND a sense of purpose. Isn't that what everyone wants? All you want is a sense of purpose and minimum wage. Ok, good for you.
>You are very probably already in the 1% of top income earners in the world. Being that that cutoff is $34,000/year, it's not hard.
Your numbers are loaded like the rest of your argument. You need 500,000 annually to be in the top 1%: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/10/19/what-percent-are-y...
>You should be focused less on fighting those with more than you, and more on working with them to do things that matter.
Who are you to tell me what I should do or what I want? You do not control what satisfies an employee. Majority consensus defines this concept not you telling me what I should do.
Also note that no employee ever really works "with" the employer as you put it. To do so means you get an equal piece of the pie. Hence the usual term is "Employees work FOR employers."
No, it doesn't. To say so is to ignore reality. Business is constantly demanding more growth, more revenue, more profit. Is it honestly that surprising that those who are making that happen be expected to share in that when it does happen? And is it honestly a problem that the employee goes and finds someone who is willing to give them those things if their current employer won't?
>There's a whole world of jobs out there that aren't tech, these fields don't have the luxury of an expanding industry propping up salaries, providing a social ladder.
Good for them. I'm in tech, and I do have that, so I will take advantage of it. To not do so would be foolish.
>Even in tech, I don't see anything wrong with the decision to keep the same compensation, and turn over staff every few years.
Now who's the one who sounds entitled?
You've obviously never worked on a large DOD program.
Learned a lot there. Not so much about technical topics, but about how to deal with bureaucracies.
Problem is, no one offering those jobs is willing to say so up front. There are plenty of people who would have no problem taking such a job, knowing it's only for a few years, and then moving on.
I have never heard people demanding a ping pong table.
I agree, to be unsatisfied is a goal that is very attainable. Many people stay in certain job roles because they made a compromise: job security over satisfaction.
Not people analytics or people ops, but a way to talk about how you think about and approach work.
Often they don't really know themselves. But they're quite sure it'll happen if only they were able to become more impressive. They will be happy once they are promoted, treated with respect, and given more money.
A great boss feels like an ally, and often it's not the outcome that makes you happy but the hope of a better future.
I think there are many people in an organisation that can alleviate this desire. It's not just managers offering personal development or leaders inspiring people to be bold, sometimes it is your friends that make you see a better perspective on how your life already is. I think it's important to think about how you can make others feel good, and not just how you feel about your own position.
(There is more evidence for people evolving rather than being designed).
To be satisfied and satiated means you no longer feel the drive to compete. There is no evolutionary advantage in a creature that does not want to compete.
otherwise known as evolution. Design implies some kind of thought process before creation.
There are plenty of counterintuitive examples of traits that have been selected by evolution. Dogs seems happy all the time and they have not been made extinct yet.
I apologize profusely for offending you with the word "Design." I accidentally implied the existence of a god which is a totally off-topic conversation and therefore must commit seppuku.
>There are plenty of counterintuitive examples of traits that have been selected by evolution. Dogs seems happy all the time and they have not been made extinct yet.
Sure, but for the specific case of humanity it is highly likely that the reason we do not stay happy is due to natural selection.
Dogs are a domestic animal and therefore a product of artificial selection. We as benevolent caretakers have have selected the dogs that are happy all the time and euthanized the dogs that are angry all the time. The evolutionary strategy dogs employ is a parasitic strategy and less common than the standard strategy most competitive animals follow. Dogs hijack our paternal and maternal instincts and cause us to give them resources, this caused them to evolve non-standard traits that make them happy all the time and unable to survive in the wild. The evolutionary strategy humans follow is more standard and thus we display more malevolent and competitive traits.
Both of these change overtime, for example in software development when the lifecycle of the project advances. As the project reaches maintenance mode, you can no longer design the architecture and implement things from scratch, its already done.
So the work the company needs you to do now is very different.
Then there is your personal preferences that change over time.
So the work you want to do and the one the company wants you to do will probably only overlap for a short period of time.
Similarly, there's only short period of overlapping of the work you want to do and the work doing which you would grow. I see too often programmers jumping around abandoning their half-written application or library once it is somewhat working, never learning what semantic versioning is about, what it takes to write good documentation, or how architecture works.
I've seen people proud of having an opportunity to maintain (note: not to develop, just to maintain) big products. Such product was doing amazing things and was well-written, of course, but would you think you could take pride of maintaining somebody else's work?
If somebody offered you a job to merely maintain an old, gigantic codebase, I don't think your first thought would be "wow, I'm going to learn so much from this!", and there probably wouldn't be any way you could assess the codebase quality before accepting the offer so you could end up thinking that eventually. This is how things that you want and that could help you grow can be vastly different.
This is why it's so important to grill your interviewers about the reality of working at the company, although I'll admit that I learned which questions to ask from bad experience. Asking those questions also happens to serve as excellent signalling to your technical interviewers, much more effective than being able to solve some silly logic puzzle.
And to be perfectly fair, you do learn so much from working on poorly written projects that are a horror to maintain. Failure teaches you which mistakes to avoid next time.
Good code is surrounded by good processes. Ask about the processes that lead to good code. This not only susses out what the situation is on the ground, but also demonstrates your own quality.
As a recent grad who has been fired from two jobs, I would be afraid to join a poorly written project because I would worry that I would fail and then be fired.
Learning how to be successful is pretty important and teaches you things you cannot learn from lurching from failure to failure.
Would you mind sharing your best, most probing questions-- the one's that proved most useful cutting through corporate posturing and BS?
Development from scratch means much more ... "sales" overhead. Meetings and (ultimately) disposable documentation.
Sure its no as nice as getting to architect a whole application from the ground up. But the database seems well designed, so it shouldn't bee to much problem to make it faster and prettier and cleaner code.
Most developers wouldn't. There's a stigma against maintenance. Most developers want to be Software Architects! (Said with the pigs in space voice).
1) reading a pile of code and trying to figure out how it works and being constrained by someone else's solutions is considerably less fun for most developers than writing something new and making decisions about how the system will be put together
2) It's much harder to point to what you did or talk up your accomplishments. Particularly to management.
Re 2. This is very true.
2: write reams of documentation for every function and module and service you decode, check them off on a checklist, and point out how you generated x pages of new docs and analyzed y% of a previously mysterious codebase. Then when you refactor, you get to point out how many thousands of lines of obsolete PL/SQL code you replaced with 10 lines of Ruby.
I would not touch with a ten foot pole the code churned out by AgileSprints(TM) held by computer-illiterate management to hit some arbitrary deadline.
The stigma is on shoddy code, which, alas, seems the norm in large swaths of our industry.
Otherwise you end up with someone who has their entire identity wrapped up in their work, which can be stressful no matter how much they "care about professional development"
While the boss would be just as happy with crappy code as good code, as long as he sees that project percentage increase, it just makes me happier to do it right as much as possible, even if I spend my own time on it.
Not that I've ever done something like that...
It's not actually that clear cut (it's more like an average performers who write shitty code quickly will be rewarded over an average performer writing solid code less quickly), but code quality isn't legible to management and HR, who control resource allocation. Even a line manager knowledgeable about the code base has incentives to lead a team that produces shitty code now instead of good code later.
Everyone was forced to do the questionnaire and afterwards we had an opportunity to discuss the results with the company and our managers. All through the process, management stressed how much they were interested in how we can grow, how we can do better in the organisation and so on.
I asked: why don't just sit down with people over a coffee and ask them? I got blank stares. You could tell they thought we were all too stupid to know what we wanted and that nothing valuable could come out of that process. Completely idiotic.
I was polite and kept to topics involving work. I left about two months after that for a much better environment.
All I want is to work remotely permanently but they insist it isn't what i want and offer me more money.
I honestly tried to turn down a $30k raise because of how frustrated I am with it some days. I only gave in because I was going through a hard time with a death in the family which killed any desire to mix that with looking for a new job.
We also had those wonderful quarterly AND yearly reviews that don't accomplish anything other than give management a way to fire.
I'm glad I no longer work there, but at the same time I mostly worked with really great people.
I don't work for that one. It wasn't a tech company, it was an ISP.
I also did not get fired.
The org psych term for this is "engagement".
Operationally "satisfaction" is an all encompassing term, that doesn't really relate to specific factors. So while you might be "satisfied" with your bank manager, you may not want to marry her.Engagement speaks of something more: A satisfaction (if you will) derived specifically from doing your work.
As an interesting aside, engagement is theoretically the other side of the coin of "burnout" and is physiologically thought to operate on the same mechanisms as "stress" (or "eustress" to distinguish it positively).
A "satisfied" state relates more to a relaxed, unstressed, disengaged mentality.
Favourite example from one of my textbooks was a lion chasing a gazelle: Both are physiologically experiencing the same thing, but the gazelle is "stressed" whereas the lion is "engaged".
Kind of like that classic experiment of the rat who is given a regular dosage of cocaine and soon starts to neglect any other activities beyond the consumption of cocaine.
Turns out some things you need to be ok, but they don't make you happy. If you don't have them, they make you unhappy. They're called "Hygiene Factors".
Then there's a whole set of things that if you have them, they make you happy, but the absence doesn't make you unhappy. These are called "Motivators".
More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-factor_theory
The original title is, "Employee Satisfaction Doesn't Matter".
If a recruiter tries to push the 'game room and free snacks' angle, I immediately grow concerned that the employer is out of touch with employees and thinks that this leads to happiness.
Everyone really wants to feel their work is appreciated.
Bear-feeding!
See Dan Pink's Drive for a good summary of many of this research, which has led to his Autonomy - Mastery - Purpose framework that is part of his more well-known TED Talk on the subject: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation
Coincidentally, those 3 pieces of his framework hit on many of the aspects of this thread and especially the Gallup research on the desire for goals and growth.
(sorry, this comes off as very blunt, please take it as only a comment on the argument and not you, but I needed to use strong words to express the strength of what it makes me feel)
As you say, "essentials for life" are different in the valley, but are also different per-person. My essentials were MUCH simpler when I was living alone. When I got a fiancee in industry, my essentials became easier to support Now that she went into academia, it suddenly became a struggle.
Combine this with area of living, and what do you see? That the "essentials" are far more dynamic than your argument typically lets on, not only in terms of material differences like spousal compensation/how many children you're supporting, but psychological/learned response, e.g. "I have to get my used car repaired every year or so because I can't afford a new one off the lot".
Is that essential? Different people could probably make different arguments. Does it hurt when you have that thought pulling in next to someone driving a Porsche? You better damn well bet it does.
So to bring this back to the root: VERY LONG TERM maybe I could agree with you, but life isn't just a very long term calculation, the dominating thoughts day to day are (at least for the less zen of us) very now-focused, and expose many situations in which a little more money (as a parent comment said) would drastically increase the quality of life.
Cavemen had "the essentials of life." That's not what I'm going for, and not what most people are going for. Every little bit extra helps.
This leaves me with three options. Rent forever, at increasing rates. (not a feasible option). Buy a house now, ride the constant increasing prices like everyone already in the market, be glad I'm not a buyer any more. (trying, but very hard to compete when 10% above listing is common.) Save up and move the hell out.
In any of these situations, a 5%, hell, a 1% raise compounded over a decade, makes a _meaningful_ difference in how long you'd be able to sustain living in a better cost of living area (e.g. if I moved out into the country somewhere), if not also on how much I can put out as a down-payment or as a lifeline to keeping up with increasing rent.
Perhaps it's a sign of what would have in the past been comfortably middle class being more and more stretched, but every little bit counts; it's an oddly similar feeling to when I used to be far less well off a few decades back.
Go take the absolute highest paying offer the next time you interview for jobs, and if you do that a series of times, I think you'll find you won't be as happy as taking the best overall offer that takes into account things like:
- Role/responsibility
- How interesting the work is
- Whether you're excited to work with your future peers
There's a reason people leave finance despite the high pay. There's more to life than money.
Issues tied to financial stability certainly will drive you to want to get a higher salary, especially with how impossible home ownership is in places like Silicon Valley.
With that being said, if you aren't having to stare at your bank balance every morning and sweat your salary, then what makes you happiest at work is those other factors of things like Pink's framework of Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. It's also the lack of those 3 areas that will make a job that pays sufficiently pretty damn miserable leading you to seek a more fulfilling job if you can find one that meets your salary needs. I bet there's a limit to what you'd put up with at work even if they paid you $1 million per year.
Having worked in a number of early stage startups I have talked to a number of older members of teams I've been on who have forgone as much as $50-60k in salary to move from a giant company to a mid-size startup. That definitely affected their quality of life to do it, but it was worth it to wake up happy, despite perhaps making some sacrifices. As they told me, they had to make some adjustments in their lifestyle but then got used to it and it was okay.
The other important factor that I would encourage you to look at Pink's research for is that it turns out if you use financial incentives to tie to creative tasks (like an engineer shipping features) it actually has been found in psychology studies to lower the quality of the work and the motivation of the person. This means bonuses are often a really bad idea. The good thing about a salary is that it is disconnected from a specific creative task.