> Motivation is a hired trait. The only place where managers motivate people is in management books.
This seems entirely false to me. To be honest it is so incorrect it significantly puts into question the rest of the article.
1. I have absolutely had managers motivate me to work harder. I have also had managers completely demotivate me and cause me to quit. How on earth can anyone who has worked in the industry for any amount of time say that "The only place where managers motivate people is in management books"?
2. Of course most of the facile strategies mentioned in the article (like 996, micromanaging, etc) won't work. The article then generalizes this to all strategies - but "if terrible methods can't solve it, nothing possibly can" feels like a shaky argument at best. A good manager understands this, and motivates by helping you understand how the things you are doing are actually critical to the success of the team and the company. (If success of the company isn't something you're interested in, then yes, it's going to be hard to motivate you.) A poor manager sabotages motivation in a hundred different ways - he makes you feel like your efforts are totally wasted, or fails to articulate why they are important.
I’ve been working for more than 30 years. I was seriously demotivated by managers, but never motivated by them. The beat I got was protection from them to give me free space to work. But the motivation was always internal.
Being a manager myself, I never got to motivate anybody do anything they didn’t want to. If they wanted to, it worked, but the motivation AFAIK was internal.
Of course that is one person speaking. Milage can vary.
This is a core part of systemantics [0]! People are going to do what they’re going to do, as a manager the most you can do to help is to put people in the right teams and to get distractions out of their way.
It’s a difficult idea to accept but once you accept it, it’s kind of liberating. It follows that hiring and then work-assignments during roadmapping are the two points of highest leverage in making a mutually-successful employee-manager relationship.
The problem you’re solving there is a search problem. You’re trying to discover if the employee’s motivation landscape peaks in any dimensions that align with the roadmap. They can be the most skilled person in the world, but if the peaks don’t overlap, the project will never run smoothly. It also follows that in extreme cases where you have a tenured employee that you want to retain for future work, you should absolutely let them drive and shape the roadmap.
You're making a nuanced point but it's correct. Good managers can give a little motivation (mostly by talking about and finding the right areas to work on for those people that don't otherwise already know). But for the most part good management is buffering the core that allows individuals own motivation to be self-sustaining (and productive over time) and also making sure that people aren't on a path that won't be useful (i.e. the manager knows the company will never fund phase 2).
this makes sense, but can be at odds with the reason you're there. If your manager is not working to align your personal motivations with those of the organization they are failing. I don't believe it's a spectrum of good-bad management and "level of motivational interference". An "average manager" just does a weak job at the individual-organizational alignment.
Great managers absolutely can provide motivation. They can have a genuinely compelling vision for a product - "we're going to build the best damn FooGadget on the web". They can figure out what motivates their reports and work to make it transparent to them - for example some engineers like to see positive client feedback, whilst other engineers like having thorny problems to solve.
Yes. It stands to reason that if a manager can demotivate you, then they must be able to do the opposite. Both building the vibe and killing it can achieve that in terms of extrinsic motivation, culture, the psychological contract, and so on.
These are important factors to consider for people who work in highly collaborative teams as opposed to those who prefer to be 10x lone wolves, which is the impression I get from the article and the overall startup vibe I've experienced over the past few years.
HN might be over-indexed on the "leave me alone to do my work", "I don't have friends I have colleagues," type of person but it's not representative of the entire population.
It would be more useful if you explained why the rest of my comment didn't provide a good enough reason (because of your clear dissatisfaction with the first sentence of it), because this is just snark that doesn't further a conversation.
Anyone can quote a subset of a message and drop a remark without substance after all, but I didn't come on HN to read Twitter-quality stuff.
>> highly collaborative teams as opposed to those who prefer to be 10x lone wolves
I was a decent developer and a much better manager, and I think a big part of it was I learned these are different games. By the time we hit multiple dev teams I had good success framing it wtih senior ICs like this: "If you want to get 10% better (better in context of what they are defining) this year, that's really, really hard. But it would be easy for you to make everyone on the team 2-3% better, and our net improvement would be well over 10%." We then talk & plan relatively straight-forward ways to make this happen, and mix in explicit personal improvement/growth components. They're motivated, they make their teammates motivated, they make me motivated. Meanwhile the 10x'er (not sure I've had one of those) keeps grinding it out in the minor leagues.
I want to hazard a guess that a motivational manager is just like a well-oiled cog in a machine. You essentially never notice them as having influence over your motivation and only pay attention to the squeaky and rattling and faulty ones.
The best one I had in that regard was just a nice dude who I wanted to help as much as I could since he'd help me when needed. I don't think any other way would really work in the current landscape. Whenever a manager talks about our grand product and the clients dying to get a taste of our artisinal code stew, even they can't take themselves entirely seriously. The only thing that seems to help is just being liked so your team wants to make your life easier. (outside of money/benefits/promotions and maybe short term gaslighting)
I've found the best managers are very aware of the "clueless manager" trope and suffer from imposter's syndrome more than most, but use that to make them good managers doing what you said: recognizing & owning where they are blind or lack skill (working on it, asking for help), helping where they can (doing a share of the shit work, or backfilling holes), and trying to be a nice person (building a relationship beyond the manager-employee dynamic). This doesn't mean they are your friend, but most people want to work (and win!) with people they like.
>> I never got to motivate anybody do anything they didn’t want to.
I'd be willing to bet that as a manager you've gotten people to do the shit work no one wants to though, mostly by explaining why & how it's important, sharing it across the entire team, working to eliminate dumb parts of it and stepping in to do some of it yourself - and yes, occasionally assigning it directly. To me, that's motivation: sustainably coordinating energies in a shared direction for the greater good.
I think you can indirectly motivate, or is that something else? If you create a good working/team environment and reduce the factors that demotivate people, then you will indirectly motivate them. This includes working on yourself as a manager. There are of course edge cases, but most people will thrive if the environment is good.
I agree with the parent because what you're describing doesn't indirectly motivate people, it merely avoids demotivation. If the person doesn't feel motivated by themselves (e.g. someone burned out or who does not care) they won't suddenly be motivated because the environment is good. It's still an internal force.
> A good manager understands this, and motivates by helping you understand how the things you are doing are actually critical to the success of the team and the company
Your definition of a "good manager" is essentially "does not actively sabotage work of subordinates". That's not motivation, that's merely absence of active demotivation. A person knowing how and in what ways their work contributes to the success of the unit and the whole are absolute basics and if a person is not aware of those either their manager is incompetent as hell or actively hostile.
Reminds me of those job ads where "benefits" section contains gems like "salary paid on time". That is not a benefit, that is such a basic that even mentioning it puts into question everything about such company.
Disagree. This is explicitly active: "helping you understand how the things you are doing are actually critical to the success of the team". It could include building out a team dashboard that tracks the consequences of bugfixes, for example.
Sorry, I do not understand which part do you disagree with.
> This is explicitly active
Is merely being active (hopefully towards eventual success) automatically places a manager among "good managers"? What defines an "average manager" then?
I have explored this in more detail in a reply to a sibling. I see "helping you understand how the things you are doing are actually critical to the success of the team" as a critical work of any manager, therefore I find it strange when such duties are attributed to "good" management.
It is critical. Done well, it motivates people. Some managers are better at it than others; some are great at it. Such managers are actually motivating rather employees rather than avoiding demotivation.
Not really? At a small startup, sure, this should be obvious, but a manager who is able to articulate how my work bubbles up to company success at a 1000 eng company, in a way that makes sense, is a pretty rare breed.
> Your definition of a "good manager" is essentially "does not actively sabotage work of subordinates".
This is not even remotely what that person said. They said "motivates by helping you understand how the things you are doing are actually critical to the success of the team and the company". That is not nearly "does not actively sabotage".
> A person knowing how and in what ways their work contributes to the success of the unit and the whole are absolute basics
Oh please. If you reject every single thing good managers do to motivate people as "does not count" then of course you will end up with nothing. It is super easy to not see how this or that contributes to the success of a thing. It is also possible to be in position where you are in fact not contributing to the success - while you created an illusion in your head about how important you are.
> They said "<...>". That is not nearly "does not actively sabotage".
We seem to be misaligned on some fundamental level here. We are in a thread countering the notion that motivation is primarily intrinsic. My stance is that understanding the impact of individual contributions is crucial to net positive contribution towards overall success and is a tool in IC toolbox. Therefore, I value lack of such alignment as demotivating and alignment being present as motivation-neutral. In my book this is one of the core duties of a manager.
> Oh please. If you reject every single thing good managers do to motivate people as "does not count" then of course you will end up with nothing.
If you include every single thing managers do then you will simply end up shifting the definition so that every manager is "good". What's so suddenly wrong with being everyday average Joe? I do dismiss some things that not being done would reduce motivation below baseline. If a developer is expected to build a notoriously slow to compile template-heavy, multi-million sloc c++ codebase multiple times a day, a latest and greatest workstation managing the build in reasonable times is just a tool, not some motivational perk. On the other hand, a potato running the build for 4 hours would be demotivating.
So yes, I do reject alignment on things critical to overall success from things good managers do as that is something everyday regular normal manager should be doing anyway.
Different IC define useful differently and the same discussion with two of them will lead to different understanding of whether they do useful work. Not every IC is motivated just or primary by that either. Many are more of about social recognition, validation, proving themselves on something they perceive as difficult.
Obviously useful teams with obviously useful members who fully understand they are useful frequently end up demotivated because they lack what they actually need to be motivated and perceive it unfair considering they are useful.
> If you include every single thing managers do then you will simply end up shifting the definition so that every manager is "good". What's so suddenly wrong with being everyday average Joe?
Why cant average Joe manager be a good manager? Or a good programmer or what have you? In well run organizations, they are. I have worked in teams where everyone or nearly everyone was good programmer and manager was good.
Also, in most companies, the quality of hardware is not on lower lever manager. These budget decisions are made closer to CEO levels.
I'll agree with you that the author tried to put in a sound bite and it failed to clarify the author's point.
The author is trying to argue for hiring early engineers who have exhibited ownership values and who want to take ownership for their work. These are the people for whom you establish "extreme transparency" (see: late in the post), a Google Doc for them to help align with others on high-level plans, a kitchen for people to informally talk in, and then get out of their way. That kind of environment is indeed in and of itself quite motivating for a certain kind of engineer.
Of course, it doesn't scale to BigCorp-size. Eventually you have too many cooks in the kitchen. The truth is that the vast majority of engineers really do want someone to tell them exactly what to do, so that they can come in to a highly structured 9-5 job and earn a paycheck that pays their mortgage and feeds their family. Author's prescriptions do not apply to large companies or to most engineers, and Author makes it clear as such.
I d argue its not the manager that motivates people that can only be found inbooks.
Its the manager that can come in and mend a toxic and dysfunctional team.
The toxic teams end up breaking good managers in the end and they either become part of the problem or leave.
The hero manager described in the phoenix project is a myth.
The motivational one imho is very real but they need a good platform just like everyone else.
I've only experienced de-motivation from managers, personally. At least for me, motivation comes from ownership, impact, autonomy, respect. You can cause me to lose motivation in a lot of ways, but you can't really cause me to gain motivation unless you've already de-motivated me somehow.
You can de-motivate me in a lot of ways, some examples:
- throwing me or a coworker under the bus for your mistakes
- crediting yourself for the work of someone else
- attempting to "motivate" me when I'm already motivated
- manufacturing a sense of urgency, this is especially bad if you try to sustain this state all indefinitely
- using AI or market conditions as a fear tactic to motivate the team
- visibly engaging in any kind of nepotism
Honestly this list could go on and on, but those are some that come to mind.
> manufacturing a sense of urgency, this is especially bad if you try to sustain this state all indefinitely
Sadly, I have seen this in almost every startup led by founders without an engineering background I've ever been a part of.
In my personal experience, this is often caused by overeager sales team promising the world for the next deal, only to fob it off to the engineering team who now "urgently" need to build "features" and "work hard" to make it happen. This is when your intrinsically motivated engineers start looking for the exit.
The author seems to lack any sort of understanding of motivation beyond some sort of vague, blackbox "fire in the belly" concept. This is definitely not true. My take aligns with yours: motivation is a vector, having both magnitude and direction. You want individuals with the fire and then somehow need to figure out how to direct the combined heat. In the earlier stages of an externally-funded venture this is the difference between building a jet engine and pouring gasoline on a campfire. I agree you don't need a manager to do this, but also feel strongly that by the time you're at multiple teams your CTO-founder is also the wrong person. They're probably a core developer who earned the title with limited experience; don't make them learn how to manage a dev team's day-to-day while they also learn every aspect of engineering management. I wish every CTO started as a team lead, but in this scenario it's too late. CTOs largely lead the parade, but you're devs need a servant-leader in the trenches who can articulate from the front, constrain the sides and push from behind.
The point is that the 'maximum motivation level' for an employee is an inherent trait. It is a ceiling. Some people have high ceilings and some don't. If an employee has a low ceiling, no manager can motivate that employee higher.
But if someone has a high ceiling, the most a manager can do is create an environment that allows the employee to achieve their max potential. A bad manager on the other hand, can very easily bring a normally high-potential motivated employee down to mediocre levels.
If you are one of those self-aware leaders that knows how to create an environment where people can excel, then hiring highly motivated people is the winning strategy.
The author seems to be thinking of word "motivate" in the way that someone in the olden days would motivate a donkey - with a whip. Every example they're listing is not "motivation", it's effectively forcing additional work and hours. No motivation is happening there.
The fantastic element that explains the appeal of games to many developers is neither the fire-breathing monsters nor the milky-skinned, semi-clad sirens; it is the experience of carrying out a task from start to finish without any change in the user requirements.
As a lead or mgmt I set my highest priorities to:
(a) make sure that the goals are set to stone and crystal clear
(b) the team can do their work without any unnecessary distractions
(c) try to remove some of these "necessary" distractions as well
It can be really hard. And it can very ungrateful. I aim to be a nightwatchman, and I'm really proud of myself when the team thinks I'm getting paid for nothing. The bigger the structure the bigger the drama and I don't want them to be any part of it.
Meanwhile I struggle with stakeholders who are like "c'mon, you already build the skyscraper, we just want you to move the parking lot from the underground to second story, how hard can it be, you have all the parts in place, just move them around".
Cared about anything other than their own upward movement, actively worked towards my professional development, made sure I had actual, not hand wavey, feedback, and made sure my compensation reflected my growing responsibility.
I am aware that all of those things may not be in their power to give, but some combination of that in any org that is somewhat functional would be motivating.
I had one manager who got extremely excited about whatever you were working on. It was infectious and motivated most of the team including myself. He’s an innately curious person, but also whip smart and surely developed this skill deliberately.
I had another boss, a founder, who had a difficult relationship with engineering but was extremely gifted and had a great vision. I found myself highly motivated at this company as well, but for wholly different reasons. There are many paths to success.
Both startups had successful exits, and I felt as though I contributed meaningfully to both.
I have read the sibling comments here and it is so saddening. The general expectations for management are, apparently, so low, that a manager attempting to do some duties in their job description is lauded as some savior. <crying-cat.jpg>
> I know several top 1% engineers in the Valley who disengage from recruiting processes when 996 or something similar is mentioned.
A few years back, on this board, 996 was something people made fun of when it was reported that some Chinese companies did it [1].
And now, the strongest claim this blog can make is that some engineers in the US would disengage from recruiting? That the issue with working on saturdays is daily standup? What happened in these years for such a change to happen?!
Until recently American engineers made a lot of money at comparatively cushy jobs. A decent engineer in the US could make 5x their equivalent in most European nations. Staff+ engineers at FAANG could make 5x that. People in a good position tend to not like rocking the boat.
Not just that, but the union would likely end up capping their salary much lower so the wealth can be spread around. How hard is the 10x engineer on the team going to work when the compensation is the same regardless? This is where people end up working multiple jobs, if they can keep up with their peers only working one day per week.
Why the fuck would an union cap anyones salary? Is this an American thing?
Over here the purpose of unions is to: Provide a strong enough legal response and guidance to deter companies from trying shady shit, pay better unemployment fees than the government and provide training/networking. They also negotiate collectively with the employers on behalf of everyone for things like paid sick leave, paid vacations etc.
I pay a flat fee every month because the union I'm in has always had relatively low unemployment, for others it's usually a percentage of their monthly gross salary (usually around 10-50€).
In what scenario would capping people's salary be good for the workers?
>Why the fuck would an union cap anyones salary? Is this an American thing?
No, it's a thing in most of Europe like France or Germany for unionized trades. All trades there have publicly documented salary bands based on education and YoE per job, where the negotiations starting point for a wage for a position must not be below the minimum threshold but also can't exceed a certain upper threshold. In some cases, the company can decide to place you outside the union agreed tariff/band range to give you a higher wage, but then you might be exempt from some strict union rules like 35h/week working hours and such.
And they cap the top end of the salary bands because the yearly budget for wage increases is a fixed pie for most companies, and so to have money left to give entry level workers the great wage increases as mandated for by unions, they need to cap the increases to the top wages to prevent bleeding/bankruptcy. Do you think all European companies have unlimited money to give all their workers X% wage increases?
In Finland we have salary bands for some jobs, but it's usually just the minimum. Some have a maximum, but there are always "personal bonuses" the employer can give on top of that. But these are usually "old" professions like teachers, nurses, factory workers.
For IT jobs I haven't seen an official salary band anywhere and there basically is no union mandated maximum and the minimum is mostly a suggestion.
We also get universally negotiated percentage raises every now and then, but it's like 1-2%. Personal raises are on top of that and can be a LOT more.
The maximum cap sounds just stupid. When you hit the limit, why would you do anything past the absolute minimum to stay at that level?
Conceptually unions are a democracy and people are selfish. Why should I let some other worker make 10x what I do when I can instead have them make 1x and spread out the other 9x around including to me?
This "spread it around" sounds like some trickle down ecodomics madness to me =)
If the company can't pay more to a high performer they surely won't just give thast money to the average folks. It'll just go to C-staff bonuses and conference trips to exotic countries.
(Provided that the average performers are above the union minimum already)
The likely two outcomes are -- 1) the upper limit of salary band for everyone in the same role is raised high enough or 2) the high performing person is leaving to a place that pays it with a band or without.
>Forcing it by spreading it around instead of paying him is more like socialism or communism.
THat's how a lot of companies in Austria apply wage increases per union mandates. Take a budget and spread it around so that workers bicker amongst themselves for not receiving what they think they deserve.
In Austria, salary is absolutely NOT capped by collective agreements. At a certain cap salaries are just not valorized anymore, that's all.
We here live in an eco-social free-market economy, where a company can pay an employee however much they want. In union terms, the collective agreements only regulates the minimum an employer has to do.
The minimum wage thing in France is true but it's so low for developers that it doesn't play any role in salary négociation.
Never seen any upper threshold except just what the company décides.
By law people with the same job and same qualification etc in a company must earn the same thing but that's theory more than practice, except maybe large companies.
Also being in an union or not does not change anything.
> No, it's a thing in most of Europe like France or Germany for unionized trades.
This is how it often works even without unions. Everywhere I worked there were salary ranges you can't go out of without changing the role, and I was never in a union.
Most unions in the US seem to have pretty strict rules about titles, who does what, and how much each role gets paid. It's not unreasonable to expect it'd happen with software developers, too.
That said, I always point to the NFL Players Association as one that seems to be able to provide value to highly and diversely paid talent apparently without kneecapping their high performers. Though it's not something I've researched deeply.
Seeing the wage difference in Europe and the UK even for enterprise developers let alone those who work for major (mostly American based ) tech companies, is not a rousing endorsement for unions for developers
When your fascists get done with you, if there's anything left, you'll deeply wish you had spent that wage difference to get rid of them. Inequality is very corrosive to society. Europe had to learn that lesson the hard way too.
While I support mostly liberal causes - I consider myself a liberal not a leftists - like an increased social safety net, universal healthcare etc, unions are just a bridge too far.
But me personally, at 51, I have said before that I plan to go by the Ben Kenobi strategy. When things get too bad, my wife and I will just become hermits somewhere and when the evil empire comes looking for us just give up and die.
We are seriously looking at “Plan B” countries to live in after retirement and are planning to spend 6 weeks in one of those countries starting next month. I work remotely.
How is an increased social safety net a liberal policy? Most liberal parties in Europe want to lower taxes / social-security payments. (see FDP, NEOS, etc.)
lol good luck. Both of those are way harder than paying union dues.
And there's no guarantee the empire won't find you wherever you go. War is an excellent counter to inequality, it works much better than progressive taxation or collective bargaining.
It’s a lot easier when you make 3x the comp of the average developer in the EU and I am not even in BigTech (anymore).
I can absolutely guarantee you that the average enterprise CRUD developer living in a 2nd tier US city is better off than a developer in the EU. Let alone the top 10-20% working in BigTech or equivalent.
>Why the fuck would an union cap anyones salary? Is this an American thing?
Huh? If you have a collective agreement, all the compensation ranges are written down there. You get level 11 comp contract and your manager puts you at 85% of the scale, then the union decides the scale goes from say 85k to 95k. The next time the agreement is renegotiated, the scale gets bumped to 90k to 100k and you can't get past 100k until you promoted to the next function with a different comp level in a contract.
That's excluding pager duty hazard pay, may the God allmerciful steer your path away from it.
Unions are more about making the job conditions better than about maximizing the comp. Want to grind, go full 996 and sleep at work to afford that fancy house in Las Vegas.
Employers already have salary caps and comp ranges. They're called the "pay band" at most companies. You can head over to levels.fyi to look at most of them.
I think the truth is that there really isn't 10xers, and that's more or less a propaganda technique to get people to crab bucket each other.
Of course everyone likes to think they're santa's special engineer, so they don't need hurdles like protections and a level playing field. But, simultaneously, the industry has been doing everything in its power to make engineers as fungible as possible. The "wet dream" is to make engineers practically assembly line workers - you can just plop some rando in at any time, and it'll probably be fine. You can see this with the extreme turnover in a lot of the industry.
These concepts are in almost perfection contradiction, but they both have the same goal: to convince you and me that the status quo is desirable for each of us personally.
There are those who can provide 10x output in certain kinds of problems. Either due to experience or however their minds work. If their output is as a tech lead then even a 2x can provide an overall 10x increase through second order impact via their team. There are also those who provide 0.5x and 0.1x output on a wide range of problems.
> If their output is as a tech lead then even a 2x can provide an overall 10x increase through second order impact via their team.
This is something the 10x mythology tends to leave out: there are a vanishingly few people who are significantly above the 90th percentile in terms of individual productivity but if the discussion shifted to team dynamics, that’s where you can actually see really big gains by helping a larger group be more productive.
I think its also that few companies have a way to allow a 10x individual productivity engineer to focus on just the things they are 10x as good at. It's almost never everything. Once you add in meetings, politics, proposals, perf ladder requirements, mentoring, code reviews, etc. the result is a regression to the mean.
10x came from actual measurements a few decades ago, getting people to implement the same project and seeing what the result was. The two parts missing from the modern usage of the term: the measurement was within a given team (not overall), and it was a comparison of best and worst, not best and average.
10x came from the 80s, so already fairly different in key ways (internet documentation, CI, platform and tool maturity, etc.), and the methodology is challenging because you don’t have easy comparisons between complex real projects without tons of confounds and trying to measure artificial challenges runs into different but also significant challenges selecting the candidates and ensuring that the work is representative.
There are definitely people who are more or less productive but I think we’re very prone to focus on the individual while ignoring the environment they’re working in, as well as the question about broadly applicable that result is.
I find it hard to believe workers would vote for a union to lower or cap their wages. That feels like a total straw man.
In my experience unions suck when they overemphasize fairness over real world practicalities (see almost anything seniority based). They don't have to be that way.
There is a large pay disparity. Why wouldn't someone at the 50th percentile vote to have those at the 95th get lower salaries so the 50th percentile goes up a bit?
"Senior". Looks like you've already made it a tenure and not output based pay system. Which I think proves exactly what people don't like about unions or those who push for them.
In an output based system the number of high level people is relatively small and terminal level is far from the top level. It doesn't take much for people to realize that there's little chance of them becoming an L8 so why shouldn't an L8 get paid less? Moreover in my experience people have little insight into the value those at higher levels provide so will consider them dead weight.
You’re welcome to try to get the entire industry to stop referring to junior and senior developers, engineers, etc. but most people know that experience is a distinguishing characteristic. The other huge mistake you’re making is assuming that compensation is based on performance in non-union shops. It certainly can be but almost everyone will collect counter examples as they get more career experience.
I would suggest considering who stands to benefit the most from the belief that high-performers don’t need unions, and whether the same companies which have been found guilty of wage-suppression would be above funding amplification for that sentiment. Tech workers gave up a ton of bargaining power for decades and while we certainly aren’t badly paid it’s worth remembering how, say, that settlement with Apple, Google, et al. didn’t fully make up the difference, not to mention the number of former high-fliers who hit things like the ageism wall long before they wanted to retire. In an uneven market with a huge imbalance in data visibility and negotiating power, unilateral disarmament by the weaker side doesn’t seem like the winning strategy.
It's both really and that's why the scale is capped.
Union shops still have compensation levels. If your pay is defined as 85% of a scale L8 and the collective agreement says it gets increased by 2 and half percentage points each year, you will eventually reach 100% and will just sit there and still make 10k less than L9. The scale itself is adjusted yearly.
> companies would want to pay theor employees more money, but they can’t because of unions
Well, inkind-of sort-of makes sense. It happens that companies would like to spread the salary increase budget as they please, while unions tend to request that the lowest salaries get a larger share.
Reminder that unions don't have to do anything about salary.
I'd love a tech union that simply says:
Every time an on-call engineer has to work during off-hours, they get compensated 4x that time in PTO, and that PTO must be used during the next 30 days, or it is paid out at 20x their normal hourly rate.
This ensures everyone shares in the burden of off-hours work. If off-hours work is happening often, then engineers are going to be spending a lot of time away on PTO, and if the company pressures them to not take the PTO, then the company is going to be paying them a lot. Let's align incentives, I don't want to work on off-hours emergencies, and the company doesn't want me to either.
No mention of pay anywhere. Unions can do a lot of good without ever touching pay.
>Reminder that unions don't have to do anything about salary.
The union is the party that negotiates my annual salary increases that are not performance related. They will however not negotiate it up to FANG level because it's not FANG and I'm not in US. I will also get mostly the same comp as the guys on the left and on the right even if they aren't really bright (I'm not either).
>Every time an on-call engineer has to work during off-hours, they get compensated 4x that time in PTO, and that PTO must be used during the next 30 days, or it is paid out at 20x their normal hourly rate.
I had a job in twenty-nine
When everything was going fine
I knew the pace was pretty fast
But thought that it would always last
When organizers came to town
I'd always sneer and turn them down
I thought the boss was my best friend
He'd stick by me to the end
Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!
Ain't got a word to say
He chiseled down my pay
Then took my job away
"Boom" went the boom one day
It made a noise that way
I wish I had been wise
Next time I'll organize
Again see Steve. Something can look like a good position and still rapidly deteriorate.
This one wasn’t that rapid either, you had plenty of warning. I remember discussing inequality with friends in 2014, and probably knew about it since Occupy Wall Street (2011). Or earlier.
Privileged is too generic of a word that does not accurately describe the cohorts. There is the capital class. Occupy was after the Capital class but im not sure if they accurately zeroed in on that. Its been too long since then.
Engineers were never part of that class. They work for a living while capital owns assets that work for them.
Engineers were part of the "Intellectual Elite" class that made good money but were super socially progressive. (Think putting BLM signs in their yards while at the same time pricing out the people they claim to help).
They ended up becoming a lot of the Elizabeth Warren cohort after being the Hillary and Obama cohorts(before it fractured into part Bernie part MAGA with the rest going to Hillary).
Extremely socially progressive but don't you dare touch economics.
Having talked to Occupy Wall Street people at the time I don't think many on the ground differentiated as much as you think they did. I used a generic word because from my experience that is how they saw the world. I got told I deserved to have everything I own set on fire for saying I spent $100 on a nice dinner once. That was on the more extreme side but the sentiment seemed to not differentiate.
You missed what I said in my first paragraph. Occupy was after the capital class but they did not express it well. Looking back, a common criticism was that the movement was leaderless and thus unorganized. It was the early days of a new generation (Millennials) getting a first taste of the coming disaster their lives were going to be.
The last time there was really a movement like that was the 1999 WTO protests...more than a decade separated from Occupy and it being a pivotal moment for Gen X to realize the same lessons millennials learned in Occupy.
Since Occupy, a movement consisting of many of the same people who were disorganized in 2011 started to learn the ropes and become organized, first in the realignment of Labor (SEIU starting a "Fight for 15$" in 2012/2013), then the emergence of BLM in 2013(Yes they started back in 2013) as a result of death of Eric Garner and the Ferguson rallies among other events, to finally Sanders running in 2015 and the emergence of a semi organized movement combining various progressives groups (economic & social progressives).
This led to the whole saga in 2016 which there is plenty of youtube documentaries about to the wave election in 2018 (of which there is an amazing netflix movie about) to the showdown in 2020 between Bernie and Biden, to winding up wandering the political woods for years after Biden managed to hold on to now finally electing Mamdani as a Democratic Socialist in the largest city and the financial capital where Occupy started. From 2011 starting as a completely unorganized group to running the finance capital of America in just 15 years. Amazing!
White washing history doesn't change the reality of what the people actually making up the movement wanted. Not what the self-elected spokespeople who had no actual power since there were no leaders said to make it all sound less threatening.
> From 2011 starting as a completely unorganized group to running the finance capital of America in just 15 years.
Always interesting how both the left and right forget democracy and checks and balanced and just assume the executive branch is a dictator when it's their wannabe dictator in power. :)
I don't even know what argument you are even trying to make anymore. Occupy had demands, they were not clear. I explained one reason why.
>Always interesting how both the left and right forget democracy and checks and balanced and just assume the executive branch is a dictator when it's their wannabe dictator in power. :)
Where did I assume that? Mamdani was elected with an amazing margin bringing out people who had given up on voting and many who had never felt to vote before. Essentially he began his term with a strong mandate. This is while everyone clearly knew he was a Democratic Socialist. He didn't become a dictator, the actual overton window of what is considered mainstream has shifted in just 15 years. Thats whats extraordinary.
They are closer but they are not part of the class so does it really matter how close they are? Engineer still has to trade their time for wealth in the form of work. Capital class has assets that work for them.
To me the only question is if there's a hypothetical revolution who will end up swinging in the wind by their neck and I have no doubt many engineers working for big tech would have been in that group. There's always nice rhetoric and focused rhetoric to not make too many enemies but the people on the ground differentiate a lot less and have in every revolution.
By the time there is a revolution, i'd imagine that most engineers will have fallen to the working classes where they are technically a part of.
Again, they are not part of the capital class. They were lucky to come across a special moment in time where there was a paradigm shift bringing with it enormous wealth and the capital class did not part with some of their wealth out of charity but out of greed because they realized that in order to capture this new found fountain of wealth they needed engineers...at least for the time being.
This allowed one generation (maybe two) to live a dignified solid upper middle class life but since the beginning there has always been a push to eliminate them.
Things such as low/no code, "learn to code", bootcamps, and now AI are attempts to destroy this avenue for people to rise above anything more than just worker class.
> By the time there is a revolution, i'd imagine that most engineers will have fallen to the working classes where they are technically a part of.
"Working class" isn't an adjective+noun that refers to anyone who works, it's a compound noun that specifically refers to physical labor. Knowledge workers of any sort are not part of it, despite both using the word "work".
I vaguely remember reading something recently, probably by Branko Milanović, about how there is a class of workers in the tech sector who earn so much money that they are gradually starting to become capitalists. When you have so much money left over that you can start putting your capital to work for you, you cross that very line. I don't mean a home savings plan or ETFs or anything like that, but if you have seven figures and can skim off returns that you could live well on, then you're definitely no longer working class.
Well on a positive note, it may eventually lead to a union or works council for technologists. Will coders be a part of that or will that skill set go the way of carpenter? Remains to be seen. But there is still other roles in tech that could take the place of coders (infrastructure, security etc.).
Also remains to be seen how long this process will take. Could take a decade or two but hopefully it will happen. Its just so nice to see little wins like a Democratic Socialist like Mamdani getting elected in the finance capital of America. It shows that people are slowly chipping away at the capital class and sooner or later they will have to throw us some breadcrumbs.
>Well on a positive note, it may eventually lead to a union or works council for technologists.
Good luck fighting offshoring.
> It shows that people are slowly chipping away at the capital class and sooner or later they will have to throw us some breadcrumbs.
That means nothing.
I'd be surprised if he can implement 10% of what he promised in his campaign or if he's just gonna be another plant of the capital class that promises impossible things but then ends up doing nothing when the finances hit the road.
I always wondered why they don't try tariffs on this? American companies that produce overseas get tariffed regardless of origin. It changes incentives and forces production closer to areas of consumption. I suspect we are going to get there eventually, leadership needs to become more left progressive like Mamdani.
>That means nothing. I'd be surprised if he can implement 10% of what he promised in his campaign or if he's just gonna be another plant of the capital class that promises impossible things but then ends up doing nothing when the finances hit the road.
His ideas were not that radical. The fast and free busses came on the heel of a successful pilot they did with one line in each borough so its not like they are starting from scratch. They have an existing model and data from that trial to build on top of.
The grocery stores consist of one store in each borough. That is not an impossible task and it does not risk really affecting bodegas since the majority of income from most bodegas are lotto tickets and cigarettes/vapes.
Universal child care...well that have already passed this in his first week.
> that have already passed this in his first week.
It's always easy to pass laws to give people free stuff and it works well initially ... until you run out of money of course. That's how Venezuelan leadership also got popular. Who doesn't want more free stuff? It's how elections are won is most of Eastern/Southern Europe too. Until the bill is due and the next generation has to pay.
I do agree that the bill has to be paid. I don't what we are going to do with the trillions of dollars of debt as a result of tax cuts for the rich, handouts to countries like Israel and so much more that does not directly help regular people. The US has been a piggybank for all the world to just loot and take advantage of. Given that this is the environment we are in, I am all for providing these breadcrumbs that Mamdani is proposing to regular people.
Sooner or later there will be a reckoning with all the money that has been stolen by the upper class. Without these small programs, that help people that reckoning will come faster but it will come either way.
Except the new perks of New Yorkers voted for, will not come from the pockets of the super wealthy elite, but from debt and taxes paid by working class new yorkers themselves. Mandani won't tax the super wealthy more to pay for it.
Mamdani plans to tax the wealthiest New Yorkers less than they spent on propaganda to try and defeat him but him not taxing the super wealthy at all is not true.
i disagree. i also disagree that most people developing tech solutions for startups are engineers or are applying an engineering discipline. but i would agree that the majority of people in valley tech firms are closer to the rentier class than they are to working engineers.
>A decent engineer in the US could make 5x their equivalent in most European nations. Staff+ engineers at FAANG could make 5x that. People in a good position tend to not like rocking the boat.
So... 500k is the normal pay and 2.5mil is the staff+ pay, right? How many people you know actually make that?
For good companies; there are _quite_ a few companies that underpay and not as many interesting job opportunities. Let's just say "at least 2x~2.5" and move on.
Also, even if you did not mention it, UK is a bit of a special case (English-speaking countries that has thus been attracting quite a lot of international talent (and companies) at least until recently), I wouldn't put it in the same bucket as EU countries.
There is a lot of everything and I got lowballed with 85 today (with three mandatory hebeas corpus days, while the rest of the team is in a different country lol).
I'm not sure where the UK part comes from zo? Nobody upthread mentioned it.
I was talking about the good days over the last decade and not now. As someone noted Europe made $50-80k. So around $250-400k. I knew a ton that made that. Basically anyone above junior at a tech company including late stage startups and second tier tech companies. Fully remote in many cases. At Staff+ FAANG if you were there a couple years then your RSUs would very likely push you above $1m and possibly above $2m. I think the most I heard of was someone making $10m/year and being deathly afraid of a layoff. Nowadays its AI companies which if you're lucky enough to get into and know ML will pay $2m+/year as your comp even at merely staff levels. If the bubble doesn't burst before IPOs then I know ICs whose next few generations won't need to work.
There are unionized engineer jobs in the United States. Every time this conversation comes up people act like we don’t have any unions, but that’s not true. There are unionized engineering jobs.
One of them even tried striking a couple years ago, quite publicly. They ended the strike a couple days later without gaining anything.
I think American engineers know their situation and options better than you think.
Former Alibaba employee for a season of my life. I have to be careful with my next sentences because on the internet because it's easy for people to read things in a vacuum and interpret in the worse possible way, so don't do that because thats not how I mean it. The 996 hours are not useful work. It's appearance over productivity.
Yep, if you were to watch what happens at a 996 shop, it's people literally living their at-home life with their fellow employees for most of the time.
I've worked with a few coworkers who came from a 996 environment and kept doing it out of habit. As I was young and impressionable, I started doing it also. I'm not going to be careful with my sentence: these people were absolutely NOT getting more work done than others, in fact they seemed to move glacially, because they had so many more hours to fill up. It's a total footgun, and it chases away good people once the rot reaches management and they start promoting based on perception rather than reality.
This has been the case for these setups long before 996 came in vogue. For the extreme majority of people there's an upper bound on what they can actually get done over a period of time. Trying to squeeze more out of that becomes performative.
As a similar anecdote, when I was at university a few decades ago there was one major where students were pretty insular. They were well known for very long hours in their building, some people would stay there a few days at a time even.
Then I had one as a roommate. He kept normal hours. he didn't work any more or harder than any of the rest of us. He explained that in their building it was mostly socializing, parties, and playing around. He went in, did his work, and left.
After that moment I approached it with eyes wide open and saw this play out over and over again in my life.
- 30 people between the ages of 18 and 25 sharing a tiny, single office room working on folding tables and CAT 7 cables hanging from the ceiling
- Whiteboards from floor to ceiling on every wall covered in scribbles and diagrams in red, black, and blue pen, half-erased with some "SAVE FOREVER" circled parts
- Typing really fast on loud, clicky keyboards
- Doing nothing but coding or working 18 hours/day with no life at all
- Living at work in sleeping bags
- Surviving on cold delivered pizza, hot instant ramen, and coffee with only a mini fridge, a microwave, and a coffee pot
- Spending absurdly little money on everything
The problem is that if even one gigabusiness began vaguely in such a manner, someone will declare some aspect(s) were "essential" and try to cargo cult the "hard work" pseudo-signals without considering sustainability or that it's even necessary. There are far too many engineers who will overwork themselves until they reach burn out or will not maximize real productivity by working less and taking breaks/vacations, and then won't want to work on a venture at all anymore.
PSA: Don't be a sucker and don't work for below market rates. Eschew working for other people and megacorps when possible; form unions, worker-owned co-ops, and/or get significant amounts of preferred liquidation-preference shares.
I would tell a recruiter directly that 996 is a red flag.
Prior to that it was cracked (née 10x (née ninja)) engineers or sigma grindset or whatever.
It's performative. If you bring people together to build something that they actually give a shit about, you'll out-perform a group of people who are grinding out of fear. And you'll _definitely_ out-perform the kinds of people who are buzzword heavy.
i agree. but. there's something in the behaviour of these unicorns that should be examined.
the idea that an engineer can be a ninja, 10x or unicorn independent of the processes of their environment and working group is laughable. i have known several people who were identified as "highly productive" and they all had some individual traits like a) they were very good with individual time management, b) were not afraid to say when they didn't understand something and c) were all pretty smart. (and d, knew how to give good code review comments without pissing people off.)
but... they also needed an environment where they could push back and say things like "i do not feel participating in today's 1-on-1 meeting (or meeting with product management) is a good use of my time", where task design gave them chunks of work that were appropriate and they were given the freedom to identify (and avoid) "wicked" problems.
which is to say... i don't think the story of the ninja/unicorn is complete fantasy, but management has to understand how it's real and craft an environment where an engineer's inner-unicorn can emerge.
I've been an early employee (sub 10 and 20) in two unicorns and another (a presidential campaign) that didn't have a valuation but did the equivalent. People did not work 40 hours per week, and I feel comfortable saying that the companies could not have been as successful if people had.
The common threads were:
- incredible ICs
- founders who spiked in the most important areas for that market
- a mission that everyone truly believed in
- a culture of people who deeply cared about one another but were comfortable pushing back (as you said!)
It's incredibly rare to find all of these together. I agree that management is responsible for helping others thrive, but not necessarily that they should shape the environment to fit any engineer. Some people want things (projects, challenges, roles) that don't make sense in that company's context. It's okay, especially when it's hard, to agree that this isn't the place for someone.
Are you saying people worked less than 40 hours a week or more than 40 hours a week in those organizations? I’m assuming over, but it’s unclear to me from the tone of your post.
Been there too, and for me it was under 40 hours. Sometimes you'd have to cut people off and say they needed to go home if they were trying to pull more. But the whole 'strategy' is that cleaning up mistakes takes way more time than getting it right the first time, so keeping people fresh and without distractions is the most important thing.
I think this is for a different domain than software engineering, but it describes the basics, mostly difficult to get consensus on detailed requirements, often due to "personal" or "group political" reasons.
> And now, the strongest claim this blog can make is that some engineers in the US would disengage from recruiting?
The statement was specifically about top 1% engineers in Silicon Valley. That’s a very, very small subset of all engineers in the US.
The pointy end of the talent spectrum in SV is a very weird place because it has had a lot of engineers for whom work is life. Living at the office and having coworkers working 24/7 might be something they like.
I’m not condoning this or saying it’s common. It’s not common. However, once you narrow down to the extreme outliers in the long tail of talent distribution you will find a lot of people who are downright obsessive about their work. Their jobs also pay north of $1mm including equity, so spending a few years of their life 996ing on a topic they love with energized people isn’t exactly a bad deal for them.
In general, if a recruiter told an average engineer that 996 was expected that would be the end of that conversation. Average US engineers are not signing up for 996 for average compensation.
I am this person (not a genius or whatever) but work is absolutely life for me.
I still absolutely resent the 996 culture and would never do that. I'd like to have agency when I want to abuse myself
What happened? Started with Musk purging half his staff ...
I've been around long enough in this industry to see the pendulum swing back and forth a few times. The peak of 2020/2021 was the epitome of "spoiled tech worker" but now we're well on our way the other side, I'd say.
If you had enough time to look back through my post history, you’ll find back in 2021 2022 I was loud as hell Screaming from as high as I could on this board primarily that we need to be doing everything we possibly could do to unionize, build labor cooperatives etc. and absolutely nobody gave a shit.
I would get roasted every time and that’s fine I know what I’m doing.
but the attitudes are changing and while it’s frustrating to have to deal with that I feel like being a Hector on this topic is just the entry fee.
I’m extremely dissatisfied at the pace and scale and lack of leaders and organization and push back and etc… so I expect the next two years to be really really really bad and the hope is that people wake up at a large enough scale that they actually are able to affect something but I don’t have a lot of hope for that.
What I describe is not real activism imo but at least I can tell you from first hand documentation that sentiment is changing.
One of my core philosophies as a manager is that by default I should get the fuck out of the way. From there, identify the biggest issues and solve them.
If you're successful hiring great people, I really don't understand the desire to micromanage them. Or do silly things that are demotivating, like 996 or trying to mislead them / market things / hide the bad stuff.
Treating people like adults is that One Neat Trick that influencer bloggers don't want you to know.
> Treating people like adults is that One Neat Trick that influencer bloggers don't want you to know.
In the companies below Big Tech in valuation at least, having been in the room with drunken executives speaking their real thoughts multiple times, I’ve found it’s because they don’t want to treat people like adults.
They want serfs to order around because they have some cultural value around being “the boss” and you can’t be “the boss” if you aren’t telling people what to do. The more things you tell them to do, the more of a boss you are.
It’s how you get executives crowing to you about all of these faang ideas like google’s 20% time back in the day, or engineers being able to vote with their feet and only attend meetings they found useful, but then have people on pips because they were consistently 30-60 seconds late to daily standups.
It’s not the only failure mode by far, but having leadership like that seems like a cause for companies getting hard stuck below a billion in profit
we used to say "employees don't quit jobs, they quit managers." i was very happy at Amazon until they moved me under a sub-optimal manager. i quit less than a month later. that manager got promoted. this will tell you everything you need to know about working at Amazon.
maybe they were trying to get me to quit. maybe that area's director was incompetent. maybe both.
Coming back to this with a late reply of more experiences, but it doesn't seem that unique for management from my perspective.
When I was an IC I dealt with a ton of software engineer peers who were pretty bad at their job and managed to stay in the field as a software engineer. I was constantly cleaning up or compensating for them. As a manager I've had to let someone go because they literally could not be demoted to a level commensurate with their abilities (there's nothing below junior, they must be able to perform commits of new work and couldn't despite months of training and support, and they refused an alternate career track in QA before being PIP'd), and yet... after a stint of unemployment that person failed upwards with an even higher engineering title at a new organization, bringing along an obviously lacking skill set and what had to be a pretty falsified resume and career experience discussion with said new employer.
The only complete exit from software engineering that I've witnessed was someone so bad at their job that they became perpetually unemployed and finally called it quits and left the industry after about 7 years of being fired or laid off back to back continuously.
The world's beginning to change but for a long time a verifiable title with the right number of years next to it would get you a long ways in the corporate software rat race.
Managers have to manage up and manage down. Lots of managers succeed in their careers by being good at managing up, despite being awful at managing down.
As a manager, yeah I’ve seen several of my peers wash out of the role for one reason or another. It happens. Usually it’s self selected though, disliking the inherent drama, having difficult to work with employees, moving up from engineering and realizing that was actually what they loved, etc.
But a bad people manager who still manages resources and timelines and expectations isn’t necessarily bad for business. Promoting them up into a more strategic role that deals less with managing a larger group of individuals directly isn’t necessarily a bad move either.
I've also seen bad "lower level" managers fail downward. But I think at some point on the manager totem-pole, you become this weird "invulnerable royalty," and always fail upward. You never see VPs get fired and move back down to 3rd-level managers. You never see SVPs get fired and move back down to being mere VPs. They always get fired and then move over to Dell or Intel or something at an even more senior level than they were at their previous company.
I'd go further: a bad manager can turn a great engineer into a very bad one. People look up to great people, and when the strongest performers are demotivated, that spreads.
Commonly in the cultures that end up this way, leadership blames / gaslights the ICs. It's toxic and honestly kind of heartbreaking.
If they are very bad, the company can let them go. If they are simple good or fine, the company lost their great engineer, and now has a seat filler that they can’t justify firing.
For sure. At that point they have to fire them, even though it's the company / leadership's fault and hard to watch. Ultimately better for that engineer, as well, to move on.
I may not be using the same definition of "motivation" as the author, but understanding what motivates your people, putting the right mix of people together to work on the right problems, and knowing how and when to apply pressure to get people to do their best work are absolutely something managers can do to motivate their teams.
Yep people have all sorts of sources of motivations. One of the key ones is a sense of ownership. Many people join startups instead of BigCorp because they want voice and influence that they don't get in a larger company. I've seen so many founders, managers, leaders, etc kill that by not recognizing this fundamental fact.
Of course there's also the problem that you can find and hire people who are motivated people but there's absolutely no guarantee people are going to be motivated for your specific problem.
Ot is it person, situation and reason (reason given in interview)
I have been most motivated when there was an aha in the interview process. Or a "cooll!" feeling. For me usually about the end product over the tech stack. I like to work on things I like to use myself.
I think motivation is contextual. When I love the mission of the project I'm working on, I'll put everything into it. When I hit a prolonged wall of politics or poor leadership, I'm not going to operate at 100%.
There's a trifecta that works well:
1. The job is what the employee wants to be doing (IC, manager, FE/BE, end product or mission, whatever).
2. It's what the company needs. (Don't let a high performer do something that's Priority 10 just to keep them.)
3. It's what the employee is good at. (This includes areas of growth that they have aptitude for!)
People in those situations, in my experience, tend to thrive. It's great that you've recognized the kinds of products (ones you use) that give you that.
Something I don't think hiring managers do enough is convince applicants not to work there. Have a conversation to discover what the person wants. If it's not this role, that's totally fine! It's far better to help someone discover what they love than hire someone into something they won't.
"I know several top 1% engineers in the Valley who disengage from recruiting processes when 996 or something similar is mentioned."
Setting this expectation early seems honest and the best thing to do. The worst is when companies sell people on WLB but then flip it to 996 -- you end up with all the wrong people and no one wins. Best to be transparent from the onset.
I always encourage candidates to go visit the company several times if possible, including a visit at 5:30pm or 6:30pm to see the state of the office and attendance. There is no right or wrong answer --
> including a visit at 5:30pm or 6:30pm to see the state of the office and attendance
As an academic, I used to work 11am-8pm many days when I was younger thanks to flexible working hours, and I wasn’t the only one working late but not early. I realize this is probably more rare in corporate settings, but keep in mind if the place has flexible hours you might see more people at 6pm despite people not doing 996.
I think that is great if you want flexibility, and I used to do that also!
What i'd assess at 6:30 is whether people are on meetings or on focus time. If you have monitors with zooms full of 5-6 people, I wouldn't think that is flex hours, i'd assume that is a meeting being scheduled at 6:30.
On the other hand, if you have people focus working, you cannot draw any conclusions from that.
Personally, I stay at work late. But there is a difference between me being obsessed with a problem and working thru the evening trying to solve it (awesome for me) vs meetings that are being scheduled at 6:30pm or 7pm
That was true of me as well, and at the same time, I was working alongside parents who worked 7:30-5:30 with a break to pick up the kids from school.
Nobody wants a "visit" from the founder, anyway. They want timely two-way flow of information, access and guidance on the occasions when they need it, and maybe (maybe) an occasional chance to hang out socially as a group with no reference to work. Nobody wants the founder randomly dropping by during work hours to assess morale.
This is really my priority to achieve at a job, and one of the reasons I try to be good enough to be indispensable is to be allowed to roll in in the morning whenever I get there.
I have a very tough time in the morning convincing myself to go to work, and a very tough time at work tearing myself away from something in an intermediate state. Things at work are always in an intermediate state at 5:00, unless you stopped working well before then (or got very lucky), so I always end up working late whether I come in on time or come in late.
So I'm always trying to get to the point where management lets me get there when I get there, and trusts me to be productive. It's a mental thing. I get up early and do a lot in the morning; I'm a morning person. Maybe too much so. The time between getting off work and going to bed is garbage time for me; a long annoying commute and a meal. When I leave at 5:00 I just fall asleep by 9:00.
We're apparently back to making psychoanalysts out of interviewers:
I'll dedicate a post to specific ways you can identify motivation
during hiring, but in short, look for: the obvious one: evidence that
they indeed exhibited these external signs of motivation (in an
unforced way!) in past jobs; signs of grit in their career and life
paths (how did they respond to adversity, how have they put their past
successes or reputation on the line for some new challenge);
intellectual curiosity in the form of hobbies, nerdy interests that
they can talk about with passion
I'm pretty confident that this doesn't work, and that searching for "intellectual curiosoty in the form of hobbies and nerdy interests" is actually an own-goal, though it's a great way to keep your Slack channels full of zesty, nerdy, non-remunerative enterprise during the core hours everyone has to actually ship code together.
10 years ago I bought into the idea of hiring for nerdy interests and hobbies as a proxy for motivation. I will say I met some excellent people during this time, but looking back those same people would have been hired anyway due to their accomplishments at companies.
> though it's a great way to keep your Slack channels full of zesty, nerdy, non-remunerative enterprise during the core hours everyone has to actually ship code together.
Spicy take, but that's 100% consistent with my experience. Hire a lot of people for their nerdy interests and hobbies and your company comms become full of chatter about nerdy interests and hobbies. Meanwhile the "boring" people who ship code and then go home to their families (or pets, or anything) are trying to ship code and get the job done.
Nerdy interests and hobbies is not a good proxy for work ability. Hiring someone primarily for nerdy interests and hobbies is probably a red herring. Focus on what matters.
>10 years ago I bought into the idea of hiring for nerdy interests and hobbies as a proxy for motivation. I will say I met some excellent people during this time, but looking back those same people would have been hired anyway due to their accomplishments at companies.
>Nerdy interests and hobbies is not a good proxy for work ability.
What I was trying to say was that having nerdy interests and hobbies isn’t a negative signal. People can have nerdy interests and hobbies and be great at their job.
But it’s not a positive signal for work ability. Having nerdy interests and hobbies doesn’t signal that you’re good at work.
I'm not optimistic about scalable strategies to identify "motivated" employees, but I'm not certain. I am pretty certain these strategies are bad. They're what everybody did in the mid-2000s.
One of the problems is the idea that "motivated" or even "capable" is some sort of intrinsic property of a person. Those things ebb and flow based on tons of variables, from stuff going on at home to decisions made by management.
> I'll dedicate a post to specific ways you can identify motivation during hiring, but in short, look for
All will be gamed by interviewees, by the afternoon this hits the HN front page.
(And, for example, tech interview prep has already been telling people to fake passion and curiosity, for many years now.)
Here's what you do:
1. Consider that the early startup also belongs to the early hires. It's their startup too. You're the last-word decider, but it's not only your startup. You want it to also be theirs. Believe this, and act like it.
2. Reflect that in the equity sharing. "0.5%", to be diluted, as options, with ISO rules that discourage exercising at all... while co-founders divide up 70% of founder real shares between themselves... is nonsense, for that founding engineer, who you should want to be as motivated as you, and contributing as much as you do.
3. With equity like you're serious, make the salaries low-ish. Not so low that it's nonviable for modest family cost of living, but low enough to self-select out the people who aren't committed to the company being successful, or who don't actually believe in the company.
4. Have an actually promising company and founding team, or you won't get many experienced people biting.
I think what people miss about indexing on social signals is that convincing social performance is hard. My suspicion when people say things like "ah but if you index on a social signal then everyone will just perform the social signal" are themselves feeling as though they do not naturally signal that thing, and ironically are frustrated by the effort that it takes to appear as though they do.
The context on this one is that we've gone from an environment in which kids were mocked for having curiosity and passion about nerdy things like systems, and it didn't pay that well as an adult, and those people would go home at the end of the day and also write open source code...
To one in which it's now a high-paying career, and a bunch of interview prep manuals coach on faking that, doing open source to promote your career, etc.
So if OG nerds look around at the environment and see the dynamics, of people who just want well-paying jobs (nothing wrong with that) seeming to do a performative dance with interviewers who also just want well-paying jobs (nothing wrong with that), and everyone is being told to project passion and curiosity (when they really just want well-paying jobs) and to look for it in others...
You think the problem is that OG nerds, for example, feel that they do not naturally signal that?
They may signal that just fine, but merely be questioning all the performative theater by people who aren't here for that, but some management fashion told them they should pretend to be.
> at 15 engineers, it is very doable for a single person to keep track of everyone's work and ensure alignment.
All my past experience disagrees. Sure you have 15 engineers, but you're supporting a business of 150 people. This is a pretty common ratio.
The noise gets very loud at that scale and it becomes almost impossible for self-managed engineers to make forward progress. At the very least you need super clearly defined ownership boundaries. That means business process and workstream ownership, not code ownership.
My rule of thumb is that management complexity is given by #direct reports x #project, where project is defined as a set of stakeholders (be it PM, etc. depending on business).
Concretely, managing 12 ICs on a well defined platform team w/ a single PM is much easier than managing 6 people working across 6 businesses, as is more common when managing a team of data scientists.
I don't believe a manager can be effective at 15 direct reports. I think it's possible to keep things afloat, but split that team in half and hire another manager and you'll be in a much better position.
What usually happens here is that your most senior members of the team are picking up management responsibilities instead of doing IC ones. By all means they should contribute to mentorship, direction, culture, etc. but there is way too much going on to have a deep understanding of those 15 engineers.
The only times I think this work is when the leader sucks, so swamping them with reports means they have a more difficult time micro-managing. But they're probably getting in the way in some other fashion.
it's worth reading Mythical Man Month WRT team composition. not because Brooks says anything new about the subject, but to get perspective on how long people have been trying to find a good idea for how to structure teams.
1. Motivation is a feeling, it's an emotion, it comes and goes, it's a bonus. It's discipline and professionalism that make the huge difference. Many people have the motivation and dream to "create their own programming language", "launch their startup", "make it to the NBA", "lose 40 pounds and get fitter" but this motivation, a feeling, will consistently fight the emotions telling you to have fun, relax, go out with friends, play video games to relieve stress. Motivation is a great boost to discipline and professionalism, but those two survive even when motivation goes off, whereas won't take you anywhere.
2. You cannot hire for motivation and if you're looking for that trait you'll likely projecting your own biases. I suspect that the author of the blog post has nerdy hobbits so he projects himself on candidates. Non sense. Yes, nerdier engineers are likely more interested in the craft and in overall engineering, but that says absolutely nothing about them being motivated in building yet another B2B SaaS.
3. A very good engineer joining a startup, should have the implicit motivation of wanting to get rich in few years, otherwise he/she's be joining a cushier job that pays better.
I disagree. Motivation is not just an emotion but an inherent desire. For a motivated engineer the balance between the work with pleasures and dreams is already won and pre-balanced for sustainable achievement.
I find the work itself rewarding and I find world improvement results reinforcing of my enjoyment. I want to code and I'm happy to direct that energy largely according to my employer's needs and our shared benefit. I can be given high level directives and refinement feedback over time. My observed results are faster, more effective progress as reported by internal and external stakeholders. I haven't minded becoming wealthier but it was never my primary motive.
> Motivation is not just an emotion but an inherent desire
Desires change as we grow up and life changes us.
The people you hire today, aren't going to be the same 3/6/9/12 months from now when a parent gets sick, a partner leaves, a child is born, when something suddenly changes their priority, etc.
Surely so. Also, for me it's been more than two decades and a partner has left, a child had been born, and parents are getting sick and starting to die. I still love coding.
That said, I'm working on transitioning to farming to get away from the psychology the industry seems committed to and has gotten worse while also I've become more aware as I have acted with greater scope and influence.
I'd love to find a place that would let me peacefully employ my love of coding and solving important problems in society but in a manner that also fit my life.
When I read about 996-style culture I am happy to be European. That would not work here. 40 hours per week max and most engineers prefer to not work more than 32 hours a week. So you have a good work/life balance. I currently work 4 hours a week.
I second this. On paper Austria has below average working hours in EU statistics but I've seen a lot of overwork in the tech companies I've been at by some people, but which was never officially reported because the workers themselves just went along with it.
Scandals in the papers around the crazy hours workers at big-4 consultancies in Vienna typically do, which again went unpunished by labor agencies, since there were no written orders from management imposing those long hours but workers just tactilely accepted it as part of the work culture there.
Similarly, a mate of mine at major finance gig in Frankfurt noticed that they were working longer hours than their colleagues from NY. Heard similar stories from colleagues from Italy and France.
So work hours are super dependent on local culture and industry. The meme about everyone in the EU being paid to slack off all day is not as common as people imagine, unless maybe you work for the government or got lucky to score a great gig in some dysfunctional monopolistic megacorp.
I've found in (EU) academia at least that people essentially lie about how much work they do. In anglosphere it's far more common for people to be open/expectant of 80 hour weeks etc. Probably the lieing approach is better for society/culture.
not everyone in the states is 996, but yeah, there's a pandemic of bad management here. or rather... not so much bad management... but management by people who read articles about how Amazon, a company with tens of thousands of engineers, manages projects and then decides they're going to manage their startup of 4 people the same way because they think it's a "growth hacking" hack.
just keep in mind that American tech startups are often just vehicles to evade estate tax. and certainly vehicles for converting VC money into more VC money by selling dreams to greater fools. there's also a down side.
This is the Charlie Kirk argument against gun control, "I'm ok with a small number of gun deaths, it's a small price to pay for freedom". All well and good until you become one of those gun deaths.
I agree with him by the way. But this kind of maximalist thought ending cliche is weird and anti intellectual.
One death of an amazon employee means we should change the whole system? A huge number of people are employed by them, enjoy their lives, became multi millionaires.
Why am I flagged for a fairly normal opinion? A few deaths are okay if the wast majority are satisfied?
There’s sort of a rotation going on in a lot of companies. There were companies which had Europe as the low cost location compared to America are now moving the type of work that had been done in America to Europe and what had been in Europe to India. But also companies treating European countries as high cost now and looking for new low cost countries
we also sort of effed up a while ago with changes to section 174... suddenly software devs in the states were 10%-25% more expensive. once that happened it made sense to see if moving devs to europe for situations where you have a european based product and sales team made sense.
in the states we've sort of repaired the damage of the section 174 changes, but i think they were rolled into a tax bill that sunsets in a few years. so we may see this again in 2029.
Are they? Do you have a source for that? My impression is that it's easier to find engineering work in Stockholm than in silicon valley atm, but I haven't measured objectively.
I live in Spain. I’ve been in the industry for the last 10 years.
I’ve seen from a very close distance several European companies move a big part of their operations to India. Have had close friends laid off recently and seen them struggle for months to find a new jobs. Plus, I see tighter freelance market these days.
My former company had the brilliant idea to outsource native app development to india. This was mabye 2015 in germany and they tried to roll out the app for several years. There were severe communication and quality problems. Our company wasted massive time on it, until they finally added a single native app dev and we started making progress. We already had like 30 people in tech department and adding a single position was a fucking joke on the payroll.
Any manager that thinks he can beat the value of a single dev with a random ass sweatshop from india is delusional. The cultural difference is massive, quality and work ethics as well. It's a high friction job for a manager. Well at least if you expect a bit of quality and timeliness.
(Sorry for all indians that do a good job, it's just the sweatshop/agency remote software dev culture simply doesn't work. Even a european sweatshop usually delivers worse quality then inhouse devs.)
I’ve worked with great engineers from India/Pakistan. I didn’t hire them, so don’t know too much about the process of how to find them but they were definitely as good as anyone I’ve seen in Europe.
Stockholm is not representative of entire Europe same how SF isn't representative of entire NA. There's too many variables and shades of gray to give a simple answer, with closest to a correct answer being "it depends" based on where you live, how good you are and how in demand your skill set is to the demand of your local market, but the market is pretty much fucked in many high-CoL locations worldwide due to offshoring to cheaper locations and many businesses in Europe seeing orders fall.
I deliberately chose to compare two tech-heavy locations to avoid weird and difficult comparisons like the tech industry in rural Nebraska Vs Moldavia.
Stockholm was a natural point of comparison for me given that I used to live there until very recently.i have a decent picture of the dev market in Stockholm. Silicon valley is the most mentioned tech centre on here, and is therefore the American tech market I know the most about (even if my knowledge is very limited in this front)
Sure but then you still can't extrapolate the comparison beyond SF and Stockholm. I'm also in Europe but the job market where I live don't give a shit about what it looks like in Stockholm but they can diverge massively.
is that for startups or for the big guys like Ericsson?
i have to admit i was surprised by how much startup activity was going on in Stockholm in the last 20 years. but disappointed by how few startups don't get B or C rounds or get bought after their A or B rounds run out.
How does this work though? Do you have around 4 hours worth of work you report on? Are you paid for more than 4 hours? I’m so curious when people throw completely alien statements like this out like it’s something that doesn’t even warrant explanation.
I freelance. Occasionally I get called by former clients to work on legacy systems I was lead on. And I have some support tasks for former clients.
For one company I log on once a month, I start a Renovate process which generates pull-requests for updated dependencies. Patch-versions get auto-merged after tests succeed, minor and major need approval of the current lead. Sometimes I need to manually tweak the code a bit because of API changes or to get tests to pass. I'm allowed to bill them four hours on it regardless of actual work, which is between five minutes (no manual intervention required) and two hours (need to rewrite some code).
For another company I create a report once a month for all outages and which errors frequently show up in logging. I automated this to be a five minute task and it generates a Wiki page. I review the page to see if everything is ok. I bill an hour on this.
The company is happy to not have to allocate engineer hours on maintenance so they can continue pumping out new features.
I'd say that on average I work 4 hours and bill 12 hours. This is comparable to the income of someone in employment working around 24 hours. But I do run a significant risk obviously.
Depends what one considers “work”; if you’re only counting focused, active coding work then there are places where 4 hours is the max you’re going to achieve of that anyway.
I count work the contracted time I need to be available/tied to my employer. Doesn't matter if I'm doing focused coding or not, it's still work because I can't be paragliding or swimming in that time, I need to be at the office or near my laptop, so it's not leisure, it's still work time.
But let's say it's only counting "focused work", 4h/week is huge stretch, unless we're competing in slacker olympics.
You don't have to work at an early stage startup - in fact most people don't. But some people do wish to participate in an early stage startup, and plenty do in Europe as well.
> So you have a good work/life balance. I currently work 4 hours a week.
And this is why when I was a PM, we shut down our Amsterdam office and shifted it to Praha, Bucharest, and Warsaw. You won't find as many people who will complain about a 40 hour workweek while earning €80k TCs
I think the occasional burst of activity can and does work, but it’s a budget you need to spend strategically and let it recover. Constant 996 indeed won’t work.
you are lucky to have lived a career where that is true. it is largely true in the states and sometimes true in startups. there are corners of the world where it is less true than one would hope.
if you surround yourself with people who are only motivated by money, you will believe that everyone is only motivated by money. if you surround yourself with people who are motivated by a creative urge to build something they can be proud of, you may start to believe that this is everyone's motivation.
it is often useful to think of people as only being motivated by one thing, to see clearly how application of that thing might change their behaviour. but if you believe that is the only thing that motivates them, you will have a very simplistic (and eventually incorrect) model of how they are motivated.
Maybe 15 years ago I would've agreed because there was genuine innovation in tech where you could actually be passionate and proud of building it. "I want to work here because I want this product to exist" could've been a legitimate thing to say back in the day.
Nowadays with every market being saturated and tech being a race to the bottom quality-wise, what's there to be passionate about and/or proud of? Do you think people are proud of building yet another OpenAI wrapper or advertising surface? If they actually are proud of those I would feel pretty sad for them.
Also, the majority of landlords don't take payment in "passion" or "pride" and rents have skyrocketed since the glory days of tech.
i think it's still out there, but yeah, you have to wade through an amazing amount of poop to find it. insert here the joke about someone digging through the muck in a horse stable and the punch line is "there's got to be a pony in here somewhere."
Many people aren't motivated by money so much as wanting to spend as much time they can with their family, where they find their creative energies most rewarding.
Making the most money per hour merely allows me to spend more time with my family rather than working more for less and giving my creative energies to greater society or an employer instead of directly to my wife and children.
That's a good callout - I have found European employers and founders to be much stingier with salaries in comparison to those I've worked with in the Bay or Israel, but I feel a lot of this is because of much more conservative investors, with boards pushing back on more "realistic" compensation.
I've been adamant about paying 75th percentile TC - I want the employees in my portfolio companies to be extremely motivated, and that requires incentivizing employees and founders correctly
I disagree. It is more accurate to say that more working hours is a continuum of productivity. Imagine that you have two nearly identical software engineers. One works 40 hours per week and the other 41 hours per week. Which will be more productive? Very likely the 41 hour per week engineer. Now, if you compare 50 vs 51, then 60 vs 61, and so forth, the productivity gap will become much smaller, possibly hard to measure after 60. I have witnessed a few young engineers in my career with simply unbelievable work ethic and talents that could work 80+ hours a week for months on end. It was amazing to see, and their output was unmatched.
From personal experience, I worked like a dog in my younger years for two reasons: (1) To become a better engineer, you need to make a lot of mistakes and fix them yourself. (2) Much junior engineering work is just time in front of the screen pounding out simple features for a CRUD app. The more that you complete, the quicker you get promoted.
You're making a feely argument for a phenomenon that has evidence. The evidence is that there's a max amount of work you do per week, and the more you work the less you do per hour - and that max amount is below 40 hours, incidentally.
There's effective evidence that people who work 6 hours a day are more productive than people working 8 hours a day, and after 4 hours of active practice, you aren't getting any better.
And on top of this, perpetually tired and exhausted people are not at their best.
Regardless of whether or not you accept that someone working 41 hours really isn't doing more work than someone doing 40 - you can see that two people working 30 is much better than one person working 60. Working people for long hours is mismanagement, at some level.
I agree, but the issue is the impetus behind the statement. The tone which that poster took and the default negative assumption is a negative trait to most hiring managers - especially at the early stage. At an early stage organization, you want your employees to be self-motivated but also open to pull crunchtime if needed (eg. customer escalation, rolled up product launch, pivot)
I think its clearly false that motivation is an inherent trait. That would imply that demotivation is also inherent, which I think is even more obviously wrong.
I think demotivating people is incredibly easy, see any Dilbert cartoon featuring the PHB ever.
That doesn't mean that motivating people is also easy. They're not equivalent.
Motivating people requires understanding their psychology, their values, what they want from their life, etc, and then applying that knowledge to create a workplace culture that feeds all of that. Demotivating them just requires not understanding any of that, or ignoring it in favour of feeding your own ego or psychology. It's a lot easier to demotivate.
Certainly it's easier to destroy than to build but if you tell yourself "my teams motivation is entirely intrinsic" you might, for example, think you can abdicate the duty of removing demotivations.
Ah yes the workplace culture, psychology angle. I would expect to read that on Linkedin, not here.
No, motivating people simply requires giving them more money (performance bonuses, stock options, thirteenth salary/end-of-year bonus...). DUH. OBVIOUSLY.
People in management positions always try to weasel their way out of paying their people more. (Well, not always, not all of them do, but you get my point.)
Unless you work on truly cutting edge stuff (by which I mean the likes of SpaceX and its equivalents in different industries), motivation is money.
It's as simple as that. No need to twist yourself into all kinds of pretzels.
No, it's not the coworkers (which, by the way, are not your friends unless you meet outside of work), it's not the job as such (very few people outside of art actually enjoy doing their job as an activity after say 10 years of doing it), it's money.
Money is the primary motivator (by far). You work for money. End of story. Anyone saying otherwise is a bs artist.
I work for money because I need food on the table and a place to sleep. It doesn't motivate me much more than that. In fact, I wouldn't even call it motivation. It's a requirement to live.
There have also been studies that have found that money stops making people happier or more motivated once their yearly salary exceeds a certain amount (the equivalent of 700.000NOK here in Norway).
Some people are primarily motivated by making as much money as possible, sure, but most people I've worked with have found someplace else to work once their current job stops being interesting.
It is better to divide motivation between intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic comes from within and is probably best explained as an inherited personality trait. Extrinsic comes from external factors, usually money and rewards, as well as positive feedback. Demotivation is most probably a result of poor management (leaving aside mental health issues).
it's not hard to de-motivate people. but here's the thing... not everyone is motivated by the same thing. the trick of motivating people as a manager is spending the time to figure out what motivates them.
and if you could only de-motivate people, eventually everyone in your team would be de-motivated.
I think by the time you are hiring people at 27 years old or whatever, there is a noticeable gap in motivation. A quarter century of lived experience (which is "inherent" to the person you're hiring) is a lot, especially at the beginning of one's life.
There are all sorts of things like depression, cynicism, past experiences, etc. that can lead to someone have a lower baseline of motivation. It's also highly contextual, which I think is what you're saying and I 100% agree with. Some people thrive in role A and would want to bang their head against a wall for 40 hours in role B. Others vice versa, others would be meh in either, etc.
The biggest thing is trust, in just about any relationship. The truth is, I think, most people are very well meaning and highly ambitious. It's disillusionment and distrust that creates the rift.
People want to work hard and they want to do good - but they're scared. They're scared that working hard will only be to their detriment and, well, can you blame them? When managers create an almost adversarial relationship, it can feel like doing your best is setting yourself up for failure.
And pay them well. If you want people to build you a thing that prints money, you better give them a sizeable cut. Otherwise enjoy "market rate" performance.
If you need motivation, maybe the organization is designed badly.
It was once said of the Roman legions "The Legion is not composed of heroes. Heroes are what the Legion kills."
Field Marshall the Viscount Slim, who commanded in the China-Burma-India theater in WWII, once wrote "Wars are won by the average performance of the line units."
He wrote negatively on various special forces type units, preferring to use regular infantry and training them up to a good, but not superhuman, standard.
Arthur Imperatore, who had a unionized trucking company in New Jersey, is profiled in "Perfecting a Piece of the World" (1993) for how he made his trucking company successful despite a very ordinary workforce.
There's an argument for winning by steady competently managed plodding. The competently managed part is hard. Steve Bechtel, head of the big construction company that bears his name, once said that the limit on how many projects they could take on was finding bosses able to go out to a job site and make it happen. Failure is a management problem, not a worker problem.
This post is talking about very small companies. At that 20+ person department, it's true. Once you have a team where the founder doesn't know everyone, the average matters a lot more.
If you have 15 people, you can hire 15 people and they will be able to organically organize if you hire well. If they have a question, they know what everyone is working on. The code base is small enough that everyone can just figure it out even if the documentation is bad.
The larger that group is, the more effort it takes to make sure everyone has the context they need to get their job done. That's where management matters.
And honestly, when I was the first manager (team of 17) brought in, I was writing code and on my own project in addition to starting to build up the "what do we need to do to scale?" You bring someone like me in at 17 people because you're going to need to scale soon and someone needs to build the first set of processes that solve the problems of the next stage, and figure out the onramp because done wrong, they make everything worse.
in the military we had a saying "you don't go to war with the army you want, but with the army you have." consequently, there was a lot of effort given to training and planning. the nature of most combat arms roles is such that you need most of the team operating at a decent level. i think the idea behind so much training is that if you can raise the performance of the worst performers, you might be able to improve the overall unit performance dramatically.
to put it in marketing manager speak, for many tasks in a combat arms unit, individual performance is a satisfier, not a a delighter. if one person in the unit does a bad job, the unit will fail. if everyone in a unit does an "okay" job, the unit will not fail. the outcome between the two cases is dramatic. but if you have a unit where everyone is "okay" and then expend effort to make everyone in the unit exceptional, you will not notice a concomitant increase in performance.
flipping this over to software development... you have a lot more control over whom you hire to be in your unit. but everyone has a bad week or a skills gap, so training (which could be as simple as giving people time to read up on a subject or write a few test programs) will eventually be important. like line military units, everyone needs to be hitting on all cylinders for the dev team to work in accordance with plan. investing in upskilling existing developers who are competent but underperforming may be a better strategy than uber-skilling your best developers or firing them and hoping you can replace them with someone with better ability to figure out how to be productive on the team.
as a humourous aside... at amazon my manager discovered i was prior-service, saying "Oh! You were a MARINE!? I want to manage my team like a military outfit." unfortunately, my response was "WHAT!? You want to spend 80% of your budget on training and logistics!?" that was probably not the best thing to say in that situation.
also... if we're talking about applying military metaphors to product development, it's worth it to look up the various OODA talks by John Boyd. i don't know if i agree with all of it, and it's not directly applicable. but there's enough there to justify at least reading about it. Boyd was a friend of my dad's, so i remember thinking he was crazy when i met him as a child, but again, he may have been crazy, but he was definitely an intellectual outsider who hit more than he missed.
Keep HR and hiring teams to the bare minimum. In the scaleups I've worked for, HR got scaled first. And therefore became more powerful than any other department. HR people get hired by the dozen, get bored, and start creating work like 'self reviews', 'peer reviews', 'yearly goals', etc... on top of scrum. Bonkers.
because comparing yourself to your competitors will get you a faster horse buggy, not an automobile. if you're in a startup, you should be risking making automobiles. if you want to make faster horse buggies, go work for AT&T.
Good ideas need the right timing to line up. AT&T can afford to keep a research project around until the timing is right where a startup needs to find market fit immediately.
i'm not sure that is true about AT&T. you may be thinking about Bell Labs, which effectively destroyed it's culture in the 90s or early 2000s.
but i take your point to mean there are large companies that have budget to maintain projects that do not have an immediate need to be profitable. and agree that for startups, it's a great idea if you're building things for which a market is emerging. everyone talks about how Steve Jobs is a miracle worker. not to diminish his accomplishments, but he was also very lucky. he wanted to sell apple 2's into a market that was just starting to want to buy apple 2's. i'll give him the iPhone, however. i think he was smart enough to understand the forces were aligning to make a product that your average user would like.
but apple didn't spend 30 years making the iPhone. they had to wait 'til the market was there and manufacturing costs were low enough and bandwidth was available. i'm mostly agreeing w/ you, but i think ideas can weave in and out of companies and organizations. CALO jumped from DARPA to SRI to Apple to Quato and motivated several more startups.
Before the 1990s, Bell Labs was the research arm of the world's largest and richest telecommunications monopoly. That explains the difference between old and new Bell Labs.
Wiki says:
> With the breakup of the Bell System, Bell Labs became a subsidiary of AT&T Technologies in 1984, which resulted in a drastic decline in its funding.
Your competitors are not necessarily targeting the same users, and their internal strengths and weaknesses are different from yours. All comparisons to competitors are superficial and distract you from building what your users want and improving upon your internal strengths and weaknesses.
> Intellectual curiosity in the form of hobbies, nerdy interests that they can talk about with passion
Although I know that a lot of people would argue for "what's wrong with doing your day job well and going home to your family, friends, etc?", in my experience, it is also true that the best software engineers I've seen during my 25 year career are the ones that made their job also their passion and hobby. I think intellectual curiosity and being a 9-5 person are inversely correlated, again in my experience.
You can make your job in general a passion/hobby/craft but that doesn't mean you have to work more than your fair share for your employer to be a competent craftsperson.
Your overall opinion might be true, but it's also unfair to competent people who treat it like their day job, and do it competently (but maybe without being amazing).
There is a place for this kind of people, among which I count myself nowadays -- I used to be way nerdier, learning new programming languages and embarking on projects just because, until life got in the way, my interests shifted, etc.
> I think intellectual curiosity and being a 9-5 person are inversely correlated, again in my experience.
I think this is objectively false. I've seen plenty of terrible coworkers -- terrible at their jobs, that is -- who I later found to have hobbies they were passionate about. One was an excellent standup comedian in her spare time. Another did lots of sports and took them seriously. They just weren't very good at software, and they also "phoned it in". One was essentially a "used car salesman" personality, I'm sure he would have excelled at selling used cars! But his code was awful, and he was very combative towards the rest of the team during code reviews, resisted testing his stuff in any way, shape or form, etc. A friend of mine is a middling developer (not bad, but he's the first to admit he's average), but is an awesome guy, funny, and also an outstanding magician.
This reads like someone who has mostly had unskilled managers. The force multiplier difference a great manager can have is immense. I worked so much harder as an IC at small startups when I knew someone had my back and cared about my growth.
As a former engineer at a YC startup from pre-A to post-B, I generally agree with much of this in a broad way if the startup is a technology first one with organic growth or hasn't really figured out product/market fit.
But I think some of the management and team stuff is much more complicated in B2B or B2B2C situations, regulated industries, or cases where there are substantial non-engineering employees, perhaps doing sales, onboarding, or things related to the "offline" world (if there are physical aspects to the business).
In particular, I don't think you can have a super flat eng structure run out of a few docs if eng needs to be working with one or more teams larger than the eng team itself unless there's some kind of separate interface to large outside teams.
If you end up with a significant sales team, account management team, support team, significant numbers of contractors, or other categories of workers because of the nature of the business, you will have to be more regimented about how things are structured. In companies that face this issue, it's often one of their major challenges and not avoidable compared to other kinds of startups - your sales team may have all kinds of ideas and some of them may even be good, and some may even want to sell them before you've built them. And if your sales team is 2x the size of product and engineering... it's not easy to run out of one document. (Note that I don't love or endorse this, but in certain kind of markets and products it seems like a bit of an unavoidable issue.)
I wonder how universal these stages are. All I can say is when I worked at a 15 person company, it was extremely clear to me that we needed more structure than "everyone reports to the CEO". We struggled to prioritize between different projects, milestones weren't clearly defined or owned, at times there would be long debates on product direction without a clear decisionmaker, etc etc.
Not to say the article is so wrong. I think their advice to consider elevating a few engineers into informal tech leads is a great answer. We went with the path of hiring one dedicated "manager" of all engineers and that worked pretty well too.
Depends team to team and founder to founder. I've seen early stage startups where most ICs were able to self manage, but others where some form of structure was needed. At the stage that you mentioned, it's natural for founders to end up hiring an Engineering Lead.
> consider elevating a few engineers into informal tech leads
It is potentially risky - I've seen plenty of talented engineers flounder because they were thrust into an ill-suited management role too soon, but I think if someone is motivated and eased into the role they tend to be superior to an outside hire.
The only quibble I'd have is with "1:1's happen organically and infrequently" - I think this is based on a misunderstanding about what 1:1's are for.
Regular, formal, 1:1's are the opportunity to get above the work and talk about meta stuff - career direction, morale, interpersonal issues, etc. It's the founder/manager's chance to check if the employee is happy and thriving, or if there's something that needs to change.
These sorts of conversations can happen organically, but often don't, and can be awkward if they do happen organically. Getting the awkward out of the way with a formal agenda can really help to get into the guts of it. Rather than having to manipulate the conversation to get to an emotional item, the manager can just flat-out ask the question because it's on the agenda.
Obviously, you can overdo this, and it can turn into a nightmare for folks so I can see why TFA proposes eliminating them. But properly done, formal 1:1's are really valuable even in small teams.
I find a lot of this to also be true with sole engineers managing agents.
I've now seriously approached vibecoding two nontrivial projects, and in each case using "safe tools" was a good way to get to a working stage, faster:
- in one I insisted on typescript early and found it to be more of a hurdle than letting the LLM cobble js learning in and address bugs in a way an engineer might find uncivilized (trial and error over bulletproof typing).
- in another, I found that using react was not offering much benefit to a given project, and asked the llm to rewrite in vanilla. while this mostly worked, it introduced new bugs that were not present when using react. switching BACK to react eliminated these and enabled the LLM to continue writing features at no (current) technical or performance cost!
This is such a great advice overall. Many people are commenting about flaws in the overall approach, yet everything said is exactly what I saw working/not working in such early companies.
i saw that people who wear black turtlenecks are lauded as visionary geniuses, so don't forget to buy some turtlenecks and yell at people on a daily basis.
I used to be very motivated to do the right thing but the culture at my company doesnt reward it and actually actively seems to be promoting bad practices e.g. not documenting. Now I also dgaf.
You dont necessarily need managers but you do need someone to set expectations and keep the team accountable. Otherwise its a race to the bottom. There's no way for me as a single engineer to undo slop faster than its generated.
This is all a bit messy to read, but seems TFA recommends against 1:1s and any kind of ticket management or any eng. management all when you have 5-6 engineers and this ... insane.
People need to get on the same page. You don't need to be (shouldn't be) process insane or go SCRUM or whatever to do that. But having regular organized interactions and task definitions is absolutely imperative even early on when you don't know for sure what you'll be doing.
yeah. i think you can get away with no 1-on-1's for small teams (like 4 people) but by the time you're at 6 or 8, it's probably a good idea. i suspect the OP has reason for believing this, so rather than say "they're wrong," i would say "i'm not sure they explained their environment sufficiently to explain their conclusion."
as for ticket management. JIRA is not your friend. i would rather go with a stack of post-its than JIRA. JIRA does not help you understand what you are trying to do (in my experience.) once you've figured out specific tasks, JIRA can track those tasks, but so can BugZilla or (as my teams are using increasingly) text files checked into the repo.
people often confuse the tool with the process and confuse following the process with making progress. the first rule of issue tracking systems is they should not get in the way of making tasks you need to do visible. JIRA routinely violates this rule.
Agree about JIRA. It trends towards TPS Reports and form filling, substituting a workflow in the issue tracker for actual human processes and communication.
We just rolled out Linear, and I'm gauging how I feel about it. GitHub / GitLab issues I don't find useful. Linear seems like a middle ground. And it's nice and fast. It also doesn't seem to let PMs go apeshit with custom fields and workflows, so that's good.
I always crave for something closer to Buganizer we had internally at Google, which was just nice and minimal and not invasive. At least in its V1 form.
The author is ignorant, and I mean that literally, not as an insult. They haven’t thought deeply about why some methods of work produce better outcomes, and are still looking at the surface level artifacts. A management function is important for aligning effort, enabling performance, and clearing obstacles. Even if there isn’t a “manager” those functions are still helpful.
Bad managers also exist, and can reduce performance, which can be fatal to a startup. But that’s not a reason to avoid having management functions assigned to employees.
Series A scripts in Linux, to concurrent 996 work mesh networks.
The Catalogue of Network Training Material refers to specifying READ_ONCE(), WRITE_ONCE().
As a manager, my job was to make sure they were working on the right thing. If they didn't carry their weight, I either reduced the impact by assigning them necessary-but-boring tasks to offload the high performers, or PIP'd them. I "rehabilitated" several engineers over the years and even gave them references when we parted. Staff that lied to me more than once were terminated.
> do not adopt all the "Scrum rituals" like standups, retros, etc. wholesale, and if you do, keep them asynchronous. There is little added value to a voiced update
I couldn't disagree more. I know it's an unpopular opinion, but when standups are done synchronously, everyone actually pays attention, notices blocks and helps with them. Things get surfaced and quickly addressed that simply wouldn't otherwise, which is the purpose of standups. When it's async, people just put in what they're working on and mostly ignore everyone else. Standups need to be about 2-way communication, not 1-way.
And retrospectives are about improving how the team works. Every team has challenges of every kind. Retrospectives are for surfacing those and addressing them. They take up a couple hours a week, but the idea is that after several months the team is more productive and it pays for itself in time.
> Organic 1:1s (as opposed to recurring ones): keep them topic-heavy and ad-hoc, as opposed to relationship maintenance like in the corporate world.
Also disagree. 1-1's aren't about "relationship maintenance", again they're about surfacing issues that wouldn't arise organically -- all the little things that aren't worth scheduling a conversation over, but which need to be addressed for smooth functioning.
At the end of the day, managing a team is managing a team. In terms of managing people, it's not fundamentally that different if you're a 10-engineer startup or a team of 10 engineers at a megacorp. These things aren't "anti-patterns" or "rituals". When done correctly, they work. (Obviously, if done badly, they don't -- so if you're managing a team, do them correctly.)
I disagree. In a company of 5-6 total engineers who are actually self-motivated and competent none of these things matter. If you need stand-ups for people to be aware of work being done then you're bandaid fixing a deeper issue. Same for retros since all of that should already be getting communicated in five other ways. If not then you've got bigger issues. Same for 1-on-1s. If the founders don't know these things organically then they have failed either in their own roles or in who they hired. The solution to that isn't rituals.
In a large org where the most senior IC and the manager are both in 35 hours of meetings a week while the rest have 20 a week you need rituals. When all they are focused on in engineering then you don't.
It has nothing to do with motivation or competence.
Teams don't just work together magically and "organically". They're made of diverse human beings, every one of us, who come from different backgrounds with different expectations about when and what to communicate and when and what not to and around what is who's responsibility when. Different levels of experience, having worked at different places with different practices, and different preferences about how to do things. This is a recipe for a hundred miscommunications and inefficiences and misunderstandings a day.
These processes exist to surface the most important things not being surfaced, and to identify and fix problems that affect the team but which nobody is understanding in full because everyone only knows their own perspective.
Again, these aren't "rituals". They're processes that are proven because they work. Including with 5-6 engineers.
To me you're describing a team with mediocre communication and social skills. That's common but its not all teams.
It has everything to do with maturity, motivation and competence. The best teams I've been on didn't care about these rituals because each person bridged the gap with other people. The TLs kept an eye on everything the TL and EM kept an eye on all the people side and concerns. In a startup it'd be the founders. There was mutual trust built by those in leadership roles and issues were communicated and everyone kept an eye out for them.
> They're made of diverse human beings, every one of us, who come from different backgrounds with different expectations about when and what to communicate and when and what not to and around what is who's responsibility when.
Have a meeting, align on some norms for these things and then hold people accountable to them. It's not hard. We're all adults. You don't need constant meetings to hand hold people like little kids.
> Have a meeting, align on some norms for these things and then hold people accountable to them. It's not hard. We're all adults. You don't need constant meetings to hand hold people like little kids.
Yes... the meetings are called retrospectives.
One of the norms is called standups.
You don't need to belittle these processes as being for "little kids". That's deeply unprofessional.
Maybe there are some teams made up entirely of these 10x communicators you describe where everybody perfectly "bridges the gap" with other people. All I can say is, I've never seen it. And knowing everything I know about how easy it is for miscommunication to happen, I'm inclined to suspect that if you think you worked somewhere like that, you simply weren't aware of how much further communication and processes could have improved. After all, how could you? It's incredibly easy for us to assume that things are working as well as they could be. Until we try something like standup+retrospectives and are surprised at how much value they end up bringing.
> Teams don't just work together magically and "organically".
This is the “employees are resources” mentality, and is common in mature companies. In a startup, however, you need to hire for individuals that will “make it rain”, and not wait around for some process or manager to tell them to communicate or do work. If your employees are not coming together as a team and figuring things out without your handholding you’ve hired the wrong people.
yes and no. "agile" has become doctrinaire and "one size fits all." i miss the eXtreme Programming era where standups, pair-programming, test-first, timeboxing, etc. were all "tools in a toolbox" to be applied as needed. i think the OP is experiencing a world where they're told "oh, here's AGILE. you have to do everything in this book," which i think i would push back on as well.
but... if you're going to do standups and retrospectives... i agree with you. do them synchronously. the idea is to get everyone to listen to everyone else. the reason they're STAND-ups is 'cause everyone's supposed to be standing so there's motivation to keep them short. this often makes it difficult to do "follow the sun" development. i quit a job a couple years back because my management insisted my engineers on the US west coast be included in standups for teams in Pune (India).
and that 1-on-1's are for surfacing issues that haven't come up elsewhere seems like received wisdom among my peer group. it seems to work well for me, so +1 on that too.
the phrase "when done correctly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. i bet people who have bad experience with these practices were in situations where they weren't done correctly.
one of my problems with environments where management thinks devs are interchangeable bots motivated only by money is that there is zero motivation for management to change their approach when it doesn't work. if they think the only thing that motivates people is money, they think they have to add more money or fire their devs and get devs that are appropriately motivated by cash.
Did I miss the article mentioning to ask the eng staff how they actually like to work? I get corporate culture and all but engineers like having their subculture and that's fine. As a manager, it's my job to make sure my ppl feel equipped (schedule included) and to keep upper mgmt happy and convinced that it works even if work hours don't match other jobs. So I don't thinly it's ever too soon to hire a manager, as long as he thinks of himself as part of the eng team.
Concerning motivation, you can absolutely motivate people by explaining why their work matters and by helping them with the corp paperwork. Example: engineers don't like SAP, I don't like it either, but the project we're working on is so cool that it's worth the 30min hassle per week and I'll sit with them until they get it.
Do not be a sole founder / tech lead / manager who uses obscure tech or add immediate geometrically-increasing tech debt to be paid almost immediately by others.
lol. "don't motivate engineers." dude can't motivate engineers with money so he thinks you can't motivate engineers. that's actually funny. and a little depressing.
why don't you criticize the arguments his making instead of the person, he is basically saying hire people with autonomy not people who need motivation.
the idea i am criticizing is, as explained, "motivation" is something which can be managed and throwing more money at engineers is not a universal motivation.
Yeah. This. In 42 years in IT, i saw way too many situations where the last thing engineers need is a "team" or "management," or even worse, an outside "team leader," which usually resulted in the engineer's work or the team's work turning directly into cowshit. "Managers" want to talk about doing a thing; engineers want to actually do the thing, and both cannot happen simultaneously.
When they see results deteriorating, "managers" think the solution is "more management," which is never, ever the solution.
This seems entirely false to me. To be honest it is so incorrect it significantly puts into question the rest of the article.
1. I have absolutely had managers motivate me to work harder. I have also had managers completely demotivate me and cause me to quit. How on earth can anyone who has worked in the industry for any amount of time say that "The only place where managers motivate people is in management books"?
2. Of course most of the facile strategies mentioned in the article (like 996, micromanaging, etc) won't work. The article then generalizes this to all strategies - but "if terrible methods can't solve it, nothing possibly can" feels like a shaky argument at best. A good manager understands this, and motivates by helping you understand how the things you are doing are actually critical to the success of the team and the company. (If success of the company isn't something you're interested in, then yes, it's going to be hard to motivate you.) A poor manager sabotages motivation in a hundred different ways - he makes you feel like your efforts are totally wasted, or fails to articulate why they are important.
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