Take OKRs, for example. Everyone is expected to set their target goals, publicize and discuss them with others, and follow them religiously. Otherwise you send the signal that you don't like setting goals for yourself, and thus have no desire for self-improvement, which reflects poorly on your performance review. There are company-wide ceremonies about OKRs themselves; workshops, office hours and endless discussions about best ways to plan, track and meet your objectives. The amount of time and effort spent just doing this management work makes up a large portion of working hours.
Speaking of performance reviews, they're another huge waste of time. In the ever-important self-review you're expected to present proof to your higher-ups that you're not only worthy of keeping the job, but also why you deserve that 4% raise. So you better have been taking notes of your accomplishments in the past 6 months, otherwise those OKRs might come in handy. Your work would apparently be invisible to the company if there were no performance reviews, so make sure to make the best case for yourself, and to cherry-pick peers that would leave you a positive review.
The amount of theatre and politics involved in modern work culture is exhausting. I just want to get good work done, and go home.
I share the frustration you express based on my experience working at large companies. However, there is a strong steelman explanation for why this is required.
In a 5 person company, it is easy to sit around the table and decide what needs to be done and then have everyone "get good work done and go home". In a 5,000 person company, it is not obvious what needs to be done in the first place talk less of making sure everyone knows their part in it. Should we be going after SMBs or Enterprise customers? What do we (or more importantly I) do differently based on that decision? How do we time the next campaign push to line up with the product launch?
There are thousands of decisions that need to be made and it is impossible to do that without having these formal processes that allow people to coordinate in large groups. I would argue that >60% of work involved in a large company is coordination rather than actual building, selling, marketing, whatever. The larger the company, the greater this percentage becomes.
I would love to know if anyone has found a solution to counteract this phenomenon but it seems like an immutable law based on my experience.
One solution is to establish a strict, clear company culture with guiding principles for making most decisions. All employees are expected to conform or leave. This allows for rapid alignment and execution. But it doesn't work as well for dealing with disruptive innovations.
OKRs etc are one approach - everything written, documented, and whatnot. Honestly though I think it's wildly ineffective.
What's a better approach? Every single manager, up to CEO level, trusts implicitly his or her direct reports. CEO trusts and delegates with confidence to their immediate reports. They in turn do likewise. Any missed opportunities or mis-steps are an issue between 2 levels in the org, IMO.
Fundamentally it's a people, comms, co-ordination and aptitude problem, so solve it like one.
I think OKRs are required to communicate intent and targets. It is a great way for communication "across" and "upwards".
But it is a shitty tool "downwards". Suddenly you have managers insisting that a feature must be rolled out before the 31st of March, even though rolling out 2 days later will be safer.
It creates perverse incentives such as OKRs used for "individual" performance reviews when in reality, a lot of work is team/x-team/group effort. It causes ICs to play corporate games.
I like offices, but I agree that OKRs and performance reviews are a farce. OKRs in particular: I cannot believe how frequently people act as though there is no way to think about work other than OKRs, as if it was some immutable natural law instead of just a thing somebody thought up one time. As far as I have seen, OKRs are a mechanism for leaders at every level to divest themselves of the responsibility to _lead_, by making "accomplishing things" somebody else's problem, as measured by a number that they will get perfunctory status reports on.
The OKRs at my workplace are self-defined and self-rated. It's a total sham. Every cycle I will write OKRs for things I've already completed, or things that will be completed a week from writing. And I'll leave 1 or 2 items I know will extend to next cycle. And 3 months later I mark those few as 'done' and make up a couple more. Nobody cares. My manager doesn't care. Nothing changes at all in the org. I've been doing this for over 6 years. I'm not sure who exactly looks at the OKRs, but I assume there is a dashboard- somewhere that I don't have access to- with numbers in green and red that must mean a lot to somebody I've never met.
And during the lulls replacing doom scrolling on Reddit with house chores has been a godsend for my mental health. I pretty much only go into the office when there's catered food (ie when there's planned non-work related socializing).
As an experienced developer, I love working remotely. As a younger developer, I'm glad I got the office experience a few times. Even if, the entire time, I hated the open office layouts.
It depends if you're trying to get promoted or not. One of the reasons I never aim for a promotion internally--remote or in person--is the requirement of theater over everything else. It perverts the day to day.
> Your work would apparently be invisible to the company if there were no performance reviews
Yet another indicator of poor (i.e. lazy) management maybe if you have to keep track of every single accomplishment yourself. How about managers keep track of the awesome things their employees do and celebrate them for it and help them improve if they're lacking.
I am a lazy manager then. The problem is context. I ask all my engineers to self track accomplishments for several reasons:
1. It puts them in control. If they want to leave the team, they have a handy list to hand to their new manager right away.
2. They can capture details I would miss, no matter how close to the work I am. They will capture exact why that design process was hard and what it was like dealing with those 4 external teams.
3. It improves their writing and communication skills. I spend my 1:1's going through the accomplishments and working with them on how to expand and add context to items, where to add detail, and how to be concise with the results.
So far, I receive positive feedback on this. On the flipside, I don't do this for myself :)
Ironically, all these will be solved by raising everybody 3% and that's it. By trying to measure individual performance, the company is taking away time from their employees. And the ones that end up getting the rise are the best ones at doing reviews, not at doing the job.
I prefer that everybody gets the same raise, and that the company pays competitive salaries. To spend so much time justifying your own job for a company that is making a lot of profits makes little sense.
> I prefer that everybody gets the same raise, and that the company pays competitive salaries.
I'm not sure how you square this with promotions (the main driver of performance reviews). No company who hired me five years ago could have kept me with a constant 3% increase, that is significantly less than I achieved through promotions, the rate would no longer be competitive.
i would add that this must include executives; 2 years ago we all got the same 3% while executives got 40% (while overseeing a stock drop of 65%).
one side effect though is w/o equity it's easy to feel a lack of motivation to work as hard if you get the same raise as everyone else who might not be doing great work.
My armchair wisdom: the degree to which a worker must generate metrics, however contrived, in order to provide accountability and transparency, however inaccurate, is directly proportional to the size and complexity of an organization. There comes a point (let's call it the Gibbons Threshold) where the work of generating metrics takes more time and effort (and cost) than what an outsider would deem to be real work that truly benefits the business's bottom line.
I think this is a really key thing to take into account when choosing where to work. Where I am now I report directly to one of the founders, and I'm one step removed from the CEO, that means there's approximately zero ceremony around tracking achievements and value added. The same was true in other small companies I've worked for.
The ceremony starts to be introduced when people become further removed from those who are ultimately responsible. In my previous job there was a whole process, company wide, to ensure everyone got properly ranked based on performance and potential. As a management team we'd spend half a day every six months just going through this process, which was preceded by everyone in the company doing a self-assessment that would then be reviewed by your manager. It was all incredibly tedious.
Some people thrive in an environment where what you're doing is driven by whatever currently seems the most important, and value is apparent just from everyone knowing what's going on. Others want more structure to things, and a clear path to get from where they are to where they want to be. I don't see either as being invalid.
You can do that. You just may not get paid by a third party, if no one else can assess or help determine if the work you're doing is aligned with what they're trying to accomplish as a group. But as an entrepreneur this is probably great. Your payment is from customers who have agreed that you've delivered something of value.
Of course, I've learned, even with the two startups I've done -- once you get above a certain size you do need to ensure everyone is aligned on priorities and that there is a structure to talk about promotions/pay raises/bonuses. It doesn't have to be OKRs and performance reviews, but its some mechanism that ends up eventually being equally hated.
How do you handle healthcare and retirement as a contractor? Many contracting shops I see offer very poor benefits. Might be looking at the wrong companies, but it seems like worse compensation than FTE.
> The amount of time and effort spent just doing this management work makes up a large portion of working hours.
Not anywhere I've ever worked.
Yeah, such things exist. Yeah, they take a bit of time. "A large portion of working hours"? No.
If they actually do take a large portion of working hours, then you're at a company that either doesn't have enough work for people to do, or else that has work that needs done but the people aren't doing it. Either way, that's a place where layoffs are likely to show up sometime rather soon, and that's a drain to work at in the meantime.
Look around. There's better places out there - places that care more about the work, and less about the ceremony. (Don't get me wrong, there's still ceremony. It just doesn't dominate.)
Maybe so, but their culture can be just as horrid.
You've gotta believe in the cause, which is really just a narrative used to promote extended work hours and grind.
Then you've got to evangelise and act as a missionary for this world changing product ... the business has a cult like sheen of "changing the world" and everyone is the smartest person in the room just for being smart enough to be there.
Behind the bullshit narrative, everyone is overworked and the directors so busy chasing their exit with their legs and stroking each other off with their hands that the only tool they have left is their mouths. Out of which spews thinly veiled promises of a great product to hide their greed.
I hate these rituals at $bigCo, but pretty strongly believe I need the stability of working for $bigCo to feel happy. Is there somewhere that isn’t a startup that doesn’t have these issues?
Metrics/KPIs/OKRs are how we align large organizations around complex outcomes.
Highly effective workers always see these measurements as a waste of time, but when you're trying to validate and steer the contributions of thousands of workers - with varying levels of skill, motivation, and accountability - you need a GPS to make sure you're still on the path.
While I think goals and metrics are necessary, I do agree that organizations tend to over-formalize the process. "The map is not the territory" etc.
OKR exist to align and motivate the company. It works top down and bottom up; the executives announce what the company is going to be doing for the next term, and it ripples down as each org and team sets goals that are aligned with the plan. That's all it has to be; a good thing done right.
Have you worked at a company where you had no idea what the plan was and where the company was headed? I have and it is frustrating. That is the kind of company that would benefit from the alignment that OKRs instill.
I'm living OKRs now and they are the biggest waste of time I've ever experienced. They encourage work that fits whatever you've nailed yourself to for the quarter. They give people who are good at dressing up their work in charts a podium. These same people are most often the people who do the least real work.
OKRs are unequivocally a disaster for productivity. Real output and its impact is not as simple as any box you can invent to hold it.
Same happens with OKRs. Once there is a meeting to review them, 2/3 of OKRs have been deprecated and not even started, and everybody talks about all this other exciting new work they did that is not reflected in OKRs at all. Deprecation and new work comes from management. How is that better?
> In the ever-important self-review you're expected to present proof to your higher-ups that you're not only worthy of keeping the job, but also why you deserve that 4% raise.
While I’m not going to say I’m “quiet quitting” as far as my work, I quiet quit a couple of years ago as far as being concerned about promotions and raises. I do just enough bs to get through the review process knowing that real raises come from job hopping.
"that you're not only worthy of keeping the job, but also why you deserve that 4% raise."
I once 'earned' a 4% raise at a perf review in July. Was then was told because I only started in January that year, my raise - affecting the pay going forward - was prorated to how long I'd worked already, so .. I only get 50% of the 4%, so... 2% raise.
Felt far more manipulative and shady than if I'd just been given a 2% raise.
However, I also realise its always easy to critisize the processes from down to top. Now put yourself in the shoes of the CEO or C suite. How do you organise an entire organisation to be efficient? What is a better alternative to OKRs?
Most of the proposals I see in this thread are catering towards smaller companies but quite frankly not a lot of us managed a 1000 people company. I would be curious to know from practitioners about what worked and what didn't.
> The amount of theatre and politics involved in modern work culture is exhausting. I just want to get good work done, and go home.
At the heart of it, this is why I tend to avoid working in particular parts of the software industry. Not every company engages in this sort of thing, and I prefer working for those that don't.
It shows the history of how they have worked well at some companies in the Valley.
You asked one question about this and now you have to read a book. That's a shame.
> Much as we might like to think of organizations as rational machines - the reality is that companies are social organizations and people interacting with people is the way decisions are made and how work gets done.
My experience is largely opposite to this. I agree that we usually need to coordinate to take action in modern organizations, but this coordination is often a formality tacked onto the more meaningful individual work that preceded it.
1. Important decisions aren't made in a meeting unless at least one person has thought through the options beforehand and come prepared to explain the pros and cons of each and why their recommendation makes sense.
2. Work doesn't get done in a meeting unless prerequisite individual work was done beforehand. There has to be some thing to discuss in the meeting. An individual has to prepare that thing.
Decisions can be made and work done with short, few, and informal meetings, but not without serious individual preparation and production.
> Important decisions aren't made in a meeting unless at least one person has thought through the options beforehand and come prepared to explain the pros and cons of each and why their recommendation makes sense.
Uh, yes. If people do not come prepared to meetings, they are a giant waste of time. (Exception - pure "information radiator" meetings) Meetings are the point where you align different well-founded opinions, not where you find a solution. But that alignment is critical to getting work done efficiently.
But note that OP didn't talk about meetings per se, just about people interacting. And in any group of people, the ultimate outcome in terms of work is always driven by interactions. If you don't collaborate, you can't build at group scope. How you collaborate depends on the group. Some groups have shared chat rooms. Some have meeting. Some angrily yell at each other. But it always shapes the work, and moves it in a defined direction.
A group without social interaction is the work equivalent of Brownian motion.
The OP says social interaction is "how work gets done". This is misleading unless we also add "and individual work is also how work gets done, in some ways to a much greater degree".
If I were to say "individual heads-down focus is how work gets done" I would be rightly criticized, even though this is somewhat closer to the truth than what the OP says.
That is what they're saying. Your individual work is placed relative to the social organisation and the interactions therein. That isn't the complete opposite, it's the same thing.
Have you ever tried working in a job where your boss just ignores you, no one cares what you do, and you're just getting paid anyway? Obviously, some people are intrinsically extremely motivated even with no contact for years, but many people, probably most, without any social organisation or interactions, will not manage to work, even if they want to.
Even just the threat of not having anything done by the next meeting is a huge part of the "social organisations and people interacting with people" that "gets work done"
Keep going down the clownhole and you’ll realise that nobody really does any work.
Take a company like twitter. It’s a finished product but you’ll have 10,000 employees there. You’ll have an entire department for youth engagement. You’ll have an internal theatre group putting on shows. But who actually does work? Maybe a dozen people? The rest are just there because somebody needs to be there because that’s what is done.
The problem we have as a species is that we’ve been so effective at optimisation that we have eliminated the need for anyone to exist. A few farmers can feed the country. A few automated production lines could produce the goods.
But then all the other people would starve to death. So we just keep on making jobs to put them in. It gets further and further away from reality the further down the hole we go. You’ll have someone who’s job is to read tweets and rate their suitability. Why? To make sure the suitability from the suitability committee is enforced of course!
> The problem we have as a species is that we’ve been so effective at optimisation that we have eliminated the need for anyone to exist. A few farmers can feed the country. A few automated production lines could produce the goods.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. Human labor is still desperately needed throughout the world in order to keep things running. It’s not just farmers. You also need drivers, clerks, mechanics, accountants, etc. And that’s just to get food into your local grocery store.
Nothing in modern life is free, even though it may seem easy for most of us living in the developed world. All of this stuff exists only because people are working really hard to keep it that way.
About 2% of people in the US work in agriculture/forestry/animal handling/etc. If you include transportation workers, that's still about 5% of US workers. And if you include wholesale workers and utilities workers -- that's still < 10% of the US population.
All of this work is critical and necessary (to your point). But I think the BLS data is evidence toward OP's point that we've automated and optimized a lot of the work necessary for subsistence.
>It’s not just farmers. You also need drivers, clerks, mechanics, accountants, etc.
Also the regulatory apparatus which does a pretty good job of ensuring that food doesn't have dangerous chemicals or pathogens in it, and the law enforcement without which the regulatory apparatus would be toothless, and the people who maintain the communications infrastructure that the regulatory apparatus and the law enforcement rely on to be effective, and so on.
As with most things, the truth is in the middle. This is obvious hyperbole but for the purpose of making a point. There are a __lot__ of useless jobs out there.
i dont know how to engage with a comment like this. but i have a feeling that its an example of garbage in garbage out. i recommend you take any one of those specific assertions, maybe starting with "a few farmers can feed the country" and really try to actually substantiate the claim. good luck!
As someone who grew up and live around farms, trust me. It's not just a handful of farmers for most things you eat, unless it's literally just corn, wheat, and soy. So many fruits and vegetables still rely on hand picking as so many automated processes damage the produce.
And as others mentioned, you're then ignoring all the steps between the field and the plate. I guess you see the chef at the restaurant or the person stocking the shelves as non-human?
> The problem we have as a species is that we’ve been so effective at optimisation that we have eliminated the need for anyone to exist. A few farmers can feed the country. A few automated production lines could produce the goods.
Yes, Bangladesh is just a country of robots making jeans, and China is just a country of robots making sneakers.
I have no doubt that a lot of the economy is built on bullshit jobs, but most people do at least "some" work. It might not be necessary for our survival, but I'd like to think human society has moved beyond that.
Still, I'd love to see some kind of UBI and acknowledgement that working isn't completely necessary for the entire population if you just want to live.
I'm not following this at all. This narrative is at odds with the cut-throat capitalist narrative which is also popular to characterize businesses today. I.e. If business administrators could cut labour costs by reducing workforce, they would in a blind of an eye. For knowledge workers, I think the "idle capacity" model is more correct. Basically, demands for output are not constant, they ebb and flow. It's expensive to acquire and train staff, so they retain surplus capacity. It's inefficient, but it's more resilient.
> If business administrators could cut labour costs by reducing workforce, they would in a blind of an eye.
But this assumes that they are smart enough to know how to eradicate those extra costs, but bullshit jobs might have co-evolved among labor as a defense mechanism against that sort of thing.
>The problem we have as a species is that we’ve been so effective at optimisation that we have eliminated the need for anyone to exist. A few farmers can feed the country. A few automated production lines could produce the goods.
But then all the other people would starve to death. So we just keep on making jobs to put them in. It gets further and further away from reality the further down the hole we go.
I understand it to be hyperbole but the point that as a rough estimate only at most 1/10th of the available work force is actually "needed" in a developed country to "function" is probably accurate. From a late 19th/early 20th century capitalist pov the optimization point was reached somewhere in the 60s/70s. The problem is we have inherited and institutionalized how to "provide for oneself" from a long gone era.
If the goal was - metaphorically speaking - to reach the West Coast from the East Coast; this kind of capitalism had done a fairly good job until the 70s or so. By no means perfect but at least somewhere in the ballpark of a right trajectory.
Atm however we are past the west coast somewhere at the edge of our outer solar system lost in the Oort cloud. Remarkable engine indeed but way off course. And because it is so confusing out here (e.g. global financial market 10x bigger than world's GDP witnessed by all in 2008) in the vast 2.7 K cold nothingness of uber-optimization, the goal of wealth distribution (participation in the market) to the levels of say the 70s seems futile and utterly romantic - a long forgotten pale blue dot of paradisiacal opportunities. Even if the propulsion system which took us way out here is proof of the exact opposite in principle. Nobody has to starve to death as in "natural law" because of a conceptual eternal idea of how a certain kind of economics which was very successful at some time period (and ultimately had won the Cold War) has to work. But people really indeed do in the millions. It is just a sad state of affairs, still.
... but yet some dream to eventually reach Alpha Centauri with this good old machine: "We are halfway there, look, you can even "see" it."
When in reality it would take approx. 1000 generations at the current speed.
I understand why many people will perceive this article as saying that the workplace is inherentely inauthentic or dishonest, but many sociologists will tell you that all social venues are theatre-like.
As humans, we have many roles that we take on for the different contexts that we live in. Me as "dad" at home with the kids, me as "husband" with my wife after the kids go to bed, and me as "employee" at work are very different roles. I use different language, have different goals, different tone, different energy level.
At the same time, none of those are any less "me". They are all authentic. They're just contextual.
And it is entirely natural that knowledge work requires social skills and performance. You may write the most beautiful efficient code in the world, but if it lands in the repo without anyone noticing, it has no effect. It must be seen and used by other humans to provide value.
>I understand why many people will perceive this article as saying that the workplace is inherentely inauthentic or dishonest, but many sociologists will tell you that all social venues are theatre-like.
The sociologists all got this from Kant as many of the 'human sciences' were deeply influenced by him. Auguste Comte, widely viewed as the founder of the discipline, was a notable Kantian.
From Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View:
"On the whole, the more civilized human beings are, the more they are actors. They adopt the illusion of affection, of respect for others, of modesty, and of unselfishness without deceiving anyone at all, because it is understood by everyone that nothing is meant sincerely by this. And it is also very good that this happens in the world. For when human beings play these roles, eventually the virtues, whose illusion they have merely affected for a considerable length of time, will gradually really be aroused and merge into the disposition."
> Me as "dad" at home with the kids, me as "husband" with my wife after the kids go to bed, and me as "employee" at work are very different roles. I use different language, have different goals, different tone, different energy level.
FYI this type of code-switching is not universally present for everyone though it may be for you. Some people are their "authentic" selves the majority of the time. It is often suboptimal to be that way though.
> FYI this type of code-switching is not universally present for everyone though it may be for you.
There's a difference between overt code-switching like people do when among members of their own race versus others compared to the more basic "I don't tell dirty jokes around grandma but I do around my bros."
> Some people are their "authentic" selves the majority of the time.
I don't think of any of these roles are inauthentic. People contain multitudes.
You're right that some people deliberately collapse their roles and behave mostly the same across all contexts. I think it's usually done as a sort of power play to show that they don't have to behave differently to suit others around them. Trump is a good example.
An Ex-Google employee had a hot-take[1] on Twitter a few months ago that nicely sums up the fact that work theatrics are starting to become the only thing that matters. It seems every year work (at many companies) becomes more and more about performance art and self-promotion and telling a story about getting things done, than it is about actually getting things done.
I think it's because the rise of liberalism in the recent decades. Every political/economic system has a way how individuals can freeride at other's expense (be selfish).
In authoritarian systems, it happens through becoming a corrupt authority. In collectivist systems, it happens through tuning out in lazy disinterest. In meritocratic (liberal) systems, it happens through hustle and pretense of usefulness.
I think it's more base than this; in order to be valued you have to be seen as useful. This is only somewhat related to being actually useful. Workers who haven't drunk the company Kool-Aid have realized that their own personal value is maximized by giving priority to work that is visible over doing the best or most work.
A lot of commentary here on HN about this as an "office vs remote" thing but my read is much more a "large organization" vs "small organization" thing.
"We want to ship and try as many things as possible" is often the only way to survive as a small new growing company in a competitive market. But it's rarely what companies maximize for when they're big and successful. The politics and theater comes from normal human interactions in a large group with a lot of intentional overlap/redundancy and not a lot of existential pressure. The org wants to be robust against any individuals leaving, they want to have teams ready to go in case they do need to move quickly in response to something, but most of the time they're just spinning wheels and keeping the money printers going. Remote work isn't going to prevent those dynamics, or the need to make sure you appear to be valuable through all that. If you fail at the "appearing valuable" game in an org like that, you're gonna be at the top of the list to cut when growth slows and the company hits the "reorgs and layoffs" part of the script.
The more intrinsically motivated, "let's directly do impactful things!", sort of person can easily end up bouncing themselves off the wrong incentives for years in an org like this.
I've been noodling about this for years now, without really coming up with such a concise thesis.
A notable example from my prior job:
There was a developer who during the early phase of cloud adoption, wrote some wrappers in powershell for the Azure Powershell cmdlets. They did some quality of life of stuff, and he checked into source control dozens of these wrappers. I recall it being about 80. He got talked about as the azure guy.
Some time goes by. I need to do some Azure automation, so I look into those wrappers. They don't do anything useful for most use cases; I write my own automation from scratch. I go on to have many interactions with this dev; he doesn't really know Azure particularly well, but still has the reputation of being the azure guy. I am pretty sure nobody calling him the azure guy actually ever used any of those scripts, and I'm similarly confident those scripts never got used for anything even by him.
Don't get me wrong - was a smart and nice guy, and a good dev and great at his job. But - the mythos he had built with those ~80 files checked into source control allowed him to find opportunities to work with Azure and get to know it better. I eventually left the company. Who knows, maybe he really is an Azure guru now?
For years I was "the big data/programming" guy at a small ~1k total employee company because I spent a lot of time with a lot of freshly available data sources, internal documentation and code, python, PHP and Apache
But I never studied anything close to it, just right place, right time and made some tools to help out people/part of the business that needed help.
(They were, for reasons not of their own making operating with sticks and stones. Those tools are also software sticks and stones but with ugly glue all over, but they work and that's what was needed and what was done)
Yeah, this is an epidemic in workplaces. Everyone just wants to appear to do things - so the hard things don't get done because everyone is more focused on showing that they work instead of tackling the problems.
I don't really have a good solution to this but it's really messed up.
The incentives often don't line up. And there can sometimes be a sticky status quo that resists change. You may also get politically subverted or just plain lied to. It's hard to predict these during a job interview.
The incentive problem started when it became better to change jobs for higher compensation. Working less intensely for the same pay while you secretly manage life problems or just play around is also appealing. Your earnings are also typically soft capped as an individual hard worker. And then there's no real security to back you up even if you decide to get invested - you can still be let go for no fault of your own.
The economy can't keep asking people to stay in these kinds of jobs while also eroding their standard of living at their mostly-static income levels. It's too easy to feel like a sucker being a hard worker and this is a recent cultural shift (within the last two decades IMO).
Remote work that’s based on quality output is the solution. At least in software development.
My first job was in an office. I became friends with someone who I’ll say mastered the “art of not working”. He was always the first one in, the last one out. When decisions needed to be made, he was the one people would consult with. However, he never did any meaningful work. It’s not like he was a people manager. He wasn’t. He was a developer. But he never developed anything. He just appeared to. That appearance of work gave him job security, raises, and eventually more power within the company. It truly was an art form as I don’t think any company would have noticed. That’s how good he was.
There is a qoute about exactly this problem, but coming at if from a very different context...
”The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy's cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him."
Miyamoto Musashi, The Book Of Five Rings
That idea is also said as: "the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing". It's been a difficult thing to do in my life, and I get it when other people get distracted, as I often do myself. And, very often I need to just go along with distractions in order to accomplish things. In practice, it's not an easy skill.
"Everyone just wants to appear to do things - so the hard things don't get done because everyone is more focused on showing that they work instead of tackling the problems."
I agree. Seems like an internal motivation thing. Not saying it's easy, simple, or in some instances even possible. But gotta want to do it for your own reasons when the external incentives (optics that lead to staying hired or getting promoted or building a reliable & professional reputation, and staving off the flip-sides as well) aren't there anymore.
It is hard to objectively measure the productivity of knowledge work, so people optimize the company's proxy metrics, and on persuading the people that are assessing their performance. And then there are companies where nobody is even trying because there are no incentives to improve; e.g., government offices, monopolies, etc.
As things stand, my incentives are to appear busy to my boss and otherwise do as little as possible. If I achieve something, there should be cash money in my pocket above having done nothing.
Currently, my incentive is to be overemployed and figure out how to seem just above mediocre. Key word being "seem." I am very dedicated to doing as little work as possible to allow for more overemployment.
Tackling a hard problem has the same pay as spending all day "consulting stakeholders" and getting bogged down in Scrum process.
> If I achieve something, there should be cash money in my pocket above having done nothing
There is cash money in your pocket in advance, so you do something. That's what a salary is. The problem lies with the company not firing you and instead focusing on folks who actually do work.
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Take OKRs, for example. Everyone is expected to set their target goals, publicize and discuss them with others, and follow them religiously. Otherwise you send the signal that you don't like setting goals for yourself, and thus have no desire for self-improvement, which reflects poorly on your performance review. There are company-wide ceremonies about OKRs themselves; workshops, office hours and endless discussions about best ways to plan, track and meet your objectives. The amount of time and effort spent just doing this management work makes up a large portion of working hours.
Speaking of performance reviews, they're another huge waste of time. In the ever-important self-review you're expected to present proof to your higher-ups that you're not only worthy of keeping the job, but also why you deserve that 4% raise. So you better have been taking notes of your accomplishments in the past 6 months, otherwise those OKRs might come in handy. Your work would apparently be invisible to the company if there were no performance reviews, so make sure to make the best case for yourself, and to cherry-pick peers that would leave you a positive review.
The amount of theatre and politics involved in modern work culture is exhausting. I just want to get good work done, and go home.
In a 5 person company, it is easy to sit around the table and decide what needs to be done and then have everyone "get good work done and go home". In a 5,000 person company, it is not obvious what needs to be done in the first place talk less of making sure everyone knows their part in it. Should we be going after SMBs or Enterprise customers? What do we (or more importantly I) do differently based on that decision? How do we time the next campaign push to line up with the product launch?
There are thousands of decisions that need to be made and it is impossible to do that without having these formal processes that allow people to coordinate in large groups. I would argue that >60% of work involved in a large company is coordination rather than actual building, selling, marketing, whatever. The larger the company, the greater this percentage becomes.
I would love to know if anyone has found a solution to counteract this phenomenon but it seems like an immutable law based on my experience.
What's a better approach? Every single manager, up to CEO level, trusts implicitly his or her direct reports. CEO trusts and delegates with confidence to their immediate reports. They in turn do likewise. Any missed opportunities or mis-steps are an issue between 2 levels in the org, IMO.
Fundamentally it's a people, comms, co-ordination and aptitude problem, so solve it like one.
But it is a shitty tool "downwards". Suddenly you have managers insisting that a feature must be rolled out before the 31st of March, even though rolling out 2 days later will be safer.
It creates perverse incentives such as OKRs used for "individual" performance reviews when in reality, a lot of work is team/x-team/group effort. It causes ICs to play corporate games.
Remote work has largely removed the theatrical aspect of my position. This is one of the reasons I hope to never work in an office again.
https://annehelen.substack.com/p/larping-your-job
https://www.theawl.com/2015/04/are-you-just-larping-your-job...
Yet another indicator of poor (i.e. lazy) management maybe if you have to keep track of every single accomplishment yourself. How about managers keep track of the awesome things their employees do and celebrate them for it and help them improve if they're lacking.
1. It puts them in control. If they want to leave the team, they have a handy list to hand to their new manager right away.
2. They can capture details I would miss, no matter how close to the work I am. They will capture exact why that design process was hard and what it was like dealing with those 4 external teams.
3. It improves their writing and communication skills. I spend my 1:1's going through the accomplishments and working with them on how to expand and add context to items, where to add detail, and how to be concise with the results.
So far, I receive positive feedback on this. On the flipside, I don't do this for myself :)
I prefer that everybody gets the same raise, and that the company pays competitive salaries. To spend so much time justifying your own job for a company that is making a lot of profits makes little sense.
I'm not sure how you square this with promotions (the main driver of performance reviews). No company who hired me five years ago could have kept me with a constant 3% increase, that is significantly less than I achieved through promotions, the rate would no longer be competitive.
Most people know when people on their team aren't pulling their weight. If it isn't addressed by management it turns into a demoralizing situation.
one side effect though is w/o equity it's easy to feel a lack of motivation to work as hard if you get the same raise as everyone else who might not be doing great work.
The ceremony starts to be introduced when people become further removed from those who are ultimately responsible. In my previous job there was a whole process, company wide, to ensure everyone got properly ranked based on performance and potential. As a management team we'd spend half a day every six months just going through this process, which was preceded by everyone in the company doing a self-assessment that would then be reviewed by your manager. It was all incredibly tedious.
Some people thrive in an environment where what you're doing is driven by whatever currently seems the most important, and value is apparent just from everyone knowing what's going on. Others want more structure to things, and a clear path to get from where they are to where they want to be. I don't see either as being invalid.
You can do that. You just may not get paid by a third party, if no one else can assess or help determine if the work you're doing is aligned with what they're trying to accomplish as a group. But as an entrepreneur this is probably great. Your payment is from customers who have agreed that you've delivered something of value.
Of course, I've learned, even with the two startups I've done -- once you get above a certain size you do need to ensure everyone is aligned on priorities and that there is a structure to talk about promotions/pay raises/bonuses. It doesn't have to be OKRs and performance reviews, but its some mechanism that ends up eventually being equally hated.
Took away all the joy I had to work in this place.
Not anywhere I've ever worked.
Yeah, such things exist. Yeah, they take a bit of time. "A large portion of working hours"? No.
If they actually do take a large portion of working hours, then you're at a company that either doesn't have enough work for people to do, or else that has work that needs done but the people aren't doing it. Either way, that's a place where layoffs are likely to show up sometime rather soon, and that's a drain to work at in the meantime.
Look around. There's better places out there - places that care more about the work, and less about the ceremony. (Don't get me wrong, there's still ceremony. It just doesn't dominate.)
There's a whole wonderful world of startups out there that don't work this way, and it sounds like you'd be a lot happier there.
You've gotta believe in the cause, which is really just a narrative used to promote extended work hours and grind.
Then you've got to evangelise and act as a missionary for this world changing product ... the business has a cult like sheen of "changing the world" and everyone is the smartest person in the room just for being smart enough to be there.
Behind the bullshit narrative, everyone is overworked and the directors so busy chasing their exit with their legs and stroking each other off with their hands that the only tool they have left is their mouths. Out of which spews thinly veiled promises of a great product to hide their greed.
It's all the same really.
I did several tour of duty in startups. There were good, bad, and ugly, just as much as in $bigCo.
Highly effective workers always see these measurements as a waste of time, but when you're trying to validate and steer the contributions of thousands of workers - with varying levels of skill, motivation, and accountability - you need a GPS to make sure you're still on the path.
While I think goals and metrics are necessary, I do agree that organizations tend to over-formalize the process. "The map is not the territory" etc.
Have you worked at a company where you had no idea what the plan was and where the company was headed? I have and it is frustrating. That is the kind of company that would benefit from the alignment that OKRs instill.
I'm living OKRs now and they are the biggest waste of time I've ever experienced. They encourage work that fits whatever you've nailed yourself to for the quarter. They give people who are good at dressing up their work in charts a podium. These same people are most often the people who do the least real work.
OKRs are unequivocally a disaster for productivity. Real output and its impact is not as simple as any box you can invent to hold it.
While I’m not going to say I’m “quiet quitting” as far as my work, I quiet quit a couple of years ago as far as being concerned about promotions and raises. I do just enough bs to get through the review process knowing that real raises come from job hopping.
I once 'earned' a 4% raise at a perf review in July. Was then was told because I only started in January that year, my raise - affecting the pay going forward - was prorated to how long I'd worked already, so .. I only get 50% of the 4%, so... 2% raise.
Felt far more manipulative and shady than if I'd just been given a 2% raise.
However, I also realise its always easy to critisize the processes from down to top. Now put yourself in the shoes of the CEO or C suite. How do you organise an entire organisation to be efficient? What is a better alternative to OKRs?
Most of the proposals I see in this thread are catering towards smaller companies but quite frankly not a lot of us managed a 1000 people company. I would be curious to know from practitioners about what worked and what didn't.
At the heart of it, this is why I tend to avoid working in particular parts of the software industry. Not every company engages in this sort of thing, and I prefer working for those that don't.
Measure What Matters by John Doerr
It shows the history of how they have worked well at some companies in the Valley. You asked one question about this and now you have to read a book. That's a shame.
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My experience is largely opposite to this. I agree that we usually need to coordinate to take action in modern organizations, but this coordination is often a formality tacked onto the more meaningful individual work that preceded it.
1. Important decisions aren't made in a meeting unless at least one person has thought through the options beforehand and come prepared to explain the pros and cons of each and why their recommendation makes sense.
2. Work doesn't get done in a meeting unless prerequisite individual work was done beforehand. There has to be some thing to discuss in the meeting. An individual has to prepare that thing.
Decisions can be made and work done with short, few, and informal meetings, but not without serious individual preparation and production.
Uh, yes. If people do not come prepared to meetings, they are a giant waste of time. (Exception - pure "information radiator" meetings) Meetings are the point where you align different well-founded opinions, not where you find a solution. But that alignment is critical to getting work done efficiently.
But note that OP didn't talk about meetings per se, just about people interacting. And in any group of people, the ultimate outcome in terms of work is always driven by interactions. If you don't collaborate, you can't build at group scope. How you collaborate depends on the group. Some groups have shared chat rooms. Some have meeting. Some angrily yell at each other. But it always shapes the work, and moves it in a defined direction.
A group without social interaction is the work equivalent of Brownian motion.
If I were to say "individual heads-down focus is how work gets done" I would be rightly criticized, even though this is somewhat closer to the truth than what the OP says.
Have you ever tried working in a job where your boss just ignores you, no one cares what you do, and you're just getting paid anyway? Obviously, some people are intrinsically extremely motivated even with no contact for years, but many people, probably most, without any social organisation or interactions, will not manage to work, even if they want to.
Even just the threat of not having anything done by the next meeting is a huge part of the "social organisations and people interacting with people" that "gets work done"
I agree that your interpretation has some truth though.
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Take a company like twitter. It’s a finished product but you’ll have 10,000 employees there. You’ll have an entire department for youth engagement. You’ll have an internal theatre group putting on shows. But who actually does work? Maybe a dozen people? The rest are just there because somebody needs to be there because that’s what is done.
The problem we have as a species is that we’ve been so effective at optimisation that we have eliminated the need for anyone to exist. A few farmers can feed the country. A few automated production lines could produce the goods.
But then all the other people would starve to death. So we just keep on making jobs to put them in. It gets further and further away from reality the further down the hole we go. You’ll have someone who’s job is to read tweets and rate their suitability. Why? To make sure the suitability from the suitability committee is enforced of course!
This couldn’t be further from the truth. Human labor is still desperately needed throughout the world in order to keep things running. It’s not just farmers. You also need drivers, clerks, mechanics, accountants, etc. And that’s just to get food into your local grocery store.
Nothing in modern life is free, even though it may seem easy for most of us living in the developed world. All of this stuff exists only because people are working really hard to keep it that way.
About 2% of people in the US work in agriculture/forestry/animal handling/etc. If you include transportation workers, that's still about 5% of US workers. And if you include wholesale workers and utilities workers -- that's still < 10% of the US population.
All of this work is critical and necessary (to your point). But I think the BLS data is evidence toward OP's point that we've automated and optimized a lot of the work necessary for subsistence.
Also the regulatory apparatus which does a pretty good job of ensuring that food doesn't have dangerous chemicals or pathogens in it, and the law enforcement without which the regulatory apparatus would be toothless, and the people who maintain the communications infrastructure that the regulatory apparatus and the law enforcement rely on to be effective, and so on.
And as others mentioned, you're then ignoring all the steps between the field and the plate. I guess you see the chef at the restaurant or the person stocking the shelves as non-human?
Yes, Bangladesh is just a country of robots making jeans, and China is just a country of robots making sneakers.
Still, I'd love to see some kind of UBI and acknowledgement that working isn't completely necessary for the entire population if you just want to live.
But this assumes that they are smart enough to know how to eradicate those extra costs, but bullshit jobs might have co-evolved among labor as a defense mechanism against that sort of thing.
I understand it to be hyperbole but the point that as a rough estimate only at most 1/10th of the available work force is actually "needed" in a developed country to "function" is probably accurate. From a late 19th/early 20th century capitalist pov the optimization point was reached somewhere in the 60s/70s. The problem is we have inherited and institutionalized how to "provide for oneself" from a long gone era.
If the goal was - metaphorically speaking - to reach the West Coast from the East Coast; this kind of capitalism had done a fairly good job until the 70s or so. By no means perfect but at least somewhere in the ballpark of a right trajectory.
Atm however we are past the west coast somewhere at the edge of our outer solar system lost in the Oort cloud. Remarkable engine indeed but way off course. And because it is so confusing out here (e.g. global financial market 10x bigger than world's GDP witnessed by all in 2008) in the vast 2.7 K cold nothingness of uber-optimization, the goal of wealth distribution (participation in the market) to the levels of say the 70s seems futile and utterly romantic - a long forgotten pale blue dot of paradisiacal opportunities. Even if the propulsion system which took us way out here is proof of the exact opposite in principle. Nobody has to starve to death as in "natural law" because of a conceptual eternal idea of how a certain kind of economics which was very successful at some time period (and ultimately had won the Cold War) has to work. But people really indeed do in the millions. It is just a sad state of affairs, still.
... but yet some dream to eventually reach Alpha Centauri with this good old machine: "We are halfway there, look, you can even "see" it." When in reality it would take approx. 1000 generations at the current speed.
As humans, we have many roles that we take on for the different contexts that we live in. Me as "dad" at home with the kids, me as "husband" with my wife after the kids go to bed, and me as "employee" at work are very different roles. I use different language, have different goals, different tone, different energy level.
At the same time, none of those are any less "me". They are all authentic. They're just contextual.
And it is entirely natural that knowledge work requires social skills and performance. You may write the most beautiful efficient code in the world, but if it lands in the repo without anyone noticing, it has no effect. It must be seen and used by other humans to provide value.
The sociologists all got this from Kant as many of the 'human sciences' were deeply influenced by him. Auguste Comte, widely viewed as the founder of the discipline, was a notable Kantian.
From Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View:
"On the whole, the more civilized human beings are, the more they are actors. They adopt the illusion of affection, of respect for others, of modesty, and of unselfishness without deceiving anyone at all, because it is understood by everyone that nothing is meant sincerely by this. And it is also very good that this happens in the world. For when human beings play these roles, eventually the virtues, whose illusion they have merely affected for a considerable length of time, will gradually really be aroused and merge into the disposition."
FYI this type of code-switching is not universally present for everyone though it may be for you. Some people are their "authentic" selves the majority of the time. It is often suboptimal to be that way though.
There's a difference between overt code-switching like people do when among members of their own race versus others compared to the more basic "I don't tell dirty jokes around grandma but I do around my bros."
> Some people are their "authentic" selves the majority of the time.
I don't think of any of these roles are inauthentic. People contain multitudes.
You're right that some people deliberately collapse their roles and behave mostly the same across all contexts. I think it's usually done as a sort of power play to show that they don't have to behave differently to suit others around them. Trump is a good example.
1: https://twitter.com/bengold/status/1618589049803132931?lang=...
In authoritarian systems, it happens through becoming a corrupt authority. In collectivist systems, it happens through tuning out in lazy disinterest. In meritocratic (liberal) systems, it happens through hustle and pretense of usefulness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
"We want to ship and try as many things as possible" is often the only way to survive as a small new growing company in a competitive market. But it's rarely what companies maximize for when they're big and successful. The politics and theater comes from normal human interactions in a large group with a lot of intentional overlap/redundancy and not a lot of existential pressure. The org wants to be robust against any individuals leaving, they want to have teams ready to go in case they do need to move quickly in response to something, but most of the time they're just spinning wheels and keeping the money printers going. Remote work isn't going to prevent those dynamics, or the need to make sure you appear to be valuable through all that. If you fail at the "appearing valuable" game in an org like that, you're gonna be at the top of the list to cut when growth slows and the company hits the "reorgs and layoffs" part of the script.
The more intrinsically motivated, "let's directly do impactful things!", sort of person can easily end up bouncing themselves off the wrong incentives for years in an org like this.
A notable example from my prior job:
There was a developer who during the early phase of cloud adoption, wrote some wrappers in powershell for the Azure Powershell cmdlets. They did some quality of life of stuff, and he checked into source control dozens of these wrappers. I recall it being about 80. He got talked about as the azure guy.
Some time goes by. I need to do some Azure automation, so I look into those wrappers. They don't do anything useful for most use cases; I write my own automation from scratch. I go on to have many interactions with this dev; he doesn't really know Azure particularly well, but still has the reputation of being the azure guy. I am pretty sure nobody calling him the azure guy actually ever used any of those scripts, and I'm similarly confident those scripts never got used for anything even by him.
Don't get me wrong - was a smart and nice guy, and a good dev and great at his job. But - the mythos he had built with those ~80 files checked into source control allowed him to find opportunities to work with Azure and get to know it better. I eventually left the company. Who knows, maybe he really is an Azure guru now?
For years I was "the big data/programming" guy at a small ~1k total employee company because I spent a lot of time with a lot of freshly available data sources, internal documentation and code, python, PHP and Apache
But I never studied anything close to it, just right place, right time and made some tools to help out people/part of the business that needed help.
(They were, for reasons not of their own making operating with sticks and stones. Those tools are also software sticks and stones but with ugly glue all over, but they work and that's what was needed and what was done)
I'm sure
I don't really have a good solution to this but it's really messed up.
The incentive problem started when it became better to change jobs for higher compensation. Working less intensely for the same pay while you secretly manage life problems or just play around is also appealing. Your earnings are also typically soft capped as an individual hard worker. And then there's no real security to back you up even if you decide to get invested - you can still be let go for no fault of your own.
The economy can't keep asking people to stay in these kinds of jobs while also eroding their standard of living at their mostly-static income levels. It's too easy to feel like a sucker being a hard worker and this is a recent cultural shift (within the last two decades IMO).
My first job was in an office. I became friends with someone who I’ll say mastered the “art of not working”. He was always the first one in, the last one out. When decisions needed to be made, he was the one people would consult with. However, he never did any meaningful work. It’s not like he was a people manager. He wasn’t. He was a developer. But he never developed anything. He just appeared to. That appearance of work gave him job security, raises, and eventually more power within the company. It truly was an art form as I don’t think any company would have noticed. That’s how good he was.
Sounds like a useful employee. Maybe not rushing around constantly allowed him time to actually think through problems.
”The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy's cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him."
Miyamoto Musashi, The Book Of Five Rings
That idea is also said as: "the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing". It's been a difficult thing to do in my life, and I get it when other people get distracted, as I often do myself. And, very often I need to just go along with distractions in order to accomplish things. In practice, it's not an easy skill.
I agree. Seems like an internal motivation thing. Not saying it's easy, simple, or in some instances even possible. But gotta want to do it for your own reasons when the external incentives (optics that lead to staying hired or getting promoted or building a reliable & professional reputation, and staving off the flip-sides as well) aren't there anymore.
As things stand, my incentives are to appear busy to my boss and otherwise do as little as possible. If I achieve something, there should be cash money in my pocket above having done nothing.
Currently, my incentive is to be overemployed and figure out how to seem just above mediocre. Key word being "seem." I am very dedicated to doing as little work as possible to allow for more overemployment.
Tackling a hard problem has the same pay as spending all day "consulting stakeholders" and getting bogged down in Scrum process.
There is cash money in your pocket in advance, so you do something. That's what a salary is. The problem lies with the company not firing you and instead focusing on folks who actually do work.