Employees: looking for “the great boss who cares about their development”
gallup.com
gallup.com
Everyone was forced to do the questionnaire and afterwards we had an opportunity to discuss the results with the company and our managers. All through the process, management stressed how much they were interested in how we can grow, how we can do better in the organisation and so on.
I asked: why don't just sit down with people over a coffee and ask them? I got blank stares. You could tell they thought we were all too stupid to know what we wanted and that nothing valuable could come out of that process. Completely idiotic.
I was polite and kept to topics involving work. I left about two months after that for a much better environment.
All I want is to work remotely permanently but they insist it isn't what i want and offer me more money.
I honestly tried to turn down a $30k raise because of how frustrated I am with it some days. I only gave in because I was going through a hard time with a death in the family which killed any desire to mix that with looking for a new job.
We also had those wonderful quarterly AND yearly reviews that don't accomplish anything other than give management a way to fire.
I'm glad I no longer work there, but at the same time I mostly worked with really great people.
I don't work for that one. It wasn't a tech company, it was an ISP.
I also did not get fired.
Five to ten years ago they had a big program that they peddled to organizations about Employee Engagement.
They ended up paying the Justice Department 10.5 million dollars for crimes associated with contracting irregularities (aka bribes.)
Looks like they're going to turn their "survey experience" to another part of employee training.
It's really sad about Gallup. They've been riding on their good name that they developed 60 years ago. They're bad pollsters (they predicted McCain would win in 2008) and they're pretty blatantly partisan. Oh, as as mentioned above, crooked.
That being said, yes, I'm sure that employees want "a great boss who cares about their development." I knew that years ago. I also know that this "story" is a puff piece to sell Gallup consulting services.
Nuttier than squirrel turds.
FWIW my Psycho-Pass is pretty clear today. Can't wait for the english version of the movie to finally get released by Funimation.
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/which-po...
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/gallup-v...
There are attempts to tiptoe around this problem with holacracies and Agile methodologies and similar concepts, but the main problem still remains.
Well, "the ownership of capital", in a lot of public companies, is basically an absentee landlord. So it's not entirely about ownership, but rather about management. You can have cooperatives that are de-facto feudal/tyrannical structures, and private companies that are de-facto democracies.
I'll take a monarchy over 5-hour meetings where nothing is decided and the room hates each other any day.
And you do get into silly arguments over exactly which version of STV you use ;-)
Because 99.9% of typical workers don't have the money to build the business.
Take for example, Google Inc. origins in 1998. Both L Page and S Brin came from upper middle class families but neither of their bank accounts nor their parents' bank accounts had $25 million to spend on a business. It's also doubtful if either family could have been approved for a $25m unsecured business loan from a bank. Likewise, Google's first 100 employeees also didn't collectively have $25 million. On the other hand, VCs like Sequioa and KPCB did have $25 million to invest. Later on, more investors bought IPO shares totaling $1.9 billion. There is no union of workers that can pool together that kind of cash.
Since a co-op by definition must be owned by the workers, the question is no longer "interesting" with a mysterious answer. Instead, it's tautological. If you look at the typical workers' modest savings as the ceiling for funding a business, it's obvious why they can't compete with businesses built by investors/capitalists money. While WorkersOwnedSearchEngine Inc scrapes together $30,000 from their owners-workers' savings accounts to buy a 5th rack server from dell.com, Google Inc. can use a fraction of its $2 billion war chest to buy an entire data center and also break ground on a brand new one.
As long as the coop members have 50% +1 that ok but it can go wrong (thank you very much ICANN) as we found at poptel.
The other problem is the coop movement in general is very old fashioned and isn't really embracing technical changes. Which is a pity as if poptel had been brought out by the main uk coop we woudl have all had a very nice 6 figure payday.
1. Cooperatives don't have strong incentives to grow, because growing typically means more people and that means sharing of power, accordingly. Their growth is probably limited by trust.
2. When someone has the ability to start the company, they won't probably want to do it as a cooperative. It's harder to start a good cooperative than just a company. This is a corollary of 1.
3. It's much harder to raise capital for a cooperative because of possibly misaligned incentives. Even though capitalist's companies suffer from principal agent problem too, this is enough to dissuade many potential investors. Since cooperatives are not very common, this is a chicken-egg problem.
4. As someone else mentioned, democracies tend to be pretty conservative. This can be good in the long term, but makes them vulnerable to well-planned short term attacks from the outside.
Workers' coops also have limited access to capital and business expertise which can make them difficult to get started, but the reason they don't grow large is the reason above.
However, it is totally fine for workers coops to remain small businesses for their entire existence, all that would mean for is that we need more of them to be started.
Is the fraction of co-operatives that fail larger than the fraction of failures in alternative structures?
[0] In reality, I would have to spend some time trimming down the list of 50 based on influence. Which is not always an easy signal to find.
I cannot stress enough how awful the opposite of this is. Coming into work every day and wondering why any of this is going on as if we're in some WWI mindless-war hell, why we are even doing this in the first place after all of the legitimate and serious objections were flat out trashed, "process du jour" being a very real thing for extended periods of time.
... and all this at not a startup but at established top-tier companies.
Clear decisions, common direction, and stated intentions are wonderful.
Democratic cooperative doesn't mean that everything has to be voted on. It can have hierarchy, if employees find such arrangement useful; the point is that you have a (collective) right to overrule it.
The way to fix this is to have honest, open discussion to collectively arrive at a vision. That way, there is no cognitive dissonance between the vision and the team members. The problem is, this is hard and requires a lot of trust. I'd recommend reading The Five Dysfunctions of a Team [0] if you really want to dig into this philosophy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Dysfunctions_of_a_Tea...
I don't disagree, but now you seem to claim something else. Originally you just wanted a strong vision with goals, regardless whether the employees agree. Now you want buy-in too.
And there is also principle of subsidiarity. If people strongly disagree on the vision, they can come to some compromise where they realize each vision in their own domains. (As John Carmack put it: "if you are not sure, explore both solutions".)
I don't understand the perspective you are asking this question from. But, my responsibility would be to follow my boss' vision. If it has clear and achievable goals, then it's easy for me to figure out what to do. Visions which are too broadly scoped won't have clear and achievable goals. Visions which are too narrowly scoped is micromanagement.
I might not always agree, but in those cases I will voice my ideas / concerns. After I know I've been heard out, I will defer because it's my boss' decision to make, not mine. As long as my concerns are heard and integrated into the decision, then I should be content.
> I don't disagree, but now you seem to claim something else. Originally you just wanted a strong vision with goals, regardless whether the employees agree. Now you want buy-in too.
There's a clear delineation between leadership -- aka, vision-creation -- and implementation. My original opening of "as an employee" was meant to frame the remainder of my comment as from the perspective of someone responsible for implementing a vision. The remainder of the discussion has been about the leadership side, or how to create a vision in the first place. If you are creating a vision with a group, you need buy-in from the entire group. If you don't, then individual leadership will walk away with differing interpretations and goals, which is what leads to dysfunction. These separate visions will then be pushed down the line, and you will have implementers working at cross-purposes, political infighting, etc.
This ~~synchronicity~~ synchronization on the leadership side is the important part. If a unified vision is being clearly pushed to all the implementers, then the collective action will result in a singular vector towards the vision. If unclear or even competing visions are being pushed, then you won't get collective movement because all the individual actions will be moving towards different results.
> And there is also principle of subsidiarity. If people strongly disagree on the vision, they can come to some compromise where they realize each vision in their own domains.
It's one thing to acknowledge that there are two potential solutions, and as a group decide that both will be explored. It's a completely different situation to have two groups that can't come to terms and are therefore competing against each other.
EDIT: Big words are hard. Let's go shopping.
Capitalism gives employees control; your life has changed immediately after you exercise your option to exit. Voting simply doesn't.
It's also potentially very harmful, due to the principal/agent problem. Every agent (employee) has the incentive to loot the company, build empires, and protect their job. But such things are of course very bad for organizations.
This is made worse by democracy, because not only do voters have no incentive to do what's best for the organization, they can do whatever makes them feel good (since their vote doesn't matter).
(As an example of the principal/agent problem, witness Marisa Mayer vs Starboard. She wants to keep her job and build her empire at Yahoo. Shareholders want to avoid paying taxes on Alibaba, which will destroy far more value than the Yahoo empire could ever plausibly be worth.)
I'd say the ideals of a worker cooperative is that the workers _are_ the organization. The organization is a means to an end for all workers benefit. Not the other way around as is usually the case in a totalitarian capitalistic one.
And yes you're right, Capitalism gives you as much control giving as any totalitarian system, quitting/exile.
As the goal of worker cooperatives is usually not to become multi-nationals I'm not sure how low your bar is for when ones vote become absolutely futile.
You observe this effect in national politics all the time - for instance, the emotional benefit of voting for a cool guy like Trump drastically exceeds P(vote effects outcome) x (Delta in outcomes). Last time I checked, I had to approximate P(vote effects outcome) by hand because it was too small to represent with double precision floating point numbers.
As other commenter said, you can always exit. But democracy gives you explicit right to change things (albeit no bigger than to other people in the organization), which is actually a more efficient method of introducing change than fatalistically wait until the dysfunctional organization dies.
I fail to see how this is any different than in any other job, at least for non top level management.
Both of these change overtime, for example in software development when the lifecycle of the project advances. As the project reaches maintenance mode, you can no longer design the architecture and implement things from scratch, its already done.
So the work the company needs you to do now is very different.
Then there is your personal preferences that change over time.
So the work you want to do and the one the company wants you to do will probably only overlap for a short period of time.
Similarly, there's only short period of overlapping of the work you want to do and the work doing which you would grow. I see too often programmers jumping around abandoning their half-written application or library once it is somewhat working, never learning what semantic versioning is about, what it takes to write good documentation, or how architecture works.
I've seen people proud of having an opportunity to maintain (note: not to develop, just to maintain) big products. Such product was doing amazing things and was well-written, of course, but would you think you could take pride of maintaining somebody else's work?
If somebody offered you a job to merely maintain an old, gigantic codebase, I don't think your first thought would be "wow, I'm going to learn so much from this!", and there probably wouldn't be any way you could assess the codebase quality before accepting the offer so you could end up thinking that eventually. This is how things that you want and that could help you grow can be vastly different.
This is why it's so important to grill your interviewers about the reality of working at the company, although I'll admit that I learned which questions to ask from bad experience. Asking those questions also happens to serve as excellent signalling to your technical interviewers, much more effective than being able to solve some silly logic puzzle.
And to be perfectly fair, you do learn so much from working on poorly written projects that are a horror to maintain. Failure teaches you which mistakes to avoid next time.
Good code is surrounded by good processes. Ask about the processes that lead to good code. This not only susses out what the situation is on the ground, but also demonstrates your own quality.
As a recent grad who has been fired from two jobs, I would be afraid to join a poorly written project because I would worry that I would fail and then be fired.
Learning how to be successful is pretty important and teaches you things you cannot learn from lurching from failure to failure.
Would you mind sharing your best, most probing questions-- the one's that proved most useful cutting through corporate posturing and BS?
Development from scratch means much more ... "sales" overhead. Meetings and (ultimately) disposable documentation.
Sure its no as nice as getting to architect a whole application from the ground up. But the database seems well designed, so it shouldn't bee to much problem to make it faster and prettier and cleaner code.
Most developers wouldn't. There's a stigma against maintenance. Most developers want to be Software Architects! (Said with the pigs in space voice).
1) reading a pile of code and trying to figure out how it works and being constrained by someone else's solutions is considerably less fun for most developers than writing something new and making decisions about how the system will be put together
2) It's much harder to point to what you did or talk up your accomplishments. Particularly to management.
Re 2. This is very true.
2: write reams of documentation for every function and module and service you decode, check them off on a checklist, and point out how you generated x pages of new docs and analyzed y% of a previously mysterious codebase. Then when you refactor, you get to point out how many thousands of lines of obsolete PL/SQL code you replaced with 10 lines of Ruby.
I would not touch with a ten foot pole the code churned out by AgileSprints(TM) held by computer-illiterate management to hit some arbitrary deadline.
The stigma is on shoddy code, which, alas, seems the norm in large swaths of our industry.
However, outside of technology fields, from personal experience and numerous discussions with peers (anecdotes), I think I finally hit the right term to describe a different 'advancement' conundrum: "The Grey Ceiling."
To put the idea in blunt terms, there's no room for advancement and career development when the prior generation(s) are stuck in the workforce for whatever reason(s) - lack of retirement savings, dependent adult children or being part of the 'Sandwhich Generation' or significant debt accumulated over the years.
The Grey Ceiling has no incentive to assist up and coming professionals to grow, to increase their income, or become peers in the corporate environment. The Gray Ceiling sees youth as a threat - insofar as if a younger worker gets a raise it's less monies available for themselves. The Gray Ceiling is not a 'guidebook' or 'conspiracy' to keep the younger professionals from advancing, but rather simply a result of self-interest amongst a cohort of people.
Of course there are dozens of firms that take on mentorship and development type programs. Like becoming an i-Banking Analyst. Of course there's light at the end of the 80 hour work week tunnel!
In the "Great Recession" a similar effect happened when many who lost their jobs took new jobs that they were overqualified for. This blocked out entry level workers and recent graduates, especially when other companies also adopted hiring freezes.
A related situation can also be if a company stops growing. If you're not growing then the company doesn't have new opportunities for people to take on. There's few promotions then and work can be "maintenance mode" (as an early thread above talks about with engineers) for everyone, thus creating boredom and career stagnation.
See Dan Pink's Drive for a good summary of many of this research, which has led to his Autonomy - Mastery - Purpose framework that is part of his more well-known TED Talk on the subject: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation
Coincidentally, those 3 pieces of his framework hit on many of the aspects of this thread and especially the Gallup research on the desire for goals and growth.
(sorry, this comes off as very blunt, please take it as only a comment on the argument and not you, but I needed to use strong words to express the strength of what it makes me feel)
As you say, "essentials for life" are different in the valley, but are also different per-person. My essentials were MUCH simpler when I was living alone. When I got a fiancee in industry, my essentials became easier to support Now that she went into academia, it suddenly became a struggle.
Combine this with area of living, and what do you see? That the "essentials" are far more dynamic than your argument typically lets on, not only in terms of material differences like spousal compensation/how many children you're supporting, but psychological/learned response, e.g. "I have to get my used car repaired every year or so because I can't afford a new one off the lot".
Is that essential? Different people could probably make different arguments. Does it hurt when you have that thought pulling in next to someone driving a Porsche? You better damn well bet it does.
So to bring this back to the root: VERY LONG TERM maybe I could agree with you, but life isn't just a very long term calculation, the dominating thoughts day to day are (at least for the less zen of us) very now-focused, and expose many situations in which a little more money (as a parent comment said) would drastically increase the quality of life.
Cavemen had "the essentials of life." That's not what I'm going for, and not what most people are going for. Every little bit extra helps.
This leaves me with three options. Rent forever, at increasing rates. (not a feasible option). Buy a house now, ride the constant increasing prices like everyone already in the market, be glad I'm not a buyer any more. (trying, but very hard to compete when 10% above listing is common.) Save up and move the hell out.
In any of these situations, a 5%, hell, a 1% raise compounded over a decade, makes a _meaningful_ difference in how long you'd be able to sustain living in a better cost of living area (e.g. if I moved out into the country somewhere), if not also on how much I can put out as a down-payment or as a lifeline to keeping up with increasing rent.
Perhaps it's a sign of what would have in the past been comfortably middle class being more and more stretched, but every little bit counts; it's an oddly similar feeling to when I used to be far less well off a few decades back.
Go take the absolute highest paying offer the next time you interview for jobs, and if you do that a series of times, I think you'll find you won't be as happy as taking the best overall offer that takes into account things like:
- Role/responsibility
- How interesting the work is
- Whether you're excited to work with your future peers
There's a reason people leave finance despite the high pay. There's more to life than money.
Issues tied to financial stability certainly will drive you to want to get a higher salary, especially with how impossible home ownership is in places like Silicon Valley.
With that being said, if you aren't having to stare at your bank balance every morning and sweat your salary, then what makes you happiest at work is those other factors of things like Pink's framework of Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. It's also the lack of those 3 areas that will make a job that pays sufficiently pretty damn miserable leading you to seek a more fulfilling job if you can find one that meets your salary needs. I bet there's a limit to what you'd put up with at work even if they paid you $1 million per year.
Having worked in a number of early stage startups I have talked to a number of older members of teams I've been on who have forgone as much as $50-60k in salary to move from a giant company to a mid-size startup. That definitely affected their quality of life to do it, but it was worth it to wake up happy, despite perhaps making some sacrifices. As they told me, they had to make some adjustments in their lifestyle but then got used to it and it was okay.
The other important factor that I would encourage you to look at Pink's research for is that it turns out if you use financial incentives to tie to creative tasks (like an engineer shipping features) it actually has been found in psychology studies to lower the quality of the work and the motivation of the person. This means bonuses are often a really bad idea. The good thing about a salary is that it is disconnected from a specific creative task.
Often they don't really know themselves. But they're quite sure it'll happen if only they were able to become more impressive. They will be happy once they are promoted, treated with respect, and given more money.
A great boss feels like an ally, and often it's not the outcome that makes you happy but the hope of a better future.
I think there are many people in an organisation that can alleviate this desire. It's not just managers offering personal development or leaders inspiring people to be bold, sometimes it is your friends that make you see a better perspective on how your life already is. I think it's important to think about how you can make others feel good, and not just how you feel about your own position.
(There is more evidence for people evolving rather than being designed).
To be satisfied and satiated means you no longer feel the drive to compete. There is no evolutionary advantage in a creature that does not want to compete.
otherwise known as evolution. Design implies some kind of thought process before creation.
There are plenty of counterintuitive examples of traits that have been selected by evolution. Dogs seems happy all the time and they have not been made extinct yet.
I apologize profusely for offending you with the word "Design." I accidentally implied the existence of a god which is a totally off-topic conversation and therefore must commit seppuku.
>There are plenty of counterintuitive examples of traits that have been selected by evolution. Dogs seems happy all the time and they have not been made extinct yet.
Sure, but for the specific case of humanity it is highly likely that the reason we do not stay happy is due to natural selection.
Dogs are a domestic animal and therefore a product of artificial selection. We as benevolent caretakers have have selected the dogs that are happy all the time and euthanized the dogs that are angry all the time. The evolutionary strategy dogs employ is a parasitic strategy and less common than the standard strategy most competitive animals follow. Dogs hijack our paternal and maternal instincts and cause us to give them resources, this caused them to evolve non-standard traits that make them happy all the time and unable to survive in the wild. The evolutionary strategy humans follow is more standard and thus we display more malevolent and competitive traits.
I want to help improve the product, and the most fundamental way to engage me with that is to ask me for input and take my ideas & concerns seriously.
Just coffee and a chat every now and then is a great setting for that. No need for made-up agendas and bullet point lists and awkward quizzes.
At my last job, I was the primary fire-putter-outer on a number of fronts, and it was very disheartening watching new projects (that I'd put my hand up for) get handed off to others while I was busy fixing up the previous efforts of said others.
I've seen this happen at an even bigger scale. The site I was part of was very successful, and was therefore completely unable to get any time or capital to do independent (non-contract) projects. And some of the projects we wanted to do were to improve our IP holdings within the space we were working! Meanwhile, the entire site that lost two contracts to rebids all got put on cool, independent, green-field projects. Completely bananas, and a symptom of a much larger problem of not rewarding success that eventually caused me to leave.
If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted.
I speculated that from their perspective someone tied down to maintaining a very successful project (that continues to make succeed or make money) is in a great position politically and those getting the new green-field projects are being exposed to risk.
It reminds me of meetings–managers don't realize that they are a drain on the people performing the work because that's of course how they work and accomplish things.
Mbrock is essentially asking for a one on one that isn't filled with Status Updates and platitudes. One that fosters genuine conversation and values their input.
You're talking about real growth and whether it's a specific title or new skills, that's also a huge motivator.
Unfortunately, in most companies, managers are not rewarded for doing either of those things, nor punished for failing to do them.
The only company I know that even measures it is Google, who uses something called the "Upward Feedback Survey" to gauge it and found correlation between scores on the survey and quality of managers (team output, turnover, etc). More on the survey and some of the research behind it here: https://getlighthouse.com/blog/google-management/
When a higher level manager wanted to know why the product development wasn't as good as it could be, an external consultant came in to observe for a couple of weeks. He actually did talk one-on-one with each employee. He asked me what I thought really needed to be done, in a genuine way.
He produced some kind of report. We asked for several months to see the report, but it never surfaced. Then I left to join a small startup...
Toyota actually even brought this to their blue collar workers with their "Total Product System" which allowed anyone to stop the assembly line if they caught a problem and engaged them in feedback to find solutions. (More here: http://hbr.org/2004/05/learning-to-lead-at-toyota/ar/1)
That other stuff sounds like completely optional nice-to-haves.
Once I wrapped my head around that it helped somewhat.
The org psych term for this is "engagement".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_engagement
Engagement speaks of something more: A satisfaction (if you will) derived specifically from doing your work.
As an interesting aside, engagement is theoretically the other side of the coin of "burnout" and is physiologically thought to operate on the same mechanisms as "stress" (or "eustress" to distinguish it positively).
A "satisfied" state relates more to a relaxed, unstressed, disengaged mentality.
Favourite example from one of my textbooks was a lion chasing a gazelle: Both are physiologically experiencing the same thing, but the gazelle is "stressed" whereas the lion is "engaged".
Kind of like that classic experiment of the rat who is given a regular dosage of cocaine and soon starts to neglect any other activities beyond the consumption of cocaine.
Turns out some things you need to be ok, but they don't make you happy. If you don't have them, they make you unhappy. They're called "Hygiene Factors".
Then there's a whole set of things that if you have them, they make you happy, but the absence doesn't make you unhappy. These are called "Motivators".
A few examples:
1) Mary Meeker's Internet Trends 2015 -> http://www.slideshare.net/kleinerperkins/internet-trends-v1
2) Gallup, here and in some of their research -> http://www.gallup.com/services/182138/state-american-manager...
3) Deloitte's latest study on Millennials -> https://getlighthouse.com/blog/deloitte-survey-millennials-2...
4) Reid Hoffman's book, The Alliance -> http://www.slideshare.net/reidhoffman/the-alliance-a-visual-...
Companies don't reward managers for caring about people's development, so it won't change until companies start to.
The original title is, "Employee Satisfaction Doesn't Matter".
Personally I am of the belief that work is work. Pay for what you expect and expect what you pay for.
But this type of stuff is usually nothing more than a justification for taking away the free lunch, without actually doing anything about making sure people have meaningful and fulfilling work. You know, we're getting serious by taking away the free Cheez-Its... and making your boss ride your ass to work 12 hour days.
Engaging work is ONLY one factor out of many things that Employees declare that they want.
What this article is trying and failing to address is the fact that most employees become dissatisfied with their work EVEN when employers try to satisfy all these needs and wants. It hints at the fact that there is something that the employee wants that he isn't fully aware of. What is this thing that he wants?
Simple. The answer is: Career Growth. As humans our needs and wants are unlimited. It doesn't matter how many needs and wants are satisfied, the employee will eventually want more. Employees are looking for a continuous improvement in their well-being keyword being "continuous." The company that provides the employee with the fastest rate of unlimited growth is the company that retains the employee.
The reality is, nothing can satisfy an employee if his wants and needs are unlimited. We all fight for this plateau of ultimate satisfaction that we will never reach. If you want to retain employees you must give employees the constant illusion that they are making progress towards this nonexistent plateau.
I spent two and a half years at my current job maintaining a legacy codebase. I looked for, and explored, growth opportunities at that job. In the end, I had to find them myself. Nobody at the company could really put in the effort it would have taken to keep me fulfilled, so I did it myself. I did lots of reading, experimenting, diving deep into fundamentals.
I am a much, much better programmer than I was when I started the job. The company did not give that to me, it couldn't have given it to me.
I eventually convinced the company to move off of the old legacy platform, that it was holding them back. I wanted to build them a new platform, but they decided to go with Magento. They're giving me a pretty sweet severance deal while I go out looking for a job.
I firmly believe that anybody can grow at any job. It's nice when the company can help you do that, but your own growth is your responsibility, and nobody else's.
I'm not talking about personal growth.
I'm talking about growth in benefits, like salary or working environment. People leave companies or learn new skills to get more benefits. The company needs to provide better benefits, continuously, or the employee leaves. Simply buying a ping pong table or giving an employee "engaging work" isn't enough.
This smacks of entitlement.
The employee won't necessarily leave, there are many reasons why they wouldn't. There's a whole world of jobs out there that aren't tech, these fields don't have the luxury of an expanding industry propping up salaries, providing a social ladder.
Even in tech, I don't see anything wrong with the decision to keep the same compensation, and turn over staff every few years. This only contributes to a thriving job market, and means more opportunity for people at the bottom to make their way into the field. More people coming in at the bottom means more demand for services, meaning more opportunity at the top for organizing and directing.
It would be wonderful to have the benefits of industry growth along with the security of one job for life, but we don't live in that world.
Not even inflation? Sounds like you're driving the benefits down. Or at least want to.
Employees should feel entitled. They generate 99% of our GDP while 50% of that GDP goes to the top 1% of the population. The capitalist employer / employee relationship is designed to screw over the employee. The word "entitlement" is a classic guilt tripping technique used by either employee or employer. Ignore it, because as an employee you will never get a high enough salary that can tip the scales. With 50% of the worlds wealth in the hands of the 1% (aka the employers), the metrics say one thing and one thing only: you are always entitled to more.
>The employee won't necessarily leave, there are many reasons why they wouldn't. There's a whole world of jobs out there that aren't tech, these fields don't have the luxury of an expanding industry propping up salaries, providing a social ladder.
If the employee isn't leaving and their isn't any growth, than the employee stays out of desperation or fear. The employee is essentially too afraid to take the risk to create growth. This is not the definition of employee satisfaction. Many employees are in this situation and many employees aren't satisfied because of it. It is very rare for a man to feel 100% satisfied without any continuous growth. Additionally, I am not talking about whether this situation is wrong or right, I am talking about what an employer needs to do to satisfy an employee. Whether the employer wants to do that is a different issue.
>It would be wonderful to have the benefits of industry growth along with the security of one job for life, but we don't live in that world.
Sure. I never said anything to the contrary. We don't live in an ideal world. But the context for my comment is "How to satisfy an employee" and I answer the question with what is required.
The conversation is sidetracking from my initial comment about the true nature of employment satisfaction into a technical argument on why such an idealist endeavor isn't executed. So what? Do you agree with me on what makes an employee satisfied or do you have evidence/logic to falsify my reasoning?
A sense of purpose. The feeling that what you do matters. The feeling that at the end of the day, you've accomplished something. Something worth giving 1/3 of your life towards.
You're hiding your greed behind classist nonsense. You don't want a sense of purpose, you just want that paycheck to keep getting bigger. You are very probably already in the 1% of top income earners in the world. Being that that cutoff is $34,000/year, it's not hard.
You should be focused less on fighting those with more than you, and more on working with them to do things that matter.
>A sense of purpose. The feeling that what you do matters. The feeling that at the end of the day, you've accomplished something. Something worth giving 1/3 of your life towards.
You truly think that's all people want? Most people with jobs do not work on something they consider meaningful. To do so means they ARE LUCKY. If that's the case why are they working? What is the factor that is satiating them when the job provides Zero meaning? Salary. You're essentially claiming most employees aren't "real" because they work for money instead of meaningful work.
You know those quants at wall street who spend their days building algorithms that trade meaningless paper stocks that contribute nothing to GDP? They do it for half a million dollars annual salary, not for a job that matters.
>You're hiding your greed behind classist nonsense. You don't want a sense of purpose, you just want that paycheck to keep getting bigger.
I'm not even really hiding anything. All people want more money, including me. You're trying to paint me as some "greedy" person because I want more money when wanting more money is NORMAL. We are all imperfect creatures and we all want more money. To openly deny this desire means you are a creature of utter moral perfection and I question your honesty and the existence of such a creature.
What I really want is this: More money AND a sense of purpose. Isn't that what everyone wants? All you want is a sense of purpose and minimum wage. Ok, good for you.
>You are very probably already in the 1% of top income earners in the world. Being that that cutoff is $34,000/year, it's not hard.
Your numbers are loaded like the rest of your argument. You need 500,000 annually to be in the top 1%: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/10/19/what-percent-are-y...
>You should be focused less on fighting those with more than you, and more on working with them to do things that matter.
Who are you to tell me what I should do or what I want? You do not control what satisfies an employee. Majority consensus defines this concept not you telling me what I should do.
Also note that no employee ever really works "with" the employer as you put it. To do so means you get an equal piece of the pie. Hence the usual term is "Employees work FOR employers."
No, it doesn't. To say so is to ignore reality. Business is constantly demanding more growth, more revenue, more profit. Is it honestly that surprising that those who are making that happen be expected to share in that when it does happen? And is it honestly a problem that the employee goes and finds someone who is willing to give them those things if their current employer won't?
>There's a whole world of jobs out there that aren't tech, these fields don't have the luxury of an expanding industry propping up salaries, providing a social ladder.
Good for them. I'm in tech, and I do have that, so I will take advantage of it. To not do so would be foolish.
>Even in tech, I don't see anything wrong with the decision to keep the same compensation, and turn over staff every few years.
Now who's the one who sounds entitled?
You've obviously never worked on a large DOD program.
Learned a lot there. Not so much about technical topics, but about how to deal with bureaucracies.
Problem is, no one offering those jobs is willing to say so up front. There are plenty of people who would have no problem taking such a job, knowing it's only for a few years, and then moving on.
I have never heard people demanding a ping pong table.
I agree, to be unsatisfied is a goal that is very attainable. Many people stay in certain job roles because they made a compromise: job security over satisfaction.
If a recruiter tries to push the 'game room and free snacks' angle, I immediately grow concerned that the employer is out of touch with employees and thinks that this leads to happiness.
Everyone really wants to feel their work is appreciated.
Otherwise you end up with someone who has their entire identity wrapped up in their work, which can be stressful no matter how much they "care about professional development"
Do that, and I'll take care of my personal development.
- clearing roadblocks - training and coaching - assigning work - forcing a change
Bear-feeding!
Not people analytics or people ops, but a way to talk about how you think about and approach work.
While the boss would be just as happy with crappy code as good code, as long as he sees that project percentage increase, it just makes me happier to do it right as much as possible, even if I spend my own time on it.
Not that I've ever done something like that...
It's not actually that clear cut (it's more like an average performers who write shitty code quickly will be rewarded over an average performer writing solid code less quickly), but code quality isn't legible to management and HR, who control resource allocation. Even a line manager knowledgeable about the code base has incentives to lead a team that produces shitty code now instead of good code later.
Consider an expedition making its way through a jungle. There are a bunch of people hacking out a path with machetes. The manager makes sure the machetes are sharp, that everybody has enough food and water, and generally ensures that hacking continues unimpeded. The leader climbs a tree and makes sure the hacking is taking place in the right place.
Back to your point - yes, you're partly right, but at its root it's an agency issue -
Shareholder (owner) cannot or doesn't want to run the company, and so employs someone (an agent) to do it on his/her behalf. These agents are leadership roles (typically CEO, CFO, COO and CTO roles).
However, where these appointed leaders don't have a large-enough financial stake in the organisation, they will do things to better their own financial interests, rather than the interests of the shareholders.
That disconnect is called agency cost. A side effect is that these leaders become managers because bettering your own interests requires finesse (aka management). Sh*t, of course, flows downwards, and needs more managers.
> What's more, companies should have all of their employees take the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment and make sure they build programs for each of those employees to get the most of their innate talents and strengths at work.
[1] From "Millions of Bad Managers Are Killing America's Growth" (linked to from the OP's article): http://www.gallup.com/opinion/chairman/169208/millions-bad-m...