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> thinks production or revenue are down because people who didnt go to $college are inherently lazier than he is.

"Than he is" is unnecessary: He may think himself lazy, even to a point of pride when he thinks of the clever stuff he gets away with.

There are fundamentally two schools of thought when it comes to management:

1. People are inherently lazy, and work only to satisfy their needs - enjoying their job is at best a distant second priority. The best way to get things done is to drive them harder with closer monitoring, punishment for failures, and threats to their ability to satisfy their basic needs.

2. People are inherently creative, and work to satisfy their desire to create - your job as an employer/manager is to help them not have to worry about lower needs on Maslow's pyramid. The best way to get things done is to give them them a vision, opportinities, targets, and tools to be productive.

Just quit a job after 5 years slaving under the former type of manager, and my life has never been better since I began working under the second.

I know people hate on unions, but unions are supposed to negotiate two things: wages and working conditions.

Negotiating working conditions with a union-enforced contract gets rid of mickey mouse management, and establishes a process for workers to review working condition changes. I honestly believe that's the best feature of unions.

(The worst feature of unions is their tendency to protect the worst employees -- the "interently lazy" types. As long as "protecting the worst employees" is a key concept, unions won't make it back.)

The problem with unions isn't just that they protect the worst employees it is that they negotiate for employees as if they are interchangeable. A subtle difference.

What's needed is a situation more akin to what hollywood has. A union sets the floor on treatment and wages and individual agents advocate for their clients. Also, I think the situation with large German corporations is better too, since it gives the union a literal seat at the board which puts the people running the corporation onto the same team as the people running the union.

And yet another alternative to consider: employee-owned and run corporations.

Pity they can't compete with capitalist owned and run corporations. I would love for them to work, but they all seem to end up failing [0].

0. Yes I know there are the odd exceptions, but these are so rare they almost prove the point.

Isn't the question whether or not they fail at a higher rate than more traditional corporations? For example many fewer employee owned companies started is going to make the successful look exceptional even if they are more likely to succeed.

If fewer employee owned companies are started it just means the failure is upfront.

If you want to know relatively which does better you need to compare success in each population.

There are a lot of confounding factors in why different types of companies are founded. Saying that less employee owned companies are started is evidence of failure is at best a very shaky understanding of how to look at the business landscape.

I grew up in Detroit in the 80’s and I witnessed the dying gasps of the US auto industry - and I do believe that the UAW had a lot to do with killing it. The problem is, if you go back further, when they unionized, they basically had no choice - they were pushed into a corner by management like in TFA, so it was a choice of committing suicide slowly or being murdered quickly.

I grew up in a suburb of Detroit, and formed a slightly different view. What I remember is that even when there were mass layoffs, and a "for sale" sign in front of every other house on my street, there were senior auto workers putting in 60 hour weeks and collecting overtime, as was their right under the union rules.

Meanwhile, in some European countries (maybe Germany?) the unions were responding to the recession by cutting back on hours for everybody, to maintain broader employment. I remember thinking about 4 day work weeks.

The impression I formed was that the American unions were serving their narrow purpose of protecting members, especially senior members, but failing to serve as a "labor movement" with broader social goals, while taking credit for social gains of the past. It created a situation where many members of the working class believed that they were competing with the unions.

> The worst feature of unions is their tendency to protect the worst employees

"Tendency to protect the worst employees" as opposed to a tendency to protect the best, or as a logical consequence of protecting the set of all current employees?

I think what they mean is that unions will protect known law-breakers beyond what most people would believe reasonable. They might protect, for example, teachers who exercise physical violence upon pupils, just because the worker is in a union. In other words, they exhibit bad corruption (as opposed to say something relatively less bad like nepotism).

I think those 2 schools of thought exist, because those 2 types of employees exist.

I've been a dev for 20 years now, and I've definitely had coworkers that fall into both those categories you mention.

I'm new-ish to management now, but I'm working under the (hopeful/optimistic) assumption that most people fall in the latter category. But I need to find a style that can handle both types of employees.

To some degree, both categories can also co-exist in the same person.

Some people are self-motivated when crunching numbers on spreadsheets because they find it satisfying but would need to be dragged kicking and screaming to provide phone support -- and vice-versa.

And there are probably some jobs that it's more common to be self-motivated for than others. Garbage collection? Data entry?

I'd say both exist in every person. I'm a software engineer with some design background. I got into programming because after trying to get into design, I found it wasn't my thing, but I've had many employers that wanted me to fill in the gaps the design team left open which I hated doing. It comes down to learning what motivates each employee individually. Companies spend so much money on surveillance and productivity monitoring, but don't spend much if anything on taking inventory of employee skills and strengths.

Even development. I hate having to deal with project management software, detailed estimations, estimating points, etc. I know some of the drudgery of process is necessary, I just don't like it.

I don't mind the software. The estimates are asinine though.

I think type 1 managers can turn type 2 employees into type 1 employees.

It’s my experience of 20 yrs in IT/office life that 1) is a result of lifelong cultural pressure to obsess over other people’s needs and dreams (enabled IMO by a fertile history of pushing religious nonsense on people, it seems perfectly socially acceptable then)

And that 2) is the view that arises when that cultural pressure is mitigated

It’s follow daddy’s orders/daddy knows best wrapped in economics and math and history that tries to say see look all this work by humans in a closed room proves this is how an economy should work

It’s religious in that no one knows how it works but we’re convinced it’s right

Having not been raised in a church and growing up in a remote place studying physics and electronics since I was 8 with my grandpa who grew up similarly in the 30s... the blind allegiance to such nonsense has struck me as utterly bizarre

“I’ve never looked. I just keep believing what they say.”

Nocebo effect in action

Google Varoufakis’s talk about the meetings during Greeks debt crisis. They had no theory or clue; they just wrote math that worked for the context in question— “Greek must lose and investors must win.”

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not talking about basic human needs being met. I’m talking about caring about Steve Jobs as if he’s was a child and enabling his childlike tantrums to hold so much sway over our reality.

In a #2 place the #1 people start to get marginalized. Some of them either keep a low profile or they wander off. The sort that don't do either can be problematic, but they need to have the numbers in their favor to succeed (votes, filibuster, etc), and you can chip away at their supporters.

There are a lot of different types of people that require different levels of management. Some may require just a direction to point them in, some may require a lot of hand-holding and close watching. Lazy management decides that everyone is the same and applies the same thing for everybody. Nothing makes the 'point in a direction' types leave quicker than that...

I have tried to force #2 at a couple of places. Sometimes it works out, people junior to me almost always enjoyed their experience, but not always my peers or 'superiors'. It's a constant battle, and what's the reward for proving to a bunch of people that #1 is wrong? You don't even get a gold star.

It would be a better use of my time to find a 1.5 place and make it into a strong 2. Or a place that's already a 2 and make it even better. Let the market sort out the rest.

I would like to add another one: some people are worker bees, some people are inherently lazy, but both are not assholes and will try to not get you into shit if they think of you as a human being.

If you can get them to care about you or the thing you are trying to do, the worker bees will have to be stopped from burning out and the lazy guys will find ways to get the job done without spending too much effort.

How to so that is difficultut, but there's one thing that doesn't work: putting the screws

Harper's had a terrific piece on workplace monitoring a few years ago: https://harpers.org/archive/2015/03/the-spy-who-fired-me/?si...

One of the common themes is the unintended consequences. For example, UPS drivers who get scolded because the truck records that it was sometimes in motion without them wearing their seat belt. Regardless of the circumstances before the scolding (there are lots of situations where it would be reasonable to make such a judgment call, esp on private property like a parking lot), afterward they would simply clip the seatbelt empty and sit on top of it. Then the truck registers 100% seatbelt compliance and they are far less safe since they're never wearing it.

Yet another good example of the saying "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

I'm also reminded of a similar Chinese saying: 上有政策下有对策。 Loosely translated as "the higher-ups have policies, the lower-downs have antipolicies." The other analogy is squeezing a bag of water: if you push one place, another place pops out to compensate, and if you squeeze everywhere and too hard, it pops.

I think it's not so much unintended consequences as it is perverse incentives.

It's the same as measuring a programmers output by Lines of Code, you're just going to get a heaping mass of code that could be done in 1/10th of the lines.

agreed I worked as a consultant for a company that had exactly that problem. They based promotions based on lines of working code.

Result: You would see huge bloobs of autogenerated code getting shipped that could have been done with about 5% of that code, and then later get discarded by security as a security risk.

Even after my consulting(I was hired to fine our how mouch of there code is rly a security risk like there industry partners claim) they did not change there practice for 3 Years.

Im surprised the Company even survived, but it did and after 3 Years a big restructering basicly fired all of IT management.

It's weird to call these "unintended consequences."

What we know about human behavior definitively indicates that having a sense of autonomy and control is essential to motivation/performance. It's also obvious that stress increases under the knowledge that someone is monitoring you. Hell even the ancient Greeks probably understood the perils of micromanagement...

In the case of readily measurable output in blue-collar work, it seems obvious that a component of compensation should scale proportionate to productivity, so that you're rewarding high performers instead of implicitly penalizing everyone uniformly. And then you just fire (obvious) chronic underperformers, so that you still gain the advantages from there being a fear of repercussions.

I used to work somewhere that gave us discounts on our health insurance based on our daily average # of steps taken. People would hook their fitbits up to drill bits and spin it around on electric drills to log 10k steps per day to get the $75/month discount.

Good for you. One of the most important lessons I've learned in life is knowing when to quit and having the gumption to leave unacceptable situations. The struggle of finding a new job, stressful it may be, is still a better feeling than being treated like a crap-piece. Life's too short for the assumed-guilty workplace, or to work for hack managers.

I think a lot of people grow up being told to "never quit", so they don't prepare for the day when they should quit. Thus, they don't sock away f-u money and they take on too many responsibilities too early in life.

Not only this but you don't get keep a career in the same company automatically. Changing Job is the norm and to reflect this company are considering you as a resource: interchangeable with someone else having the same 'qualification'.

It's funny, every time a post about hiring practices comes up, there are a million different and contrasting comments about how to hire. It's chaos.

Then an article and a comment like this come along.

Honestly, there are a lot of businesses out there that are just plain run by idiots and/or crazy people. It feels like the majority are, to me.

So, next time you feel like the only sane person in the room/interview/review, you really should consider the possibility that you are correct, and not dismiss that thought out of hand.

next time you feel like the only sane person in the room/interview/review, you really should consider the possibility that you are correct

I've been amazed by how often this is true, especially in the world of "startup CULTure". When I was naive and fresh out of college, I assumed that people who made it into management or into executive leadership did so because they knew what they were doing. That couldn't be farther from the case. There are so many companies run by people who are borderline insane, and so many people who will just blindly follow them through their nightmare.

In contrast, there are great people and companies to work for if you put in the effort to find them. I will say that the whole tech recruitment industry has made that harder though as you have people who are financially incentivized to get you hired and tell you whatever bullshit you want to hear even if they know you will be miserable in that position and that 90% of that information is false.

> In contrast, there are great people and companies to work for if you put in the effort to find them

Is that true, though? That is, is merely putting the effort in enough? I'd expect there's an element of luck/timing, especially with startups, since funding is so limited.

I was thinking up a reply and now you're confirming it before I even write it. That's amazing.

I tend to be critical during interviews and demanding during work... but I'm always ready to forward some trust towards the guys on my team. More often than not, I end up assuming "There's probably a good reason for that decision".

And so far, it has paid off. If I trust people to make good decisions, people make even better decisions than I could ask for. Many, many people want to do a good job I've found.

Over 20 - 30 people I've had on teams, there has been 1 guy who stretched that trust and he was a known troublemaker people put on my team as a test. As a result, I gave them a clean and solid case to fire that guy.

> I cant understand why anyone would put up with a lot of this, but I can guess its probably some smug "white collar" manager who thinks production or revenue are down because people who didnt go to $college are inherently lazier than he is.

That is literally exactly what happens, and how too many people in management think. David Noble's Forces of Production is about machine tool shops in the 1960s and 1970s, and is full of accounts just like yours (with details right down to management accusing workers of sabotage), with sources from both the worker and management sides.

To me it more sounds like a manager who can't reach the goals. He was probably hired to improve profitability or at least keep it stable. If revenues fall he'll try to get them back up and this appears to be a quick fix. I don't think there's a management technique behind it, just cluelessness as to what would actually help.

Disclosure: I'm what most would consider "white collar". Also , this is tangential to your post.

One of my closest friends has been an automotive tech in the dealership world for the past 12 or so years and has mastertech certifications for 2 manufacturers.

I never cease to be amazed at how fucked that industry/line of work can be, even for someone who is firmly at the top of their game. The incentive structure seems totally out of whack to me, such that it's no wonder that people assume the worst when they are faced with having to take their vehicle in for service.

> I cant understand why anyone would put up with a lot of this

This has been ask throughout the history. And we have come a long way since we were duped that Kings, Queens and Popes have "Divine Authority".

However, today, we have been duped again. And just like in the past, people didn't readily realize it. It will take effort and probably blood.

Here's one good relatively recent example when people were finally fed up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair

clearly "management" lost sight of the big picture. Why would you charge for finding new leads? Let us inspect the car for free, and if we find something that needs repair, then hey we can take care of that (for a fee). Even better, the customer feels like they got something for free - someone is caring enough to look at my car for free, looking for dangerous shit that I'm not aware of.

I suppose you could apply the value of the diagnostic to the eventual repair, but I'd feel trapped with that kind of arrangement and prefer not to enter it.

I worked as a bike mechanic which is a small subset of all of the goo you guys get on your hands and I remember the process for getting my hands clean enough to go to the bathroom took almost a minute.

I think washing your hands thoroughly before clocking out might have forced that issue, but it sounds more like the last straw for you.

Clearly they killed the goose when they unbundled that service contract. It's too bad some of you didn't walk and find a different shop to offer the same deal.

As an amateur mechanic (mostly cars), I've found wearing medical gloves (esp. the more expensive nitrile ones) helps a lot with keeping my hands clean. They tear open on sharp stuff of course, so you'll probably have to replace them several times, but it's better than not wearing anything, and gives you more tactile sensation than the thicker "mechanic's gloves".

I've found nitrile to be pretty durable - they're meant for protecting against needles and scalpels and things, so I'm surprised they're tearing on you?

They are durable, very durable, compared to vinyl and latex. But they're not some kind of exotic metamaterial; eventually something will tear them open, and car internals can be rough environments. The much-thicker mechanics' gloves are more durable for a lot of that stuff, but they really limit you because of their thickness.