Comment by LeifCarrotson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LeifCarrotson | Hacker News Reader

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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?

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'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.

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

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