Hacker News Reader

Comment by ergothus | Hacker News Reader

I've seen these arguments repeatedly, yet I only see this mattering to those companies where employees have a relative level of power and choice (e.g. non-game industry programmers, etc). Elsewhere, the attitude appears to have remained: "use them as much as possible". Consider assistant managers at your local chain store. Pick a chain! Outside of a handful of companies that are well noted for their bucking of the trend, regardless of market, these employees will be used and abused, year after year. If my anecdotal experience is representative, the more they actually care about the job, the more they'll be abused. Managers get the same, and by the time you get to district or regional managers, they are mostly the people that survived the lower levels...where "survived" means "did the abusing" not "got burnt out and quit for greener pastures".

View on HN

This is true even within tech companies, but for hourly workers. Hourly folks are treated like trash. I’m talking people who live in the bay, and work side by side with other professionals in SF.

In a position like that you almost have to take a “durrr, I dunno!” attitude to everything, because if you try to talk to salaried people about what you need to do your job, you are looked at like a dog who just started reciting poetry.

Every now and then a salaried person will try to engage, take you seriously, but once it bounces up the chain of command that an hourly person is acting like they have something to contribute, it will be quietly shut down.

Seems like the business model requires hourly people stay out of the “brain space” entirely. Otherwise you’d have to pay them a living wage.

Really despicable way to treat people IMO. I don’t see why you wouldn’t want people to be proactive about solving problems.

The again, I’ve seen similar attitudes from engineering managers towards their direct reports.

What kind of jobs to hourly people hold? I mean, if the company hires consultants then some of the Exalted Developers themselves will be hourly.

Exactly, I thought that in some areas in US was not that that uncommon to get north of 150/200 per hour? And that wouldn’t seem so despicable to me...

None of that is true at my company, in my experience. It is a large company, so I might not have the full picture, but my little corner of it is not like that at all.

Seems pretty common to me. I have worked in smaller companies where everyone was an integral part of the business, and that isn't most large companies I worked at since then. I think it is partly a cargo cult thing. Very successful business can afford to threat people as disposable, be elitist or inflexible. So they end up thinking that is part of what makes them successful, without realizing they are throwing away opportunities. Maybe there are some larger companies that does things differently, but I haven't really seen it.

Good ideas come from all skill levels. But good idea vs bad idea ratio is fundamentally what separates those in or out of brain space. To get your ratio up, you need training and experience in making good ideas more frequently and bad ideas less frequently. And then you get placed in a space where your ideas are your core output. Those people tend to be salaried the most often. And they don't like to spend their time sifting through the bad ideas of untrained people when they could instead be generating more good ideas per unit time. I don't see the problem here

What your casual elitism disregards is that people who actually do the work can have different ideas, especially related to the work they are doing. Put another way, since they have a different perspective than the higher-ups, they are sometimes able to find potential efficiencies and product improvements that wouldn't occur to others.

Additionally, front-line workers can see real problems with how customers experience the product that may not be reflected in the metrics used to evaluate the product, since metrics are inevitably gamed.

The ratio of good to bad ideas doesn't matter if you miss the one good idea you really needed. A company that invests in ways to effectively use the ideas of 'untrained people', as you so delicately put it, can derive a lot of value from those ideas.

I think you're right. The front-line workers often have a certain level of ground-truth about how processes actually work in practice. They may not have all the same information as the higher-ups, but they have a very unique and valuable perspective that can be used to improve strategic decisions.

IMO, this is one of the reasons why distributed command (as opposed to centralized command) models often work better, particularly in a fast moving environment.

A CEO only has to be right 51% of the time to be successful.

That really depends.

Sure, my statement is merely metaphorically true. It's meant to communicate the point that the CEO must optimize for being right enough frequently enough to be successful. Competition surely drives whatever that number is up, and good managers surely listen to the ideas from their line workers. And they must mentally triage ideas to be worth considering more deeply. The best managers credit the line workers and encourage more idea sharing. But the manager must do the triage, and the manager must ignore ideas that don't pass the bar, and the manager must empower only those that have a track record of producing good ideas and not the others.

So do you think Donald Trump has good ideas to improve things for poor people ?

Empirically, it turns out the answer is yes.

But reality is the complete opposite.

Why, this makes sense.

In every industry, there are employees whose influence on the company success is outsized, and who are hard to hire or train. In software industry, they are experienced engineers and product managers. In a fashionable restaurant, they are experienced cooks. In an airforce, they are experienced pilots and repairmen. Etc.

When these people are happy with their work, they achieve great results. When they are unhappy, they look for ways to conveniently jump ship, because they have a number of opportunities elsewhere waiting for them to become available. They are in short supply. Every boss has an incentive to keep these people content and loyal.

OTOH every industry has positions for which supply is plentiful, compared to demand. Aspiring game developers without experience, dish washers, burger flippers, etc, can be readily hired, paid little, and easily fired, too. There is no incentive for their bosses to walk an extra mile to keep them happ, especially when pressing them a bit more yields an extra bit of performance, so they mostly aren't happy about their jobs.

Another hypothesis that equally well explains the data: employees at successful companies tend to be happy because the rising tide lifts (almost) all boats. Companies that are doing poorly will tend to look to cut staff, wages, and benefits, which could be a source of unhappiness. Etc. I don't really think the evidence presented here gives much reason to believe that seeking the well-being of your employees will do anything for the bottom line. OTOH, it's easy for me to believe that improving the top line will improve your employees' happiness.

> Another hypothesis that equally well explains the data

As noted in other comments, this DID check for causation and found employee happiness led the benefits, not the other way around.

You can't check for causation unless you manipulate a subsample of the companies randomly.

Article: "However, the authors cite studies of changes within individual firms and organisations which seem to show that improvements in employee morale precede gains in productivity, rather than the other way round."

A theory could be that employers see the improvement in productivity before they are measureble by the methods employed and therefore are happier. E.g. bad processes are replaced which gives happier employees before the gains are evident.

Right. Sometimes you can eliminate obvious correlates, but it's quite difficult to eliminate all of them.

My point is that you have to keep your key people content, else they will leave. During a downturn, you especially want your key engineers, best sales reps, most well-connected customer liaisons to stay around. If they leave, this will hit the bottom line, and getting a replacement will be expensive, or often impossible. This is a known way into oblivion [1].

There are booming industries where the boom mostly floats top executive boats, though. Ask an Uber driver, or an Amazon warehouse worker.

[1]: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

Hey I'm an Amazon warehouse worker, and while I would have to agree, I love the chances to climb to management or an actual career. I'm part of the career choice program which pays for 95% of my college tuition, fees, and books for an IT program (which I chose). The job is boring but not too difficult. I know others might say otherwise though.

Great to know!

Now you need the job more then the job needs you; eventually you may find yourself in a position where employers compete to have you in the team instead.

Most of the happiless business seems susceptible of robotization.

Robots aren't going to give you feedback on how to improve the customer experience, or implement kaizen workflow improvements.

This comment just gave me hope for humanity :)

> There is no incentive for their bosses to walk an extra mile to keep them happ, especially when pressing them a bit more yields an extra bit of performance, so they mostly aren't happy about their jobs

That's the theory - but I don't see the distinction you listed ever proven. People do it because it's the easiest thing, that doesn't make it the best thing. I can just as easily theorycraft that happy employees improve production ACROSS THE BOARD, with lasting and compounding results. The studies that argue this never make the distinction you've listed.

Yes, having everyone happy is likely the best long-term policy.

Pressuring a bit on the suckers that got to cling to their jobs still looks like a good short-term policy, especially if the higher-up executing it is also not very happy but is clinging to the job.

That is, the best org is where everyone is level 4 or 5 on the "Tribal leadership" scale [1], but a lot of orgs are at level 2 at the lowest rungs.

[1]: https://emergentbydesign.com/2012/06/28/a-step-by-step-guide...

Look at the success Trader Joe's and Costco have had. Either company could replace the happy, experienced checkers, who care about what they're doing and how they're doing it with $10/hr people who have no stake in what's going on. The important distinction is the stake that your employees take in what's happening.

The people who are closest to and most affected by problems are the best suited to solve them. If you hire a fleet of people who don't care about solving those problems, they won't get solved. You hire a fleet of people who give a shit day in and day out, you're going to get those nagging issues that, in the long run, cost you the most.

Those companies that think that boots on the ground are replaceable in any industry overestimate the importance of management.

I rely on my people to keep me abreast of the issues, as a manager, that I need to be aware of. I expect them to fix the issues that are within their power to fix and escalate the rest of them.

Ultimate stake is that the employees are also the owners themselves.

This is why a (small) grant of stock, or at least options, is a typical way to pay part of the compensation for higher-level employees.

Reminded me of a Jocko Willink quote I just came across today:

"People that don't love what they're doing, that don't like what they're doing, they have problems. They're not enjoying it, they're not putting in the extra hours, they're not being creative in trying to find new solutions. So when you love something and you're passionate about it, you put the extra effort into it naturally, you try and get creative with it naturally, and you end up more successful naturally because it's something that you care about."

I suspect one aspect behind these connections in both directions - agency. Those who have outsized influence can make increasing demands and gain more control over the enterprise. If they are competent their changes will have a positive impact, they feel motivated and both company and them will experience growth. If not well either it gets corrected or things go pathological and they and/or the enterprise goes downhill.

The reverse where employees feel restricted is bad for both productivity and morale. While procedures have their place (more consistentcy) they also have costs. That sort of strategy may actually work in some cases or be neccessary but it often caps or bottlenecks growth both individually and institutionally. For example medicine is a conservative field partially because of the complexity of the body and the stakes. For every "germ theory" introduction of experimental ideas there are thousands of "just try high doses of amphetamines or radium to strengthen the heart"!

What's being left out is unhappy, discardable employees cost you customers. Customers you would otherwise have never get put in the spreadsheet.

I agree that there are many companies that ignore this correlation, but I'm not convinced those companies are making the most rational choice.

If Burger King significantly increased the salary of their workers or otherwise found ways to improve their morale, would it benefit Burger King in the long run? I tend to suspect so, but it would be hard to prove.

The burger joints known for taking care of their people are also usually seen as being pretty good burger places, and that may be causal, but it also may be that they're just slightly "upscale" of the other burger places and also spend more on the ingredients.

> I'm not convinced those companies are making the most rational choice

Neither am I - they're just making the common choice.

They tend to be somewhat upscale in terms of ingredients, employee training, overall experience, etc.

That's not to say that Burger King or McDonald's couldn't do better. I don't really have enough experience with them as a customer or anything else to have a real opinion. But I suspect that, if Burger King were to try to improve their experience in a way that forced them to raise prices by 25% they'd lose a lot of business from people basically just looking for the cheapest burger.

See also the experience of JC Penney and Ron Johnson. A lot of people are pretty much in the position where they have to shop on price.

> A lot of people are pretty much in the position where they have to shop on price.

Keep in mind, though, that if a larger portion of money went to the workers, less of them would be in that position.

Only if that happens across the board, not in one particular company.

No? Even if only the employees of one particular company get a wage increase, that's however-many-people-work-there who now have more money to spend. It might not be a very large number of people, depending on the company, but it doesn't have to happen across the board for the people to exist.

In my limited experience big chains vary greatly based on locale, presumably due to those particular stores being owned by different franchises.

>If Burger King significantly increased the salary of their workers or otherwise found ways to improve their morale, would it benefit Burger King in the long run? I tend to suspect so, but it would be hard to prove.

It would not benefit Burger King as its clientele’s main goal is purchasing at the lowest price and they will happily go to McDonalds if prices went up. Not all businesses have the luxury of selling to people willing to spend more than rock bottom, and you can see that in most cities, only one or two areas where the upper middle class live will have the business that pay more than the minimum.

Worker wages could go up without increasing the cost of a burger (or other food item), it would just mean the owners make less money per sale. If the decreased stress leads to Burger King workers being more productive (and/or more pleasant to customers), that could mean more sales and more money for everyone involved.

Restaurants are notoriously low margin businesses, I doubt there’s much room to move up in wages, which is also their greatest cost.

"Low margin" is relative. If the owner is taking home more money than the employees, there's room to shift things. I would bet quite a lot that most Burger Kings are in that position.

Profit margin is the amount left for the owner after all expenses are paid. Googling shows restaurants in general have single digit profit margins, so there isn’t much room for pay increases, especially if the owner wants to save for capital improvements like renovations, equipment, or new restaurants.

"Single digit profit margins" is in terms of percentages. I'm talking absolutes: However low the profit margin is as a percentage, as long as it's positive and the owner makes more than enough to live on, it could be made lower by a pay increase.

Remember the analysis of Losers/Clueless/Sociopaths in corporate life.

The Losers are low level people who know they have lost the battle to be a big shot.

Clueless are the strivers, the first level or two of management, who think they have a chance to be a big shot.

The Sociopaths actually do have a chance. Not all of them are evil but they all know 100 hour weeks won't do it for them.

Lumbergh in Office Space is classic Clueless. He has surrendered any chance of human contact in his job, but he will never get any higher than he is.

Sociopaths? The groups should be audience, losers, contenders and winners.

GP is talking about the Gervais Principle analysis https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Oh, interesting, but quite simplified and dogmatic principle. Anyways confusing labels for the groups. The group labels should rather be e.g. A,B and C since the labels don't really corresponds the their literal meaning.

The labelling isn't confusing at all. Not only do top-level managers cluster around sociopathy, but corporate structures specifically reward selfish sociopathic behaviours and punish empathy and context-awareness.

You have to be a certain kind of person to cut staff - some dedicated and valuably skilled - in order to boost the short-term return on your stocks. Likewise, you have to be a certain kind of person to think of customers as a resource that can be farmed and exploited with dark patterns and other manipulations. And in more extreme cases - you have to be a certain kind of person to make non-payment of contractors a deliberate policy.

People who score high on empathy won't be comfortable with those kinds of actions.

Anything customer oriented tends to benefit

Reply on news.ycombinator.com