The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves | Hacker News Reader

The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

quoteinvestigator.com

141 pointsstepstop53 comments

The shift in meaning of the word morale is important. "Pour encourager les autres" is subtly different. Officers (and sergeant's) canes are sometimes called 'starters' and were used to 'encourage' harder work. I think calling them 'swagger sticks' came into use when hitting troops and sailors became less acceptable.

'give that man the end of the rope to encourage him to pull harder' comes to mind: it does not mean 'let him be the one pulling on the back end' -a concept found in many a book by CS Forester, Patrick OBrien or maybe even Herman Melville (who witnessed flogging)

Capt. Vladimir Littauer was an influence on George Morris, and hence on US olympic equestrian teams. Littauer was trained in the imperial russian cavalry, where the staff sergeants instructing the young officers would often whip them for correction, excusing themselves by saying "sorry Sir, of course that was meant for the horse." He notes dryly that when he was earning his biscuit in exile by teaching rich New Yorkers to ride, he'd had to slightly modify his pedagogical methods...

(the soviet equivalent is from a movie in which the scout camp director reminds the scouts: "Remember, young people, this camp belongs to you! You are the owners, therefore, you must have Di. Sci. Pline.")

For "starter" you could also substitute "Persuading Officer".

Although "pour encourager les autres" is similar to "the floggings will continue", I do not think that it is the same sentiment, or in the same lineage.

The sarcasm lands on the word "encourage" - so that it does not mean "encourage to have better morale", instead it means "encourage to work harder out of fear of punishment".

The phrase means "to make an example of someone, as a warning to strike fear into the rest, and ensure compliance". (1) It is a crack of the overseer's whip.

On the other hand, "The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves" expresses a self-defeating cycle of interventions that perpetuates the situation.

1 ) https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pour%20encourager...

I fully agree, the distinction is split between fear and farce.

I'm not convinced. Merriam Webster seems consistent with the article's interpretation saying that it is meant ironic. The examples given by you and others in this thread of "encourage" meaning to force doesn't rule out the double meaning and irony. The modern saying is merely more transparent.

> The sarcasm lands on the word "encourage" - so that it does not mean "encourage to have better morale", instead it means "encourage to work harder out of fear of punishment".

I feel the french "encourager" and the english "encourage" are subtly different, and while "motiver" also exists in french (with pretty much the same meaning as in english) I think "motivate" would come across closer to the original sentiment.

In modern parlance:

Scrum meetings will continue until velocity improves.

I know PMs that have meetings amongst themselves calling them "scrum" meetings. I suppose it's no worse than a department of programmers that named itself something that is also a field of math without being aware of it.

> I know PMs that have meetings amongst themselves

As a developer, I love those kinds of meetings.

Developers aren't invited to those meetings.

Exactly.

...but I'm not a developer.

Have fun in your meetings.

You actually want to be on those, because that's where half of the nonsense comes from that you then have to deal with on the job.

True client story, heavily anonymised: I was representing my client at a meeting with a third party with which they were planning to integrate. Financial systems and many zeroes were involved.

It became apparent early in the call that although we were talking in some detail about integrating two complex and complicated systems, no-one on the call was a developer (except myself, lapsed).

It had never occurred to me that the powers that be might do that. Next time (and from then on) there were developers involved, at least from our side.

Managers just want to be able to make software without those pesky developers getting in the way.

Classic. Yet when projects fail it's IT that gets the blame. Not to say IT is without fault sometimes. But IT based projects fail because everyone else failed to acknowledge it was an IT project. Effectively talking when they should have been listening.

You missed a big opportunity to create your own “Project Rescue” outfit for when the project inevitably fell apart.

It depends. I can see myself getting exhausted of arguing and explaining and then having to deal with it anyway.

Engineers:

>what are these requirements? Where the hell does product come up with this crap? This is so unrealistic and just explaining why will take 15 minutes! What is the deal, why can't we just get aligned? Product is so stupid.

Also engineers:

>have fun in your product only meeting, dorks. I'm a programmer, and we HATE meetings cause of programming and stuff.

Ah, you mean "Scrum of Scrums" where the people with at best half a clue lose that half.

I distinctly dislike my job (and am looking elsewhere, interview monday).

Scrum - as pretty much everything - is bad when it’s done bad and can be good when it’s done good. I’ve seen both: 30 minutes of SoS where you’d wish for a pure caffeine infusion just to keep your eyelids up and daily SoS meetings with representatives from about 15 teams which were quickly adjourned most of the days when no cross cutting concerns needed coordination. It all hinges on the person responsible for the meeting.

Shrugs, I don't have the authority to fix the problems yet I'm responsible for the fallout - hence I'm leaving as soon as possible.

If you have a broken process the developers with options will leave, what is left is the developers who are either stuck for family reasons or simply unemployable elsewhere - a few years later you wonder why a simple change takes a week and a half and breaks things that should be totally unrelated and blame the process, so you do workflow re-org number #27 to see if you can fix it.

It's hard to explain to a more senior manager that they are in fact the problem.

I used to dread the weekly scrum-of-scrums when I was a squad lead at IBM. Everyone used to recite their lines and yet none of the presented information ever seemed to register in people's minds. I would often get calls right after the scrum-of-scrums asking about exactly the things I had just presented

Scrum really just seems like a massive reporting framework, except that instead of written reports they have oral reports, which is basically just the same as having the server logs print to a speaker.

You might get something useful if you’re around to hear it and are interested in that particular thing at that particular time, but otherwise it’s just a lot of background noise.

PMs having meetings amongst themselves doesn’t sound that productive, one of my favorite expressions to that effect is

“This problem can’t be fixed by talking”, e.g. a developer is required.

Some non-developers are good people though ;)

They just need to "manage harder."

Simply "Meetings will continue until velocity improves" would work just as well.

I'd totally buy a plaque of that to set up at the office :D

With a faintly inscribed whip as a back image. Just subtle enough to make out upon close inspection.

This right here is why I'm glad my office has a policy of no more than 3 hours of meetings a week, and no more than 1 hour any given day. If you can't fit it in that time, you have a week to think over how you can be more efficient without waisting everyone's time.

Not joking - I've seen this happening in different companies:

A team is poorly managed and becomes unproductive.

Some scrum taskmaster is dropped to "improve efficiency" and wastes everybody's time micromanaging every engineer.

It adds a good 20% overhead on the whole team while also "focusing" the team on urgent work and dropping any experiment, exploration and learning.

Good engineers leave.

Or the Fred Brooks version: Manpower will be added to the team until product delivery happens earlier.

Gotta finish up that baby in one month.

Mythic comment.

The wikipedia article on John Byng (the ultimate source of the quote) is fascinating, particularly this section:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Byng

"Naval historian N. A. M. Rodger believes it may have influenced the behaviour of later naval officers by helping inculcate:

"a culture of aggressive determination which set British officers apart from their foreign contemporaries, and which in time gave them a steadily mounting psychological ascendancy. More and more in the course of the century, and for long afterwards, British officers encountered opponents who expected to be attacked, and more than half expected to be beaten, so that [the latter] went into action with an invisible disadvantage which no amount of personal courage or numerical strength could entirely make up for.""

So it seems that Morale did actually improve!

Perhaps, but I'm not convinced that was the real cause of British naval dominance during the latter part of the age of sail. Their real advantages were that the officer corps was at least partly a meritocracy, and the government provided enough funding for realistic training. By contrast the other European navies were so badly managed that they often basically beat themselves through sheer incompetence.

Also that Candide quote: «in this country, it is good to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others»

Byng is not actually a “source”, just the one who has been killed:

“He was sentenced to death and, after pleas for clemency were denied, was shot dead by a firing squad on 14 March 1757.”

That’s what apparently got Voltaire to write “in this country it is good to kill an Admiral from time to time to encourage the others.”

As the article shows, this was known to Lord William Pitt Lennox in 1863, who referred to that while describing another even in his memoir:

"Later in the day he had to . . . run messages, and do his little marketings . . . with the risk, if caught out of bounds, of having a flogging, to encourage the others, as a Frenchman said of the execution of Admiral Byng."

Modern take on it:

Scrum meetings will continue until morale improves

Edit: Accidentally submitted twice

Until KPIs improve?

Fuck scrum.

Edit: No really, fuck scrum.

Spoken like someone who has never witnessed the abomination that is SAfE... God I miss the time when Scrum was the worst part of my job

I'm sorry; office liaisons are against company policy.

Interesting read but I think this 'Quote Investigator' went off at a tangent with "pour encourager les autres" (a famous quote in its own right, but not quite the same sentiment). It seems more like the 1961 navy cartoonist who coined "all liberty is canceled until morale improves" deserves credit for the creative act, unless some earlier source is found.

Byng's fate seems to mirror a bit a history of Thucydides, an Athenian general who lost Amphipolis to Spartans and was sentenced for exile because of that. The sentence pushed Thucydides to create one of the greatest historical works of ancient era.

It's funny that ancient Athenians were less barbaric than imperial Britons.

First example that popped into my head was Mutiny on the Bounty. Anthony Hopkins as Bligh.

Captain Bligh was actually notable for an unorthodox management style. He was doing his best to be an enlightened and humane captain of the ship and, for a long time on the way to Tahiti, managed to entirely avoid floggings. He gradually reverted to a more traditional naval flogging policy as five months in Tahiti led to dereliction of duty, but his main morale problems were more around Tahiti being a tropical paradise, while life on board a ship is miserable. Taking away the rum because someone stole his private coconuts probably hurt more than the beatings.

(However, he is easily conflated with Edward Edwards, who was sent to hunt down the mutineers and bring them to England to be tried and hung. Cruelty was in the job description.)

Your comment reads as if you were there. :)

The film is just a film, probably not a true reflection of what happened. Memorable for the performances nonetheless, speaking only for myself.

The incident was investigated in detail, with several journals, testimony in court of ten mutineers (of whom only three were hung), as well as the captain's own logs, and more. Much of it is fascinating reading. Bligh's own post-mutiny voyage was nothing short of heroic and he was hailed upon his return.

The interesting human study, I think, is the image of Bligh as the earnest, "enlightened captain," but a failure at that: paternalistic, overbearing, out of touch, naïve about the motives and feelings of those serving under him, prone to causing jealousy and resentment, dangerously mixing business and friendship with things like a personal loan to his first mate... and just not self-aware, oblivious to his own anger management issues and the impact of verbal abuse on his officers.

You could take real management lessons from that.

The Bounty (1984) - Directed by Roger Donaldson; Starring Mel Gibson, Anthony Hopkins, Laurence Olivier; Based on the book "Captain Bligh and Mr. Christian" by Richard Hough

Looks like 1961 is the oldest example identified. The earlier quotes have a fundamentally different character.

As "encouragement" goes, it is sometimes cited that the Soviet NKVD had a quota to shoot down the ten percent of their own infantry who were furthest from the front line of any battle. As might be expected, it is hard to verify, but it would have discouraged reluctance to advance.

What is well established is that being taken prisoner was considered desertion, and soldiers released after the war, or liberated by advances, were routinely executed or sent to the GULag.

A couple posters have brought up the "meetings will continue" version. US Senator Max Cleland used this is 2000, but I wonder if it can be antedated? https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-106shrg85968/html/C...

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