Hacker News Reader

Comment by dwd | Hacker News Reader

It really comes down to personality.

Highly creative people generally rank low on conscientiousness. Organisations as they grow need ALL their employees to be conscientious: organised, punctual, goal-oriented, accountable - to not just to control outcomes but maintain cohesiveness.

Organisation culture stifles those type of people.

For an organisation to keep their innovators they need to be siloed away in an autonomous 'Skunk Works' where they can be free from the bureaucracy required to run a company.

View on HN

True.

The one thing that corporations are extremely good at is destroying all the initiative and add so much bureaucracy to the development that you loose interest to improve / inovate as you are paifully aware that this will bring in more documents, jira tickets, endless "bicycle shed" discussions, endless covincing of managers that only care about their schedule (which you will corupt by "unknowns"), endless politics as there is always some architect/team lead that "must be the smartest" (and typically those comming to those positions are excelent in navigating buereaucracy and politics and are rarly inovators as those endanger manager schedules, adding risks, ...) and so on.

Too many cooks spoil the broth.

At the end you just figure out it is not worth it , do what you are paid for and you inovate at home.

If those inovations become a startup you just leave.

I used to infuriate one development manager by going on a streak of productivity where I'd generate a mass of code over a matter of days, and then go quiet while I was thinking, trialing and tinkering with the next project - this was in a role where I had some latitude to do that. I'm not sure if other's thought I was slacking off at those times and complained, or it just messed with him because his burn-down charts would always look like a cliff face.

I struggle with the same pattern and worries myself, though mostly internally. My position affords a lot of latitude for it (I replaced the previous lead dev 10 years ago when the company was 5 people). It seems to be (and is said to be) okay with others as long as I communicate even as little as, "I'm deep in the weeds on this and probably will be for the next 2-3 weeks."

I worry about the optics of it, but at least have confidence that other developers can see the end result is solid for the total amount of time invested. Smooth workflow for everyone is the other major concern, but again we're lucky to be working on our own system and not beholden to external deadlines.. and I guess lucky to have enough want-to-dos in the backlog that no one is ever without something useful to work on.

We do create a bit of expectation of every developer having at least some tasks each week that are picked up and some that are completed, and it's tempting to just game that a bit to put up some numbers on the weeks where I'm figuring out how to do what I'm about to do.

When it comes to smoothing out a burn-down chart, the trick is the break up the tasks in a way that allows for each to be completed in full according to how you work on them. It may go against the logical or functional division of the project but it helps you mark stuff as done.

For JIRA in particular, also avoid creating sub-tasks if you're burn-down is tracking at the task level - as you have to complete all subs for the main task to be complete.

> Highly creative people generally rank low on conscientiousness.

Are you sure about that? I would rather assume that highly creative people often rank low on "tolerating bullshit" instead of having a low conscientiousness.

Wow... you nailed it. I was formulating this exact same thought the moment I read this comment. Big companies have so much bullshit the repell creatives.

What is sad, is that there are people who seem to thrive on company politics, gossip, and all the infighting and backstabbing.

We're not all good looking enough to get on Survivor so we play it out in the office.

Conscientiousness can be broken down further into 5 factors: two of which correlate with openness to experience: industriousness and achievement. Creatives tend to be low on the other three: order, dutifulness, and deliberation.

Probably safe to say dealing with other people's bullshit gets in the way of industriousness and achievement and leads to low agreeableness. ;)

Generalizations like those need solid data to back them up. As it stands, it's just pushing a pseudo-psychological narrative.

How do you know? Do you have solid data to support your statement?

Explanation for your downvotes: GP's description is not a generalisation or pseudo-psychological, but reflects the current standard model of personality in psychology. http://enwp.org/OCEAN_model

Thanks for the link. Actually, I think the downvotes were somewhat deserved. I wasn't careful enough to set the proper tone of my critique.

In any case, I just wanted to point out here on HN we value those who back up their claims with good data.

You did this. So, thanks.

You may also have been thinking of Myers-Briggs which is pseudo-scientific nonsense and quite worthless given the ease it can be gamed when answering the questions.

I'm pretty sure the big 5 model was developed from data directly, not from a pre-existing theoretical model. I.e. they just made big personality tests and then checked how many factors there seemed to be, and it came out to 5.

The model is not without its fair share of criticisms. Check out this section on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Cr...

Usually, that bullshit is tantamount to defrauding the investors by taking salary without creating business value, or screwing over the customers by forcing them to upgrade to a substandard version of the product.

Saying refusing to play along is not “conscientious” is classic corporate double speak.

I’ve definitely similar elsewhere. In fact, the article points out that people that “can’t cut it” at corporate culture often go on to create the best companies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com