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Comment by zaptheimpaler | Hacker News Reader

>We want the super-productivity, and we want the innate love of software development, but we don't want all the extra baggage. Instead: > > Hire people who care about users. > Hire people who understand the difference between a job and a hobby.

In the same breath he wants people who LOVE their jobs and super-productivity, but yet also understand its only a job. You can't have the super-productivity that comes with intrinsic motivation if the environment is boring and lacks anything that might produce intrinsic motivation.

There was a great article about Elon Musk about this from collaborative fund, which I can't find. People love that he's crazy enough to build spaceships and electric cars, but they wish he would just tone down the crazy when it comes to Twitter or whatever controversy he gets into. Its a fundamentally dehumanizing attitude - you DON'T get to pick the good parts of crazy without taking the bad too. You have to take or leave the whole person - warts and all.

Most companies ultimately value more predictable and less productive over slightly crazy and more productive. I realized this is kind of my situation.. advice on what do is much appreciated :)

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This becomes especially true with various mental health issues. Take for instance, ADHD - I've found employers love the intensity and focus I can have sometimes (leading to extreme productivity), yet when it comes to the fact that some days I just can't focus or have an intense weekend to blow off steam and am useless on Mondays, they throw a hissy fit.

They seem to think that if I can be 200% focused some of the time, why can't I be like that all of the time?

For some it's all take take take.

Employers also seem to tend not to value the notion that employees have different strengths. There are some coders I know who seem to savor working hard on what I would call the "boring stuff", and there are those who can intensely work on a new problem and come up with novel approaches, but they're not going to be as good at doing assembly-line work. Both have their place, but employers want the best of both across the board, which is impractical except when you have the occasional wizard.

Imagine that you have two employees with complementary skills (one excels where the other sucks, and vice versa) working on the same project. They will probably enjoy it a lot, because from the perspective of each, they can do the "easier" part (easier for them, than is). And the quality will probably be high, because each is working on what they know best, and what they enjoy.

However, from the average manager's perspective...

What happens if one of these two takes a vacation, and you decide to put in the sprint something that the other one sucks at? (Planning? What planning? This is Agile!)

What happens if you later decide you could save some money by moving one of them to another project, and leaving the other one to handle it all?

Also, what if one of them asks for a raise?

This is the part that came very very quickly when I started managing people. I had people who are useless on tech but can pick up the phone and get it sorted,no matter what's the problem.On the other spectrum there were detail obsessed people that would take ages, but when I open that file I know it shows reality. Personally,I find this extremely interesting during the management meetings,where CEOs need have to listen to all of and often make decisions upon given info. I often find myself in a situation,where I can only think ' oh shit, didn't even think about it', while I'm sure other do too. To expect the same office drone functionality from everyone is insanely stupid.

I used to work with a guy just like this. He slogged through crap code happily. He did his job and went home. Sadly, the first company I worked with him at fired him. "He wasn't competent, blah blah blah." He did a fine job, people just didn't like that his mentality was different than theirs. I tried to explain to them that the one person who would actually work on their horrendous software was the one they let go. Was he a superstar? No probably not, but he was good and liked his job and went home to his family at the end of the day. A lot of people don't realize a great employee comes in many forms.

I’m in a different, somewhat awkward, but good position where my company champions work/life balance. The pace is slower than I expected and I have ADHD. I struggled at first especially since I want to respect other’s WLB. Sometimes I’d do a weeks worth (or more) of work in a day or two, but I try to spread that work back out so that it seems like things are more consistent. Some days I just can’t/won’t? focus on work. I think it’s because it’s not engaging? Does anyone “have it all,” ie working on interesting things at a challenging, yet decent pace? Has anyone been in a similar position? Do you have any advice?

ADHD here as well. Best thing I've found is when facing tasks of little or no interest, think about the projects/tasks that excite you/you prefer that are on your list, and think of how you'll get to those the sooner you finish the boring stuff.

Also, in terms of focusing, what's helped me is to find a single, non-lyrical, instrumental, ambient track, and just put it on loop for the whole work day. It's been easier to think/less distracting to not hear and process language or have to find the next track that I'm in the mood for, and I believe in some way it helps my mind stay focused on my thought processes related to my work through patterns the mind makes with the looping of the track.

From the employer side: The unfortunate reality is that anything resembling "heroic effort" work becomes difficult for teams to manage. It becomes impossible to plan around an employee who may or may not be able to contribute on a given day. Eventually, it becomes clear that relying on an employee to maybe or maybe not put in a couple of heroic days to catch up each week isn't as good for the team, as a whole, as someone who puts in steady and predictable work, even if the overall pace is slower.

I don't mean to detract from your personal issues. However, I would suggest that you work on finding a position that allows you to average out your productivity better over the course of a week.

Yep, I do much better in startups where I basically have autonomy to "get it done".

This is one reason I hate Scrum. Companies that (I've worked for) have really tried to implement it don't understand that sometimes you just won't be as productive. It's always, "Well you committed to it...." They can't (or don't want to) understand those miracles they want their employees to perform comes at a cost. It means those people are less productive at times while they are exploring an idea or they are just exhausted. If they just want someone to do the minimum set each sprint, that's fine, just don't expect anyone to walk on water when you need to be saved.

Estimates are by nature probabilistic. Saying "two weeks on average" means something like: 20% it is one week, 60% it is two weeks, 20% it is three weeks. And that assumes you are already pretty good at estimating! Most people are not.

This is by sleight of hand changed into a commitment to make it in two weeks, 100% sure. Then, 20% of time, developers are blamed for not fulfilling their committments or not estimating correctly. But they did!

If the most important thing for you is getting your commitments done with as high probability as possible, have a three-week sprint, but estimate only for two. Even this will fail once in a while, but less often. And maybe let developers work on the tasks of their choice in the remaining time. Autonomy, yeah!

"Two weeks on average" literally means it could be less but just as often it could also be more. If it is always two weeks or less, then it is not two weeks on average. What if it is always exactly two weeks, not a day more or less? No, that level of precision simply does not happen in real life.

Many leaders nowadays are very insecure, and that leads to an intense desire for control. It's sick, and sad, that this has happened over the past few decades.

I must say that this blog made me sad.

It is exactly due to such thinking code becomes bloated, full of frameworks, zillion of 3rd party libraries for something that could be implemented with bearable codebase by just having a little more experienced crew that is not afraid to "just do it".

Yes, people described are hard to manage but this doesn't mean that there is something wrong with them. It means that they need competent managers that they will respect (Oh and they are there - I had a PM once and we were late on project and people were working into the night, he came to the dev. team, pulled the code and started debugging the issues, testing,... It was not his job (anyway, quite frankly, how many PMs you know that are able to fully use/test the product if you ignore the coding/debugging part). But he never had any issues with engineers ever. This action echoed for a years and he had an endless respect from anyone technical around. But people like this are not found by looking at nice graphs of jira tickets and burndown charts)

As far as I am concerned the whole post comes down to: "B people hire C people, C people hire D people,...". And if what you have are D people (not only engineering), you cant hire A people. They prove D people cant work with them. Or vice versa.

An advice:

Find company with A people. Ignore the rest. And they are there, just not advertised as aiblockchainnosqlserverlessiot (pun intended) companies.

George Bernard Shaw: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

So just be crazy and if you love to code, dont care for the money. It is not the money that makes you happy, it makes happy someone else. Find the company with the code and people that will make YOU happy. And dont crave for social respect from people who dont understand what you are doing by allowing them to drag you to their level and compete with you on "I have a better car" (or "we make loads of money") basis. That is their play and you dont need to play along.

> It is exactly due to such thinking code becomes bloated, full of frameworks, zillion of 3rd party libraries

Ironically, much of the codebase bloat I've seen in recent years has come from super-hackers who want to gain experience with all the new frameworks and services on the market.

A prime example is hiring a front-end wizard to rebuild sites in React, just because React is the new hotness. That engineer gets to put "Replaced legacy website with all-new React codebase" on their resume and pivot into the next job.

At my previous employer, one of the teams had a front-end that had become an unholy conglomeration of React and Angular, simply because the engineers were afraid their skills would fall behind if they didn't keep up with React. It was a mess.

Ironically, hiring developers who care more about getting the job done tends to choose the path of least resistance forward, which means sticking with frameworks, languages, and services that may not be the trendiest, but they get the job done.

What you consider as super-hackers are hype driven developers and architect-astronauts to me :) We are not talking about same set of people.

There ought to be a recognized set of ethics & principles that are involved with making good software, like with any Profession. Following the hype or silver bullet solution for it's own sake should not be one of those principles.

> much of the codebase bloat I've seen in recent years has come from super-hackers

I'd say they aren't really super-hackers; no true Scotsman and all that.

Do you ever feel like this is a sort of paradox? You feel like you need to be up to date with the new hotness to stay relevant in the market, yet often the most productive use of your time would be to use some boring old well-trodden thing. It gives me anxiety.

I have built a react app to be mounted inside an existing angular app (not my idea) it was... Interesting

Superstars are necessary when you just get started and you don't really care too much who's doing that magic thing that pulls off the whole ship a few hours later. However,at some point the superstars need to go and be replaced by more common people. This isn't unique to the software world.

It seems to me you have hold of a false dichotomy.

I love cooking, but I very rarely cook food just to cook and then throw it away. That I am cooking for people is part of my intrinsic motivation.

I feel the same way about software. I definitely also enjoy tinkering. But a lot of the motivation for me is in creating things for people to use. So I make sure to take jobs where the mission is one I can get behind and where I can develop empathy for the audience. I also find teamwork intrinsically motivating.

For me that makes for a pretty clear separation between intrinsically motivated coding on the job and intrinsically motivated coding at home. If I'm just fucking around with something cool to explore it, that's hobby time, because I'm not looking to help users or my team. But my days are still full of intrinsically motivated work because I'm there to fight for the users.

> Most companies ultimately value more predictable and less productive over slightly crazy and more productive. I realized this is kind of my situation.. advice on what do is much appreciated :)

Are you considering yourself as "slightly crazy and more productive" (it's not certain from the wording)?

If so, you may want to think in terms of time perspectives. Another way of viewing the dichotomy is "Most companies ultimately value (more predictable and less productive in the short term and more productive in the long term) over (slightly crazy and more productive in the short term and less productive in the long term).

Thinking oneself as "more productive" doesn't motivate to build the personal and technical skills required in the long term, instead, it centers the focus on one's ego (I'm cool; if they don't hire me, it's because they're wrong).

But I'm also skeptical of the entire concept, at least in some cultures. Excluding staff workers, there's a lot of mobility in American companies, to the point that it's quite common to change company every few years (say, 2 to 5). How "crazy" should one be to start disrupting productivity even before a couple of years?

> You can't have the super-productivity that comes with intrinsic motivation if the environment is boring and lacks anything that might produce intrinsic motivation. There was a great article about Elon Musk about this from collaborative fund...

Dan Pink wrote a book about this [0] in which he postulates, people are motivated by three fundamental things:

- Autonomy: The urge to be in control

- Mastery: The desire to get better at something

- Purpose: The yearning to do what we do

So, if managers took care of these three for their reportees, according to Dan Pink, they'd be inherently motivated to be doing their best work.

Note that, mastery (great hax0r) and purpose (care about users) need to align (especially true for a small company), which is what TFA may be alluding to in as many words?

[0] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/KgGhSOAtAyQ

> you DON'T get to pick the good parts of crazy

I used to rant a lot. At times it was perceived as an attack on someone's work, when it wasn't meant to be. Then, I'd apologize, assuming it was ok.

I was experienced, and I thought I was being paid to mentor and oversee as part of my work.

I thought that others would understand and sympathize that I ranted because I was under a lot of stress. They didn't.

They would tell others, and they would not confront me about it, which eventually resulted in a hellish working environment and semi-isolation. I believe at least one was even being unethical in their reaction to me speaking my mind, causing problems for me, probably with the best intention to wear me down, to get rid of the toxicity in their work environment "for the good of the whole".

I now try to think about what I say, even when being direct would solve a problem more quickly. Sometimes that means that when I'm on calls, others will run over me. To get over that, I also try to act and believe that the other person is more qualified. I don't do that with everyone, and it's not appropriate for speaking with young children, but it's usually good.

Aside: Consulting and mentoring share some things in common. One thing that is gold for a consultant is to be sitting in a meeting and have the client repeat your ideas, word for word, back to the execs. and claim the idea as their own. To outright 'steal' the idea and get all the credit. It means that the client actually listens to you and thinks your ideas are good [0]. The same mechanism is true with mentoring. If your mentee nearly parrots your ideas, you're gold. If they continue to do bull-headed things, you're sunk; you must how you mentor as it's clearly not working [1].

[0] This means you can raise your rates without fear, btw.

[1] To be clear, mentoring is a lot more than just this. Whole books have been written about mentoring, read them.

"[1] To be clear, mentoring is a lot more than just this. Whole books have been written about mentoring, read them." Probably a lot of bad books about mentoring have been written as well. Could you recommand the good ones?

This is why Agile's Retrospective is so awesome to have on your team. Agile doesn't work for a lot of the work I do (data scientist) but if there is anything worth grabbing and incorporating into other PM frameworks is the restrospective. If done right, it would have prevented this issue and other team community communication related issues. I highly recommend it. That and a time machine would be nice.

Had a recent data science experience where the exploratory part of the project was shoehorned into a micromanaged scrum framework. Apparently they discarded their task tracker entirely the same week I left.

Me too. I'm currently working on an Agile engineering team, due to it being a startup, so they like to group people together. (We got a data engineer, an infrastructure engineer, a consultant of all things, a firmware engineer, a hardware engineer, and a jack of all trades.)

This at first bothered me a lot, due to Agile micromanagement, but after a few months the company realized my work load is nothing like engineering, and because I have to become the domain expert on a topic to solve the challenges at hand, I end up knowing best what the next steps should be. After realizing this the company has since put me in the team lead meetings (which is excessive imo) and has personally requested that I make my own epics, issues/pbis, and do my own refinement. The only downside remaining is the company wants presentations every two weeks, but now I'm in control to slowly grow my pbis into whatever time span I want (within reason), allowing me to present as often as I want. Responsibility comes with rapport.

Getting the work done should be enough, though it only works when management has some technical oversight. If they do not, or squeeze the sand out of their hand, they lose that edge.

What happens when they lose that edge?

You get C&C or hype-driven development.

The question I pose myself is: “Am I trying to say the right thing or am I communicating”

> In the same breath he wants people who LOVE their jobs and super-productivity, but yet also understand its only a job. You can't have the super-productivity that comes with intrinsic motivation if the environment is boring and lacks anything that might produce intrinsic motivation

Both are not exclusive. Your job can be interesting and fulfilling and yet be only a job meanwhile your heart is at home with family and friends.

> People love that he's crazy enough to build spaceships and electric cars

He does not build any of that. His employees do. Volkswagen or Volvo also make electric cars without needing a grab attention CEO. For each Elon or Jobs there are a million similar guys that fail misserably. Survivor bias is a thing.

Elon Musk is not CEO of SpaceX. He is CTO and is in the trenches building the rockets. He is fully cognizant of the whole machine and he expects his engineers to be also. That way the design can be changed without regard to departmental infighting, etc. The best part is no part and always trying to get little improvements. Not something NASA can do with specs fixed in place for manufacturing in 40 different states 5 years in advance.

Of course he does not "build" the whole thing, but he has a vision that inspires people and the technical chops to lead from the front lines. And the endurance to put in productive 80-100hr work weeks for decades.

>And the endurance to put in productive 80-100hr work weeks for decades.

That's called drugs.

I am not being flippant, I think there's a whole other segment not fully touched on by this article that needs to be addressed in this subthread. More hours is not always better, and folks who can sustain this typically are using some sort of substance to do so. Whether that substance is as mild as caffeine in the 10 shots of espresso they have a day or they're railing lines of coke in between high-stress meetings, they aren't doing this off their own natural energy, and it takes a serious toll on their physical and mental health which they may not even be aware of.

I speak this from experience. I'm one of those people who was known as a "super-hacker" doing "80-100hr work weeks", and what most people didn't realize was I was downing between 20-30 shots of espresso a day. I actually ended up hospitalized at one point due to severe dehydration caused by constant mass intake of caffeine and not enough fluids. It almost caused me to have renal failure, and basically was the wake up call that represented a turning point in how I thought about work-life balance. It certainly helped advance my career and gave me a mythical reputation, but it was in no way healthy, and it ultimately didn't serve the interests of my team at that company, only the interests of the executive leadership who profited off my extra hours of work for which I was not compensated fairly.

These are the same companies that will claim to desire diversity, but actively work to remove any personality in the workplace.

LOL... WC, they mean diversity of skin color, not diversity of beliefs, personality, etc.

They want the kind of diversity that doesn't require any thinking to consider. You look at the photo, you see a white woman, an Asian man, a Black transgender person, and a Native American non-binary... <whatever I'm supposed to define them as>.

That's the diversity they want.

But what they really want, is for the public to leave them the fuck alone. The above is just how they get it.

Exactly. It is a new form of informal control. Post-Occupy corporate culture had to adapt. Naturally the first adaptation is superficial signalling.

If the company has to advertise it during the interview, there is a higher chance than not it is bullshit. The #1 rule of marketing is advertise your weakness.

Whether people love their job is up to the employer.

Sure you want people who have 'a passion' for the technical domain to begin with but that's not the same as loving the job, which is very much down to the atmosphere, environment, compensation, etc.

A passionate software engineer badly paid and treated like shit won't love his job...

I think it takes two to tango here.

You do need an employer who cares about their employees, treats them fairly, supports and encourages a great atmosphere etc.

You absolutely need enthusiastic, motivated and pleasant employees too though. Employees create the atmosphere as much as the employer.

Now you could flip this and say a good employee should be good at hiring, but IMHO that’s kinda just the same thing.

A good manager should be good at hiring, good at choosing who works under them, choosing the team that cultivates that environment. This is why most companies look for a culture fit more than a skill fit, because it's easier to beef up a good hire's skills than it is to get someone to have healthy communication, empathy, and team working skills towards their employees.

(Technically, team working skills are optional. Not all projects need it as unusual as that sounds. If they have good communication skills, then they can work well with other teams, which is what specialists need to know as they're often a team of one or two. Eg, I'm a data scientist and most of my career I've been a team of one.)

Having an encouraging manager is 80% of job satisfaction according to some survey

Saw the collaborative fund linked to https://medium.com/startupsco/too-crazy-to-be-lucky-a-chat-w...

I think you misunderstand, or at least are taking the quotes a bit too far in either direction.

You can certainly have a passionate person who understands that at the end of the day user value is paramount even at the cost of some beauty. The author just wants to make sure you hire someone who can ship, not just passionately rewrite the codebase when a long weekend rolls around.

> In the same breath he wants people who LOVE their jobs and super-productivity, but yet also understand its only a job.

Yeah, it's a sentiment that I'm not sure was meant to be taken literally rather than rhetorically. Consider who the essay is written towards -- ISVs in 2004. What about an ISV requires super-productivity? In fact, the author states this literally:

> It's okay to be in awe of these great hackers. But as a practical matter, small ISVs would be much better off hiring professionals.

For what it's worth, it's fascinating to look at this essay with 2020 lenses on. I have two observations:

1) The traditional ISV, while not dead, has at a lot of its traditional role usurped & cannibalized by players higher up the value chain. This somewhat relates to my next point.

2) The rise of growth and data science roles as a fusion of marketing and technology along with the enormous growth of tech as a whole (hard tech and soft tech) means that archetypical average social media literate hacker founder archetype of today is quite interested and capable of interacting with users today.

And of the three "sins" the essay points out, that's probably the most cardinal one -- for the vast majority of businesses, if you have high enough margins and an employee who's good enough at growth to add double digits to your bottom-line, are you going to whinge about their predilection to fuss about interesting projects and tools? No, you're going to raise a ton of cheap VC and let them go to town.

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