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Comment by plutonorm | Hacker News Reader

If you want teams to think for themselves you need to provide an incentive. Independent thought requires effort, if I am going to use my energy in pursuit of the company goals, what is in it for me? You can't just expect people to go above and beyond because you encourage them to and pat them on the back for it. Sooner or later it will dawn on them that this is not a reciprocal arrangement. You need to offer genuine promotion opportunities. Real financial incentives. Real autonomy, which means freedom from the quarterly demand for metrics.

I've worked at precisely 0 companies in my time that have offered career opportunities that offer the kind of incentive that I would need to go all in and give a job all my attention.

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I'd like to introduce you to the games industry where the incentive is frequently just "millions of people will get to play the thing that you made". At least where I work there is a huge amount of autonomy ready and that's exactly what drives people (as a simple example - senior rendering programmers just suggesting and implementing new features and techniques for no reason other than the fact that they want to be proud of the product they are building)

Games industry have massive turnover.

At junior/intermediate level, sure. At Senior/Expert/Lead, not so much, people do stay very long time. I certainly work surrounded by people who have been at the same company for 10,15,20, 25+ years(I have a guy on my team who has been here for 27 years!).

Please take this in the constructive way it's intended. You might want to consider that your stance of withholding your full effort is very probably the reason you've never experienced a healthy relationship with your employers.

"Full effort" means different things to different people.

If your definition of "full effort" means: 50+ hour weeks with no end in sight, arbitrary deadlines disconnected from reality that exist only to give some a-hole exec an illusion of lower risk, make-believe agile, inability to disconnect after work, and countless meaningless hoops to jump through, that's NOT something which will reap rewards in the long term and it is far from a healthy relationship.

"Full Effort" should mean a solid day of work, with enough time to have a life outside the office. Sure, sometimes there's a crunch and one needs to stay late. If the relationship is healthy that will happen a handful of times a year, max. Anything more than that, and you're getting used.

Funny thing is, the second version of full effort is more consistent and sustainable in the long run, and consistent and sustainable is what most employers outside of the startup bubble are looking for.

I worked my bum off for 10 years. Saw that it had no effect on my career prospects and then gave up. Wiser employees gave up way before then. I've not seen a single promotion out of development in nearly 20 years in the industry. It's a simple fact at least in the UK, that one does not progress out of software development. Senior/lead developer is easy but after that there is no progression. Development manager roles are hard to come by and require growing into the role. Moving sideways into project manager or scrum master roles is generally very difficult to engineer as well. The simple fact is that engineers are seen as line workers. Line workers are not managers and are not suited to the role.

For as long as I can remember, the best way to get a salary increase/promotion is to find a job in another company.

You might get lucky in the current job, but odds are against you.

I struggled getting a pay rise without changing organisation until i hear the term "technical individual contributors".

A bit of a lightbulb moment for me as i didn't want to go back into people management. I now use this term to set out what i have and what i can do for the project and how that has lead to greater success/value of a product.

It also highlights to management what happens if i was to leave.

I've been a software developer for thirty years and every pay increase has been less than 3% unless I switch companies.

It's their rules. I'm just playing the game.

This right here is the problem though. Unless you're so good that the company can't afford to pay you a fair share of the value you generate a rational firm ought to want to keep us working for them and feeling invested in their future instead of our own.

> I've not seen a single promotion out of development in nearly 20 years in the industry. It's a simple fact at least in the UK, that one does not progress out of software development.

As someone who have experienced British managers in practice, this explains a lot.

All of this sounds like an accurate description of the software industry, and I'm not sure why you think it's unacceptable. You worked hard to become a good developer, you progressed in your career to the point where you can do it very well, but you sound offended that the industry expects you to continue doing it?

I don't think your expectations are realistic. Most peoples' salaries don't increase monotonically throughout their career, they top out around 40, the day you get your last big raise. For most people that's the day they become a senior/top/lead/etc, whether they're a chef or a welder or a doctor or whatever.

I don't know how people cope with the boredom of such a limited career. It's like deciding as a child that you like strawberry sauce and then being forced to eat strawberry sauce for the rest of your life. It's madness.

I mean, if you don't like programming there are other careers; but I've never heard of a successful senior dev that a) wanted to switch in to management or PM, and b) couldn't do so easily.

! Then we live in completely different worlds.

Apparently! But to be clear, the reason I don't see this is because very few senior devs opt to move in to management (even less in to PM, scrum master, etc), not because there are so many management jobs available. And the converse (a senior dev complaining, "I feel like the business keeps pushing me towards roles with more leadership/meetings and less coding") is very common IME.

@zelos For someone people, yes, it really is that bad. Lack of progression is a really really big issue for certain kinds of personality. It's also a really big issue for me because I don't like software anymore - there is no challenge left in it. I am as good a coder as I can be. There's plenty to learn on the architecture side, but..... I'm just bored of it. I want to be able to focus on something else.

That's interestingly the opposite of what I've experienced in the UK. I suppose it depends on what type of company you work for, but in my experience those that realise they are a tech company and truly value technology make ample opportunities for their developers to move forward. My current workplace has both managers (and senior/execs) who have come from a tech career and very high level ICs.

It's not that bad is it? Lead developer puts you on a similar salary to senior doctors or lawyers, generally with a significantly less stressful work environment and shorter working hours.

I've seen several developers work towards management roles, make the switch and then end up moving back to IC roles after realising the grass isn't always greener.

> similar salary to senior doctors or lawyers, with a significantly less stressful work environment and shorter working hours.

There's so much to unpack here. Some doctors make 400k. Some make 700k. Some make 300k. Some are stressed and work a lot of hours. Others aren't and don't.

Some lawyers want to be on partner track at a big firm. They might be stressed and working a lot of hours so that they can make 400k or 500k or $1,000,000 annually. Some make $100k and don't work much, aren't stressed.

Most software developers make less than $150k. Most software developers I know are stress balls until they check out and then start working 24-30 hours a week and the rest of the office time is bullshit.

On the west coast of the US and in Fintech in NY some developers make 300-400k.

Median pay for lawyers is $120k. For doctors $210k. For senior software engineer it’s $130k.

In VHCOL areas those numbers are much higher of course.

I read the comment as that the person has likely tried to give his or her full effort ("sooner or later it dawns on them that this is not a reciprocal arrangement" kind of implies that), or perhaps was positioned to watch others do so, and not receive the benefits.

I don't think lack of promition = unhealthy relationship with colleagues v

'full effort' might mean a variery of things, but if we are talking about working overtime to meet a sudden new requirement, or studying new framework over weekend, then thats a cancelled family trip and dissapounted spouse.

And if you do that repeatedly it will result in unhealthy relationships at home, which is much worse than at work

politics and timing can have just as much an impact as personal effort. you can put in unlimited effort but if it’s on low visibility/impact products, nobody will notice or care

Yep, I've been burned by that. Spent a lot of time going above and beyond because I wanted our product to be the best it could be, but when it came time to downsize, they still laid me off instead of the employees who barely did anything, but went out for beers during lunch with the boss.

Beers with the boss is where it's at.

>I've worked at precisely 0 companies in my time that have offered career opportunities that offer the kind of incentive that I would need to go all in and give a job all my attention.

You miss all the shots you don't take.

I tend to put effort into my jobs and I've gotten very large promotions or bonuses multiple times now at jobs. Other driven people I know at both large tech companies and startups have had similar experiences.

Anecdata, but of the people I know most report that significant promotions only come from job hopping, never from staying in one place. I'm glad that this hasn't been true for you, but based on hearing many stories that are unlike yours and very few that are like yours, I think your case is unusual. Hard to phrase 'you got lucky' in a way that doesn't imply it was just luck or that you didn't work hard (and that the hard work was a necessary step).

Then you have been very lucky or have been working in a different environment to me.

In my experience it's a self full-filling prophecy. If you don't come off as driven then companies that want and reward driven individuals won't hire you. That also extend to networking where previous co-workers won't recommend you for companies that look for and reward driven individuals. Moreover you won't know how to filter for companies that do want and reward driven individuals.

No. I was extremely driven for the first half of my career.

Maybe you got unlucky.

Your original post did mention "freedom from the quarterly demand for metrics" which I don't see as driven from a company perspective. Companies and teams have complex sets of overlapping goals and generally you want to align what you do with those goals. Many of those goals are disjointed from what one would consider necessary for company success. If your boss wants quarterly metrics to go up for their own promotion then you're not going to get promoted by not making those metrics go up.

You're not going to get promoted anyway. No one hires from inside the company, not in the uk anyway.

> if I am going to use my energy in pursuit of the company goals, what is in it for me?

Salary? Isn't the above definition of employment?

They all offer a Salary, so what makes me stick around (and want _this_ company to do better)?

A sense of belonging to a social group. With anything from families, to local sports teams, to nation states, humans have a natural (and quite rational) desire for their own (current) group to succeed. This desire for belonging, and often 'identity', is quite powerful and it typically requires some really bad circumstances for a person to decide to switch groups.

Not everyone sees their company as their group. Companies like to talk about how they treat their employees like family, but it's just a way to manipulate them into doing extra work. Once you see it for what it is, it's easy to start thinking of jobs as something you just do for a paycheck, not something you do because you care about what happens to the company.

But even if you don't care about the company as an entity, isn't it nicer to work for a company whose mission you care about and with peers why care about the same?

I would agree with it written like you just did but not like written before.

What I mean is that I really don't think of my co workers as family at all and any company actively trying to promote that is going to find me very annoyed with that. It's not my family. Don't force me into parties and such.

What I am looking for though is peers that care about doing a good job. I'm tired of working with people that don't know how to do their job. That don't care about clean code. That follow the letter of agile practices but not the spirit.

I couldn't care less about the mission. Every company I've been at so far has had a completely different domain and many of them I couldn't have cared less about.

I am not clear how does this logic work.

I belong to a social group that does barbeque and goes for beers. What would group succeed at if I go "above an beyond"?

Local sports groups dont win championships, most of the time they don't even compete. I struggle to find an example where this analogie hold.

>I belong to a social group that does barbeque and goes for beers. What would group succeed at if I go "above an beyond"?

Well, I suppose this would mean that instead of just being a passive participant, you go out of your way to look for that cool new pub that your friends might enjoy, or a way to make the hamburgers more juicy. You'd take some pride in your ability to provide this value to the group and enjoy the improved social standing of being 'the one who really knows this stuff', and of course just enjoying a better culinary experience overall.

You do not in fact need that. It can work, of course. Financial traders and salespeople, for example, often work in situations with strong extrinsic motivation.

But I've spent years in both startup and non-profit contexts, and I think intrinsic motivation is much more powerful, especially for work that requires creativity. The best people I've worked with, even in startup contexts, weren't focused on the money. They liked making things and solving problems.

And I don't think it's just my experience. McConnell's Rapid Development has data from surveys of developers; they were much more motivated by things like responsibility and challenge than they were by cash.

Thats great for them - but I'm an extrinsically motivated person and so are many others

I don't think there are fixed categories of people for this. I've never met a child who wasn't intrinsically motivated to do creative work. E.g., I think of the many hours I spent lost in drawing and making ascii art.

I think it's mainly a matter of training. People who want us to do things for them train us in responding to extrinsic motivation. That's not terrible; some amount of it makes the economy work, after all. But for me one of the essential characteristics of adulthood is deciding how to train ourselves. If you want, you can reconnect with your intrinsic motivations.

Then go work in sales or another extrinsically motivated profession

Exactly. I'm hiring right now for 3 developer jobs at a mission-driven organization. I user-tested the job posting and found that mission-driven people loved it and more mercenary people were put off by it. Which is exactly the effect I wanted. If you have smart people aligned on the same mission, you get higher productivity with much lower managerial effort.

I don't think it's impossible for cash-maximizers to be good developers, but I do think it's hard. A lot of software is essentially a long-term investment, so the short-term thinking of people hustling for a buck works against it. More than once I've had to clean up code bases put together by contractors who were clearly in it for the money and it showed in their work. There might be some theoretical way to bridge the long-term needs via a complicated short-term incentive structure, but I doubt it. It's too prone to things like the "code me a new minivan" problem: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/488178/what-does...

That sounds awesome and I couldn't agree more.

Don't get me wrong, I am in it for the money in the sense that I need a proper salary but I couldn't care less about a 'bonus' being dangled in front of me and putting metrics in place that I'm supposed to hit to get a larger or smaller raise and percentage of the measly bonus (and no, making the bonus larger doesn't make it better. Makes it worse).

I do my best every day just because I enjoy my job. I won't try to do it better because of some metric someone is judging me on. I might actually do a worse job if I find my employer trying to use these metrics to deny me proper raises. Worse in the sense that you will probably see the metric reached. Actual output or overall results for the company will suffer.

There is only 1 way out of this: start your own company.

Indeed, I am currently doing so.

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