How do I manage an employee who doesn’t need the job? | Hacker News Reader

How do I manage an employee who doesn’t need the job?

askamanager.org

106 pointsmooreds149 comments

"Jean is quite brilliant, but has made it clear several times in the four years she’s been with us that she doesn’t work for the money, but works because she loves the job."

Kiss their ass.

(I feel this blog post is 100% made up though. "It's 3 am. What do I fill the comuter page with? Ficticional Jean sounds nice?)

I used to read this blog but it became clear a few years ago that most of the scenarios were phony.

Yeah I was surprised this made it to the front page, it looked like an obvious straw man or slow pitch / setup to me, no evidence of realism in how it is written

I have worked with people kind of like this. They are senior developers can do software anywhere, so go ahead and threaten them. It won't matter.

They do it for you because they enjoy the work. Plenty of others want them. They do need money, but 15 other people will give it to them if you won't.

"Fact is stranger than fiction."

I had a coworker whose very well-compensated husband told her she had to get a job to pay for her extravagant vacations. They paid cash for cars, etc and she had been a homemaker for a few years and they had no kids. But her penchant for spending a month in places like Bali was more than he was comfortable with.

She got a job. She totally took a month off to go to Bali.

I have no idea how heavily edited the questions are on Ask A Manager, or whether the "reader" is an actual person or a contrivance, but let's assume it's real.

Although the "no leverage over her" language is misguided, the fact is that among the duties of a manager is laying out the expectations for a role and finding the right incentives to motivate workers to reach or exceed those expectations. And in this case, the manager is having trouble finding the right incentives because the compensation lever doesn't seem to work.

So the manager could spin their wheels trying to come up with lots of creative alternate incentives that may or may not work ... or they could start to chip away at all the things that make it hard to get rid of a person who isn't meeting expectations -- work on documentation, spreading knowledge of their duties around, researching whether a temp agency can help, etc. Or they could adjust their expectations.

Which is not to say that it's totally unreasonable for someone to take a month's unpaid leave. The manager should also address the organizational stuff that keeps that from being an unreasonable expectation.

n=1 but I've submitted to Ask A Manager, and Alison didn't change a word when she published my question.

I hope that one day, no one needs their jobs and everyone is like Jean, only working because they want to. Right now the employee/employer relationship is more like indentured servitude. And a lot of managers like it that way, because it's the only way they know how to lead a team: with the threat of losing your shelter and food to motivate you. Universal basic income can't come soon enough, but I'm willing to compromise at just universal healthcare for now.

Who will clean the toilets?

Everyone uses toilets. Maybe everyone should clean the toilets?

And what about communal/public toilets?

Just like Jury duty

So, by force.

Yes, a civic duty.

People who are compensated enough to do so despite having other options.

Sounds like the current system.

People who want clean toilets.

If it’s a job that needs doing, the wages offered will rise to compensate.

What's the difference between that and "indentured servitude"?

Is that a serious question? Do you consider C-suite executives exploited indentured servants?

>Is that a serious question

yes

>Do you consider C-suite executives exploited indentured servants?

No, but I fail to see how this answers the question. If I'm asking you what the difference between a kid and an adult is, and you reply with "do you consider 80-year olds a kid", it doesn't tell me anything about what's a kid or not.

Ideally a robot, tbqh. Anything that doesn't require actual human thought, we should push off to machines.

But lacking that—we could also offer people the option to clean toilets in exchange for larger homes or more lavish hobbies. But unlike today, they'd also have the ability to quit their jobs and lead a simpler life, without starving.

Cleaning toilets doesn't require actual human thought?

I look forward to the day that toilets are the last problem on earth

Probably quite highly paid people who don't mind manual labour.

I find it really interesting to think about how prices and practices would have to shift if we couldn't "force" anyone to do anything.

We don’t. We hire for a job that needs doing for a price that someone is willing to do it for.

If no one applies to do it, you’re not entitled to go out and impress someone into service: you keep looking or you do it yourself.

The reason some people are willing to do some jobs involves force. The idea that people have freedom of choice in what they do is a sleight of hand to obscure the fact that many jobs are taken due to threat of immediate homelessness.

Believe it or not, that's still a choice.

There are people on the street not willing to make that choice. Most people on the street chose homelessness in some sense and to some degree.

Someone on r/homeless once said "I didn't choose the choice." In other words, homelessness is often a case of choosing the lesser evil.

They decided it was better than staying in an abusive relationship or something like that.

I wish we would design and build a world with better options and fewer people being pushed into homelessness. But I also wish people would see homeless people more clearly as real people with minds and personalities and some degree of agency.

It is a disservice to them to simply stamp "victim" on their forehead and think no further on the matter.

I can’t add to your response, so I’ll simply endorse it.

The forefront of our society's choices that creates this state are zoning laws. They create artificial barriers that increase the minimum viable income level. Around here that minimum is about $1000 for a one bedroom. That's a pretty tall minimum, especially when someone is down and out. Anyone who doesn't make the financial cut for any reason and has no willing support network is on the street.

I'm not talking about more high density housing, though making that less limited would help.

With existing resources it wouldn't be hard to turn parking lots from rundown commercial districts into live-in-your-car lots. I ran a bunch of numbers, and it would be reasonable for a person to rent their parking space and additional shared facilities (wifi, bathrooms, showers, food prep area, laundromat) for less than $150/mo. You might hit as low as $50-$100 depending on local real estate pricing as a non-profit. Most of these ingredients are readily available in every modern city and having a very low rent outlet that allowed people independence would clean up a lot of homelessness. I know I'd much rather live out of a car than on the street.

This is just one potential solution. The impediments are more institutional inertia than an actual inability to solve the problems.

It's a lot more complicated than that and I'm really not interested in hearing more schemes to provide "homes for the homeless." All such schemes boil down "I have some idea for housing people that sounds like it might interest people currently sleeping in a dumpster."

The thing about homelessness is that the minute you have a home, you are no longer homeless.

This is not a separate population that needs some weird sub par answer that damn few people would genuinely desire as a housing solution. Homeless people are just people currently without housing. That's it. That's all it is.

We need more housing for ordinary, not wealthy people. Housing with dignity but that dignity needs to stop being defined by people who think "If it's not a mansion, I ain't living in it!"

We used to build small homes. Normal, market rate small homes.

We mostly don't anymore.

Financing mechanisms and tax incentives are part of the morass of housing policies creating the current mess, not just zoning codes. Though we have largely zoned out of existence the ability to build Missing Middle Housing, etc.

How do small homes improve the affordability gap when a one bedroom apartment is too much?

Financing mechanisms and tax incentives, neither of these prevent creative solutions to problems. Zoning laws do. They dictate all aspects of land use.

Missing Middle Housing is essential for creating mixed use, walkable neighborhoods. We need to resume building neighborhoods of that sort so cars are genuinely optional.

Housing is the single biggest budget item for most people followed by transportation because car ownership is nigh unavoidable for most Americans. Even if rent doesn't actually drop, if you can live without a car and still get to work, suddenly some things make sense.

We no longer build functioning small towns and neighborhoods. We expect everyone to drive everywhere.

Financing is part of the problem because the easiest thing to finance is single family detached housing thanks to precedents set shortly after WW2 which have strongly shaped housing expectations and policies for decades.

Tax incentives, like breaks on interest, tend to encourage "housing inflation" where those who can afford a house at all buy a bigger house because it's no more expensive than a smaller house. It doesn't benefit most people looking for cheap housing. It just encourages Americans to build larger homes.

Zoning laws are absolutely part of the problem. I completely agree with that point.

But New Urbanism has tried to get around that and one of their major sticking points is difficulty in financing projects.

You know how in the early and mid 20th century people were predicting all this cool stuff about how the world will be post-scarcity some day soon, nobody will have to work more than a few hours a week, etc?

There is a reason why the "people in power" (hand-waving over who they might actually be) never want that to come to pass.

That's a conspiracy I can't get behind, considering how desperately we cling on to the one taste of a post-scarcity society, having cheap power (pun intended) from oil.

Robot self cleaning toilets? For fuck's sake

An automated Toilet cleaner and a small number of people who enjoy the work

That sounds great if the technology and/or the requisite number of people exist, but what if they don't?

Then a given society has not progressed to a point where a new economic paradigm is ready to replace mixed market economies. Even Karl Marx believed capitalism would remain dominant until automation had removed unskilled labor from the equation.

I've spent time researching (space) toilets. In a post-scarcity world, I might spend time to improve their design, or those of the robots that'd maintain them.

My attempt, although I called it a cyber toilet.

https://d18qs7yq39787j.cloudfront.net/uploads/solutionfile/6...

And was that for NASA's Lunar Loo challenge by any chance?

Toilets should be redesigned to be easy to clean.

https://d18qs7yq39787j.cloudfront.net/uploads/solutionfile/6...

Currently toilet cleaners are so cheap that the efficient use of their labour is not considered.

There is always a price at which people (myself included) will happily clean toilets. The problem is right now the "choice" for the people doing it is – do the job or your family goes hungry. Have you ever noticed it's always the refugees or undocumented immigrants doing it?

Reminds me of the punk song, Jesus Does The Dishes by Wingnut Dishwashers Union.

And so you're asking me, who does the dishes after the revolution?

Well, I do my own dishes now, We'll do our own dishes then

You know it's always the ones who don't who ask that fucking question

https://genius.com/Wingnut-dishwashers-union-jesus-does-the-...

The first thing I thought was, "what would you do if she died/had to take care of an ailing parent full-time/became a religious mystic/ran off with the person of her dreams/got arrested/whatever. Any given employee is always, potentially, gone tomorrow, whether they "need" the job or not.

Many managers don't realize the need for redundancy in their workforce. In technical industries you are taught to have machine/system redundancy to ensure no line interruptions...but there is little attention paid to making sure your workforce has the same redundancy.

no shit, I thought covid taught us all that we need some fat on the hog

Which is interesting, as plenty of businesses treat their workers as commodities.

To be fair, people redundancy is hard. Not only is hiring them expensive [0], but you also need to find someone that gets along with you, the company and especially their counterpart. Then this person needs to also have similar competencies and even if you have all of those points checked, you still need to get them to share enough so that they can actually replace each other - which is in itself already a hard problem. And, if they get along too well, you might end up in a situation where they leave together.

Engineering redundancy really is a children's play compared to people redundancy.

[0] It's not too much of a problem for large corporations, but small businesses with less than ten people can struggle quite a bit to hire replacements, especially if they don't have the workload for two people right away.

It _shouldn't_ be too much of a problem for large corporations, but from what I've seen it often is.

The people problems stay, of course, but larger corporations have the advantage that a) hiring an additional employee is not as big of a financial hit and b) they usually have larger teams, where load balancing tasks or filling in for a missing employee is not as big of an issue. That's what I meant by it is easier for them :)

I didn't necessarily mean double the amount of people...but at least have enough cross training that a single person won't cripple your company. I've seen this far too many times that one or two people have too much of the key knowledge for a group and if one or both are all of a sudden gone (for any reason) then the rest of the team is absolutely screwed. Rotating job scopes and responsibilities is one of the best ways to ensure you have knowledge redundancy in my opinion...although depending on the team this may be extremely difficult, but still necessary.

We've spent decades rewarding managers for "cutting the fat", while ignoring that fat is the reserve the body keeps to stay alive in times of stress.

Like a bodybuilder who has cut for competition, we have no reserves for day-to-day living.

The issue isn't just that she's disappearing, it's that she's setting a precedent that she doesn't actually want to be a full-time employee. She's not actually leaving the company; She expects the company to backfill her position for a month and then return the position to her when she decides to come back.

In practice, people are generally quite forgiving and happy to step in to cover for someone who has to leave for family emergencies or a normal vacation. It gets a bit harder when someone has simply decided that they're not working this month.

Unless her work can simply stop, this means other employees will have to pick up extra work. They can't hire someone new to backfill because this person will be returning soon. They could hire someone new to add extra capacity to the team, but then why give this person their job back in a month when they return? Why not just give it to someone else who plans to actually work full-time?

It's actually a much more challenging logistics problem than it sounds, unless the person really does work in a vacuum on work that can be paused for a month without consequence. The impact extends to the rest of the team's workload.

...all true, but from the way they asked the question, it sounds like they're not ready for any of those other scenarios, either.

This was my reaction.

Feel grateful for the time someone gives you. You might not be able to replace them when they move on - but that should make you appreciate what they have given you even more.

Are you better off muddling through when they are gone, or never having them at all?

I find it saddening, and yet too usual, that managers/business owners feel that they need to "have leverage" on their employees, say, use the stick while dangling the carrot.

With the risk of coming across too philosophical/impractical I'd start with _why_. Why you as a business owner wake up in the morning? Why did you started the business in the first place? Employees that are not motivated by money or that can easily find a job anywhere else can are motivated by a vision, purpose, meaning. They can also be motivated by the inherit pleasure of working (the book "Deep Work" by Newport come to mind).

I personally identify with Jane and in a recent experiment it showed that finding a job as a senior software engineer is no trouble at all. And thus, it is the mission of the company, the problem that we are solving, SEEING the results of my work in happy customers, etc.

Companies that do that have me for the long run!

These advice column problems always feel a little bit like a strawman argument designed to make it easy for the reader to dunk on the person asking the question. The quip about not having leverage over the employee is poor phrasing, at best.

That said, the advice delivered is good. Specifically:

> But the point is to have an honest conversation with Jean when this stuff comes up — here’s what she wants, here’s what you need, and is there a path forward that works for everyone? If there’s not, that’s okay.

Like most of these situations, the solution is to have an honest conversation with the person and lay out clear expectations. Many of these problems arise when people are too timid to address the elephant in the room. In this case, the issue is that the employee has no qualms with leaving the job for a month on short notice without coordinating with the employer.

Having employees who come and go as they please (specifically excluding medical and family emergencies out of their control) is not a great situation. I don't mind coordinating leaves of absence with employees in advance, but it requires some two-way communication and planning. If an employee decides to take spontaneous, extended leave (again, excluding emergencies and other situations out of their control) without first coordinating it with us, I would strongly consider transitioning the relationship to a contractor arrangement.

Keep in mind that this impacts the entire team's workload. If one team member disappears occasionally, the rest of the team will have to pick up the extra work to cover for her. Ask yourself how you'd feel if one of your coworkers disappeared for months at a time because they felt like it and you were asked to cover part of their workload. Not great for team morale.

The other issue with these situations is that it sets a precedent: If one employee disappears for a month because they decided not to work for a few weeks, you're in a tough spot next time someone else wants to do the same thing. If you let this employee come and go as they please but refuse to allow someone else to take voluntary leave, it's not a good look. Don't give people one-off allowances unless you're ready to give the same allowance to anyone else who asks.

I’m thinking, why would you refuse a month of unpaid leave to anyone at all? Surely hiring someone new is way more expensive and takes longer than a month.

You need to plan for this and it sets a precedent. This company has 4 employees; 25% of the whole workforce suddenly missing for a whole month is probably not easy to handle and definitely not something you want to establish as okay.

You’re assuming you’ll still have the employee if you refuse.

The point is that once you have no leverage over employees (because their livelihood doesn’t depend on the job), you cannot establish what is not or not okay on your own.

> You’re assuming you’ll still have the employee if you refuse.

If the employee quits, you're in this situation once (and you'd be in it anyway). If you allow it and set a precedent, you might end up in this situation far more often and with worse consequences if you decide to change your mind.

> The point is that once you have no leverage over employees [...], you cannot establish what is not or not okay on your own.

Sure you can. You just need to find people that are okay with what you're okay with (and the same thing in reverse, of course).

I don't think leverage works in this case either way. If you have employees that are willing to let you stand in the rain and sabotage your business [0], you need to find new ones anyway. Leverage only let's you avoid the inevitable for a small bit in exchange for burning a bridge.

[0] I'm not saying that this is necessary the case in OPs scenario, but it plausibly might be.

If their work is isolated and can be paused while they're gone, it doesn't matter. Well, other than dropping productivity for that duration.

But for most of us, we're operating as part of a team. Our duties don't stop when we're gone. They have to be covered by someone else. If I'm disappearing for a month, the rest of the team will have to pick up the slack and do my job for me.

This might be okay if you're working on mythical man-month projects where the work can be redistributed and deadlines pushed back at will, but at most companies it just means everyone else has to work harder to cover.

If someone wants to come and go for months at a time, it's better to restructure their employment as a contractor and provide the work in contractor-sized blocks. Full-time employees are expected to make an effort to be available full-time for the team's sake (excluding emergencies and such)

> The quip about not having leverage over the employee is poor phrasing, at best.

I actually think she handled this quite well. She shortly pointed out that this is not a good way to phrase our think about things, but then she actually discussed the real underlying problem of the employee possibly leaving on short notice.

They can be your best or worst employee. I like Naval Ravikants attitudes where he just straight up tells them he doesnt expect them to work there forever and that he will help them start their own thing one day. Principal agent problem.

I think so much would be gained from this, if simply graceful transitions between people.

People are going to leave, but most companies prefer that it be a surprise plopped on their desk with two weeks of notice.

That manager needs to learn about the bus factor [1] and key person insurance [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

[2] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/k/keypersoninsurance.asp

A family owned business and one of their employees has more knowledge of the business than the owners, 4 years and they never thought spend some time documenting that knowledge.

Not everyone is capable of running a business.

This is what I was thinking. Jean IS the business. They should offer to sell it to her. Then they can buy a fast food franchise. They'd have more leverage over teenagers and old people with no retirement.

Geeez .. give the person a job they want to do and be proud of doing .. the need of a job is the worst reason to have a job.

If they are that critical then they are an unrecognized partner. You could consider giving them a cut of the business.

If you don't want to do that, then I think you need to start finding a way to spread their responsibilities around to less critical people who will have no ownership of the business.

I took out a loan and bought a fancy sports car right after I got my first job. I was proudly showing it off to colleagues in the parking lot, when my manager walked by, stopped and smugly said, "I've got you now!" That snide comment taught me so much about life: Do your best to avoid debt and bad managers and/or work environments. Funny thing, when I quit (after selling the car and clearing my debt), that same manager threatened not to pay me unless I finished a project (about another month of work). The movie, "American Beauty", had been out for a little bit, and I stole a line: "So don't pay me." The look on his face was priceless.

Always have FU money.

"I’m concerned about the timing because we won’t have a way to cover Y while you’re out, and I’m concerned that we’ll be setting a precedent where if we approve it for you, we’ll have to approve it for others."

Always the lamest of the lame excuses. If you are a business owner, never use this lame reason.

Every agreement between an employee and a company, is just that. An agreement with a specific employee and a company.

Companies take on part time workers if they want. Or quarter time workers. Or interns. Different pay rates.

All a business owner has to do is say that it is the agreement between the employee and the company.

The reality in any business is that you have A-level employees, B-level, C-level, and "fire that slacker" employees.

A good business person will bend over backwards to keep the A-level employees. The A-level employees actually should have total control over management, and management should kiss their asses. It's just the way it is. Those employees are the boss.

In most things, the Pareto principle, which states that 80% of the results come from 20% of the causes. So if you have 100 employees, that's 20 employees that do 80% of the work, and 80 employees that do 20% of the work.

The A-level employees always have options, so if you fluck with them, they are gone, and you are stuck with your 80 employees that don't do crap.

So if you hire an asshole manager or CEO and they treat A-level players like shit, then the A's will leave. Maybe after 2 years, you only have 5 A's. Then your whole business will start spiraling downwards.

Give the A's what they want. They are the golden goose. If other employees get resentful, f them, they are easily replaced, much easier to replace them than A players.

So treat A's like gold.

I mean, if they're a serial killer, or grab titty all the time, then, no, but other than egregious sh-t, go to great lengths to keep the A's. If they want more money, fire 5 of the C-level employees. Whatever you have to do.

This is for all you business owners, current or future.

> I feel that we have no leverage over her at all.

Shudder

That sentence, right there, is why I have no intention of working for anyone, ever again.

If I sign a contract, then I am bound by that contract. It doesn't matter whether or not I "need" the money. I have signed onto the job, and have agreed to deliver something, in return for something else. Failure of either party, to fulfill their end of the bargain, will result in legal action.

Employment should be considered to be a similar arrangement. The deliverables and payments are different (as are the laws), but, at the heart of things, that's what it's all about. Me give, you give. We happy. Me no give, or you no give...We unhappy.

However, I have noticed that the current HR mindset, has become more like a "Dom" one. The company is in charge of the relationship, and assumes that they have more power than the agreed-upon contract.

I've seen this taken to ludicrous extremes.

I have a couple of friends that are very rich. They got that way, the old-fashioned way. Built a small company into a big company.

I am often told how they pretty much owe everything to their CFO, who they value, and compensate extremely well. The CFO doesn't need the job at all. She's been set for years.

But they treat her with Respect, and give her a satisfying work environment, and everyone makes lots of dosh.

Isn't employment that way? It is basically a two week cycle renewable indefinite agreement that either party may terminate for any reason at any time.

I am not bound to deliver anything at all as part of my employment agreement. There are no set deliverables. Maybe others have different experiences.

In my employment, we signed a basic contract, upon employment. Also, those goals and whatnot that are set in employee evaluations? They are contract milestones. At the company I worked for, HR was run by the General Counsel. Fun bunch.

Generally, the more "intellectual," or "knowledge-based" a job is, the more likely it is to have a well-established (and enforced) contract.

Most C-levels work on contracts.

After living and working in North America for 5 years, my brother returned to Australia. The biggest difference he immediately noticed is how employees are treated.

When everyone has healthcare as a human right, minimum wage is $20.33/hr[1] and a single person with no kids can easily get $1440/mo[2] in welfare (even if never had a job, been out of work for a decade, etc.) the playing field is vastly different.

People are not stuck with their job, and so employers know they must treat them well if they want to retain them.

[1] https://squareup.com/au/en/townsquare/minimum-wage-australia

[2] https://www.servicesaustralia.gov.au/individuals/services/ce...

Meanwhile, as a Canadian, if you try to bring this topic up with certain Americans in certain locations, expect to get treated as if you're the literal reincarnation of Karl Marx.

And after living in the USA myself, I can see the other side of the coin too, and I understand why some people will fight extraordinarily hard to keep the status quo.

Keeping the workers "engaged" certainly helps the economy, and it helps the asset owners get obscenely rich beyond belief.

After all, if Walmart had to pay all their employees in the USA a minimum of $20/hr the Walton family would probably only be worth a few tens of billions, instead of $235 billion.

In countries like Australia and Canada good living conditions for all is more important than obscene riches for a few. The USA just flips that around.

TBH Australia is VHCOL country and the minimum wage makes it survivable but you will struggle to say buy a median priced property. The free healthcare is partially true as well.

But worse is if you lose job the unemployment benefit called jobSeeker is very low and poverty level. It was temporarily boosted in pandemic and current lockdowns but you can't realistically live on that.

> TBH Australia is VHCOL country and the minimum wage makes it survivable but you will struggle to say buy a median priced property

Yes, property prices are insane in Australia, though it's clear you'll do much better in Australia on Minimum wage than you will in the USA. Working class poor, multiple jobs and all that.

> The free healthcare is partially true as well.

In what way? My family have lived in Oz for generations, everyone gets everything free. My brothers horribly broken leg, Mum's Stage 4 lung cancer, child birth, etc. etc. Never paid a single cent out of pocket, never had a single second stress about money for healthcare. Even when people have been without jobs that doesn't change a thing.

> But worse is if you lose job the unemployment benefit called jobSeeker is very low and poverty level

Of course people without jobs are not living large, but they're living.

Reading this article I picture John Travolta offering rats as a way to get leverage. The whole thing was cringy. As a manager you will find diminishing control over your employees and will need to hire more people to pick up the slack when someone wants to live life.

The advice is even worse:

> The way you motivate someone who doesn’t need the money is the same way you should motivate people who do need the money: by giving them meaningful roles with real responsibility where they can see how their efforts contribute to a larger whole

Completely misses the point: the manager needs Jean, not the way around.

Not to mention, Jean could just plain refuse to take on the "meaningful" role, if she likes what she does now and how things are going currently.

Whatcha gonna do if the "meaningful role" isn't so meaningful to her?

Some people just don't understand: Jean is probably in a better position than both the manager asking the question and the person giving the "advice".

The manager just can't have leverage over her.

Exactly. Maybe she enjoys the work enough that she wants to do it when it’s convenient for her, but would set it aside if something more interesting to her came up — which could be family! or a holiday! Or retirement! Or a different job! There doesn’t have to be grand purpose to employment and there can be a mis-alignment of goals: maybe the employer values reliability over skill, maybe she isn’t the perfect employee because of her likelihood to leave… that’s the assessment the employer has to make, there’s no magic solution.

The idea that the employer just needs to incentivise the employee the right way is absurd.

I have a friend that has been in “funemployment” for the last 20 months.

He always says he wishes he could take “working vacations” to exercise his productive self.

It’s a bit like contacting, if the contractor didn’t need the money but was looking for an interesting challenge.

I have a feeling this will be the future of employment. Basically salary positions with 9-11 months of unpaid vacation. We just need a really good project/schedule management solution.

The idea that the employer just needs to incentivise the employee the right way is absurd.

Why is that absurd? Who would work at a job if they aren't incentivized the right way? My employer incentivizes me with a salary and interesting work. Take either of those away and I'll look for a new job. For "Jean", then interesting (or otherwise rewarding) work is the only way to incentivize her.

I haven’t read the article, but you might be the one missing the point: a meaningful role can be meaningful for both parties.

You need to get to a product/market fit in some sense.

Sounds like you either missed the point, or didn’t read the whole article.

Relying on a magical single person, where it would be a disaster if they suddenly left, is a bad spot to be in. “Bus factor” seems to be the main point of this advice.

> Completely misses the point: the manager needs Jean, not the way around.

I think you miss the point: Something meaningful in this case is (probably) meant as "something Jean thinks of as good and important", with the intention that Jean herself is happy and simply doesn't want to leave.

So what?

It's a very useful skill to know how to entice, encourage, and work with people who have more power than you. Among other benefits, it opens up positions in the very top echelons of society, where (by definition) you are going to meet lots of people you have zero leverage over. It also means you get to work on high-performing teams (high-performing employees tend to get their pick of where they work), and it's just a lot nicer work environment when everybody is there because they choose to be rather than because they have to be.

I feel like there's some fairly large subset of humanity that assumes that nothing ever gets done without some overseer cracking the whip, and just lacks the conceptual framework to understand people coming together to accomplish things because they mutually agree that it's work worth doing. It's worth breaking out of that frame.

Whatcha gonna do if the "meaningful role" isn't so meaningful to her?

Then it's not a meaningful role -- clearly the role needs to be meaningful to Jean or it's no incentive to work there.

My wife has a "Jean" at the nonprofit she works for -- she and her husband both come from wealthy family. Jean continues to work there purely because she believes in the mission of the organization and feels that she's making a valuable contribution. She draws a token salary but donates that back to the organization at the end of the year.

It's certainly possible to find meaningful roles that people will enjoy working at even if they don't care about the salary.

I think that an employee who has little to lose is going to make better decisions and. take smarter risks. An employee who feels they can't lose the job is probably going to be overly cautious and not risk speaking up or taking action when they should.

she would have simply quit, and that would be disastrous for the business because of the institutional knowledge she holds and all our clients love her and always sing her praises. We would also probably have two hire two people to replace her, because she’s very versatile (graphic design, copywriting, strategy, account manager, etc).

Her "not needing the money" is not the real problem here. She would have them over a barrel even if she was a divorced single mom because she is critical to their business and not easily replaced and replacing her with two employees likely means paying more money for less net benefit which potentially could kill their small business.

Give them real investment in the business, by way of shares or a vote or something. Next!

Diverging a little, but still related, I'm thinking a bit about dynamics in orgs where perhaps _many_ employees don't really need the job. E.g. my understanding is there are some academic fields where a large percentage of scholars have family wealth. In some non-profits, highly qualified staff know that they're earning much less than they would in industry.

In cases where passion for an organization's mission or interest in the work or perceived prestige is the most important consideration for many employees at an organization, does that change how they work overall?

I'm an employee that doesn't need the job. As far as I can tell I get managed just like everyone else, because I'm a professional. The only time I can imagine it mattering is if my manager started acting unprofessionally, in which case I'd first try to fix it directly and through my org, and then go to HR to discuss next steps, such as a transfer or an amicable end of employment.

Supposing a hypothetical employee who doesn't need the job and is unprofessional, why would one handle that differently than any other unprofessional employee?

If that's your approach, and you think you need that kind of leverage, then they should leave. Be better than this. This is a child's view of how management works.

Imagine they're contractors if you must.

Simple, manage by objective. Full stop.

P.S. allowing yourself to get into this position was a mistake to begin with. One is none and two is one. Always have a backup/spare. To that end, if you cannot institute the burden of documentation for everything- at least then if you lose this person you’ll have a decent shot at picking up the pieces.

Her negotiation power is beyond the control of the manager. Despite the contractual relationship, it is actually her hiring the company to fulfill her needs, since they are so dependent on her. The manager's job in this scenario, is not representing the company to her, but representing her to the company, i.e. adjust the company's policy to avoid losing her.

The truth is that the owner feels trapped because he doesn't want to pay/doesn't have the money to pay the wage of two people to replace this one employee. Once the owner gets past that, then he'll be empowered to say no to the request.

When an employee becomes that integral to your business then a way to manage that employee is to allow them to buy into the company or give them a small piece like 1-5% so they have an interest and responsibility in it's success.

Our society is full of roles people only fill because they need a job to feed and house themselves. If everyone was financially independent, nobody would clean the shitty toilets.

Managers should not have leverage over employees. Any management is simply, straight up, abuse. Sorry not sorry your chosen profession was not viable. That's not my fault.

This must be a popular attitude with your employer?

Do you really see no option to have a firm that requires the coordination of staff be a large enough task that it deserves its own specialists, or are you violating HN guidelines for fun?

I think it depends on what management means. I work (well, until they turfed my department today) for a project manager and they manage my day to day activities. I suspect they do disagree with this part.

I am officially managed by the director of software development. Formal employment stuff is run through him.

You could be right, and I can say that I don’t really enjoy being project managed all the time. But, project management is not always abuse, even if it sometimes seems poorly aligned with corporate goals.

Management, like other disciplines, is hard. The odd part is that it is frequently treated as a secondary responsibility for people who also have other jobs.

Management is not only hard but also populated with sadists, because they are the only ones willing to manage.

That's correct. I believe firms should not have more than 200 employees, based on life experience.

What's your excuse for being with a world where dominance and submission is tolerated as a requirement to survive?

Specialization of labor. 200 is a big company to have none.

"200 is a big company to have none" I can't parse this sentence. Are you saying 200 people without managers in untenable? Because I know for a fact that is not true.

I think we could be more open-minded about it though. Maybe “manager” could be a position that developers rotate through, like I’ve seen done with the position of scrum master.

No need for a dedicated person and everyone gets management experience.

Or maybe management could be automated away somehow. I mean in an ideal world, if a person isn’t a worker then they’re redundant in a way, aren’t they? Let’s have computers doing the organizing.

Thank you for some sanity.

Also "my employer" lololololololoolol

If you want something you don't have with a standard employment relationship, perhaps you can negotiate a contract that also gives them something that they want.

I think having an employee that is not interested in money, is also not interested in the success of your business. Its that simple.

It might be that their interest in the code happens to coincide with your business interest right now, but you can guess what will happen when you change direction and have to throw out all the beautiful code they have been creating. Or perhaps you have to add an ugly feature for a client, or you hire somebody who writes ugly code.

Your employees need to be motivated by the same things you are, and if not, you should part ways and find better partners.

> I think having an employee that is not interested in money, is also not interested in the success of your business. Its that simple.

They are obviously far, far more interested in the business than someone who's just there for the money (most people) and that will leave as soon as someone else gives a little bit more.

Having a salary doesn't mean one is any more interested in the business – the only concern that provides is whether or not the business will be solvent to make payroll.

If you are giving founder-level stock options, then you can demand a similar level of "interest" as a founder. Anything else, it's just an exchange of money for labor. That's it.

Leaving as soon as somebody paying more money is just as likely to happen as somebody leaving because there are more interesting problems to solve elsewhere. (Or they just get bored of your business problems)

I'm not sure about stock options, but I agree that key employees should get rich when an owner gets rich.

This is a pretty grim outlook. It’s at best a false dichotomy between “code lovers” who write beautiful code and “money lovers” who write ugly code. An engineer who can adapt their output based on constraints and requirements deserves to be well compensated for that flexibility.

I didn't mean it to sound grim.

>An engineer who can adapt their output based on constraints and requirements deserves to be well compensated for that flexibility.

Yes, but somebody that is not motivated by money will have no incentive to adapt to the constraints and requirements. Which is what the whole thing is about.

Except perhaps if they are motivated to make the rest of the team happy I guess.

Most businesses exists to make money. I think having everybody in the room on the same page is very valuable.

You can't manage employees. You can only manage agreements.

"I feel that we have no leverage over her at all."

What a horrible approach to management.

The advice is even worse.

Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28215737

How so?

See my other reply to the post itself -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28215737

Could you be more specific? Having a non-confrontational conversation to get what you need and figuring out how to reduce the dependency on a key employee are pretty obvious tactics.

If there's anything "bad" about this advice, it's that adopting the detached attitude necessary for such conversations is hard when you are stressed about the situation yourself. My coping mechanism is to be relentlessly positive that things will work out but that clearly does not work for everyone. (Including me, sometimes.)

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28215737

The useful advice is in the second half of the answer. Your comment seems to be fixating on just one part of the response.

How is the advice worse?

The advice is acknowledging the reality that employees can always leave whether for other job opportunities or family reasons or just because. As a business owner, you need to plan for that reality. Having the expectation that your employees will never leave you for other things is unrealistic and unhealthy.

The employer makes it clear that the employee does a great job. The only complaint the business owner seems to have is that the employee isn't in a desperate financial situation and thus has control over her life decisions.

"The only complaint the business owner seems to have is that the employee isn't in a desperate financial situation and thus has control over her life decisions."

This is the sad situation we are in presently.

Good lord. I hope this person either reevaluates their whole approach to management or stops being a manager. If the club you swing around as a manger is “or you’re fired” then you got into management for very very wrong reasons.

It's likely they don't want to be a manager at all. It says they started their own business and have two employees. Probably just didn't want to work for someone else, but realized they can't do it alone, but don't have the means to hire an actual manager to hand the reigns to. You can have the greatest idea for a product or a business, but it doesn't mean you know jack about leadership or human motivation.

"I feel that we have no leverage over her at all."

This sentence explains so much about modern employee relations.

I think you may be overreading the text. The writer could also be just saying they feel really stuck. It's a common problem in small companies, especially in cases where it's hard to hire replacements.

Maybe, but the phrasing makes me think that the only tool he considered initially is coercion.

Yea, that's how I read into the phrasing too: "We can't get her to do what we want by holding a threat of her paycheck or job over her. How else do you motivate someone?" Yikes!

Quite the contrary I think it says everything we need to know about the business owner. It really just seems like they’re concerned they won’t be able to get such a nice deal of an employee, if Jean were to leave.

They would have to hire two whole employees to do her job, and pay them market wages! Jean works for less because she likes what we tell her to do, and she doesn’t need the money. Instead of maybe paying a little more to ensure the business would continue running in the case that Jean leaves or even just falls sick for an extended period, they would rather look for ways to lock her in (it doesn’t really seem like pay raises are on the table though). This just reads like textbook exploitation to me.

I agree. If you can't afford to pay wages people will accept, then you don't have a viable business.

> Quite the contrary I think it says everything we need to know about the business owner.

It's hard for me to believe anyone can assess a human being from one ambiguous sentence. This is not Twitter.

I think it means they feel they have no leverage over this person at all.

There's an expression for that. Tough.

I unknowingly found myself in a similar employee situation. I had left a company to work at a startup. The startup failed. Around the same time a key person on the team I used to be on went on maternity leave. I was available so I agreed to contract employment to the end of the year. They put a clause in the contract that if I don't stay to the end of the term there would be a $10k penalty. I didn't think twice and signed it, though at the time I thought it would be better for me to give my word on it since we all knew each other.

Well anyway, during the summer there was this coding contest and I won 2nd place. The contest was a recruiting stunt, no surprise, and I was offered a job. I said yes for Jan. They really wanted me ASAP and I explained my situation. They offered to pay that out and a signing bonus, so I said yes negotiating to start in a month to hand over ongoing work. Funny thing is, if I'd given my word I would have stayed to the end of term. Putting the penalty clause in the contract actually made it so much easier to leave because the conditions were so cut-and-dry for both parties. So my take is that you shouldn't run your business on money and fear, but rather get to know who you're dealing with.

Now that I'm thinking of this, I was in another similar situation, where I had my full-time programming job but was bored and got a summer job at Sporting Life (upmarket sportswear + equipment chain). I onboarded for a week with a bunch of highschoolers off for the summer, aced the textiles knowledge. At one point they pointed out that I was far overqualified for the position, and I said that I was bored and the employee discounts are pretty good. Anyhow I ended up staying there all summer, fall, and most of the way through the winter, outlasting multiple waves of staff turnover. I gave it up because it was stressful to get there on time, finding parking, and the parking tickets were racking up. The best part of the job was when ladies trying on clothes would ask how things looked and I'd give it to them straight. I don't recall anyone being offended and many thanked me for my honesty and bought stuff. I wasn't on commission but would have done the same anyway. [I'm a bit socially autistic-like, I once declared that a friend "wasn't at all photogenic" and there was dead silence. Part of the problem might have been that I looked at a lot of photos of them before I said it. I still didn't think there was anything wrong with saying that. It seemed the same to me as saying you're not tall.]

>I think you may be overreading the text. The writer could also be just saying they feel really stuck.

I guess there's a chance where it was just poorly-articulated "one of my employees has a stronger negotiating position than I'm conformable with." But had that been the case, the question-asker would already know the answer. The answer provided was to actually negotiate rather than expect to get their way, and work to improve the company's resilience in the areas where they're dependent on a single supplier.

Modern?

Yes. They aren't allowed to use a stick to beat you anymore so they need other methods.

"I can't condemn this person to starvation and homelessness" certainly makes it clear.

This is an obvious case, you treat them like you treat anyone else. You show respect, and manage them the way you manage everyone else. If they don’t want to meet expectations then they receive the consequences.

I don’t see why more needs to be said

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