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Comment by khazhoux | Hacker News Reader

Our field is based on trust. When the backend is having massive performance problems, and Steve tells you it will take a week to fix, that might make sense to you because you’ve seen hairy backend problems in the past, and he’s the one that looked into the technical details on this one. But you’d be pissed to later learn that it was a one line fix that he knew about all along, and he just took a week at home chilling out while others were waiting on him.

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That kind of Steve wouldn’t fool me because I’m all about redistribution of XP. Even if Steve is the best at that task, I would assign it to not-Steve with some probability. If not-Steve was able to fix similar issues in less then a week then that I’d end up assigning fewer tasks to Steve in the future, which would affect his output and that would eventually affect his livelihood.

or in XP fashion you could assign it to Steve and non-Steve to work on it as a pair?

Then how would I know who really did the work?

And how would I know that non-Steve would mark on Steve or not?

Every field is based on trust, so I don't see why you emphasize that.

Once again, if as a manager, you are happy with your employee's output and feel that their compensation is fair; why would the knowledge that they could have done more change that? It was fair before. Why should the worker do more to earn their salary?

As an engineer, I mean it kind of comes down to competition doesn’t it? If entity A is able to get something done 5x faster than entity B and just as well, wouldn’t you choose entity B in the future? Sure entity A might have been acceptable but at a certain point, who’s more likely to get a contract, a promotion, a raise, a pay cut, or laid off? This stuff matters, it’s how the world works, it’s no secret. Generally, pay cuts and layoffs are reserved for when the company is suffering but really what is happening the tolerance for slack is dropping, and productivity will absolutely play into that.

> Every field is based on trust, so I don't see why you emphasize that.

Most workers around the world have no "trust" from their manager on the number of hours they spend in a week.

> Once again, if as a manager, you are happy with your employee's output and feel that their compensation is fair; why would the knowledge that they could have done more change that? It was fair before. Why should the worker do more to earn their salary?

Because there is a tacit understanding between the two parties (if most cases, apparently you disagree) that the engineer is working the "standard" number of hours in a week (35+, more or less). If you tell your manager "I work one hour a day, and this bug took me three days to fix" and your manager doesn't mind, then it's all good.

But if you tell your manager "this bug took me three days to fix" I can guarantee he'll think it was a challenging problem that took 15+ hours of your time, and he would be pissed to know that everyone else was forced to wait for what was actually a quick fix.

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