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Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

I often find most people are really bad at taking a step back and thinking freely about the problem at hand — especially if they are stressed out. And they (we) are stressed out all the time, because apparently it is considered good managment to not consider what happens when you put pressure on people.

I tend to say: "You cannot afford to go fast if you are in a hurry, because this is where stuff goes wrong. And if you are in a hurry you cannot afford stuff going wrong."

If you are a manager and you want your people to deliver the most innovative, creative, best solution you have to lift stress of them and that also means freeing them of their daily duties and giving them the space to think openly about solutions. If your shop will collapse when you relive the best people of their daily duties for a week that means you shop is badly managed.

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counterpoint: As a new-ish manager - who despite its impact on my pay would like to live in a world without middle managers - it's been my unfortunate experience that a lot of people don't work as well when there's zero pressure. The right kind of incentives would likely provide a sense of motivation without urgency, but those aren't in the power of most managers to create.

I believe there are two things to disentangle here:

1. What problem are you using pressure to sweep under the rug? I.e. why are your colleagues disengaged by default? Most people happily do things they find important. Have you hired the wrong people who don't share your values or are you asking unimportant things of them?

2. When you say people work well under a little pressure, do you mean they produce more... things during a given time interval, or that the long-term quality of their work actually improves?

Not disengaged, people start chasing butterflies, developers start getting lost in irrelevant technical details and adding complexity instead of solving the problems at hand — since it’s more fun to play with tech than it is to solve business problems

Is this how the developers would describe what they are going? "Chasing butterflies and adding complexity because it's more fun"?

If so, they seem to live in a bubble and are not integrated enough into the rest of the business. Developers need to understand and be involved in financial, customer, and product concerns.

More likely in my experience they are very busy working off technical debt that would be under-prioritised by the manager creating pressure. Some of them may even be innovating new solutions that will open up entire new markets. Sure, not all innovations are successful, but it's enough if a small fraction is.

R&D ("chasing butterflies") is a comparatively very cheap way to acquire knowledge, and what puts you ahead of your competition is the knowledge you have acquired and they have not (yet).

> If so, they seem to live in a bubble and are not integrated enough into the rest of the business. Developers need to understand and be involved in financial, customer, and product concerns.

In my experience that's the problem 99.9% of the time. Developers didn't get into their career to care about business, most of them are more excited about reading a new features on kubernetes than they are about solving a real business problem.

In big enough companies there's a lot of silo that is hard to break too. And specialization, someone who has 20 years of experience in $domain-specific-knowledge hardly wants to take a broader view of the world.

> More likely in my experience they are very busy working off technical debt that would be under-prioritised by the manager creating pressure. Some of them may even be innovating new solutions that will open up entire new markets. Sure, not all innovations are successful, but it's enough if a small fraction is.

Then they should communicate better. Your distinction of R&D or not is not relevant.

An important thing at play here is that for many engineers, and craftspeople in general, it is painful to do things in a way that is inelegant or "wrong," even if it's best for the "business," which is to say there are other tradeoffs at play.

There are two ways to resolve this. One is for the engineers to learn to accept "wrong-ness" through therapeutic techniques. The other is to remove the external pressure somehow.

Either way, there is pressure that needs to be relieved.

I agree with your first paragraph. Of course that the definition of wrongness or inelegant varies per engineer, which without a "pressure" towards a business solution being delivered might never converge.

I have never met anybody that likes tinkering with code more than releasing it. Not even academics.

When people refuse to release it's usually because they are afraid of something that comes with it. And yeah, in a "some pressure is necessary" environment, it's a safe bet that it's realizing their technical debit and not being allowed to fix it.

Surely, making them more afraid of tinkering than of releasing does solve that one immediate problem.

> I have never met anybody that likes tinkering with code more than releasing it. Not even academics.

Really? What about Tinkering with new tools ? The whole Kubernetes adoption came from a marketing driven campaigns/FOMO.

And your point on releasing is fair too. It's incredible how people are afraid of releasing software and would literally do anything else instead.

> why are your colleagues disengaged by default? Most people happily do things they find important.

Almost nothing is important. The vast vast majority of people work for the paycheck. If you only hire people who truly think that what you're doing is important, you'll have a hard time finding anyone.

I would argue that this is because you have the wrong people on the bus. I know that may not be your choice as a manager (you may be stuck with what you have), but make sure you are not misunderstanding the problem.

Good, 10x people don’t need pressure to perform. They are self-driven. Unfortunately, most places don’t optimize for the right people on the bus, only someone that can do what they are told. A team or organization populated with self-driven people with good judgement is a force to be reckoned with. A team without these types of people needs to be managed.

How do you find 10x people? Optimize for attitude, not skill set or intelligence.

If there are 10x people, that means the norm is 1x people, so there is still a lot of interest in making those productive.

I want to point out that just because a top performer is self-driven, doesn't mean they will over-perform without incentives or in the direction you want.

Got any tips for optimizing for attitude?

I don't personally need a lot of pressure to keep me focused on delivering business value...but I think that's how I ended up managing people who do. Finding that "motivation without urgency" balance is both difficult and necessary.

> The right kind of incentives would likely provide a sense of motivation without urgency, but those aren't in the power of most managers to create.

So whose power is it, then? There are two ways to tackle this issue: Apply pressure to the ones below you, or buckle up and take a step upwards. One is easier then the other.

While this sounds legit in isolation, it's worth noting that it's not always managers who put pressure, but rather the circumstances. We live in a competitive world, and success depends on how fast we can deliver a product to the market. It's easy to put all the responsibility on managers, but this is only part of the picture.

I mean, you can create a better product by taking more time, and the whole company still dies because you're too late. This is where the stress comes from; managers only translate it.

That's a manager talking.

The company dies anyway, so that argument is moot.

The solution lies somewhere else. For instance, actually taking the pressure off with resources - e.g. the manager can get their status reports by actually understanding the project by short one-on-one interviews and attending design meetings. Instead of asking everyone to come to a staff meeting, or send their status reports and jamming them into one aggregated email and forwarding that as their own work and pretending they did something.

Agreed.

One powerful idea for software development is "integration and promotion" - integrating code from different commits / workers and putting them into one package and testing it and only then moving it forward.

you can take this principle into everything - got a marketing launch? Set up in the room downstairs and run your timings,

Basically "plans" that do not involve early surfacing and use of the product (and just hoping you are a good enough manager to tell everyone what to do) is doomed.

we only do well things we do often

A good manager is among other things a "shit umbrella". If a manager thinks they're doing a good job by 'translating' external factors into pressuring the team to work harder, faster, they're not.

Creating artificial pressure due to some broad and unfounded fear like “we live in a competitive world” is the tell tale sign of a weak manager.

Right up there with the fake pressure to add a sense of importance.

Management as I see it has to do with managing the resources of a company just in the right way. That means there are many wrong ways and few right ways. So instead of providing to few resources for a task you could of course also mismanage into the other direction and have a ton of people doing nothing.

That is not the point.

Typical organizations very often have both at the same time, but in different places. (Bad) managment sometimes has a hard time telling the two apart, but in my experience they are more afraid of allocating too many resources ("wasting resources") than of allocating too little, because the cost of allocating too much is obvious to their superiors, while the costs of allocating too little is much more hidden, delayed and harder to correlate.

If that really good employee quits after three years of resource-starvation, the causal connection to mismanagment might not be drawn, the manager might even be applauded how well they managed the resources. The friction that comes with replacing that person, however, is real.

There are organizations that burn through employees like it is nothing, and they think that amount of turnover and the waste of resources and time that it brings is normal.

I argued against that.

100%. People forget managers are humans too.

They were likely an IC at some point and now have to answer to higher up power who are under more acute PnL stress hence the pressure flows down to them.

The trick with manager is to release some of that pressure as it goes down to their directs, this might mean taking it head on directly and shielding directs from it or just re-directing it back up the chain.

Not only, but yes. The skill is to know when to take your time and when not to.

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

“I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have time.”

"Don't confuse starting fast with finishing fast."

Take your time, i'm in a hurry. - The emperor of china to the guy who helped him dress

What if your greatest strength is moving fast while making less mistakes than others, how do you identify when slowing down is valuable? Isn't the point of moving slow just to train yourself to go fast?

Somebody drives race cars

This phrase is also a mantra of the US Navy SEALs.

Really any US military outfit. I was airborne infantry in the US ARMY and this was our mantra when learning anything new.