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Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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