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Comment by screye | Hacker News Reader

It's easy to validate the veracity of 'War mode'. If survival hinges on a critical deliverable, then the promised reward must be in line with the stakes.

You can't have an employer offering a 20% bonus for keeping them alive. It's an insultingly low payoff or the crisis was a lie.

There is definitely such a thing as wartime software engineering. But such moments offer a clear path to millions of dollars or generational glory. Otherwise, you're being fed koolaid.

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>You can't have an employer offering a 20% bonus for keeping them alive. It's an insultingly low payoff or the crisis was a lie.

I've told my direct reports something similar. "Don't stress out about this. If it were a real problem, someone would have noticed 3 months ago when it broke / was never completed before [employee] left." Most of these crises are painfully fake.

I also often say "this is the scope right now but we can cut portions of this if we need more time. These are the critical elements that we need before the deadline. But the rest of this stuff is us using this opportunity to not ship a pile of garbage we can't support. If we have to do that, we'll fix it as soon as the deadline passes." But also I actually have the mandate to do that.

The crisis is orchestrated around someone in the middle layer who thinks they get fired if they don't deliver anything this quarter.

> I've told my direct reports something similar. "Don't stress out about this."

I too do that often to my direct reports. Not worth the stress. But of course it helps to pretend that one is working hard and stressed :) .

That is like young media professionals who think being stressed is a badge of honor that shows how important they are.

As a freelancer I had to interact with these people and was constantly annoyed by their lack of efficient communications. If you are a freelancer your own time is actually valuable to you, wasting time is not a luxury you might be willing and/or able to afford, depending on your agreement.

If your company/project is constantly in emergency mode you should reconsider the quality of that companies/projects managment. Personally most companies/projects where I have wittnessed emergency mode the emergency was not only self-inflicted by mismanagment, it was also routinely self-inflicted.

If your emergencies could have been avoided by a thin veneer of foresight that emergency is on you. If you routinely get into emergencies without learning: congrats you're stupid.

If you conjour emergencies out of thin air to squeeze more work out of your employees you suck as a human beings.

If you think working under emergency mode makes for quicker, cheaper or more reliable results you probably never witnessed how quick, cheap and reliable a well planned project can be finished.

Kinda describes most of the people (loosers) in the corporate world I'm aware of.

Or you know, sometimes your boss just lies to you, you do the crunch time, then when you save their asses you get laid off because that's cheaper than the raises or bonuses and you're prolly burnt out anyway so you won't be that productive again for months

At will employment, baby

Do you think the privates trying to get off the boats on D-Day had the promise of millions of dollars if they made it off the beach?

Sometimes, the ‘amazing’ reward is not going bankrupt, and that is enough.

Well they got off the boat so that they could die a little further down the beach or if lucky down the road. Death slightly later is a big motivation.

yeah, and ‘Not going bankrupt right now’ is the economic equivalent.

It doesn’t have to be a nice juicy carrot to be sufficient motivation for things to happen.

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