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Comment by maerF0x0 | Hacker News Reader

> and most managers fail to punish at least some of these slow learners of theirs

False, they punish by not crediting that work as work.

Glue work, keeping things tidy, dealing with that annoyance that everyone else has been able to get away with suffering through (and ignoring), all of this will be worth approximately 0 at performance review time because your time is a zerosum game that is traded off with highly visible, political, and otherwise rewardable work.

It's been my experience that in larger companies you generally have to play in the framework.(I'd roughly draw the line at 1000+ employees), at quite small companies (or as a self employed / entrepreneur, roughly <200 employees) you should follow the path of highest EROI on your efforts regardless of who's job it is. In the gap you have to read the culture and management.

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I can think of at least two people in my career who were, ahem, load bearing for the company. They did all of the BS, non-sexy work required to keep the place running. Never wasted time on vanity projects, just showed up day after day doing the actual necessary things.

They were criminally under appreciated by management. Their career trajectory significantly worse than those who engaged in the highly visible projects.

As someone that has done a lot of that work, can confirm.

I've never understood why people would continue to care so hard when their efforts are unappreciated.

But I've also never worked at a large company.

Do you exercise because it makes you stronger and faster? Or because it's something you enjoy, and it also keeps you healthy?

Many people get satisfaction from doing their job well. From their perspective, if they are already happy with what they have, why would they make themselves unhappy by constantly pursuing more?

For me - I don’t enjoy it personally.

I've been at the top of the org chart. I hated it. I intentionally decided to go back to engineering.

"Appreciation" in this case means, promotions. I don't want them, and would actively change jobs if you forced it on me.

So I am more than happy to just do a great job at my job. I do not desire or want anyone to notice me in any particular way. I want to be paid a reasonable amount, and make sure everyone that uses anything I touch is happy with the experience.

That's a great life. I don't understand why anyone would think that caring about things matters at all.

There's a massive difference between your users, and peers appreciating you, and management appreciating you.

Management doesn't know anything. Why would I value their appreciation?

I care much more about my intelligent peers, or even commenters here, than what a non technical person thinks.

These people exist all over the place and they are the reason why society generally works. Shit would, and shit does go sideways when they stop doing their jobs, small and big companies alike.

>why people would continue to care so hard when their efforts are unappreciated.

So quite a few marriages.

Some people have the primary goal of making things work for everyone. Other people have the primary goal of personally benefitting. These are often in conflict. The better a company or team can align these goals, the more effective it is, and the more everyone tends to benefit, but in many organizations the folks looking for personal advantage are most likely to end up in charge.

It's because being rewarded is not the primary reason they do anything. It's a component and it's nice, but it's not the definition if life and existence.

I think you've completely misunderstood my point. It's not that they shouldn't keep doing what they do, its that there are places that will appreciate what they do.

I accept that public sector, charitable sector etc, make this calculation a bit different. But in the private sector it just seems silly to give yourself to a job that doesn't appreciate what you give it.

Because it’s how the brain is wired. Some are wired to not give AF, some are. Doesn’t take much to figure out who is who.

You never understood why some people are not grifters?

Wait, you think to not be a grifter you have to "care so hard when their efforts are unappreciated"?

Wut?

I'm not encouraging the to grift, ffs, I'm encouraging them to go and work somewhere that will appreciate their efforts!

Was the company over 1000 employees?

In my case and experience, yes.

Significantly larger, yes.

Exactly. As a media tech guy, my best feedback during the past decade of work was always linked to some lazy fuckup of someone else that I "heroically" rushed in to fix by fixing some noob level misuse.

Meanwhile the actually most heroic work I did was literal PCB level repair of a piece of ancient equipment whose function my boss wouldn't even understand, but the failure of which would stop our main room to a grinding halt. I then had to repeatedly ask to replace that equipment with a new replacement.

The highly visible work is often not the one that really counts, especially if you do not understand the subject matter.

Similar environment, identical experience.

Fixing something that’s visibly and publicly broken (or able to be sold) gets immediate praise. Preventing that issue before it occurs is thankless and invisible.

There are people doing that invisible work in every org. They normally become visible around a week after they quit.

Well and this goes further. You will find that some people will only chose to do the visible work. And this will often get great feedback from superiors, although it is the metaphorical equivalent of running around with a fire extinguisher and waiting for fire to pop up in an environment littered with flammable garbage, instead of — you know — ensuring that a fire doesn't start to begin with. So being celebrated for leaving everything at the brink of collapse, they will just do that, while ensuring to be in the spotlight when the shit inevitably hits the fan.

This can become so perverted that the number of extinguished fires is treated as some sort of metric for success by management, instead of seeing it as the failure it is.

Feel free to replace this with "all nighters" in other jobs. Who is more dedicated to the job, the person that just does it all in time with plenty of room for mistakes and unforseen circumstances or the one who slacks around 90% of the duration and then squeezes in some all nighters in the last hours? If your project has to rely on all nighters without good reason¹ this just indicates bad planning to me.

¹: There are legit reasons why working through the night is needed, e.g. the work you do can only be done during the night or there are legit last minute problems that nobody could have planned for. But if you literally have those every time, they are to be expected and are to be scheduled for during normal working hours.

If the company does not recognize its importance just LET THE DAMN THING FAIL. That is how management will pay proper attention to it.

This is only a viable strategy if you are under resourced. There’s a whole art to managing upward by crisis.

Successful communication strategy: There is too much work for the department. If we don’t scale up we’re going to have some kind of incident or failed delivery in the next few months. <explain expected failures, provide numbers>. I’m doing everything I can to keep this from happening, but there simply are not enough resources. I’ll email you a summary of all of this.

Then proceed to work a normal number of hours until a genuine incident occurs. Refer back to the earlier conversation (and email summary). Receive resources if the problem actually impacts the company. It may have just been acceptable risk for management.

Key mistake I see: Don’t work 80 hours a week to be a hero unless you have a specific strategic goal in mind. You’re actually hurting the company by hiding a resource allocation issue.

Worse, competent managers won’t promote you for persistent Herculean efforts. For a couple reasons. First, they would need to replace you with two people. Second, you are not exactly showing that you understand how to solve a problem with teamwork if you’re solving every problem by working unsustainable hours.

I agree that heroic effort can hide a resource allocation issue, but often the goals of those controlling resource allocation are not well aligned with the hero's goals. By no longer buying supplies for a student, a teacher is not going to get the school system to provide free supplies.

In terms of work in the job description, I could probably be replaced by 1.2 (1.1?) average competent workers. In terms of other benefits of my employment to coworkers and patrons, my impact is hard to estimate. Others bring in goodies for snacking, but I maintain a consistent but limited selection of snacks; others may spend as much or more money per year on snacks, but knowing that certain snacks will be available has significant value.

While I would have liked being promoted one level (from library page to library aide, from shelving only to shelving and check-in), higher positions have responsibilities I would have found extremely stressful. I was passed over twice for a promotion supported by my immediate supervisor (the decision was made by higher ups, the second time my supervisor was miffed that his input was not given more weight) and I had a meltdown at the interview for a third chance when technical issues (not working audio in an online interview) forced cancellation of the interview. I took my reaction as evidence that I was not ready for more responsibilities.

The first time I was not promoted, I was not especially bothered; the person getting the job was competent and went beyond minimal effort. The second time I was told that I would probably get the job (which I think was part of why my supervisor was not happy about my not even getting an interview) and the person getting the job seemed (after some observation) to be less competent and less enthusiatic than the previous transfer. (I think this estimate was not derived entirely from my disappointment: my first impression was "this is a library person" (glasses et al.). Perhaps seeing a library person not seeming enthusiastic about working at a library may have soured me more than if I had no hints of a kindred spirit.)

I like helping my coworkers (I like most of them and dislike none), but shelving books is not that team-oriented. I do not want to manage people (I am not good at it and do not enjoy it).

My advice likely does not universally apply outside of a reasonably well managed business with a P&L statement at the back of management’s minds.

Y’all have to answer to boards of various kinds with completely unreasonable expectations. (I have good friends who work in a library. We live in completely different worlds, you and I.)

I suspect a programmer working for a well managed business might be willing to work unpaid overtime to tidy up code from professional pride. Personal feelings do not generate monetary profit (at least not directly) but have value to workers; the worker's and the management's values are not completely aligned.

This seems to be a wisdom issue both for the worker (e.g., avoiding burnout or even just resentment) and the management (workers who have external principles can be more valuable but they can also be more difficult to manage even decently, i.e., with average ROI)

Your comment reminded me of Bunny the accountant's statement that Skeeve must charge the going rate to have the kingdom on a rational budget and Skeeve deciding to refund taxes to those who complained the most (in one of Robert Asprin's Myth Inc. books). What could possibly go wrong? :-)

It can take years for the damn thing to fail even after the key support stops entirely. In that time you and your colleagues will suffer, and the people responsible will jump ship long before the full impact has been felt, learning nothing from the experience and likely blaming it on the person they leave holding the bag. You can try to get a job elsewhere but things which aren't appreciated at one company often times aren't appreciated at most. Doing a good job is often in your personal best interest regardless of what an out of touch middle manager thinks is more important.

I like getting paid each month and not having to look for job. Letting it fail is directly opposing my need to pay mortgage.

Presumably your official duty is not to make sure that the company does not fail, but something more circumscribed. Work on your responsibilities, and if your manager is nagging you to fix something that isn't that, have him make it official so you get recognized for it. If it should not be your job, push back.

If the entire company of thousands of employees stand or fall depending on your work alone, then you can find something which pays double your salary in less than a day. And thus pay your mortgage.

> LET THE DAMN THING FAIL

Fully agree, enterprise failure is one of the most important mechanisms in market economies.

This also applies to gov't bailouts

Right, but that's more a lack of reward than outright punishment. If you work with these people on something that "crosses boundaries" and that something succeeds, you can credit them and in the hope to help their career. I agree that larger places are worse in this regard (though there can be a small part of a large place which is, well, small enough to work like a small one), and that you should generally make sure you're rewarded for your work, and if you're not, either work less or work elsewhere.

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