Hacker News Reader

> The best developers are almost always intrinsically motivated.

Have you managed a large team before? The single best way I know to demotivate a highly motivated developer is to let them see a coworker at the same pay grade do significantly less work without any good reason. (footnote: individuals going through cancer treatment are the tricky complication here, due to privacy issues)

And I should emphasize that for most of the developers I've managed, it wasn't a fear thing like, "oh, he'll fire me if I don't work" but rather a removal of the sentiment that, "why should I keep working so hard when others here don't pull their weight and are being rewarded for it?"

That's a large part of the reason I like semi-enforced distributions in curve-oriented review systems. Many managers, particularly first-level leads, tend to pull their rewards towards the mean (barely rewarding high performers and still rewarding low performers) instead of focusing on doing the right thing at the tails. Though that's certainly no guarantee of success; I got a decently sized development and test organization (~60 of each) merged into our organization and it took nearly a month of full-time work for myself (and one of my peers) to sort out the years of misrewarded individuals to get neglected high performers promoted and HR action started on people who'd been resting and vesting.

These aren't comparable situations necessarily. How you fix a mostly functional organization with problems is different from how you fix a fundamentally dysfunctional organization. If you have a functional organization then it makes sense to get rid of all the low performers, regardless of how much "effort" they're putting in. And if you end up with someone who is able to work fewer hours and still be as productive as other team members you would be silly to get rid of them even if other team members were upset.

and, I think, Engineers have their own hierarchy; we understand that an hour of the new kid's time is worth maybe 5 minutes of the really expert person's time.

Generally speaking, if one person isn't working all that hard but is contributing a lot (due to greater skill) the other Engineers can recognize and appreciate this. We all understand the tradeoff between ability and effort; The better you are, the less effort is required (but, there are minimum levels for both effort and ability; no matter how awesome you are, you need some minimum level of effort; even if you dedicate your life to the job, you need some level of ability. - but, to some extent, ability can make up for a lack of effort, and effort can make up for a lack of ability.)

>That's a large part of the reason I like semi-enforced distributions in curve-oriented review systems.

I'm still at the point where I tend to see the disadvantages of this approach. It seems to me that, in terms of performance management, that the important pieces are the regular one on ones and an honest effort to work equally with people who are high/normal/low performers to improve. A forced distribution seems to work against that because it puts people in the position of defending themselves rather than being open to a discussion. However, that's my view from a bit further down the food chain from your own experience (as a first level lead for teams between 21 and 37 developers). I also agree with InclinedPlane that ultimately it's about intrinsic motivation and being connected to work that interests you. If you can create that kind of work environment you'll get developers who are engaged and want to work hard because it's something that interests them.

So you're essentially saying that the people in the WFH program have given up because it's not inspiring work. And Mayer canning that program to cut the dead weight is bad because it gets rid of them?

She's trying to shift the culture over there and it's going to be hard to do that with a bunch of people outside the main HQ, especially when they aren't actually doing anything.

Another way to look at it might be that employees who work from home, who aren't exactly feeling inspired, feel re-energized being on the main campus again and get a new spark for doing great work. Lot's of spin, lot's of angles.

I'd give her a bit more time before raising the pitchforks.

Let me try an analogy.

Let's say you are an allied soldier in the early parts of World War I. You're in your trench in dirty clothes, you can feel your feet rotting away inside your boots as you stand in knee deep water, mud, and filth. Most of the buddies you had a year ago are dead or gone away, having lost limbs or sanity in the war already. You spend your days watching your squad mates shit their guts out from dysentery. You've been over the top before, you've run across hundreds of meters of cratered moonscape filled with mud and barbed wire, all the soldiers around you are getting ripped apart by ferocious machine gun fire. And you know how futile it is to attack enemy trenches head on. You've seen thousands upon thousands of men killed by shelling and machine gun fire before they even got close to the other trench, it's a suicidal strategy and yet it is the only strategy the commanders have come up with. You think about deserting. You think about getting a group of friends together to rise up against the officers. But your friends are dead or gone, and desertion or rebellion are a certain route to execution. You start to think seriously about acquiring some sort of injury that would send you home, maybe if you shot your own foot. But your thoughts are interrupted by the announcement that tomorrow morning there is another attack planned, you're going to go over the top and attack the enemy trenches again.

Your morale, and everyone else's, in this situation is obviously low. The solution the commanders have for this problem is that if you don't do your job you'll be shot. The result of this genius was the destruction of a significant percentage of an entire generation. The problem in this situation wasn't the soldiers. As many historians have detailed many of them "fought like lions", and many of them were intrinsically motivated to fight the enemy to the utter limit of their abilities. But morale was still low and a lot of people deserted and some even rebelled. The problem was the strategy and the commanders. The problem was that the actions being undertaken were hugely wasteful of men and resources without having any reasonable chance of success.

You don't win this sort of war by ordering yet another mass assault backed up with the threat that anyone who doesn't comply with the order will be executed. You fix it by changing your strategy and tactics.

So you're saying it might be better if anyone anywhere had any idea what Yahoo was actually trying to be?

They had the guy in the trenched die to hold the enemy from taking over your towns and your tank research teams, your aircraft factories; to buy time for the engineers and scientists to master their craft.

It sucks, but it worked.

They do that by staying in the trenches and mowing down the enemy with machine guns, not by getting mowed down. The latter didn't work. In the period 1915-1917 neither the Allies nor the Germans had made any significant tactical or strategic gains in the West, though the Allies had much higher casualties because they made a greater number of failed attacks. Indeed, such attacks almost weakened the Allies so much that they could have lost the war in 1916. And in 1917 20,000 French soldiers deserted, it took replacing the General in command and ending the practice of mass frontal attacks to prevent the army from dissolving away or rebelling.

You don't win a war by trading human lives for bullets, it's necessary to gain some average net advantage if you lose lives, otherwise you will lose.

Suicide attacks didn't win the war for the Allies, it was patience, attrition (through naval blockades), new tactics, new allies, and new technology which led to victory.

I am french and my great grandfather served in WWI as an aide-de-camp to a general and I used to talk to him on our long walks when I was 8-9 and he was 87-88. I have a rather unique perspective on the war. He also showed me the road where Stukas gunned down fleeing Parisians in 1940. He showed me the trenches and the woods where people would run to and hide. We used to walk around in those woods. It's near Nemours, in Seine-et-Marne. His son (my grandfather) was the commander of a tank unit in 1940. He was captured and sent to a work camp in Germany, near Baden-Baden. He returned in 1942, to work the more fertile french farm. My mother was born in '43. There were two SS officers quartered at the house, in the upstairs bedroom. I slept in the same beds when I stayed with them. The more senior of the SS officers, according to my great grandmother, made sure that my mother had eggs and milk in the first year of her life. They left in June of 44 and she did not hear of them again. She told me the younger one came home crying one evening. She asked him what had happened. They were sitting on the stone doorsteps, side by side, just as she and I were when she told me the story 35 years later. He said, through sobs, that US bombers had bombed his town and killed his entire family. His parents, grandparents, sister, and much younger brother. Last but not least, my great grandfather told me that in July of 44, an american bomb exploded near our house, in the rear field, and a shapnel fragment broke a hole in the back courtyard door, raced across the yard, barely missing my mother's head by 20cm, then crashed into the water cistern. He then walked over and ran his finger over the discolored patch. He said: "This is where the hole was."

All this to say that while I have read the history books, some in French and never translated into English (apparently some french material isn't suitable for a British audience's taste and sensibilities), I also have some more intimate knowledge that transcends the written page and the maps with arrows and dashed lines.

Note that I don't disagree with you, and as you point out, it was partly new technology that won the war for the allies.

I'd agree with you if the only output of the "best" engineers was their code. But in my experience, good engineers help pass on their practices to the engineers working with them that aren't as good, making new "best" engineers in the process. That can't happen, at least not as effectively, if the good engineers and the average engineers are not working side-by-side.