How To Keep Your Best Programmers
daedtech.com
daedtech.com
The big issue is that of the less talented taking ownership of tasks. Give workers freedom to do their jobs right and expect good things from them.
In a nicely compartmentalized organization/application this isn't a huge issue - worst case, one compartment performs poorly, the people running it are replaced, and a complete rewrite of one component is performed.
This can be really bad in a more monolithic organization/application. Bad work in one component (e.g., a poorly designed database schema) will leak out into the rest of the system. Because others are building things on top of it, it will be extremely difficult to rip out and replace.
Find new workers then. The principle is you do the work, you own your work or job, it is yours with a share of the risk and reward that comes with it.
> Bad work in one component (e.g., a poorly designed database schema) will leak out into the rest of the system.
The solution there is two-fold:
1. Encouraging (though not forcing) getting second opinions, discussions etc ahead of time.
2. Post-review once the component is nearing usefulness by respected peers. "Can we use this? What is the quality?"
Is there expense when you have to say "this needs more work" or even "this must be done again?" Sure. However does putting less technically apt managers in charge of the technical decisions cause fewer problems or more ones?
You can't just have management and review go away. But management is the midwifery of production, and review of technical peers beats review of managers any day.
I'm leaning toward the 'bored and want an excuse to leave' school of thought on this one.
For example, employees get bored because they are consistently doing work which is far below their skill level in a vocation which they haven't fully explored[1]. The respectful thing to do would be to either find work that is more challenging for this employee or allow them to move on to greener pastures, giving them great references and even assisting find their ideal role. If they do move on, whoever used to be our second best employee in that area becomes the best we have, who will be closer to what we need in terms of skills, whilst maintaining a great relationship with the previous employee.
Also, if I'm overseeing an absolute wizard at what they do and they are far better than me at it, they deserve respect by being listened to when they offer advice when it comes to their craft. They deserve recognition of skill and if something isn't feasible or if there's a better way, I damn well better make sure I do it their way for the sake of my product/service/building/whatever and for the sake of my employee's general wellbeing. Hell, if they're that good, perhaps I can entrust them with a little bit more. After all, we should be hiring people to both do the jobs we haven't got the time for anymore and, at the same time, do them better than us.
Telling an employee "do x by this time and you get a promotion" is not respectful either. This will create a bad culture, where cutting corners is rewarded where as doing your best work and offering sound advice is ignored or punished.
It's really interesting to talk about theories of motivation, value and what not, I've done this and applying tactics and strategies like this works but it's overcomplicating shit that can be kept simple: treat everyone with respect, treat everyone as you'd like to be treated. It's very motivating going to your manager and saying "look, I need work that's a bit more challenging" and them replying with "understood mate. give me a bit of time and we'll work something out" (and, for brevity, ignoring the conversation in between of what exactly 'more challenging' means). It's very motivating your manager calling on you to give advice on the best course of action, rather than dictating how things will be done. This is simply respect.
You should aim to give absolute respect to every person you work with, who works under you and works above you. Hell, you should do this for everyone in your life. Whether they return in kind is irrelevant, just keep at it. Sometimes those who haven't treated you right before will warm to you.
[1]: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f6/Cha... taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
I always get queasy reading lines like this. In the US, most employers can fire at will. The corollary should be that any employee can leave at will. There should be no cultural stigma against the latter.
>>> humans are not motivated economically toward self-actualization
The RSA video that supposedly supports this claim cites research that is only tangentially related to full-time employment. I'm not sure it's as applicable as the video host thinks: I can't help but note that ownership of tasks doesn't come with ownership of the company relative to the value of the tasks. It's all about who started it, or who got big equity.
Am I the only programmer who doesn't like being economically exploited (in the formal microeconomic sense)? For me, it's demotivating to know I'm putting forth effort for which someone else is reaping huge value.
Asking me to stick around for salary only (and perhaps a few worthless options) doesn't overpower my understanding of economics and make me excited to drive someone else's value creation process.
If you think about it, there's a pretty good reason for why this perception exists. Human social dynamics. Just like pack animals, we tend to ascribe virtue to the collective and vice to the individual. We've a fairly individualistic society, but still, jumping out of a safe and secure collective for an uncertain and possibly lucrative future is still going to be looked at as somewhat sociopathic. Even if it's the only way to receive fair compensation for your services.
To me, the behavior of employers towards employees ("here, go create all of our value; go let us economically exploit you") is the sociopathic behavior (and somewhat misanthropic too.. except not really, because founders take the risk and expect a reward, and that's how the economy works). I guess this gets into all kinds of deep economics, but employees either let it happen, are powerless, or most likely, are completely oblivious to their exploitation.
They generally know but don't care, as they have what they consider to be more important things to worry about. Lives, family, friends. These things take up all their mindspace, leaving no room for career machinations. You should read Venkatesh Rao's series of essays called "The Gervais Principle".
Jobs are the problem and self-employment is the answer ;-)
However, the tradeoff is real. You accept risk in exchange for freedom and reward.
No, far from it.
Personally, I'm willing to take an "unfair" deal if I get something for it. If the risk reduction merits the lower expected value, then fine.
Increasingly, though, organizational life is becoming about a world in which the higher-ups play "heads, I win; tails, you lose". You still get the mediocre compensation, but not the risk reduction and career development and easier lifestyle that have, traditionally, made mediocre remuneration tolerable for 90% of the population. Now employment is, for most people, not about genuine risk reduction or career support, but just a shit deal they take because they have no leverage.
Economics and the market economy, as instantiated, is about a number of things other than the usual platitudes of Pareto efficiency, wealth creation, and "freedom".
I'd realized quite some time back that there's a fundamental relationship between economic and political power, a point driven home by Citizen's United and Lawrence Lessig's work. The inability of Libertarians to understand (or admit) this is the central weakness of their philosophy (not helped much by the exploitation of the American Libertarian and Tea Party movements by the Koch brothers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_activities_of_the_Koc...).
Economics and business are also very much about risk management, reduction, and offset. Business legal structures (literally: LLCs -- limited liability corporations, among other forms) exist to reduce the risks of investors. Which can be a positive, but also a harm to society at large. Niall Ferguson, as much as I find him generally personally repulsive, hammers home this point in his Ascent of Money (see especially "Safe as Houses").
The shift of retirement plans from defined benefit to defined contribution is a handy way of shifting risks from fund managers (generally: employers) to employees. The fact that it's also leading to a general gross underfunding of retirement planning isn't unrelated. The story of the oil and energy industry (themselves really the core economic engines of the past century-plus of growth) are largely a continuous story of violation of free-market assumptions through monopoly, collusion, cartel, government ownership, military and diplomatic interventions, and commodity-markets manipulation (Standard Oil, As-Is agreement, Seven Sisters, OPEC, Saudi/Iranian/Venezualan/Mexican oil companies and others, broadly most 20th century wars but particularly WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Gulf I & II, Arab-Israeli conflicts, Britan's coup against Iranian Mohammad Mosaddegh (and all that's emerged from that)). Read or watch Daniel Yergin's The Prize.
The same risk transfers are seen within organizations -- the front line generally takes risks, management sees rewards (though tenure at top spots in firms has also become increasingly brief).
The economy is also as much about wealth concentration as it is of wealth creation, and moreso during decline. Especially in the absence of a progressive taxation system (or even a fair national lottery). John Michael Greer expands on this nicely: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2011/12/what-peak-oil...
And while I agree with your observation that life as a cog in the corporate machine is increasingly less rewarding (again: see the early economists, including Smith's observations on labor wages and Ricardo's Law of Rent for the mechanics behind this), it's a bit less of a vast conspiracy (though there are conspirers) and more of an inevitable Greek tragedy. Not that you might not be able to wage your own Horatio Alger victory over the short or perhaps even longer term, but the fundamental issue is reduced real growth rates within the economy as a whole, very likely caused by increasing constraints on energy flows, availability, and costs.
And that is a subject largely ignored by orthodox neoclassical economics, but increasingly the focus of heterodox economics. I'm finding thermoeconomics (a/k/a biophysical economics) and ecological economics rather more powerful in explaining past, recent, and likely future economic events than the neoclassical models. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoeconomics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_economics
There is no formal micro-economic sense of exploitation, except perhaps not getting the competitive wage, which is not what you are describing.
However, depending on who you talk to, workers are not 'exploited' in a loose sense because they can move to another organization that pays the prevailing wage. But the fact remains that the prevailing wage may be below the worker's contribution to organizational productivity at the margin. Thus, my econ professor still taught that exploitation, in a formal sense, occurs whenever wage(worker) < marginal_productivity(worker).
And this is, by definition, the competitive wage in neoclassical theory. Suppose there is a group of employers, and a group of employees, and each employee adds value X to any of the employers. Then any employer will want to hire all the workers for themselves, if the prevailing wage is X - 10. So competition ensures that there is no exploitation in that sense.
So while neoclassical theory does allow for "exploitation", it also predicts that it is very unlikely to actually occur.
You seem to be reinterpreting neoclassical theory where "marginal value" is decided according to your accounting rules, rather than the competitive market.
Microeconomic models that assume the marginal productivity of a worker can be calculated in advance are drastically at odds with the reality I see, where employers are terrified of a bad hire and even if they get a good hire, they may still end up with zero to show for it because of bad management or simply market conditions.
You could argue that the reason we have corporations at all is to spread the risk of unknowables across many people, so that it becomes bearable and not everyone is exposed to ruin if luck doesn't turn their way.
Micro theory is very general, and almost tautological. For example, you can re-interpret "marginal value" to mean "marginal expected value conditional on what the employer knows about you" and then everything you said fits neatly into the usual framework again.
Hence my comment below about the market deciding what a worker's marginal value is. Micro theory makes no claims that the "true economic" (and unobservable) marginal value of a worker is equal to their marginal value measured by some accounting system. Hence why micro theory is to a large extent irrefutable and makes few predictions about the world: if people eat big macs, we assume that increases their utility more than eating kale, and if the market doesn't pay a worker well, we assume that person contributes little marginal value.
Corporations do certainly help spread risk, that just happens to fall slightly outside of the usual micro framework.
You're assuming that your employer adds no value to your labour.
Maybe that's the case, and maybe it isn't. There's actually no way to know unless you go into competition with them.
Let us know how that goes.