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Comment by jaegerpicker | Hacker News Reader

Dear God this was my life at a past employer. The biggest issue is that Get Shit Done usually turns to Get Shit Done exactly how I want even though I won't tell you what it is because I'm "Getting Shit Done!". I know better now. If I see that at an interview now, I'll run, not walk, run away. People bitch about how hard it is to find good developers and yet hire talented developers but put them in shitty positions. Then bitch about them not being good enough. It's like buying a sports car and putting shitty watered down gas in it and complaining about how the car doesn't perform like it should.

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> People bitch about how hard it is to find good developers and yet hire talented developers but put them in shitty positions.

Notwithstanding the fact that the GSD mentality is often nonsense that comes from folks who don't know what they're doing, I would make the point that a lot of software jobs are "shitty" in the context of what many expect to find when they decide to become a developer. And that's life.

Even at many of the biggest names in tech, a lot of developers are performing mundane tasks that are not nearly as interesting or sexy as one would imagine. If even the biggest companies in tech, which deal with some of the biggest problems, can't create more "good" positions than "shitty" ones, it shouldn't come as a surprise that smaller companies and startups can't either.

Incidentally, it's like this in just about every profession that is glamorized in some fashion (i.e. investment banking, law, etc.).

"That's life" what a load... no, that's a corporate job which doesn't give a shit about you. It's not really life.

The only reason people put up with it is because they're told "that's life" or "that's just how it is." when that's meaningless bullshit.

This is a prime example of the attitude the author is warning against. This kind of anti-establishment ignorance comes from people with little clue as to how 99% of software is written...

Which is why a small but vocal minority of us prefer not to work in overly structured corporate environments.

No one really fucking cares that the implementation of the design is pixel perfect, they care whether it moves the needle whether it matches the design or not.

Like anything there is an effective version of 'get shit done' and a cargo cult version, most are the cargo cult version where people are not actually empowered to make decisions.

99% of software is developed in shitty cargo cult conditions, half the world lives on less than $5 a day, I don't care to trend toward the average. If you want to hold up the average as something to strive toward knock yourself out.

There is never an effective version of 'get shit done'.

Why would you expect a corporate job to give a shit about you? It's not a person (regardless of what the Supreme Court says...), it doesn't have feelings.

Your parents love you unconditionally. If you want anyone else to care about you, you have to make it happen through your actions.

Why would you expect a corporate job to give a shit about you?

Why would I expect the company to treat me decently? Why do I expect the company to treat me decently? It's because people do not only have rights, they have duties towards their fellow man, that's why!

This is a long-standing idea in German political thought - it's called Sozialpflichtigkeit des Eigentums, and it made its way into both the Weimar and present constitution. "Eigentum verpflichtet", it says there. Americans have a hard time understanding this.

> they have duties towards their fellow man, that's why!

That's exactly what he's saying. It's a company, not a person. You are not its "fellow man"--because it's not a man. It's a legal structure that exists to generate profit.

Yeah.

It's not unreasonable to expect your boss to treat you decently, at least if you treat her decently. She's a person, after all.

But the corporation as a whole? The corporation is a system. It responds to the environment around it. If it doesn't make the right response (as in one that maximizes its chance of survival), it is replaced by other corporations that do. That right response may be at odds with your interests as a person.

You, your boss, your boss's boss, and all your coworkers are part of that system. If they don't take the "right" action (as in, the one that maximizes their chance of survival within the organization), they will be replaced by others who do. If you feel you've been mistreated by this, your only option is to look for a different place in that system where you will be happier.

It's a two-way street. It's not just that people should refrain from treating you poorly, it's also that you shouldn't put yourself in a position where you will be treated poorly.

The documentary "The Corporation" actually illustrates this point quite well. The psychological profile of a corporation is one of a sociopath, hell bent on making profit, at the disregard of all else.

Don't be loyal to a corporation, don't buy into propaganda about the well-being of the corporation == your well-being.

"It's a legal structure that exists to generate profit."

There just might be differences in the behaviour of an organisation that generates (and maximises) profit over the short term and one that generates profit over the long term.

The latter organisation may have to pay more attention to the 'social obligations of ownership' than the former, including the training and skill level of its workforce.

"Americans have a hard time understanding this."

Because most of us don't speak German!

Here, I'll help you with that

Sozialpflichtigkeit des Eigentums can be roughly translated as "Social duty of property"

"Eigentum verpflichtet" is more or less "Property committed (to a duty)"

Corporations don't make decisions, people do. In most jobs the people you work with and work for DO care about you.

I've worked for corporations that treated me well.

I have too. In those cases, I treated the corporation well as well. Hence the "make it happen".

It's a two-way street, and when you're a faceless unknown dealing with a large entity, you usually have to make the first move.

Same here. Although its true theres a lot of bad corporations out there, there are plenty of bad startups as well. People don't like to hear about great paying corporate jobs that treat you like human beings though.

Or because of the pay and the stability.

Major upvotes to you - ignore these other comments, you're entirely correct.

A lot of these mundane jobs do need to be done, but a lot of people enjoy stable mundane jobs. Leave these kinds of jobs to them, they will actually thank you for it. If you're more interesting in accomplishing something, there are far more jobs that really need someone with some skill to come and do them - or, more realistically, find them.

I agree completely in the terribleness and lack of will in a statement like "That's life". No it most certainly is not. Life is entirely what you make of it and we are a long, long way from being forced to perform mundane tasks. If you can handle the stress of doing something new instead of doing something mundane - the door is always right over there. Walk through it and find your own path.

> A lot of these mundane jobs do need to be done, but a lot of people enjoy stable mundane jobs.

It took me way too long to accept this. I always thought those people just did not know better, or something.

I will never forget the QA department at a previous company and their ~200-step excel-based manual QA procedure. For me, that is basically a nightmare made reality. I tried to talk them into automating it, but they resisted that, almost angrily. They liked stepping through that 200-step spreadsheet.

I cannot understand it, at all, but I now accept it. People are different.

It could also be because they thought you were going automate them out of a job. People who aren't in the business of change don't like it as a general rule.

I actually took some pains to assure them I was not trying to do that. I offered to teach them the techniques I would use, which would actually have increased their market value. They just would not have a word of it. About 6 months later we were all laid off when the company folded.

I now hire spreadsheet testers on odesk for $10/hr. Upskill when you have the chance or die.

I think you may be confusing two different types of people. The idea, to me, of making $xxx,xxx while working 40 easy hours a week (manytimes fewer) and spending the rest of my time with money for my hobbies and lifestyle sounds great; I feel like I'm beating the system. Mundane tasks are the price you pay for that. There may also be people want to press that button 200 times, but they're a different group.

You clearly glossed over my comment. I wrote:

"I would make the point that a lot of software jobs are "shitty" in the context of what many expect to find when they decide to become a developer. And that's life."

It is easy to develop unrealistic expectations and romanticized notions about a lot of things. That is life.

Tech companies aren't forcing employees to perform "mundane" tasks (fix bugs, refactor code, etc.) in air-conditioned offices in exchange for $xxx,xxx/year in salary plus benefits and perks the vast majority of American workers don't receive.

If you want something different, there are of course many other options. But here's an inconvenient truth: if you think running your own show (freelancing or building a business) is eight to twelve hours a day of fun and intellectual stimulation, you are probably going to be very disappointed when you're your own boss as well. If anything, "doing your own thing" is even more romanticized than working at Google, Facebook or [insert hot startup name here].

I agree with you but your conceptualization doesn't explain why people should put up with suffering just because they've seen suffering and are used to suffering. That's not logical. There's no reason to go in depth unless you can actually present an argument based on necessity or some kind of platform that would explain it other than "people put up with it".

How about "because you're being paid 6 figures to do it and you could be getting paid $25k for something a lot more shitty"

Bah, it's a soul sucking reason. I quite my microsoft job to go bum around in SE asia while my SO finishes her TOEFL master degree. My startups annual revenue is only like 60k and I have two developers, an assistant, content guy and a designer on the payroll part time but I'll take my 100k less a year salary out here versus doing boring crap back at Microsoft any day.

Suffering? I don't think that word means what you think it means.

Hur, I can suffer harder than you! I almost can't believe you want to one-up me on a race to hell.

I'm not sure if performing mundane tasks is the same thing he's talking about. When you are prevented from doing your tasks because of a lack of support by your company and a lack of communication under the guise of "Getting things done", you are given accountability without responsibility i.e. You are punished for failure but not given the tools to make yourself succeed.

Exactly. Everyone has to write migrations or make new branches in source control or a million other mundane tasks that few actually like doing. I meant a shitty position as in a job that should be a great gig but isn't because you are constantly told "GET SHIT DONE!" without being told what type of shit you should be getting done. I'm completely able to make up my own shit to work on but don't bitch if my shit doesn't match your shit that was locked in you mind.

I completely get that but a shitty job at a cool competent company that communicates well is a world of difference away from what should be a great job at, what turns out to be a shitty company. In other words you can be treated like a valued employee or like a scapegoat. How shitty your tasks are usually have little to do with which end you land on that scale.

To play devil's advocate, I've been in startups where it seems like very little ever gets done and dithering and playing around with cool code becomes the norm. Eventually, a "bull dog" personality has to be brought in to light some dynamite under the ass of engineering and get them focused on delivery.

GSD works so long as it's focused on shipping.

I'd argue that is rarely if ever works well. I think there is a world of difference between playing around with cool code and the GSD path. Controlled, focused, and communicative processes, driving towards building the best, most light weight piece of software/system you can works better than either extreme. Work hard, damn right but work smart also. It takes both IMO. Software developers are smart people by definition, enable them to use that for the benefit of the company. If someone is just scrambling to meet an arbitrary quota because they need to "GET SHIT DONE!" they aren't making smart decisions, and as a startup that will kill you.

That’s not about what this article is about, at all. It’s about thinking that „get shit done” is somehow enough, not that being goal-oriented is bad. It’s about thinking that screaming that term around is somehow a valid management technique.

In fact, you don’t need a bulldog, more like an elephant. Patient, but smart, and they’re gonna get there.

GSD works so long as it's focused on shipping.

What if shipping isn't the problem?

I had a previous job that was this way. Their informal mantra was "Do it now, scrape the blood off the walls later." In practice, this meant poorly communicated expectations, multiple conflicting reporting lines, non-specific project task ownership (everyone owned it, or someone else did and you were expected to as well), and best of all, no formal (or even informal) QA process.

No surprise then, that between the various forms of attrition (whether from firing, as managers spread blame and scapegoated, or quitting from those capable and prescient enough to see it coming) the company lost nearly half of its IT staff in a 12-month period, which included a major software release.

Yep, that pretty accurately describes where I once worked. But I don't think this is a bad thing from the perspective of the board of directors, only for the likes of you and me.

Remember, the goal is to spend as little money as possible developing a product/service and then sell out in 5 years. So you want to hire inexperienced but talented drones who will do as they're told and give you value for money (i.e. work their evenings and weekends for free). Anyone with the sense to push back on that needs to be cut loose fast.

> People bitch about how hard it is to find good developers and yet hire talented developers but put them in shitty positions. Then bitch about them not being good enough. It's like buying a sports car and putting shitty watered down gas in it and complaining about how the car doesn't perform like it should.

Beautifully said!

"No, you got the wrong shit done! What's wrong with you?!"

"Ready, fire, aim!"

Also known as "iteration" and "failing fast" and "being quick to pivot."

These are not bad concepts when properly understood. Unfortunately they are rarely properly understood.

Hint: they do not mean "it doesn't matter whether what you do has any merit out of the starting gate," nor do they mean "quality doesn't matter, just fling shit and see if it sticks to the wall."

I wonder if this piece I wrote on one way for organizations to succeed without bureaucracy or heavy top-down management might not be of interest to those suffering from the "fail fast" syndrome: http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/03/how-winners-win-john-boyd-...

Not to say it's the only way to do things, of course, but it's a hell of a lot better than "Get Shit Done" ...

EDIT: Submitted the post to HN for discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6669129

Shit, I can't believe you took the time to ready.

"I got the shit done in a very shitty way."

Define shit or I will define it myself... that's how it goes.

There's a spectrum. On one end are the large organizations stuck in analysis paralysis. On the other end are firms too busy getting shit done to fix root causes. You can put Google and Facebook at spots somewhere in the middle - where they are relative to each other says a lot about their culture.

Neither extreme fits 100% of the solutions. When your company (or market) is on life support, you need to only worry about the present. When it becomes habit, you can't move from saving the company to rebuilding it. And as others say, too much GSD is terrible for morale. It's good for 6 months to save a company. It's bad for 2 years of floundering.

Half of the work at a startup, or in programming (and many other things) is figuring out what to get done next. GSD isn't a problem in itself, the people who have both vision and GSD are usually killing it and I love working with those people. What you describe is more like a PITA-client who picked up GSD as a buzzword.

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