Work and Meaning: View from a Senior HP Manager | Hacker News Reader

Work and Meaning: View from a Senior HP Manager

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His perspective appears to be from one who is young and self-involved, so I'll be kind: the 60% that he hates have personal goals other than promoting HP's agenda. These goals could be raising a family, taking care of an elder, etc; he will never know. Remember the sacrifices your parents made for you. Working for any company (Ycombinator startups included) will never return the love you give it.

Bottom line: develop your skills, have integrity, be a professional. But, remember that it's just a paycheck at the end of the day. A company will lay you off the moment you are no longer useful to it. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; just don't have undue illusions about it.

i think there's a difference between not making your job your number one priority and actively impeding the people you work with. you are talking about the former, the author of the blog article is talking about the latter.

the 60% that he hates have personal goals other than promoting HP's agenda.

So do the much of the other 40% percent. Does someone wanting to get things done and the passion to get interested in what they are working on immediately make them a promoter of an agenda that is not their own? Is what we decide to work on always a product of external expectations? If so, I suspect your understanding of human behavior is faulty. Not everyone works for money because they have people depending on them or a company line to toe. Not all of this is about deciding the more noble sacrifice, or even about sacrifice at all, ok?

Developing skills is good; having integrity is good; being a professional (whatever that means) can be good. But if you make what you do just about the paycheck, or if you justify that stance by waving at other people who depend on you, I don't know that I can consider that a stance that demonstrates integrity. It demonstrates a willingness to sacrifice, for certain; this is something you consider very noble. But sacrifices can be made for reasons that are anything but noble, and even sacrifices that are noble are not necessarily ones that are wise.

For instance, you raise the point about raising a family, and the way that makes a person become a 60%er. Quite frankly, I wish I would start seeing people around me sacrifice less to their families. Of the men I have met who are married and have families, I can't say that all or even most of them are happy with the balance they feel forced to make. It is almost as though the family goal, or at least the degree to which they feel obligated to focus on it, was foist upon them by someone else. They want to focus on other things too, but they can't and not risk having people sneer at their “bad parenting”. I have recently had to endure a good friend going through a divorce, brought on because he sacrificed his creative spirit to be the family man. It was very noble of him, but it was also amazingly dumb as he learned in hindsight. His family would've held together far better if he had pushed harder for time to be creative and accomplish his other goals in life. Instead, he let it fester, and it imploded in his face.

And as for my parents sacrifices to me, I do remember, and I wish they had made fewer or at least different sacrifices. I would happily give back a number of the presents they gave me when I was younger to see them happier and personally more fulfilled more often. I would not have minded a smaller house, less privacy, fewer toys, or similar withholdings if it just meant I could look back and not feel like such a fucking burden on them. I think it would've allowed me to develop a more positive outlook on life and what it has to offer sooner, rather than having to realize on my own later on that a lot of this self-sacrifice people do gets us largely nowhere.

So no, this is not all about picking the sacrifices we make, with the realization that in the end we're all gonna get screwed and have to except the sublinear returns we do get. It is about realizing that how we treat ourselves, and how much we make sure we are feeling fulfilled in life, has a huge bearing on how we treat those who we care about and who care about us, regardless of the bullshit we tell ourselves about how we can strictly segment our lives. All that is bollocks, and it has real consequences; just ask my now freshly single friend.

I suspect there's just a wee bit of hypocracy taking place here.

One has to wonder if this truly was the case, and he came to these conclusions in a reasonable timeframe (on the order of 1 year), why on earth he's bothered to stay with HP for 2 full years?

Very likely this was due to an "earn out" clause in the acquisition agreement of Tabblo (his start-up).

So, in other words, the author has stayed-on for...the paycheck.

There might be hypocrisy, but I suspect that is not the case. It is possible that the A player 20% he encounters is enough to make him feel like the value he gets out of working at HP is greater than the value he might get going somewhere else. Not all the value one derives from an employer is in the form of currency.

HP is a vast company, 150,000+ employees. 30,000 of those are of a quality that if they move companies, press releases get written? Doesn't ring true to me.

They have the skills to get things done, the passion, and perhaps most importantly, the patience required to make elephants dance (big companies get stuff done). Every time I meet one of these gems, I walk away believing a little more in the human condition.

I really wonder how often these three traits are all found in one person. I have a hard time imagining a person being passionate and able to get things done, but being willing to move forward at a rate mandated by the rest of a large, bureaucratic organization. Perhaps this is the group of people that is competent but also feels a stronger obligation to those they support to have something stable.

My reaction to this is slightly different than the authors: I actually find myself fearing for the human condition. Whenever I meet these people, I find that they are often on the brink of ceasing to care. They'll keep their skills, and keep learning new ones, if only because they are insatiably curious. They'll remain patient, because what they are dealing with at that moment is likely the hardest test their patience will have. But, they'll lose the passion, either because they tire from constantly pushing against the elephant, or because the feeling of obligation will force them to, so that they don't burn-out and potentially leave those who depend on them unsupported.

One might argue that their passion isn't lost, it is just redirected to other things (children, family, other hobbies, etc.). This I have a hard time believing, because I've run into people at small, young companies who are passionate about their families and hobbies, but they are also passionate about their work. These are the people that make me believe a little more in the human condition; they are the ones that have decided that sacrificing their fulfillment, although noble and heavily encouraged socially, has its own risks that are not trivial. It's possible that they can be fulfilled just by family and other hobbies, and their work doesn't have to matter. If they can't, depression will fill the cracks, and will bleed over into every part of their lives, in spite of how much they may claim success in compartmentalizing. Even if they can, treating this as a zero-sum game seems broken to me, if for no other reason than the people I've known who are counterexamples.

sounds like atlas shrugged

"...you will never get more than a paycheck..."

That pretty much nails it.

Almost every time I asked someone in a large institution about putting up with something that obviously made no sense, I got the same 3 word reply, "It's a paycheck."

Which often means "I tried and tried to change that thing that made no sense, until I was told that I would be fired if I didn't stop."

In my experience, that's almost never the case.

In my experience, that's almost always the case.

EDIT: Just to expand a little. In my experience (and Philip Greenspun would support me: http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/managing-softwar...), managers generally are less up to date on technology than the people that report to them. While they may be more "in the know" about the concerns of the business, it's almost invariably backward-looking, i.e. what got the company this far, and protecting those gains. Add to that the rigors of trying to climb the career ladder, the increased status that makes most people less "hungry," and it's just common sense that change comes from the bottom. Good managers recognize that, and try to manage it. Bad managers just say "No." There's a lot more bad managers out there than good ones.

My experience challenges your experience to a duel to settle this for good!

Resumes at dawn!

It's all about mindset.

The startup mindset is focused on building something great.

The big company mindset on survival within the organization.

At least that is what many of the founders I have represented have reported back to me after having their companies acquired and after having gotten roped into employment stints with the acquiring company.

In almost all such cases, once the employment period expires, they can't wait to get out.

I am sure this is not any kind of universal rule, but it often happens.

BTW, not endorsing this particular author attitude in particular, which I found off-putting in itself.

There are two kinds of workers. Those that say Yes - let's do this, yes, let's build it. And the other kind are those that say No.

Why do they say one or the other? It has to do with the perception of risk and reward.

Crazy new Yes guy says, let's do this! And the long-time No thinks, this won't make my stock options go up, and if I fail, I'll be punished by management.

It is unpleasant to be one kind and interact with the other.

Big companies tend to have an outsize appreciation of negative risk. We might look bad in the press, etc. So the general behavior tends towards consensus and risk-mitigation quite naturally, rather than risktaking. You need the right mix of both.

His 60% has got to be untrue. Much more likely it's 60% of the people he is actually exposed to.

While reading, I was expecting the 60% to be the salt of the earth, the nameless drones who did the unsexy work that no one else wanted to do, the professional service workers, the documentation workers, the QA folks, etc.

Also, may just mean 60% of the managerial class.

That was my impression. It's an obnoxious perspective.

I don't know. Have you ever worked in a large IT department or large organization? It can be very, very painful when 10% of the people are working their ass off and the rest are kind of skating. Even worse the 80% can make projects harder than they need to be by layering on meeting after meeting because they approach all projects with the same techniques - large or small.

I agree, I work in a relatively small company (100 people) and there are a large number of people who are more concerned about the traditions of their functional role rather than the overall health of the business and adapting to market realities. I don't think it is 60% of people, but based on what I've heard from friends who work at places like P&G it isn't too far off.

Probably because sticking to the "traditions of their functional role" is exactly what they're told to do and rewarded for.

Sometimes the reasons the rest are "kind of skating" is the obnoxious behavior of the managerial classes I'm referring to. Though I admit that I'm speculating about the original post.

I currently work in a large organization.

It's very difficult to fire people in most countries. If you've got someone who was never particularly good at their technical job (or hasn't kept their skills current), you kind of have to transfer them to a hands-off position to keep them from damaging anything directly, and the only way to do that and everyone saves face (i.e you don't get sued for constructive dismissal) is to promote them to management.

And that does protect the codebase and the production systems in the short term, in the long term, all the reports they insist people write that don't create any new and valuable knowledge, all the meetings they insist people attend that don't communicate any information or make any decisions, etc, are enormously damaging, not only directly in lost productivity but in the damage to the morale of those who are still motivated.

So most management really is bad, but not because of anything inherent in the management role - because the wrong people are doing it for the wrong reasons. There needs to be much more up-or-out http://thedailywtf.com/articles/up-or-out-solving-the-it-tur... .

I really enjoyed that article. Thanks for the link.

i dont seem to hate his post as much as most here do. In fact if anything, im suprised that he went so lightly on the 20% Peter-principle-bucket folks.

While I agree on the breakdown, my personal feeling is that the lame 20% is the reason why the other 60% exist. They allow it, and through incentivizing the wrong behavior grow it. If they stamped it out (and they are the people in the position to do it) n% of the 60 will up their game (because it now becomes the strategy closely allied to their own self interests) and n% will leave, which I think is an ok result n the long run anyway..

And which category does the author fall into?

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