The following post is an exploration.
It is the attempt of a puzzled mind trying to work things out.
It should be analysed cautiously to see what, if any value it might contain.
The author though does post it in the sincere hope that it will provide something for you.
End of warning.
The amount of care that you are given as a person degrades as you progress through life.
In primary / elementary school your teachers know you very well and very personally, as such the good teachers tend to care a great deal about you.
In secondary / high school your teachers do not know you as well, the impersonal nature is a shock coming from primary school. The teachers still do care about you, but the energy that goes into personal attention is diluted by the number of classes that teacher runs.
Tertiary / college / university institutions are a more gentle degradation of the high school education system.The jump from secondary to tertiary education is easier because it's just a minor variation on what you are already used to. Yet at the tertiary level those running the courses still do care about you, but the effort now is now mostly put into delivering course material and marking assignments and exams.
Now when you commence work, that care, remote though it might have seemed, vanishes.
It comes as a nasty surprise because in the case of the software developer the transition from school to work seems like just a variation on what has gone before.
Let's compare the two environments.
At college you have access to a terminal that you use to produce programs and on the side you teach yourself new skills.
At work you have access to a terminal that you use to produce programs and on the side you teach yourself new skills.
It seems like the same: assignment papers become change request specifications.
But there is actually a role reversal that happens. You were a consumer you are now a producer.
Students are consumers. The teachers are producers. The teacher produces educational material that the student consumes.
Society is fashioned to always pay attention to the consumer. This attention may often mainfest itself as care but does not always do so.
For example:
Shop assistants are encouraged by management to pay attention, in most cases this means being nice, to customers in the hopes that they will buy something. The shop assistant therefore pays a great deal of attention to the customer, but the customer is under no obligation to pay attention to the shop assistant. The customer's only interest is in getting what they want.
There is a power equilibrium between the shop assistant and the customer, with a significant tilt in the customer's favour.
So what happens if the customer gets what they want? The customer is satisfied they get their item or service, the manager is satisified the business makes money. The shop assistant (assuming that they are paid a fixed salary) however just expended energy with no immediate reward.
What happens if the customer doesn't get what they want? The customer is dissatisfied they have nothing, the manager is dissatisfied, they have no sale. The shop assistant has still expended energy and quite possibly has a vexed manager to deal with.
In either situation the shop assistant loses.
In the production hierarchy those at the bottom, either directly making or selling the products lose. They produce but their only return is a fixed wage.
What role does the manager play?
The manager is a consumer. He naturally consumes the efforts of those under him either:
(a) For profit or power.
(b) To give to his manager.
So all the profit and power spreads up the chain of command to those at the top. The other workers in the chain are left with their salaries but little else.
This is how things play out in their natural state.
As a software developer you are producer at the bottom of the food chain, while your manager or your customer may get to draw immediate appreciable benefit from your efforts you will not.
As a peon at the bottom of the food chain a lot of people simply rebel, and management is left with a lot of surly unresponsive employees. The only reason these poeple are kept on staff is because the cost of recruiting new staff in terms of time, money, and energy seems dauntingly high.
Management of course realises that employees on fixed salaries don't perform well and try all sorts of things to motivate them, most of which fail.
Nagging and bullying causes employees to leave. Non-monetary rewards tend to raise cynicism in employees: "you're saying my effort is only worth this lame X?". Parties and social events tend to fall flat.
What management easily miss is that employees really want them personally involved in their efforts. Let's face it: most work is complete shit, but a manager able to understand what an employee is going through and encourage them on a day to day effort makes it all bearable, indeed it makes the work incomparably good. This is why employees tend to follow good managers.
Unfortunately for a new person coming into a medium or large organisation it is fairly random as to whether or not you get such a manager. In a medium or large organisation it only takes one person to be horrible to another for the effects to come cascading down the tree. And this sort of bad karma eats away at the very morale that you seek to establish. Eventually you get feelings of: "they don't care, so why should I bother?" and good luck trying to stamp that out if it gets entrenched.
Working for a medium to large organisation can really suck, and you want to be very wary before going to work there. The wages offered at medium to large organisations are higher in part to make up for horrible deficits in morale.
The final message seems to be: get yourself into a small organisation that you like. It should be easy to decide whether or not the organisation has the desired qualities that you seek, everything is apparent before your eyes, as opposed to medium or large organisations where it may take a while to see everything that you need to.
In a small organisation the morale is high. The manager and his team must gel otherwise the organisation will die. Medium to large organisations tend to breed selfishness, apathy, and joylessness.
I will finish with a quote from the comments following Steve Yegge's Being the Averagest:
Are you insinuating that working our asses off year after year for that 40 rating and a 1% raise isn't motivation enough to make us all rise to stardom??"
- Anonymous
Hi Anonymous,
That's a very interesting, complex question, and undeserving of a flip answer from me.
All I can say is: if you're working your ass off, stop right now. Amazon's not worth it. If you have a crappy manager who's making you work your ass off, fire your manager (by finding another group to work in.) There are plenty of bad, insecure, incompetent, neurotic managers in every organization, including ours, and you don't need to keep them in business by working hard to make them look good. I don't know why it takes so long to root out and eliminate bad managers at Amazon, but that seems to be the way of things.
Once you find a group at Amazon where you're actually working because you enjoy what you're doing (which is typically determined more by your team members and your management than by the actual work), then you can come back to this post and start wondering whether you might not want to "work" (in a fun way) to make yourself more effective at doing what you love to do.
What many people find is that when they're in the right environment, doing something they believe in (and being recognized by their peers for it), they work harder than folks who are supposedly "working their asses off." But it doesn't feel like work anymore. When it does feel like work, something's going wrong, and you need to fix it.
If you can't find a suitable team in Amazon, well, there are lots of places that pay higher than we do. I know a few guys who've gone across the street to work for Wells Fargo or Washington Mutual, made 50% more than they do here, and they leave at 3:00pm to go play golf.
My god, life's too short to bust your ass for wage increases. Nobody gets rich off wages.
- Steve Yegge
P.S. This post still has a draft feel to it. There is a lot more that I will say on this and related topics but I hope that it's good enough to be useful.
