Hypothesis - Organisational Values: Producers and Consumers

Warning:

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.

Starting Out

What better place to start than at the beginning?

What you may get out of this entry:

(a) For those who have yet to start out, there will be some valuable questions that you should ask prospective employees about work place induction and culture.

(b) For those who have just started out there will be a little insight into the corporate culture of my organisation to which you can compare your own.

(c) For those who are managing there will be some recommendations about how you might possibly handle brand new, green, workers.

PART ONE

The date that I started working was early 2006. What follows falls in roughly the first 3 - 6 months.

I was part of what was a sort of quasi-internship program. I was part of a group of young people who were all similarly just out of school. I will call us interns.

A little bit about my organisation. The organisation is medium size and is very serious about: accountability, record keeping, service, and security. I was placed in the IT department, which provides infrastructure and software solutions to the rest of the organisation.

All of the interns were given two and a half days of orientation to familiarise us with it's aspects. I felt very nervous and jittery.

What I expected was to be drilled heavily in things like: our roles and responsibilities, organisational strucutre, code of conduct, record keeping, and security.

What we got were a lot of talks that felt very thin on content, some feel good motivational speeches (we were told that we were the organisation's future, which felt distinctly false to me), and a brief tour around the town that we were working in.

What was conspiciously absent from the discussion was exactly what we were supposed to be doing: responsibilities, performance goals, etc.

It all felt very vague and wishy-washy. I expected a lot of structure, order, and discipline and found what looked like disorganisation and entropy.

This was not confidence inspiring and I only felt more frightened.

Then I met my director. I will call him Adam.

ASIDE: All names mentioned here are pseudo names.

ASIDE: The hierarchy in decreasing order of authority: directory -> team leader -> myself.

What immediately crossed my mind was: something's wrong.

Adam asks me: "So would you like to go and see your work place?"

My thoughts: "Um ... you are in charge here aren't you? Shouldn't you just be laying out what will happen?"

The sense of disorganisation was only increasing. But it got worse.

It turned out that my team leader i.e. my immediate supervisor, was away on leave. Let's call him Bernard.

For two weeks I had nothing to do but busy myself learning the technologies that we used: C#, HTML, ASP.NET etc. All of this time wondering nervously: what is in store for me? When is the axe going to fall?

Then Bernard returned from leave, and I thought: "This it ... ", and nervously waited. Two hours passed and he gave no sign of noticing me.

Then I realised: he hasn't been told that I'm a part of his team.

So I went over and introduced myself timidly.

Bernhard: "Oh! So you're on my team?"

Me: "Um ... yeah ... "

ASIDE: What I often felt like I should have said was: "Um ... I don't know what to say ... sorry?".

ASIDE: I told one of my friends about this little episode and he burst out laughing. It had a very Dilbert feel to it.

As it turned out he was a nice man, we both had a similar sense of humour, and got on well. I'm very fond of Bernard.

PART TWO

After I got used to Bernard you would think that things would improve, but they didn't noticeably.

Bernard said to me on a few occasions: "I'm sorry I just don't have anything appropriate for you to do right now."

No one seemed to be taking the initiative in regards to teaching me. I hoped that on joining the organisation that I would be apprenticed to a skilled programmer who would help me cross the divide between school and work and that things would move along. But this never happened, and I was quite dissapointed.

Now don't misunderstand: Bernard would always help me if I had a direct question, but no one was offering me any clues about the larger picture.

I did wonder why no one took a skills inventory. I did raise the issue on at least one occasion, but Bernard did not seem interested.

There was however a performance development plan that had to be filled out. Bernard said to me: "Don't worry about most of this, just sign it." I asked: "Is there a set of performance outcomes for IT interns?" and he replied: "No, but there should be ..."

I can only say that my morale was low during this time. To my mind nobody seemed to care that much about my development,and I was hardly getting any work to do. I was very worried that someone would ask me why I wasn't up to a certain standard.

Indecision played a large part in my suffering. I kept wondering: "is this how things are meant to be?" And I would always reply to myself: "this is your first job, obviously you can't tell much, you need more data, just watch and wait."

I did however ask another IT intern Charles about how often he spoke to his team leader, and he replied on average once a day.This was very disheartening since I sometimes spoke to Bernard once every two to three days, but these periods could easily stretch for up to a week or more, lack of contact was making me miserable. Charles was also involved in a significant project, while I had barely touched a few lines of code.

I was told much later: you can always ask questions. This attitude vexes me greatly. If you have knowledge of what you need to learn then yes you can ask questions. But a green recruit in their first job is ignorant of what they need to know. The recruit needs to be taught at least a little. This is up to other team members and managers. You can bootstrap yourself from a little knowledge but not from no knowledge.

You may ask why I didn't simply speak to someone. The truth was I was uncertain and frightened: "is it ok to speak to someone about these worries?", "will I cause offence?", "will I be branded a trouble maker?", "will I be written off?" I honestly did not know and so I chose to remain silent, afraid that if I was wrong and I raised these issues then things would get worse. I considered myself at the bottom of the food chain and border line expendable.

ASIDE: My managers would probably be shocked and maybe offended at this last paragraph. I'm not saying that this was true, it was just how I felt.

ANALYSIS FROM HINDSIGHT

I overheard one of my coworkers remark that the organisation was very relaxed and also that you were expected to be very independent, (I would say autonomous).

Much later I would hear that the industry that I do IT in is infamous for having a management culture of: just keep doing what you are doing and only if you do something wrong will we tell you. This management culture is meant to be on the way out, but I can safely say that it is alive and well, and sadly still spreading down to younger team leaders ...

So let's review the factors:

- Workers are expected to be autonomous.

- Managers keep more of a hands off approach.

- Feedback is minimal especially positive feedback.

Workers who are left to do their own thing with little interaction from management would naturally come to think that what they do doesn't matter.

This seems to explain the sense of apathy and entropy that I have felt since I started.

ADVICE FOR MANAGERS

- Green interns straight out of school often do not have enough prior knowledge to be able to direct their own development. Also be alert to the need that they may not feel comfortable raising these issues.

- Take a skills inventory of the intern. You will probably be amazed at what skills are lacking e.g. I had no knowledge of databases before starting work which boggled the minds of my team leader and director.

- Pay attention to your intern, leaving them off by themselves for more than a day at a time simply says: "I don't care about you."

- Paying attention to your intern doesn't mean micromanaging them, or being tyrannical, but just asking them what they have been doing and the problems that they have gone through will boost their morale no end. It certainly helped me.

- Try to arrange for some sort of teaching / mentoring from senior programmers within the organisation. There is nothing like talking to a veteran to help an intern get a better view of the field and to gauge their own skills.

- One to five day external, vendor developed courses are not adequate training by themselves. I will have more to say about vendor developed courses in a later entry.

ADVICE FOR INTERNS

- Unfortunately the placement and treatment of interns in medium to large organisations is pretty random.

- No one really owes an intern anything. Managers often have more urgent higher priorities.

- Try not to get angry if your manager does forget about you, it's not personal. If you can master this please tell me how you did it ...

- Assume that you will be expected to teach yourself a lot of the skills for your job. More about skill sets will come in a later entry.

ADVICE FOR THOSE STILL IN SCHOOL

Ask at the interview:

- Whether they have a mentoring system, or anything similar.

- What training is provided, note: external vendor developed courses don't count for much.

- What sort of culture the work place has:

-- how much pressure is there?

-- how autonomous are the workers?

-- what is the management style?

-- how much contact is normal? how easy is it to get feedback?

-- how does the performance system work?

-- are there special rules for interns?