
Work and Meaning: View from a Senior HP Manager - replicatorblog
http://theonda.org/articles/2009/07/03/work-and-meaning
======
supahfly_remix
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.

~~~
azanar
_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.

------
bonsaitree
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.

~~~
azanar
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.

~~~
gaius
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.

------
azanar
_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.

~~~
pj
sounds like atlas shrugged

------
edw519
"...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."

~~~
ojbyrne
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."

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

~~~
ojbyrne
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...](http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/managing-software-
engineers)), 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.

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

~~~
ojbyrne
Resumes at dawn!

------
grellas
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.

------
joshu
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.

------
euroclydon
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.

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

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

~~~
andymoe
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.

~~~
gaius
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...](http://thedailywtf.com/articles/up-or-out-solving-the-it-turnover-
crisis.aspx) .

~~~
ojbyrne
I really enjoyed that article. Thanks for the link.

------
mh_
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..

------
mrbgty
And which category does the author fall into?

