
How to Pay Programmers Less (2016) - NourEddineX
https://www.yegor256.com/2016/12/06/how-to-pay-programmers-less.html
======
foobar_
Dealing with a talentless narcissistic manager or a dipshit CEO? A talentless
piece of hack who doesn't know anything about technology but is somehow
calling the shots ?

0\. Boundary setting doesn't work with these losers because they don't respect
them, so you will have to adopt devious tactics. Running away is a cowardly
act. Learn how to spot them and their co-dependent friends. I would highly
recommend the book Cracking the Psychopath Code and works by Sam Vaknin.

1\. Hack their computer! This way you can leverage their insecurities and
exploit them. They probably have troubles at home. Just borrow their phone and
install spy tools, best 50$ ever! Even better if you can hack their bank
accounts and give them a headache.

2\. Always make them look good but bad mouth about them all across the board.
Firing a narcissist takes time. About 2 years if you do this diligently. Take
care not to badmouth it to the narcissist's allies.

3\. Adopt the narcissistic's official ideology whatever it may be. This is the
most painful thing and your code will probably look stupid.

4\. Always work diligently so that you become a valuable asset to the firm and
let other managers/startups know. You should become the army general that
dethrones the king. They are plenty of female narcissists as well and it is
highly improbable for a guy to take them down. This is one place where you
might need at least one female ally to take them down if you are a guy. If you
are a woman then ... all the best! Not all women are empathic monks are they?

5\. Always remember ... they don't really care about you or your friends. You
are an extra in their drama.

6\. Develop a thick skin when they throw temper tantrums ... work on your
submissive poker face.

7\. Narcissists are paranoid, to put it mildly, so you have to challenge them
a few times truthfully so that they think you are being real with them.

8\. Read a book on dealing with pets because Narcissists respond to reward and
punishment like infants and pets. Set boundaries by disguising them as
compliments and appeal to their selfishness. Give the narcissist multiple
options that you control.

9\. If you have done all these steps and won, congratulations you are now a
Narcissist 2.0 in your firm!

~~~
baybal2
Been though that once on my last job in Canada.

After 1.5 years on the job I was quite elated to promoted to "work directly
under a C-level" in a quite sizeable company when I was just 25 years old.

That was in a sourcing company that works for BestBuy, Target, LondonDrugs,
WM, Amazon, and other top tier retailers, delivering OEM stuff on demand for
their captive brands.

The man... happened to be a totally textbook case of "pro-manager:" net worth
of few millions, few cousins and brothers in similar corporate positions,
black lambo, and a mistress secretary.

I quickly understood that I became the only "general" in the business that
keep things going on the technology side, and that the business will not be
able to keep going unless they can customise products beyond the paint job and
silkscreens.

We came to an eventual animosity, and few months after the "promotion" we had
an argument in his office where he tried his cheap pressure tactic, and he
made me to slam the door. As I was going through the parking lot, I saw the
guy running shouting "how much you want!?"

I returned to the building and had him talk it over with me not in his office,
but in the middle of cubicles of the team, to everybody's amused looks.

In the end, it was the LMIA rules update that made me leave Canada and that
company. Been working with in an engineering consulting company in China for
nearly 3 years now, and I can't be more happy now with Canada kicking me out.

~~~
foobar_
Damn .. it sucks dealing with these clowns. I will never allow these clowns to
take away the joy of working with code and fellow programmers from me. That
way they win!

I hope you are having a swell time working in your new gig. How is the coding
culture with the Chinese folks?

~~~
baybal2
I can not generalise at all. Chinese companies can be on both sides of the
extreme.

But one thing is certain, there is much more natural selection involved with
businesses. A factory producing low quality widgets will be evaluated
incomparably more harshly by professional buyers than a customer facing brand
selling them in the US.

There are bosses who learned to respect engineers, and there ones who didn't.
The later keep loosing businesses, go from one master to another, until they
hit the bottom, unless there is somebody who keeps bailing them, which is not
rare.

I knew one dude who lost 3 businesses as an appointed director, but each time
he failed, his well connected uncle was ready to refer him to then next "good
friend."

In China, "the boss" is much more of a social/hereditary class than a job,
much more than it is in USA. The majority of the economy is still kept by the
people called "the first generation money," though they been slowly losing
their dominance in the economy over decades. You can imagine, a lot of the
first gen wealth were former party bosses themselves, or their relatives.

Out of that class of people, there are some good bosses who were taught by
hard life experiences, and ones who weren't. I myself recommend people not to
risk and try to find an employer whose boss is not coming from that social
group.

------
alokrai
> Brainwash them regularly by communicating how great your company is, how big
> its mission is, and how important their contribution is.

A few year ago a friend was working as a consultant for Disneyland mentioned
about how little Disneyland would pay its lowest rung employees who kept the
place running. Instead the workers were fed corporate bullshit about how lucky
they were to work at the "happiest place in the world."

Perhaps being educated or skilled does not reduce one's susceptibility to
psychological manipulation.

~~~
geomark
_Brainwash them regularly by communicating how great your company is, how big
its mission is, and how important their contribution is._

It works even better in the world of classified programs because, due to
compartmentalization of information, the engineers don't know much about the
overall project or what anybody else is doing. But they can always be sure
their contributions are important...to management's bonuses.

~~~
mettamage
As I'm practicing consulting cases right now for an MBB interview, my standard
question to reducing company costs is: can we reduce labor costs by lowering
their wage? Ah, they're unionized. Ok, let's look at another cost saving
strategy that does not involve labor.

The first time I learned this I was shocked that this is a standard question
in case practice for strategy/implementation consultants. Now I'm happy that I
know this is how strategy/implementation consultants think. It kind of feels
like learning to defend against economic exploits by coming up with them
yourself (a similar thing occurs with security when one learns ethical
hacking).

~~~
arethuza
I remember reading about one large consulting form whose answer was always
"lay off 25% of your staff" regardless of what the question was.

Of course, companies would have to pay a huge amount to get that answer - but
it was always the same answer.

This was from the book "Rip-Off":

[https://www.leadershipreview.net/business-management-
consult...](https://www.leadershipreview.net/business-management-consultancy-
rip)

------
dagw
Another good trick is to pass blame diffusely upwards. If you believe that
your boss is fighting as hard as he can do get you the raise he 'wants' to
give you, but the powers that be above him is blocking it, then you'll be far
more accepting of the fact that you didn't actually get that raise. Hell your
boss might even be 100% genuine in his desire to get you that raise, that's
even better.

------
latte
If I remember correctly, the advice to give raises randomly also appeared in a
serious, non-ironic "How to become a CEO" book [1].

There, it was positioned as a way to make subordinates work harder and make
them more loyal - people were assumed to react to fuzzy, random bonuses and
raises better than to a linear relationship between results and pay.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/How-Become-CEO-Rising-
Organization/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/How-Become-CEO-Rising-
Organization/dp/0786864370)

~~~
kthejoker2
Ah yes, from the famous executive consultant BF Skinner ...

Other famous executive consultants: Pavlov, Milgram, Zimbardo, Mengele,
Torequemada, Machiavelli, Sade ...

------
billions
Don't forget free lunches. $10 bucks for an extra hour of productivity.

~~~
tiew9Vii
Yeah. 12 months in to a job there was a big push to move to the cloud, all
devs go on 24/7 mandatory support. You would be required for a week to be on
call, rotating in your team, so every 3-4 weeks depending on devs in the team.

For this you where required to always have internet access, return a phone
call within 10mins to acknowledge a issue then be investigating within 20-30
mins. This means for 7 days if you wanted to drink you could not, you could
not travel to a place without phone signal, you always had to have a laptop
and phone on you. Essentially your personal time was not personal time, you
are severely inconvenienced and for 168hrs you where essentially at work. For
this you got 200AUD extra in your pay packet minus tax. It was non negotiable,
this was no small company but at the time a recently IPO’d company with a shit
load of cash. If you look at it as 168 hours for the week on call due to loss
of personal time it’s a massive pay cut. I would of come out significantly
ahead working minimum wage for just the sat/sun and loose less personal time.

Discussing it with my managers how I did not want to loose personal time and
was happy to do it for free on a best attempt I’ll answer a call if I get it
and available vs being absolutely available and accountable resulted in “but
you get free lunches here, take it for the team”, the perks where used as
leverage. As you said the cost of lunches to the company was peanuts, worse
than that I had special dietary needs so never utilised it.

Didn’t stay long after that

~~~
fuzz4lyfe
Pretending to be naive can be useful from time to time.

"I'm sorry, I have dietary restrictions that prevents me from enjoying the
free lunch. It would be a great bonus if I was able. How about this you forgo
the large cost of the free lunch and instead pay me the minor amount of
overtime for the rare times I'm called out." (they always present that you
will rarely be required to fix something off hours, call that bluff)

The only directions they can go is "Well that will cost more than the free
lunch" or "we demand it" so either you win the argument by having them make
your point for you or you will have a nice casus belli to find a new job.

------
dusted
"They must keep this information secret. Warn them or even sign NDAs
prohibiting any talks about wages, bonuses, compensation plans, etc"

That's directly illegal, at least in Denmark, so I assume in the rest of the
civilized works as well.

~~~
mindjiver
I think I remember my previous employment contract here in Germany stating
that talking about salary was a fireable offense. Can't remember anything
similar in Sweden. Just some datapoints.

~~~
dagw
Salary in Sweden is publicly available information.

------
baybal2
I think what is forgotten is: _make programmers work less!_

And I can't stress this enough, just how much work in both "dotcom type"
companies and corporate IT goes completely to waste.

N out of 10 software features some smart "requirements manager" manager, or an
artsy type "product manager" make up usually end up as ballast.

I'm saying that to highlight that the prime majority of companies spending
pennies on devs are almost as a rule pathologically inefficient, and that is
the root of their problems.

I think there is a wrong image of tech companies among the rentier types as a
maintenance free cash cows, and that they can pick a well performing
companies, fire all devs, but the "maintenance crew" and secure their
retirement in a few years. My own experience with that is a complete opposite:

Companies with well selling tech products only do so for as long as they give
good support, and keep money burning on marketing. The moment the rentier type
buys the company, and cuts both new developments (which in reality usually are
support, and bugfixes) and marketing, they really destroy the only things that
were keeping the business going.

------
ohyash
My urge to put this in our slack "general discussion" group is huge.

~~~
dejaime
Do it during the friday happy hour, and then blame the free drinks

------
cryptica
This is very true. I've worked for several employers like this. Usually it's
better to quit but sometimes it's still worth staying because some jobs can
open up more opportunities. In these situations, the best you can do is build
leverage by creating direct relationships with stakeholders (e.g. clients and
investors).

~~~
goatinaboat
The whole of the Scrum methodology - funnelling all access to users via the
“product owner” - is explicitly designed to disempower both end users and
developers and concentrate power with the project managers and other managers.
That’s why it’s so popular.

Even better some developers have even been brainwashed into thinking Scrum is
for their benefit!

~~~
badpun
It's just what businesses are familiar with and, frankly, what works. Before
scrum you've had system analysts writing requirements and use cases, now you
have product owner writing stories.

Engineers have so much on their plate fighting the actual code that making
them talk to users (who don't know what they want half of the time or are
involved in some sort political battles themselves) is just putting too much
on their plate IMO. Maybe this could work in a smaller organisation with a
fairly straightforward business, but in any place old and large, there's
usually so many stakeholders involved (usually playing poor man's game of
thrones amongst themselves) and so much random conflicting bullshit (in the
requirements etc.) that any sane developer would be happy to just be oblivious
to that.

~~~
goatinaboat
I disagree, based on my experience in both small and large organisations,
nothing at all beats a developer spending a half-day or a day sitting with an
end user saying “show me what you are doing, or trying to do”. And making
copious notes then going away and programming it.

Very few organisations are willing to work like this because nearly all
project- and middle-management would be out of jobs. The management class will
always strive to protect itself and its members from the workers (both end-
users and devs).

~~~
badpun
I agree that it can work in cases where the business is actually well
organized and knows what they want. However, what I've often seen is that
nobody pretty much knows anything and/or they're afraid to make a decision and
hence you need a product manager to go around various business units, arrange
workshops etc. and try to pound out some definitive statements out of the
business guys. This is super common on large multi-million (or billion)
projects which are supposed to transform the whole org in some way. On the
other hand, if the project is just for one business unit and they're the one
driving it, then maybe product owner is less needed.

~~~
goatinaboat
Surprisingly often they do know what they want, even if they can’t articulate
it they can demonstrate it.

The spec only becomes inane gobbledygook when filtered through a PM who
doesn’t understand it but rewrites it in business-speak anyway, or an
“architect” who also doesn’t understand it but thinks it needs to be a grand,
generic solution.

------
gorzynsk
Additionally when they treat managers as other engineers - meaning that they
want to discuss changes or improvements without judging others for their ideas
- just decide for them and announce your decision to show who is in charge.

~~~
arethuza
"just decide for them and announce your decision to show who is in charge."

That reminds me of a conversation I had with a CEO once when I was a VP
Engineering:

Me: "I think we have the scope of the new version pretty well understood by
everyone and things are looking good for delivering on time"

CEO "I know for a fact that you don't understand the scope"

Me: "<confused>Pretty sure I do"

CEO: "Well I've decided as things are going so well we can add a few
additional features"

Me: "Arghhhh..."

NB This was a while ago - my rookie mistake was having everything under
control and everyone working calmly and productively and letting the CEO know,
whereas the CEO favoured the "everyone must be near to panicking at all times"
school of management.

Edit: Of course the features he mentioned were daft and were never implemented
- he wasn't actually interested in them, just in unsettling me <sigh>

------
ecmascript
Joshua Fluke just released this video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nyHRcI5Fto](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nyHRcI5Fto)

Which I thought was pretty funny and straight down this alley.

------
ai_ja_nai
>Warn them or even sign NDAs prohibiting any talks about wages, bonuses,
compensation plans, etc.

Isn't this actually illegal?

~~~
habnds
might depend on the state but for sure illegal in most. At the same time, I've
never heard of it being litigated, ever. Usually the people told not to talk
about their salaries are making the most.

~~~
padraic7a
"Usually the people told not to talk about their salaries are making the
most."

Oh buddy, I hope you didn't fall for that one.

~~~
habnds
it's a battle of wits for sure :)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EkBuKQEkio](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EkBuKQEkio)

------
stareatgoats
Previous discussion (2016):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13120114](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13120114)

------
qrbLPHiKpiux
This has got to be satire. There’s no other way any sane person could really
mean this. I took it all as comedy.

~~~
goatinaboat
These are all real things that happen in real companies.

------
jenkstom
This is uncomfortably close to how those with a narcissistic personality
disorder psychologically abuse and control their victims. I maybe should
rethink my life. :-(

