Comment by 6nf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 6nf | Hacker News Reader

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I've told this story a few times and I always get surprisingly diverse reactions to it, especially on Reddit.

Back in the late 90s I worked at a place that sold all kinds of automotive parts. Everything from nuts and spark plugs to turbochargers and large assemblies. The secret sauce of this company was a small team of people who worked through thick supplier (paper) catalogs and figured out which parts from different suppliers are in fact interchangable by comparing their specifications. This all went into the database for the sales team's use.

Well one younger guy in this team worked out a way to largely automate his job using OCR and spreadsheets. Instead of taking 8 hours to work through his day's load, he would do it all in an hour or two. Then he'd slack off for the rest of the day.

Soon the manager found out but the manager was not upset, instead the manager was disappointed. Why didn't this employee share this system with the others? Why did he think it was OK to slack off for 6 hours a day instead of doing 4 times as many catalogs? If this employee worked for me, I'd be putting him to work finding other things to automate!

In the past I've had many comments from people saying 'oh he should have kept it a secret' or 'he is getting paid to do X and if he is more efficient then why cant he slack off' or even 'oh no this is a disaster now most of that team will be laid off'

>Why didn't this employee share this system with the others?

Because the consequences of him doing that are unclear. And since one potential (if not likely) consequence is management would simply retain 1/4 of staff doing this work and fire the rest, why would he share that?

Was there a huge sign at his workplace outlining the consequences of automating anything? An explicit policy that would alleviate such (reasonable - read the article!) fears? I don't think so either.

What was clear, presumably, is that as long as he processed X catalogs a day, he was getting his salary paid. That was what he was hired to do. And so that was exactly what he was doing.

>Why did he think it was OK to slack off for 6 hours a day instead of doing 4 times as many catalogs?

Because this is how work works. You pay someone to do something, and the expectations on the amount and kind of work - and the amount and kind of compensation - are discussed in advance.

>If this employee worked for me, I'd be putting him to work finding other things to automate!

Yes, and that's exactly the problem.

What if there aren't any? What if there are, but he doesn't find them? What if he finds them, but doesn't know how to automate the task? He was hired to go trough books and compare specs, automating his employer's business was literally not his job.

You see, your "reward" is not paying the employee 4X salary for being 4X efficient (you left that little part out!). Your reward is making the employee perform a more difficult job that they didn't sign up to do, presumably for the same salary (since you didn't mention paying them more).

Do you still wonder why they kept their silence?

If someone with this attitude worked for me, I'd get rid of them ASAP. We don't want people sitting around saying 'thats not my job' or 'I'm not going to look for ways to do things in a better way' or 'I wasnt hired for that'

Our company culture is the complete opposite of that. We want people to help each other. We want people to challenge how things are done. We want to change things all the time, experiment, see what works.

I have NEVER hired someone and said 'heres exactly what you need to do for 8 hours, have at it'. Not even close. All businesses must move forward, lest they die in the dust. The old cushy 9-5 job where you just do the same thing over and over your whole career is dying out quickly.

>Our company culture is the complete opposite of that. We want people to help each other. We want people to challenge how things are done. We want to change things all the time, experiment, see what works.

OK, so you are explicitly making this a part of the job description. Which, arguably, was not the case for that particular employee at that particular job.

>If someone with this attitude worked for me, I'd get rid of them ASAP.

When people are "got rid of ASAP" for their attitude and not due to their performance, that's more than reason enough to keep silent about, well, everything.

Because who knows what kind of attitude the boss might have on that day, or seek from their employees.

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Now on the me-note: in my current job, I do my best to automate and document processes to save my and my co-workers' time. But, unlike in the case above, that's my job as a software engineer. And I know that when I make things better, I am rewarded - either with a thank-you, a bonus, or joy from improving my own work flow. I don't have to fear being reprimanded or fired for that.

In my previous job, which was a Teaching Assistantship, I went over and beyond trying to improve things (I rewrote the lab assignments that everyone hated, and turned them into something useful and enjoyable) - and got hit with a plain, literal, "it's not your job" from the administration when trying to push these changes. Initiative was unwelcome there.

The moral? I've seen both sides. If you are the manager, it's on you. You create the environment where people will be either eager to be improving things, or will be scared to try (and will keep mum if they do).

>All businesses must move forward, lest they die in the dust.

And so do the employees.

>The old cushy 9-5 job where you just do the same thing over and over your whole career is dying out quickly.

Indeed, and that's why people move on to other jobs. I think the puzzle will solve itself once you put yourself in the shoes of the person your story was about.

>We don't want people sitting around saying ... 'I wasnt hired for that'

But surely you hire people for something? I hope you don't expect your software engineers to, say, clean toilets - and vice versa. And if you do, I hope you pay your cleaning staff as much as you pay your engineers.

Which, again, was not the case in the story you posted (the person doing the automation was neither expected to do it, nor was paid at the level that people whose job it is are).

You're really hung up about this 'not in the job description' thing. If you see a small fire in the cubicle next door, I guess you'll just ignore it cause putting out fires wasn't in the job description. Neither is looking out for fires and reporting it, so just let it burn.

You won't last the probation period working with us, thank god for that. I'd hate to be in an office full of people who only does what's in their job descriptions and never anything else. We hire people who care about each other and help each other in difficult periods. That's one of the reasons our employee retention is so high.

EDIT: If I thought that cleaning a toilet was for some reason the most valuable thing I could do for the company right now, I would do it.

You sound like a terrible employer.

Why? Because we want people who act like humans instead of corporate robots? Because we care about people who care about each other?

Any potential employee of your company will be asking "what's in it for me"? Do you pay well above market wage to make this extra effort worthwhile? If I automate or eliminate a lot of work how am I compensated for that extra effort?

Every company says they want people like you describe but few actually put the incentives in place.

Well people don't usually like or want to work for little dictators which fire people on a whim for minor things.

So your employees (assuming you have any and this is not some hypothetical scenario) won't straight out say those things, they will just quietly do them :)

Just to be clear, I've certainly never fired someone on a whim and in fact I can't even remember the last time I actually had to fire someone. Probably at least 5 years.

But we do try really hard to hire people that fit in our culture, and we make sure new employees understand how we work. If someone's just sitting there doing their assigned job as they were trained, they'd be fine but they would probably not get promoted or earn a pay raise every year.

And of course if someone DID need to go because we lost some clients or whatever, those are the ones we'd want to let go first.

This is race to the bottom behavior which we largely got away from him post industrial revolution. It's well and good to want employees who are passionate about their jobs, but no one is passionate 100% of the time. The rest of the time, they're going through the motions of pretending to be so they don't get fired. We know this leads to bad results for society in the long run. Mass burnout isn't good for anyone. Which is why we have (mostly cultural) enforced limits on what employers are "allowed" to expect from their employees (like a 9 to 5.) No one has the energy to go above and beyond 100% of the time, and honestly expecting them to do so is delusional. Of course it's beneficial for individual companies to find ways to compel their employees to work more (whether it's "culture" or otherwise,) but it's very bad for the "system" if everyone is doing it. People need to have time to spend money and engage in meaningful leisure to keep the economy spinning.

The only real exception is employees who are really committed to the vision of the company. Ultimately though that's usually only the executive team and early hires since they're the only ones who (usually) materially share in the actual success of the vision beyond just keeping their job. Most of your frontline employees are not going to get any benefit from sacrificing their energy (and there is a real cost to this) and time to fulfill a vision they don't even really contribute to forming, besides just keeping their job. The incentives just aren't usually there. Furthermore, It's common for founders to be very deluded about how "laudable" the vision for their company is. There are very few companies that act as clearly morally good agents in the world. It's not a given that profit-seeking entities inherently behave in a way that's ethical. I just don't see how anyone could possibly expect employees to be 100% committed to executing on the vision of most b2b or even consumer facing businesses. Especially when they don't really reap the benefits of company success.

And yeah, you can argue that you're buying someone's time and you're entitled to expect 100% of their mental capacity etc... during that time. But like anything else in capitalism, you get what you pay for. There are plenty of other employers that don't expect that or don't have the time/resources/collective IQ to determine that you've automated, and I don't see why your employees wouldn't just go work somewhere where they can get away with doing 1/4 of the work for the same salary vis a vis automation unless you provide some extraordinary benefit just for being a "member" of your company. And if being challenged is important to the employee in question (I'm one of these) I'd just go find a job that pays 4x (or make my own) where I could be challenged. In general, you can't eat a corporate vision and it's just not that valuable for most workers (there really are exceptions, companies that are clearly "morally good", but that's the exception and not the rule.)

Which isn't to say it's fun to work at a place where people are just jumping through their daily assigned hoops. But speaking as an employee, I'm certainly not willing to put in extra effort at a company paying at or below market rate with bland corporate vision/culture and/or uninteresting problems. Which seems to be the expectation of most employers. I'm lucky to work at a company where even though I'm ambivalent about moral character of the product (it's b2b stuff, so morally neutral,) I'm well compensated and enjoy a flexible corporate culture and have interesting technical problems to solve. Ultimately though, most companies are bland (in terms of vision) somewhere on the scale of utterly toxic to tolerable (in terms of culture) and totally boring (in terms of the nature of the work.) If you're not paying above market rate in these situations, it's completely absurd to expect employees to give anything "extra." Speaking from experience, most founders/CEOs are completely deluding themselves about how many of the boxes on compensation/culture/vision/interest their company is checking.

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