Comment by nhashem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nhashem | Hacker News Reader

All these "now you're the dishwasher, gg idiot" comments I think are taking this too literally.

We've all probably been "the nice guy" in some situation that did some mundane/tedious task, ended up being that guy forever, and ended up resentful and vowed never to do it again. I don't think this is the point here though.

In my opinion, the easiest way to command respect is to not think about commanding respect. If there's a problem, just solve it, and your peers and subordinates will respect you an order of magnitude more than if you just tried to motivate them with some "problem-solving" Power Point slides.

One of my favorite examples I've seen of "washing the dishes:"

- At a startup myself and four other engineers wanted attend a conference across town. Our cab was running late and we were in danger of missing the first sessions. The CEO chucked his keys at us (he drove a minivan) and his credit card and said, "take my car, it needs gas though so fill it up with my card on the way back."

Did we expect we now had unlimited use of this guy's car forever and abuse it? Of course not. Did we totally respect him for trusting five guys to drive his car and made sure we had enough gas? Yes. Did we notice that he didn't even use the corporate credit card because only about 10% of that full tank of gas would be used for work purposes? Yes.

"In my opinion, the easiest way to command respect is to not think about commanding respect. If there's a problem, just solve it, and your peers and subordinates will respect you an order of magnitude more than if you just tried to motivate them with some "problem-solving" Power Point slides."

It depends on the size of the organization you're in. Sad and irrational as it may seem, people are basically just monkeys, and we react most strongly to shiny, noisy things (which is part of the reason our society seems to tolerate 'social media experts' and celebrate certain bloggers...but I digress.) If there's too much background noise, it's hard to earn respect if you're quiet and industrious. Take a close look at any big company (including "engineering driven" companies), and you'll find that the upper echelons of the organization are dominated by people who ruthlessly self-promote. Don't misunderstand: at the good companies, those folks also "do the dishes" -- they're just very strategic about the timing and promotion of their dish-washing initiatives.

The problem with being the Guy Who Quietly Gets Things Done is that if you do your job too well, you don't get noticed. If you don't get noticed, you don't get rewarded, even if you're doing a kick-ass job. It's usually easier to get noticed for being quiet and reliable in a small group of people, but once you've got more than a few monkeys in the cage, it gets very noisy and it's hard to stand out, even amongst your small group of peers.

I suppose that we'll have a revival in the way we measure employees. Not everything can be put into neat metrics but there are probably lot of factors and outputs we haven't even begun to put together in a systematic way.

Knowing who your "Guys Who Quietly Gets Things Done" are would be invaluable for any enterprise. Would they pay for a tool to help them identify and retain these quiet superstars? I think so.

"I suppose that we'll have a revival in the way we measure employees....would [people] pay for a tool to help them identify and retain these quiet superstars?"

Perhaps, but I don't think it would help. The way things are isn't necessarily bad...it's just human nature. Give a cage full of monkeys a new incentive system, and the monkeys will learn to game the system in order to get more bananas. Give them a tool that lets the quiet monkeys make more noise, and the loud monkeys will use it to make themselves even louder.

Generally speaking, hyper-rational people (like most geeks) try to fight this trend at first, but they eventually come to the conclusion that it's easier and better to just play the game.

This is rather along the lines of the idea of servant leadership that I've heard of, or some may call it "stepping up to the plate"

Just like startups have the myth of the sole person having the million dollar idea in the basement, leadership has the myth of all glamour and charisma.

In my first job, I had a boss named Lex. We were out doing a field test in Germany at an airfield. Of course, most of us were pretty busy doing this or that. Lex was overseeing things, but when he had nothing to do, he looked around for something to do, and was often seen with a broom cleaning up after us in the hanger.

The idea is that shit needed to get done, and if the rest of us were busy getting shit done, he would do support work to make sure the rest of us would be able to do our jobs, even if that support work wasn't glamourous.

In the end, I know he has the group's goals in mind as his intentions indicated through his actions of doing support work--anything to get things done--rather than for his own personal gain or ego. With that in mind, I'm more willing to follow with him at the helm.

Funny, I had the exact same thing happen at a startup in the 90s - we had to pick someone up from the airport, we were late, so the CEO gave a couple of 22-year-olds the keys to her car to solve the problem.

If a CEO won't step up in that way to get the ball moving forward in a company, why should they expect their salaried employees to?

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