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Comment by amw-zero | Hacker News Reader

What is this idea that “engineers need to be kept happy?”

Are programmers children that we need to entertain in order for them to do their job?

Considering caring for the happiness of your employees (or really people in general) to be infantilizing is a pretty toxic mindset IMO. I WANT MY JOB SOUL CRUSHING BECAUSE I'M A REAL MAN.

Happiness and entertainment are not the same thing. Most of us spend a huge portion of our life working, we might as well try to make it at least a little bit fulfilling instead of just a way to fund the two days of the week when you can do something else.

And more cynically happy people will almost certainly work better. Have you never taken much more time than necessary to complete a task just because it was so incredibly dull, tedious and uninteresting? Bugtrackers are filled with issues that would require two lines of code to fix but nobody can be bothered to write them.

I'm obviously not saying that you should purposefully treat employees like garbage. The parent comment's tone was as if a business needs to beg for workers, and to make sure that programmers are kept happy with fancy and trendy technology. This is what's toxic and infantilizing. We are all a part of a business for one purpose - to continue or increase the success of the business.

For me, a job has to be reciprocal. I take my salary very seriously, and I reflect on what I've done in the past pay period. I want to make sure that I've provided that amount of value in that amount of time. Of course my feelings are important, I'm not going to contribute to an environment that doesn't reciprocate the value that I provide with some combination of compensation and gratitude.

My point is, I hear a lot of programmers talk about the feelings of the business with disdain, and frankly complete entitlement. I've seen plenty of engineers not contribute their fair share value to the business side - they think they earn their living by showing up and completing a couple of tickets a week, when in reality the business needs are much more demanding. The ideal working relationship is reciprocal - both parties get some satisfying bit of value out of it.

> The parent comment's tone was as if a business needs to beg for workers, and to make sure that programmers are kept happy with fancy and trendy technology. This is what's toxic and infantilizing.

That was just your interpretation. The parent commenter said that some engineers are motivated by money and some by new tech. Either way you need to keep workers happy or they will leave, that is just common sense. So if you choose boring technology you will get people motivated by money and not the "infant" engineers who "need toys" as you say. But really they don't "need" the toys, they just prefer it and will therefore leave if someone else gives them that when you don't.

Employees are hired guns. Employees want a tolerable job and a good salary while the executives and owners want to maximize profits.

If programmers can act with “complete entitlement” sometimes it’s only because they are some of the few workers who can demand something from their jobs, even without a union backing them. Most workers do not have that privilege/leverage.

Happiness does not equal to entertainment. It's called job satisfaction, not specific to engineers.

Multiple factors can satisfy you. Pay is one of them. Some engineers can also take less pay in exchange for use of shiny tech because boring tech can be very demaning. But that's not always the case.

In either case, one need to be happy with job to continue right? Or else one can find another job if they are not happy with pay, organization, food, location, ethics, abuse etc. It's not 1-dimensional.

Happy people are more creative, and most engineering is definitely creative work. If most of your work is engaging or satisfying, it's easier to drudge through the bad bits.

It's not like physical work where you can just keep doing it and it'll resolve itself eventually; it is entirely possible to keep hitting your head against an engineering problem forever without making any progress if your brain just refuses to make the correct connections, and it's really difficult to tell if you're making progress or not.

In general, all people deserve to be kept happy, so removing barriers to happiness is nearly always a good thing.

Employees need to be kept happy, otherwise they leave and the company has to spend more money hiring and training a replacement.

The alternative to this is offering more money, which isn’t even guaranteed to work.

> The alternative to this is offering more money, which isn’t even guaranteed to work.

This is true, but I feel misses the mark a little.

The absolute best development job I've had in my 15 odd years of experience was my first job. It wasn't about the technology. What I was using there was completely new to me, down to the text editor and keyboard (vim + Microsoft Natural ergonomic, you should have seen me struggling to do anything learning both at once). It wasn't about the pay. The company was paying an embarrassingly low rate because they were one of two companies in town hiring developers. It wasn't because we had a fancy office or a stocked pantry or beer on tap. We had none of that.

No. It was entirely because of the people I worked with. We would all play World of Warcraft after hours. We would joke around at work during the day and eat lunch together.

That's it. That's the entire secret to a happy job. And you can't bottle that magic sauce up and sell it at trade shows and conferences. You can't write a book on it. Because it's situational. If you've ever worked at a place like that, then you know what I'm talking about. It has little to do with the company. In fact, the CEO was a bit of a narcissistic slimey toad.

Businesses spend a fortune trying to force such an environment through cargo cult. "If we provide X, then developers will show up and work all night." So every company is a "campus" that resembles a college dorm environment. And it all falls flat and infantile. Because we are adults and see it as the pandering it is.

And yet the general consensus in "software engineering" seems to be that one should switch jobs for a pay raise every 2 years.

I disagree that employees need to be kept happy. The confident/ well informed ones do if you want them to stay, because they will go spend the extra time to leave and find another job. But I've been in jobs where developers are clearly not happy, but they put up with it.

So the point is, you will brain drain your company if you don't make developers happy.

I was initially gonna say "Good" in place of "confident/ well informed", but I'm sure some developers who are good simply don't know there are better places out for them.

Eventually the confident/well informed ones will start sniping the goods ones for the new companies they're at.

> I disagree that employees need to be kept happy

Are you my old manager?

Sounds like you'd easily get the dead sea effect if you manage teams like that.

Yes thats what I was trying to explain. I didn't know the name was dead sea effect. I don't recommend doing this, I just mean employees don't "need" to be kept happy, many companies exist like this, and some do quite well financially. I guess the dead sea effect doesn't always happen.

I’m not saying you should abuse employees. It’s pretty weird how much we think engineers need to be coddled and kept engaged though. First of all, if you have to consciously think about this, your company probably isn’t engaging to begin with. Second, you need to work to eat. I think people forget that sometimes.

Right now qualified developers are a sort of privileged working class. I imagine, like car engineers in the 1940s or so.

They need to be pampered because they have high mobility.

I resent that. The difference between pure privilege and entitlement is that, when you are entitled, you expect your privilege and don't acknowledge what you should be reciprocating for it.

That's what made me react so strongly to this comment. I think we should have more gratitude for our privilege.

> I think we should have more gratitude for our privilege.

The company hired you because you make them money. As soon as the company feels you are a bad deal they will fire you. Why shouldn't you do the same to them? Feeling gratitude about a shitty job will just make shitty jobs more common, that isn't good for anyone.

Sure, maybe to other people in the world who are not as privileged, but help keep society tick anyway. We can be grateful to them that their toil is allowing us to spend our time doing this. But like the sibling comment said, employment is a business transaction, even if it’s usually heavily lopsided in favor of the employer. Typically it’s an organization owned and run by people who are even more privileged than us, and that don’t have any qualms about applying pressure in the other direction when they can (see the working conditions of most of the aforementioned ”other people in the world”).

Of course we should be respectful and strive to do our best and provide value commensurate with our compensation. But if the market is such that people can take a pick and go to companies that let them have more fun while doing so, I think that’s great. It’s a pretty calvinistic mindset to see it otherwise.

Having the opportunity to change jobs because you might be happier, more fulfilled or better paid somewhere else is neither privilege nor entitlement. It's pretty much a sacred right. Every single job should be like this.

The decision to "coddle" and "engage" engineers is made by companies. It's their choice, and their strategy. I would even argue that this is not even close to what engineers prefer: most would definitely choose a raise, or decreased number of hours over the "happiness" thing.

They’re professionals whose decisions and input companies must afford the appropriate amount of consideration, and whose professional development companies must also respect to be competitive in the hiring market. These tech choices are usually contextual, and that context includes business factors such as continuity and retention, which present a trade off. That is a compressed version of the GP post.

> What is this idea that “engineers need to be kept happy?”

Are you honestly asking why people who happen to have a profession need to be happy?

And what's this idea that happiness is something that is only desirable in children? Do you honestly believe everyone should be cursed to die inside once they enter adulthood?

A healthy society is a society where happiness is not an abnormality, but the norm.

I'm not against happiness. Read the wording of that statement:

"Engineers need to be kept happy."

This is a statement rooted in fear - that if you don't entertain programmers with things that they enjoy, they will leave. Does that not sound like how you'd approach a child who you fear will have a tantrum if you don't give them a lollipop?

I'm saying, programmers also need to take pride and satisfaction in the contribution they make to a business. Focusing on the business outcomes that you contribute to is more satisfying than getting to use React at work, or whatever it is you think will keep you "happy."

I'm talking specifically about the idea that programmers conflate tech stacks with happiness, not happiness in general. I would hope that was clear.

> This is a statement rooted in fear - that if you don't entertain programmers with things that they enjoy, they will leave.

This is not a matter of "entertaining" engineers. This is a problem of providing good or even decent working conditions. High stress and high churn work environments have high attrition, because when given a choice adults prefer not to be miserable.

You're pretending that this issue is all about pampering when at it's core there are poor work environments that needlessly cause mental problems, some of them permanent.

Are we supposed to pretend that there was at least one FANG, supposedly a group of companies known for being generous to it's employees, which a few years ago was known for having employees crying at their desks?

A lot of people are missing a nuance. Should employees take satisfaction in what they creating, what the business is selling to customers, and how they're advancing in their careers/learning? Of course.

Does that mean that the business should allow developers to indulge in whatever resume-driven development decisions they feel like lest they burst into tears? No. There are various comments in the thread about people who get bored after a few months because they have to do code maintenance.

> There are various comments in the thread about people who get bored after a few months because they have to do code maintenance.

There is nothing wrong with getting bored by maintenance work. If you have that kind of work then hire boring engineers who will do whatever as long as you give them money, but don't say that all engineers needs to be happy with that kind of work.

There is that, but mostly the concern of many engineers is that they need to stay buzzword-compliant to have a marketable resume, otherwise they risk career stagnation. It's an indictment of hiring managers, and to an extent a self-fulfilling prophecy, but we all know the best technology does not always win in the marketplace.

It's more about avoiding avoiding negative emotions being associated with the work in a way which does hamper productivity.

Software Development is that strange split between clear defined engineering aspects and creativity aspects which are often as important.

I have seen major problems in projects due to developers being dissatisfied and annoyed with the tools they can use.

The problem was twofold

- first it was not that they couldn't use the newest exiting tools, but that the tools they had to use had horrible UX making them unnecessary hard to use. Like if you tell someone they have to now turn pages of an book with a fork instead of their hands.

- The other problem was that one person involved had a fixed view about what is good and in their view must be done and nothing else is good and doing something else is always stupid and as such in their view their work is stupid and worthless and as such they don't want to do that at all as it's just a pointless wast of time which will be discarded in the future anyway... Which is quite a bad approach to your job, tbh. And caused some massive problems later on.

Yes. It’s called job satisfaction. Also you don’t have to if you’re willing to pay more

Nope. Their are humans. And (seeking) happiness is one of the most powerful motivators (if not THE most powerful one) for such beings.

Also, happy people just produce better results. Especially if the way for them to achieve happiness is the route to better results. If you just want your coal mined, happiness of your workers may not matter much. As soon as you want quality output from any intellectual worker it will start to matter. (Though I'm pretty sure that it's true for any job with any level of autonomy and creativity needed, even if it's manual labour.)

Well yes, because next funky startup doing Z is going to take them away unless you pay them much more to stay with you.

All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players;

Players stay in the game as long as it is fun.

You don't have to be happy to do your job, but I wish everyone was

Yes, I wish for a lot of things.

If you wish to be happy at your job why wouldn't you leave if you are unhappy?

Contrary to what some seem to think, for most people, getting a new well-paying job isn't a matter of sending a couple of emails and starting somewhere else for the same or more money the following Monday. I've been unhappy, for certain values of unhappy, for periods at probably every one of the handful of jobs I've had over the years. I've either worked through it or I've switched jobs. But it's never been something I've done casually.

Yeah, you don't have to make people without options happy, you are right. But I wouldn't want to work at a company that accumulates engineers without options.

If I have to do a Magento project I charge double. If I knew COBOL I would charge even more.

Simply put, if the job is not enjoyable I'd rather look for an enjoyable job or ask more money until it's worth it.

The market still favours developers and finding a job is pretty easy, so developers have all the incentive to look for a fulfilling position, while it lasts.

I'd be quite happy to show up, build something, and then keep it producing value for customers for decades with as little time and effort for all the humans involved as possible.

As long as there is a way to quantify that value, it could be incentivized, boring systems should be the most profitable.

It's a reality that retaining developers in the US sometimes involves indulging their pet projects despite negative expected value. In other parts of the world, many capable developers are happy to just have reliable, reasonably paid work. There may be a correction coming.

More generally "all employees need to be kept happy", does that satisfy you?

Turnover is expensive, employee retention is a generally important goal for successful companies.

The engineer pushing to rewrite in haskell or whatever is also a particularly high risk to leave when it's "done" and saddle you with it, though.

"Keep engineers happy" is not the same thing as "let engineers do whatever the hell they want".

It's not. But there are definitely people commenting who, for them, seem to feel that "happy" equals, at least in part, playing with cool new stuff. Which is obviously a valid preference. They just shouldn't be surprised if most companies won't be open to people flitting from thing to thing, getting bored every few months.

Yes, and everything is "painful" and frustrating.

I think this phenomenon is a temporary luxury that arises due to the high demand for skills and relative immaturity of the discipline.

In many cases, in some industries: yes. When working in media production, it does not matter if the media being produced is feature films, feature animated films, a TV series, an animated TV series, or a AAA to C level video game production - the software developers, digital artists, and line producers are ready to quit or reduce productivity to a trickle at the drop of a hat if they sense the production will not be a commercial success and not grant them social bragging rights. Yes, this sounds completely absurd, until you are in the media production industries and see it happening. It's an entitled attitude, but getting the line workers to see it that way is not gonna happen.

> It's an entitled attitude, but getting the line workers to see it that way is not gonna happen.

Not it is not. Knowing you can get a better job elsewhere and therefore going elsewhere is not entitlement. Thinking that workers who are unhappy and can get a better job elsewhere shouldn't leave is entitlement.

>It's an entitled attitude, but getting the line workers to see it that way is not gonna happen.

Why is entitled to act like you owe nothing to your employer when they would fire you on the drop of a hat if it made them more money?

A business is founded on reciprocity. If you really provide value, you won't get fired to save 5 dollars.

If the company really provides value the employee wont leave just to work on a new framework. If your employee leaves you simply didn't provide enough value to them.

That’s simply not always true, due to a lot of mitigating factors; bad bosses, jealous bosses, sexist bosses, layoffs, etc.

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