Hacker News Reader

Wow, this speaks so many truths. And to add to this, if you want us to care more about the product, the simple truth is just to pay us more. Hit that sweet financial spot for us and we're yours. This is universally true for any job, in fact.

Instead we get what is essentially a Mcdonald motivation video in white collar form... telling us that we should care cause of impact, customer care, improve motor skills, blah blah.

I really don't think this is universal. Sure, some people are definitely like this, but I want to be able to believe I'm building something interesting that will be used after I leave. I would take (and have taken) slightly lower-paid jobs that I thought would matter more in the long run.

Also, I feel like this view of software developers' motivation would have a really hard time explaining major FOSS projects.

There's two ways to look at this. One is you've found your dream job, and that job defines you as a person. That's fine, because it's working for you and it's how you want to spend your life. But I feel this is a rare event, to find and maintain their dream job for years over reorgs and new CEOs, or having the company bought out and new company making bad internal changes.

Then there's the other bucket of people, who are just trying to make a living, but the environment makes it hard for them to do so due to it being so toxic. And this is where no amount of starry-eyed speeches will sway this group to working harder without pure cash. They're there to make money, they understand that the employer they work for are gonna get richer while they only get inflation-rate increases. These people would rather spend their time with family and friends.

For what it's worth though, based on friends who are chaplains and priests, those dying on hospital beds always tell a tale of being with friends or family, or personal events that gave them positive memories. Not a single one of those people they talked to ever spoke of how they did well at any of their jobs. And from this I think most of us fall under the second bucket. To encounter someone like Linus or Stallman who would probably talk about their work as a life achievement is probably a one-off unicorn.

I feel like there's some room for middle ground here. While I disagree with some of 80,000 hours' conclusions, I do think that a person's job is a major way they have an effect on the world.

I have hobbies, friends, family, etc. that I consider more important to who I am as a person than my job is. However, I still have a marginal preference for decently-paid meaningful work over well-paid meaningless work.

> This kind of comments resembles the thinking process of a person with "product manager" position in a small/medium size company. Deep down (consciously or subconsciously) they don't really respect or see the value of the individual developer, but they see the team more like a bunch of horses going around the mill. They optimize for "the product" and throw around sophists-like pseudo-philosophical thoughts that appeal to like-minded individuals or to their bosses.

There’s some truth to that somewhat cynical description. :) But how do you organize software development without falling into that hole? A product has to make sense as a whole, and the only/easiest way to accomplish that is to make a single person responsible for its high-level specification. From there the negative cultural fallout you describe is to some extent inevitable (although you can and should counteract it of course).

I think product manager is a very important role. But I'm yet to see a product manager that respects the craft/skill or even spends any effort to understand what's entailed. Most are shoot-an-email-assign-on-jira-and-call-it-a-day type. Nothing more depressing than getting a condescending "good job!" from an oily haired zoro for making a menu bigger and not getting any recognition for lowering server costs 50%. This is not an exaggeration, there are many many stories like that or even worse. I've heard developers described as plumbers even from people who work in highly respected and big companies. There's nothing wrong with plumbers, but it's just to show how they think about what we do.

Sure, I’ve seen a lot of it first hand, both as a developer and in other roles. It’s sad really as it feels very destructive / counterproductive. But it seems hard to get around.

Couldn’t help noticing your username implies you’re Swedish. I am too. Sometimes I get a feeling there is something about Swedish work culture that makes this worse. We have a long tradition of workers unions and collective bargaining, and everyone being replaceable is sort of taken for granted (or even encouraged). Any thoughts on this or how to get around it?

It's not ironic that I am failing to communicate when my argument is that it is hard to communicate.

Perfection is in knowing everything and not having to communicate. Nobody is perfect and communication is inevitable. New domains pop-up every year. It is up to the developer to work out which domain they want to seek out next and a team of developers that have all sorts of skills will always be required. The core of my argument is that we need to empower developers to discover what will lead to efficiency. Hopefully those developers can cross-train, as the only way to lessen the load on the team is remove complexity of the application, and the only way to do that is to communicate between all of the domains. The best way to communicate is to have someone who knows all of the domains.

> The core of my argument is that we need to empower developers to discover what will lead to efficiency

As others have answered, the answer is very obvious and doesn't need a lot of theorizing. Give good money and respect. Treat people as individuals (especially your mid/senior people). Accept that people will work on your team NOT because they believe in your product (they may in fact hate it) but because they need the money or the experience. This is not bad or wrong as long as they're being professional about it. Most important one is to not generalize, and to recognize nonsense that might creep into your thinking process. Most engineers have a great eye for spotting nonsense and they smell bullshit a mile away.

> as the only way to lessen the load on the team is remove complexity of the application, and the only way to do that is to communicate between all of the domains

Shaky assumptions upon shaky assumptions. These kinds of statements usually come from either a very experienced person or an extremely inexperienced one. From the substance of these statements it's obvious it's the latter and not the former.

> The best way to communicate is to have someone who knows all of the domains.

Honestly if you had started with this statement I wouldn't have replied at all because I would be 100% sure you're trolling. I can't even tell anymore. But this is way beyond unfounded.

> These kinds of statements usually come from either a very experienced person or an extremely inexperienced one.

Why not both? I'm an experienced developer with no management experience. This is exactly why I opened with "moving into". I do not believe that these are shaky assumptions, but have been proven by my development work. I am a man of many hats. Some of those hats are chiseled perfectly, some of them are rough.

The way that I work out how to go about learning things is go down a utopian path and create myself a minimal example. Many times the approach falls apart right away. When they don't, like this one has, and the world isn't already working that way, I expect that I am wrong but don't know why. So I reach out on places like Message Boards and peers in an attempt to work out why.

Unfortunately this thread has been filled with a lot of harsh responses that mostly show that I have blown peoples weirdness budgets and am outside of the Overton Window with no real substance. That may be partly my fault and I hope that I at least learned something from it.