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Comment by Terry_Roll | Hacker News Reader

> One thing that was immediately apparent to me was this company-wide culture of getting things done. If you ever need help with something critical someone will step up and help you, there's a strong focus on the product, customer, and always delivering on time. You will never hear someone say, "that's not my job".

And that is a key to success which then enables numbers to come into play!

It works for every organisation.

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It only works if such a behaviour is rewarded. In many settings, stepping up will men you doing the work while someone else gets the reward.

How should employers reward such behavior?

I’m guessing a “thank you, good job” isn’t what you mean by “gets the reward”.

The very least, you should not reward alternate behaviour like in my example above. That's a good place to start. In some of the cases I have seen, individual contributors got a pat on the back while the others got disproportionate raises, bonuses etc.

In your year end performance review it should show how impactful you have been, not only to your team but to other teams as well, and should be used as part of the consideration for promotions.

Bonuses and increased compensation if possible. If not, then increased autonomy, respect, and trust at the very least. If someone goes above and beyond outside of their job description, they're demonstrating initiative and judgement.

What you shouldn't do that a lot of places do is just give the person more work with nothing else. "Good job, now keep doing that AND all your other work for the same salary. That's cool, right? Your boss got a fat bonus for your work, though."

Money.

or worse: you do the work, they'll get the reward but they are still afraid of the risks so they reject it.

Learn the politics of the organizations you work for. Learn how to gain visibility for your work. This is primarily how to communicate its impact to stakeholders of all kinds, not just tech people. Learn it's hard to hire engineers, and if your manager isn't helping you with the above, it's time to quit or tell someone above them.

Truly I've never had trouble getting recognition for extraordinary work, and I've worked at a lot of questionable organizations.

As a manager, it’s really not hard to see who’s actually doing what within a team. I’d have to be completely blind to communications and stop doing 1:1s to mis-attribute some work to the wrong person. As a developer I’m also familiar with Git and routinely look through recent commits, usually just to maintain familiarity with what’s being done but it also makes it clear who’s delivering what code.

But even if I wasn’t as involved, it’s still easy to see who’s always stepping up to help others and who’s struggling to deliver on their own with nearly any tiny amount of communication with the team.

It’s also really easy to see who’s developing a “not my job, not my problem” attitude. When a team gets to a point where individuals are delivering what they consider “their work” but the team as a whole struggles to deliver anything because everyone avoids the loose ends or refuses to help others, the entire team is getting poor performance reviews.

> As a manager, it’s really not hard to see who’s actually doing what within a team.

You may be good at this, but lots of managers are not.

From my experience, this is true, but reward is not why such behavior becomes culture. Culture is ingrained by leaders who act and lead according to value organization adheres to. The key here is to have leaders at every level who embodies such value. Having such values baked into performance evaluation is how "reward" plays a role in engendering and sustaining such culture. It is about whom does the organization promotes and chooses to be a leader. It's not about simple salary increase or cash rewards, as such things don't last more than a few months.

As a manager, I strongly agree. There’s a huge difference between teams where people are happy to help each other out and teams where people have a “not my job, not my problem” attitude.

My recent experience (past 5 years) had been with remote teams, where this problem is exaggerated even more. Some people see remote as an excuse to minimize their own workload so they can finish their tickets early and log off as quick as possible.

It takes some mentoring to get employees, remote or otherwise, to understand that the team’s deliverables are what counts rather than just closing the tickets they claimed. As hard as we try, tickets will never account for 100% of the work that needs to be done, especially when it comes to things like sharing knowledge with newer team members and helping with loose ends. Someone who wants to isolate and avoid helping others can’t really be effective in a collaborative team environment.

Email and slack work great for newbie questions. Wikis even better. A culture that documents in a central location would fix many of your environmental issues.

Loose ends get lost and should be in a ticket.

Team objectives sit with the team leader. Project objectives with the project owner.

Interesting. As my team has gotten more experience being remote, we actually work as a team much better.

Where I've noticed more of a breakdown is between teams. Not necessarily in the form of "not my job", but rather a refusal to collaborate. So more "not your turf" fiefdoms.

> It takes some mentoring to get employees, remote or otherwise, to understand that the team’s deliverables are what counts rather than just closing the tickets they claimed. As hard as we try, tickets will never account for 100% of the work that needs to be done, especially when it comes to things like sharing knowledge with newer team members and helping with loose ends. Someone who wants to isolate and avoid helping others can’t really be effective in a collaborative team environment.

This scales out to the inter-team level as well. the organization's success is ultimately paramount. If the company goes out of business, everyone's out looking for a new job.

My experience has been that systems where people's job is to "finish tickets" actively contributes to this attitude. Even if somebody agrees in principle that it's the team and business goals that matter, what's getting measured? What feels like it matters? If somebody isn't finishing their tickets quickly they will feel bad about it because it looks bad and the processes around it reinforce that it looks bad. Even if you tell people that it's actively better to help the team, any individual doing that is still going to feel bad going to some "ceremony" and needing to say "their" tickets are "behind schedule".

I remember somebody explaining to me that culture isn't based on what an organization or manager says is rewarded—or even on what's "officially" evaluated—but on what people feel is rewarded and punished. If you're constantly tracking individual tickets, that's what people are going to perceive as important just because the organization's actions place such an emphasis on it.

People aren't "using remote as an excuse", they're responding to the system as it's designed! Frankly, seeing the situation as people "making excuses" is fundamentally counterproductive as a manager—it sounds like you're blaming individual team members for the problem. Starting from that perspective, how can you meaningfully work with the team to improve the system and the culture?

> My recent experience (past 5 years) had been with remote teams, where this problem is exaggerated even more. Some people see remote as an excuse to minimize their own workload so they can finish their tickets early and log off as quick as possible.

Listen to yourself, you are viewing a way people want to work as a problem.

The way they get the job done ?quickly? and then log off sounds ideal for a change of contract where a basic wage + performance pay could be used to incentivise parts of the workforce which in turn could improve customer satisfaction.

So I wonder if you have spotted an opportunity for change whilst viewing it as a problem?

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