Hacker News Reader

Comment by Brigand | Hacker News Reader

There is no way for executives to create a well working company if the employees think of nothing but themselves.

Sure there is. Compensate them for accomplishing tasks that benefit the company. If they do not benefit the company, stop compensating them. We call this practice employment.

There are numerous ways for a purely self-serving employee to give the appearance of creating benefit to the company while doing as little as possible. Emplyoment in general only works because the employees in many cases actually care about the quality of their work and not only about themselves.

> Emplyoment in general only works because the employees in many cases actually care about the quality of their work and not only about themselves

I do see what you're saying, but I don't think that quality of work and caring about oneself only are mutually exclusive.

You can care about the quality of your work without really caring about the fate of a particular company. Employees with great output are in high demand, so you know that you can just continue somewhere else.

I happen to care about the quality of my work and the company, but even then, the company's future (unless I own it) comes way below my own needs (thinking of my family here in particular).

I don't think it's possible to make a significant portion of your workforce altruistically care about the company. Hence, the original commenter's suggestion is that managers are responsible for correctly incentivizing workers.

I think we need to ignore the employee who games the system when setting up this relationship though, and focus on the good kind of selfish, not the bad kind. You can't build a system with the latter and have a lower-level problem to solve in that scenario. My experience as an engineering managher is these individuals are the exception.

Isn't this the single job of management though, to come up with an approach that is mutually beneficial so that an employee pursuing what's in their best interest moves the team and company forward, and conversely putting the company & team first benefits the individual?

Anyone who's spent any time working in the work world knows that 90% of companies simply don't care about their workers, particularly at the lowest level.

If I put the company and then the team first, and the team and company think the same way, who is there to look out for me?

Only a sociopath, and a stupid one, would put their company ahead of their family. And there aren't that many sociopaths in society.

Loyalty must be earned, and most companies have earned not loyalty, but resentment and deep distrust.

(I have been lucky that I have mostly avoided such companies, because I have a fairly rare talent, but not entirely. Oh, boy.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com