I think Office Space summed up the problem nicely:
"Peter Gibbons: The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.
Bob Porter: Don't... don't care?
Peter Gibbons: It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime; so where's the motivation? And here's something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now.
Bob Slydell: I beg your pardon?
Peter Gibbons: Eight bosses.
Bob Slydell: Eight?
Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled; that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired."
Most companies only care about the next quarter, or next investor call. Quality be damned, cut corners, work late. It's a never-ending series of death marches.
When I was a youngster, the eight bosses line made me laugh because it was absurd. Deeper into my career, it makes me laugh because it's true.
On a good day, on an unimportant project, I still have three bosses. I have my team lead, my PM, and my actual manager. Currently I'm on a cross-team project of critical importance, so you can add on my manager's manager, his manager, the other team's manager, and his manager. I've got seven goddamn people breathing down my neck on this.
I used to work at a place where I had one manager, even for critically important projects. He was the only one breathing down my neck (and that wasn't often). No PM constantly hassling me to groom my backlog[0], the managers above my immediate manager all had enough trust to not directly meddle. Most productive I've ever been in my career. Ended up leaving because I just didn't give a shit about the project, but sometimes I dream of going back...
[0] I need to rant about this. How am I supposed to be agile if I have to have my backlog completely planned out for the whole project? And I can't just estimate it or backlog the big chunks, because when we start making progress and I update the backlog to reflect things we've learned, I have to justify every single change to my PM who will grumble that we are going off plan. If I don't update the backlog, I get grilled about how accurate it is at the next too many cooks/status update meeting.
We can either do agile or try to plan out the next six months of work at the start. Stop trying to make me do both.
> Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled; that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired."
This is literally my company. 8 bosses - all of who spending their entire existence in monitoring and PIPing engineers instead of using their authority to deliver constructive outcomes for the business.
There is zero growth mentality among them (except headcount growth for their empires). Can't even imagine how to steer their org to produce value.
Why the f will a IC care more about the success of the business than the 8 destructive bosses above them?
> Most companies only care about the next quarter, or next investor call. Quality be damned, cut corners, work late. It's a never-ending series of death marches.
Or next round of funding.
> Quality be damned, cut corners, work late. It's a never-ending series of death marches.
I watched Office Space for the first time when I was a teenager many years ago. It's funny how much my perception of the movie changed and how much it resonates with my work now, specially since the last years. One difference is that I have 10 different managers, which makes me dissociate enough from work without the need of any hypnotist.
Peter Gibbons: Our high school guidance counselor used to ask us what you'd do if you had a million dollars and you didn't have to work. And invariably what you'd say was supposed to be your career. So, if you wanted to fix old cars then you're supposed to be an auto mechanic.
Samir: So what did you say?
Peter Gibbons: I never had an answer. I guess that's why I'm working at Initech.
Michael Bolton: No, you're working at Initech because that question is bullshit to begin with. If everyone listened to her, there'd be no janitors, because no one would clean shit up if they had a million dollars.
But if they don't only care about the next quarter how is Gerald Q. Public, born 1958, going to retire to Florida after buying three McMansions (and selling them all at a loss), a sports car, and paying for three divorce settlements? Who are we to deny him the experience of moving down to Boca so he can get his maintenance-provided house on a golf course wiped off its slab by a hurricane before being rebuilt so that he can play golf and wife swap until the dementia sets in?
The lack of "another dime" when you work extra is also something that prevents most people from going above and beyond. If there's nothing else out there, why would you care?
Working with my wife now to get her to start a business so we can keep my salary to pay the bills but focus on the business so our effort can have a meaningful impact on the bottom line.
I have one that's even worse than that. The company I worked at once insisted on you keeping a timesheet for work done and which clients should be billed for each 15 minute block. They charged the clients according to that. They even went as far as charging other internal teams for your time if you had a chat with a colleague in another team!
If you, however, had any unaccounted for blocks (i.e. not 8h per day), it'd be brought up in your appraisal, and on one occasion when we were told we had to work overtime one evening (about 4 hours) but wouldn't be paid for it, that's when my feelings towards their policy really shifted. From that point on, even if I'd worked late to get the work done for the customer, I made sure that the timesheet only listed the 8 hours so that the company wasn't going to profit from my misfortune. They picked up on that too, and weren't happy, but there was nothing they could do about it.
That culture was truly toxic as an employee. If you were a couple of minutes late for the start of the day, you were hauled into your manager's office for a 10 minute shouting at about the importance of time keeping. There was an unofficial "flexitime" working policy - "you can start any time you like before 9 and end any time you like after 5:30". Obviously, anyone who'd been there more than a year grew tired of this, and at 5:30 every day there was a stampede to leave the office. Nobody left even a minute early because we had timestamped entry/exit logs and we knew the consequences, but equally almost nobody was prepared to stay a minute longer than they had to.
There’s a great Dilbert about that… he turns in his timesheet to Carol the secretary and then she says why are you still standing there and he says I still have 14 minutes scheduled for this.
"Peter Gibbons: The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.
Bob Porter: Don't... don't care?
Peter Gibbons: It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime; so where's the motivation? And here's something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now.
Bob Slydell: I beg your pardon?
Peter Gibbons: Eight bosses.
Bob Slydell: Eight?
Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled; that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired."
Most companies only care about the next quarter, or next investor call. Quality be damned, cut corners, work late. It's a never-ending series of death marches.