I founded a company and we were successful, but we really tried to continue the momentum. We had a group of 7-10 engineers, built over time and strenuously recruited and managed. And we have plateaued over the past 5 years. Now looking back I realized that probably a lot of the engineers had an attitude similar to what you describe. So they really ended up damaging their co-workers, because less growth at the company means limited advancement and less money all around, some layoffs during tough times, worse company culture, etc. It also wasted some of my professional time, because I am passionate about the industry and want to accomplish something in it.
Do you feel bad when the Product Manager is eagerly contacting you and trying to pull together all requirements and engineering estimates for the next sprint, or whatever, that you are sandbagging that person's career?
Now, I know what all the HN burnouts will say, "Screw them! If I can trick somebody out of a wage, that's my right!"
It's kinda weird to blame your employees for your poor hiring choices, and for failing to recognize at the time that your current slate of employees wasn't pulling their weight.
But also think about why they weren't pushing harder to help the company grow. Were you not compensating them enough? Did you allow morale to go down, and then do nothing about it? Did you push your people to work unreasonable hours because you should have hired more people, but didn't want the added expense?
Or maybe your product just wasn't compelling enough, or your addressable market not big enough.
There are plenty of places where I would expect the blame to go, and "my employees didn't work hard enough" is likely at the bottom of that list.
I was an employee at a company that slowly declined due to employee malaise.
In our case, it wasn't about options or compensation. It was a slow poisoning of the well as a few obvious slackers were allowed to persist without consequences. If your team lead is only showing up for 4 hours per day and nothing bad happens to them, you suddenly don't feel like putting in more than 4 hours per day yourself. In fact, you get paid less than the team lead, so maybe you only put in 2-3 hours. Then your junior teammate sees this happening and decides to push it even further to 1-2 hours per day.
Meanwhile, the backlog piles up more and more. If you take a task, you're just inviting more work on yourself because you'll be responsible for it. You'll also have to convince the lazy teammates to help you with all of the blockers that fall in their domain, which they don't want to do. Better to just sit tight and claim you're still working on something else.
From the management side, it's critical to address severely underperforming employees before the mindset is allowed to spread. Some times it's a simple matter of engaging with the employee and determining what's wrong. Other times, some people just like pushing the limits of how much they can get away with. They won't do any work unless prodded by a manager. They either need constant attention from their manager, or if that's unavailable they need to be removed from the company (sadly).
I founded a company and we were successful, but we really tried to continue the momentum. We had a group of 7-10 engineers, built over time and strenuously recruited and managed. And we have plateaued over the past 5 years. Now looking back I realized that probably a lot of the engineers had an attitude similar to what you describe. So they really ended up damaging their co-workers, because less growth at the company means limited advancement and less money all around, some layoffs during tough times, worse company culture, etc. It also wasted some of my professional time, because I am passionate about the industry and want to accomplish something in it.
Do you feel bad when the Product Manager is eagerly contacting you and trying to pull together all requirements and engineering estimates for the next sprint, or whatever, that you are sandbagging that person's career?
Now, I know what all the HN burnouts will say, "Screw them! If I can trick somebody out of a wage, that's my right!"