Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog

The conventional dogma goes this way: people need money, so they’ll take a job they really love, and then they’ll become team players and we’ll all be happy. The reality of the situation is that there are few good jobs, and endless menial clerk-like ones, especially in IT, and that most of us work to pay for our families and don’t really like what we do.

What we do like is being effective, which is a way of having power without having to control other people except as is natural in pursuit of a goal. Having cake, eating too: power without being a jerk. It’s a form of creative power. When we have a job, we either feel that power or have a nagging suspicion that we’re wasting our time and will eventually incur the displeasure of others.

There is an anti-pattern that I’ve seen in large organizations which I have come to call “the Dead Sea effect”. The Dead Sea, of course, is a large body of water between Israel and Jordan, located well below sea level. The Jordan River empties into it; water leaves only by evaporation, which means that over the eons, the Dead Sea has become very salty (e.g., 8x saltier than the ocean). As such, it is generally unable to support life, except when spring floods temporarily lower the salinity.

Many large corporate/government IT shops — and not a few small ones — work like the Dead Sea. New hires are brought in as management deems it necessary. Their qualifications (talent, education, professionalism, experience, skills — TEPES) will tend to vary quite a bit, depending upon current needs, employee departure, the personnel budget, and the general hiring ability of those doing the hiring. All things being equal, the general competency of the IT department should have roughly the same distribution as the incoming hires.
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What happens in this pattern is that people with skills and knowledge and intelligence keep moving on, and they leave the average people behind. This presents a huge problem to a corporate IT department, because it means that all of the knowledge capital built up goes out the door and what is left are the people who are everyman cases. They follow instructions. They are competent at a limited range of tasks. They are oblivious to how to make things better and will move at a microscopic, dead-end pace without achieving any great output. It’s questionable how valuable they are except as warm, trained bodies who run at the machine guns when the enemy is at the gates.

In contrast, there’s a new pattern: the skilled leave work (for various reasons, although maternity’s a good one) and will come back if they’re given a chance to jump into the action, feel that creative power, get things done quicker and better than others, and then go back home:

Lots of employers would like to be able to hire cheap, temporary teams of seasoned pros with experience managing $2 billion investment portfolios, running ad campaigns or earning Ph.D.s in neuroscience.

But few know the secret to finding temps of that caliber: Look on playgrounds and at PTA meetings.

The decision among some highly educated women to stay home with children is sparking a countertrend: The rise of the mommy “SWAT team.” The acronym, for “smart women with available time,” is one mother’s label for all-mom teams assembled quickly through networking and staffing firms to handle crash projects. Employers get lots of voltage, cheap, while the women get a skills update and a taste of the professional challenges they miss.
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As mentioned before on this site, it’s good to have people with interests outside of work, especially family. This keeps them from, like the Dead Sea people, hanging around at a job and making small tasks into ongoing, unending labor to justify their own position.

However, once an employee shares all of his external knowledge, learns all that there is to know about the business, and applies all of his past experiences, the growth stops. That employee, in that particular job, has become all that he can be. He has reached the value apex.

Skilled developers understand this. Crossing the value apex often triggers an innate “probably time for me to move on” feeling and, after a while, leads towards inevitable resentment and an overall dislike of the job. Nothing – not even a team of on-site masseuses – can assuage this loss.

On the other hand, the unskilled tend to have a slightly different curve: Value Convergence. They eventually settle into a position of mediocrity and stay there indefinitely. The only reason their value does not decrease is because the vast amount of institutional knowledge they hoard and create.
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If you are unskilled in a job, you take the negative aspects of the job in exchange for it being there as a source of income. One group that appears unskilled but is not are The Unmotivated, which seems to be most of the bright liberal arts graduates in America who take slacker jobs and do poorly at them but not poorly enough to get fired. They recognize this system is slanted toward the unskilled, because although they are mediocre, in any industry that is not aiming for radical growth they are tractable, obedient employees.

As a manager, your job is to get the unskilled into clerkship positions and to get the skilled into positions where they can exercise creative power, or you’ll have the worst of both worlds: clerks in middle management and skilled people long gone and now seated in positions of more power at your competitors.

Sloan based this on management principles. But of course it is the first lesson of political theory and political history. Authority without responsibility is illegitimate; but so is responsibility without authority. Both lead to tyranny. Sloan wanted a great deal of authority for his professional manager, and was ready to take high responsibility. But for that reason he insisted on limiting authority to the areas of professional competence, and refused to assert or admit responsibility in areas outside them. Peter F Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander

I’ve worked in a number of roles from development to copyrighter to documentation to glorified administrative assistant. I’ve been on the creative side, the technical side, and the demi-management side a project manager inhabits. I’ve done everything from sweep floors to define department policy.

One constant has been that people who are closest to directly performing work, such as art directors and developers, often complain about management. A frequent sentiment: executives don’t do anything, project managers are glorified clerks, and upper management has no idea what we’re actually doing.

All of these are true.

Just like most corporate IT departments hire randomly, retain people haphazardly, are managed badly and end up as IT ghettoes where anyone with a better option has moved on, most managers are either on their way to something good or stranded in a job that’s above their ability and for that reason, they can’t give it up and become defensive.

An enduring truth of life and business is that most things are done badly and most roles are poorly performed. Is the solution to curse the role, and say all executives are bicycles for fish?

Whether you work as a developer, or an art director, or any other role, you try to do a good job. That’s great until you run into a command from above that limits how effective you can be. Maybe it’s a simple request that you spend more time on the TPS reports than on writing code, or worse, it’s a silly direction to take the product or a command that contradicts all sense and knowledge.

This is why the study of management, and finding and keeping good managers, is essential. Someone competent in that role can make all the difference, while someone below that role can’t fix the damages of incompetent demands from that role.

Drucker’s statement reflects this truth. Authority without responsibility is illegitimate; but so is responsibility without authority. Both lead to tyranny. In this case, the developer has responsibility without authority, and if management is making bad decisions, they’re acting as if they have authority without responsibility.

Here’s a small, silent plea to managers of managers: know your people. Invest in their education not just in their job, but in the jobs of those that they manage. You don’t expect executives to be C++ programmers in their spare time, but if the product is written in C++, how horrible is it to insist they know something about the topic? A community college class at night is cheap and effective in this regard, and will help them understand those who they must manage.

When people have other obligations outside of work that they actually care more about than your probably-not-so-world-changing idea, the crutches are not available as an easy way out, and you’ll have to walk by the power of your good ideas and execution or you’ll fall fast and early. ^{^}

The hardest part of any project is knowing the mountains from the molehills. When we calm down, and stop trying to act like management or look like we’re heroes working late into the night, we can see what actually needs to get done, which is often a very small subset of what people belabor. Do the minimum, but make sure it’s the minimum required to achieve the end goal. You wouldn’t break out a slide rule to sweep a floor, so don’t make mountains out of molehills.

At the same time, good managers need to know how not to go into denial and make molehills out of mountains. Too often the big task is so daunting, and everyone so unprepared, that they spend their time doing everything but what actually completes the job. This process happens organically, so a manager without much control over the situation wakes up to it happening around them, but it doesn’t need to.

Some will say I’m a dreamer, but I think as our belts tighten, the concept of intelligent management is finding full flower. It’s time to be more efficient in what we do, and to eliminate the politics and infighting and confusion that take good people, with good intentions, and have them make bad products. If you want to know one ultimate way to “go green,” it’s to not make unnecessary activity, to not produce reams of unwanted and irrelevant reports, and to make products that are good and long-lasting so they don’t get discarded so quickly.

More Druckerisms:

Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.

Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.

Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.

The most efficient way to produce anything is to bring together under one management as many as possible of the activities needed to turn out the product.

Executives owe it to the organization and to their fellow workers not to tolerate nonperforming individuals in important jobs.

It’s this kind of thinking that keeps us all from being trapped on dead-end projects with frustration vibrating through our nerves.