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 effectâ€. 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.