from Hacker News

The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

by jpn on 4/17/24, 3:04 PM with 247 comments

• by luisgvv on 4/17/24, 4:09 PM

  I began as a junior dev and climbed up the ranks til the point where I became the SME in some areas of the product.

  Got laid off because sales goals were not met while they retained people which I think were incompetent in their work. Even some guys which I think were better and more critical to the projects were dumped.

  I'm not climbing that ladder by being proactive and "pragmatic" again...

  Call me a paycheck stealer, quiet quitter etc.

  Just give me some JIRA ticket and let me read books while I get my job done in 1-2 hours a day.

• by tuckerpo on 4/17/24, 4:49 PM

  This puts the cart before the horse. In reality, the biggest source of untapped potential, at least anecdotally as an engineer, is that corporations tend to give grease to squeaky wheels. So, the upper quadrants in the article.

  If you have even a few years of industry experience, modulo being intentionally naive, you've noticed that work begets work. The 'skilled pragmatists' quietly do their jobs well. Their reward is even more work to do, without much recognition.

  It's analogous to software quality. It's fleetingly rare that a consumer of software writes in to let you know how great, zippy and bug-free it is. You only ever hear about how terrible things are. When things are 'good' -- that's just the expected status quo. So no reward for steadily doing good things.

  I'm also sure after a few years in industry you've also noticed that the Do-Nothing (TM) guy who sprints around with their head on fire gets managerial recognition, promotions, bonuses.

  You know the kind. They wander from meeting to meeting, initiative to initiative, never actually accomplishing anything concrete, but showing their face to management and saying a lot of nice words.

  Eventually, the skilled pragmatist notices this dichotomy and mentally clocks out. I've heard this anecdote many times, both in online circles and IRL.

• by imzadi on 4/17/24, 4:59 PM

  I don't know if this is related, but growing up there were certain values instilled in me that went something like "don't toot your own horn," "it's better to be seen and not heard," "keep your head down," etc. The main gist being that I should just do my job quietly, competently, and stay out of the way.

  In practice, this resulted in me being effectively invisible to management, even when I was out-performing everyone else on the team. The guys who were loud and boisterous and constantly cawing about their achievements got all the raises and promotions, even though I was consistently doing more and better work. This came to a head when someone with far less seniority was promoted over me. I brought it up with my boss who said something like "I don't even know what you do all day. I never hear from you." The guy who was promoted would literally spend twice as much time boasting about what he was doing that actually doing it. I was objectively more productive, as in, there were metrics showing my productivity was significantly higher, but since I wasn't talking about what I was doing, I was unseen.

• by NateEag on 4/17/24, 4:58 PM

  This is an appealing narrative without evidence.

  How does the author know Marias make up the majority of most companies? Where's the data supporting that claim?

  It may be true - it sounds plausible to those of us who've been a Maria in the salt mines of a dysfunctional company.

  It appeals to us to think we're the hidden gems the company needs to invest in.

  Something being appealing doesn't make it true, though, even if you can tell a just-so story about it.

• by hinkley on 4/17/24, 4:17 PM

  I don’t think I can agree that 75% of the workforce falls into one quadrant. Particularly this one.

  If I’m very lucky the semi space contains 60% of my coworkers, if I’m unlucky (or arrive after the writing is on the wall) it’s more like 1/3.

  I suspect part of the confusion is that there are some people with enough political acumen to appear like frustrated agents of change without actually having the drive or skill to do so. If you create opportunities for these people to show up, you may be shocked to find them making excuses for why they still can’t.

  And truthfully the industry is not full of untapped brilliant people. It isn’t even “full” of brilliant people period. maybe 1/4 of the human population could be counted as very smart, and we get a disproportionate share of them for sure, but it’s definitely not more than half.

• by clintonc on 4/17/24, 4:14 PM

  This reads as a cynical description by someone who identifies as a "skilled pragmatist" (as I do, incidentally), but it doesn't seem to have a useful point of view. For example, "playing the system" and "making waves" have other names -- "driving initiatives" and "cross-team collaboration". They seem like "mushy" phrases because they are not well-defined sets of tasks like "deliver feature A" can become.

  Are skilled pragmatists undervalued? Maybe, but this article doesn't do an good job of making me believe that.

• by swagasaurus-rex on 4/17/24, 4:46 PM

  Enployees need three things to avoid becoming an uninspired cog:

  1) Control

  2) Responsibility

  3) Recognition

  Control and responsibility of a project but no recognition will demotivate quickly

  Responsibility and recognition with no control means they’re a scapegoat for when things bad

  Recognition and control with no responsibility is like a third party who will take credit but has no reason to ensure success

  All three need to happen for an employee to care. If an employee is missing one or two of the three, they’ll feel it in their work

• by cousin_it on 4/17/24, 7:03 PM

  I think the root cause of why managers reward flashy employees over useful ones is because managers are clueless about the work itself. The more a manager understands the work, on a micro level, the more they'll be able to judge it accurately. Note that it doesn't mean micromanagement: you must understand the details, but stop yourself from second-guessing the employees on these details. And it doesn't mean you can't delegate: as long as you have intimate understanding of the details, you're free to delegate and be as hands-off as you want. In fact the best way to delegate is to learn to do the thing well yourself, then delegate it to someone and do occasional spot checks on them.

• by zamalek on 4/17/24, 4:31 PM

  Very recently two other engineers had a long debate on a PR of mine that really had no material impact one way or another. My approach rang true with the article: "they can sort it out."

  I do enjoy a certain degree of challenge at work, though, to be more precise less anti-challenge (high friction, high ceremony work). I will invent work, especially if I'm experiencing paper-cuts: e.g. I spend a stupid amount of time improving CI speed. It's thankless and invisible, but makes the mundane more bearable (nothing is worse than trying to push mundane work through flaky CI).

  Edit: this entire perspective comes from having given a huge damn at one point. The one-sided relationship with an employer taught me the inevitable, and very hard, lesson. Barry is one acquisition away from becoming Maria.

• by dkarl on 4/17/24, 5:02 PM

  I strongly buy the premise of this article, and it goes beyond people who try to fly under the radar and blend in because of toxic politics. Even in companies without toxic politics, a lot of managers subconsciously overestimate the abilities of engineers who regularly propose ambitious, complex solutions, and underestimate the abilities of engineers who are more leery of complexity. This not only leads to unnecessary boondoggle projects, it also results in managers not assigning challenging work to engineers who are quite capable of doing it, which is the waste the article describes.

  I was fortunate early in my career to have managers who had strong technical judgment themselves and rewarded it in their engineers, managers who spent their innovation tokens but spent them very carefully, so later in my career I was able to recognize when I had managers who relied on crude heuristics like assuming the engineers who proposed the most complex projects had the best judgment and the best ability to execute.

  One simple hack I use all the time, regardless of my manager's personality, is to say, "It would be fun." As in, "It would be fun to handle this with an event-driven system using Kafka. We could build an incredibly scalable and resilient system that way. I'd love to tackle a project like that, but I don't think we can justify it, because it would take more time and more engineers to build and be more expensive to operate, and I think our existing system only needs a few tweaks to what we need, even if we execute on our entire product roadmap and exceed our sales goals. I think we should take a careful look at tweaking the existing system, and if that won't get us what we need, we might have to build the more expensive solution."

  This lets me advertise my awareness of a fancier architectural solution, as well as my ability and willingness to execute on it, without actually saying that it's a good idea.

• by jabroni_salad on 4/17/24, 4:18 PM

  To me, pragmatism is set of knives by which I decide what to leave on the cutting room floor. The biggest one I have is that there are only so many hours in a day but more issues on the board than can fit into it. The second one is that my time billable, and anything that doesnt count towards my utilization is de facto not valued by the company.

  The overrunning theme seems to be 'how do we get more from a pragmatist' but my response is you can look at my todo list and rearrange it whenever you want. I am happy with my work, the metrics are on target, the feedback I get from clients is great and they ask for me on their future projects. Only one person is unahppy and its the guy who squints at spreadsheets all day. I think he is the one who is wrong.

• by klabb3 on 4/17/24, 4:23 PM

  Insanely spot on, for once (most of organizational analyses are not).

  Another fun thing pointed out in the article is the obsession over weeding out poor performers, ie the lazy ones. My theory is that it’s done solely to scare everyone else to work harder, whatever that means exactly. It’s about creating a culture of constant busyness which is only really a good proxy for work in domains that don’t require long term thinking. For engineers, it’s detrimental.

  If you wanna go after the ones who are contributing the least value, why obsess over the lazy? There are sooo many examples of people who added huge negative value, from the rockstars who create an unmaintainable mess to some product manager that re-steers the ship and changes something that was completely fine the way it was. Especially when they leave the mess behind which opportunists often do. Dead weight is nothing compared to the whales that swim towards the bottom and drag the rest of them down.

• by jasonlotito on 4/17/24, 3:55 PM

  This is from part 2, but wow...

  > Do not use mushy words like ... ownership,

  If you think ownership is just mushy words, you've never given someone ownership. Giving someone ownership isn't just mush. It's real, and can have real impact. Of course, this also literally means giving them some actual, real, legal ownership in that project and it's results.

  This is especially hypocritical when paired with an "actual example"

  > The intended outcome is to increase the rate at which we create value for customers, facilitate easier troubleshooting, decrease downtime, enable more developers to work across different code bases seamlessly and improve developer morale.

  Talk about mush. That's just one part of a completely mushy "behavioral statement" that just reeks of insincerity and mush. This is also covered under specifics, and the entire thing lacks ANY specifics.

  Give them ownership. Real ownership, not this fake "ownership" that clearly comes from someone who doesn't know what the word means. Give them power to drive direction and results, and reward them for that.

  There are more things that could be said about this, but honestly, reading that, it just screamed hypocrisy.

• by fortani on 4/18/24, 1:25 AM

  "I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent — their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy — they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent — he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief."

  Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord

  This is an interesting quote from a WWII General. So "skilled pragmatists" seems to map to what Kurt terms as clever and lazy. But it also means that most people are lazy and stupid.

• by hiAndrewQuinn on 4/17/24, 5:53 PM

  I'm more interested in figuring out what kind of knowledge base most reliably turns a junior dev into a "skilled pragmatist".

  My guess is the highest ROI thing one can do in software engineering is take your command line environment and OS internals seriously to heart. This can be either bash/Unix or PowerShell/Windows, depending on your career goals, although having gotten reasonably good with both sets I'd recommend the former. Wherever you go, you'll have that ultra portable knowledge to rely on, and do in 10 lol minutes what might take your coworkers 20 or 30.

• by schaefer on 4/17/24, 6:10 PM

  There are many assertions of facts in this blog article, for example: 75% skilled pragmatists. Do any of these facts have citations?

  Even if the author were to directly state they are his observations as a developer, it would have more value than absolutely no citation.

  As written, these facts are giving me a very made up or "story time" vibe.

• by netbioserror on 4/17/24, 4:20 PM

  Interesting model. Reminds me of all the methods of breaking down game players (e.g. honers vs. innovators, Jimmys vs. Timmys, etc.). I'm very lucky to work at a small shop that can't afford the other three sectors; there are too few of us, each of us needs to impactfully improve our part of the product stack. In fact, we each basically have full ownership of our part of the product stack. Yes, I know, bus factor. But when we're a team of 7 with a fair number of software components all connected together, each one needs a clear vision. Also luckily, we do team interviews; it's fairly easy for us to suss out BS and identify matching competent people who fit the pragmatist mold.

• by DylanDmitri on 4/17/24, 4:11 PM

  Breaks down to: (1) build trust with your people, then (2) give them autonomy to guide their own work. The inverse of "Seeing Like a State".

• by TheGRS on 4/17/24, 4:36 PM

  This post is an introduction to the idea and then as a Part 2 for actions to take. For anyone who hasn't continued into Part 2, it goes into first steps on listening to different performers in your company and basically doing research on what makes everyone tick. There will be a follow-up Part 3. Just want to say that's an interesting way to blog, but a little unsatisfying since I'm not sure if I'll keep coming back for new updates every week.

  Interesting topic though! I consider myself both self-motivated and a little lazy at heart so I think I fall into the skilled pragmatist. For me personally it was that realization that I wasn't going to be the 4.0 student, but that I could still get a great 3.5 by doing a lot less work. Sometimes I crank out tons of extra work that helps various people by the simple virtue that its interesting to me. So I think this is hitting a chord with me somewhere.

  I find myself in management these days, and the people I manage are all great and talented and as far as I can tell no one is upset with my laissez-faire management style. But I'm always wanting to find how to make the job more interesting for them. The roadmap can often be kind of boring work. When we have interesting projects the work just flies by and you can see the satisfaction on everyone's faces. Would love to just have more of that.

• by csours on 4/17/24, 7:50 PM

  I can't give my boss any work they don't want to do.

  If I find a problem in another team's domain, I can try to interest them in it, and failing that, I can try to interest my boss in it, but if no one gets interested enough to fix the thing, what am I going to do? Work around the problem and sulk.

  See Also: Glue Work

  https://noidea.dog/glue

• by dbrueck on 4/17/24, 4:52 PM

  Part of me feels like the untapped potential is just one of many symptoms of all of the dysfunction going on, and if you can fix some of the dysfunction, then you'd not only unleash some of that potential but fix a bunch of other problems at the same time.

• by jongjong on 4/18/24, 1:46 AM

  This is assuming that the skilled pragmatists are even employed to begin with. What I'm seeing is that they've been steadily getting pushed out of the industry. There have been many highly skilled open source devs who left the industry because they can't deal with the bureaucracy and nonsense anymore.

  The dispassionate, status-oriented bureaucrat seems to have the upper hand; and they appear to have the majority necessary to get their way in the centers of power.

  We have a bad case of the blind leading the visionaries.

• by bilsbie on 4/17/24, 4:08 PM

  I’d add that this breakdown needs to include the naive. I found most overworkers never thought about questioning the purpose to tasks or working long hours.

• by mattgreenrocks on 4/17/24, 4:32 PM

  It feels like a common institutional problem is the people who push more of their identity into the institution get disproportionately rewarded over time for their (sometimes ill-considered) sacrifice, which causes them to seek out other people like them, which causes the org to select for that over time. And other people see this, respond with, “I don’t want that,” and put up boundaries like you see discussed here.

  Orgs love to say they like results, and they do — to a certain extent. There’s a ceiling on it that isn’t there if you are coded by other people as One Of Us. This is wholly different from being a yes-man, of course. It can’t be too obvious you’re playing this game or people don’t like it…probably because it reminds some people of the gamble they’re making there. I’ll wager that some people are honest enough to say, “well how else should we treat loyalty?” And others would say, “well that’s what they chose for their life, so they should be rewarded.” Both answers really just serve to entrench no-life-ism, though.

  IMO, hovering on the border of engagement/disengagement is not a problem. People tend to oscillate back and forth there naturally. Work is fundamentally a transactional relationship that can sometimes confer meaning, intellectual stimulation, social connections, and structure. And sometimes it fails at some or all of those.

  Expecting it to always provide those things is delusional. Keeping the transactional nature in mind without being a jerk keeps expectations grounded. We should be far more suspicious of those who are constantly parading their love of work on social media.

• by JohnMakin on 4/17/24, 4:39 PM

  I'd categorize myself as a "Barry" - which he seems to define in part II of this blog post as someone who is willing to take great personal and career risks to rock the boat, and will even risk getting fired to get their job done - it has usually cost me a lot in whatever organization I end up in. I think these people eventually become skilled pragmatists when burnt out, but I'm not sure he has any insight in these posts about how people become a "Maria."

  IMO it's when Barry's finally realize that working their ass off and taking risk for the betterment of a company or leadership team that will not hesitate to take advantage of a Barry and/or ruthlessly cut him down when convenient. I guess by author's definition if a Barry became a Maria, he was never a Barry to begin with, but I do think this happens a lot. I see it in my own career path, with myself and some of my peers.

• by gr4vityWall on 4/17/24, 10:45 PM

  I fail to see how trying to get more out of Maria would make any thing better for Maria herself.

• by fuzzfactor on 4/18/24, 7:32 PM

  From the final paragraph of Part 2:

  >Instead of “getting more out of” people, think about “achieve more together, and for each other.”

  You can't herd cats without being an integral part of the herd.

• by meowAJ16 on 4/17/24, 5:02 PM

  There is no way 80% of people care about craft and impact. There are books on creating impact even when employees don't care about impact.

  It's hard to find people who care about their craft.

• by AndyNemmity on 4/18/24, 5:36 AM

  This might accurately describe me, although I am very challenged in what I do.

  I guess I find the intersection between what I do, and other people, to be a waste of time.

  Whenever I try to bring other people into the mix, they tend to misunderstand, and I spend so much time correcting them, it's hard to get value out of the process.

  I do get value out of the process (did today), but it often feels like I am increasing my effort exponentially for very little.

• by cyberbender on 4/17/24, 4:10 PM

  I've seen this firsthand...I think it is less of an issue at smaller companies where taking initiative and leaning into their intelligence is less politically restricted. At large organizations, often it requires too much energy for them navigate the bureaucracy and tap into their potential.

• by bb88 on 4/17/24, 6:52 PM

  As the saying goes:

  "If you stick your head up above the cube wall, prepare to have it decapitated."

• by mtreis86 on 4/17/24, 8:30 PM

  Biggest waste I see is people arguing over equally good options. Flip a coin and go.

• by cebert on 4/18/24, 2:49 AM

  I can appreciate the some of the frustrations many here raise with corporate work culture. However, in reality, you need to sell the value you bring. If you see more junior folk or good folk who don’t highlight their own value, help bring visibility. If you don’t highlight your value and peers you appreciate, you risk it not being recognized. Don’t let the good people lose out in the game. Help get good people promoted and into positions of power.

• by aubanel on 4/17/24, 8:55 PM

  Putting "cut-throat bureaucrats" in the "do not care for impact" side of the axis seems unnatural to me: I think these people do care for impact, and that's why they are so decided about imposing their ways. But their definition of impact is "doing things the right way", which corrupts their want for improvement into a pile of processes.

• by chrisgd on 4/17/24, 5:43 PM

  It’s crazy we still hire so slowly and fire so quickly when it should be the exact opposite.

• by chatmasta on 4/18/24, 12:16 AM

  Why are all four quadrants bad contributors? Surely that’s a bit cynical?

• by xyst on 4/17/24, 11:24 PM

  I have found that Fortune 500 companies are usually the worst when it comes to this.

  If you want to get shit done, don’t work at a soulless corporation. These are glorified retirement homes for people.

  Have had the unfortunate experience with having to hand hold what’s been described as “20+ YoE industry veterans” through the fucking basics of oauth.

• by namuol on 4/17/24, 6:49 PM

  The article’s thesis is based on the assumption that most contributors care a good deal about the business and/or their craft. I just don’t see that.

• by seporterfield on 4/17/24, 3:48 PM

  Real

• by billtsedong on 4/17/24, 5:04 PM

  Honestly if that guy was my manager, I'd quit no matter what. I'm already selling 1/3 of my lifetime just to be able to eat, so no freaking way I'd contribute to someone already robbing me of the most valuable resource one can have.