Comment by GolfPopper
9 hours ago
Clashing priorities. Generally speaking, workers want the business to work, i.e. to do the thing for which it was ostensibly created. (If they didn't want that, they would go work somewhere else.) Management wants the business to make money, which is increasingly poorly aligned with the business fulfilling it's ostensible purpose well.
Now, without money, the business stops working. But increasingly - by which I mean, every for-profit business for which I've worked in the last 25 years - what I see is management trading the long-term health of the business for short-term profit, trusting that they won't be the ones to face the consequences.
It's the officers of a ship who are only interest in getting this cargo to its destination (after which they'll move to a different ship or retire) no matter how badly the ship and its relationships are abused in the process vs. the crew, for whom the ship is their life and their home.
One of my main motivations as a leaf node in the org tree is to try to make my job the least annoying possible. Meaning spending time making sure things don't annoy me in the future (like cleaning up code, updating legacy systems, fixing bugs in ways that ensure they won't happen again).
Not necessarily so I can work less (afterall there is always work to do as a developer). But so I don't get annoyed.
Usually that ends up saving time for the company, but not always.
Not always, but overall having cleaner code with less bugs, more documentation and tests, is not just an annoyance to you. It's a money-maker for your employer as well in the long term by virtue of reducing burnout rate, decreasing onboarding time, making any improvement possible at all...
I get it, but my incentives are deeply misaligned with the company's in this regard, I prioritize things that annoy _me_ directly or indirectly (through not having to troubleshoot bugs made by other people).
On a ROI and prioritization metrics I put myself first, co-workers second, product third, company bottom-line fourth. Part of putting myself first is delivering things mandated by management (so, you know, I don't get fired) which skews to product and company bottom-line, but things I do of my own volition is definitely not going to the bottom-line/product.
I am lucky I am not time tracked aggressively and that my immediate superior lets us work on things out of our own volition. The fact that some of the stuff I do benefits the company indirectly is secondary to my motivation to do it.
> Generally speaking, workers want the business to work, i.e. to do the thing for which it was ostensibly created. (If they didn't want that, they would go work somewhere else.)
Or workers don't care where they work as long they get a pay cheque. If management wants to do stupid things sometimes it's not worth the fight as long as payroll is made.