<story><title>How to drive away your best engineers</title><url>https://blog.hulacorn.com/2021/09/08/how-to-drive-away-your-best-engineers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>astura</author><text>This article could be a parody with how shockingly naive it is.&lt;p&gt;The purpose of work is to solve business problems, not personal amusement and self-actualization. Business problems exist in the real world and have significant constraints. Many people will be much happier if they understood this.</text></item><item><author>23B1</author><text>Like many engineers, the author of this article assumes all engineers are ethical, and perfectly suited to the assigned task. The author also assumes unlimited budgets, perfect control over a company&amp;#x27;s hiring and resource management, and a perfect understanding of the software&amp;#x27;s requirements.&lt;p&gt;These are the same complaints I hear from inexperienced engineers over and over and over again – and not just engineers, but anyone primarily responsible for &amp;#x27;labor&amp;#x27; vs. &amp;#x27;management&amp;#x27;.&lt;p&gt;The &amp;#x27;best engineers&amp;#x27; empathize with the perspective of &amp;#x27;management,&amp;#x27; that running a company is probabilistic, and that managers, co-workers, and other departments – like finance, recruiting, product, and marketing – are also duty bound by challenging constraints often beyond their control.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>EnKopVand</author><text>I think the point here may be that when you’re dealing with an occupation in which the best engineers can pick and chose. Then you’re likely to lose your best engineers unless you’re exceptionally good at managing them. Especially if you introduce boundaries and restraints.&lt;p&gt;I’m not sure it’s naive to view the world like the author does. I’ve worked both sides of the fence, and while I’m now back in software development I do see the appreciation for my experience with creating the most business value out of your resources that managers come with. The thing is, though, if I don’t have to work in a place with too much bureaucracy or too many constraints then I’m not going to do so. I obviously try not to be an asshole about it. I don’t follow the company dress code in the basement troll factory where they placed IT, but I do have a suit at work that I can change into whenever I leave the “cave”. Those sort of things, so naturally I’ll play a long way in regards to what management want, but I’m never going to do estimates by the hour until the job market actively forces me to do so. Which likely won’t be in our lifetime. So when&amp;#x2F;if management go down the route of treating Software Development like they treat any other department (which like you state also are under significant constraint) then the company is just very likely to lose their most talented developers very quickly. I suspect that it would be (and probably is) exactly like that in any department, it’s just easier to get away with in engineering because we’re privileged enough to be able to leave our jobs today and have another good job by tomorrow.</text></comment>
<story><title>How to drive away your best engineers</title><url>https://blog.hulacorn.com/2021/09/08/how-to-drive-away-your-best-engineers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>astura</author><text>This article could be a parody with how shockingly naive it is.&lt;p&gt;The purpose of work is to solve business problems, not personal amusement and self-actualization. Business problems exist in the real world and have significant constraints. Many people will be much happier if they understood this.</text></item><item><author>23B1</author><text>Like many engineers, the author of this article assumes all engineers are ethical, and perfectly suited to the assigned task. The author also assumes unlimited budgets, perfect control over a company&amp;#x27;s hiring and resource management, and a perfect understanding of the software&amp;#x27;s requirements.&lt;p&gt;These are the same complaints I hear from inexperienced engineers over and over and over again – and not just engineers, but anyone primarily responsible for &amp;#x27;labor&amp;#x27; vs. &amp;#x27;management&amp;#x27;.&lt;p&gt;The &amp;#x27;best engineers&amp;#x27; empathize with the perspective of &amp;#x27;management,&amp;#x27; that running a company is probabilistic, and that managers, co-workers, and other departments – like finance, recruiting, product, and marketing – are also duty bound by challenging constraints often beyond their control.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>the_gipsy</author><text>There are so many actors and groups and dynamics and forces in effect in the relations that we commonly call &amp;quot;work&amp;quot;, that trying to reduce it to a single purpose  is laughably naïve.</text></comment>