Posted by CharlesW 21 hours ago
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Stokowski#Hollywood_Bo...
Not sure that the general public would have any kind of awareness for conductors or anyone in the classical music world today: perhaps Yo-Yo Ma, and some years ago 'The Three Tenors' were a thing.
In my college daze, Chuck Jones dropped by to give a talk to a packed auditorium. Of course, what he showed was What's Opera Doc. We all loved it, and Chuck enjoyed our enthusiasm.
How many companies work just because the average worker is the one making it work? In my experience a lot of them.
It is sad that the money always accumulates at the top even when so often that same people at the top are an impediment for doing better work.
A business has limited resources, and somebody has to decide which hill they're going to conquer.
The reason managers make more is because their decisions can make more / lose more money than the workers.
BTW, in every company I've worked for, all of the workers thought they were smarter than the manager (including yours truly). The funny part would be when one would be promoted into management, and instantly became incompetent in the estimation of the other workers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This isn't such an unexpected outcome. Junior & senior dev roles rarely prepare staff for the type of meta responsibility that's involved in managerial work, and there's almost no exposure to the majority of your manager's duties. It's typical that the only exposure a non-manager gets to their manager's role is a 20 daily minute standup, some tickets shuffling around a Jira board, and a fortnightly 30-45 minute catch up. Then when your mastery of .NET/python/K8s/whatever is sufficiently well established, the business takes that as evidence that you'll be an adequate manager of humans, and promotes you with little additional training, and you often stop doing hands-on dev work.
Meanwhile, if you're a junior staff member at a supermarket, you're doing managerial-type work daily, and throughout your time, you get exposure to low-stakes managerial responsibility. You work alongside your manager for 9-12 hours/day, and you see pretty much everything they do. Over time, you're given more and more of the meta-managerial work, and when you finally get promoted, it's because both you and the business already have evidence that you can do the managerial work. You then continue stacking shelves 9-12 hours per day, as a manager.
I think there's something the software industry could learn from the supermarket industry's approach. They have a much smoother gradient between non-manager and manager.
I've never heard of it and would have appreciated at least a cursory definition. I thought I was going to see an article about an ad for Opera the browser.