Ludicity

Should You Stick It Out At This Terrible Workplace?

Since I wrote Most Data Work Seems Fundamentally Worthless, I've done the following:

  • Got some mentorship from senior Amazon/Google/Microsoft folks
  • Received a fair amount of mentorship from a few directors and C-suite executives
  • Read the most widely-recommended management book I could, Turn The Ship Around. If a reader has an alternative suggestion, I would welcome it - most material I could find, including this book, has a distinct aura of trying to set the author up for speaking engagement (even if some of the material is good)
  • Done some substantial technical study

I've done this with the aim of answering a few big questions, which may be useful to others in similar circumstances:

  • Should I stick it out and improve things here?
  • If I leave, how can I ensure the next place has enough quality to be good for my mental health?
  • What do I need to study given that I've got years of 'bad' experience?
  • Is starting my own business the only way to reliably run things in a quality-focused and healthy environment?
  • Should I leave the tech industry entirely?

For now, I'm dealing with just one part of that. Should I (and by extension, some readers) stick it out and improve things? After plenty of thinking, barring truly extenuating circumstances (it is the only organization that works on a social problem you care about), absolutely not. Here's my reasoning.

Are You Already In The Sub-Par Hiring Death Spiral?

Something I've been reflecting on deeply is that everything starts with the quality and motivation of the people you have. Technically competent people who are burned out are not particularly useful. Technically incompetent (whatever that means in your field) are even less useful than that. For most projects that succeeded in any meaningful sense of the word (many succeed only on PowerPoint slides), I can point at one or two people who were instrumental in making it happen.

To some degree, the extent to which my organization struggles is driven entirely by the difficulty they have in attracting the right people because of our reputation and our structure - and incompetence/burnout breeds more incompetence/burnout, so there's a wonderful death spiral effect to the whole thing. So if you're not optimistic about a company's people, that's probably already enough reason to leave.

Take, for example, the three kinds of people that make up the majority of our analytics space.

Firstly, we have those getting a start in their career, as we have low standards for entry, don't run technical interviews, and pay a disproportionately high amount for lower-level positions. Some of these people are quite good, as they don't have the experience to negotiate for what they're worth and just need somewhere to get experience. They also don't have perspective on how badly we work, or how much of their work is valueless, though they do figure this out eventually.

Secondly, we have those with a few years of work experience. Unfortunately, this echelon of our organization is faced with two predominant issues - we have a large number of staff who are attracted to the organization because they know that it is easy to collect a salary for producing very little value, and we have a large number of staff with minimal technical skill. This is compounded by the fact that, while we pay a higher rate than usual for juniors, we pay a lower rate than would be expected for seniors, so our seniors are scarcely better than our juniors.

Thirdly, we have the management layer, where my read is less clear. I certainly think some of the managers are excellent, though I must admit that given the fact that most of our work isn't connected to any real-world outcomes, it's difficult to know this for sure. What I can say instead is that some managers have teams that like them, and complete complex projects. Most of the managers settle for one of the two, largely leaning towards being liked. We have a real mix of directors with extensive experience at major organisations, who actually do deliver projects, and other directors that... well, they're clearly going to move on in a few years and functionally steal money from unsuspecting companies. In the meantime, the latter group wants to grow headcount at all costs (as this makes them more important) and they have no idea how to hire good people.

So, where I am now, I meet plenty of smart people, but for various reasons they have self-selected into not getting a lot done. The juniors don't have the strategic understanding to do the right work, the seniors are largely here to recover from burnout (see: me), and it's totally up in the air which of the two managers you're going to get, plus half the people you meet are incapable of doing a good job anyway. I don't have the ability to pay the best juniors enough to stay once they develop vision, I can't motivate seniors that have seen every project for the last five years fail, and I certainly am not interested in entering the managerial thunderdome (at least with this type of manager).

Assuming you're in a similar position, bailing out makes a lot of sense. Find better people - and I don't mean this as a slight against the current colleagues. Recovering from burnout is admirable, and finding a way to earn a comfortable living without really working is fine. It's just not what I or the people that read this blog probably want.

Are You Close Enough To Unobfuscated Reality?

It is fascinating watching people try to hide information from their managers. Or, as one executive (who I trust deeply trust to present sound analyses) told me recently: the main job of most managers is to ensure the information reaching their manager is good. Embedded in this is something that he took for granted - most organizations are inherently dysfunctional.

Of course, this is precisely why David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs work was so popular, and to a lesser extent why my original post immediately went viral. Most people can recognize that large parts of their office jobs are entirely built around enough subterfuge to accumulate either wealth or safety.

In this same vein, the people that read my first post and said they avoided the phenomenon of bullshit work overwhelmingly stated that they found a position where there was an extremely clear deliverable. In particular, they worked in fields where the thing they did has an extremely direct relationship with something important to the business. The benefit (for competent people in the right position) is that they can remove a lot of politics from the equation.

Currently, if I want to get resourced to do something, I have to make extremely vague arguments around things like code quality or best practice. In theory, everyone agrees with me. In practice, the effort it takes to communicate anything is horrendous because every discussion has far too much nuance and no clear objective.

Take a conversation around whether it's worth refactoring some consultant's work. It was written in a huge hurry, is undocumented, and no one can read it clearly. The code operates allows our team to perform our main function, but that function is to generate data for another team to pass up the chain and 'make decisions'. Most of these decisions are unrelated directly to the main revenue-generator of the institution, and there is no quantifiable output that can be unambiguously associated with those decisions.

Should we refactor the code? I actually have no idea. I advocate for yes entirely because I know that bad code is bad, and have literally nothing else to weigh against it. What happens if we stop delivering for a week for the refactor? Not a clue.

It seems that one should, wherever possible, find a role where you're close to the value being generated, and the relationship is unambiguous. As you can't really change this at a dysfunctional organization (particularly when measuring some things will make certain managers look bad, and hence threaten your job security), this seems like a clear sign that one should leave.

This does have a few unfortunate side-effects, namely, that money is super easy to measure and everywhere cares about it deeply. This means that it may be very hard to find a place doing something socially useful. I haven't yet worked out a good way to dig these roles up, other than personally knowing knowing non-profit leaders that you trust (and there are plenty of them that shouldn't be trusted).

Is There Anything To Learn Worth Sticking Around For?

One of the most heated points of discussion I've had with a brilliant engineer (who is also at a dysfunctional organization) is whether there's enough to learn at this kind of organization. It's true that we do have some leaders who say sensible things, and some initiatives that might turn things around in a few years. Is it enough to learn by watching them?

It's true, a bad organization isn't a total loss in terms of learning. But I do know plenty of people who wanted to stick things out another few months, or to round out a period of time on their CV, but I don't think this strategy makes very much sense. There is, after all, an opportunity cost. While there's value in seeing how not to do things, in some cases it's much easier to go the short way and just check out the right way directly.

When I started studying technology again seriously, I mentioned to a more experienced friend that I was hoping to get a role created for myself in my organization focused around doing the work I'm interested in - improving code quality and teaching other staff. A director believed that I had a reasonable chance at getting this kind of role, if I put the work in to demonstrate how useful this kind of position would be to the organization.

Well, firstly, as I mentioned above, this is going to be a very hard case to make because the reason the organization is like this is that they have no way to trace quality to any particular outcome.

But what my friend pointed out (and his very wealthy FAANG friend latter repeated) is that he didn't see what the organization was offering me. He asked me if I was doing exceptional work? Well, no, maybe it is by the standards of the organization, but I know it could be much better, especially if I was working somewhere I was proud of. Was I getting paid tons? Not really, I'm getting paid a lot to do very little, but I don't like not producing anything, and I could get paid more for actually producing at a place that values it. Am I experiencing truly excellent management? I think maybe, in some of them, but it's hard to tell because 'exceptional' results here just mean that the project was finished at all.

And, of the engineers I know that really tried to get things right here, the impact they had on the organization was minor and vanished as soon as they left. If anything, they did learn here, but they were best served by learning just enough to meet the bar at someone excellent and fucking right off.

Are You Being Compensated Super Well?

And this is the last one, for other young people out there. Early career, I was pretty money-obsessed. Eventually I realized you don't need that much money in the first world, and eased up. One of the Google guys told me that I'm probably underestimating how much freedom the money you get from being actually excellent can get you at the right place.

The reason my current organization doesn't pay absurdly well is because they aren't in a position to convert anyone's skills into revenue at a good rate. You could give us the greatest genius in Silicon Valley, and they'd probably create <$10K per year for us as we consign them to 20 hours of pointless stakeholder meetings every week. The organization has no use for extreme skill, which means they can never justify paying anyone that well, save for the few executives that earned that position by work they did elsewhere.

I think you can certainly go too far chasing money, but if you're a non-manager at the places I'm describing, well, you're probably far off that mark. And money has the great upside of being useful regardless of whether the organization you're at does a damn thing with any of your work. It's a solid consolation prize.

In Summary:

  • You probably can't fix enough people problems at your organization to make things function well enough
  • You probably aren't learning that much about how to actually do things correctly, just taking the consolation prize of how not to do things
  • You probably can't change your team's proximity to meaningful metrics and quantifiable outcomes
  • You probably could get paid a lot more with a bit of study and strategic job hops
  • Most importantly but not discussed, you're going to die eventually and don't have enough precious life years to waste time doing work you're unhappy with or cleaning up after years of systemic mistakes other people made

I had plenty more to say on this, but historically know that I won't hit publish if I don't do my writing in one sitting. If any readers have input on the topic, strategies for finding good teams, or preferably hatemail, please reach out to me at ludicity.hackernews@gmail.com!