The fish rots from the head down.

– A beaten saying

People generally don’t do what they’re told, but what they expect to be rewarded for. Managers often say they’ll reward something – perhaps they even believe it. But then they proceed to reward different things.

I think people are fairly good at predicting this discrepancy. The more productive they are, the better they tend to be at predicting it. Consequently, management’s stated goals will tend to go unfulfilled whenever deep down, management doesn’t value the sort of work that goes into achieving these goals.

So not only is paying lip service to these goals worthless, but so is lying to oneself and genuinely convincing oneself. When time comes to reward people, it is the gut feeling of whose work is truly remarkable that matters. And what you usually convince yourself of is that the goal is important – but not that achieving it is remarkable. In fact, often someone pursuing what you think are unimportant goals in a way that you admire will impress you more than someone doing “important grunt work” (in your eyes.)

You then live happily with this compartmentalization – an important goal to be achieved by unremarkable people. However, nobody is fooled except you. The people whose compensation depends on your opinion have ample time to remember and analyze your past words and decisions – more time than you, in fact, and a stronger incentive. And so their mental model of you is often much better than your own. So they ignore your requests and become valued, instead of following them and sinking into obscurity.

Examples:

• A manager truly appreciates original mathematical ideas. The manager requests to rid the code of crash-causing bugs, because customers resent crashes. The most confident people ignore him and spend time coming up with original math. The less confident people spend time chasing bugs, are upset by the lack of recognition, and eventually leave for greener pastures. At any given moment, the code base is ridden by crash-causing bugs.
• A manager enjoys “software architecture”, design patterns, and language lawyer type of knowledge. The manager requests to cooperate better with neighboring teams who are upset by missing functionality in the beautifully architected software. People will tend to keep designing more patterns into the program.
• A highly influential figure enjoys hacking on their machine. The influential figure points out the importance of solid, highly-available infrastructure to support development. The department responsible for said infrastructure will guarantee that he gets as much bandwidth, RAM, screen pixels and other goodies as they can supply, knowing that the infrastructure he really cares about is that which enables the happy hacking on his machine. The rest of the org might well remain stuck with a turd of an infrastructure.
• A manager loathes spending money. The manager requires to build highly-available infrastructure to support development. People responsible for infrastructure will build a piece of shit out of yesteryear’s scraps purchased at nearby failing companies for peanuts, knowing that they’ll be rewarded.
• A manager is all about timely delivery, and he did very little code maintenance in his life. The manager nominally realizes that a lot of code is used in multiple shipping products; that it takes some time to make a change compatible with all the client code; and that branching the entire code base is a quick way to do the work for this delivery, but you’ll pay for the shortcut many times over in each of your future deliveries. People will fork the code base for every shipping product. (I’ve seen it and heard about it more times than the luckier readers would believe.)

And so it goes. If something is rotten in an org, the root cause is a manager who doesn’t value the work needed to fix it. They might value it being fixed, but of course no sane employee gives a shit about that. A sane employee cares whether they are valued. Three corollaries follow:

Corollary 1. Who can, and sometimes does, un-rot the fish from the bottom? An insane employee. Someone who finds the forks, crashes, etc. a personal offense, and will repeatedly risk annoying management by fighting to stop these things. Especially someone who spends their own political capital, hard earned doing things management truly values, on doing work they don’t truly value – such a person can keep fighting for a long time. Some people manage to make a career out of it by persisting until management truly changes their mind and rewards them. Whatever the odds of that, the average person cannot comprehend the motivation of someone attempting such a feat.

Corollary 2. When does the fish un-rot from the top? When a manager is taught by experience that (1) neglecting this thing is harmful and (2) it’s actually hard to get it right (that is, the manager himself, or someone he considers smart, tried and failed.) But that takes managers admitting mistakes and learning from them. Such managers exist; to be called one of them would exceed my dreams.

Corollary 3. Managers who can’t make themselves value all important work should at least realize this: their goals do not automatically become their employees’ goals. On the contrary, much or most of a manager’s job is to align these goals – and if it were that easy, perhaps they wouldn’t pay managers that much, now would they? I find it a blessing to be able to tell a manager, “you don’t really value this work so it won’t get done.” In fact, it’s a blessing even if they ignore me. That they can hear this sort of thing without exploding means they can be reasoned with. To be considered such a manger is the apex of my ambitions.

Finally, don’t expect people to enlighten you and tell you what your blind spots are. Becoming a manager means losing the privilege of being told what’s what. It’s a trap to think of oneself as just the same reasonable guy and why wouldn’t they want to talk to me. The right question is, why would they? Is the risk worth it for them? Only if they take your org’s problem very personally, which most people quite sensibly don’t. Someone telling me what’s what is a thing to thank for, but not to count on.

The safe assumption is, they read your mind like an open book, and perhaps they read it out loud to each other – but not to you. The only way to deal with the problems I cause is an honest journey into the depths of my own rotten mind.

P.S. As it often happens, I wanted to write this for years (the working title was “people know their true KPIs”), but I didn’t. I was prompted to finally write it by reading Dan Luu’s excellent “How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal“, where he says, among other things, “It’s sort of funny that this ends up being a problem about incentives. As an industry, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to incentivize consumers into doing what we want. But then we set up incentive systems that are generally agreed upon as incentivizing us to do the wrong things…” I guess this is my take on the incentives issue – real incentives vs stated incentives; I believe people often break rules put in place to achieve a stated goal in order to do the kind of work that is truly valued (even regardless of whether that work’s goal is valued.) It’s funny how I effectively comment on Dan’s blog two times in a row, his blog having become easily my favorite “tech blog”, while my own is kinda fading away as I spend my free time learning to animate.