I think that "Boring work needs meaning, not tension" is a great explanation of bad bosses.
Any work will go a little faster when your boss puts an arbitrary deadline on it and screams "We need this by Friday, we're gonna tell the VP that it's late and it's your fault!!" But it's hugely demoralizing and stressful.
But if you say "this work will get the client's hospital equipment monitoring suite out sooner; if it works reliably, they'll be able to deploy it sooner, and it'll save the lives of some sick kids," then that'll also get the work done a little faster, and it'll make you feel good about doing it.
Arbitrary tension is a patch that you put on work that has no meaning. "We want you to go faster because it will make our metrics go up which might raise the stock a few percentage which might make our investors a few extra millions" has no meaning, which is the root problem.
>But if you say "this work will get the client's hospital equipment monitoring suite out sooner; if it works reliably, they'll be able to deploy it sooner, and it'll save the lives of some sick kids," then that'll also get the work done a little faster, and it'll make you feel good about doing it.
The problem is that the smart ones will easily figure out that 'this next version will save lives' is a total lie. If your monitoring product doesn't work, it gets dumped and replaced. In developed countries, if your code has the potential of harming someone you're in a heavily regulated industry. The software in those industries is speced out in enormous detail to avoid this problem.
>Arbitrary tension is a patch that you put on work that has no meaning. "We want you to go faster because it will make our metrics go up which might raise the stock a few percentage which might make our investors a few extra millions" has no meaning, which is the root problem.
I disagree. Financial goals are the easiest to understand for people, and also easiest to communicate, and personally for me easiest to reason about how to achieve them. Just hit a number and you're done, collect your bonus and go do something you enjoy. As they say, the best way to ruin something you love doing is by making it your job. IMO people who chase some higher purpose and meaning are destined to be forever unhappy at their job.
> As they say, the best way to ruin something you love doing is by making it your job.
As someone who made a job and career out of what I always loved, it's far from ruined. Your relationship with the thing changes, and like anything that changes, sometimes it will go well and sometimes it will go bad, often both in succession like a rollercoaster.
> IMO people who chase some higher purpose and meaning are destined to be forever unhappy at their job.
I can 100% agree about people like that being forever emotional and passionate at their job. But to label it as unhappy is terribly reductive. "Unhappy" is a part of it, but there are plenty of other emotions you will go through: happy, scared, hopeful, dubious, frustrated, satisfied, elated, etc. Much like emotions that play out for us in "real" life events and relationships.
> IMO people who chase some higher purpose and meaning are destined to be forever unhappy at their job.
This is only because we’re ok with billionaires dictating what we have to do to earn money. We’ve absolutely got the technical mastery over our environment needed so that most people don’t need to work. The majority of jobs done today are performative. Have a kid and you’ll realize pretty quick that awful, boring work can still be 100% fulfilling.
Not to be personal but your attitude is disgustingly complacent. Nobody should be ok with being a waste of space so one human can have billions of dollars.
Most people already aware of the meaning of their work though, it's not something you can deliver updates on.
Whereas tension is easy to manufacture
Regarding updates: at your all-hands meetings, show inside customer success stories, and the real impact it had, or how your product/service is being used for great things?
(Different than a marketing testimonial, big sales landed, or charts showing financial growth.)
I worked for awhile in flight safety, almost entirely in software that I only ever ran on my laptop, and on servers seen through my laptop. I found that even little, but relatively concrete, reminders that I fit into this larger system of aviation, where great things are done, by very dedicated people, were nice occasional refreshers of inspiration.
> Most people already aware of the meaning of their work though, it's not something you can deliver updates on.
It isn't always. I did use to write health care software. It was used by "SLPs" and dozens of other acronyms I barely understood what they meant. Their clients had "FASD" and abuse victims and all sorts of things.
I was given a spec, we need this, it needs to have these fields, and these words, and I made it happen.
I never saw our software used in the wild. I never spoke with the clients that used our software, I never saw the difference that they made in childrens lives.
The more time we could save the clinicians and therapists and others, the more time they could spend helping their clients.
It was meaningful, but I never saw any of that. Maybe once or twice a year our boss would come in and explain some of that stuff to us. It was nice to hear.
Yes arbitrary tension is one of the most infuriating things that some agile people and bosses do. It's like they treat you as an unthinking machine that merely needs to constantly be prodded and poked to perform. Of course if you have any ability to think you will instantly figure out that it was fake pressure and who doesn't love it? I don't know why they think that this is going to work out for them. Well I do know actually, it's because many people do very little without being poked and asked constantly. That's the other side of the coin but frankly, that's a hiring problem. Such people shouldn't even be in the company.