[dharmon]

Be glad you hired savvy employees. Anyone who comes into a new company and starts enumerating everything they are doing wrong is a fool who will have poor career longevity. That's how we end up with shitty tech blogs from people who keep insisting they have the answers if just somebody will listen (cough Michael O'Church cough).

You need to put something concrete behind your words. One off-the-top-of-my-head suggestion: Have a few current engineers start working on some of your known problems as part of their responsibilities. It doesn't have to be 100% their job, just a "kaizen" approach is ok (improve some small part each time they use it). Let them know it will be part of their evaluations.

Now when you ask new employees point to these examples: "John noticed our tracking system was crummy and important issues were slipping through the cracks, so we offered to let him be in charge of re-vamping it."

Obviously you'll have to manage what you allow them to improve, and who gets to work on it. This idea isn't perfect, of course, but the idea is to show them you are serious about these suggestions.

X% of management is aligning incentives (X is some large number). Think about how to incentivize them to give the information you want, and how to remove disincentives. Money and responsibility / autonomy are the most basic incentives.

[cookiecaper]

Great post. The snide remark toward michaelochurch might be the cause of your downvotes, but I upvoted you for the rest of it, because it is smart and right.

>X% of management is aligning incentives (X is some large number). Think about how to incentivize them to give the information you want, and how to remove disincentives. Money and responsibility / autonomy are the most basic incentives.

All of management is systemic. You can rarely change behavior by sitting down and tackling the problem head-on; people have an internal defense mechanism that interprets this as an attack and shuts everything down.

Any change one wants to make without triggering hostility/resentment has to occur as a side effect of gently and gradually manipulating the structure that the employee finds himself in, including the incentives and the environment.

Your example, which normalizes working on an internal processes and will make the employee feel like the odd one out if he doesn't have a suggestion for fixing the insides, is a pretty good one.