[strangattractor]

The best teams appear to be doing nothing. If as a general rule things are always in a fire drill then your software sucks (there are other reasons for this). We always measure how many things are fixed. New features added. Rarely how much time is spent baby sitting machines etc.

[snidane]

The best way to motivate devs to build truly robust systems is to let them go home at 2pm when things are finished and production process is running smooth.

However most organizations would pile more work onto devs if they finish early, so devs then compensate by taking more time on their current tasks. Why finish them early, when you'll be thrown another one right away.

[horsawlarway]

The best way to motivate any employee is to give them a vested interest in the company (ownership, equity, profit share, etc).

Prod can be running as smoothly as you like - it doesn't matter if your company is having its lunch eaten by competitors adding or improving features faster than you.

You should be incentivizing employees to step back and look at the big picture every now and then. If customers are happy, the company is profitable, and prod is running smoothly? Go take some time off, head out early, etc.

Is revenue down? Company growth slowing, or worse, is the company shrinking? Time to work. Prod being red or green has little to do with it.

[snidane]

That kind of works in theory or for people up there in decision making ranks. For engineers down in the trenches it might not be such a motivating factor because they don't feel their individual contributions matter as much. It might motivate them to stay and slack off without getting fired until the company does an exit. So one might suggest giving devs equity would motivate them not to their maximum potential, but rather to the very minimum which will not get them fired before the cash day.

Also I'm sure we could come up with examples of people who got a good amount of equity just because they were there among the first employees and then not working at all because, well, their profit was already locked in by just waiting for others to do the hard work.

[kamilafsar]

Finish what? Where do you draw the line of “work for today”? I don’t think motivated devs want to go home at 2pm.

Speaking as a dev, the best way to motivate me is to give me some head cracking challenge, trust (no reporting) and autonomy (don’t tell me how to do my work).

[snidane]

> I don’t think motivated devs want to go home at 2pm.

That's the beauty of it. Motivated engineers will use the spare time after 2pm to study and improve things. Or run some errands if they have to, without feeling their butt has to be glued to the chair until 6pm.

I've often solved many problems at work in my spare time or when taking a dump or something. It's pretty difficult to really get into deep thinking at the office because of 1. noise and 2. looking unproductive when you actually think hard.

Paradoxically office slackers bashing keyboard when chatting on facebook look more productive from a distance than somebody who actually is deeply thinking about system design and spinning in a chair or staring at a ceiling while doing it.

[BossingAround]

> I don’t think motivated devs want to go home at 2pm.

I can understand the attitude when one's in their twenties, has no significant other, kids, or other commitments.

Me? I just get tired. I'm very motivated and like what I do, but at some point, it's just silly to stay behind the screen. And sometimes, that point is even earlier than 2pm. That's ok. We aren't machines to be working like a Swiss watch.

[Jtsummers]

I was most productive when my office let us take a few hours a week to exercise. I wouldn't use it if I had anything critical pending, but otherwise I would duck out an hour early several times a week to go get in a good long run (5-10km).

It felt like they had more respect for my time and well-being. When they cut it (with bullshit reasons [0]) "productivity" did not improve in the office. Instead, projects expanded to fill the time. Those 3 hours or so we got to use at the gym before became 3 hours spent to produce the exact same total work. There was zero motivation to utilize it "properly" by using it to get ahead on anything. Every project continued to hit the same deadlines they were hitting before.

[0] One reason I say it was BS, we were typically on or ahead of schedule on projects. Teams that were behind weren't making use of this time while they were behind, they weren't permitted to.

[visarga]

They might let us go home at 2pm but we can't stop thinking about work problems even in the weekends - that's when we get a nice juicy project to think about.

[GVIrish]

Honestly I don't think most engaged developers who care about their work need the carrot of going home early to develop more robust systems. Most developers who care about their work want to build robust systems, especially if they're responsible for handling outages.

The challenge is whether the organization prioritizes robust systems and devotes resources to making things more observable, reliable, and resilient. The team can want with all their heart to engineer fixes to common failure modes but if the decision makers are always pushing full steam ahead on new features it can be really difficult to improve the app.

[emteycz]

Sadly business people want to fire you when you're seemingly doing nothing (as in coming to work on time, doing your job without stress and conflict, going home on time)... Even if all the business goals were met, they just can't stomach someone not working their asses off 24/7 for them.

[ndiscussion]

It's about power not money.

[karmakaze]

That's actually insightful. Wish I'd known this early in my career. Often, I'll be doing a great job with no complains from peers or project deliveries but seemingly 'tolerated' and not liked by any management types as they had no influence, I just did what needed doing of my own accord. Or maybe I didn't need to know, ignorance was bliss.

[ndiscussion]

Check out this post: https://daedtech.com/defining-the-corporate-hierarchy/

I really recommend his book Developer Hegemony, although it was very depressing and I haven't quite recovered a year later :D

[karmakaze]

Enough of that is funny 'cause it's true or sad but true. I work at a big co but not a full-on enterprise corp. I value my own time and work, more-or-less in alignment with broader initiatives. Learning new things and technical challenges makes the journey interesting, and it's fun/easy to get work done with most people. Sometimes I have varying degrees of communications (tech vs non-tech or grok/non-grok conceptual) issues but for the most part leadership has enough technical sense to make decent choices. So far, so good.

[maximente]

well, yeah. if you don't have air cover from a team or manager and don't appear to be engaged in shared suffering, it's no surprise people are going to ask questions, both from above and equal level. other labor will resent your non-suffering (how come /they/ get to leave on time?) and management will wonder whose reports get such a cushy setup and why.

[emteycz]

The thing is, there might be no suffering one is "avoiding" - the business people are often sitting around drinking coffee and beer, cracking jokes, watching developers' backs.

[mbrodersen]

You nailed it. The best engineers I have ever worked with never worked much. The bad engineers were always super busy trying (and failing) to fix the problems they put in the software in the first place.