Comment by decimalenough a day ago
This is the "Voice" option of the Exit/Voice/Loyalty model:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
These days it seems to be deeply unpopular though: the normal pattern is superficial Loyalty, followed by a quick dash to Exit as soon as something slightly better pops up. Anybody even attempting to Voice and actually change the organization is laughed off as hopelessly naive, especially if they're junior.
the "being grumpy" or being able to recognize problems is why during technical interviews I always ask the candidate to name their biggest complaint about a technology they know well/love/mentioned earlier. This to me is a great signal especially for mid seniority engineers that they are aware that things could improve
If they can't complain they either can't tell what's wrong or can't gain the courage to say what's wrong. Neither is a great quality, though the latter can be heavily influenced by company culture
But I also think how an engineer complains is important. It gives good insight into how they think.
Very interesting, thank you!
The following stood out to me:
"Exit and voice themselves represent a union between economic and political action. Exit is associated with Adam Smith's invisible hand, in which buyers and sellers are free to move silently through the market, constantly forming and destroying relationships. Voice, on the other hand, is by nature political and at times confrontational."
In national and international politics we see a lot of "Voice" (in these terms) but I feel they are often ineffective because they are blunted by threshold effects, i.e. the resultant change is a softmax with temperature near zero.
People don't realise and utilise the power they hold by means of "Exit", especially as wealthy consumers who engage in these debates, who have more consumption and hence more influence as it's a "one dollar, one vote" system rather "one person, one vote". See for example how effective the response to Jimmy Kimmel was. The same thing was effective against Apartheid in the 1980s and can be applied through things like the BDS Movement.
Exit applies a much more continuous pressure where the effect of each actor is cumulative whereas Voice is more discontinous and requires a critical mass.
I'm part of a chat group related to videogames, and it took me ages to convince the Pokémon die-hard fan to stop buying the games if he found so many things he didn't like (he voiced them... ALL THE TIME).
Maybe I didn't make the best argument for it, but the general sense was: Stop buying them. If you keep buying them even when you see so many things you disagree with, they'll never improve upon them. Some were such stagnant anti-features, at that point it wasn't honest from the company to keep them in the games.
He finally understood for Sword/Shield. So he hasn't bought this last generation, although the latest calls to him because there are some interesting changes, but I told him to wait for the next refinement, assuming they really improve even more.
It's always interesting to read opinions that are diametrically opposed to your own, especially when they come from people you have deep disagreements with (in this case, it's not the poster, but his inspiration, Drew DeVault who I am philosophically not aligned with).
Maybe the philosophical disagreements stem from different life experiences, as I started my career at a Big Tech, and learned the hard way that no, I could NOT change the organization I was a part of. It was the C-suite's way (and they served at the pleasure of the Board and the shareholders), or it was the highway.
So I took the highway, started my own business, and we're small and obscure and it follows the principles I want it to follow and it makes me money, and as far as I'm concerned that's awesome. It's the good version of capitalism and if we're smart enough we might very well beat the old company I walked away from in some manner in a free market one day.
My main point is that a company is going to follow the interests of its board and its shareholders. I suspect that whatever Drew did did NOT change the organization at Linode. I suspect it always followed the interests of its shareholders and still does, and what he really did was improve the efficiency of the asset they owned. Not to throw shade on someone who makes things better within their organization. But either you own it or you don't in which case you merely serve at the pleasure of the ones who do. I think more talented people should go off and own their own thing.
> My main point is that a company is going to follow the interests of its board and its shareholders.
Fundamentally the company's success depends on the product, right? Sure, the shareholders are what needs to be appeased but they set their price on the excitement of what's to come. We can abuse this by creating artificial hype but do you not think that growth is better sustained with hype over worthwhile new products?
The investors are fickle and do not have the interest of the company in mind. They only have that interest so long as they hold their shares and they couldn't care less when they sell. But a business should not think in the moment, but the trend over time. Those investors will come and go and we want them to. You don't do that by appeasing the small subset of investors that invest now, especially those who are looking to get in and out as fast as possible. If the investors are the "real customer" then how do you sustain them in the long term? Certainly this is highly aligned with sustaining the people actually buying the products.
This seems highly related to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy[0]. Those who voice are the first group, devoted to the goals of the organization. Those who care about the quarter and no further are the second. Loyal to the organization. Worse, loyal only while it suits them. And that's no loyalty at all.
I've been a developer for close to 30 years now. Voice has never worked for me. I tried it when I was young and naive. It didn't work.
There is of course, in addition to "exit" and "voice", an option of "paycheck", which is very different from "loyalty".
Thanks for the book rec, seems like it'd be worth reading.
In general it is not worth pursuing changes to an organization, because in some sense the you need the organization more than they need you, and stepping on the toes of too many people with unpopular opinions is just gonna make you look like an idiot, or in the worst case, get you fired. Therefore, people can only rationally ascribe to the the capitalistic view of "vote with your wallet" or "if you don't like your job, just leave."
In a bit related way I've been trying to push the idea of "engineers need to be grumpy."
Not so much that we need to not be happy and not enjoy our lives, but that our job is to find problems and fix them. In that setting, being "grumpy" is recognizing the problems. If you're dogfooding your product, you should be aware of its strengths and faults. Fixing the faults gives clear direction that allows you to make your products better. You don't have to reach perfection, such a thing does not even exist. Instead we do this iteratively, as the environment is dynamic, just as is the customer's needs.
I would say that this is loyalty to the company and the product, though not loyal to the politics. It is clearly loyal to the product, which we as engineers are in charge of creating. But it is also loyal to the company because the things we build are the very foundation of the company itself. Being loyal to politics may keep you your job, but it is a short term solution that reinforces a culture of politics itself.
To managers: don't dissuade engineers who raise issues or complaints. These are not "no" in the language of engineers, they are "yes, but". Encourage those conversations because that's how we resolve the issues and build the things. The managerial role is to help those conversations not get stuck or too heated. Your job is to help maintain engineers' passions because that's what pushes the product, and consequently the business (and consequently your success), forward. But that passion is fragile. STEM is a creative endeavor through and through. If not given time to "play around" and try new things then that passion dies. When that passion dies your innovation turns lazy and your only goal is to make something bland like a thinner phone for the 7th year in a row.