“Oh, that’s not my job,” is the sound of doom. Maybe not imminent doom, but doom indeed. It’s the magic inflection point when a company becomes too big (even if only psychologically) for any single employee to give a rat’s ass about job numero uno: Making shit work.
No profession is immune. You can have designers who oh-thats-not-my-job to get the JavaScript they wrote to work, programmers who cry for operations to make their slow code run on time, operations people who refuse to answer customer complaints from their network outage, and on and on. Once the mentality cements, everything is eventually someone else’s job, and they’re being a toad for inconveniencing you with it.
And besides, it’s easy to put it on somebody else, right? Everybody else’s job is easy!
Departmental hedges grow fast and tall if not trimmed with vigor. It’s the natural path unless you take steps to fight it.
That’s why, at 37signals, we all chip in when lots of customers have questions after a new product launch and customer support is overwhelmed. It’s why programmers will wake up in the middle of the night if a sql query tipped over and needs an urgent rewrite until faster servers can arrive.
Don’t let your company culture become one where certain people are too good to do the jobs that need doing. Making shit work is everyone’s job.
Alex
on 17 Apr 12I think part of feeling like “it’s not my job” for some people stems from the fact they feel like “It’s not their company”. When people feel a real connection to the place they work they are much less likely to pass off work and responsibility.
Jace
on 17 Apr 12@DHH
This sounds fine and dandy but can’t be true.
I doubt that your attorney, or your accountant, or your office manager are talking to customers in order to “make shit work” using your words.
As stated on HackerNews and in the last 37svn post on this topic, if it’s taking your entire company to be engaged to resolve customer issues – this is a symptom of a much larger issue at your company and/or product development approach.
DHH
on 17 Apr 12Alex, I agree that this often comes straight from the top. If your top brass is too good to do certain things, that’ll trickle down real fast.
Jace, we have no attorneys or accountants employed by 37signals (although we purchase such services). But yes, even our office manager will write customers.
You seem to think it’s a bad thing that the whole company is eager to resolve customer issues. I wear that as a badge of honor.
Dan
on 17 Apr 12I don’t disagree, but this seems like another instance of being somewhat product-specific. Certainly it is always the case that employees should do everything in their power to make shit work, but beyond a certain size, this is just impossible. For example, a Microsoft developer working on a specific feature of a piece of productivity software just doesn’t have the requisite knowledge to figure out why the servers are down.
That is simple efficiency. In historic times, societies were poor precisely because people had to do everything themselves. People made their own clothes, farmed their own food, and repaired their own houses. Once trade evolved, societies became wealthier because the fact is that some people are just better at some things than others. This isn’t a perfect analogy, but the point is that there are opportunity costs to doing anything, and the more time you spend doing something you are not optimal at, the less you spend doing something at which your time is better spent.
The fact that you can achieve vertically integrated roles is fantastic, but I believe is one of the luxuries of a small organization.
Bill
on 17 Apr 12I couldn’t agree more. I have always been very committed to the companies I have worked for.
Even when I worked for the phone company with 10,000 employees, if I accidentally got a call routed to my phone I would make sure I got it either routed to the right person or would do what I could to take care of them, and I was in IT and rarely could do anything directly for end customers.
I frequently went out to see end users of the software we wrote in IT to address their issues and would make sure they had resolution.
Joe
on 17 Apr 12I agree with today’s CNN opinion piece that too often “long hours and constant availability are taken as proxies for commitment and competence (despite evidence to the contrary)”. http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/16/opinion/stone-leave-work-day/index.html?hpt=hp_c2
Anonymous Coward
on 17 Apr 12This can’t really be true. You have,what,45employees? Yet your support team had to shut off you incoming email submit form multiple times recently stating support was too “overwhelmed”? Where was your huge staff chipping in then? So either no, everyone doesn’t help out, or your support is BROKEN and out of control! Increased volume with a new product means you didn’t prepare well enough for people’s questions, plain and simple. If your own support team can’t keep up with the volume, then your curated “smiley ratings” really don’t count.
Wayne Robinson
on 17 Apr 12I’ve always found that “Oh, that’s not my job” is usually synonymous with “Oh, I don’t know how to do that.”
Anonymous Coward
on 17 Apr 12@37signals
Holy shiz, you have had a lot of bug fixes lately.
http://37signals.com/changes
jtk
on 17 Apr 12Wow, you touched a nerve with this post.
I had been trying to understand this inflection point myself, for a long time, and really enjoyed your explanation of it.
I can tell exactly when it happened for me. We went public, new management came in, friends from the startup days lefty, cronies were hired for super specific tasks, and I went from being a useful part of a hardworking team to a shit sponge to care for everything I had ever helped with in the past.
Taking care of everything went from being the right thing to do, to being insane self sacrifice for a psychopathic machine.
I miss those early days.
Sigh
on 17 Apr 12The “I will sound authentic if I litter every sentence with profanity” approach is so 1990s.
Emmet
on 17 Apr 12Reminds me of the legend of the Steve Jobs “Janitor vs VP” story:
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-05-07/tech/30043798_1_janitor-steve-jobs-excuse
Essentially at a certain level within an organization you aren’t allowed to have excuses for why something failed, or you couldn’t do something. You FIGURE IT OUT, you take responsibility, even if that means doing it yourself.
This is a winners attitude, the alternative is a whiners attitude. Even beyond the “all hands on deck” mentality of helping your co-workers, it’s also helpful to have an understanding of other aspects of your company. To know what support deals with allows you to be able to relate and to understand more of the ins and outs of the organization.
EH
on 17 Apr 12A problem is that capitalist and corporate success (in the US, or at least the SF Bay Area) is commonly predicated on externalizing problems. I started freelancing partly because at any size of company I worked in, it seemed like too many people were simply working overtime to expand their SEP field, which my ethics don’t allow me to do.
There’s a fundamental disconnect between business and responsibility that infects a company’s culture well before large problems crop up, and a common route to this pit is through working founders/CTOs who begin hiring people mainly because they think they’ve paid their dues enough not to have to do mundane work anymore.
Tim
on 17 Apr 12The main point of DHHs post is 100% correct.
I just hope people don’t confuse his specific example of 37S with the overarching theme.
That is, it doesn’t matter what your job is, you chip in wherever you can to make stuff work to benefit your customer.
Nothing annoys me more than people who say it’s not my job. Those people are cogs and can be replaced (notwithstanding the fact some companies Just Need Cogs).
It’s a pity more CEOs don’t read your posts, DHH and JF.
Albert Francis
on 17 Apr 12I agree employees should help out when they are able to and the company really requires it.
But where do you draw the line? Do you really want to your best developer(s) spend a lot of time responding to banal customer issues?
And when does this just start being a sign of a badly managed/structure company that doesn’t know how to allocate its resource appropriately?
To put it hyberbolically, do you want a company full top-notch highly-skilled specialists that really know their craft, or do you want a bunch of generalists that just run around doing other people’s laundry?
Aamir
on 17 Apr 12From my own experience whenever I am asked to do extra and hectic work, this particular sentence comes in my mind.
Sebastian
on 17 Apr 12Poor workers at your office. They have to make shit work and stand up in the middle of the night?
Sounds not like a good place to work.
James Roper
on 17 Apr 12Absolutely. In my experience, these banal customer issues can be solved by the software doing something smarter, so that the customer doesn’t have the issue in the first place. Whether it’s making a button more obvious, simplifying the software’s workflow, or even improving the documentation, the best developers can often come up with a solution that will stop these issues from ever coming up again. But they won’t have an opportunity to do so if they are shielded from ever seeing those issues.
peterUK
on 17 Apr 12This doesn’t make sense.
I do what is needed and I make my hands dirty if necessary, but, hell, there are reasons for why people get different educations.
And yes, sure its not “my” company, because I get paid as a employee. It’s all company owners wet dream when less paid people work for them like they own the company. But they don’t. If you want people to work for the company like that and stay up in the middle of the night and come back from vacation like they don’t have a private life make them own the company partially and give them a lot to profit from including shitloads of money, connections and knowledge.
I wouldn’t ever work for your company.
Hmm
on 17 Apr 12It’s why programmers will wake up in the middle of the night if a sql query tipped over and needs an urgent rewrite until faster servers can arrive.
Uh, while honest, this line will not win you many job applications from programmers who read it.
Hugo
on 17 Apr 12<>
+100!!!
Produce
on 17 Apr 12This is a failure of the industrial revolution. Prior to it, people owned the farms they worked on. If your hands produced something, it was rightfully yours. Post industrial revolution 99% of employees work for a pittance while the executives take the lion’s share. It’s an inherently unfair social structure and this is a side effect of it.
GeeIWonder
on 17 Apr 12Just completely and utterly factually wrong. Did you just come up with that and decide it was true?
Paul
on 17 Apr 12Does it mean there’s no specialization at 37signals? People do have areas of expertise and issues should be handled by people who have expertise in that area.
Edinho
on 17 Apr 12@Alex Good point. Maybe we should try to give the rest of our team the feeling that it also is their company. This could be done by sharing of ownership (plenty of plans available for that) or by tuning in to their intrinsic motivation, by making them more aware of the mission (BHAG) that you are trying to achieve together as a team.
Deltaplan
on 17 Apr 12There’s something even worse, when you do your best to make shit work, because you’re the only one who can currently do it, and some manager blames you for that because “that’s not your job”.
Keppla
on 17 Apr 12I am a programmer. Let’s say, i screw up, produce a query that makes continental drift look quick.
Now, the problem surfaces as some angry customer’s call. Is it the designers Job to fix my query? No, there’s a good chance, he doesnt even know what SQL stands for. Is it the accountants job to fix my query? No, he does not even know what a query is.
It is my job (or: a coder’s job).
It’s the designer’s, the accountant’s, everyone’s problem, because it’s the company’s problem, and it’s everybodys job to help that the problems and the people who can fix them come together, but it’s not everybodys job to fix it.
“It’s not my job” can be said in two ways: in a way that implies that even if you could, you wouldnt. Here, the sound of doom is the sound of people detaching from their work, thinking like bueraucracies.
The other way is: “I really want to solve the problem, but you are making me responsible for things i have no power over”. Here, the sound of doom is bad management. Instead of assigning problems to the peoble who can solve them, you assign blame to people who cannot defend them.
Edmund
on 17 Apr 12I respectfully disagree. This may work in very small companies but definitely not when you scale up. I can’t imagine this working in my organization (100,000+, services company), I can just see the chaos when everyone jumps in “making shit work”. People have roles for a reason here. I have no business going and resetting a gateway when our IT guys aren’t here, because I’d be locked up for breaching security. And that’s the way it should be when you scale up, unless you want to be a 20-man team forever.
Paul D
on 17 Apr 12All these people complaining about “Making Shit Work” doesn’t scale at 100K people… NOTHING scales to 100K. The only stories of “Shit Working” at that size from people I know who work at such places, involves them working in teams of 10-20 ppl. They’ve usually focused down to some small facet of the biz, and that team is responsible for making their shit work.
My last employer had slowly but surely morphed into a classic “That’s not my job” sort of place… from around 12 ppl when I got there to 120 when I left. Morale and productivity had imploded. And it wasn’t so much that the people had changed, it was because the structure, incentives and leadership of the place dictated that there was a strict division of labor, and that siloed mentality did trickle down from the top. As time went on, there were HUGE incentives for passing the buck.. so guess what happened.
Places either seem to have people at the top concerned with making shit work, or they have bureaucrats who are far more concerned with observing “protocols”. THAT is what you should worry about. Who is running the show near the top and how they’ve structured things is more important than anything.
At my last job, the most successful exec was one who compartmentalized his responsibilities into smaller and smaller chunks, he offloaded all failures on to those around him, he covered his ass with email flames and he would not respond to anything that violated his own bizarre internal protocols. He didn’t give a shit about our clients, and felt that failures that he caused were not his responsibility in the slightest. The CEO thought he was a genius. And soon everyone was just like him. And the whole company has begun to spiral down. They are hemorrhaging clients and employees.
Look at what the top brass is rewarding, and that’s what you’ll get.
Dutch Rapley
on 17 Apr 12I liked the phrase, “Departmental hedges grow fast and tall if not trimmed with vigor.”
It happens the other way, too. Sometimes you take something on and see it to completion only to have someone in another department come down on you with, “Why are you doing that??? That’s NOT your job. Someone from OUR department is supposed to do that.”
Nathan
on 17 Apr 12So many people are missing the point here. Correct me if I’m wrong DHH but this post is talking about people’s attitudes. No, in general terms you don’t want people covering roles that aren’t really their area of expertise. But you DO want everyone to care when there is a problem, (regardless of where it is) and have a vested interest in seeing it resolved.
Danielle
on 17 Apr 12I completely agree with this. I’m a recent college graduate working at my first “real” job and am currently going through a phase like this in my company. As a art major and crafter, I always knew I’d probably have to work ridiculous hours to get stuff done, so I have no problem working hard . However at my company, the lack of communication + people’s bad attitudes have put me in the position of working in two departments – one of which I had NO experience with. At first I did bitch and complain about it – I was needed in Graphics [where I was hired into]. Why couldn’t they just hire someone who knew what they were doing? But I’ve come to realize upper management has the “it’s not my job” mentality and refuse to listen to the employees. So instead of continuing to be unhappy and complaining all the time, I’m just splitting my days between my two departments trying to get as much work done as possible – despite the fact that that’s not what they asked me to do.
Commonsense dictates that this isn’t a permanent solution, but until then, the work has to get done. It doesn’t do any good for EVERY department to claim “it’s not their job”, that everything gets blamed on them; that they’re the ONLY ones with so much work to do. If everyone would just help each other out and communicate and be willing to do the small, unexciting tasks – things would flow so much better. Like Nathan said – what you do want is everyone to care when there’s a problem, and have an interest in getting it resolved.
rdo
on 17 Apr 12Very good post and I wholeheartedly agree.
I was working on an internal R&D project for which we needed assistance from another department. Not because we didn’t want to do it ourselves, but because we COULDN’T (i.e. policies, etc.). Every so often we would get “that’s not our job” or worse “that’s above my pay” I cannot tell you how many times I had to exercise my “serenity now, serenity now”. It got to the point where I had to tell the higher ups of this toxic attitude and behavior and judging from the lack of action, I suppose they’re OK with that sort stone-walling.
Crustaceo
on 17 Apr 12Am I the only one reading this post that was put off from the get-go by the gratuitous use of the word “shit” in the headline? If being a cutting-edge leader in the design community means working to coarsen discourse to playground level, I guess I’ll never be one of the cool kids.
Steve
on 17 Apr 12I agree, in theory, but the first comment is right—it’s about the company, too. If company is screwed up and all you do is try to ‘make shit work,’ it is very unhealthy. In rare cases—sure, but not always. From experience, if somebody tries to address everything herself and don’t care whether it’s her job, they cannot perform their responsibilities, thus they become “somebody else’s work.” Add employees below that person, and how is “she” supposed to be a great boss?
Bottom line—with the right organization & great employees it works. Otherwise, it doesn’t.
Arek Dymalski
on 17 Apr 12That’s a nice (if taken figuratively) post. But it should be addressed not only to employees but to managers. Hereby I support Paul’s opinion.
Sharky
on 17 Apr 12Nice Post. I agree with Nathan’s analysis.
Pete
on 17 Apr 12“That’s why, at 37signals, we all chip in when lots of customers have questions after a new product launch and customer support is overwhelmed.”
I work in customer support and don’t think my job is shit work.
Norm
on 17 Apr 12Would love to see David or Jason get through an interview without profanity… they’re just too cool not to curse.
Yuan
on 17 Apr 12@37signals
It’s good to know that you consider Support work “shit work”.
I’ll never work for a company that describes work for everyone to do as “shit work”.
I can only imagine how demoralizing this post is for the current employees of 37signals.
DHH
on 17 Apr 12Yuan, read the sentence like “Making – shit – work” not “Making – shit work” and your indignation levels will come down to normal.
gmreece
on 17 Apr 12“That’s not my job” a perfectly fair thing to say when you’re already overloaded with the work you’re doing and someone is trying to give their work to you. You’re responsible for the work you have been assigned. If that work takes up all of your paid time and then some, as is often the case, then you have two choices when someone tries to make you do something more. You either fail to deliver what you were hired to deliver and what the company needs you to deliver, or you say, “I’m sorry, but that’s not my job.” I don’t work to rule. I do pitch in. I also work ten hour days and weekends. I don’t want to work eleven hour days because everything is everyone’s job.
John M.
on 17 Apr 12Unfortunately DHH, you have a plethora of readers here who are lazy idiots. I agree, it’s everyone’s job to make shit work.
To those of you who disagree, maybe it’s been too long since you dealt with the real problems. And if it has, roll up your sleeves and get dirty.
I’d love to work in a place like 37signals and companies like this don’t come down the pike too often.
Keep up the good work.
Zero
on 18 Apr 12Good save?
Trevor
on 18 Apr 12@37signals
I’m really disappointed.
I continually lose more and more respect for you.
I’m not certain if it’s just DHH arrogance over the years that has rubbed me raw or your company culture – but I’m done.
At the end of my next pay cycle, I’m cancelling all of my accounts.
Bye guys.
Danny_Fr
on 18 Apr 12I like how many people got it completely wrong. It’s not about asking the accountant to learn perl to help a developer. It’s about noticing little things that can be fixed, have to be fixed and won’t be if people keep on saying “Yeah well I know there’s a bug, but I’m a accountant and it’s not in my TOR to report bugs”. Where I work, if you notice a problem and don’t report it, you’re held responsible for the damages it causes. Simple and efficient.
Ben Kinnaird
on 18 Apr 12Sure, the accountant isn’t expected to program but they can give an opinion, and if they notice a problem they let the support staff know.
But I think it’s bigger than this. It’s about being connected as a company and getting closer to your customers. This is everyone’s job. Think how a football team would operate if they where only responsible for ‘their position’.
37s may not have it right, but it works for them and their way of working works for me.
LuatAmi
on 18 Apr 12@37signals i like all you think about shit work. it bad but it true
OnLooker
on 18 Apr 12Well, this is sort of funny, as it may be a case where adding a little cursing went the wrong way. If David had said something like… “Fixing problems that come up should be everyone’s responsibility…” I bet there would not be all this worry about classifying work as “shit work”.
I got what David was conveying, but apparently not everyone read it that way.
@Trevor, cancelling your accounts because of this post? I would not “cut your nose off to spite your face”. Just saying.
JF
on 18 Apr 12OnLooker: To your point… Like Osmo Wiio said, “If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm.”
TJ
on 18 Apr 12Nice point JF. Osmo Wiio might be brilliant.
Phillipus
on 18 Apr 12“It’s why programmers will wake up in the middle of the night if a sql query tipped over and needs an urgent rewrite until faster servers can arrive.”
How fucking awful.
Amy
on 19 Apr 12I think the real reason that people take a “that’s not my job” attitude is that they work in environments where the schedules they are accountable for are too tight and do not allow them to pick up other work without letting that slide.
If they’re going to get fired for taking time out to help with something that’s not on the schedule, you can bet they’ll say it’s not their job.
Zarel
on 19 Apr 12agree, we must be careful to maintain our company culture because it is the heart of company.
this happened because this people don’t have the feeling of ownership. There are two causes:1. The Company itself. When the company treats employees like “YOU WORK, I’LL PLAY. DONE!” The employee doesn’t feel the ownership. It’s not all about money, people like to be treated with respect acknowledges they as a human being.
2. The Employee itself. If the company had done well at no 1 and the employees still remain so. It’s better to KICK this people out!
Also I remember, mark pincus says:
Frank Beesh
on 19 Apr 12@JF
You’re obviously NOT concerned about people misunderstanding what you say simply because you as a company use profanity.
You have to understand, any use of profanity immediately instills a NEGATIVE tone.
Case in point:
- “Make shit work” – super negative tone
- “Make things work” – positive, and says the exact same intent of what “make shit work” was suppose to mean.
I suggest you as a company stop with your loose use of profanity that is found in many of your blog posts and speeches.
Zarel
on 19 Apr 12@Frank,
But I LOVE THE WAY 37signals BLOG or SPEECH or BOOK or WHATEVER they do! It looks like I am dealing with human.
And they didn’t say “shit” or “another words” to the people or specific people, they said it to the “thing”, not to the people but to the “thing”.
David Andersen
on 19 Apr 12“You have to understand, any use of profanity immediately instills a NEGATIVE tone.”
That’s your opinion, not a cosmic fact. And in fact, you’re completely wrong.
boone simpson
on 19 Apr 12First off, I like that 37 signals has the balls to use strong, and often coarse, language. To me, it conveys a passion and a persuasion that G-rated talk might not muster.
In response to the article, I agree, more employers should foster an environment where everyone WANTS to help and not just pass the buck.
However, to play devil’s advocate for a minute, I know many employees are paid lousy (again an employer issue), like barely above poverty lousy, due to a variety of factors, and sometimes doing someone else’s job, when you aren’t even fairly paid for your own, is taxing. So you simply pass the buck. Why do your neighbor’s works, when he is getting paid for it and you aren’t. I am not excusing it, but I can understand it.
And please don’t chime in with “just find a new job” as that is not a reality for many people with families (including aging parents) and mortgages, living in economically depressed zones.
Dr. Zoidberg
on 19 Apr 12Making shit work? I’ll tell you who was good at making shit work: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Dubya, mofos like those deviants.
Meanwhile, over here in civilization, we observe the separation of concerns and a division of labor for a very good reason.
GeeIWonder
on 19 Apr 12Like it or not, 37signals are role models for some people. While this may not be asked for, I would argue this comes with some responsibility, and this is especially true if you approach things in such a didactic way as SvN does.
Personally I have no problem with cussing, and far less problems with it than some of the more insiduous ‘truthy’ talk that sometimes flows here. The cyclist who runs a clinic for kids or writes articles in the local paper has a special duty to make sure he wears a helmet when out around his neighborhood compared to the road warrior. If you’re going to promote people looking up to you, it’s probably a societal good to try and make sure the emphasis is on your better habits.
To me, this statement (yours) conveys a lack of appreciation or possibly knowledge of the written word.
Cam Collins
on 20 Apr 12@JF – I had never heard the Osmo Wiio quote, but I love it and I just sent it to my whole company. We fall victim of petty “shit” (e.g irrational interpretation) all the time. (Oooops – Sorry @Frank)
GregT
on 20 Apr 12I think the language DHH uses (not so much 37S in general, just DHH) reflects badly on him. Makes him look like an immature motherfucker.
oonert
on 21 Apr 12I’ve found there are two types of issues people face a choice to “own” or not:
1. Issues that have arrived at their desk through the ignorance, incompetence, or laziness of a co-worker.
2. Actual mis-routed issues or “overflow” items in which the “expert” is unreachable or too busy, etc.
The 2nd scenario makes sense in the context of this post.
The 1st doesn’t, but it’s far more common. Sure, good employees will still work on solving the problem. But that often masks the fact that they are doing someone else’s job, and lazy/incompetent people will always let the hard-working people do their jobs for them if they can.
But this just a symptom of the root problem: identifying (and fixing or eliminating) poor employees. That’s generally a problem at larger companies, too (though not always). There’s nothing worse for morale than having to work with people you don’t respect.
jery
on 21 Apr 12I remember working in an Asian restaurant as my first job. Everything was communal. Everyone helped everyone out. Tips were split at the end of the night. There was little sense of “this is not my job.”
My next job was at an American chain restaurant. Everyone’s attitude was “this is not my job. Stay away from my tables. I’m too busy to help you.” And so on.
Fast forward to my first office job at a non-profit of 50 employees. I was amazed at how everyone tried to get out of helping. The “it’s not my job” attitude was out of control.
But with that said, I also don’t side with greedy employers trying to get people to do more work and yet not share in the profits. Reminds of me the greedy kids in elementary lunchroom who never wanted to share any of their snacks but they wanted you to share with them.
Tom Cooper
on 21 Apr 12This is ultimately a question of leadership. “Why am I here?” If I feel that I am here to “write code” or “handle complaints” or “tell people what to do” or “define product features for version +1” then I’ll likely fall prey to the “departmental hedge” issue.
For those who say “this doesn’t scale” or “I miss those startup days” again I’ll suggest that this is an issue of leadership. A well-led organization which is wildly focused on a) mission – 37Signals makes simple products that solve real business problems for customers b) staffing – people who share the values of the organization – in 37signals case, the desire to help customers solve business problems will tend to create a culture which is focused on the right things to help customers. Take a look at Zappos.
The real challenge is that most people have NO LEADERSHIP SKILLS and their people suffer. The best developer is made the development manager – and those skill sets are orthogonal.
The good news is that leadership skills are…. skills and can be learned. If only tech companies would make the investments in what we geeks tend to think of as “soft skills” – how much more could be accomplished!
Technology is hard. People are harder.
David
on 21 Apr 12David,
You’re heart’s in the right place, and I agree that everyone needs to be willing pitch in and not silo themselves or otherwise be unwilling to chip in, but you are wrong wrong wrong.
Simple analogy – let’s use the game of baseball:
If a batter hits a pop fly to center field, you can’t have the entire field team running for the ball.
It’s the center fielder’s job.
If he’s otherwise occupied, the other players know exactly who’s supposed to fill in in that situation. Backup duties are clear to all.
You designate positions with specific duties for a reason. Your job can’t be “everything” or else no one knows what to do when.
Business owners and managers who fail to designate what each position is accountable to do and when are left scratching their heads when a ball is hit to center field and NO ONE catches the ball.
But, it’s simply that no one knew who was supposed to catch it. (note: I made my career in business management for ~20 years so this isn’t armchair philosophy on my part).
Worse, they’re thrilled with the one person who’s always running for center field or all over the field doing everything everywhere.
Employees need to know what they’re accountable for. Everyone cannot be accountable for everything.
Like the baseball analogy, to win the game you have a game plan and each player knows what their primary (and backup) roles are.
It’s not rocket surgery. It’s just basic principles of properly managing a business’ goals and functions.
Michael G.
on 21 Apr 12@David
I think you’re missing the point. DHH is saying this philosophy is only applicable in crunch time or crucial moments. It is not an everyday occurence.
To use your baseball analogy, some teams employ a defensive shift in crucial moments. Sometimes the third baseman plays SS and the rest of the infield is shifted over accordingly. I believe what DHH is saying, is the third baseman should not bitch and moan about playing SS for that one play. It is a crucial play and everyone is expected to do what it takes to get the out. There are plenty of “third basemen” in the business world that would never agree to this type of shift. Playing SS is not technically in their job description.
Peter
on 21 Apr 12the top manager of a very big company does the following to test ‘company culture’: he drops a little piece of paper in the lobby and then waits until somebody picks it up and throws it away. the time mesaured is inversely proportional of the ‘goodnes’ to said ‘company culture’.
kranz
on 22 Apr 12Once upone a time there were four guys: their names were EveryBody, SomeBody, AnyBody and NoBody.
There was an important work to get done and EveryBody was asked to do it. EveryBody was sure that SomeBody should have done it instead, AnyBody could have done it, but actually NoBody did it. SomeBody got angry because it was EveryBody’s work, but EveryBody said “AnyBody can do it!” and NoBody was in doubt that SomeBody could do it. Finally EveryBody blamed AnyBody because NoBody did what SomeBody should have done.
Moral
Without blaming EveryBody, it would be nice for AnyBody to make the shit work without expecting for SomeBody to do it in his place. Because experience demonstrates that when you wait for SomeBody, usually you find NoBody.
Sean
on 22 Apr 12I hate to be another commenter to pile on. But I’ve followed this thread from the start, and I find the comments really interesting.
Seems like a lot of people are missing the point. There’s a lot of theorizing, and none of it rings true to my experience with a couple of small/medium agencies.
What’s worse than people not wanting to make shit right is an office culture that makes people not care about making shit right. New employees come in with new excitement. A year or so later, they’re feeling as unempowered and unappreciated as everyone else. Typecasting roles and responsibilities is way too common. I’ve had managers encourage me to do less and take less risks b/c they find it easier to pass the buck than to learn how to do more. It’s sad and embarrassing.
It’s good to have people in place to do what is more their job than mine or vice versa. But it’s not good to maintain a culture where you’re only encouraged to wear your hat and let the other roles go to people with the right hat.
It’s even worse because along with this kind of company culture is piss poor communication. Ugh. Collaboration is nonexistent, and projects suffer.
Sure, you can drop a fucking piece of paper on the floor and wait to see how long it takes someone to pick it up. Or you can have your finger on the pulse of the company and actually have a clue.
I think in the end it’s the acceptance of mediocrity by mediocre management that sets the tone. Then the cycle repeats itself and feeds the next generation.
Jean-Remy Duboc
on 23 Apr 12Some companies (or institutions) try to “optimize” the work by creating silos between design/programming/database/system administration, etc. It was fine in the industrial age, where everything was just a machine, even people. Digital technologies make business more and more human, paradoxically. And so this false optimization doesn’t work anymore. It’s about making shit work for clients, for real people. Which is why you are so right: it’s everyone’s job.
This discussion is closed.