On Thu, May 03, 2012 at 04:30:58PM +1000, Cameron Beere wrote: > I think you're conflating ambition and.... I don't want to use a term as > strong as disloyalty, but something along those lines.
It's not so much that I'm disloyal as I believe the concept of loyalty (as in staying in a job position longer than it is in your best interest to do so, in order to benefit your company, in the hopes that this will be somehow reciprocated.) is obsolete. It's very clear that "It's just business" for your employer, so why shouldn't it be "just business" for the employee, too? okay, I guess that makes me a disloyal employee. I mean, I think it's important to be honest and up front and to honor your contracts, make sure the next guy has passwords, etc, etc, and to give your traditional two weeks notice (if longer notice hasn't been specified in your contract) and to spend that two weeks writing documentation and tying up loose ends, and to answer short questions (and consult for longer questions) if they call you up later; there's no reason to be a jerk about it; it's just business. I'm just saying, one way loyalty is obviously bad for the giver, and I think it encourages exploitative behavior on the part of the receiver, and all loyalty you give to an entity with a legal mandate to maximize shareholder value is going to be one way. I mean, it's your job, not your kid or you mom or something. the rules of business apply, not the rules of family. In my experience? when someone tries to invoke the rules of family in a business situation? they are trying to take advantage of you (e.g. they want /you/ to follow family rules while /they/ follow business rules... or worse.) > I'm not sure that being ambitious necessarily means that you're going to > leave as soon as you see the opportunity for a 5% pay increase. There is a big difference between a 5% raise and a 20% raise. If your salary only goes up 5% in a year? you should see that as a 'neutral' evaluation from your boss. (okay, maybe with inflation and interest rates being what they are right now, it's a slightly positive evaluation. For most of my career, 5% was neutral at best.) a 20% raise? that's an 'excellent' evaluation. I've only gotten a 20% (annual) raise without switching jobs twice in my career, and one of those was when I moved from phone monkey to programmer. Both followed dramatic and externally obvious increases in my own productivity. Switching jobs for 5%? well, you better not be switching jobs for the money, as there is only so often you can switch jobs (as a younger person, you want to switch jobs not more often than every 12 months, but not less often than every 36 months. I imagine by my current age, I should widen that out a bit, but fortunately, I am not working for other people.) and like I said, 5% a year is not a "you are doing a good job" level raise. Yeah, being ambitious can mean being ambitious in terms of gaining knowledge or responsibility; but again, most of the big changes there? Rarely happen at the same company. I mean, as an example from my early life, during the froth of the first dot-com, I was a phone monkey right out of high school, working at a local ISP. Not a very good phone monkey, either. I accidentally sent my resume to jobs@mycompany rather than jobs@ the local college, and I got an interview. It was like '97 or '98 and I wasn't illiterate, so I got the job. I learned a lot, and a year later they wanted to ship me to the east coast headquarters of the company that bought them. I went over and interviewed, and they liked me. Well, I was 19, and my parents didn't want me to move all the way to the right coast, and my neighbor was Paul Vixie's sister. So my dad cajoled people until Paul emailed me, I sent him some patches for apache and other code I had written, got an interview, did well, and then had to choose. Go work for some random dot-com ISP that didn't seem to have a lot of technical talent, but that had given me a chance? or go work for Paul fucking Vixie running a dnsbl that at the time something like half the mailservers on the Internet used? I mean, it was an intensely disloyal thing to do to the company that really had done a pretty great thing for me; they had taken some poor kid that barely made it through highschool and gave him a pretty good programming job. I mean, everyone told me that without college, I'd be working at the local 7-11. I applied for programming jobs anyhow, 'cause thinking a goal unrealistic has rarely deterred me from a goal, but I figured it'd be years before I got a programming job. So what do I do for this company that made my dreams come true 5 years before plan? I jump ship to some place where I'll be surrounded by people who are terrifyingly better than I am. (the salary was the same both places; at the ISP, they had stock options, Vixie's thing didn't have stock options. I chose the experience over the stock options, which turned out to be the right choice. Even at that time, it was blindingly obvious that this was not sustainable.) I mean, that's ambition, even though I chose less money in the short term. (well, the same money without the chance of selling my stock options to a greater fool.) I took the best opportunity I could get. (Of course, I blew the whole thing a few years later because I was a dumbass kid, but I'm not really comfortable telling that part of the story in public yet.) > There are a lot of opportunities for the ambitious to advance outside of job > hopping, and outside of the number of figures on your paycheck. I consider > myself extremely driven and ambitious in the sense that I'm constantly > working towards being better at what I do. The ability to do something > interesting and to grow my knowledge and skillset means far more to me than a > few extra dollars. As long as my job is meaningful and I have the opportunity > to work on interesting and novel projects (as opposed to resetting passwords > over and over for a year), then my ambition is directly internally, towards > building and improving the company I'm currently with. There is a conflict of interest even here. The new and interesting technology that you want to learn is quite often not the best business choice for the business. The best business choice is usually doing the thing that you know will work. The thing you know will work in a suboptimal fashion in a fairly well-known timeframe is usually superior, from a business perspective, than an optimal thing that might or might not get done and that has a high degree of uncertainty in it's timeline. This has been one of the really interesting things about running my own business; I see myself in the conflicts I have with my employees. "Yes, I know that new technology is cool. Yes, I want to learn about it too. But you know what I want more? I want those dedicated servers up today; we've got three new customers waiting, and that means doing it in this suboptimal way that we know works." I used to be on the other side of those arguments. > I don't think there's anything wrong with an ambitious sysadmin, but maybe > there is in the sense of the word that you're talking about. I'm just saying; right now? ambitious folks, confident folks? bosses have a very strong preference for us. Ambition (and especially confidence) doesn't correlate much at all with getting more done for the employer that the employer needs done, and ambitious people well, they leave more often. and yeah, sometimes they try to change your company from the inside instead of leaving, and sometimes that is good. but sometimes that's bad, too. I mean, I try really hard to avoid arguments about things that are not worth the time. (I've declared bikeshed, for example, on server names. If you have a name you want for a server, put it on the list. If you have a server that doesn't have a series of names assigned to it's class, make one up. You can't change names that are in production. you aren't allowed to argue about names.) Some things are worth arguing about, but often I find that the two ways to do it both work, it's just that there is disagreement about which way is optimal. I am attempting to instill a "do-ocracy" into company culture; e.g. if you want to make it better? great. do it. But so far, I have failed at that, and still waste a lot of time on technical arguments. I mean, I'm not saying it's not my fault, either; it's one of the classic nerd-traps; I can see it coming, but it's really hard to pull out once I'm in it. I mean, I'm not suggesting that you start discriminating against ambitious people I'm just saying, the current common case is to discriminate against people that aren't particularly ambitious or confident. Most employers see it as a negative if someone under 30 has been in the same place for more than three to five years; and that's incredibly harmful to all involved. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
