Monologue incognito with one IT conference
Disclaimer. The monologue below is a transcript of a speaker’s speech at one of the IT conferences. The author of the post just publishes it here with the permission of the speaker.
Hello!
In the program of events you were promised an incognito dollar millionaire. Alas, he left for the waters in Baden-Baden to treat the negotiation liver and had to plug the hole with just anyone.
')
My name is Sergey. To say “I’m a bad speaker,” at least you need to be a speaker. I do not it. I spent my first and one of the last presentations at the age of 18 in Spain, a man in front of an audience of 100. My very average English was synchronously translated into Spanish at that time, people yawned and scratched turnips, waiting for this misunderstanding to finish bleating and a coffee break would appear.
To say that I was ashamed - to say nothing, red as cancer, I dumped the second exit, huddled in my room and was afraid to appear on the eyes. All kinds of public professionals like Carnegie would say “shame!” And “never again!”. For myself, I decided - anything, even Zhiguli beer on Fridays, but not public executions
What is it for me? Many, looking at ITshnikov, confuse modesty with shyness. And figs with them. The main thing is that we do not confuse ourselves. I am shy, so I will look at the floor and read a piece of paper. I would drink, of course, for courage, gramchikov hundred (or better one hundred fifty), but the organizers banned. Well, let it go, but honestly!
I am the owner of company P, in which we have been working for 13 or 14 years to develop any garbage about which no one has heard. Not having the talent to do something beautiful and aesthetic, we are content with the underwater part of the iceberg: soft switches and clients for IP telephony, hardware and software solutions for high-loaded content processing systems, impersonalization systems for web and e-mail for virtual presence, cloud-based video surveillance , several reference and trading Internet portals, and, well, a couple of projects in the startup stage, which are too early to talk about, because it is embarrassing
Everything I am going to talk about is based solely on personal experience, refers to small companies and is absolutely not obliged to work in large ones, although sometimes it happens. For 25 years, given to the IT business, I managed to visit different hides, from a technician who brings coffee junior to developers, to a company owner who does not need to get up at 8. In the middle between these dubious facets there were probably two main hobbies - the C language and dark Irish beer. Alas, both had to be severely curtailed over time.
First about the quantity. After working at Microsoft and refusing from an interview from fairly high positions in the Russian office of SAP and Google headquarters, I finally became convinced that working in large teams is not mine. I am against complex hierarchical submissions more than one depth, I don’t like undercover games under the motto “if you want a comrade’s place, hook him up”, I want to know the name of all my colleagues and how they live. In general, I want to go to work with pleasure, because this is a big part of my life and I need to spend it comfortably. There are only 10 people in our company, and I think many in the hall will grin - a trifle. Well, garbage, we have enough.
The motivational relationships of programmers and bosses in modern history were laid until the mid-90s, when we were nerds in glasses, approximately from this joke:
Causes the deputy chief:
- So! tomorrow move! do not forget to collect garbage in addition to tables and computers
- what bullshit?
- well there, teapots, wires, programmers ...
There was no particular shortage of programmers, the main interests of consumers lay within the framework of text editors and games, programmers were perceived by aliens, and in the worst sense of the word. And this time should be recognized as a period of decline for AITISM. Motivation is zero. But it was a time when universities still taught this profession and quite well. When there were no helpers, google and you had to think, try and analyze, to solve the problem, spend the night on coffee with mayonnaise. And do not go away to drink tea, when the Internet was turned off in the office and the entire knowledge base became unavailable.
During the 90s, a very remarkable process took place, thanks to which you are all in the top of salary wages, buying imported beer and sea beaches, and also looking condescendingly at office plankton working for 10 per month. And then a huge number of talented programmers moved to the United States, Israel, the UK and Canada. Who did not fall down - en masse moved into other professions, not being able to feed the family. There are two categories of people left in the profession: stupid, who are not needed by anyone, and those who are convinced that, in fact, are also stupid - it was necessary to bring the hole in the matrix open! First, forgive me again the terminology and my own subjective opinion, later they were employed by onanist pogromists in the bread 1C-field, and the latter are also not in poverty.
If you were born after the 85th year, there is no merit in this IT boom. Do not inflate the cheeks, do not laze, just get, grow and enjoy. And remember that history is cyclical. Economy and society always, albeit belatedly, react to such perturbations and restore the status quo.
I believe that before you talk about what motivations are and why they are bad or good, you need to say why they are needed at all. From the point of view of the economy of IT business and its processes, people are the main capital. And at all not because they are unique and irreplaceable, but because the payment of their labor makes up to 90% of all expenses. Everything else is trivial. Avoiding the crap word "team", each owner understands that the strength of his company is in the ability to support and organize an effective group of colleagues.
This process is not easy, we meet every day in the same office, not because we went to the same kindergarten and were friends at school, but because we do the same work. In order for everyone not to quarrel and not run up, and the satisfied ones work as long as possible, various schemes of encouragement and socialization are applied.
The most popular of them - premium. As it was at Vysotsky - "the premium was covered in a quarter". The thing is good - you can also get a supplement to the salary. It does not matter - once a month, quarter or year, the essence of the scheme does not change. The most striking example is the "13th salary" - a concept devoid of substance and meaning. The disadvantage of this scheme is one: who decides to award or fine, and by how much? there is clearly no justice here, and the foreground is the ability not to do one’s work, but to demonstrate it, not to be, but to be known. In Moscow, it is called "succeed." In this scheme, all large Russian companies work, and I think we all have heard well about their level of efficiency.
Smoothly arising from the previous one - the motivation of "work in a large company." 80% of respondents would prefer to work in Lukoil, and not in a small effective LLC. These people sincerely believe that working in such a company is safer, is paid higher and looks more prestigious. In practice, all this is a common misconception: one cannot identify the reliability of the company itself with its presence in it. The mid-level salaries of the developers in Krupnyak have long been out of competition. Separately, I would like to take a stroll by prestige: the national Soviet feeling is cool! And if you remove cheap Ponte, what is cool? Write code in morally impoverished 4GL languages? Participate in endless and insanely useful meetings? Wear a suit of a given color? To lose the prize for a 5-minute delay? Know and feel that video cameras are watching you, even in the toilets? Attend wonderful courses of some Hubbardism at a corporate university, where with the help of NLP from your already delicate botanical consciousness will they make plant growing?
The main problem of large companies for IT people - either you, playing by the corporate rules "lick - hook - boast" will grow up in it to be a functionary, or she will spit out you and it will not be easy to get settled. In short: from small to large you can, back - shish. As with 1C: the programmer can become 1Snik, back - never.
Okay, let's move on to more progressive methods of motivation. The following scheme came to the leading plan since the IT staff’s salaries passed the level of common sense. Spoiled new celestials are lazily looking through the hunter's tapes: where, and most importantly, what else are they luring? To curb the salary race, the largest metropolitan employers agree not to entice specialists from each other, so as not to drive themselves into a corner with each new round of the salary spiral.
Hiring housing, discount programs for large retailers, group trips to the pool, building a floor for a gym, trips to a sanatorium, free cake for a jolly fellow guests and other complimentary pleasures. A joint team building that makes you a flock of sheep, with a wonderful “what did you do for your company today?”. Guys, this is not your company, the company belongs to the owners and does nothing for free. And if you are over 25 and you still need to be led by the handle to the pool and the dining room, picking up your friends for an hour and a day, then you should think about it in a famous movie: “my parents used to forbid me, now my wife . And when will I grow up ?! ”. You are an IT specialist and for a confident path uphill you should be capable of self-organization, knowing and soberly assessing your capabilities.
For more independent individuals, there is a “you will be a shareholder with us, druh!” Scheme in which small packets of shares are distributed to key employees. These bags resemble pills of “nepizdina”: you will confidentially inform your friends that you are not just there to hell with the mountain, you are a co-owner of the company! But here, as usual, there is one nuance that the American writer O'Henry told in the story about the trade in land at the bottom of the lake. If 51% of the votes are needed for making key decisions in a company, then happy and key ones can receive up to 49%, theoretically owning almost half of the company. This is one of the most powerful ways to bind a person to a business. However, one should remember the law on societies, according to which, in fact, you do not own anything. The assets of the company can be withdrawn without your knowledge (both immovable and contractual), decisions on the payment of dividends are also taken without you. The owner cannot risk losing his company, and will take precautions. If you understand this perfectly, is it not time to become an employer?
It is obvious that all these schemes are not evolution from bad to good, they exist in parallel and with different success are used in different combinations in different companies.
Perhaps, someone will be offended by the terminology, but it is worthwhile to abstract oneself (and you obviously should be able to do this) and take the essence. The question of relations between the masters and the slaves must be as simple as possible. What the owner should do: pay the agreed remuneration on time and provide acceptable working conditions. What should a slave do: do his job efficiently and on time, and also appear clearly in the workplace at the agreed time windows. What else should the parties to each other - only one thing and mutual: do not compost brains. No one else owes anything to anyone, and no need to be cunning, all the notorious social responsibilities of business are the fruit of the imagination of illiterate economists and managers of short stature, who were refuted by Comrade Marx in the nineteenth century.
Well, in the end I want to mention the most attractive to me, but still not working method of motivation: the mercenary simply needs to pay an adequate fixed salary. Once a year with him to revise it: it does not pull - reduce, shine - increase. This approach allows a person to clearly understand how much money he will receive and when, in time to pay his obligations and know what obligations he can afford.
Why is that? Yes, because a normal, harmonious person does not need to impose, nor indicate with whom to go to the pool, you do not have to knit knots and shout in unison at the trainings of team spirit. This spirit will be rotten. Strange - we trust the modern developer to develop complex systems in linear teams, but we do not consider it sufficiently independent to decide where and how to spend the money. And we continue to pay him lunch tickets and ust-roll tickets. And you have to trust - without the trust of colleagues, business will not be successful.
That's all I wanted to say. Thanks for your time and attention!
Hello!
In the program of events you were promised an incognito dollar millionaire. Alas, he left for the waters in Baden-Baden to treat the negotiation liver and had to plug the hole with just anyone.
')
My name is Sergey. To say “I’m a bad speaker,” at least you need to be a speaker. I do not it. I spent my first and one of the last presentations at the age of 18 in Spain, a man in front of an audience of 100. My very average English was synchronously translated into Spanish at that time, people yawned and scratched turnips, waiting for this misunderstanding to finish bleating and a coffee break would appear.
To say that I was ashamed - to say nothing, red as cancer, I dumped the second exit, huddled in my room and was afraid to appear on the eyes. All kinds of public professionals like Carnegie would say “shame!” And “never again!”. For myself, I decided - anything, even Zhiguli beer on Fridays, but not public executions
What is it for me? Many, looking at ITshnikov, confuse modesty with shyness. And figs with them. The main thing is that we do not confuse ourselves. I am shy, so I will look at the floor and read a piece of paper. I would drink, of course, for courage, gramchikov hundred (or better one hundred fifty), but the organizers banned. Well, let it go, but honestly!
I am the owner of company P, in which we have been working for 13 or 14 years to develop any garbage about which no one has heard. Not having the talent to do something beautiful and aesthetic, we are content with the underwater part of the iceberg: soft switches and clients for IP telephony, hardware and software solutions for high-loaded content processing systems, impersonalization systems for web and e-mail for virtual presence, cloud-based video surveillance , several reference and trading Internet portals, and, well, a couple of projects in the startup stage, which are too early to talk about, because it is embarrassing
Everything I am going to talk about is based solely on personal experience, refers to small companies and is absolutely not obliged to work in large ones, although sometimes it happens. For 25 years, given to the IT business, I managed to visit different hides, from a technician who brings coffee junior to developers, to a company owner who does not need to get up at 8. In the middle between these dubious facets there were probably two main hobbies - the C language and dark Irish beer. Alas, both had to be severely curtailed over time.
First about the quantity. After working at Microsoft and refusing from an interview from fairly high positions in the Russian office of SAP and Google headquarters, I finally became convinced that working in large teams is not mine. I am against complex hierarchical submissions more than one depth, I don’t like undercover games under the motto “if you want a comrade’s place, hook him up”, I want to know the name of all my colleagues and how they live. In general, I want to go to work with pleasure, because this is a big part of my life and I need to spend it comfortably. There are only 10 people in our company, and I think many in the hall will grin - a trifle. Well, garbage, we have enough.
The motivational relationships of programmers and bosses in modern history were laid until the mid-90s, when we were nerds in glasses, approximately from this joke:
Causes the deputy chief:
- So! tomorrow move! do not forget to collect garbage in addition to tables and computers
- what bullshit?
- well there, teapots, wires, programmers ...
There was no particular shortage of programmers, the main interests of consumers lay within the framework of text editors and games, programmers were perceived by aliens, and in the worst sense of the word. And this time should be recognized as a period of decline for AITISM. Motivation is zero. But it was a time when universities still taught this profession and quite well. When there were no helpers, google and you had to think, try and analyze, to solve the problem, spend the night on coffee with mayonnaise. And do not go away to drink tea, when the Internet was turned off in the office and the entire knowledge base became unavailable.
During the 90s, a very remarkable process took place, thanks to which you are all in the top of salary wages, buying imported beer and sea beaches, and also looking condescendingly at office plankton working for 10 per month. And then a huge number of talented programmers moved to the United States, Israel, the UK and Canada. Who did not fall down - en masse moved into other professions, not being able to feed the family. There are two categories of people left in the profession: stupid, who are not needed by anyone, and those who are convinced that, in fact, are also stupid - it was necessary to bring the hole in the matrix open! First, forgive me again the terminology and my own subjective opinion, later they were employed by onanist pogromists in the bread 1C-field, and the latter are also not in poverty.
If you were born after the 85th year, there is no merit in this IT boom. Do not inflate the cheeks, do not laze, just get, grow and enjoy. And remember that history is cyclical. Economy and society always, albeit belatedly, react to such perturbations and restore the status quo.
I believe that before you talk about what motivations are and why they are bad or good, you need to say why they are needed at all. From the point of view of the economy of IT business and its processes, people are the main capital. And at all not because they are unique and irreplaceable, but because the payment of their labor makes up to 90% of all expenses. Everything else is trivial. Avoiding the crap word "team", each owner understands that the strength of his company is in the ability to support and organize an effective group of colleagues.
This process is not easy, we meet every day in the same office, not because we went to the same kindergarten and were friends at school, but because we do the same work. In order for everyone not to quarrel and not run up, and the satisfied ones work as long as possible, various schemes of encouragement and socialization are applied.
The most popular of them - premium. As it was at Vysotsky - "the premium was covered in a quarter". The thing is good - you can also get a supplement to the salary. It does not matter - once a month, quarter or year, the essence of the scheme does not change. The most striking example is the "13th salary" - a concept devoid of substance and meaning. The disadvantage of this scheme is one: who decides to award or fine, and by how much? there is clearly no justice here, and the foreground is the ability not to do one’s work, but to demonstrate it, not to be, but to be known. In Moscow, it is called "succeed." In this scheme, all large Russian companies work, and I think we all have heard well about their level of efficiency.
Smoothly arising from the previous one - the motivation of "work in a large company." 80% of respondents would prefer to work in Lukoil, and not in a small effective LLC. These people sincerely believe that working in such a company is safer, is paid higher and looks more prestigious. In practice, all this is a common misconception: one cannot identify the reliability of the company itself with its presence in it. The mid-level salaries of the developers in Krupnyak have long been out of competition. Separately, I would like to take a stroll by prestige: the national Soviet feeling is cool! And if you remove cheap Ponte, what is cool? Write code in morally impoverished 4GL languages? Participate in endless and insanely useful meetings? Wear a suit of a given color? To lose the prize for a 5-minute delay? Know and feel that video cameras are watching you, even in the toilets? Attend wonderful courses of some Hubbardism at a corporate university, where with the help of NLP from your already delicate botanical consciousness will they make plant growing?
The main problem of large companies for IT people - either you, playing by the corporate rules "lick - hook - boast" will grow up in it to be a functionary, or she will spit out you and it will not be easy to get settled. In short: from small to large you can, back - shish. As with 1C: the programmer can become 1Snik, back - never.
Okay, let's move on to more progressive methods of motivation. The following scheme came to the leading plan since the IT staff’s salaries passed the level of common sense. Spoiled new celestials are lazily looking through the hunter's tapes: where, and most importantly, what else are they luring? To curb the salary race, the largest metropolitan employers agree not to entice specialists from each other, so as not to drive themselves into a corner with each new round of the salary spiral.
Hiring housing, discount programs for large retailers, group trips to the pool, building a floor for a gym, trips to a sanatorium, free cake for a jolly fellow guests and other complimentary pleasures. A joint team building that makes you a flock of sheep, with a wonderful “what did you do for your company today?”. Guys, this is not your company, the company belongs to the owners and does nothing for free. And if you are over 25 and you still need to be led by the handle to the pool and the dining room, picking up your friends for an hour and a day, then you should think about it in a famous movie: “my parents used to forbid me, now my wife . And when will I grow up ?! ”. You are an IT specialist and for a confident path uphill you should be capable of self-organization, knowing and soberly assessing your capabilities.
For more independent individuals, there is a “you will be a shareholder with us, druh!” Scheme in which small packets of shares are distributed to key employees. These bags resemble pills of “nepizdina”: you will confidentially inform your friends that you are not just there to hell with the mountain, you are a co-owner of the company! But here, as usual, there is one nuance that the American writer O'Henry told in the story about the trade in land at the bottom of the lake. If 51% of the votes are needed for making key decisions in a company, then happy and key ones can receive up to 49%, theoretically owning almost half of the company. This is one of the most powerful ways to bind a person to a business. However, one should remember the law on societies, according to which, in fact, you do not own anything. The assets of the company can be withdrawn without your knowledge (both immovable and contractual), decisions on the payment of dividends are also taken without you. The owner cannot risk losing his company, and will take precautions. If you understand this perfectly, is it not time to become an employer?
It is obvious that all these schemes are not evolution from bad to good, they exist in parallel and with different success are used in different combinations in different companies.
Perhaps, someone will be offended by the terminology, but it is worthwhile to abstract oneself (and you obviously should be able to do this) and take the essence. The question of relations between the masters and the slaves must be as simple as possible. What the owner should do: pay the agreed remuneration on time and provide acceptable working conditions. What should a slave do: do his job efficiently and on time, and also appear clearly in the workplace at the agreed time windows. What else should the parties to each other - only one thing and mutual: do not compost brains. No one else owes anything to anyone, and no need to be cunning, all the notorious social responsibilities of business are the fruit of the imagination of illiterate economists and managers of short stature, who were refuted by Comrade Marx in the nineteenth century.
Well, in the end I want to mention the most attractive to me, but still not working method of motivation: the mercenary simply needs to pay an adequate fixed salary. Once a year with him to revise it: it does not pull - reduce, shine - increase. This approach allows a person to clearly understand how much money he will receive and when, in time to pay his obligations and know what obligations he can afford.
Why is that? Yes, because a normal, harmonious person does not need to impose, nor indicate with whom to go to the pool, you do not have to knit knots and shout in unison at the trainings of team spirit. This spirit will be rotten. Strange - we trust the modern developer to develop complex systems in linear teams, but we do not consider it sufficiently independent to decide where and how to spend the money. And we continue to pay him lunch tickets and ust-roll tickets. And you have to trust - without the trust of colleagues, business will not be successful.
That's all I wanted to say. Thanks for your time and attention!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/208224/
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