Brian Mathis <[email protected]> writes: > It would also be helpful to study economics and follow some of the > other recent ideas about what drives people to do things. It's not > tech, but neither is management. You need to start studying and > understanding people as much as you do computers.
Figuring out what motivates your people is really important. Personally, I don't think management books are particularly helpful in that regard, but it's an important problem you need to focus on and experiment with. The thing about the management books is that they are usually a paragraph or so of interesting idea padded out to 200 pages. a few months back I read "drive" by Daniel Pink. So his thesis is that money is not what primarily drives people (okay.. that's certainly true for some people.) but then he goes off into trying to pretend that your corporation isn't about money, something that is a huge turn off to most geeks. (I mean, it's basically impossible to pretend a corp is about something other than money without sounding fake, and sounding fake is the worst thing you can do around geeks.) But there were some good ideas. Even though the corporation is about money, that doesn't mean that the corporation's relationship with the employee needs to be only about money... he did talk about career development and interpersonal relationships and helping employees reach their personal goals, etc... which are good ideas all, but eh, I felt like the book could have been a very good 10 page essay, and that is how most management books feel to me. The thing is, what drives different people varies pretty widely. You have to experiment to figure out what drives your people. For example, I've been trying to get the most out of my main sysadmin for while... and money doesn't seem to be doing it. I gave him a raise, and he left his other job, but he hasn't really sold me many more of his hours, which was my goal behind the raise. During crunch time, I'll often declare double-pay days... but I find I don't really get more out of him on double-pay days than I do on crunch days when I don't declare double-pay. I don't even get more hours. I find that the only thing that really gets him moving more than usual is sitting down and working with him. In a lot of ways, it makes a lot of sense; I mean, he's at the beginning of his career and making a small fraction of what he will in a few years, so it makes sense that he'd value training/experience more than cash on the barrel head. And really, it's good for me, too... I find I screw off much less when I'm working with him, and like most arrogant people, I really enjoy teaching. Especially when the student is bright and picks things up quickly; it makes me feel like I'm a good teacher. (note, I'm really only figuring this out now... yeah, I haven't been the brightest student here.) On the other hand, my brother, who is in a similar place in his career, and who is also pretty bright is almost as mercenary as I am. He's /very/ interested in any double pay hours, and not all that interested in work at the regular rate. -- Luke S. Crawford http://prgmr.com/xen/ - Hosting for the technically adept http://nostarch.com/xen.htm - We don't assume you are stupid. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
