If you don't really like your job as an engineer, it makes total sense. Management means, well, management: check on people, approve time off, help people with some wise-sounding standard advice and fake coaching. I've thought about that as well. Oh, don't tell me it depends on the company, I have a fair experience in very big corps and small startups. Variations on the same theme.
In the end, my advice to other people would be: try to find a job you really like, something you're passionate about if you can, and avoid politics and drama (well, unless that's your passion of course).
I love the creative pursuit of solving problems and all the related engineering aspects. Software development is however becoming more of a cargo cult and that is the aspect of working I find very challenging. But at the end of the day, I’m mature enough to understand that there is a reason why this is called work - you get paid to do stuff and I’m happy if I find satisfaction in 70% of the things I do.
How can something bringing value (read: money) to a lot of companies all around the world be considered "cargo cult"? As developers we are lucky enough that the market is so so wide, that if you don't like a company (heck, even just a person in a company) you can just change. So, nah, I don't buy it. Management is the real cargo cult, if we have to find one. People so aroused by the idea of mentoring (lol) other people (even more mature than them, quite often)... Look up "developer anarchy" on YouTube.
I'm not talking about company's goals, but those that some companies want ICs to set for themselves. Obviously companies must have some key objectives to present to the public.
How would that help precisely? You should put more effort in hiring, if you're worried about developers not understanding how to help a company grow. In the past I worked for startups and very small startups. The wannabe-corp ones have goals, the real ones don't. They want to stay afloat and grow as well, but transparency is enough motivation for devs to do their job: we need the MVP or we sink, all of us.
Genuine question: do you have experience in management with OKRs? Do you have some examples proving they helped in your career? Even made-up examples, just to understand what people expect from OKRs.
Think of it this way: It's a social contract between the company and the employee that you will spend your time on something valuable to both the company and you. In larger organisations it can also help to answer the question "What is your team working on?".
I have in fact experienced employees (peers) that will simply slack off and say they "weren't told what to do" when asked. It's infuriating to work with those kind of people. Those have been exceptions though.
I might argue then that your company does a bad job at hiring :) Also, do you also ask yourself: what is my manager doing? I do and in good, healthy companies I can see that.
> It's been proven that employees don't normally do that?
I have no idea, but I think the psych literature (and common experience) does show that people will take stronger ownership of stuff they defined themselves in the first place (well, duh). If HR think they can get more buy-in for free then why would they not go for it.
Should my boss answer like that, I would be very offended, since I'm a fairly senior developer who doesn't want to manage people and thinks he knows where he's going. If he said that referred to the HR intern, well, he could be right (still offensive, but sometimes right) :)
Why do you have to micromanage? Why do you have to measure productivity (especially if the team if productive as a whole - and that's always visible)? Genuinely asking
I am not a manager, so I am merely speculating here, but I suspect measuring productivity is important in determining which employees are of most value to the company (who is pulling their weight, so to speak), particularly for example in the cases of raises/promotions or redundancies. Also, different people will have different skills and preferences, so if a team member shows a particular aptitude for a set of tasks and is generally more productive at doing those, it may be better to give more tasks of that style to that team member to boost productivity.
I get your point. So the premise is that employee's personal desires and company's objectives don't usually tend to align themselves naturally, right? If there were no goals in place, would that be bad? How bad?
I think the first step - independent of company goals - is to know yourself and your own goals. Maybe your goal is "make more money." Maybe your goal is "take a class in art history, because I'm curious about it." Maybe it's "read more books" or "connect more with nature through hikes." Know yourself first. Avoid the temptation to succumb to pressure to force-align yourself with company goals, and just get a good understanding of yourself first. I believe this is important for all of us to do just as humans - even though I'm a manager, I have my own personal goals. One of those for me right now is running a 5K at under 20 minutes, because I like running and like the challenge of getting faster. To achieve that goal, I need to leave the "office" at a suitable time to catch daylight for a run.
Knowing yourself and what you want is very important. If your job just poofed out of existence today, but you still made the same salary - what would you want to do with your time?
Once you have that firmly entrenched in your head, then you can begin the negotiation with your manager and your company on how to align your personal wants with the company's wants.
I think it's bad when you-and-company don't have that alignment, because it means one (or both) of you hasn't truly thought about what you want and aren't communicating your desires well.
The endgame in all of this is an agreed-upon social contract between you, your manager, and your employer. You agree to provide a certain amount of work in exchange for compensation, which might include money, learning opportunities, pleasant coworkers, an easy commute, etc. Proper goal-setting, at its best, should be just ironing out line items in that contract.
And that's a great explanation of the theory behind that :) and it delights me, every time. But the question, alas, remains unanswered: "would everything work well anyway without such a framework?"
Basically I'm curious about this: we're all applying this framework, taking it for granted. It was there, we accepted it. But I wonder: what if it wasn't there?
I'm building a machine, I know the minimum requirements to make it work. I build it like that and then I think: should I also add to it this other cog as well? Would it improve _somehow_ the machine? Well, the other folks are doing it, heck, I'll do it as well!
Now you have a heavier, more complex, machine, with one more cog, and you don't even know if you really need it.
Sorry for the brutally simple example, but I'm still missing an evidence we really need these frameworks.
If you accept these postulates as true:
* on a long enough time horizon, companies must either adapt to their environment by changing their product, or they must cease to exist.
* a changing product means changing the abilities required to deliver that product at some level
* changing the abilities required to deliver that product means the humans must change as well
then you have to conclude:
On a long enough time horizon, the humans must change their own abilities to match the changing requirements of the product, or the company will go bankrupt.
Now, given that conclusion: you are correct, goal-setting is not required. And we have evidence that it is not required in companies that mostly outsource technical labor on an as-needed basis rather than set goals to continually realign employees with company objectives.
In some way, you have to choose an approach for calibrating changing employees and changing company objectives. Goal-setting is a low friction approach for calibration when the company prefers employees with internal domain knowledge over time. There are plenty of other approaches for aligning needs and available labor as well, but they are generally not preferred by both companies and individuals which is why you see the prevalence of this approach.
On such a long term horizon, you should consider staff turnover, which is never zero. So, no, what you're inferring from those "postulates" is incorrect.
I worked for a big dotcom company in the past and
1) there was a cap on headcount (as it's usually the case), so a lot gets outsourced
2) they don't care about internal domain knowledge: everybody should be replaceable at any time, ramp up costs are not even taken into account. Companies that wants employees to set goals usually are big and usually can afford to lose people with "internal domain knowledge". Even if, of course, they'll try not to do that, but it's still not that big of a deal.
While I really like philosophy (really, I do!), I'm a very practical guy and I'm still missing the evidence that I'm looking for. And I'm pretty sure it won't come in the form of a syllogism :)
I'm familiar with it. Question remains: what's the strongest argument (with supporting data) that it improves something in the company? Anything, even the employee's mood, productivity, etc.
In the end, my advice to other people would be: try to find a job you really like, something you're passionate about if you can, and avoid politics and drama (well, unless that's your passion of course).