Social trust is the key to economic growth (by allowing de-risked specialization) and political liberty (by allowing minimal black-letter law.) It is too bad that it is rarely discussed, and has been casually jettisoned by the west.
Take the innocuous example of tipping. In one culture, waiters are tipped X%, in another, it's just in the food prices. Clearly, neither is absolutely right or wrong, yet in both directions, awkwardness ensures when the signals are crossed.
Signals can cross in much less innocuous ways.
It's one of the things I think the "melting pot" idea got right, and I tend to agree a lot of people who didn't really understand it did indeed jettison it too quickly and with too much excitement... layering on a minimal, high-level culture that defines things like the trust parameters, which are often not absolutely right or wrong like the tipping example above, while leaving religion, dress style, foods, cultural celebrations, all the really important elements of a culture vary beneath that umbrella was actually a really cool idea. (In practice, perhaps it was not quite minimal enough, but I think we'd have been better off addressing that directly rather than throwing out the whole idea.)
I don't see China as being a tremendously high-trust social environment, for instance.
I contrast the west with, for example, Russia, which has a very intelligent work-force and extensive natural resources, but has been unable to break out of the corruption and lack of trust endemic to their culture. India is another example: there is no reason they shouldn't be a first world country looking only at their human and natural capital. The middle east is lousy with countries with incredibly intelligent peoples stuck in second-world (at best) conditions. And so on.
The West of a previous time, presumably.
China (afaik) is just an environment with low social trust.
That's an interesting counter-argument to OP's last assertion (with whom I agree) since China has +10% economic /year while having really poor social trust standards.
When you select for low-trust options in a previously high-trust environment, you also select for shorter timeframes of activity. Those shorter timeframes directly manifest as fewer options; there simply isn't enough time to let beneficial compounding effects ramp up and hence open up more options by supplying more per unit resources over time. The cognitive load to manage these shorter timeframe activities also goes up per unit returned equity/resources/margin versus a longer timeframe; I wouldn't be surprised if it goes up non-linearly in most cases. None of these effects are reported upon, tracked, or even detected in accounting systems today, except at terminal end stages. The current dominant business culture is yield chasing with this behavior, and that has historically ended poorly.
Obviously, trust has varying degrees and context. In Japan, you can leave your laptop at a cafe; in the U.S., you probably wouldn't. That doesn't mean that we're "low trust" or trust-sparse. We might generally trust most people to be decent while aware of the ~0.05% (?) chance per person (that someone steals the computer.
What is changing is trust with regard to competence. People were never so foolish as to trust all others without limits, but there used to be an assumption of competence in the professional world. Institutions like universities are less trusted, and so are people in general when it comes to basic competence and readiness for autonomy. It would be unthinkable, 20 years ago, that CS graduates from MIT and Stanford could be expected to justify hours of their time in "Scrum ceremonies" (which means that they aren't trusted, which means that their credentialing institutions and work experiences aren't trusted). Even average programmers in the bowels of Fortune 500's IT organizations had more autonomy than the typical "Agile" programmer today.
Right now we are in an era of organizational decline. It's not necessarily catastrophic; it might not even be bad. What it does mean is that institutions (universities, professional organizations, corporations, and even unions) have lost their role as central brokers of trust. It raises interesting questions. Thus far, most of the successful startups have been beneficiaries of institutional decline (and, again, some of those institutions deserved to break down, so I'm not moralizing) and there doesn't seem to be any economic reward to build institutions (as opposed to mere corporations, smaller in scope) up... so it doesn't happen.
If that's been your experience with Agile, you've have the misfortune of seeing Agile done horribly wrong in a patholgically unhealthy workplace. You may also be romanticizing a bit about old school way of doing things (I have a co-worker who used to work at a major jet engine manufacturer. They were expected to be sitting at their desks when the bell (literally!) rang at 8:30 am. They were expected to wait for the bell to ring break time in before they went to the washroom. As a programmer! Scrum ceremonies aren't sounding so bad).
Seriously, stand-up isn't supposed to be about accounting for your time, and it isn't supposed to be a vehicle for top-down micro-management. If it's either of these things for you, the problem is your organization, not your specific process.
In my (very positive) experience, stand-up is about maintaining situational awareness in the team. It's a well defined point for people to raise general questions if they've run into ambiguity, or cast a wide net if they've run into impediment. To-do lists are de-emphasized; it's an opportunity to pick the collective brain and gain some clarity / help with what you're doing.
Heck, in writing doesn't count for much if it isn't part of a contract.
Worse still is the fact that the salary/performance review comes up in a few weeks and I started in January. Getting the job offer at all apparently counts as the performance review so to get a salary increase or title upgrade I effectively have to wait 1.5 years.
I usually work at BigCorps. One problem I have is that they send the exceptional workers to interview me (and other candidates), but once I start I find out I'm working with a bunch of duds. How can I get a big picture view of (almost) all of the people I will be working with along with their skill levels?
I don't expect everyone in the company to be all A team or B team tier, but I don't want to be a part of an organization where 80% of the people are barley qualified to do their job.
If you're not being interviewed by anybody who will be on your prospective team, that's already a red flag. You should be talking to your future coworkers (and maybe others, sure) and you should know which ones they are.
To be more precise: Let's say I will be working on a team of 5 people. They send the manager and the smartest guy and things look great, but how do I gauge the skill level of the people who aren't there along with the skill level of other teams. For example, maybe my team is great, but I'll be working with other teams (infra guys, networking guys, legacy systems guys, whatever) who are obstructive and unskilled.
How do you get outside the "interview box" to see more of the company?
I do appreciate it when a candidate has a list of questions related to things that are important to them. In my experience though, that is exceedingly rare - at least with engineers.
I'm lucky to be asked basic questions like what time people are expected into the office in the morning let alone someone asking for concrete examples of advancement.
Usually I have to probe into their past job history to try to figure out what is important to them and doing that in an hour is extremely difficult - just breaking down their defensive barriers so they'll relax and give me candid answers can take half my time. Still, there is only so much I can do in a limited amount of time, so at the end I just try to lay out what an average work day looks like and my philosophy as their manager and hope that they will be able to make an informed decision.
> I don't want to hire anyone who would be unhappy working for me.
Then you're not going to hire anyone, your empire will stagnate or shrink, and you will not be promoted into senior management. At some point you will be kicked to the curb.
Lying enables you to hire people who might otherwise be unavailable or much more expensive. When the labor market is weak, this isn't very important, but in a strong labor market it can be the difference between growing your organization and losing it to attrition. Assuming you're not willing/able to pay more than your competition (no one is), lying to candidates is going to be among your top tactics. By the time they both know they've been lied to and are upset enough to want to do anything about it, they'll have kids and a mortgage, or there will be another recession, or some other circumstance will trap them. They're not happy, but you are: by growing your team, you've earned a promotion to director.
Sure, your hires are less productive than starry-eyed believers, but there aren't enough of the latter to staff a giant corporation (or even a medium-sized one), and senior management pay is based primarily on the size of one's empire. There's no point in a staffing policy that limits empire growth. A giant company, even a very inefficient one, pays senior managers far more in absolute terms than a smaller, more profitable one. Therefore it's in the interests of the senior managers to encourage hiring as many people as possible as long as they're cheap, regardless of whether they're happy or productive (and don't worry, if business is bad, they can be kicked to the curb). As a line manager, it's in your interest to go along with this no matter what it takes, because that's how you climb the ladder.
> I do appreciate it when a candidate has a list of questions related to things that are important to them. In my experience though, that is exceedingly rare - at least with engineers.
It's more that there's little point in asking because the assumption is that you will lie. At best, even honest answers have a very short shelf life; the experienced candidate assumes that conditions will change quickly and for the worse. Most importantly of all, the candidate knows he or she will have no recourse if conditions are not as advertized, regardless of the reason. That makes the answers non-actionable, and thus the questions a waste of time.
> Usually I have to probe into their past job history to try to figure out what is important to them and doing that in an hour is extremely difficult
We don't tell you because we know you don't care. People have been getting a lot smarter about the employer-employee relationship over the past decade or two. A corporation exists primarily for the benefit of senior managers: it gives them a place to compete with one another, engage in cutthroat politics, try out pet theories about business and management, and gives them the lion's share of the business's profits for little or no work. It does not exist for the benefit of the rank and file, customers, or shareholders. Few people are so foolish as to expect anything but misery and insecurity as a member of the rank and file. Why give you information you can use against us later? Put another way, what's in it for us?
And your question to Aloisius is excellent: what's in it for us?
It's rare because in our experience, this does nothing to help your chances of getting the job, and can do a lot to hurt them. And while they can help you root out places you don't want to work, many places will simply lie.
2 and 3 are firm statements: ask for them in writing. Even if they're not in an official employment contract, an email stating same might give you enough ammo for a Fraudulent Inducement Of Employment case (if push came to shove).
Ask follow-up questions to get a quantitative answer based on past performance. Promises of future raises (or other future actions) are complete BS and should be treated as such.
Everything in the article's list is a basically gratuitous promise. Things change -- the economy, the financial performance of the company, management, etc. Any change can be justification to nullify one or more of those promises.
The easy way to see if the hiring company is lying? Ask them to put everything in the contract, and put --numbers-- where applicable (30 days of training at the company's expense per year, ability to work at home 2 out of 5 business days, budget to hire help if workload exceeds 50h/week, etc.).
It'll be pretty clear whether they're lying or telling the truth if they start balking at specifics.
It's always your option to quit if things aren't as advertised, and not worth salvaging. This means managing your finances and attitudes to be more mobile, and not basing your security and contentedness on the good will of your employer.
Bad employers act a lot like political candidates. The hiring process is the campaign, and once the votes are tallied and the position is locked in, the worker is subjected to things not quite as described. You never know what things are going to be like for your personal situation regardless of how much you read up on company experiences, so keep a fallback plan open, sacrifice to maintain a financial buffer, and don't get bogged down in your possessions and location.
This mindset is also useful even when your employer is great, in family emergencies and other life-upheaving events.
Immediate requirement to fill a newly opened position. Must be able to assume a project which had abrupt departures of project members. Must be able to work in a fast-paced environment. Travel required.
For job seekers, it's fair and reasonable to assume that any employer who makes promises against the future is lying, so for every promise you are made ("You'll eventually get to work on cool technology X!") you should increase your starting salary expectations, because you need to get a fair wage for being lied to.
I've personally seen other 'tactics' used, most notably a former company's CFO told my Manager that I was being paid 20k more in Salary than I actually was.
This 20k was then subtracted from the IT Budget presumably on a yearly basis. Any other stories from readers?
I don't think most employers around me lie on purpose. It's really that kind of situation were you try hard to be good to the other person, but in the end real life hits you in the face and you don't come around to deliver as much as promised. I'd argue I fell in that trap a few times myself.
Investor contact is another, related, one. When engineers accept 0.05% equity slices at the expense of hedge-fund jobs, they're doing it because they've been told (and haven't had the life experience to have doubts) that they'll have investor contact within 6 months if they do a good job, and have the connections necessary to be founders inside of 18 months. It almost never happens that way.
