This is great if you have something worth yearning for.

"Teach them to crave fast data insight from the their analytics software for marketing campaigns" lacks the same sense of romance or moral imperative.

I'll acknowledge that's a bit tongue in cheek and not being charitable to the underlying point as it applies to day to day work, but I also think that this snark often applies to the "missions" that some/many Silicon Valley startups proclaim for enterprisey, salesey products, because I think those missions are a form of self-delusion about how much good you're really doing for society, as opposed to just making money because there's value to be captured.

A good leader can put a twist on that - "Let's improve the accuracy of ad targeting so small businesses can reduce their spend but attract customers and grow" or "Let's connect the world. Let's help unite lost friends."

Oh, absolutely, and being a former tech worker in the advertising industry, I'm intimately familiar with that line of thinking. When you're trying to inspire the workers, it works (I used it), but now I hate it for the dishonesty of the framing. That's also why it'll take very unique circumstances for me to ever go back to that industry.

>"Teach them to crave fast data insight from the their analytics software for marketing campaigns" lacks the same sense of romance or moral imperative."

I'm not sure what your specific role in the industry was. However while it may not have the same sense of romance or moral imperative as something else, it can still help rally great teams around causes. I've found people, particularly teams of data-driven marketers, can get quite excited when seeing a business grow directly because of insights they distilled from data. It's the feeling of making a tangible impact.

I won't discuss my specific role in order to keep what shred of my anonymity might be left.

My response was mostly aimed at statements like one of 8ytecoder's examples: "Let's improve the accuracy of ad targeting so small businesses can reduce their spend but attract customers and grow". This is because the focus on small businesses is often a foil, and reality is much more morally ambiguous.

Actual small businesses are at the far end of the long tail. Very few companies primarily serve small businesses or primarily make their money from small businesses. In practice, in order of how much money is spent, the list goes: (1) large brands, (2) local/state franchises and political campaigns, (3) small businesses.

Most companies (Google/Facebook, for example) might coincidentally serve small businesses, but the real infrastructure and engineering investments are for the other two groups.

Small businesses tend to be the least sophisticated of the campaigns, because they honestly don't need much sophistication. Their numbers are too low to bring in real data science anyway, so it's more about being savvy at community presence. However, when you get to franchises and politics, the sophistication really kicks in.

Also, some of those small/medium businesses were for things like predatory lending companies. That realization made me stop and think for a moment about what "small business" actually meant.

Point being that I've seen and used (earnestly, at the time) small businesses as a sort moral foil while actually aspiring to develop technology for the other groups. And you believe it because you're paid to believe it.

In general I agree with everything you're stating wrt accuracy of the statement. In context of motivation though, people are all different. And in this case I think there's a type of person who is internally motivated by seeing the results of their decisions and hard work.

In that context, trying to make it about the businesses you are serving (external validation) may not be as interesting to that person as making it about them finding the key to the optimization settings that unlocked growth for the team and business that is credited to them. Helping them celebrate via recognition or whatever else drives that individual can let them get more out of the win than they otherwise would have, and become more engaged in their role.

The big brands also have ecosystems of thousands of small businesses that supply and support them.

The framing doesn't have to be dishonest. But if your company really has NO 'goal' or 'vision' beyond 'make as much cash as possible'...then maybe frame that instead of making up a bigger goal. "Lets become titans of our industry, and fly around the world in private jets" or some other relatively soulless goal. Still inspiring to the right folks, but not dishonest!

Framing isn't dishonest if it's true ;) helps if you believe it yourself.

Hm. We might be imaging different scenarios but I'll try to puts words to my agreement with the "dishonesty" thing :)

Feels like it's shining the light of attention at the spot most aligned with human desires, but usually at expense of shrouding the holistic goals (which might not be in interest of participants).

It might be true, but the framing could still be dishonest because the specific focus is often intended to distract from a less savoury whole. <3

"Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."

"[REDACTED]'s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together."

"Our mission is to be Earth's most customer-centric company."

"[REDACTED]'s mission is to bring transportation—for everyone, everywhere."

Yeah, I do not know why but I do not feel very inspired by those ...

>organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful

Not inspired by that? Is it too abstract? Asked another way, what kind of mission would inspire you? FYI I do agree with the general sentiment by munchbunny.

I'm very inspired by inspirational things - but can't believe there's anyone left who would feel real inspiration from those. Perhaps the first company that decided their mission would be "to make the world a better place" would have sounded (and maybe even been) good - but now it's just meaningless word-salad disguised as a profound statement. It's the "trite motivational poster" of the business world.

In a way those statements all would have been inspiring when the company set out and the world didn't have those things. Is it possible that those companies have achieved those missions to such an extent that it's no longer inspiring? That would be the mark of an epic success. The question is what comes next?

moralestapia's point, as I understand it, is cynicism towards broad, idealistic mission statements because large tech companies with them still have a history of using their employees in what he/she perceives to be immoral ways.

The mission statements mentioned, in order, correspond to:

* Google * Facebook * Amazon * Uber

Because we've been hearing such phrases so often that we are now immune.

good idea. however, the moment you get people on staff buying in to that, you should probably have some mechanisms to listen to their ideas too.

Every time I buy in to some sort of corporate mission statement and believe it, I want to actually help get there.

If I'm being told to do something which obviously/patently won't get there - because I've done XYZ for 25 years and I know the ramifications/impact of these decisions, and I know they don't get us closer to "mission statement" - I want my input and direction to be heard/heeded. Not always 100% "do what he says", but... when you simply ignore my warnings, and my outcome happens... I lose interest in your "mission statement".

Sure, you could do that. But honestly, as a worker drone it all sounds like corporate bullshit to me. No one says things like, "Lets do this well so we can make more money so we can get paid more" or anything actually truthful like that.

That’s what we call “lying”.

All belief is self-delusion. Here's an idea at the other end of the spectrum: You are an assembly of atoms floating around pointlessly.

But of course truly believing something like that would make your life difficult. So you create stories for yourself, "missions".

> You are an assembly of atoms floating around pointlessly.

I mean... I do believe that. I also believe fervently that all of humanity's existence is an insignificant stray mark in the book that is reality. For some people that's a fundamentally depressing idea, followed by "well then why do we even exist?" For others that's liberating. For me... that line of thinking doesn't lead to any practical conclusions about what you should do, so I tend to keep my thinking at levels of abstraction that are somewhat more Earth-sized (or smaller) in scope.

But more broadly, the point I was getting at is that I don't think people in general spend much time thinking about the multiple possible perspectives/beliefs that can be held about their actions, or about the second order effects of their actions, and my personal plea is for more people to do that.

Even more specifically, this time speaking about conversations I've actually had, if you are one of the thousands of engineers whose job is to crunch data ever more efficiently, perhaps it's worth spending some time mulling over why it's not kosher to just pull that customer data into the training data for a new ML model without getting consent first. I promise it's not because stupid laypeople want to make your job difficult.

> All belief is self-delusion.

Do you believe that?

Yep, but I'm not selling a thought system like Deepak Chopra :D

To the extent that we lie to ourselves when we hold something to be absolutely true, yes. Everything is just a guess based on patterns and expectations.

I agree. It's hard to make grandiose statements about a mundane thing that is just business trying to make money. In the little company I own, I've eschewed, grand mission statements, although I do secretly harbour one.

None of my team would believe me anyway.

My pitch is more mundane: please give me good service, at least as much as you would want from any contractor that you might have hired to work on your own home. In return, you should expect that I am a good customer for your services, one that you would want to do repeat business with, and that serving my company is a profitable for you. I don't know if they actually buy my pitch, (they haven't yet quit! :-). I hope its a reasonable one.

I'm not very interested in working on intrusive marketing, but I'm more motivated than ever on my current project, which involves linking enterprise architectural models to all sorts of other business data in order to provide insights into how the business is doing.

That doesn't sound terribly exciting, and yet it is. I've been involved in this project from the very start, I've been talking with many stakeholders, I've had to make decisions on how to approach this, what tech stack to use, what features to focus on, what new features we could add, how to prioritise different concerns, etc.

I'm involved in the context of the project, and not merely the execution of it, and that's given me a much greater sense of ownership. I really care about this project and want to see it succeed.

So maybe just talk about the context isn't quite enough; involve people in that context, make sure they understand the why and have them decide on the how. Make sure they're not just cogs in the machine.

(It helps that the tech stack involves a Graph DB, which we didn't have any experience with before, and we create a lot of interesting data visualisations.)

Ironically, the post talks about the importance of context, yet you’ve given an example focused exclusively on technical features, and completely ignored any of the problems they might be built to solve.

How about teach them to crave slow data insight then?

A very good strategy if the stuff you do is actually any good. For many ethically questionable fields obscuring or misreptesenting the context or the actual bussinesmodel is the only thing that allows you to keep a workforce. The best way to do this is to give them the tools to lie to themselves (this usually contains a flag to wave against the “other team”).

It’s rather conceited to assume the entire workforce shares your opinions of which fields are ethically questionable.

If you are open about what your money-making-model is, they can decide for themselves — however — if you are brainwashing them into believing you are the good ones while hiding the colateral damage, then you are wrong.

This isn’t about opinion, it is about honesty and transparency and knowing what you’re working for.

Ship building is a specialized trade, with tradesman located in a town near the dockyard. I doubt that shipbuilders are motivated by the love of the sea. The quote does not work in high-specialization industrial society where the product is constructed for a customer, with sales department claiming credit for the sale, and the owner pocketing the surplus value.

Much better motivation is love for a process, in ship building example, ship engineering with management supporting career development.

Call me crazy but I think it's possible you've missed the point.

It's becoming a huge peeve of mine when people seem to have forgotten what thread they're in and take a statement out of all reasonable context or nitpick about things that do not materially degrade the point (quotes are a little fussy that way, who knows how people will interpret them).

On reddit they'd just invoke /r/lostredditor

My latest strategy is to hit back with humor. I don't know if it's working, but early results are positive.

>It's becoming a huge peeve of mine when people seem to have forgotten what thread they're in and take a statement out of all reasonable context or nitpick about things that do not materially degrade the point (quotes are a little fussy that way, who knows how people will interpret them).

Welcome to HN

At no point did I claim it's new behavior. It's just getting old.

More like "Welcome to teh Internet"

It's called pedantry and lots of programmers seem afflicted by it.

I think it's a valid counterpoint. Those who would be great shipbuilders should hopefully love not only the sea, but also the act of building a ship. They should get as much if not more joy out of executing a weld perfectly, or shaping a piece of wood partly to their own will and partly within the constraints of its grain. Those who only yearn for the sea make great ship passengers i.e. customers, or ship captains or crewpersons. There's a divide there, and it's inherent.

But I guess (still using the language of this quote) you could say the the article is presuming the shipbuilders already love shipbuilding, and just need to be reminded that what they're building is for purposes of going to sea. Fine, but should they be impressed? To milk the analogy for all it's worth: A ship goes on the sea but it's not of the sea. It's of metal that comes out of the ground, or trees that grow out of the ground, and it's built on the ground, by people who go home at night to sleep in their houses that are on the ground. That's the divide. Shipbuilders actually have very little to do with the sea; in fact it's sort of their enemy, the thing they're protecting the customers from, the thing always threatening to creep in, seep in, and ruin their work! Maybe the analogy breaks down there... although then again... :)

Anyway I disagree with the notion that doing something for its own sake, or even (perish the thought) TO MAKE MONEY, somehow isn't adequately motivating. Half the time I wish all the temporarily-embarrassed millionaires could just fess up for once and say, yeah, I need the money. I wish it were okay to say that.

I wrote this on the top of my whiteboard in the last place I was CEO at. Still my mantra for management.

short of hypnotism i can't see how i can motive my employees about enterprise CRUD app.

Who are they making the apps for? Are they making the enterprises work better? Are they meeting the actual users and identifying their pain-points while developing solutions?

Or are they just getting a list of requirements from a middle-manager (rather than the user) who doesn't actually know what needs to be done?

The former can help motivate them and also help them develop better systems (that fit the real user needs, not management's perceived needs).

Some of the most technically mundane projects I’ve worked on have been the most exciting simply because the impact it would have on the people who would use it. Oh and I was talking to those users to get a good handle on what they needed and how it would help.

Joel Spolsky talked years ago about how software companies are doing it by letting them use the latest cool toys -- Erlang or whatever is hot these days.

I'd ask why you need an "enterprise CRUD app". Programmers tend to like doing new things, and if your app doesn't offer anything new, why are you even building it?

Share what motivates you to be doing your work. If you are trying to motivate them to make more money, what do you think makes them some sort of different creature with some sort of differing motivation ?

Paychecks & benefits is the usual way. Only gets you so far, of course.

dubious: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/08/25/sea/

Less dubious than I feared. If you prefer:

"One will weave the canvas; another will fell a tree by the light of his ax. Yet another will forge nails, and there will be others who observe the stars to learn how to navigate. And yet all will be as one. Building a boat isn’t about weaving canvas, forging nails, or reading the sky. It’s about giving a shared taste for the sea, by the light of which you will see nothing contradictory but rather a community of love."

Thanks for the pointer, I love quote provenance research (well, reading it.)

Well we can't blame all clever sayings on Ben Franklin now, can we.

I knew this quote and agree. Yet, how can we argue towards this direction with someone who disagrees. Like "A.S.E. was not a manager but a dreamer. Look, he wrote the Little Prince." Any concrete, recent example ? In a company, big, small, startup ?

Ask them why they disagree, and listen. They may be right.

I should clarify: this is also the way to get them to agree. If you genuinely listen to their concerns, and consider all their points, and are genuinely willing to change direction if they're right, then that is psychologically powerful.

Being listened to, and having a point of view heard and considered, is powerful stuff. If at the end, they feel heard, and their point of view considered, then they're usually willing to go along with the majority opinion at least, and sometimes become your biggest supporter.

It is also the best possible way to find toxic employees. When someone just simply will not listen to logic, will not listen to your viewpoint, or uses your time listening to them as their time to dish about everyone around them, you have a choice to make.

Most times, being heard is all people want. Some times, being heard only validates a false sense of superiority and correctness.

Jobs and Musk are recent examples of successful people who manage by vision. Of course, plenty of people object to their style also.

How about “A computer on every desk, and in every home, running Microsoft software.”

I'm having this etched on the wall at my office and on my kids bedroom walls :D

I love this, thanks for sharing!

It is one of my favorites as well. It seem apropos.