Compensation is important up to a point but nobody likes feeling like they are wasting their time and powerless to make positive change.
> No one likes to do Oncall or operational or migration work or deal with mess left by earlier group.
No one likes doing these things if they don't see the point, if there's no buy-in and the work is just a directive from above, if everybody feels like they are treading water and not making any progress, etc...
There are too many possible contributing factors to list them all but most solutions involve listening, communicating, and making small changes that compound over time.
Build teams that: make progress, understand why their work is important, have meaningful feedback loops.
Some good starting points:
[1] The Management Flywheel - https://skamille.medium.com/the-management-flywheel-c076f398...
[2] Work is Work (In which returns diminish) - https://codahale.com/work-is-work/
[3] Model, document and share - https://lethain.com/model-document-share/
[4] Why limiting work-in-progress works - https://lethain.com/limiting-wip/
I have been EM for 5+ years now. There are number of factors on which I have zero control. M1 and M2 are doing often have no power besides sprint, agile processes. For whatever reason people are inherently unhappy. I have seen this happening in 3 different companies.
Compensation is major factor in unhappiness. But, lately it’s also the work that makes people unhappy. No one likes to do Oncall or operational or migration work or deal with mess left by earlier group.
Almost every single engineer think that they know better. I see large disagreements and often grunting agreements. You can apply advice like this all day long , but if compensation and work items are not satisfying, team will be unhappy.
Now, don’t get me even started on the hiring. It’s bizarre practice of leetcode, every tom,dick,Harry copying large organization processes like Amazon and Google.
I am actually quite frustrated in my manager career as someone who is not new the management. I am thinking if director and above level roles are more IC type but have better control over their career. Middle management is powerless in almost every aspect as far as I can tell. Please advice if you know how to get better.