Therefore, if Anne documents her database properly etc, this increases her replaceability and constitutes altruistic behavior. Unless she values the positive feeling of doing her employer a favor more highly than she values the money she might make by avoiding replacement, this might even be true altruism.
Anne’s payoff matrix looks more like a Prisoner’s Dilemma than straightforward altruism to me. She can take steps to make herself less replaceable, but most of them appear to come at the cost of reducing the speed, fault-tolerance, and expansibility of the system she’s working on, or at least letting it slowly stagnate into obsolescence. Since the company’s performance depends to a large extent on the aggregate behavior of employees like Anne, and since well-performing companies offer much better job security than faltering ones, a cooperation strategy isn’t an obvious loss even from a self-interested perspective.
You could probably model employee morale to a large extent as propensity to defect in situations like this one, actually.
I’m currently writing a novel. I have a ton of scattered plot notes, some written, some in my head. Since the novel is an active project, I don’t need a ton of notes—I remember most of it. In 5 years, these notes would be less useful to me. If someone else took over and didn’t have the benefit of my presence, they’d probably be totally lost.
Equally, I use a lot of archaic programs on my home computer. I could spend a week converting my entire music collection to MP3, but right now it only works with Winamp and a suite of custom plugins to handle obscure formats like “raw SNES music files”. For me, this is trivial upkeep, since I replace computers every ~5 years, and it takes 15 minutes to re-install the plugins. There’s no reason to convert the collection UNTIL I decide to switch away from Winamp, or hand it off to someone else.
In other words, “mainstream, up to date tools” are not necessarily better, even if they’re more likely to be FAMILIAR to someone new to the project. Writing code in COBOL might make it 10x more maintainable and faster, as long as you have a COBOL programmer on staff to handle it… The whole Y2K bug speaks well to that.
So, no, I don’t see any reason to conclude that replaceability and usability go hand in hand :)
Eliezer Yudkowsky gets hit by a bus. Do you want his unfinished ideas to be in a text file on his cellphone, in a pile of handwritten sheets, or in his head?
Eliezer keeping his notes where I can access them is altruism. It does NOT make him more efficient as Nornagest was claiming, and might actually waste quite a lot of his time.
I’d want him to keep them in whatever format he feels is best—keeping them in his head might drastically increase his productivity, and we’d all benefit. Even being altruistic, it’s still a risk-reward tradeoff, and I trust him to make that decision better than me (he knows the factors better, and I’d wager that he’s smarter and more rational than I am about such things anyway)
Documentation in a corporate environment, or even in something like an open-source project, serves several purposes: to make it easier to get new team members up to speed (which can be used to train replacements, but also serves an expansibility purpose), to reduce coordination overhead, and to make it easier to remember what the heck you were doing after spending five months tasked with something else. Most of these motivations aren’t purely altruistic.
Obviously this is going to be quite different for a solo project, and it does look like the downsides to defection are less severe in situations where you have a unique skillset and your company isn’t expecting a need for other people with the same skills. But the point remains that there are performance-oriented reasons for doing a lot of things the OP describes strictly in terms of affecting your replaceability, and in any case the problematic situations seem too limited for cooperation in their context to be called a major virtue.
Can we agree that f your goals are “don’t get replaced, but help the company grow” it’s a risk-reward tradeoff to do things like documentation? And sometimes documenting won’t help growth at all, and sometimes it won’t affect how replaceable you are?
My point wasn’t meant to be a generalized “documentation NEVER helps”, just that it’s entirely possible for an action to be primarily a risk-of-being-replaced without much personal gain :)
Isn’t it somehow the manager’s job to make sure that what is good for Anne is aligned with what is good for the company?
If Anne makes a great documentation and teaches Beth everything she knows, it may save the company a lot of money. How about giving a part of that money to Anne as a reward for being helpful?
Or is it just Anne’s moral obligation to ignore her own utility function for the benefit of the company? If so, then in addition to making the documentation and teaching Beth, she should also ask the company to give her as small salary as legally possible. (She could also sell her kidney, and donate the money to the company. Perhaps do the same thing with the second kidney on the day that Beth is ready to replace her.)
Also, it is the manager’s job to decide whether it benefits company more if Anne works on making herself replaceable, or if she fully concentrates on doing what she does best. Maybe making Anne spend a part of her time writing and maintaining the documentation would cost company $500 per month; the risk of losing Anne in any specific month is 2%; and the cost of replacing her without documentation is $10,000. Then the rational choice is not to let her work on the documentation. Anne does not know all the relevant numbers.
Anne’s payoff matrix looks more like a Prisoner’s Dilemma than straightforward altruism to me. She can take steps to make herself less replaceable, but most of them appear to come at the cost of reducing the speed, fault-tolerance, and expansibility of the system she’s working on, or at least letting it slowly stagnate into obsolescence. Since the company’s performance depends to a large extent on the aggregate behavior of employees like Anne, and since well-performing companies offer much better job security than faltering ones, a cooperation strategy isn’t an obvious loss even from a self-interested perspective.
You could probably model employee morale to a large extent as propensity to defect in situations like this one, actually.
Documentation seems largely altruistic:
I’m currently writing a novel. I have a ton of scattered plot notes, some written, some in my head. Since the novel is an active project, I don’t need a ton of notes—I remember most of it. In 5 years, these notes would be less useful to me. If someone else took over and didn’t have the benefit of my presence, they’d probably be totally lost.
Equally, I use a lot of archaic programs on my home computer. I could spend a week converting my entire music collection to MP3, but right now it only works with Winamp and a suite of custom plugins to handle obscure formats like “raw SNES music files”. For me, this is trivial upkeep, since I replace computers every ~5 years, and it takes 15 minutes to re-install the plugins. There’s no reason to convert the collection UNTIL I decide to switch away from Winamp, or hand it off to someone else.
In other words, “mainstream, up to date tools” are not necessarily better, even if they’re more likely to be FAMILIAR to someone new to the project. Writing code in COBOL might make it 10x more maintainable and faster, as long as you have a COBOL programmer on staff to handle it… The whole Y2K bug speaks well to that.
So, no, I don’t see any reason to conclude that replaceability and usability go hand in hand :)
Eliezer Yudkowsky gets hit by a bus. Do you want his unfinished ideas to be in a text file on his cellphone, in a pile of handwritten sheets, or in his head?
Eliezer keeping his notes where I can access them is altruism. It does NOT make him more efficient as Nornagest was claiming, and might actually waste quite a lot of his time.
I’d want him to keep them in whatever format he feels is best—keeping them in his head might drastically increase his productivity, and we’d all benefit. Even being altruistic, it’s still a risk-reward tradeoff, and I trust him to make that decision better than me (he knows the factors better, and I’d wager that he’s smarter and more rational than I am about such things anyway)
Documentation in a corporate environment, or even in something like an open-source project, serves several purposes: to make it easier to get new team members up to speed (which can be used to train replacements, but also serves an expansibility purpose), to reduce coordination overhead, and to make it easier to remember what the heck you were doing after spending five months tasked with something else. Most of these motivations aren’t purely altruistic.
Obviously this is going to be quite different for a solo project, and it does look like the downsides to defection are less severe in situations where you have a unique skillset and your company isn’t expecting a need for other people with the same skills. But the point remains that there are performance-oriented reasons for doing a lot of things the OP describes strictly in terms of affecting your replaceability, and in any case the problematic situations seem too limited for cooperation in their context to be called a major virtue.
Can we agree that f your goals are “don’t get replaced, but help the company grow” it’s a risk-reward tradeoff to do things like documentation? And sometimes documenting won’t help growth at all, and sometimes it won’t affect how replaceable you are?
My point wasn’t meant to be a generalized “documentation NEVER helps”, just that it’s entirely possible for an action to be primarily a risk-of-being-replaced without much personal gain :)
Yeah, that seems reasonable.
Isn’t it somehow the manager’s job to make sure that what is good for Anne is aligned with what is good for the company?
If Anne makes a great documentation and teaches Beth everything she knows, it may save the company a lot of money. How about giving a part of that money to Anne as a reward for being helpful?
Or is it just Anne’s moral obligation to ignore her own utility function for the benefit of the company? If so, then in addition to making the documentation and teaching Beth, she should also ask the company to give her as small salary as legally possible. (She could also sell her kidney, and donate the money to the company. Perhaps do the same thing with the second kidney on the day that Beth is ready to replace her.)
Also, it is the manager’s job to decide whether it benefits company more if Anne works on making herself replaceable, or if she fully concentrates on doing what she does best. Maybe making Anne spend a part of her time writing and maintaining the documentation would cost company $500 per month; the risk of losing Anne in any specific month is 2%; and the cost of replacing her without documentation is $10,000. Then the rational choice is not to let her work on the documentation. Anne does not know all the relevant numbers.