Early in my career Steve Bourne gave me useful advice, he said the difference between junior engineers and senior engineers was that senior engineers had an agenda. More specifically they had an execution goal (like write a new file system, or create a product that solves problem ‘X’) and they worked toward it. (...) The alternative to having an agenda is “Goofing off and waiting for someone to give you a task.”
And the counterpoint:
The bimodal distribution of effort is really true, although people flip from one side to the other based on circumstances. Companies want people who (a) give a shit, but (b) are willing to subordinate their own career goals (including the long-term goal of becoming really good at engineering) to corporate objectives for a long (more than 3 months) period of time. The reality is that such people don’t exist.
So the takeaway seems to be that people will flip from agency to non-agency depending on circumstances. When you’re lucky enough to get encouragement from others while pursuing your own interest, you’ll seem more agent-like.
Seems to me that companies want high-agency employees, but for sufficiently high values, “high-agency employee” is almost an oxymoron. If a person is very-high-agency, why shouldn’t they start their own company and keep all the profit? The mere fact that someone agrees to be your employee suggests that a) they are missing some important skills, and b) they cannot compensate for the missing skills e.g. by paying someone else to do it.
OK, in real life I can imagine reasons why a very-high-agency person would become an employee. Maybe the company has a monopoly, or is willing to pay tons of money. But most probably, the given person is not strategic, and never realized they don’t need a boss or they have some emotional problem with being a boss. Finding and employing such person could be a gold mine.
I’m not sure why being very agenty would necessarily mean that starting your own company should be the best bet. Being an employee lets you reap the benefits of specialization and others having taken all the risks for you (most new companies fail), and can be a very comfortable if you can just find a position that lets you use your skills to the fullest. Then you can focus on doing what you actually enjoy, as opposed to having to spend large amounts of extra energy to running a company.
Yes—absolutely true. ‘Entrepreneurship’ requires a unique skill set, and like every other skill set, comparative advantage and division of labor apply. It’s entirely consistent to be a god of programming, relatively worse at entrepreneurship, and otherwise excellent at achieving your goals (agenty).
if you can just find a position that lets you use your skills to the fullest.
...
if you can just
I’m quite sure finding an ideal position somewhere in an organization that you agree with enough to stick to for the long term, and that motivates you regularly, and that lets you use your full skills, and that you actually enjoy (notice the conjunctive probabilities yet?), and that people would find you the best match, and that you can properly signal being the best match for…
...is nowhere near as simple or easy as that phrasing makes it sound like. I’d bet it actually reduces the chances of success and expected value or costs to around the same order of magnitude as starting your own business, in the current social environment and job market. Granted, some of the above usually correlates, but it’s still hard to find anywhere near a 50% match, let alone a position that one truly loves this much. Of course, I’m assuming the above is relevant and valued by the person being agenty, since they are for me. Different minds and wants might have better odds.
But I agree that being agenty doesn’t imply striking off on your own by any means. As has been repeated over and over again on LW, being rational, especially agenty-instrumentally-rational, implies winning, and if being a small member of a big group lets you achieve more both individually and as a group, clearly that’s what they would/should do.
This seems parallel to the problem E.Y. mentioned in one of the sequences about how a “rationalist” army shouldn’t run off with each person doing their own thing, and should actually be more organized than an army composed of a few smart leaders and a chain of dumb grunts. (I might be slightly misremembering the example, but most people here, especially if they’ve read the sequences, probably know what I’m talking about).
There are plenty of reasons to work at a company even if you are very agenty. I work at a company where any advance I make may be turned in to cash across about 700 million chips a year that we sell. It is economic for my company to have me around doing whatever I feel like as long as, on average, i spit out really tiny improvements in chips every once in a while. A company selling the equivalent of 7 million chips a year would need about 100X as much innovation from me to get the same value from me that the bigger company gets.
In addition to my screwing around however I want being 100X as valauble for my employer than for most other potential employers (including my self), My employer provides me with an insanely excellent toybox. That toybox includes demo implementations of systems with chips that aren’t even commercial yet, complete with the best imaginable tech support for using these demo platforms. It provides me with proprietary data it has gathered from its vast engineering force and from its vast customer connections.
If what I want to be agenty about is fairly narrow, then it is a gigantic win to work as an employee for a big successful company.
“Keeping all the profit” seems like a bad strategy to me. The only way a company is going to succeed is to continue to grow & the only way to continue to grow is to reinvest. There’s also inflation & all that. Sitting on a big pile of cash isn’t the same as it used to be in the Scrooge McDuck days.
Ah, okay, I’ve heard people use the term “agenty” with me before but didn’t know what it meant (the context didn’t help much and it only came at the point where s/he was cutting off communication).
The context was:
“Silas, since you’re [near X] at [time Y], can do you [task for me] at Y? No trouble if you can’t.”
“[leaves silas a voicemail]: time Y has moved to inconvient time Z.”
“[my reply back with a voicemail]: I can’t make that time, and it would be cheaper at this point anyway to do it youself.”
[still expects me to do task]
[I get a call from someone else who was told I would do task.]
[I attempt to do task to the extent I can anyway.]
[I get condemned on the basis that “Silas, I thought you were agenty.”]
Ah, I now see why you wrote ‘agenty’ instead of ‘agency’. I thought you meant to use the term as a noun, in the sense of ‘capacity for action’. But you were in fact using it as an adjective, to refer to the property that makes certain folks outgoing and willing to do things.
Your usage was probably inspired by Luke’s “The Power of Agency”, which makes use of the term ‘agenty’ (I only discovered this article a few minutes ago, after using the search box to look up that term).
An interesting exchange on HN about “agency”:
And the counterpoint:
So the takeaway seems to be that people will flip from agency to non-agency depending on circumstances. When you’re lucky enough to get encouragement from others while pursuing your own interest, you’ll seem more agent-like.
Seems to me that companies want high-agency employees, but for sufficiently high values, “high-agency employee” is almost an oxymoron. If a person is very-high-agency, why shouldn’t they start their own company and keep all the profit? The mere fact that someone agrees to be your employee suggests that a) they are missing some important skills, and b) they cannot compensate for the missing skills e.g. by paying someone else to do it.
OK, in real life I can imagine reasons why a very-high-agency person would become an employee. Maybe the company has a monopoly, or is willing to pay tons of money. But most probably, the given person is not strategic, and never realized they don’t need a boss or they have some emotional problem with being a boss. Finding and employing such person could be a gold mine.
I’m not sure why being very agenty would necessarily mean that starting your own company should be the best bet. Being an employee lets you reap the benefits of specialization and others having taken all the risks for you (most new companies fail), and can be a very comfortable if you can just find a position that lets you use your skills to the fullest. Then you can focus on doing what you actually enjoy, as opposed to having to spend large amounts of extra energy to running a company.
Yes—absolutely true. ‘Entrepreneurship’ requires a unique skill set, and like every other skill set, comparative advantage and division of labor apply. It’s entirely consistent to be a god of programming, relatively worse at entrepreneurship, and otherwise excellent at achieving your goals (agenty).
...
I’m quite sure finding an ideal position somewhere in an organization that you agree with enough to stick to for the long term, and that motivates you regularly, and that lets you use your full skills, and that you actually enjoy (notice the conjunctive probabilities yet?), and that people would find you the best match, and that you can properly signal being the best match for…
...is nowhere near as simple or easy as that phrasing makes it sound like. I’d bet it actually reduces the chances of success and expected value or costs to around the same order of magnitude as starting your own business, in the current social environment and job market. Granted, some of the above usually correlates, but it’s still hard to find anywhere near a 50% match, let alone a position that one truly loves this much. Of course, I’m assuming the above is relevant and valued by the person being agenty, since they are for me. Different minds and wants might have better odds.
But I agree that being agenty doesn’t imply striking off on your own by any means. As has been repeated over and over again on LW, being rational, especially agenty-instrumentally-rational, implies winning, and if being a small member of a big group lets you achieve more both individually and as a group, clearly that’s what they would/should do.
This seems parallel to the problem E.Y. mentioned in one of the sequences about how a “rationalist” army shouldn’t run off with each person doing their own thing, and should actually be more organized than an army composed of a few smart leaders and a chain of dumb grunts. (I might be slightly misremembering the example, but most people here, especially if they’ve read the sequences, probably know what I’m talking about).
There are plenty of reasons to work at a company even if you are very agenty. I work at a company where any advance I make may be turned in to cash across about 700 million chips a year that we sell. It is economic for my company to have me around doing whatever I feel like as long as, on average, i spit out really tiny improvements in chips every once in a while. A company selling the equivalent of 7 million chips a year would need about 100X as much innovation from me to get the same value from me that the bigger company gets.
In addition to my screwing around however I want being 100X as valauble for my employer than for most other potential employers (including my self), My employer provides me with an insanely excellent toybox. That toybox includes demo implementations of systems with chips that aren’t even commercial yet, complete with the best imaginable tech support for using these demo platforms. It provides me with proprietary data it has gathered from its vast engineering force and from its vast customer connections.
If what I want to be agenty about is fairly narrow, then it is a gigantic win to work as an employee for a big successful company.
“Keeping all the profit” seems like a bad strategy to me. The only way a company is going to succeed is to continue to grow & the only way to continue to grow is to reinvest. There’s also inflation & all that. Sitting on a big pile of cash isn’t the same as it used to be in the Scrooge McDuck days.
I agree. It was supposed to mean “keep all the (profit—reinvestment)”.
Minor correction: it’s ‘agency’, not ‘agenty’.
Ah, okay, I’ve heard people use the term “agenty” with me before but didn’t know what it meant (the context didn’t help much and it only came at the point where s/he was cutting off communication).
The context was:
“Silas, since you’re [near X] at [time Y], can do you [task for me] at Y? No trouble if you can’t.”
“[leaves silas a voicemail]: time Y has moved to inconvient time Z.”
“[my reply back with a voicemail]: I can’t make that time, and it would be cheaper at this point anyway to do it youself.”
[still expects me to do task]
[I get a call from someone else who was told I would do task.]
[I attempt to do task to the extent I can anyway.]
[I get condemned on the basis that “Silas, I thought you were agenty.”]
Sounds like someone has a new buzzword for catch-all criticisms. Best not to take such people seriously.
Fair point, “agenty” is a little idiosyncratic to LW. Edited.
Ah, I now see why you wrote ‘agenty’ instead of ‘agency’. I thought you meant to use the term as a noun, in the sense of ‘capacity for action’. But you were in fact using it as an adjective, to refer to the property that makes certain folks outgoing and willing to do things.
Your usage was probably inspired by Luke’s “The Power of Agency”, which makes use of the term ‘agenty’ (I only discovered this article a few minutes ago, after using the search box to look up that term).