Jargon is the refuge of the elitist, but I will stoop to it - to hide behind a word, my ideas. Performance Inversion is that dark fate that awaits a "Can Do" person in the hands of an unscrupulous [1] taskmaster. Something dark and deadly which destroys your work ethic and pushes you ever closer to a burn out, while still under-utilizing your real talents. In relatively mild quantities, the problem solves itself, thanks to that great human ability to forget. But for some more unfortunate souls, it throws them into a bottomless pit of effort, in a spiral of work and more work.
Performance: You are stepping into an existing team, filling someone else's boots. Invariably, your first few weeks will be typical bootcamp. You are pushed to deliver and most of us, do deliver in that initial phase putting in extra effort in return for the manager's confidence. But having gained the confidence and trust, the work cycle settles down into a more sustainable load, by mutual consent from both parties.
Distribution: Not everybody in the team works at the same levels of productivity. There are a few who have bursts of extreme results, while some of the more settled folks deliver a constant, steady stream of work. Most managers would like a decent mixture, so they have enough afterburner fuel in the former while the latter keeps chugging. Work comes in and the work load sort of averages out for everyone, a few extra bits given & taken, in general everyone ending up with their fair share - no more, no less.
"Can Do" XPloited: The former category of "in reserve" people are those who are more commonly known as "Can Do" people. Nobody sane (or at least has heard of "Mythical Man Month") will dare to plan for these people to work at full throttle. But a few still break this cardinal principle to keep the wolf off the door, for a few months more. After all, what good are developer resources, if not for working.
'Tis an act of betrayal, worthy of Macbeth and more. But unlike the lady of the play, the blood seems to wash right off the hands - maybe she should've tried the sweat and tears of engineers, instead of perfumes from arabia. Anyway, if someone had yelled out "abort mission!" at that point, I'd shake them by the hand and buy them lunch. For otherwise they have to be eternal optimists who never learn (incompetent) or of the feudal weasel family, whose concern for the serfs is legendary - either way, let them expense lunch.
Blame Spread Thick: Having been told to do the impossible, the developer has a faint idea that he/she is going to be pushed to the very limits of his/her ability. In some sense, the "Can Do" people enjoy that experience. But then something goes wrong, some dependency fails to deliver, the whole plan's a pile of toilet paper as far as the project's concerned. And a landslide of backlogs land on the developer's shoulder and the difficult task becomes mission impossible (where work should've been a walk in the park instead). To compound insult to injury, he/she is called in by senior management to explain the delays. Watching the man responsible for the mess (in your opinion) sit on the other side of the table with a reproachful look, doubting your commitment, is too much for anyone with a straight backbone to bear.
Character Shows: But you still eat crow, swallow the remnants of your self-respect and buckle down. You work insane hours, on weekends, skip meals, eat junk food and work work work. By an amazing coincidence, you manage to drag the entire module back on schedule, mainly by doing the dependencies yourself and doing QA's job when you're done coding. Having got your workload to a manageable level, you wait for the release, the associated kudos and a general pat in the back.
Inversion: And when you think it can't get any worse, it does. So the boss shows up at your cube, and says "Ummm,yeah ... $_nameless_ is quite behind schedule. You're the only one ahead of your tasks, so I'm moving a bit of work off to you". Not only are you not getting credit for finishing your work, but you are getting more work just because you keep doing it. All this while, $_nameless_ has been shirking work, lazing about in the food court and generally enjoying life. So, faced with the basic injustice of the situation and remembering the last lecture about "communication", you walk back up to your boss's office and enunciate - "No, I'm not doing that". Boss takes offense to your "Not my job" reply and lectures for half-hour on team work and "one for all, all for one" philosophy.
Final Straw: For an external observer (such as middle management), in a matter of months, you've gone from being a "Can Do" whiz kid to becoming a whiner who says "No" to work. They just can't comprehend why or how of the scenario and decide to take strong steps to discourage this behavior. In response to your glowing achievements on your self appraisal, they write out a "negative attitude to work" and give you an average hike. Your complaints to HR fall on deaf ears, used to listening to employees bitching about pay, quote salary parity to ignore you. Of course, the boss probably got a good hike for managing with (*sic*) employees like you. The inversion discontent spiral is now complete.
In a few short steps, one person has gone from being an excellent employee to someone who's polishing up their resumes. But the really sad part is that as long as the real offender is not punished, this developer is only one among a long line of people whose work ethic will be destroyed totally by mismanagement. There are a few other branches and variants to the above scenario, some worse, some better, but they all end up in the same gutter anyway.
All this only goes on to prove why I think of management as a dark art
of sorts. It requires a lot of finesse and panache to pull it off,
rather than mere authority behind you.
You can't convert any average joe from a tech lead into a
manager, at least not into a good one. There is a certain
Je ne sais quoi which sets apart the good ones from
the average ones. So if you have a good manager, you don't know
what you're missing 
And for the record - I only observe, I don't interfere.
[1] - Hanlon's Razor:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny.
-- Frank Hubbard
posted at: 17:42 | path: /observations | permalink |