As I work more with someone from the midwest, and being from the mid-atlantic region myself, I'm growing more and more suspicious of the "hard worker" mindset.
What I'm seeing, over and over, is that this drive to "work hard" ends up creating all kinds of "bad" work; difficult/tedious labor intensive decisions rather than efficient and innovative ways that are objectively better.
He gets stuck on a problem, and won't put it down and go pick up the other problems that are easier to complete and provide similar (if slightly reduced) value to the customer. That's his "hard work" ethic at play, and I've found it pretty difficult to break him of that habit.
And this isn't some idle efficiency meddling on my behalf; instead of providing some incremental value on a daily or near-daily basis, he goes completely dark for days or even weeks at a time before surfacing with a "glorious solution" to the problem he's ratholed on. If he had dropped the work at the first sign of trouble (seemingly anathema to a "hard worker"), he would have found other ways to have an impact on our customers. He's substantially less effective because he wants to "work hard".
I do believe that people who value "hard work" generally don't understand this downside, and it's kind of fascinating to me, because of how ingrained this flawed trait is into an entire subset of American culture (being an American myself).
This is quite the hasty generalization. 70 million people live in the American Midwest. Do you really think that your coworker is the first person from the Midwest you’ve worked with? Jack Dorsey and Sam Altman are from St. Louis. John Carmack is from Kansas. Larry Page is from Michigan.
It sounds to me like you don’t like your coworker so you started to make a generalization about millions of people. Pretty silly thing to do, if you ask me.
I didn't say all midwesterners are like my coworker, I said the midwestern trait of "hard worker" that's referenced explicitly in the article has a logical flaw that I'm noticing in my coworker.
Though it does sound like I've struck a nerve! Not my intention, I'm just growing more suspicious of people who highly value "hard work" as a result of this logical issue with this value that I've noticed.
What kind of software do you write that self-describes too difficult problems as taking a few weeks? It’s crazy to me how attention seeking and superficial some software jobs and engineers are these days. Taking a few weeks to learn about the problem domain, research and implement a good solution is not extreme at all.
I probably wouldn’t think too highly of an engineer who drops work at the first sign of trouble and is only interested in going after low hanging fruit, with the rationalization that anything hard isn’t immediately delivering value to the customer and hence not worth it.
I’m also suspicious of people who are intentionally biased at such work. The next time someone is “rat holed”, instead of hating them for it, maybe try and take a break from your 0.5 point task and help out your fellow teammate stuck on a difficult problem?
It's immensely important to involve your users in what you're building, and going multiple weeks without showing a customer what you've built to gather feedback is a great way to build the wrong thing and kill a startup.
It may be fine if you're in a large company, but when your runway is measured in weeks not months, you don't have the luxury of rat holing. Even if you have "months" of runway, it's not generally acceptable to take 1/6th of that to build just one feature, especially if that feature isn't work on as a group, including the customer.
I value engineers that collect feedback every single day from customers, and if a "hard work ethic" means the developer is unwilling to collect iterative feedback, that developer should probably look for a role not on my team.
If you are having engineers talk to customers daily, the value of each of those interactions is likely not very high, or the scope of the work you are doing is transactional in nature. I would be cautious to fall into the trap of thinking the only thing that matters is customer feedback, it doesn't replace product strategy and is often times not the source of innovation. So many products have been built by rumination and coming up with something new, how do you explain Apple, Google, hardware tech companies, etc that release a product once a year? Henry Ford famously said if he had listened to his customers to the fault of everything, he would have delivered to them a faster horse, not a car. Many of the best products are created by solving problems that customers didn't even know they had in new and creative ways.
I would encourage you to keep an open mind and understand that if you want to grow beyond incremental work, you will need engineers that work on longer term projects, and be able to take gambles on work where the idea didn't directly come from a customer. Sure most of them probably won't pan out, but for the few that do, they often times open up entirely new features or product lines that you or your customers didn't even know existed, and are quite rewarding for the team. Every team needs a healthy balance of different kinds of thinkers, it's not something to be angry or resentful about.
This is an issue with hustle culture and not Midwesterners, IMO. I see just as much of this sort of thing, if not more, at my current West Coast employer that mainly hires out of top-20 CS programs
My experience with "hustle" culture is entirely the opposite. "hustle culture" folks are loathe to do any work at all until you can tie to directly back to value, usually for them.
Maybe on the business side, but I've seen lots of undesirable grinding from engineers from all sorts of places, and wanting to prove they have hustle (ie. they are hard workers) is often at the root of it.
What I'm seeing, over and over, is that this drive to "work hard" ends up creating all kinds of "bad" work; difficult/tedious labor intensive decisions rather than efficient and innovative ways that are objectively better.
He gets stuck on a problem, and won't put it down and go pick up the other problems that are easier to complete and provide similar (if slightly reduced) value to the customer. That's his "hard work" ethic at play, and I've found it pretty difficult to break him of that habit.
And this isn't some idle efficiency meddling on my behalf; instead of providing some incremental value on a daily or near-daily basis, he goes completely dark for days or even weeks at a time before surfacing with a "glorious solution" to the problem he's ratholed on. If he had dropped the work at the first sign of trouble (seemingly anathema to a "hard worker"), he would have found other ways to have an impact on our customers. He's substantially less effective because he wants to "work hard".
I do believe that people who value "hard work" generally don't understand this downside, and it's kind of fascinating to me, because of how ingrained this flawed trait is into an entire subset of American culture (being an American myself).