The Dangers of Apathy

There is a silent killer stalking the software industry: apathy. Apathy can severely impair both individual employees and whole teams. It is infectious and can turn once great companies into mediocre shells or even paralyze them completely. And the worst part is that it is often seen as normal and inevitable.

What is Apathy?

The Cambridge Dictionary defines apathy as “behaviour that shows no interest or energy and shows that someone is unwilling to take action, especially over something important” which is too broad of a definition for this discussion. Instead, this blog post will use the following definition: Employees are suffering from apathy if they don’t care about the results of their work unless their performance is directly being measured based on them.

Excellent employees are almost always intrinsically motivated. They will try to find the best solution for a coding problem, customer ticket, UI design, or whatever else they are currently working on, even if nobody but them cares. This drive is missing in apathetic employees. They can still produce acceptable results, but somebody would need to give them very specific acceptance criteria that cover everything their non-apathetic peers keep in mind when doing their work to get the same level of quality. Since this is not realistic, apathetic employees will usually produce worse results compared to their unafflicted co-workers.

Since they are not intrinsically motivated, apathetic employees typically don’t think about their work process and what they would need to do to improve it (unless someone would tell them to do it, but this is very rare). As a result, apathetic employees typically don’t show improvements over time, which leads to them falling behind the non-apathetic employees. Eventually, this can create vast gulfs of productivity inside a team.

At first, apathy is a problem of the individual employee, but once other members of a team become affected, the entire team is in danger. Apathetic teams will see their productivity stagnate or even decline over time since they cannot compensate for losses of productivity caused by external factors. This is a massive problem since lower productivity makes it much more difficult to reduce technical debt and to achieve the working conditions needed for not having to choose between software quality and fast feature delivery. This situation can be very difficult to break out of once apathy has spread far enough in a team.

How common is apathy? Since we cannot peer into the hearts and minds of employees, hard data is difficult to find. However, there are indicators, and they are not looking good. For example, Tom DeMarco and Timothy R. Lister mention in their excellent book Peopleware that employees in software development projects typically only spend 5% of their time attending trainings, investigating new methods, or doing other things that can improve long-term productivity. DeMarco and Lister also report that the average developer does not own a single book on software engineering and has also never read one. This data indicates a large portion of apathetic employees in the workforce, since intrinsically motivated employees spend considerable amounts of time with the activities DeMarco and Lister were hard-pressed to find and most certainly read books – or blogs – about software engineering.

Before we go any further, I want to stress that raising awareness on apathy is not a call for perfectionism. Employees should not start feeling responsible for things outside of their control or obsess about individual factors of their work at the cost of the whole. Caring about results implies making judgment calls when something is “good enough” and compromises are not a sign of apathy (in fact, apathetic employees wouldn’t even think about what is good enough but just blindly do what they are told).

I also want to point out that employees do not owe intrinsic motivation to their employer. If anything, they owe it to themselves, since they not only will become better at their job but also will have a much better time doing it. Over time, it might even get them that promotion they have always eyed.

Causes of Apathy

There can be many causes of apathy. A common source can be personal problems like health issues, relationship troubles, or personal tragedies. We will call this type of apathy personal apathy. Personal apathy is serious but also individual and should hopefully not affect many employees at the same time, which reduces the risk for infection.

Apathy can also be caused by the work itself. Let’s call this cultural apathy. Cultural apathy means that motivated employees slowly get the enthusiasm sucked out of them by the work environment. This is the worst kind of apathy since it is highly infectious. Unchecked cultural apathy is a surefire way to hamstring an entire organization.

Cultural apathy is usually caused accidentally. Apathy grows when people feel that their work does not matter. Whether this impression is correct or not is irrelevant; if employees feel that the higher-ups do not care about the quality of the product or some other thing that is dear to their hearts, apathy will soon set in.

The quickest way to cause cultural apathy is by rejecting or suppressing ideas raised by employees. If the team comes up with some idea on how to improve the product or their way of working, only to get stonewalled by their boss, motivation will invariably suffer. Once this has happened a couple of times, weary acceptance will set in and apathy will reign. Sometimes organizations even react hostile to the suggestion of changing something. If this happens, apathy becomes a defense mechanism to avoid punishment by the higher-ups, and only the bravest employees will resist it.

Finally, there is wrong job apathy. Some employees have a job that isn’t right for them anymore and are just keeping it out of convenience or because they are scared to try something new. Naturally, they are only doing the bare minimum and aren’t interested in long-term success.

Leaders & Apathy

Leaders can also be afflicted by apathy, which is especially dangerous since all eyes are on them. If they appear disinterested, their subordinates will notice and feel disheartened if they still care about their work. This makes leader apathy highly infectious.

Development managers are particularly at risk since they are expected to manage their teams, to help their boss, and to keep up with their management peers. This can easily become overwhelming, and once they start cutting corners, they can quickly appear apathetic to others.

Apathy & the Developer Skill Matrix

Long-term readers of this blog might be wondering how apathy affects the different types of developers outlined in the developer skill matrix. Unsurprisingly, stars are almost never apathetic; their high-quality output simply would not be possible if they were not intrinsically motivated. Apathy might have started to creep in, and they might be coasting on their previous results, but this is very rare. By contrast, plants are almost certainly apathetic, especially if they have been in this quadrant for a year or longer without signs of improvement.

Glaciers usually care too much about quality to be apathetic but might have the wrong definition of success. They obviously do not care about fast results or efficient ways of working, which is a problem in most software engineering jobs.

Like the stars, volcanoes are almost never apathetic. They are driven to code, even if no one appreciates their breakneck speed. Indeed, their high drive is what makes volcanoes so dangerous. They want to be fast but don’t care about quality or maintainability, which prevents long-term success and shows intrinsic motivation on its own is not enough to achieve excellence.

Overcoming Apathy

Apathy can only be cured by removing its cause. If you suffer from personal apathy, focus on your personal life first. Motivation at work will come back once your private affairs have settled down.

For cultural apathy, try fixing small things at work that bother you. It is common that employees try to solve the big problems – maybe some other team is slowing you down or the Scrum process has some glaring faults everyone else ignores – which almost always need buy-in from others. These changes usually take a long time and fail more often than not.

This can be very frustrating; however, it is rare that developers are so disempowered that they cannot change anything. Focus on what you can improve and do this first; over time you can gain a lot of ground this way. If you need buy-in from other people, try making it easy for them by only mentioning the problem when you already have a solution in mind. Avoid complaining about things that you cannot change or where you don’t have an actionable solution yet. While it can be cathartic to vent, doing this too often will make people label you as a complainer and ignore what you say.

If the culture of your company is so apathetic and top-down that you cannot change anything, do yourself a favor and leave. The same is true if you secretly want a different kind of career and suffer from wrong job apathy; you are doing nobody a favor if you stick to a job you don’t really want.

Finally, refrain from trying to fix the apathy of others. It is unlikely to work and could get you into serious trouble. You can only cure yourself and try to improve the culture around you. Similarly, leaders cannot micromanage apathy out of employees since intrinsic motivation by definition cannot be created by outside factors. They should instead focus on breaking cultural apathy, which is easier for them than for their subordinates.

Conclusion

Apathy might seem like a natural response to the difficulties of the corporate world, but this is an illusion. It does not offer a solution to a problem but rather numbness to it, the acceptance of it as normal, and the removal of any expectation otherwise. This may help in the moment but is devastating for the long-term success of an individual employee and of the company as a whole.

We all need to take steps to prevent and overcome apathy so we can continue to improve our way of working and get better results in the future. Leaders have to be especially mindful of it and make sure they do not accidentally create or perpetuate cultural apathy.

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