7 ms·

This is why companies need to be "results driven" vs "face-time driven". "What did you deliver this week? This month? This quarter?", should be the only releva

This is why companies need to be "results driven" vs "face-time driven". "What did you deliver this week? This month? This quarter?", should be the only relevant question in the workplace, managers included.

jrcii 10y ago
I always wonder what percentage of corporate America's time is spent looking busy or alt-tabbing between a spreadsheet and solitaire when the boss walks by. If you could quantify it I bet the amount of waste is staggering.
- ashark 10y ago
  Protip: plain text Project Gutenberg books in quarter-screen Tmux panes (under `less`, or your preferred command line text reading tool) looks almost like real work from all but the closest inspection. Less of a waste of time that Facebook/HN/Solitaire/whatever. Fortunately I've only ever worked one place where that was super-useful, and only briefly. Got three novels read while also completing my work and doing a bunch of other work that I probably didn't need to, in ~2 months' time.
  - executesorder66 10y ago
    Excellent idea. Time to catch up on my backlog of old phrack and 2600 articles.
- superuser2 10y ago
  Except employers can't capture the value of eliminating that waste, because people who can actually do 40 hours of head-down intellectual work in a 40-hour workday are unicorns. It's employees who get screwed by this - if their managers are too concerned about waste, they can't do anything like read a book or go for a walk, so they're on Facebook and Reddit, which are much less effective as breaks from focused work.
  - cmdrfred 10y ago
    The "10X" developer might just be a reasonably competent guy who can focus for 8 hours straight.
adrianN 10y ago
That doesn't matter. It will just lead to an increase in workload until you don't manage to finish all your tasks.
- ashark 10y ago
  Yeah, I don't get the "results-based workplace so you can go home a lot and stuff LOL who needs a vacation policy!" because businesses that manage to pack in more results will outcompete those who can't, until the effect is at least as bad as a traditional 9-5 (haha, right, 8-6) with a vacation policy. It's at best a very vulnerable form of rents destined to be competed out of existence (if it's actually more efficient that more traditional styles of working), assuming it's not simply fiction to begin with.
  - a_small_island 10y ago
    I've read your response a few times and still am unclear as to what you're saying.
    - ashark 10y ago
      If results-based work actually gains employees any extra free time, companies that find a way to fit more work into that time (say, by assigning more tasks) will outcompete those that do not. Goodbye, glorious results-based-work free time. Either that or results-based work doesn't actually help us get things done faster than traditional work (_i.e._ it's snake oil) and at best it'll limp along providing little benefit to anyone but the people selling books about it. So either it will fail/stagnate because it doesn't improve productivity, or it will become the new norm and we'll just have enough results expected of us that the effect on workers is at best indistinguishable from traditional work (businesses that fail to fill up the free time with more work will, generally, lose to those that do)
      - Nadya 10y ago
        If this were entirely true, businesses wouldn't be open from 9am-5pm but would have three 8-hour shifts throughout the day and run 24/7 and simply outcompete companies that are only open 9-5. The "best" companies would have even longer shifts and more complex schedules, with fewer employees. 9-5 isn't the 'optimal'. It's simply what is 'most common' for a diurnal society. Nobody is driving around town looking to get a hair cut at 3am and staring at an IDE from 1pm-5pm trying to solve a bug isn't making you any more efficient than thinking about the problem while cooking an early dinner. Humans do suffer fatigue - both mental and physical - and proper lengths of rest helps both kinds. I posit that happier employees are more likely to trend their work/life balance in favor of work if they enjoy their work and enjoy their company. Unhappy employees will skirt by on the bare minimum required knowing that hiring/training a new employee isn't worth the cost of firing them.
brebla 10y ago
I kinda think it is with an over-the-top deliverable being physical presence. Being here is only the baseline. Executing on strategy is what keeps the paychecks rolling in.
tbrownaw 10y ago
A non-trivial part of my job is ansering questions that co-workers run into while trying to do their jobs. This would become far less efficient if we didn't all keep mostly the same hours.
- mhurron 10y ago
  Good thing you don't work in a globally distributed company, nothing could get done. Maybe you should look into technologies like email that allows people to send messages that can be responded to when the person has the time.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    Adding a 12-hour round-trip to any question doesn't seem like a good alternative. Isn't it a given that very few companies actually are hiring the top 0.01%? Unless you really need the absolute world best, you're probably going to do fine hiring local people who can work together closely.
    - ethbro 10y ago
      I've found that adding {floor} round-trip to any questions someone could have figured out by reading the first result on a search to be excellent for the productivity of all involved.
      - snowwrestler 10y ago
        Ok but that still leaves all the questions that can't be answered with the first result of a search.
        ethbro 10y ago
        Absolutely, I'm not saying that the best use of my time for my clients isn't asking me questions... sometimes. There's a set of stuff that I can answer in 2 minutes that might take someone an hour poring through code to figure out.
whack 10y ago
> "What did you deliver this week? This month? This quarter?", should be the only relevant question in the workplace, managers included. Unfortunately, there's another camp that (with credible arguments) claims that task-estimates are almost always meaningless. If you buy into that camp, and if someone under-delivers, it doesn't tell you anything about whether or not they are performing poorly. They could simply be the victim of an overly optimistic task-estimate. As a manager, what are you going to do then? This is pretty much the double-edged-sword in the NoEstimates movement. Either you judge people purely on the basis of results, and end up punishing people who are victims of poor task estimates. Or you don't judge people at all, and watch as people take advantage of the situation to slack off as much as they want. Or you judge them on the basis of hours-spent-at-work, which will then induce the same complaints we see in this thread.
- lj3 10y ago
  What if you judge a team based on the revenue it brought in vs the cost of the employees in the team? Since profit is the real measure of success, it makes sense to use that as the metric. Measuring individual contributions is problematic, no matter the system you use. Measuring based on the entire team is much easier.
  - bdavisx 10y ago
    That won't work for all jobs - I work in the actuarial department for a (very) large insurance company. We can't directly affect profit. You could argue for whether or not our projections are correct, but they can be affected by many things out of our control. I'm guessing that's true for a lot of areas in a large company. What about the department that takes care of buildings or HR for example?
  - Joof 10y ago
    Some projects aren't directly profitable, but are important and must be done. Infosec for example. Using this metric, important jobs may not get done.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > What if you judge a team based on the revenue it brought in vs the cost of the employees in the team? That can still be hard to accurately measure. You can measure, of course, how much revenue was attributed to sales of the product developed by the team, but how much of that is attributable to the team's work and how much is attributable to company-wide marketing and how much is due to company image developed by public experience with products developed by other teams is...not always readily obvious. (And, of course, then you have teams that aren't devoted to particular products or which provide company-wide services supporting product teams, but not directly generating revenue -- unless, of course, you organize your company so that accounting, HR, marketing, etc., are all broken up and product-team specific.) Of course, if you measure by the entire company a lot of that uncertainty gets washed out.

jrcii 10y ago

I always wonder what percentage of corporate America's time is spent looking busy or alt-tabbing between a spreadsheet and solitaire when the boss walks by. If you could quantify it I bet the amount of waste is staggering.

ashark 10y ago
Protip: plain text Project Gutenberg books in quarter-screen Tmux panes (under `less`, or your preferred command line text reading tool) looks almost like real work from all but the closest inspection. Less of a waste of time that Facebook/HN/Solitaire/whatever. Fortunately I've only ever worked one place where that was super-useful, and only briefly. Got three novels read while also completing my work and doing a bunch of other work that I probably didn't need to, in ~2 months' time.
- executesorder66 10y ago
  Excellent idea. Time to catch up on my backlog of old phrack and 2600 articles.
superuser2 10y ago
Except employers can't capture the value of eliminating that waste, because people who can actually do 40 hours of head-down intellectual work in a 40-hour workday are unicorns. It's employees who get screwed by this - if their managers are too concerned about waste, they can't do anything like read a book or go for a walk, so they're on Facebook and Reddit, which are much less effective as breaks from focused work.
- cmdrfred 10y ago
  The "10X" developer might just be a reasonably competent guy who can focus for 8 hours straight.

adrianN 10y ago

That doesn't matter. It will just lead to an increase in workload until you don't manage to finish all your tasks.

ashark 10y ago
Yeah, I don't get the "results-based workplace so you can go home a lot and stuff LOL who needs a vacation policy!" because businesses that manage to pack in more results will outcompete those who can't, until the effect is at least as bad as a traditional 9-5 (haha, right, 8-6) with a vacation policy. It's at best a very vulnerable form of rents destined to be competed out of existence (if it's actually more efficient that more traditional styles of working), assuming it's not simply fiction to begin with.
- a_small_island 10y ago
  I've read your response a few times and still am unclear as to what you're saying.
  - ashark 10y ago
    If results-based work actually gains employees any extra free time, companies that find a way to fit more work into that time (say, by assigning more tasks) will outcompete those that do not. Goodbye, glorious results-based-work free time. Either that or results-based work doesn't actually help us get things done faster than traditional work (_i.e._ it's snake oil) and at best it'll limp along providing little benefit to anyone but the people selling books about it. So either it will fail/stagnate because it doesn't improve productivity, or it will become the new norm and we'll just have enough results expected of us that the effect on workers is at best indistinguishable from traditional work (businesses that fail to fill up the free time with more work will, generally, lose to those that do)
    - Nadya 10y ago
      If this were entirely true, businesses wouldn't be open from 9am-5pm but would have three 8-hour shifts throughout the day and run 24/7 and simply outcompete companies that are only open 9-5. The "best" companies would have even longer shifts and more complex schedules, with fewer employees. 9-5 isn't the 'optimal'. It's simply what is 'most common' for a diurnal society. Nobody is driving around town looking to get a hair cut at 3am and staring at an IDE from 1pm-5pm trying to solve a bug isn't making you any more efficient than thinking about the problem while cooking an early dinner. Humans do suffer fatigue - both mental and physical - and proper lengths of rest helps both kinds. I posit that happier employees are more likely to trend their work/life balance in favor of work if they enjoy their work and enjoy their company. Unhappy employees will skirt by on the bare minimum required knowing that hiring/training a new employee isn't worth the cost of firing them.

brebla 10y ago

I kinda think it is with an over-the-top deliverable being physical presence. Being here is only the baseline. Executing on strategy is what keeps the paychecks rolling in.

tbrownaw 10y ago

A non-trivial part of my job is ansering questions that co-workers run into while trying to do their jobs. This would become far less efficient if we didn't all keep mostly the same hours.

mhurron 10y ago
Good thing you don't work in a globally distributed company, nothing could get done. Maybe you should look into technologies like email that allows people to send messages that can be responded to when the person has the time.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  Adding a 12-hour round-trip to any question doesn't seem like a good alternative. Isn't it a given that very few companies actually are hiring the top 0.01%? Unless you really need the absolute world best, you're probably going to do fine hiring local people who can work together closely.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    I've found that adding {floor} round-trip to any questions someone could have figured out by reading the first result on a search to be excellent for the productivity of all involved.
    - snowwrestler 10y ago
      Ok but that still leaves all the questions that can't be answered with the first result of a search.
      - ethbro 10y ago
        Absolutely, I'm not saying that the best use of my time for my clients isn't asking me questions... sometimes. There's a set of stuff that I can answer in 2 minutes that might take someone an hour poring through code to figure out.

whack 10y ago

> "What did you deliver this week? This month? This quarter?", should be the only relevant question in the workplace, managers included. Unfortunately, there's another camp that (with credible arguments) claims that task-estimates are almost always meaningless. If you buy into that camp, and if someone under-delivers, it doesn't tell you anything about whether or not they are performing poorly. They could simply be the victim of an overly optimistic task-estimate. As a manager, what are you going to do then? This is pretty much the double-edged-sword in the NoEstimates movement. Either you judge people purely on the basis of results, and end up punishing people who are victims of poor task estimates. Or you don't judge people at all, and watch as people take advantage of the situation to slack off as much as they want. Or you judge them on the basis of hours-spent-at-work, which will then induce the same complaints we see in this thread.

lj3 10y ago
What if you judge a team based on the revenue it brought in vs the cost of the employees in the team? Since profit is the real measure of success, it makes sense to use that as the metric. Measuring individual contributions is problematic, no matter the system you use. Measuring based on the entire team is much easier.
- bdavisx 10y ago
  That won't work for all jobs - I work in the actuarial department for a (very) large insurance company. We can't directly affect profit. You could argue for whether or not our projections are correct, but they can be affected by many things out of our control. I'm guessing that's true for a lot of areas in a large company. What about the department that takes care of buildings or HR for example?
- Joof 10y ago
  Some projects aren't directly profitable, but are important and must be done. Infosec for example. Using this metric, important jobs may not get done.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > What if you judge a team based on the revenue it brought in vs the cost of the employees in the team? That can still be hard to accurately measure. You can measure, of course, how much revenue was attributed to sales of the product developed by the team, but how much of that is attributable to the team's work and how much is attributable to company-wide marketing and how much is due to company image developed by public experience with products developed by other teams is...not always readily obvious. (And, of course, then you have teams that aren't devoted to particular products or which provide company-wide services supporting product teams, but not directly generating revenue -- unless, of course, you organize your company so that accounting, HR, marketing, etc., are all broken up and product-team specific.) Of course, if you measure by the entire company a lot of that uncertainty gets washed out.