8 ms·

I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet

• amelius 9y ago
  I wonder how many programmers secretly work on their pet projects during work time.
  • tricinel 9y ago
    And I wonder how many companies have benefited from the experience said programmers gained while working on pet projects...
    • jameskegel 9y ago
      I look at it like taking a walk, or a smoker taking a smoke break. That small reprieve, the 15 minutes I take working on a side project, or tinkering with something for fun, rejuvenates me and gets me jazzed about the task at hand when I get back to it. That's a productivity booster, and ultimately a benefit.
      • Tomis02 9y ago
        A rationalization that's likely to get you fired if you were to own up to it publicly. Although it's true, the company would benefit from you feeling excited about the task at hand.
  • ars 9y ago
    Probably a lot, but despite the title, that's not what this article is about.
  • overgard 9y ago
    I would just view pet projects as practice time. Its like getting mad at a musician for playing when the mics are turned off.
    • scaryclam 9y ago
      Well, doing it on work time is more like getting mad at the musician because they're supposed to be in the next room recording a track...
  • eagsalazar2 9y ago
    People are being pretty friendly to this idea but honestly I've known more than one disgruntled developer, on their way out, who basically worked 90% of their time on their pet project, just doing the minimum work to not get fired. I don't think that is what people are advocating for but to answer the original question, I think this happens a lot where it isn't "practice" that the employer benefits from.
  • eagsalazar2 9y ago
    People are being pretty friendly to this idea but honestly I've known more than one disgruntled developer, on their way out, who basically worked 90% of their time on their pet project, just doing the minimum work to not get fired. I don't think that is what people are advocating for but to answer the original question, I think this happens a lot where it isn't "practice" that the employer benefits from.
• haburka 9y ago
  Sounds like an awesome place to work. I love autonomy and the ability to make my own plans and follow through with them. However, if it's a team effort then you definitely need buy in from everyone involved!
• wccrawford 9y ago
  >If you can make a decision and you don’t think it’s going to get you fired, just do it. This advice only applies to people with enough experience. I'm thinking of a certain ex-employee that followed that advice all the time, despite us constantly correcting him. Even on their final day, they was still insisting that they was doing good work. To this day, we are still finding code they wrote or modified that is wrong or broken in horrible ways. Why? Because they didn't have the experience to know the difference between a quick fix and a good fix, and when to employ them. (Hint: The "quick fix" is almost never good enough.) My personal line is a long way away from "Will it get me fired?" and I've got decades of experience. I've always said that programming is all about making assumptions. And I'll frequently send off an email stating some assumption I'm making and start coding based on that assumption. If I get corrected, I can change pretty quickly. But I'm usually right. But just not asking? Forget it. If I'm unsure enough to bother with sending a 2-line email, it's worth asking.
  • sharmanaetor 9y ago
    Isn't the solution to this a good code review process? Even the author of the article states "I either wrote up a plan and shared it beforehand, or I just announced what I’d done after it was completed". This is very similar to asking someone review your code.
    • wccrawford 9y ago
      Again, my comment was about having the experience to make these decisions properly. I'm sure he didn't tell people about every single decision he made, only the ones he needed validation on. However, I noticed that he only told others after it was completed sometimes, which is often far too late. Experience lets you know which ones that's okay for, and which ones it isn't.
  • naasking 9y ago
    > I'm thinking of a certain ex-employee that followed that advice all the time, despite us constantly correcting him. The natural addendum then is, "listen to feedback".
  • 9y ago
• randomf1fan 9y ago
  I think this depends a lot on two people - your immediate manager, and their immediate manager. I've been lucky to have great management, and I've been able to do a lot of stuff that the article talks about, and I work in a stodgy BigCo (old school tech co). I once went to 99Designs and paid $2000 for a designer to redo a certain set of pages on our corporate site. Start to finish, the project took 27 days. This is insanely fast in our context - the usual process would have taken 6-8 months, and at least $100,000. The large agency we work with would have dedicated a team, spun up a project, set up a series of meetings... To be fair, I get the need for process and I totally get the value of working that way, but it's nice to have management that backs you up when you really need to get something done fast. And yes, once the need for those pages was over (conference related), I made sure they were handed over to the right team for long term management, and not just abandoned as orphan pages.
  • toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Well played hacking the system.
• shawnbaden 9y ago
  I can’t help but think having such autonomy is tied to profitability. I’m sure there are plenty of examples where an employee at a profitable company doesn’t have autonomy. But how many have autonomy where there's not profitability?
  • sbuttgereit 9y ago
    Think about a financial trader (stock, commodities, etc) that place big, but risky, bets on their own initiative. The times we know about this sort of thing happening have all been disastrous to the companies they work at. Of course, what we hear about in this regard selects out all but the disasters (nature of news reporting)... and as far as I know were almost certainly not the de facto sanctioned actions of a bottom-up culture. But these cases of autonomy were anything but profitable.
  • ryanbrunner 9y ago
    I think you're close to the mark, but it's less about profitability specifically, and more about growth. A company that is focused on growing as fast as possible, dominating a market, and generating a favourable outcome for investors is only going to get there through big audacious bets in terms of product strategy. If you need to get 3x as large as you are a year from now, no amount of small tweaks for better user experience from individual developers is going to get you there. Instead, you'll find large numbers of developers (or maybe even the entire team at smaller shops) all working towards big, flashy advancements. There's a relationship here with profitability, for sure - companies that are profitable are likely not prioritizing growth over profit, and aren't beholden to investors who want a big exit, but the profitability is more of an indicator than the cause.
• d--b 9y ago
  His boss trusts him enough to let him take his own decisions, good for him! It's definitely not great advice for every employee, or for every company though... I mean, it's great to be able to discuss things with your boss and colleagues and take collegial decisions... I don't understand the idea behind the post...
  • nstart 9y ago
    From the perspective of basecamp/37 signals, they've made it a point to do things which most people say "wouldn't work". And they do it and prove that it is possible. A lot of objections one might have to their choices are usually deeply rooted in other organizational dysfunctionalities. Other companies for example may choose to hire weaker employees due to the urgency to get people sooner. Sooner is more important than correct and then you have employees you can't trust to be autonomous. Or you put people in managerial positions whose purpose is to delegate, or approve tasks as part of their monitoring duties. This goes against autonomy entirely. Basecamp for example doesn't have any real managers. While you are right that this won't work for many larger established companies, from the perspective of people starting out (and there are a lot of them), these posts serve a purpose of raising a middle finger to the established norms of running a business. There's a purpose built around tearing down bad decisions that lead to other bad decisions that eventually lead to ineffective teams. And that's the idea behind this post.... Probably :)
  • endlessvoid94 9y ago
    It's marketing.
• RUG3Y 9y ago
  This only works when you have the hiring process dialed in and you're selecting the right candidates to work from you.
  • Joeri 9y ago
    Exactly. I once had the conversation about bottom-up vs top-down decision making with my CEO, and his point was essentially that the people we've hired can't be trusted with that level of responsibility. For me this was proof that our hiring process needed to improve, for him it was proof that our supervision process needed to improve. There's a great book about companies run through bottom-up decision making called Reinventing Organizations. My take away was that bottom up can work at any scale, but it requires true believers at the top who are constantly working hard at making themselves unnecessary. Once the true believers walk out organizations naturally revert to hierarchical decision-making.
    • mywacaday 9y ago
      The best advice I received from an old manager when I moved into management was that if I wanted to achieve anything my primary goal was to make myself and my position redundant. Hiring and empowering the right people is the only way to achieve this, its not easy but its definitely worth it. When you can truly trust the people you are responsible for its a different game.
    • frankc 9y ago
      On the other hand, if you can make an organization work with a lower grade of employees, you will scale much more easily and cheaply. Maybe its a pipe dream to accomplish this but I think it's probably somewhere in between. At the scale of a multinational corporation with hundreds of thousands of employees, it surely comes into play more.
    • RUG3Y 9y ago
      I'm a true believer in bottom up decision making. That said, when I was in the USMC, I had to lead some Marines that I would consider incapable of making even the most basic decisions on their own. It's unfortunate but that's reason the military must have such a rigid hierarchy. If I'd been able to pick only the best Marines for my team, we'd have been able to allow more bottom up decision making. I've experienced it on some teams, others not so much.
• jdc0589 9y ago
  Assuming the people doing this have experienced and are trustworthy, this is honestly what companies need in a limited capacity, even if they don't think they need it. Over the course of my relatively short career so far (7 years?), almost every single "big win" has been because something was bugging the crap out of me, and I just decided to do something about it. The key is to do this kind of autonomous stuff while still delivering things people expect you to do, unless/until your peers and management are clear on the value you bring just doing stuff on your own all the time.
  • xxSparkleSxx 9y ago
    Also, the two things that push most people towards entrepreneurship is money and autonomy in their work. If you can give employees these things, they will stick around longer.
• ryandrake 9y ago
  In most companies I've worked, approval process is the scar tissue of years of mistakes. In every case where you need to ask for approval to do something, you can probably trace back in the company's history and find the past mistake that some goofball made that necessitated getting approval to do something like that. Someone got us sued. Someone lost us some money. We need to take some kind of corrective action and the easiest solution is to simply require oversight next time. A place where you can "do whatever you want" strikes me as a place with a very short history of mistakes.
  • devmunchies 9y ago
    My company has been getting a lot of talent from Amazon and Microsoft, so we are getting their "scar tissue" without any of the context, jacking up our culture. I have to do a detailed doc and plan for everything. It wouldn't be a big deal but we've gone from 700 to 1500 employees in just 2 years, so its been fast change.
    • xemdetia 9y ago
      I find it almost required to try and jolt these people out of it if they move between organizations. There is definitely a value to procedure but it often comes up that the underlying assumptions have moved as well. You have to encourage people to reevaluate eventually or the third or four generation handling the bureaucracy does not understand the why and does the same thing covered by the first procedure on some grand new thing that looks about the same.
      • louithethrid 9y ago
        If you have a floorplan, and get to draft a process, you can use that to draw turtlegraphics with emails.
    • DonbunEf7 9y ago
      I just left a place where nobody writes design documentation. I requested that several teams write documentation for their tasks and they refused. As your company grows from small-sized to medium-sized, your technical processes need to grow, too.
• jrm2k6 9y ago
  This wouldn't work for 90% of companies. You cannot do whatever you want in a PCI environment, or a HIPAA compliant environment. It also boils down to your managers, product managers etc.. Do they micromanage? Is your focus shifting all the time because new high priorities tasks are coming your way? If so, I would never feel confident in doing whatever I want, as I know I wouldn't be able to put 100% of my focus on it, and probably forget something important that could screw a lot of things up.
• caseymarquis 9y ago
  Their company has good cash flow and a small number of very talented employees. I don't feel like this paradigm is easily applied to organizations that either can't afford their level of talent or have thousands of employees.