4 ms·

I don't work there, but it seems pretty clear to me. Morning slack message (which isn't the same thing as a standup): "Hey, I'm going to do X,Y,Z today but I'm

I don't work there, but it seems pretty clear to me. Morning slack message (which isn't the same thing as a standup): "Hey, I'm going to do X,Y,Z today but I'm also going to run a few errands after lunch so I'll be MIA from 12-2 CET but available after until 6 CET". "Work when you want" doesn't have to mean "I have no idea when you'll be available today".

verelo 8y ago
> "Work when you want" doesn't have to mean "I have no idea when you'll be available today". People confuse the two all the time! Flexibility and reliability have to go hand in hand, if you cannot be reliable when left unsupervised, you need to expect I cannot leave you unsupervised. On the plus side, when people are given this explanation they often self manage into a good routine.
- 1337biz 8y ago
  But this is the problem. The current mindset is - as long as you are here, I trust you to do something productive. The work-when-you-want is easily leading to a - show me the evidence on why I should trust you to have done something productive today. It forces someone to just push for quick wins and avoid anything that is not leading to directly accountible results.
  - wgerard 8y ago
    You should really know what you're doing all day. If you can't even summarize what you were doing all day, that sounds like a bad thing. The evidence is your story about what you actually did. Here's a perfectly great update that didn't result in a quick win: "I spent all day debugging that null pointer issue like we discussed. I thought maybe it was because the API was sending nulls across, but I looked at the logs and couldn't find any instance of that happening. I thought maybe it was a type coercion issue too, but I wrote a few tests to rule that out and it turned out not to be the case. Then I remembered reading about a memory corruption issue that sometimes happens in our runtime version, so I spent the rest of the day reading about the situations where that occurs and figuring out if it applies to us, but didn't get enough time to finish that up completely."
    - 1337biz 8y ago
      That's the thing - this works only when you have clearly task - solution based jobs. But when it is more creative and abstract this is not feasable.
      - wool_gather 8y ago
        You should still be able to recount what you did, past tense. "This morning I sketched out three different possibilities for the new client check-in service. First draft of the spec is in progress, I expect to send it over to Jen and Andy tomorrow for their feedback." "I made a dozen or so mockups for the new landing page. I have a couple more ideas I want to try out tomorrow, then I'll figure out what the best four or five are and show them to the team." "Since we don't have any feature work pending right now, I've been experimenting on a branch with using $TOOL to do $THING better. It looks good because $X, although $Y might be a problem." "We talked a while ago about doing $THING with the user's documents so they can $WHATEVER more easily, and I wasn't sure it was even possible. I've been looking into that today. It looks like there might be a way, so I'm continuing to investigate." "We've wanted to replace $FRAMEWORK for a while now. I've identified the parts of it that we actually use, and I'm putting together a plan for what we can swap in and/or get rid of. It looks like, since we made $CHANGE last month, we can actually do most of it ourselves without much trouble."
        jodrellblank 8y ago
        That sure sounds like a day of productive work or a day of doing nothing being covered over with some made up fluff. One or the other.
        ska 8y ago
        It doesn't really matter which. Look, if I'm leading a group like this, I'm going to have an idea of what your output is like in an average sense, both compared to your historical output and the group as a whole. If you blow off a day it's not really going to matter. (although I'd rather you tell me you needed to blow off a day than try and hide it, sure). However, if you blow of enough days we're going to have a conversation about how your performance is dropping, and why, and discuss your ideas about how to turn that around. If it doesn't, we'll have another conversation, and so on. Eventually if none of this works we'll have a different conversation (about why you are leaving). This doesn't actually have anything to do with reviewing daily/weekly reports. Those are for different things.
  - matwood 8y ago
    > as long as you are here, I trust you to do something productive. And this is a terrible mindset. > The work-when-you-want is easily leading to a - show me the evidence on why I should trust you to have done something productive today. No, start from the stand point of trust. > It forces someone to just push for quick wins and avoid anything that is not leading to directly accountible results. It does force someone to think about results, but not necessarily quick. Even a result that takes months, has many steps along the way that can be communicated.
tywheatley 8y ago
this seems only one degree removed from a 9-5. "work when you want" to me requires more than that. multiply your simple example to 2-4x a week, xN employees, that's a lot of noise

verelo 8y ago

> "Work when you want" doesn't have to mean "I have no idea when you'll be available today". People confuse the two all the time! Flexibility and reliability have to go hand in hand, if you cannot be reliable when left unsupervised, you need to expect I cannot leave you unsupervised. On the plus side, when people are given this explanation they often self manage into a good routine.

1337biz 8y ago
But this is the problem. The current mindset is - as long as you are here, I trust you to do something productive. The work-when-you-want is easily leading to a - show me the evidence on why I should trust you to have done something productive today. It forces someone to just push for quick wins and avoid anything that is not leading to directly accountible results.
- wgerard 8y ago
  You should really know what you're doing all day. If you can't even summarize what you were doing all day, that sounds like a bad thing. The evidence is your story about what you actually did. Here's a perfectly great update that didn't result in a quick win: "I spent all day debugging that null pointer issue like we discussed. I thought maybe it was because the API was sending nulls across, but I looked at the logs and couldn't find any instance of that happening. I thought maybe it was a type coercion issue too, but I wrote a few tests to rule that out and it turned out not to be the case. Then I remembered reading about a memory corruption issue that sometimes happens in our runtime version, so I spent the rest of the day reading about the situations where that occurs and figuring out if it applies to us, but didn't get enough time to finish that up completely."
  - 1337biz 8y ago
    That's the thing - this works only when you have clearly task - solution based jobs. But when it is more creative and abstract this is not feasable.
    - wool_gather 8y ago
      You should still be able to recount what you did, past tense. "This morning I sketched out three different possibilities for the new client check-in service. First draft of the spec is in progress, I expect to send it over to Jen and Andy tomorrow for their feedback." "I made a dozen or so mockups for the new landing page. I have a couple more ideas I want to try out tomorrow, then I'll figure out what the best four or five are and show them to the team." "Since we don't have any feature work pending right now, I've been experimenting on a branch with using $TOOL to do $THING better. It looks good because $X, although $Y might be a problem." "We talked a while ago about doing $THING with the user's documents so they can $WHATEVER more easily, and I wasn't sure it was even possible. I've been looking into that today. It looks like there might be a way, so I'm continuing to investigate." "We've wanted to replace $FRAMEWORK for a while now. I've identified the parts of it that we actually use, and I'm putting together a plan for what we can swap in and/or get rid of. It looks like, since we made $CHANGE last month, we can actually do most of it ourselves without much trouble."
      - jodrellblank 8y ago
        That sure sounds like a day of productive work or a day of doing nothing being covered over with some made up fluff. One or the other.
        ska 8y ago
        It doesn't really matter which. Look, if I'm leading a group like this, I'm going to have an idea of what your output is like in an average sense, both compared to your historical output and the group as a whole. If you blow off a day it's not really going to matter. (although I'd rather you tell me you needed to blow off a day than try and hide it, sure). However, if you blow of enough days we're going to have a conversation about how your performance is dropping, and why, and discuss your ideas about how to turn that around. If it doesn't, we'll have another conversation, and so on. Eventually if none of this works we'll have a different conversation (about why you are leaving). This doesn't actually have anything to do with reviewing daily/weekly reports. Those are for different things.
- matwood 8y ago
  > as long as you are here, I trust you to do something productive. And this is a terrible mindset. > The work-when-you-want is easily leading to a - show me the evidence on why I should trust you to have done something productive today. No, start from the stand point of trust. > It forces someone to just push for quick wins and avoid anything that is not leading to directly accountible results. It does force someone to think about results, but not necessarily quick. Even a result that takes months, has many steps along the way that can be communicated.

tywheatley 8y ago

this seems only one degree removed from a 9-5. "work when you want" to me requires more than that. multiply your simple example to 2-4x a week, xN employees, that's a lot of noise