4 ms·

To be honest, reading the article made it sound even worse than the title. Having everything at your company priced for individual workers (from PCs to desks to

To be honest, reading the article made it sound even worse than the title. Having everything at your company priced for individual workers (from PCs to desks to smaller things) is a lot of nonsensical stress placed on workers. I already do enough econ bullshit outside of work, the last thing I want to do is start keeping spreadsheets for things that my workplace should provide me.

tehlike 7y ago
This i agree. Cognitive load of pricing everything would be very high. I agree on putting monetary impact on meetings, however.
- 1123581321 7y ago
  The cognitive load needs to be high; it’s the thought required to make better decisions about time and resources. Normally little thought goes into these things. Plus, it seems that over time it becomes easier to operate more effectively. A team who has decided to save $200 a week by skipping status meetings isn’t thinking about them anymore beyond a periodic re-evaluation.
rtpg 7y ago
Yeah, applying “free market principles” instead of getting workers to just _make better decisions_ is real consultant bullshit that upper management eats right up Imagine you have a bunch of workers who don’t know how to effectively avoid meetings, because they haven’t learned about working more asynchronously. You start charging them for the meeting rooms Now you have a bunch of people who don’t know how to effectively work without meetings, who can’t use meeting rooms anymore.
- dmix 7y ago
  These guys can get heavily rewarded by using those meetings effectively. It's hardly just punishing people for doing regular business activity, it's all about earning bonuses on top of a base income combined with a decentralized managerial approach. It says top performers can get a full years salary each quarter which is hardly working for some peanuts like most bonuses. The workers can choose which managers to work under based on their ability to perform, while allowing workers to bid and propose what to work on, while freeing up budget capital directly under the people doing the actual work. Which together is an amazing concept by itself. Plus I don't see how this fuels consultant speak or useless managerial processes. If anything this is very hostile to those types of people who feed off useless meetings, long email threads, powerpoint presentations, unwieldy google docs, etc at high hourly rates. I can't count how much of my career (and millions of other people's careers) was wasted appeasing heirachical managerial processes, usually via useless meetings so the managers can feel like they are doing something. Although I agree that the small stuff like charging for "space for a wet umbrella" is taking the concept too far. Sometimes basic ideas work really well in some core areas... then people get excited and try to pigeonhole it onto everything (gamification is a good example of this in software). The other challenge is avoiding rewarding "vanity metrics", which means they need a very good analytics and data science teams working with top management to establish KPIs, with frequent retroactives to evolve the reward models. This also obviously isn't for everyone but I could see this working very very well with certain types of people. Valve has a similar structure, minus the currency part, which resulted from hiring a very left-leaning economist to help build out a decentralized company structure. So it's not just "free markets" vs top-down authoritative control. But rather strict hierarchical managerial structures vs decentralized individual units. Combined with a purely fixed compensation vs a basic income + fluid performance based compensation. TLDR: It sounds brilliant to me, given a couple of the above asterisks (avoiding vanity metrics; pushing back on pigeonholing incentive systems onto everything just because you can; not every personality or industry niche flourishes in these types of environments).
pochamago 7y ago
It's hardly complicated econ work. Naming it Will was an apt choice, in my opinion. If you really need something done to accomplish your job, you'll pay for it. If it's not worth the cash, maybe you overestimated its value. It also strikes me as a great way to make people feel invested in their work, since they're constantly evaluating its real worth and apparently free to move to teams they believe are more valuable
inlined 7y ago
Facebook has vending machines for common hardware with the actual cost to the company listed. Everything is free, but it’s there to make you pause and reflect on whether you need it.

tehlike 7y ago

This i agree. Cognitive load of pricing everything would be very high. I agree on putting monetary impact on meetings, however.

1123581321 7y ago
The cognitive load needs to be high; it’s the thought required to make better decisions about time and resources. Normally little thought goes into these things. Plus, it seems that over time it becomes easier to operate more effectively. A team who has decided to save $200 a week by skipping status meetings isn’t thinking about them anymore beyond a periodic re-evaluation.

rtpg 7y ago

Yeah, applying “free market principles” instead of getting workers to just _make better decisions_ is real consultant bullshit that upper management eats right up Imagine you have a bunch of workers who don’t know how to effectively avoid meetings, because they haven’t learned about working more asynchronously. You start charging them for the meeting rooms Now you have a bunch of people who don’t know how to effectively work without meetings, who can’t use meeting rooms anymore.

dmix 7y ago
These guys can get heavily rewarded by using those meetings effectively. It's hardly just punishing people for doing regular business activity, it's all about earning bonuses on top of a base income combined with a decentralized managerial approach. It says top performers can get a full years salary each quarter which is hardly working for some peanuts like most bonuses. The workers can choose which managers to work under based on their ability to perform, while allowing workers to bid and propose what to work on, while freeing up budget capital directly under the people doing the actual work. Which together is an amazing concept by itself. Plus I don't see how this fuels consultant speak or useless managerial processes. If anything this is very hostile to those types of people who feed off useless meetings, long email threads, powerpoint presentations, unwieldy google docs, etc at high hourly rates. I can't count how much of my career (and millions of other people's careers) was wasted appeasing heirachical managerial processes, usually via useless meetings so the managers can feel like they are doing something. Although I agree that the small stuff like charging for "space for a wet umbrella" is taking the concept too far. Sometimes basic ideas work really well in some core areas... then people get excited and try to pigeonhole it onto everything (gamification is a good example of this in software). The other challenge is avoiding rewarding "vanity metrics", which means they need a very good analytics and data science teams working with top management to establish KPIs, with frequent retroactives to evolve the reward models. This also obviously isn't for everyone but I could see this working very very well with certain types of people. Valve has a similar structure, minus the currency part, which resulted from hiring a very left-leaning economist to help build out a decentralized company structure. So it's not just "free markets" vs top-down authoritative control. But rather strict hierarchical managerial structures vs decentralized individual units. Combined with a purely fixed compensation vs a basic income + fluid performance based compensation. TLDR: It sounds brilliant to me, given a couple of the above asterisks (avoiding vanity metrics; pushing back on pigeonholing incentive systems onto everything just because you can; not every personality or industry niche flourishes in these types of environments).

pochamago 7y ago

It's hardly complicated econ work. Naming it Will was an apt choice, in my opinion. If you really need something done to accomplish your job, you'll pay for it. If it's not worth the cash, maybe you overestimated its value. It also strikes me as a great way to make people feel invested in their work, since they're constantly evaluating its real worth and apparently free to move to teams they believe are more valuable

inlined 7y ago

Facebook has vending machines for common hardware with the actual cost to the company listed. Everything is free, but it’s there to make you pause and reflect on whether you need it.