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>Who doesn't think libraries are a valid substitute for offices? Anyone who enjoys having a personalized ergonomic workspace that fits their needs. Working on

>Who doesn't think libraries are a valid substitute for offices? Anyone who enjoys having a personalized ergonomic workspace that fits their needs. Working on a laptop 8 hours a day is going to be terrible for your body long term. >without also becoming feudal lords. You really underestimate what people given power, implicit or explicit, can do with it. Once you're able to tell people what work they should do, you have a lot of power to wield as you wish.

derefr 6y ago
> Working on a laptop 8 hours a day is going to be terrible for your body long term. Libraries have computer workstations with proper ergonomics. Bring your laptop and a long HDMI cable. Push the workstation’s keyboard and mouse back. Plug your laptop into the monitor with the HDMI cable, then set the laptop down where the workstation’s keyboard was. Switch the input on the monitor to your laptop. (Ignore the laptop’s screen; don’t try to use it as a secondary display. It’s too low; you’ll hurt your neck.) Since you’re not unplugging anything from the workstation, you won’t even have to ask permission from the library IT staff first to do this. It’s just like using a USB stick. Alternately, bring one of those HDMI “compute sticks” and your own Bluetooth keyboard and mouse paired to it. You won’t get the same level of compute power that you’d get from your laptop, but you will get slightly better input ergonomics. Fine if your work is cloud-based. Alternately, sign up for (or get your company to sign up for) a cloud Desktop-as-a-Service service, e.g. Amazon WorkSpaces. Then VNC/RDP into your workstation from any old library computer. Even the 10-year-old Dells with Celerons are powerful enough to support VNC streaming; and, given that you’re at a public library, relying on the wired Internet means you avoid the bottleneck of the single overloaded wi-fi AP everyone else is contending over. Certainly, these workstations aren’t personalized; but they won’t kill your back/neck. > Once you're able to tell people what work they should do, you have a lot of power to wield as you wish. The simple difference between a manager and an executive assistant is that the manager hires the team, but the team hires the executive assistant. It’s the same as the difference between monarchy and democracy: subjects live at the sufferance of their monarch, but a president commands at the sufferance of their people. If you can fire your boss, they’re not really your boss.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  >but the team hires the executive assistant. Some manager up the hierarchy hires the executive assistant, the team simply has input into the process. I suspect the input into the firing will quickly go down to 0 if the person who actually has firing power likes the EA. If the team has direct firing power then you're going to get some lovely politics going on between everyone like giving choice work to half the team all the time to keep them on your side. >but a president commands at the sufferance of their people. Technically, they only need 50% of the people at best. edit: And since the EA isn't actually accountable for productivity (how can they be, they can't fire the "unproductive" team members after all) they can play even more political games since they're less in the line of fire for backlash.
  - derefr 6y ago
    > Some manager up the hierarchy hires the executive assistant. My post assumed team autonomy, where each team has an entirely separate hiring pipeline. Think “startup that’s recently been acquired by a big company, but hasn’t yet been absorbed into it.” I think Amazon’s AWS service teams are also like this. Tiny little independent business units. But really, you don’t need that; you could still have a mostly-hierarchical organizational structure, but just take hiring/firing away from the managers at every level. with no managers making hiring decisions at any level. You’d give all hiring/firing power, instead, to teams; or rather, to each team’s hiring subcommittee (which would be a temporary thing, elected anew from the team members each time hiring/firing must be done.) You can still have traditional managers in such an org, but their main purpose at that point (if the EA duties are being played by an actual EA) would be to serve as the contact point for a team — the “API” that the rest of the org uses to access the team members and their labor. So, essentially, a talent agent. > edit: And since the EA isn't actually accountable for productivity Sure they are. Just because something may fail for reasons entirely out of your control, doesn’t mean you’re not usually, partially in control. A wilderness guide can still be held accountable for the safety of those in their charge, even if sometimes there’s just suddenly an angry lion. The point of the EA—like the point of an effective manager—would be to (attempt to) be a multiplier for the team’s aggregate productivity, usually by subtly enabling knowledge-sharing and communication, while deflecting outward pressure. As such, a measure of the EA’s effectiveness, is the same as a measure the team’s aggregate productivity, against a pre-existing baseline measurement of the team’s aggregate productivity with no EA/manager. I would guess that it’s very likely that the average EA/manager has neutral or negative impact on aggregate team productivity. Which makes sense; an EA/manager needs to have (much) higher coordination skills than the average human being, in order for their inserting-themselves into coordination problems to be worth the overhead it introduces. > Technically, they only need 50% of the people at best. If you like — and this works especially well when done remotely — you can set up your EA/manager as a (team-specific, unlimited-scope) helpdesk, where team members “file tickets” with the EA to do things for them; and where the EA/manager can also file tickets themselves “on behalf of” someone, when they notice something going subtly wrong and are trying to help without being explicitly asked to do so. Probably you could do this in a streamlined, ChatOps way, where any new team-workspace message thread with the EA/manager is automatically a new ticket. Then, you can throw industry-standard IT-helpdesk ticket-resolution performance metrics at the tickets the EA/manager is creating+resolving. This won’t tell you anything about aggregate productivity, but it will tell you — in a very legible, statistical way — whether the EA/manager is preferentially solving problems for only a subset of team members. (Don’t hook anything automated up to that fact; you need manual review, because it might be the team member that’s giving the EA stupid asks that they’re rightfully ignoring.)

derefr 6y ago

> Working on a laptop 8 hours a day is going to be terrible for your body long term. Libraries have computer workstations with proper ergonomics. Bring your laptop and a long HDMI cable. Push the workstation’s keyboard and mouse back. Plug your laptop into the monitor with the HDMI cable, then set the laptop down where the workstation’s keyboard was. Switch the input on the monitor to your laptop. (Ignore the laptop’s screen; don’t try to use it as a secondary display. It’s too low; you’ll hurt your neck.) Since you’re not unplugging anything from the workstation, you won’t even have to ask permission from the library IT staff first to do this. It’s just like using a USB stick. Alternately, bring one of those HDMI “compute sticks” and your own Bluetooth keyboard and mouse paired to it. You won’t get the same level of compute power that you’d get from your laptop, but you will get slightly better input ergonomics. Fine if your work is cloud-based. Alternately, sign up for (or get your company to sign up for) a cloud Desktop-as-a-Service service, e.g. Amazon WorkSpaces. Then VNC/RDP into your workstation from any old library computer. Even the 10-year-old Dells with Celerons are powerful enough to support VNC streaming; and, given that you’re at a public library, relying on the wired Internet means you avoid the bottleneck of the single overloaded wi-fi AP everyone else is contending over. Certainly, these workstations aren’t personalized; but they won’t kill your back/neck. > Once you're able to tell people what work they should do, you have a lot of power to wield as you wish. The simple difference between a manager and an executive assistant is that the manager hires the team, but the team hires the executive assistant. It’s the same as the difference between monarchy and democracy: subjects live at the sufferance of their monarch, but a president commands at the sufferance of their people. If you can fire your boss, they’re not really your boss.

marcinzm 6y ago
>but the team hires the executive assistant. Some manager up the hierarchy hires the executive assistant, the team simply has input into the process. I suspect the input into the firing will quickly go down to 0 if the person who actually has firing power likes the EA. If the team has direct firing power then you're going to get some lovely politics going on between everyone like giving choice work to half the team all the time to keep them on your side. >but a president commands at the sufferance of their people. Technically, they only need 50% of the people at best. edit: And since the EA isn't actually accountable for productivity (how can they be, they can't fire the "unproductive" team members after all) they can play even more political games since they're less in the line of fire for backlash.
- derefr 6y ago
  > Some manager up the hierarchy hires the executive assistant. My post assumed team autonomy, where each team has an entirely separate hiring pipeline. Think “startup that’s recently been acquired by a big company, but hasn’t yet been absorbed into it.” I think Amazon’s AWS service teams are also like this. Tiny little independent business units. But really, you don’t need that; you could still have a mostly-hierarchical organizational structure, but just take hiring/firing away from the managers at every level. with no managers making hiring decisions at any level. You’d give all hiring/firing power, instead, to teams; or rather, to each team’s hiring subcommittee (which would be a temporary thing, elected anew from the team members each time hiring/firing must be done.) You can still have traditional managers in such an org, but their main purpose at that point (if the EA duties are being played by an actual EA) would be to serve as the contact point for a team — the “API” that the rest of the org uses to access the team members and their labor. So, essentially, a talent agent. > edit: And since the EA isn't actually accountable for productivity Sure they are. Just because something may fail for reasons entirely out of your control, doesn’t mean you’re not usually, partially in control. A wilderness guide can still be held accountable for the safety of those in their charge, even if sometimes there’s just suddenly an angry lion. The point of the EA—like the point of an effective manager—would be to (attempt to) be a multiplier for the team’s aggregate productivity, usually by subtly enabling knowledge-sharing and communication, while deflecting outward pressure. As such, a measure of the EA’s effectiveness, is the same as a measure the team’s aggregate productivity, against a pre-existing baseline measurement of the team’s aggregate productivity with no EA/manager. I would guess that it’s very likely that the average EA/manager has neutral or negative impact on aggregate team productivity. Which makes sense; an EA/manager needs to have (much) higher coordination skills than the average human being, in order for their inserting-themselves into coordination problems to be worth the overhead it introduces. > Technically, they only need 50% of the people at best. If you like — and this works especially well when done remotely — you can set up your EA/manager as a (team-specific, unlimited-scope) helpdesk, where team members “file tickets” with the EA to do things for them; and where the EA/manager can also file tickets themselves “on behalf of” someone, when they notice something going subtly wrong and are trying to help without being explicitly asked to do so. Probably you could do this in a streamlined, ChatOps way, where any new team-workspace message thread with the EA/manager is automatically a new ticket. Then, you can throw industry-standard IT-helpdesk ticket-resolution performance metrics at the tickets the EA/manager is creating+resolving. This won’t tell you anything about aggregate productivity, but it will tell you — in a very legible, statistical way — whether the EA/manager is preferentially solving problems for only a subset of team members. (Don’t hook anything automated up to that fact; you need manual review, because it might be the team member that’s giving the EA stupid asks that they’re rightfully ignoring.)