501/anti 501 are symptoms, not the disease

tl;dr You are not a factory worker, stop working like one. And if you are starting a tech company don’t model it after a factory. I’m a fan of Hacker News, but I view it from afar. It’s like a strange other world and I’m just a voyeur. I’m a tech entrepreneur, but I live outside of the US. I’m not trying to bump my valuation to get bought out by a giant. But a lot of great information is shared on Hacker News, and I like you guys, even if I don’t always understand you. :-) The 501 manifesto and the anti 501 response strike me as really amusing. I know where the 501ers are coming from. I used to be a coder in the trenches. I also understand the anti-ish response, because as soon as you write a manifesto people will come running to trash it. It’s just a risk you take when you write a manifesto. And now here I am to tell you that you are both wrong. And dammit that puts me dangerously close to writing my own manifesto. What you are experiencing is the death throes of the industrial era ‘factory worker’ mentality that has been carried over to an ‘office worker’ mentality and stretched to the point of ridiculousness when applied to ‘knowledge workers’. The vast majority of you are knowledge workers. Highly skilled (we hope), well trained, creative problem solvers. You are paid to solve problems with code. You are craftsmen and artisans yet you are being used like no skill, brain dead, button pushing assembly line workers. You will sit in the cube and be creative from 9am to 10:30am, then you will stop being creative and be attentive while we have a meeting on something inane for an hour and a half. You will then go eat lunch and return to your cube on time to commence with the creativity again. Ignore your dumb ass coworkers that are still playing high school games. Ignore the weird lighting and the noise. Ignore the distractions. Be creative dammit. Oh and by the way we own you, your free time is ours, anything you create is ours, and our needs come before your family and loved ones. To me it looked like you had two choices: Care a lot about whatever the company is/does, sacrifice yourself and burn out doing everything you can to support it, or give up, just become the factory worker, do a fine job and punch out at 5:01. But I decided to go a different way. I decided to scrap the factory worker mentality all together. Think about the best work you have ever done, I bet it wasn’t in the office. For me it was always either hunched over my laptop at 3am or at a coffee shop kicking around ideas with other people. Now that I am the guy making the decisions why was I falling into the same trap that everyone else falls into, even though I know it’s a trap? Because it’s safer. If I did it like everyone else and failed you can’t blame me, right? Fuck that. I want the best work I can get from my crew. Not the best work I can get between the hours of 9 and 5 while surrounded by distractions. I am an idiot before 10am but on fire from midnight to three am. Why would I force myself to do important things at 9:30 am? One of my business partners is best from 6am to early afternoon and then becomes useless. Why don’t we as a business and development culture pay attention to these things? Because we are hanging on to some outdated industrial era assembly line ideal. Henry Ford wanted conformity so his people were as interchangeable as his parts. But the difference between one factory worker’s output and another’s probably only varies by ten percent. My best work is so much better than my worst work that it’s worth building a new system to get as much of my best work as possible. The same goes for you. I started with myself. I stopped going to the office. I started working in the places I was most comfortable. I started paying attention to when I was creative, when I was distracted, when I was effective. I took notes. I watched my output and then I remade my life around it. Guess what? It worked. That time in the afternoon that I used to find myself distracted and on facebook or mindlessly surfing, I now spend that time with my kids at the park. The hour and a half that I am answering emails and arranging my schedule each day, I do that while having coffee with my wife. You know that line between WORK and LIFE I just took it away. Guess what? My life got better. I was happier, my family was happier, and my output was higher quality. So I did the same for the people that worked for me. It isn’t easy. Some people have been trained their whole lives to be factory workers without knowing it. It is really hard for them to give up that crutch. But when they ‘get it’ they do better work and are happier people. And as the boss that’s exactly what I want.