5 ms·

Workplace experiments: A month to yourself

108 points by ksat 14y ago

Smerity 14y ago
I love this idea. Many tech companies have hackathons that run over a day or a weekend. Hackathons are a strange mix between R&D (any idea is on the table), lean startup (prove your assumptions through minimum work) and a work party. Whilst usually great fun, the projects attacked are limited in scope in order to fit in the limited time available. Turning this into a longer exercise means more time can be put into properly proving your assumptions and investigating concepts that can't be bashed out in two or three days. The other important fact is that, when you have good employees, allowing them kind of flexibility can pay dividends both for the company and their own workplace satisfaction. The fact this flexibility is so widely encouraged in the start-up scene is really encouraging.
ksat 14y ago
Great idea , but i wonder how this would work for other companies: a) This works for 37s because they have a somewhat don't care attitude. So if a customer quickly wants feature-x, they could respond with "We will look into it but won't guarantee anything". I am not telling that's wrong, but other companies might not have created the same image for themselves b) Having 'Everyone' work on some other idea could be distracting. Especially Support. c) Last, and i've heard this from a ceo, if the company dosen't accept the idea to be implemented, by that time employees might be so much interested in the idea that they might want to quit and startup their own with 'that' idea.
- adam 14y ago
  I think it's a great idea in concept as well but it seems likely based on the way it's described that Jason's project will move forward (because he's the CEO) and then the rest of the folks will have to battle it out to get their project funded ongoing. In addition to allowing people to go off and do their own thing there also needs to be some sort of evaluation criteria set up or else you're going to have a bunch of annoyed people at the end of the process who worked hard then found out they didn't have a realistic chance to get funded.
- mseebach 14y ago
  a) That's not a "don't care" attitude as much as a product company attitude. Companies that respond to individual customers' "quickly want feature" requests are consultancies, and consultants can't as easily just take a month out of the calendar. b) That's very much the point. You get to switch contexts completely and immerse yourself in the idea. Presumably they have their support and operations concerns covered by non-developers, and if there's an emergency, devs are around to deal with it. c) Think about it for a minute: "As a CEO, I want my employees should keep their creativity under wraps, so they don't get inspired to quit". If some employees get an idea that doesn't fit 37S, but they believe enough in to give up the very comfortable life as 37S employees for it, then that's a good thing. Or at least, it's an unavoidable by-product of hiring brilliant people.
steve8918 14y ago
I've seen a lot of articles from 37signals.com on HN but I have no idea who they are or what they do. They certainly seem quite innovative in terms of how they treat their employees, which is great. Are they profitable? I'm curious if their generosity to their employees translates to their bottom line in measurable ways.
- ontoillogical 14y ago
  37signals is a web products company, most famous for Basecamp. Ruby on Rails came out of there. I don't know if their generosity to their employees translates to their bottom line. I think it works the other way: they are profitable enough that they can afford to be generous to their employees. The 37signals model seems to be: 1) have amazing people working for you 2) treat them really well. It's highly effective, but you need to have cash in the bank to get to step 1.
  - prezjordan 14y ago
    Where exactly does their money come from?
    - qq66 14y ago
      They charge money for their products like Basecamp, Campfire, etc.
    - codedivine 14y ago
      Most of their products are web-based with paid subscriptions.
    - dangrossman 14y ago
      "Millions of people in 150,000 companies..." "Pricing starts at $20/month." http://basecamp.com/ http://basecamp.com/
      - prezjordan 14y ago
        Oh wow I had no idea it was such a popular product.
cnbeuiwx 14y ago
Everyone knows that the best work comes when you are free to create something you believe in and that you have a real desire to create. The problem is combining that desire with capitalism where someone wants to get rich from your ideas, and with a minimum of costs. Googles most successful products such as Gmail and the search engine was created as small, experimental products, born from the brains of people who were NOT under strict deadlines and pressure to perform. The brain works much better under those conditions, and so does creativity and thinking outside the box. Today we see the influence of managers and bosses in the way Google ignores privacy. That was probably never part of the vision the product creators had when they put their products together.
codeonfire 14y ago
If someone is capable of putting a product together they should probably quit, start a company, and enjoy infinity time to themselves. It's frustrating when companies try to coax innovation out of employees when its pretty much guaranteed in a company of any significant size that people less, ahem, "production inclined" will step in and try to own anything that gets the slightest traction.
- davyjones 14y ago
  Sure. But I think the deal here is that you get paid your salary in the interim.
- nandemo 14y ago
  They just have to make something like a proof-of-concept. That's a far cry from shipping a product / selling a service, let alone starting a company from scratch do it. Also, it's riskless, since they're getting paid whether the product works out or not.
- rythie 14y ago
  Really, a lot good people can't quit their jobs a try something like that because they have families and couldn't afford to pay others work on it etc. etc. I'm sure if it took off, they'd get to be project lead with a nice pay increase - which is much better than would done otherwise, because they were never going to quit (well not least till their family grew up). Also, who knows they could use it as springboard for project #2 - the sequel usually makes more money than the original movie.
- kstenerud 14y ago
  "they should probably quit, start a company, and enjoy infinity time to themselves." A shining example of "Shit's Easy Syndrome".
nowarninglabel 14y ago
Kiva has been doing this for a couple years now, we do a full 2-week innovation iteration where us engineers get to work on whatever we want. More info: http://blog.build.kiva.org/buildkivablog/2011/02/10/kiva-engineering-innovation-iteration http://blog.build.kiva.org/buildkivablog/2011/02/10/kiva-eng... It's pretty awesome, and has some produced some great projects like http://kiva.org/live http://kiva.org/live
sown 14y ago
I've been thinking of doing this on my own, since my workplace won't honor this kind of request. Just take 3 weeks off or so, and go work on something I want to work on. Anyone tried this? Any tips?
- uptown 14y ago
  I've taken a month off twice in my career. It was truly refreshing. One of those times I did build a site that I brought to completion. It wasn't successful (I didn't really have a grasp on the promotion/marketing part of things) but it was rewarding to do. The other time I took a break for other reasons. One benefit/consequence (depending on how you look at it) is that when you return to work (depending on where you are), you may find that it takes awhile for work to figure out how to re-integrate you into the workflow since they've kept rolling without you. In my instance, it made for a gradual re-adjustment back into the things, but it may not be what you want, and I suppose you also run the risk of a workplace deciding they can get by without you while you're gone.
tferris 14y ago
'This June we’re trying something new'—I don't believe this. 37signals will always do the same: blogging. Instead of coming up with new products or groundbreaking tech 37signals still relies on one past success and heavy Marketing which is mainly about blogging. Yesterday, somebody on HN wrote a laconic post and marked their articles as 'recycled trash from popular business / personal wealth books.' But people seem to like this appreciating every little advice with stronger or just different opinions. And they never forget that 37signals created the foundation of their income and wealth as a coder—Rails. So, upvoting 37signals can't be bad. It's good to be aware that these writings are Marketing activities and basically indirect lead generation to all of their products. This isn't something bad and everybody should have a decent Marketing strategy too but if it's your only strength while missing product development at all I doubt that's enough to be successful in the long run and you are nothing more than a typical Clickbank vendor. This is now really the ironic part, sharing advice how to come to new fresh ideas and projects (by taking one month off) considering that 37signals didn't have any new and really successful products for years. And we shall take such advice seriously? Especially when seeing failed and unsold 37signals projects on Flippa right now (Sortfolio offered for 480K). Maybe one month off is not enough, maybe a hard reset would help 37signals better. EDIT to downvoters: downvoting != disagreeing, reply if you disagree
- helipad 14y ago
  1) It's not just blogging if there are actions behind it. If they change how a multi-million dollar business works for a month it's not just a blog post, is it? 2) "This is now really the ironic part, sharing advice how to come to new fresh ideas and project...considering that 37signals didn't have any new and really successful products for years" - well even if this was true, wouldn't an action like this help create something new and successful? And which part of the blog post is advice? So far as I can see, saying what they do != telling others what to do
gouranga 14y ago
In other news: "Profitable trendy app vendor shows off about how they can afford to piss a month up the wall while their clients are paying for it"
- philwelch 14y ago
  I didn't think they had clients anymore. I thought they made their money from Basecamp.
  - gouranga 14y ago
    That's the clients I'm talking about, sorry customers.
- mikeryan 14y ago
  You mean like those crazy folks who work on self-driving cars and augmented reality glasses while their hardworking advertisers suffer?
jmagar 14y ago
Sounds like someone found Dan Pink's lecture: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
renegadedev 14y ago
Obviously 37S has built up enough of a trust level with the employees to even experiment with something like this. That in itself is commendable. Dan Pink talks about Atlassian and their "FedEx days" in his talks on intrinsic motivators. Seems like he should be using 37S instead.
alainbryden 14y ago
This reminds me of A/B testing. Sure, you may stumble upon a method that leads to a more motivated and productive staff, but do your successes have a reasonable chance to make up for the lost productivity when your social experiments perform worse than current industry practice? I don't know, maybe that doesn't even worry them. Maybe their real goal is to attract the sort of workers that would be interested in this sort of workplace experimentation. (Edit - I'm noticing a number of comments asking if they're hiring.)

108 points by ksat 14y ago

I love this idea. Many tech companies have hackathons that run over a day or a weekend. Hackathons are a strange mix between R&D (any idea is on the table), lean startup (prove your assumptions through minimum work) and a work party. Whilst usually great fun, the projects attacked are limited in scope in order to fit in the limited time available. Turning this into a longer exercise means more time can be put into properly proving your assumptions and investigating concepts that can't be bashed out in two or three days. The other important fact is that, when you have good employees, allowing them kind of flexibility can pay dividends both for the company and their own workplace satisfaction. The fact this flexibility is so widely encouraged in the start-up scene is really encouraging.

ksat 14y ago

Great idea , but i wonder how this would work for other companies: a) This works for 37s because they have a somewhat don't care attitude. So if a customer quickly wants feature-x, they could respond with "We will look into it but won't guarantee anything". I am not telling that's wrong, but other companies might not have created the same image for themselves b) Having 'Everyone' work on some other idea could be distracting. Especially Support. c) Last, and i've heard this from a ceo, if the company dosen't accept the idea to be implemented, by that time employees might be so much interested in the idea that they might want to quit and startup their own with 'that' idea.

adam 14y ago
I think it's a great idea in concept as well but it seems likely based on the way it's described that Jason's project will move forward (because he's the CEO) and then the rest of the folks will have to battle it out to get their project funded ongoing. In addition to allowing people to go off and do their own thing there also needs to be some sort of evaluation criteria set up or else you're going to have a bunch of annoyed people at the end of the process who worked hard then found out they didn't have a realistic chance to get funded.
mseebach 14y ago
a) That's not a "don't care" attitude as much as a product company attitude. Companies that respond to individual customers' "quickly want feature" requests are consultancies, and consultants can't as easily just take a month out of the calendar. b) That's very much the point. You get to switch contexts completely and immerse yourself in the idea. Presumably they have their support and operations concerns covered by non-developers, and if there's an emergency, devs are around to deal with it. c) Think about it for a minute: "As a CEO, I want my employees should keep their creativity under wraps, so they don't get inspired to quit". If some employees get an idea that doesn't fit 37S, but they believe enough in to give up the very comfortable life as 37S employees for it, then that's a good thing. Or at least, it's an unavoidable by-product of hiring brilliant people.

steve8918 14y ago

I've seen a lot of articles from 37signals.com on HN but I have no idea who they are or what they do. They certainly seem quite innovative in terms of how they treat their employees, which is great. Are they profitable? I'm curious if their generosity to their employees translates to their bottom line in measurable ways.

ontoillogical 14y ago
37signals is a web products company, most famous for Basecamp. Ruby on Rails came out of there. I don't know if their generosity to their employees translates to their bottom line. I think it works the other way: they are profitable enough that they can afford to be generous to their employees. The 37signals model seems to be: 1) have amazing people working for you 2) treat them really well. It's highly effective, but you need to have cash in the bank to get to step 1.
- prezjordan 14y ago
  Where exactly does their money come from?
  - qq66 14y ago
    They charge money for their products like Basecamp, Campfire, etc.
  - codedivine 14y ago
    Most of their products are web-based with paid subscriptions.
  - dangrossman 14y ago
    "Millions of people in 150,000 companies..." "Pricing starts at $20/month." http://basecamp.com/ http://basecamp.com/
    - prezjordan 14y ago
      Oh wow I had no idea it was such a popular product.

cnbeuiwx 14y ago

Everyone knows that the best work comes when you are free to create something you believe in and that you have a real desire to create. The problem is combining that desire with capitalism where someone wants to get rich from your ideas, and with a minimum of costs. Googles most successful products such as Gmail and the search engine was created as small, experimental products, born from the brains of people who were NOT under strict deadlines and pressure to perform. The brain works much better under those conditions, and so does creativity and thinking outside the box. Today we see the influence of managers and bosses in the way Google ignores privacy. That was probably never part of the vision the product creators had when they put their products together.

codeonfire 14y ago

If someone is capable of putting a product together they should probably quit, start a company, and enjoy infinity time to themselves. It's frustrating when companies try to coax innovation out of employees when its pretty much guaranteed in a company of any significant size that people less, ahem, "production inclined" will step in and try to own anything that gets the slightest traction.

davyjones 14y ago
Sure. But I think the deal here is that you get paid your salary in the interim.
nandemo 14y ago
They just have to make something like a proof-of-concept. That's a far cry from shipping a product / selling a service, let alone starting a company from scratch do it. Also, it's riskless, since they're getting paid whether the product works out or not.
rythie 14y ago
Really, a lot good people can't quit their jobs a try something like that because they have families and couldn't afford to pay others work on it etc. etc. I'm sure if it took off, they'd get to be project lead with a nice pay increase - which is much better than would done otherwise, because they were never going to quit (well not least till their family grew up). Also, who knows they could use it as springboard for project #2 - the sequel usually makes more money than the original movie.
kstenerud 14y ago
"they should probably quit, start a company, and enjoy infinity time to themselves." A shining example of "Shit's Easy Syndrome".

nowarninglabel 14y ago

Kiva has been doing this for a couple years now, we do a full 2-week innovation iteration where us engineers get to work on whatever we want. More info: http://blog.build.kiva.org/buildkivablog/2011/02/10/kiva-engineering-innovation-iteration http://blog.build.kiva.org/buildkivablog/2011/02/10/kiva-eng... It's pretty awesome, and has some produced some great projects like http://kiva.org/live http://kiva.org/live

sown 14y ago

I've been thinking of doing this on my own, since my workplace won't honor this kind of request. Just take 3 weeks off or so, and go work on something I want to work on. Anyone tried this? Any tips?

uptown 14y ago
I've taken a month off twice in my career. It was truly refreshing. One of those times I did build a site that I brought to completion. It wasn't successful (I didn't really have a grasp on the promotion/marketing part of things) but it was rewarding to do. The other time I took a break for other reasons. One benefit/consequence (depending on how you look at it) is that when you return to work (depending on where you are), you may find that it takes awhile for work to figure out how to re-integrate you into the workflow since they've kept rolling without you. In my instance, it made for a gradual re-adjustment back into the things, but it may not be what you want, and I suppose you also run the risk of a workplace deciding they can get by without you while you're gone.

tferris 14y ago

'This June we’re trying something new'—I don't believe this. 37signals will always do the same: blogging. Instead of coming up with new products or groundbreaking tech 37signals still relies on one past success and heavy Marketing which is mainly about blogging. Yesterday, somebody on HN wrote a laconic post and marked their articles as 'recycled trash from popular business / personal wealth books.' But people seem to like this appreciating every little advice with stronger or just different opinions. And they never forget that 37signals created the foundation of their income and wealth as a coder—Rails. So, upvoting 37signals can't be bad. It's good to be aware that these writings are Marketing activities and basically indirect lead generation to all of their products. This isn't something bad and everybody should have a decent Marketing strategy too but if it's your only strength while missing product development at all I doubt that's enough to be successful in the long run and you are nothing more than a typical Clickbank vendor. This is now really the ironic part, sharing advice how to come to new fresh ideas and projects (by taking one month off) considering that 37signals didn't have any new and really successful products for years. And we shall take such advice seriously? Especially when seeing failed and unsold 37signals projects on Flippa right now (Sortfolio offered for 480K). Maybe one month off is not enough, maybe a hard reset would help 37signals better. EDIT to downvoters: downvoting != disagreeing, reply if you disagree

helipad 14y ago
1) It's not just blogging if there are actions behind it. If they change how a multi-million dollar business works for a month it's not just a blog post, is it? 2) "This is now really the ironic part, sharing advice how to come to new fresh ideas and project...considering that 37signals didn't have any new and really successful products for years" - well even if this was true, wouldn't an action like this help create something new and successful? And which part of the blog post is advice? So far as I can see, saying what they do != telling others what to do

gouranga 14y ago

In other news: "Profitable trendy app vendor shows off about how they can afford to piss a month up the wall while their clients are paying for it"

philwelch 14y ago
I didn't think they had clients anymore. I thought they made their money from Basecamp.
- gouranga 14y ago
  That's the clients I'm talking about, sorry customers.
mikeryan 14y ago
You mean like those crazy folks who work on self-driving cars and augmented reality glasses while their hardworking advertisers suffer?

jmagar 14y ago

Sounds like someone found Dan Pink's lecture: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

renegadedev 14y ago

Obviously 37S has built up enough of a trust level with the employees to even experiment with something like this. That in itself is commendable. Dan Pink talks about Atlassian and their "FedEx days" in his talks on intrinsic motivators. Seems like he should be using 37S instead.

alainbryden 14y ago

This reminds me of A/B testing. Sure, you may stumble upon a method that leads to a more motivated and productive staff, but do your successes have a reasonable chance to make up for the lost productivity when your social experiments perform worse than current industry practice? I don't know, maybe that doesn't even worry them. Maybe their real goal is to attract the sort of workers that would be interested in this sort of workplace experimentation. (Edit - I'm noticing a number of comments asking if they're hiring.)