So, I think that there is something that a lot of businesses have trouble dealing with: Employees are a leaky abstraction. People are what you employ--and eve

So, I think that there is something that a lot of businesses have trouble dealing with: Employees are a leaky abstraction. People are what you employ--and even if they present the IEmployee interface, they are still human beings who get mad, get happy, fight, fuck, flee, cry, laugh, and do all the other things that are more complicated than just taking in object A and emitting object B. The best people I've worked with understand this, and have been understanding and supportive when things in life go sideways--and then their teams do the best work. Especially in a knowledge/creative industry such as software engineering, it can be very hard to produce anything useful when you're stressed/scared/sad/pissed about something. Oftentimes, you need to go deal with those pesky facts of being a person and then come back, at which point your work will be much better and overall time loss lessened. Trying to drive employees to produce when they're not at their best, or allowing them to drive themselves when they clearly have other things that need sorting out, is ultimately counterproductive. For straightforward manual labor, one can make an argument that it shouldn't matter (and even then, consider accidents on the job when somebody's mind was on personal problems), but again creativity is very closely tied with how you're feeling. Interestingly enough, this is a great time to plug universal healthcare--it helps lessen the burdens on companies and employees to deal with health issues, and that in turn helps plug some of the leakiness.