9 ms·

The problem with working for home is that the person who gets half of what you do done, but stays in the office, is more visible to the higher ups. So you want

The problem with working for home is that the person who gets half of what you do done, but stays in the office, is more visible to the higher ups. So you want everyone to work from home and meet when needed, rather than half and half. In 2011-2012 I had one guy actually consistently take credit for what I was doing because I would work at my place and show up once a week with deliverables (there was a hardware part to the job, and I'd rather use my small workshop built next to my home if I can). Essentially he told everyone that he was the team leader for the project, and people started to believe him. All he did was walk around the offices and make powerpoints. He kept telling people that he needed more men and resources to complete the project... all the while, me and another guy were doing good on the project (about on budget, a little ahead of schedule). Eventually this guy's whining, intended to give him a little empire, is heard by one of the actual bosses. We get called in to explain why we're behind and need more people. And that's where the crazy thing happens. We show up with the first batch of production devices -- not even prototypes -- and do a full demo, and say "this has actually been ready to field test for a couple weeks now". Great, right? Except... everyone was so used to talking with the douche guy that they didn't really pay attention to us. So we got a dressing down for being late (douche said "it'll take two months for this to be ready to go unless I get two more guys on it"), with the finished product happily beeping and logging data on the conference table! I felt like Galileo before the Conclave. These were scientists and scientific administrators, believing some twerp's word over their own eyes. And that's the story of why I quit NASA.

mavdi 12y ago
I see how this could be a problem. Luckily where I work, everyone is a remote. And I think this is something to watch out for, make sure remote working is embedded in company culture before accepting the role.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 12y ago
  Well, it sounds like it was embedded in NASA culture, but this guy was able to brainwash the bosses because he was nearby. It's political games like this that make remote work nearly impossible. Did you notice the brainwashed victims were actual scientists? Good luck with your better culture.
  - seanwilson 12y ago
    Office politics is always going to exist even if you're all in an office together, all remote or some combination.
    - spiritplumber 12y ago
      But it's easier to "do" office politics if you can talk to someone over lunch, than if you only interact with someone by email. The lesson for me there was to assume that not everyone has the mission's interest at heart. My problem was that for me getting on base was a 2 hour commute, and I had 90% of the gear I needed to do my work rihgt at home -- it got more done to work from home and only show up to deliver prototypes for testing, or use the "big boy" machine tools.
    - 0xdeadbeefbabe 12y ago
      Office politicians, like the Twerp of NASA (though he probably has a better title now), are most excited about some combination, I bet, as it leaves the culture more vulnerable to attack.
      - spiritplumber 12y ago
        He did get a management job. At a Denny's. He didn't last very long in there. I will gladly admit to being very happy to see him in there. He must have recognized me because he sort of hid in the kitchen the whole time.
  - nostrademons 12y ago
    There've been a number of psychological studies that show that face-to-face interactions build trust, regardless of the contents of those interactions (unless they're emotionally negative). When you're facing different stories from two people, one of whom you trust and one of whom you don't, who do you think wins? This is also why many startups insist on people not working remotely. Startups frequently need to make decisions on very low information, such that the only conceivable reason you'd have for following through on the decision is trust.
- xeromal 12y ago
  If you don't mind me asking, how did you find a remote position?
  - talsraviv 12y ago
    I found my remote job through my personal network. There's a great site recently launched called http://remoteok.io http://remoteok.io that may be helpful.
  - mavdi 12y ago
    I found this particular one from LinkedIn of all places but some great websites for remote work: http://careers.stackoverflow.com http://careers.stackoverflow.com http://www.remoteworking.io http://www.remoteworking.io https://weworkremotely.com https://weworkremotely.com
yodsanklai 12y ago
Good point. It's always better to be there when decisions are made (unless you're important enough that people are scared to keep you out of the loop!).
xtracto 12y ago
What I think is unique of the linked article (yup, I read it all and it was really interesting and related to my startup) is that the type of work being done by the telecommuters is easily measurable: they are telephone operators. So it is quite simple to compare the number of successful calls (depending on what the company is about) made by people both in site or telecommuting.
lfender6445 12y ago
To me, this speaks bigger to your work culture and processess es - what tools were you using to host meetings and have conversations verbally? Assuming the right toolset, having a strong voice and impaact in a company is not impossible from a remote position. Yes, there is real value to face time, and I agree with you on some level - but only given the proper tools and a company that respects them. Given your example, it sounds like you didn't get the attention you deserved.
- notahacker 12y ago
  If senior management are sufficiently preoccupied with other things and some Machiavellian schemer is sufficiently preoccupied with increasing their own influence over the organization, it's entirely possible that no level of detailed daily status updates and well-structured regular webconferences can undo the amount of FUD the schemer can spread by having water-cooler chats and asking "quick questions" of exactly the same members of management that don't read the status updates. And at the risk of stating the obvious, watercooler chats can have non-negative outcomes in other situations too!
seanwilson 12y ago
Couldn't he have just done something similar as well if he worked remotely though? You always get e.g. people that are much more noisy about what they've achieved over email so everyone gets the impression they've achieved more that quieter ones. Isn't this more about him taken advantage of success being measured incorrectly?
- cookiecaper 12y ago
  It's much harder to pull off remotely. This is manipulation, and a physical presence with inflection, body language, and the ability to consistently inject into every open moment is very important to its success. While it'd be possible to pull such a con over IM, unless your bosses are complete morons, it's probably too difficult.
  - wolfgke 12y ago
    > While it'd be possible to pull such a con over IM, unless your bosses are complete morons, it's probably too difficult. That's a pretty good argument to assign as much work as possible to remote workers.
zaphar 12y ago
I work from home and it's less than half and half for our team. But working from home doesn't mean you don't communicate. Email, Document collaboration, Regular VC all contribute to the visibility of your work. No one can take credit for my work because I'm extremely visible through multiple channels. I don't even show up at the office more than once every few months. Visibility doesn't have anything to do with being in the office. It has everything to do with communication and you can do that with a VC pretty much as easily as you can face to face.
- enraged_camel 12y ago
  It's worth noting that, in a lot of companies without an established work-from-home culture, you need to over-communicate in order to compensate for the lack of physical presence in the office. As the saying goes, when you're out of sight, you tend to be out of mind. Therefore you always have to remind people that you're in front of your computer or on the phone busting your ass, instead of watching TV or taking a nap, which is what people assume you're doing by default because that's what they would be doing if they were at home.
  - Swizec 12y ago
    This is probably the best piece of advice I've ever read on HN about working from home. Especially the part about what normal people do when working from home. Very important to take that into account.
  - zaphar 12y ago
    This is exactly right. When someone asks the question what was "Joe" doing yesterday there should be at least one person who can say "I was working with him via {email,chat,phone,VC} on that thing we had discussed earlier." Or... "Oh, didn't you see his email? He sent out that design doc for further discussion" or some other variant. Even in companies with an established work from culture it's important to communicate frequently and with detail.
  - s_q_b 12y ago
    Github checkins, Hipchat comments, JIRA tickets opening and closing, emails, texts, etc. If you work from home I recommend : 1. Overcommunicating, which also creates documentation 2. Leaving an audit record, like a time log 3. Going to as many office social functions as possible. You can up your visibility as much with one party as you can with ten days in a cube.
bonif 12y ago
Be smart. Let others know your progress. Send emails (showing completed work) at 6:25 AM. Let others understand you can be productive while they're commuting. If they cannot understand, find someone who can, he/she will have the usual doubs, but will get it after a while.
rondon2 12y ago
So was the guy your boss or not? What kind of organization lets someone promote themselves to project manager or the boss of other engineers?
- spiritplumber 12y ago
  He basically said "Of the five of us I know the least about the tech, so I'll talk to the people who need this widget built, and do the paperwork". People just sort of assumed that he had been appointed project manager after that.
  - r00fus 12y ago
    Sounds like a major lack of leadership - the kind of thing that happens in a college project. This kind of behavior, to me, speaks to me of dysfunctional management and I think it's probably good in the long term to get out of that kind of situation. Lesson to be learned: You can't ignore others on the team. You can't have clear separation of duties without strong management or a good working trust relationship. Both of these are weakened if you're remote most or all of the time and the culture doesn't reward/support remote workers.
  - anon4 12y ago
    If he's talking to the people, he IS the project manager.
p0nce 12y ago
People will often listen to the ones with higher perceived status often regardless of the facts.
modarts 12y ago
Awesome ending
dba7dba 12y ago
I feel for you but may I dare say that some fault lies with you, for letting the douch take credit. You should've stopped him before he got out of control.
- spiritplumber 12y ago
  Probably. Thing is, I was just elated at doing NASA stuff and just threw myself at the technical side of the project without paying attention to much else. I mostly only showed up on base when something cool was happening (In my defence, it was a 2 hour commute each way).
  - dba7dba 12y ago
    Didn't mean to really fault you. Just sucks that some douchebag caused you harm and ultimate NASA too. Many many years ago I worked at a badly run startup. One dude was made a manager over us and started trying to shake things up. One thing he wanted was documentation (although mostly it was to prepare let go some people). So I wrote up one page document, really simple stuff (no formatting at all) and put up on fileserver. Few days later I happened to see a printout of a documentation lying around. It had been printed to show higher up that IT was improving process. Content was what I had written. Word by word. It was in better formatting, with tables to separate creator, date etc. For the creator, the manager had put in his own name. There's no mention of my name AT ALL. World is full of such douchebags.
    - spiritplumber 12y ago
      ENCOM MX 16-923 USER #0176825 06:00 INFORMATION VIDEO GAME PROGRAM: SPACE PARANOIDS ANNEXED 9/22 BY E. DILLENGER ORIGINAL PROGRAM WRITTEN BY K. FLYNN THIS INFORMATION PRIORITY ONE END OF LINE Add this to the printout? :) But yeah, had that happened to me a few times too. One time it was at a conference (Open Science Summit), the same douche guy decided to do a presentation on my tech as if it had been developed under him. So I pushed past security, turned off the projector with the powerpoint, went on stage, slammed the microphone down, and did my presentation by shouting. Got a fair amount of applause. And yes, I was wearing a Flynn's t-shirt. And yes, I know this is a bit of a tall tale, so here's the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnRSu9LjV7E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnRSu9LjV7E
michaelochurch 12y ago
I think that this is a general problem with WFH. You'll get 3-5 times more done, because most office environments are horrible and anti-productive, but you're basically stepping out of the political fight. There's so much nonverbal subcommunication that you'll miss about who's viewed as a top performer, who's not, who's ascending and who's not. The social environment of most workplaces is Meritocracy By Assertion. It has to conceive of itself as a meritocracy but the politically successful people are always most able to make themselves seem to have the most merit. No one ever said, "I'm promoting this guy because of his political success". And yet... over time, what we see is that non-WFHers rise up the ranks, because it's just such a political environment to be in the office during normal working hours, and, in general, when they get to the top, they're hostile to the whole concept. So then you have places like Yahoo where, even if you don't care about climbing the executive ladder, you have to adopt behaviors of those who do (namely, avoiding WFH). The really depressing thing to learn about organizational politics is that, while they're a grind for hard-working, decent people, they're actually fun for psychopaths. About 95 percent of people will be utterly miserable if they have to spend 90 hours per week in a packed, open-plan environment. The other 5%, mostly psychopaths, thrive on that shit, like the creatures that live in deep-sea thermal vents (extremophiles). It energizes them. You see this in The Wire. Stringer Bell doesn't love "The Game" (meaning criminal enterprise). He plays it because he's good at it and is trying to work his way out of it, but Marlo (and, to a lesser degree, Avon) is a natural gangster just as much as McNulty and Kima are natural cops. Natural office politicians are the 5% who don't start to fade and fail when subjected to 90-hour weeks in open-plan bullpens, for the same reason that polar bears don't mind ice. Eventually, though, an organization ends up full of natural politicians and has lost the whole "vision thing". Most organizations think that it's valuable to "be tough" and schedule meetings during weird hours and cram developers together and set unrealistic deadlines. But the people who thrive in such environments aren't "the best" in terms of the ability to get work done. They're the natural politicians who thrive in that sort of environment.
- genericresponse 12y ago
  Did you really just assert that the only people who thrive in "packed, open-plan environments" are psychopaths? What about extroverts, people who get energized by social contact? Are they all psychopaths? Also, when you refer to how "most organizations" think it's valuable to be tough, you're going against the bulk of organizations I've worked with. I'm going on close to 50 organizations now that I've worked with in some capacity. I'd say less than 10 had that mentality.
ugh123 12y ago
I generally call these guys "non producers". Not much value to add to a project yet always seem to be hanging around either taking credit, giving input where its not needed, and usually both. I would throw most project managers in that lot as well as non hands-on middle managers. I'm finding there's an additional skill that engineers/programmers/producers need to obtain in dealing with these types and their politicking and not letting them run you over during tech projects. I believe it falls out of the normal realm of what we call "people skills". I feel your pain
- jqm 12y ago
  I have stopped calling them "non producers" and started using the term "counter producers". Not only do these types of people not help, they are almost always a hindrance to the completion of projects.
jjtheblunt 12y ago
This is exactly analogous to what has happened with the part of a hugely successful computer / cellphones / etc maker I work for in Cupertino, in engineering. 5 years ago it was a wonderfully productive environment; since, it has filled with do-nothing middle manager detritus, who deeply impede results, and quell enthusiasm, perhaps the most damaging detriment. Thankfully, this hasn't happened across the entire company.
- mapmap 12y ago
  Sounds like the bozo explosion that a late leader of another hugely successful Cupertino company warned about.
tajen 12y ago
An excellent system: In my 50.000-people company, everyone was required to work 1 day per week from home. It ensures everyone is involved in finding good solutions for the VPN, the chat, VC and work visibility. It also shift the prejudice of "working less" away from the teammate. Of course it's not an immediate solution if some remote workers aren't in the same city, but it makes them more legitimate.
brohoolio 12y ago
bummer dude.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
To be fair, that sort of office politics / system gaming can exist in any environment.
partition 12y ago
Story of my life lol.
yenda 12y ago
Clearly you are terrible at communicating with other human beings or this story is fake.
- spiritplumber 12y ago
  This story is true, and I am indeed terrible at communicating with other human beings. :)
chupy 12y ago
Honestly, I was not expecting that punchline. The story really sounded like you were working in a typical "change the world" startup with flexible hours and some just hired frat boy manager took credit for your work. This I could see happening in such an environment but not...NASA.
didibus 12y ago
You're only as good at your job as your good a looking good.

mavdi 12y ago

I see how this could be a problem. Luckily where I work, everyone is a remote. And I think this is something to watch out for, make sure remote working is embedded in company culture before accepting the role.

0xdeadbeefbabe 12y ago
Well, it sounds like it was embedded in NASA culture, but this guy was able to brainwash the bosses because he was nearby. It's political games like this that make remote work nearly impossible. Did you notice the brainwashed victims were actual scientists? Good luck with your better culture.
- seanwilson 12y ago
  Office politics is always going to exist even if you're all in an office together, all remote or some combination.
  - spiritplumber 12y ago
    But it's easier to "do" office politics if you can talk to someone over lunch, than if you only interact with someone by email. The lesson for me there was to assume that not everyone has the mission's interest at heart. My problem was that for me getting on base was a 2 hour commute, and I had 90% of the gear I needed to do my work rihgt at home -- it got more done to work from home and only show up to deliver prototypes for testing, or use the "big boy" machine tools.
  - 0xdeadbeefbabe 12y ago
    Office politicians, like the Twerp of NASA (though he probably has a better title now), are most excited about some combination, I bet, as it leaves the culture more vulnerable to attack.
    - spiritplumber 12y ago
      He did get a management job. At a Denny's. He didn't last very long in there. I will gladly admit to being very happy to see him in there. He must have recognized me because he sort of hid in the kitchen the whole time.
- nostrademons 12y ago
  There've been a number of psychological studies that show that face-to-face interactions build trust, regardless of the contents of those interactions (unless they're emotionally negative). When you're facing different stories from two people, one of whom you trust and one of whom you don't, who do you think wins? This is also why many startups insist on people not working remotely. Startups frequently need to make decisions on very low information, such that the only conceivable reason you'd have for following through on the decision is trust.
xeromal 12y ago
If you don't mind me asking, how did you find a remote position?
- talsraviv 12y ago
  I found my remote job through my personal network. There's a great site recently launched called http://remoteok.io http://remoteok.io that may be helpful.
- mavdi 12y ago
  I found this particular one from LinkedIn of all places but some great websites for remote work: http://careers.stackoverflow.com http://careers.stackoverflow.com http://www.remoteworking.io http://www.remoteworking.io https://weworkremotely.com https://weworkremotely.com

yodsanklai 12y ago

Good point. It's always better to be there when decisions are made (unless you're important enough that people are scared to keep you out of the loop!).

xtracto 12y ago

What I think is unique of the linked article (yup, I read it all and it was really interesting and related to my startup) is that the type of work being done by the telecommuters is easily measurable: they are telephone operators. So it is quite simple to compare the number of successful calls (depending on what the company is about) made by people both in site or telecommuting.

lfender6445 12y ago

To me, this speaks bigger to your work culture and processess es - what tools were you using to host meetings and have conversations verbally? Assuming the right toolset, having a strong voice and impaact in a company is not impossible from a remote position. Yes, there is real value to face time, and I agree with you on some level - but only given the proper tools and a company that respects them. Given your example, it sounds like you didn't get the attention you deserved.

notahacker 12y ago
If senior management are sufficiently preoccupied with other things and some Machiavellian schemer is sufficiently preoccupied with increasing their own influence over the organization, it's entirely possible that no level of detailed daily status updates and well-structured regular webconferences can undo the amount of FUD the schemer can spread by having water-cooler chats and asking "quick questions" of exactly the same members of management that don't read the status updates. And at the risk of stating the obvious, watercooler chats can have non-negative outcomes in other situations too!

seanwilson 12y ago

Couldn't he have just done something similar as well if he worked remotely though? You always get e.g. people that are much more noisy about what they've achieved over email so everyone gets the impression they've achieved more that quieter ones. Isn't this more about him taken advantage of success being measured incorrectly?

cookiecaper 12y ago
It's much harder to pull off remotely. This is manipulation, and a physical presence with inflection, body language, and the ability to consistently inject into every open moment is very important to its success. While it'd be possible to pull such a con over IM, unless your bosses are complete morons, it's probably too difficult.
- wolfgke 12y ago
  > While it'd be possible to pull such a con over IM, unless your bosses are complete morons, it's probably too difficult. That's a pretty good argument to assign as much work as possible to remote workers.

zaphar 12y ago

I work from home and it's less than half and half for our team. But working from home doesn't mean you don't communicate. Email, Document collaboration, Regular VC all contribute to the visibility of your work. No one can take credit for my work because I'm extremely visible through multiple channels. I don't even show up at the office more than once every few months. Visibility doesn't have anything to do with being in the office. It has everything to do with communication and you can do that with a VC pretty much as easily as you can face to face.

enraged_camel 12y ago
It's worth noting that, in a lot of companies without an established work-from-home culture, you need to over-communicate in order to compensate for the lack of physical presence in the office. As the saying goes, when you're out of sight, you tend to be out of mind. Therefore you always have to remind people that you're in front of your computer or on the phone busting your ass, instead of watching TV or taking a nap, which is what people assume you're doing by default because that's what they would be doing if they were at home.
- Swizec 12y ago
  This is probably the best piece of advice I've ever read on HN about working from home. Especially the part about what normal people do when working from home. Very important to take that into account.
- zaphar 12y ago
  This is exactly right. When someone asks the question what was "Joe" doing yesterday there should be at least one person who can say "I was working with him via {email,chat,phone,VC} on that thing we had discussed earlier." Or... "Oh, didn't you see his email? He sent out that design doc for further discussion" or some other variant. Even in companies with an established work from culture it's important to communicate frequently and with detail.
- s_q_b 12y ago
  Github checkins, Hipchat comments, JIRA tickets opening and closing, emails, texts, etc. If you work from home I recommend : 1. Overcommunicating, which also creates documentation 2. Leaving an audit record, like a time log 3. Going to as many office social functions as possible. You can up your visibility as much with one party as you can with ten days in a cube.

bonif 12y ago

Be smart. Let others know your progress. Send emails (showing completed work) at 6:25 AM. Let others understand you can be productive while they're commuting. If they cannot understand, find someone who can, he/she will have the usual doubs, but will get it after a while.

rondon2 12y ago

So was the guy your boss or not? What kind of organization lets someone promote themselves to project manager or the boss of other engineers?

spiritplumber 12y ago
He basically said "Of the five of us I know the least about the tech, so I'll talk to the people who need this widget built, and do the paperwork". People just sort of assumed that he had been appointed project manager after that.
- r00fus 12y ago
  Sounds like a major lack of leadership - the kind of thing that happens in a college project. This kind of behavior, to me, speaks to me of dysfunctional management and I think it's probably good in the long term to get out of that kind of situation. Lesson to be learned: You can't ignore others on the team. You can't have clear separation of duties without strong management or a good working trust relationship. Both of these are weakened if you're remote most or all of the time and the culture doesn't reward/support remote workers.
- anon4 12y ago
  If he's talking to the people, he IS the project manager.

p0nce 12y ago

People will often listen to the ones with higher perceived status often regardless of the facts.

modarts 12y ago

Awesome ending

dba7dba 12y ago

I feel for you but may I dare say that some fault lies with you, for letting the douch take credit. You should've stopped him before he got out of control.

spiritplumber 12y ago
Probably. Thing is, I was just elated at doing NASA stuff and just threw myself at the technical side of the project without paying attention to much else. I mostly only showed up on base when something cool was happening (In my defence, it was a 2 hour commute each way).
- dba7dba 12y ago
  Didn't mean to really fault you. Just sucks that some douchebag caused you harm and ultimate NASA too. Many many years ago I worked at a badly run startup. One dude was made a manager over us and started trying to shake things up. One thing he wanted was documentation (although mostly it was to prepare let go some people). So I wrote up one page document, really simple stuff (no formatting at all) and put up on fileserver. Few days later I happened to see a printout of a documentation lying around. It had been printed to show higher up that IT was improving process. Content was what I had written. Word by word. It was in better formatting, with tables to separate creator, date etc. For the creator, the manager had put in his own name. There's no mention of my name AT ALL. World is full of such douchebags.
  - spiritplumber 12y ago
    ENCOM MX 16-923 USER #0176825 06:00 INFORMATION VIDEO GAME PROGRAM: SPACE PARANOIDS ANNEXED 9/22 BY E. DILLENGER ORIGINAL PROGRAM WRITTEN BY K. FLYNN THIS INFORMATION PRIORITY ONE END OF LINE Add this to the printout? :) But yeah, had that happened to me a few times too. One time it was at a conference (Open Science Summit), the same douche guy decided to do a presentation on my tech as if it had been developed under him. So I pushed past security, turned off the projector with the powerpoint, went on stage, slammed the microphone down, and did my presentation by shouting. Got a fair amount of applause. And yes, I was wearing a Flynn's t-shirt. And yes, I know this is a bit of a tall tale, so here's the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnRSu9LjV7E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnRSu9LjV7E

michaelochurch 12y ago

I think that this is a general problem with WFH. You'll get 3-5 times more done, because most office environments are horrible and anti-productive, but you're basically stepping out of the political fight. There's so much nonverbal subcommunication that you'll miss about who's viewed as a top performer, who's not, who's ascending and who's not. The social environment of most workplaces is Meritocracy By Assertion. It has to conceive of itself as a meritocracy but the politically successful people are always most able to make themselves seem to have the most merit. No one ever said, "I'm promoting this guy because of his political success". And yet... over time, what we see is that non-WFHers rise up the ranks, because it's just such a political environment to be in the office during normal working hours, and, in general, when they get to the top, they're hostile to the whole concept. So then you have places like Yahoo where, even if you don't care about climbing the executive ladder, you have to adopt behaviors of those who do (namely, avoiding WFH). The really depressing thing to learn about organizational politics is that, while they're a grind for hard-working, decent people, they're actually fun for psychopaths. About 95 percent of people will be utterly miserable if they have to spend 90 hours per week in a packed, open-plan environment. The other 5%, mostly psychopaths, thrive on that shit, like the creatures that live in deep-sea thermal vents (extremophiles). It energizes them. You see this in The Wire. Stringer Bell doesn't love "The Game" (meaning criminal enterprise). He plays it because he's good at it and is trying to work his way out of it, but Marlo (and, to a lesser degree, Avon) is a natural gangster just as much as McNulty and Kima are natural cops. Natural office politicians are the 5% who don't start to fade and fail when subjected to 90-hour weeks in open-plan bullpens, for the same reason that polar bears don't mind ice. Eventually, though, an organization ends up full of natural politicians and has lost the whole "vision thing". Most organizations think that it's valuable to "be tough" and schedule meetings during weird hours and cram developers together and set unrealistic deadlines. But the people who thrive in such environments aren't "the best" in terms of the ability to get work done. They're the natural politicians who thrive in that sort of environment.

genericresponse 12y ago
Did you really just assert that the only people who thrive in "packed, open-plan environments" are psychopaths? What about extroverts, people who get energized by social contact? Are they all psychopaths? Also, when you refer to how "most organizations" think it's valuable to be tough, you're going against the bulk of organizations I've worked with. I'm going on close to 50 organizations now that I've worked with in some capacity. I'd say less than 10 had that mentality.

ugh123 12y ago

I generally call these guys "non producers". Not much value to add to a project yet always seem to be hanging around either taking credit, giving input where its not needed, and usually both. I would throw most project managers in that lot as well as non hands-on middle managers. I'm finding there's an additional skill that engineers/programmers/producers need to obtain in dealing with these types and their politicking and not letting them run you over during tech projects. I believe it falls out of the normal realm of what we call "people skills". I feel your pain

jqm 12y ago
I have stopped calling them "non producers" and started using the term "counter producers". Not only do these types of people not help, they are almost always a hindrance to the completion of projects.

jjtheblunt 12y ago

This is exactly analogous to what has happened with the part of a hugely successful computer / cellphones / etc maker I work for in Cupertino, in engineering. 5 years ago it was a wonderfully productive environment; since, it has filled with do-nothing middle manager detritus, who deeply impede results, and quell enthusiasm, perhaps the most damaging detriment. Thankfully, this hasn't happened across the entire company.

mapmap 12y ago
Sounds like the bozo explosion that a late leader of another hugely successful Cupertino company warned about.

tajen 12y ago

An excellent system: In my 50.000-people company, everyone was required to work 1 day per week from home. It ensures everyone is involved in finding good solutions for the VPN, the chat, VC and work visibility. It also shift the prejudice of "working less" away from the teammate. Of course it's not an immediate solution if some remote workers aren't in the same city, but it makes them more legitimate.

brohoolio 12y ago

bummer dude.

InclinedPlane 12y ago

To be fair, that sort of office politics / system gaming can exist in any environment.

partition 12y ago

Story of my life lol.

yenda 12y ago

Clearly you are terrible at communicating with other human beings or this story is fake.

spiritplumber 12y ago
This story is true, and I am indeed terrible at communicating with other human beings. :)

chupy 12y ago

Honestly, I was not expecting that punchline. The story really sounded like you were working in a typical "change the world" startup with flexible hours and some just hired frat boy manager took credit for your work. This I could see happening in such an environment but not...NASA.

didibus 12y ago

You're only as good at your job as your good a looking good.