They Work Long Hours, But What About Results? 285
theodp writes "HBS lecturer Robert C. Pozen says it's high time for management to stop emphasizing hours over results. By viewing those employees who come in over the weekend or stay late in the evening as more 'committed' and 'dedicated' to their work, as a UC Davis study showed, managers create a perverse incentive to not be efficient and get work done during normal business hours. 'It's an unfortunate reality that efficiency often goes unrewarded in the workplace,' writes Pozen. 'Focusing on results rather than hours will help you accomplish more at work and leave more time for the rest of your life.'"
One way to do this... (Score:5, Funny)
Them Harvard guys (Score:4, Funny)
Them Harvard guys don't miss a thing, do they?
Re:Measuring results (Score:5, Funny)
In other words, yes it is.
Or do you work at that place with nowhere to park your car, because it has a unicorn paddock in front?
Re:If I don't have a list of jobs to do, (Score:3, Funny)
I just go home for the day.
You are lazy! If you were a committed employee, you'd stay and read Slashdot instead! :-)
Re:One way to do this... (Score:4, Funny)
Great. Measure productivity by least lines of code written. ;-)
Re:One way to do this... (Score:4, Funny)
It's more readable than perl and less bug prone than PHP.
Re:One way to do this... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm picturing this confluence of side effects, obfuscated C, and monkey patching ending in some sort of miniature black hole that envelopes the Earth.
;)
Suck that, strangelets!
Re:Measuring results (Score:1, Funny)
It is for those reasons that I, as a manager, hire as many blacks as possible. When you have a lot of blacks on your team, you can intimidate other departments into doing your work for you. You don't even have to ask the other departments explicitly, you just have all of the blacks on your team look really squinty and mean, and at least one of your blacks should menacingly tap his ashy palm with a length of pipe or perhaps a baseball bat. The software industry is dominated by docile, effeminate white men who will dare not cause a stir.
That's why I hire only the biggest, blackest, meanest, most tatted-up thugs on this side of the train tracks. As President Franklin Roosevelt said, "Speak softly but carry a big pipe."
-- Ethanol-fueled
Re:One mark of a bad company... (Score:5, Funny)
It was actually pretty funny. Our team had cultivated our clients and we were quite profitable. We got bought by this other company with the bonus plan. Pretty much all of us quit within a year.
At bonus time, one of our more outspoken engineers opened his bonus envelope, marched into the manager's office, slapped it on his desk, and yelled: "What am I supposed to do with this? Take my wife to McDonalds?" I hadn't laughed that hard since.
Re:One way to do this... (Score:5, Funny)
Nobody "codes" in Perl. Perl programs are written by eating a bag of alphabet pasta and then chasing it with ipecac.
Re:Measuring results (Score:5, Funny)
The guys in the unicorn paddock are fine; they just ride the animals in and lock the doors. It's the god-damned leprechaun valet parking attendents that are the problem. Half the time you have like ten "mystery miles" on the car, or a fresh ding in the bumper.
Re:One way to do this... (Score:4, Funny)
My alphabet spaghetti only had A-Z. Perl uses the *other* half of ASCII.