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.'"
Measuring results (Score:5, Insightful)
Judging employees by results is great, if you have a good way to measure results.
This is notoriously difficult in creative, team efforts such a software development.
Re:Measuring results (Score:5, Insightful)
Its not really. Specifications -> result. That does depend on having a manager sufficiently on the ball to have constant contact with sales and marketing though, and able to tell them that scope creep will cost more and slow things down.
Really I'm amazed that results based metrics aren't standard everywhere, I've worked with companies where management doesn't care when people show up as long as they meet their milestones. A company that puts "time at your desk" before "results" will be eaten by one that has the two in the correct order.
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?
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That doesn't even make any sense. I mean, none. Unless you mean the manager isn't part of the team, in which case I'm not surprised you're throwing darts at a calendar for delivery estimates.
Re:Measuring results (Score:5, Insightful)
That doesn't even make any sense. I mean, none. Unless you mean the manager isn't part of the team, in which case I'm not surprised you're throwing darts at a calendar for delivery estimates.
Darts would be just as good a tool as the standard practice of "Estimate it'll be done by the time the sales guys promised it" . . .
Actual meeting many years ago . . .
Boss: How long will it take you guys to do this new feature? (This was the first time I heard of this new request.)
Me: I just don't know. It's so different from what we've done before, my estimate is a wild guess now.
Boss: Well, just give me that.
Me: OK, I say two months at least. We don't even know what sort of unknowns we're facing yet.
Boss: Really? You think it will take that long?
Me: Like I said, I'm not sure. We'll have a better idea after we get into it a little and we see the kind of issues that come up.
Boss: But really that long? I thought maybe it would take 2 weeks?
Me: Well, I think it'll be longer than that.
Boss: Are you sure?
This question and answer are repeated and rephrased several times.
Me: (giving up) OK. Two weeks.
Boss: Are you just saying that to make me happy?
Me: Yes.
Boss: How long do you think it will take?
. . . and so on and so on.
I guess I could have told the boss we really needed to invest in a few days investigation and planning so he could have a better number to pass on up the chain. But I knew that the 2 weeks was the number that had been passed down to him anyway, so it didn't matter. And we had the culture: "If you're so smart, how come I'm boss and you're not?"
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Feature X is worth $Y. If it takes two months to complete, the value might not be there. If the manager thinks it is 10 man-days of effort, putting 20% down just to find out it will actually far exceed the budget might not be worthwhile.
Of course, the manager gets into these issues by overstepping their own knowledge and committing to things beyond their own expertise.
I do it all the time, and have no issues with it because I know I am hopefully accurate in a +/-25% range. You can't make "management" dec
Re:Measuring results (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Often, there aren't really a lot of unknowns. There are lots of times where the programming task is something along the lines of "Put together a UI that looks like this and behaves like that, takes data from these places over here, and if the user hits the 'save' button shove that data back over here to save it." That entire task is well-defined and quite straightforward, and there should be very little unknown about how to do it.
That's all fine and good, but unless you are heavily indentured into the actual infrastructure of all the systems involved, you're still doing guess work.
'Put together a UI that looks like this and behaves like that'. Yea, so what tool are you using? The existing one? Well, it doesn't allow the buttons to be exactly where the user interface wants. You can't manually hack it. So we have to write a custom module for that. The save button is actually having to talk to a MSQL database over the firewall into a vendor turnkey server, so we have to open up firewalls, write a custom database connector for the MSQL database, and oh, wait, you said the filesystem is on NFS as well? Oh, apparently the background save data needs to be faster than NFS can provide, so we need some SAN local disk as well. Wait, you don't have that in the budget? We have to put it on existing NFS? But it won't be fast enough. Wait, it doesn't matter? Ok, whatever.
If you ever assume a project is 'straight forward and well defined', then you don't deserve to be a PM. It's never that simple. Ever. If you had any experience in the field, you'd know that by now.
2. Estimates provide valuable information to those deciding what to do next. If a developer estimates project A (worth $3 million) at 20 days, that's likely to be a better return on investment than project B (worth $4 million) estimated at 40 days. Somebody just looking at revenue would be more likely to pick project B, somebody looking at the revenue plus the estimate would pick project A.
Estimates appease the share holders and investors. They also help utilize personal hours on projects. Otherwise, there's no real point to them. And sadly, you are absolutely correct that projects utilize the lowest dollar. What they don't realize that a lot of times, PM's, like yourself, are providing them with cooked numbers, based on half-assed quotes, ideas, and expectations without any real input from IT professionals who know their business. You basically tell them exactly what you said. 'We want X'. Give us hours. You don't tell them the budget, or if you do, it's prior to any hardware or software or man-hours. So now the IT professionals have to fit the timetable into the pre-defined man hours. Then other times, the upper management already have promised a deadline on the project prior to getting even you, the PM, involved, so you're just trying to get the IT people to find some way to make the unrealistic time frame work. Feed your BS to someone who doesn't know it for what it is.
3. The procrastination argument is simply wrong. If a developer has estimated 20 business days to do something, he may scramble to get it done on days 18-25. If he's given no estimate, days 20-60 zoom right by and he still doesn't have it done, because he can just put it off until tomorrow.
Then you need to find better employees. When I give '20 business days' to do something, it is the estimate of 20 + 8 hour days. Not '20 days'. Based on your comment above, you equate 20 business days as 20 direct days. Well, I have news for you. IT professionals, like programmers, are doing more than project work. They can not, and will not, be applied 100% on a singular project. The only exception to this are hired consultants who are tasked with ONLY the project at hand. And they are paid hourly for that work, at a very costly sum. For salary employees, they have more than just your p
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:Measuring results (Score:5, Insightful)
Its not really. Specifications -> result. That does depend on having a manager sufficiently on the ball to have constant contact with sales and marketing though, and able to tell them that scope creep will cost more and slow things down.
Really I'm amazed that results based metrics aren't standard everywhere, I've worked with companies where management doesn't care when people show up as long as they meet their milestones. A company that puts "time at your desk" before "results" will be eaten by one that has the two in the correct order.
A number of real-world issues can and do stymie your proposal:
In my experience, the best "metric" is having a seasoned software development managers, who's well versed in the details of the project and knows the software developers, to rate each programmer relative to the expectations of that programmer's position.
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"and able to tell them that scope creep will cost more and slow things down"
Too few resources and unanticipated setbacks should have been padded out beforehand to be honest. As someone once said, if I had six hours to cut down a tree, I'd spend four hours sharpening the axe. If that doesn't happen, its a management failure.
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"and able to tell them that scope creep will cost more and slow things down"
Too few resources and unanticipated setbacks should have been padded out beforehand to be honest. As someone once said, if I had six hours to cut down a tree, I'd spend four hours sharpening the axe. If that doesn't happen, its a management failure.
I suppose it depends on how one defines "unanticipated".
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If its unanticipated enough to blow delivery dates out of the water completely, the team, and I include management, were inadequate to the task in the first place. There's nothing special about software development versus comparable projects, like say movie production. Once everyone (including the customer) knows what's going on, there shouldn't be any major surprises. This is why a good manager is rare and important - they can speak and understand the language used by customers, developers and sales guys,
Re:Measuring results (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a manager and I find scope creep works both ways. My job is largely protect my team from customers and sales guys who want to change the requirements AND to protect the sales guys and customers from coders who constantly want to leave out or do a halfassed implementation of important features. As much as possible I tell customers and salespeople that their requests are not in scope and would cause schedule delays and cost increases and I tell employees to implement the features as they were originally agreed with customers or sales.
Sales guys are generally a lot worse than customers. Customers generally know what they want and know they don't know what we can do. Sales guys don't know what customers want and don't know that they don't know what we can do.
Of the development guys, the most dependable are the firmware guys, who almost always have a clear idea what they can do with hardware. Then the hardware guys, who are prone to mistakes but know very well how much time it takes to design hardware to meet reasonably well-defined specs. At the bottom of the barrel are the software guys. They can do amazing things but have absolutely no idea how long it will take to do them and can't communicate their status to managers and can't communicate with customers (with a few blessed exceptions).
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One also does not exclude the other. If you put results before time at your desk, that will end in people working double shifts for the same pay.
That's not putting results before time at your desk, that's busting your nuts to get results. If you deliver in half the time without negotiating a bonus structure beforehand, that's your problem. What I'm talking about is the cargo cult like behaviour of equating time at the desk with productivity.
Re:Measuring results (Score:4, Informative)
Hasn't been my experience across a half-dozen entities of varying sizes, but YMMV. (excepting very precise software such as nuclear control or avionics, but that's an entirely different world from business code)
Except for one entity that had used the same process for 40 years and wrote excruciatingly detailed specs for every change they made, and QA'd the heck out of the changesets and the developers. Problem was that it was taking them 9-15 months to get any of the changes spec'd and deployed, and their industry had evolved from one with three year change cycles to a fast-paced fashion-type industry with major market changes every 6 months. Getting your heavily spec'd, perfect software deployed in 12 months wasn't really helping when the competitors were updating their web sites and methods of selling every six weeks.
sPh
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if you have a good way to measure results
True statement. On the other hand, judging results by now many hours were worked is easy but notoriously inaccurate.
Re:Measuring results (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually that's quite hard.
Measuring how many hours they were present, that's easy.
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So what you're saying is that management has a real job to do, and that the managers need to have an actual clue about what they're doing?
Yeah, I can see how this doesn't work out very well in most companies.
Teams and goals (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's say, as an example, that you have two programmers on a team, Alice and Bob. Alice writes large amounts of code, which has few bugs and which works consistently, and she is an expert in the languages and libraries that are used by the team. Bob is not great at writing code and does not have the language expertise that Alice has, but he is great at solving problems and figuring out what code needs to be written. If Bob is not around, Alice produces less because she is not as good at problem solving; if Alice is not around, Bob tries to write the code and does a terrible job. Can you really say that one of these employees is "better" or "more valuable" than the other? What about Catherine, the person who is a mediocre coder and a mediocre problem solver, but who is great at keeping the team's morale up and who can help motivate people to meet deadlines (but who is not officially in a management position, and who maybe lacks the qualifications when it comes to organizing budgets or making tough hiring or firing decisions)?
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+1 Insightful
+a story everyone should read [leanessays.com]!
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Apparently, it IS insightful since so many 'experts' seem to be oblivious to it.
Re:Teams and goals (Score:4, Informative)
Not sure I'd call it insightful. This is the situation with every team; different people always have different strengths and weaknesses. It's also one reason Agile rarely works the way the "experts" say it should (everyone is supposed to know all about the project and can pick up any task - just doesn't happen in real life).
When Fred Brooks wrote the original Mythical Man-Month and suggested the Chief Programmer Team approach to software development, a homogeneous team was quite the opposite of what he posited. The Chief Programmer Team was supposed to operate like a surgical team, with a designated lead and various supporting specialists. Not interchangeable grunts.
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You forgot Chris.
They suck, their work is lower quality, they don't solve problems well.
But Alice, Bob, and Catherine are all working 50 hours a week.
Chris takes a lower load of projects and they have bugs.
But they were done and they do work well enough not to lose the customer.
Sure- you'd like to have a superstar, or then alice, bob and catherine.
But your job as a manager is to get enough out of Chris to turn a clusterfuck into a nuclear bomb. Because it's going to take 6 to 9 months to find an Alice, Bob
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That may be the case but that doesn't mean we should just stick with a flawed method of judging people based on hours put in just because it can be hard to judge people based on results.
Agreed. I think the best measure we've found is to have a manager who both is a seasoned software developer and is well-versed in the project on which the staff are working.
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Sure it is. That is supposedly why managers get the big bux. If they want to just phone it in by using metrics like staying late or lines of code, they should take a pay cut and surrender their MBA.
Double edge-sword (Score:2, Interesting)
While the author of the article seems to lean into this approach with the target of maybe working less hours, a results-based way of working can also have disadvantages: working more hours than the stipulated (to try to achieve visible results, or just better-looking results), burnout because of the latter, etc.
Coding is just what it is: knowledge discoverability. Sometimes you discover it very quickly, sometimes you don't find it. The only good management technique I know is: hire the best people, and then
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One way to do this... (Score:5, Funny)
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So you prefer to have CGI apps written in assembly language?
Re:One way to do this... (Score:4, Funny)
It's more readable than perl and less bug prone than PHP.
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Measure performance based on lines of code put online. That should help efficiency.
But I code in Perl you insensitive clod!
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:One way to do this... (Score:4, Funny)
My alphabet spaghetti only had A-Z. Perl uses the *other* half of ASCII.
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: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!
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Do you really want more one-liners? :}
Not all companies are the same (Score:5, Interesting)
After a few days the boss came to him and asked him:
1) Is there a problem with the project? Are there enough people and resources allocated for it?
2) Does he need extra training to do his job?
3) Is the job a good fit for him?
So he stopped staying late just for the sake of staying late
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Dear sir,
If this company is till in business, please let us know its name, and whether or not they're hiring.
Sincerely,
98% of the programmers on the planet.
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I'm not that old, but all three places I've worked in the UK did this. (My university during a summer, a large electronics multinational, a scientific non-profit.)
My manager tends to leave at about 16:30 on Fridays, saying, "go home everyone! Why are you still here?". She's also had to remind one of my colleagues that he's obliged to use all his holiday days (he was only 20, and a bit keen).
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It's the norm in Scandinavia, so if you just pick a random company there's a good chance they'll be just like that. Also, we usually have a shortage of people with technical degrees (Preferably a masters or equivalent. Just a bachelors won't get you far.), but it's not so pronounced with the current crisis.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Not all companies are the same (Score:5, Informative)
If there are 2 people working 60 hours a week, it could also be 3 people working 40 and most likely more efficient as they won't be burned out.
That depends on whether the task can be broken down into three pieces, and on the degree of communication required.
The other option (and often the more realistic one) is to extend the schedule by 50% -- still two people, now working 40 hours per week, but for, say, six weeks instead of 4.
This issue is the fundamental point of Fred Brooks' "The Mythical Man Month".
Re:Not all companies are the same (Score:4, Interesting)
This is the kind of management style that results when there isn't constant pressure to keep headcount low to avoid paying for health benefits. Nice,ya?
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Oh! That's an eye opener!
As a scandinavian I never though of that. The health system in the US is just that alien to me I guess.
Re:Not all companies are the same (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, I would say that this sounds like most Scandinavian companies. I live in Finland, and you're not expected to put in more than your 7-8h per day. Mandatory time tracking systems will not allow you to put in more hours than you're getting paid for, and if you do, you have to keep that time off work. The company can even be fined if you work too much overtime, so it is in the company's interest to make sure you don't work too much.
Whenever we get new foreign people here, they think they can impress with working long hours. But they learn quickly. And working weekends, that's a completely unknown concept. For example, if you work on a Sunday, the company have to pay you up to 400% of your normal salary. I can count on one hand then number of times I've been called in for emergency work during weekends during the past 10 years. I'm a senior developer for a quite critical system.
So, welcome! We have a quite advanced technology sector and practically everyone speaks fluent English here.
Re:Not all companies are the same (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, I would say that this sounds like most Scandinavian companies. I live in Finland, and you're not expected to put in more than your 7-8h per day. Mandatory time tracking systems will not allow you to put in more hours than you're getting paid for, and if you do, you have to keep that time off work.
I live in the United States, and at several jobs the mandatory time tracking system would not allow us to put in more hours than we were getting paid for.
All this meant was that the bosses required us to lie on the time tracking system, and not record the 20-40 extra hours we were putting in every week.
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They might complain, but frequently they'll put up with it, because the alternative is unemployment.
It's actually a serious problem in this country, a big enough deal that it has a name: wage theft [wagetheft.org].
I've heard about it too (Score:3)
A colleague of mine used to work for a company where he would be criticized for not staying late with the others when deadlines were looming, even though he had already finished his part long before.
How do you get work done during business hours? (Score:3)
With the constant meetings, phone calls and emails, how do you ever get some serious code written?
Many of our group work either very early or very late, and often a bit on the weekend.
Re:How do you get work done during business hours? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you don't have time during your work day to do...you know...work, then that's a failure of management. Why are you donating time to the company just because the management they hire is an utter failure? People like you are the reason these worthless management people continue to hold their jobs in the first place, and it leads to some really warped and twisted expectations of what is to be expected of you and your peers.
As one of your peers, I'm telling you to knock it off.
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Because, as a manager, I have banned pointless meetings and phone calls for the majority of my team. My job, as a manager, is to handle that portion of the job and disseminate the information to my staff. This gives them the time to do what they are good at (development and QA) and not waste time doing what they are not necessarily as good at (dealing with customers, answering asinine questions repeatedly for the benefit of those who can't understand tech, and doing things other than development).
Yes, this
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Re:here in america (Score:4, Informative)
We have salaried employment here in Norway too for leading and particularly independent positions, you just wouldn't qualify for one.
If they're either a) counting hours or b) tie you to a partially or wholly fixed work schedule or c) expect you to be on call when they want you to work, you're disqualified. Of course they can expect you to show up for meetings or such, but if you're explicitly or implicitly tied to office hours the employer can find themselves at the wrong end of a lawsuit for back pay. In the same vein if you can only work at the office you're disqualified, if they don't acknowledge work in places they don't control you're not independent. Third and probably the biggest is that you choose your work, if you're assigned specific work instead of areas of responsibility you're not independent either.
In the US, I have the impression that making you a salaried employee is almost unconditionally an advantage for the employers, a lot less employee rights and practically no extra restrictions. In Norway, it's a lot more that you can't both have your cake and eat it too. If you want to make your employees independent, you lose a lot of the control that employers normally like to have. Thus it becomes much more of a balancing act, is this really the kind of employee you'd trust to just do good work on their own? If so here's your paycheck, you're not getting overtime or domestic travel costs and you're off the corporate leash but we'll of course be following up on the results you deliver.
Them Harvard guys (Score:4, Funny)
Them Harvard guys don't miss a thing, do they?
But if you're a lawyer... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Trying to get them to move to a partial fixed bid structure, where I would realize all of the scoped hours for a project even if I only work half of them.
Be careful what you wish for, as long as you are costing them per hour they are all working to reduce the number of hours you will bill them. Once you switch to a fixed bid and change orders model, nobody cares how much time you use - it's your problem not theirs. You have to get anal about what's in the specification because you're not getting paid for extra bells and whistles and they will get anal about the specification because they don't care if it takes you two weeks to implement the nice-to-have feat
One mark of a bad company... (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked for a company that based your annual bonus on the amount of overtime you put in. Not productive, mind you, just hours. At the end of the year, they would tally up the hours you worked, and those with the most hours at their desk got the biggest bonuses.
Being new to this, I asked my boss: "If I do everything right, and my project never needs rework, and my clients are happy, and all my projects are profitable, and I go home on time every day, will I get a bonus?" "No."
"If I screw up, my projects are late and over budget, and I'm working a lot of hours because my clients are pissed at the low quality of work I do, and my projects constantly lose money because I'm an idiot, will I get a bonus?" "Yes."
True to form, my bonus for the year was $50, in spite of being one of the most profitable employees in the organization. I left shortly thereafter.
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Bummer that you had to stay there long-enough to get that check.
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.
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Ah, the joys of working for f'ed up companies. Good times, good times...
Ya far too many of those (Score:3)
I have a friend who doesn't work for a company that does bonuses like that, but still is a "moar hours = moar better" kind of place. My friend is a nice guy but... not as competent as one might hope. Back when we both worked at the same place another co-worker described him as someone who "Broke down big rocks in to little rocks and then glued the rocks back together." Basically he has a lot of enthusiasm, but ends up spending a lot of time fixing problems he created by not having a good understanding what
Working Smarter is rewarded (Score:2)
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http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-12-21/ [dilbert.com]
well... (Score:2)
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The set of employees that has come in to work extra hours is almost surely more "willing to work extra hours when necessary" than the set of employees who have never worked extra hours (including, potentially, because they've never needed to.) On the other hand, the "extra hours" probably also contains a higher percentage of "people who can't budget their time well enough to finish things within the time planned." As a manager I'd certainly count overall productivity as one of my main concerns, but I might value an employee with lower "average" productivity but who is better able to accommodate spikes than the employee whose average productivity is higher but who is unwilling to make any personal sacrifice during extenuating circumstances. And that seems perfectly reasonable.
Have you noticed that the "extenuating circumstances" seem happen more frequently the more "people who can't budget their time well enough to finish things within the time period" are on the case? Is it possible that the "no personal sacrifice" folks feel that way because they don't want to pick up the slack left by the highly-valued-but-can't-budget people?
Part of an age-old problem (Score:2)
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...and then people will learn to work to the metrics instead of actually being productive.
Suddenly, the reports say everything is peachy, but in reality nothing is getting done. The managers sit in meetings scratching their heads wondering what has gone wrong, and try to fix it by setting more targets and measuring them with metrics.
similar issue. Open Plan (Score:2)
I work in an open plan office. While this allows me to see what is happening, and make sure my employees are happy and productive, it means I get no peace.
I have recently started to time the intervals between me actually getting any work done. Last Tuesday I went for 12 minutes without someone coming and asking something.
While I don't mind answering and helping people, it means I get none of my actual own work done. Sometimes I just need an hour to get x done without interruption. Often times this leads to
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Thought here: if you have that much of a problem with an open-plan office, do you really think your employees are any more satisfied with it than you are? I'm fairly sure they're having the same problem you have, with the same consequences for their work.
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Absolutely. Don't get me wrong, though; I do like open plan for the most part. I just don't like how convenient it makes everyone.
It would be nice if we had a walled off quiet zone where you could go and sit to get actual work done. I'm sure there are better alternatives.
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I've always though the opposite: it'd be nice if the default were individual offices where people could concentrate on the work at hand without disruption, with open shared workspaces available when needed. Especially with things like webcams for occasions when you need face-to-face with someone and don't need to leave the office.
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Don't we call those areas 'offices'?
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You make a good point. At least I can ignore emails until I am ready... ;)
I will grow a pair and get a sign I guess
This assumes we should care (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess my point is, don't count on your boss caring about your productivity dropping as your hours increase. If you trip and fall there's 100 guys waiting to overtake you in the race to the bottom that is supply side economics...
but new worker still need to get up to speed on (Score:2)
but new workers still need to get up to speed on project / code base / how other internal stuff works.
And just putting people in sink or swim can end very badly if some who does not know what they are doing messes up.
They'll do that in their own time (Score:4, Insightful)
That trouble is, the way the world works doesn't match up with the economics we're taught in school
Japan's lost decade is a good example (Score:4, Interesting)
In Japan white collar workers are expected to stay late, even if they are out of work and are just looking busy. It's the total opposite of the Japanese blue collar factory worker experience. A lot of folks think the faux productivity has kept them from getting out of their financial woes. The article focuses on hourly billable jobs like lawyers but a lot of it apply to poor eastern management styles. In particular the focus on reading and writing memo and BS paperwork. There's a lot of rote BS work that goes on.
On the hand I quite enjoy working as an hourly computer consultant. I think my focus is results and I think things like iterative design really shift the focus from hours to what you got done. That brings a lot of value to the client in the end. But there are a lot of consulting companies out there where the focus is utilization and bill (mostly seen in creative services such as Marketing IT or off-shore consulting).
That's a bit a problem (Score:2)
Norway leads the way. (Score:2)
In Norway, work hours are 34 hours a week. And yet Norway have some of the highest salaries in the world, some of the least unemployment and they are amongst the happiest people in the world as well.
Why? I'm pretty sure that is because they do reward efficiency rather than how many hours you put in.
In Sweden it's the other way around, here they work 40-45 hours a week, and people sometimes feel miserable over the long working hours.
Of course, this is a problem that relates to the country you live in. Take a
Work to much results in not much getting done. (Score:5, Insightful)
As a member of the military, we do heavily take our cues from the Boss (Commander or Chief) When they go home everyone else feels safe enough to head home.
I learned a long time ago that was a pretty stupid thing to do. I've had a lot of bosses that hated their home life or didn't feel like driving accross town during rush hour, or were just burning time to make some regular events so they would stay late for no work related reason.
I get dirty looks when I head out the door on time or early to go to the gym, like I'm skating. The reality is my bosses know I'm a go to guy when things are screwed up, that I've been known to work 16-24 hour straight when they really go south, that I'll come in for however long it takes on the weekends, and can be packed and out the door to Krap-ic-stan on deployment without much fuss...if there is an actual reason to do.
Otherwise I head on home when it's time, take my vacation time without guilt, and ignore the drones' in the office snide comments, who make their own lives missereable while blaming it on work.
Looking good for the client (Score:5, Interesting)
So I sit in a chair in front of a laptop for 8 hours writing "documentation" and dealing with change manglement processes, then another 1-3 hours actually getting real work done after the close of business. It'd be cheaper for them to hire a wannabe actor to sit in my seat from 9-5, and then just pay me for my 3 hours a day of actual productivity.
Re: (Score:3)
It'd be cheaper for them to hire a wannabe actor to sit in my seat from 9-5
I think some Asian companies actually do this. I've forgotten where the article was, but the point was that people are hired simply for good looks, manners and English for international business meetings.
I had this discussion with my Boss (Score:4, Interesting)
I had the exact discussion with my boss the other day. She was inquiring on how to motivate me to work harder -- meaning, she has seen that when I am focused, I can get loads of non-stop quality work done quicker than anyone else in our team, however there are days when I accomplish little in terms of new functionality etc. This is the flow that we all know, you either can get there or not, it does not always come on whim.
Anyhow, I replied that I am a simple being and I can be motivated easily -- if I coded harder, and more quickly, would there be a monetary bonus if the project was finished early? No. If I coded harder, and more quickly, would it be possible to use less than the allocated hours per week sitting in the office? No. Well, how do you expect to motivate people to code quick and hard on constant basis? Uhh.. *insert generic company talk here*.
Anyhow -- if there are no incentives to work hard, why should I drain myself more? I do not get paid more, there are no bonuses for meeting the deadline, there is no extra time to spend for my own activities if I finish the job quicker. Why should I strain myself more than I have to, when the no-sweat approach brings me far above average in productivity?
If anyone can help me here, I would be keen to know the solution. And so would my boss.
No, they can't let that happen (Score:2)
If employees had more free time, they might think.
"Fred Flintstones" (Score:5, Interesting)
One VP for whom I used to work referred to employees that left right at closing time as "Fred Flintstones." He made sure his derisive attitude towards these employees was well displayed in front of the CEO of the company at the end of the day as the line of cars left the parking lot. Most of the employees who stayed after the 5PM quitting time were there because they started their shifts later than the other employees.
This VP's attitude blinded him to the fact that those be labeled "Fred Flintstones" were on the job first thing in the morning, well before he arrived to sit in his office for the day doing nothing engaged with production of product in the company. Never mind that these very employees were the engineers that developed and made the technology of the company's primary product. Ironically, the one engineer he praised for staying late each day was staying late for a very special reason: it was the only time he could switch out the sabotaged firmware he created into shipping machines and put non-sabotaged firmware into machines that were being returned for "repairs". He was sabotaging the firmware in order to ensure that his job of hunting down bugs in the programming would be too important to get laid off.
This sabotage was discovered when the engineer was out of vacation and forgot to remove his secret code from his computer. The senior engineer on the project needed to double check the programming, logged into the saboteur's computer and discovered the two sets of code. Sadly, it was long too late for the many employees that had to be laid off because the company was struggling due to the problems the device was having. Most of the employees let go were the ones the VP had labeled Fred Flintstones. With the truly productive employees gone, it was pretty much game over for the company. They were able to float a little longer, but the lack of improvement and productivity stopped any possibility of growth in the company. When the sabotage was discovered, the laid off employees were no longer available. Eventually, the company pretty much closed their doors, being bought out by a competitor.
The attitude that the people who left at the end of the day and didn't put in extra hours were substandard employees was dead wrong. They were the people who made things happen in the company. Once let go, no longer were there any doers in the company and everything ground to a halt
Management doesn't care (Score:2)
'95% of assets drive out front gate every evening' (Score:5, Interesting)
Jim Goodnight, SAS Institute CEO, in: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-550102.html [cbsnews.com]
Sara Robinson, http://www.alternet.org/visions/154518/why_we_have_to_go_back_to_a_40-hour_work_week_to_keep_our_sanity/?page=entire [alternet.org]
;-) who figured it out, but Henry Ford.
"Management Summary": It's not Karl Marx
Nope. Never going to happen. (Score:3)
In order to place performance over the appearance of labor, management will have to develoop some metrics for measuring actual work done. In its own right, this is a difficult problem in engineering, CS and other disciplines that involve creative, self directed and non-repetitive work*.
Problem: There are employees hiding among the ranks of professional who would never survive such a metric. They would push back against any adoption of actual performance criteria in favor of the status quo [dilbert.com]. Long hours is something that the untalented can achieve and keep their standing in the workplace.
* A 'professional', as defined in the NLRA [nlrb.gov].
Managers view... (Score:3)
All employees should be working at 100% of their ability during every hour and if employees are competent and giving full effort there shouldn't be drastic variations in work output. So the big variable should be number of hours worked.
In general the idea is that anyone who isn't giving full effort every hour of every day is a bad employee waiting to be caught and fired no matter how "good" they are at the job function. If you are giving full effort and producing substantially less you probably would benefit from training by someone who is "good" at the task and be able to produce increased output. Working extra hours is a sign of commitment to the task. So the guy who works extra hours but produces low output you train. The guy with high output who does the minimum needed to not look bad vs peers you try to motivate. The guy who produces high output and works extra hours you give maximum increases. The guy who produces high output, works extra hours, and is always telling you about the work that needed doing that he found and just did or is in the process of doing before you can tell him about it, you promote.
That is why this type of argument always fail with management. Why should producing more an hour mean you work less hours when it can mean you work the same number of hours and produce more?
It isn't all bullshit. There isn't a one to one correlation but in general when the company is raking in profits it is a hell of a lot easier to get broken things replaced and fixed and to get pay and benefit increases. Even in a fortune 500 where nobody gets real pay increases without a promotion, the company being flush means expansion which means room to promote more staff.
Re: (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! :-)
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What about 1 shift crews that have to maintain 3 shift servers and police departments? Off hours is a necessity and out budget doesn't cover overtime.
So don't work off-hours, and your budget should be increased following the next problem.
Re:If I don't have a list of jobs to do, (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, if you worked for me and you left an hour or two early from time to time I'd have no problem with that. But in general I expect people who work for me to spend down time "sharpening their saw" by doing research and experimentation. So if you routinely had nothing to do for several hours a day, I'd expect you to find something to do that'll make you awesome on the next big project. If you didn't find something like that, I would. In that kind of work environment a few hours of "mental health leave" couple of weeks is no big deal, as long as you're doing a good job and getting better at it.
When I managed a development team I recognized that the occasional all-nighter or weekend session was necessary,but I had a policy that my guys had to take comp time *right away*, within a day or two. That wasn't popular; they liked the idea of comp time, but they'd have preferred to bank it. But the point wasn't to compensate them for their extra effort -- they were salaried employees -- it was to make sure when they were at work their minds were sharp.
I believe an engineering team needs three things: skill, energy and focus. "Dedication" is neither here nor there as far as I'm concerned, at least if by that you mean some kind of sentimental attachment to the organization. If you have the big three, you'll get whatever else you need. Too many managers don't manage, they work out a personal psychodrama in which there are good employees and bad employees. To me that's baloney, unless an employee is "good" if and only if he contributes to productivity and "bad" if and only if he does not. An employee who suffers unproductively for the company is neurotic, no matter what else you choose to call him, and shouldn't be encouraged to do that.
Re:If I don't have a list of jobs to do, (Score:5, Insightful)
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Keep up the good work, dude.
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