I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet
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I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet
1–10 of 71 posts
Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet
#2I wonder how many programmers secretly work on their pet projects during work time.
Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet
#3Sounds like an awesome place to work. I love autonomy and the ability to make my own plans and follow through with them. However, if it's a team effort then you definitely need buy in from everyone involved!
Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet
#4I wonder how many programmers secretly work on their pet projects during work time.
And I wonder how many companies have benefited from the experience said programmers gained while working on pet projects...
Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet
#5>If you can make a decision and you don’t think it’s going to get you fired, just do it.
This advice only applies to people with enough experience.
I'm thinking of a certain ex-employee that followed that advice all the time, despite us constantly correcting him. Even on their final day, they was still insisting that they was doing good work.
To this day, we are still finding code they wrote or modified that is wrong or broken in horrible ways.
Why? Because they didn't have the experience to know the difference between a quick fix and a good fix, and when to employ them. (Hint: The "quick fix" is almost never good enough.)
My personal line is a long way away from "Will it get me fired?" and I've got decades of experience.
I've always said that programming is all about making assumptions. And I'll frequently send off an email stating some assumption I'm making and start coding based on that assumption. If I get corrected, I can change pretty quickly. But I'm usually right.
But just not asking? Forget it. If I'm unsure enough to bother with sending a 2-line email, it's worth asking.
Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet
#6I think this depends a lot on two people - your immediate manager, and their immediate manager. I've been lucky to have great management, and I've been able to do a lot of stuff that the article talks about, and I work in a stodgy BigCo (old school tech co).
I once went to 99Designs and paid $2000 for a designer to redo a certain set of pages on our corporate site. Start to finish, the project took 27 days. This is insanely fast in our context - the usual process would have taken 6-8 months, and at least $100,000. The large agency we work with would have dedicated a team, spun up a project, set up a series of meetings...
To be fair, I get the need for process and I totally get the value of working that way, but it's nice to have management that backs you up when you really need to get something done fast. And yes, once the need for those pages was over (conference related), I made sure they were handed over to the right team for long term management, and not just abandoned as orphan pages.
Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet
#7I can’t help but think having such autonomy is tied to profitability. I’m sure there are plenty of examples where an employee at a profitable company doesn’t have autonomy. But how many have autonomy where there's not profitability?
Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet
#8His boss trusts him enough to let him take his own decisions, good for him! It's definitely not great advice for every employee, or for every company though...
I mean, it's great to be able to discuss things with your boss and colleagues and take collegial decisions...
I don't understand the idea behind the post...
Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet
#9This only works when you have the hiring process dialed in and you're selecting the right candidates to work from you.
Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet
#10I wonder how many programmers secretly work on their pet projects during work time.
Probably a lot, but despite the title, that's not what this article is about.