I wonder how many programmers secretly work on their pet projects during work time.
I would just view pet projects as practice time. Its like getting mad at a musician for playing when the mics are turned off.
I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet
11–20 of 71 posts
Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet
#12I 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 i…
Well played hacking the system.
Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet
#13This only works when you have the hiring process dialed in and you're selecting the right candidates to work from you.
Exactly. I once had the conversation about bottom-up vs top-down decision making with my CEO, and his point was essentially that the people we've hired can't be trusted with that level of responsibility. For me this was proof that our hiring process needed to improve, for him it was proof that our supervision process needed to improve.
There's a great book about companies run through bottom-up decision making called Reinventing Organizations. My take away was that bottom up can work at any scale, but it requires true believers at the top who are constantly working hard at making themselves unnecessary. Once the true believers walk out organizations naturally revert to hierarchical decision-making.
Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet
#14Assuming the people doing this have experienced and are trustworthy, this is honestly what companies need in a limited capacity, even if they don't think they need it.
Over the course of my relatively short career so far (7 years?), almost every single "big win" has been because something was bugging the crap out of me, and I just decided to do something about it.
The key is to do this kind of autonomous stuff while still delivering things people expect you to do, unless/until your peers and management are clear on the value you bring just doing stuff on your own all the time.
Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet
#15In most companies I've worked, approval process is the scar tissue of years of mistakes. In every case where you need to ask for approval to do something, you can probably trace back in the company's history and find the past mistake that some goofball made that necessitated getting approval to do something like that. Someone got us sued. Someone lost us some money. We need to take some kind of corrective action and the easiest solution is to simply require oversight next time.
A place where you can "do whatever you want" strikes me as a place with a very short history of mistakes.
Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet
#16Assuming the people doing this have experienced and are trustworthy, this is honestly what companies need in a limited capacity, even if they don't think they need it. Over the course of my relatively short career so far (7 years?), almost every single "big win" has been because something was bugging the crap out of me, and I just decided to do something about it. The key is to do this kind of autonomous stuff while…
Also, the two things that push most people towards entrepreneurship is money and autonomy in their work.
If you can give employees these things, they will stick around longer.
Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet
#17In most companies I've worked, approval process is the scar tissue of years of mistakes. In every case where you need to ask for approval to do something, you can probably trace back in the company's history and find the past mistake that some goofball made that necessitated getting approval to do something like that. Someone got us sued. Someone lost us some money. We need to take some kind of corrective action and…
My company has been getting a lot of talent from Amazon and Microsoft, so we are getting their "scar tissue" without any of the context, jacking up our culture. I have to do a detailed doc and plan for everything.
It wouldn't be a big deal but we've gone from 700 to 1500 employees in just 2 years, so its been fast change.
Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet
#18I 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...
I look at it like taking a walk, or a smoker taking a smoke break. That small reprieve, the 15 minutes I take working on a side project, or tinkering with something for fun, rejuvenates me and gets me jazzed about the task at hand when I get back to it. That's a productivity booster, and ultimately a benefit.
Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet
#19In most companies I've worked, approval process is the scar tissue of years of mistakes. In every case where you need to ask for approval to do something, you can probably trace back in the company's history and find the past mistake that some goofball made that necessitated getting approval to do something like that. Someone got us sued. Someone lost us some money. We need to take some kind of corrective action and…
It also indicates to me a certain broader immaturity (in terms of product and engineering process) than simply a short history of mistakes.
Re: I do whatever I want at work and I haven’t been fired yet
#20>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…
Isn't the solution to this a good code review process? Even the author of the article states "I either wrote up a plan and shared it beforehand, or I just announced what I’d done after it was completed". This is very similar to asking someone review your code.