161–170 of 518 posts
How about they first do away with the culture of "have to show your face in the office until 7pm and then go drinking with your colleagues until midnight, or your wife will ask why you're home so early"?
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We did this at my new company. One 30 minute scheduled standup. That’s the only meeting we have all week. Of course people are free to jump on a video call to work through stuff, but scheduled meetings are generally discouraged, and to date we only have the one. Since everyone is contract, we’re seeing an average of about 26 hours per week. It’s by far the most productive team I’ve ever been on or have built. We ship…
Why is contract important to this?
Some, not all, but certainly some people use work as their only form of social life and interaction. Which leads to a lot of time not working. I’m not saying this is inherently bad. It’s just not the type of company we’re building. Filtering for contract work has taken care of this so far. Will continue to evaluate as we scale up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We did this at my new company. One 30 minute scheduled standup. That’s the only meeting we have all week. Of course people are free to jump on a video call to work through stuff, but scheduled meetings are generally discouraged, and to date we only have the one. Since everyone is contract, we’re seeing an average of about 26 hours per week. It’s by far the most productive team I’ve ever been on or have built. We ship…
Why is contract important to this?
How about they first do away with the culture of "have to show your face in the office until 7pm and then go drinking with your colleagues until midnight, or your wife will ask why you're home so early"?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whaaaat? What year, country, and/or location was this? Call center?
That was the routine at Safeco in Seattle well into the 90s. My wife temped there over summers during grad school. Although she says they played Muzak instead of bells. So, in fact, it was much worse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We did this at my new company. One 30 minute scheduled standup. That’s the only meeting we have all week. Of course people are free to jump on a video call to work through stuff, but scheduled meetings are generally discouraged, and to date we only have the one. Since everyone is contract, we’re seeing an average of about 26 hours per week. It’s by far the most productive team I’ve ever been on or have built. We ship…
How about benefits such as health insurance, vacation days, sick days?
Sick/vacation days are harder because we pay for whatever I get an invoice for. Since we don’t track what people do on a day by day basis (I often don’t even know if someone is working that day until I reach out to them or slack, or vice versa), there’s nothing stopping them for billing me for extra hours. And to be honest I really wouldn’t care. I just care about output and quality of that output.
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That’s insane. I’m in the states, but my company treats us like adults. I roll in when I want, work out in the gym for 2 hours during the day, leave whenever I want. I can’t imagine working for a place that tracked my hours.
You've never worked at a job where you had to submit time sheets at the end of each week? Lots of "professional" gigs where people have to do that in order to accurately track time to customers - particularly when they are billing you out at $500/hour on the contract.
It's an open secret at least in the tech world that absolutely no one is putting in a productive 40 hours of work a week. This was true well before the pandemic and is more pronounced than ever now. Everyone needs to be "present" for 8 hours a day 5 days a week, but spends their time in pointless meetings, preparing documents and powerpoints that no one will read, faux social/teambuilding events, hour long lunches, g…
We did this at my new company. One 30 minute scheduled standup. That’s the only meeting we have all week. Of course people are free to jump on a video call to work through stuff, but scheduled meetings are generally discouraged, and to date we only have the one. Since everyone is contract, we’re seeing an average of about 26 hours per week. It’s by far the most productive team I’ve ever been on or have built. We ship…
So, gig economy. Or, at best, hourly wage at Amazon warehouse, but for developers. I heard those warehouses are super extra no-bullshit efficient.
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I think it makes sense to have people available for regular hours, just so that if I ask someone a question I can expect a response today-ish. But, I agree that a lot of meetings should be emails, teambuilding events are usually poorly done, and procrastination is hard to avoid when you've got access to the internet. Minor nitpick: Is an hour long lunch really that bad?
I think the point is not that there’s something wrong with hour long lunches, but that people have to find ways to fill up their day if they’re expected to be “at work” for 8 hours a day and can only be productive for a fraction of that. As a “productive” software engineer, in the sense that I have gotten positive feedback in my career and never had a problem “getting enough done” to satisfy my superiors, it took me…
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> Especially in industries that require deep thinking, the output doesn't necessarily scale with # of hours a worker puts in, not every hour is the same. Its not about the number of days per week, it's also about the frequency of the thinking you put into it. If you do a 4 days break between two work days, I'd be very surprised if you remember anything in detail of your previous work period.
Not all "weekends" have to be at the end of the week. You can have a weekend Wednesday and be able to recharge every 2 days without having to wait for 4 full days before your next weekend.