111–120 of 128 posts
As a company owner, I've resisted the temptation to do this. We did make it easy for our employees to behave themselves by making it very easy to 'clock in' and 'clock out.' I told everybody that this is a time to be close to family - if your child wants to play ball in the middle of the day, then go ahead! Just clock out before you do. Get your 8 hours in and document your work. Thankfully everybody has responded we…
As a company owner, I've resisted the temptation to do this. We did make it easy for our employees to behave themselves by making it very easy to 'clock in' and 'clock out.' I told everybody that this is a time to be close to family - if your child wants to play ball in the middle of the day, then go ahead! Just clock out before you do. Get your 8 hours in and document your work. Thankfully everybody has responded we…
Certainly would feel creepy, if I knew it was happening. But, I would ask, beyond a gut feeling of being creepy, what particular objections does anyone have to this? Do you believe employers are not entitled, either legally or ethically, to do this on their own equipment?
I think the main objection is that these companies are treating their employees as an enemy rather than part of a team. Seems to me to be a very strong indicator of a toxic workplace
Do we expect orgs not to respond to insider threats, or is it just this particular response that is especially distasteful?
[0] https://enterprise.verizon.com/resources/executivebriefs/ins...
As a company owner, I've resisted the temptation to do this. We did make it easy for our employees to behave themselves by making it very easy to 'clock in' and 'clock out.' I told everybody that this is a time to be close to family - if your child wants to play ball in the middle of the day, then go ahead! Just clock out before you do. Get your 8 hours in and document your work. Thankfully everybody has responded we…
Why is it tied to time, instead of deliverables? I mean, if I work extra hard to get the days work done in 4 hours, why can’t I leave early compared to a co-worker who is working less focused and more slowly? I get that it’s not easy to set good milestones, and to keep it fair in terms of making sure everyone has approximately equal work, but I feel the same problems exist with required work “time” especially since i…
We all know it's easy to "work" as in get "stuff done" but "hard work" is the basis of our economy. Part of the problem is the notion of hardness, a dimensionless constant on the Moh scale which you can look up elsewhere. Difficulty, as in the complexity of thought required to predict a system, is another matter altogether. We should speak instead of power, the ability to perform work quickly.
I know a few powerful thinkers. Give them a problem and they'll return an appreciation quickly. An answer will follow, and more thereafter, until things settle, and they can share their understanding.
One of the most useful techniques in this regard is contextualisation, whereby we physically, perhaps synesthaestically, abstract ourselves from our abstractions by being with, and learning from, each other. Think of children and think of Alan Kay.
Children put in all their time to being children. When we're employed we're employed as adults. Eight hours of work is equivalent to eight hours of cooking and cleaning, or playing and teaching, of exploring and learning. When we pay each other to be adults we maintain all the rest of society.
Paid by hour or minute we're best off working as autonomous heroes for the greater good.
I love hacker news, smart people share politely. I can show my Mother on occasion. But Hacker News is still just a bit of a cuter slashdot with pretentions of lambdatheultimate and a healthy dash of shtetloptimised, downed with a bit of whatever you're having yourself.
As a company owner, I've resisted the temptation to do this. We did make it easy for our employees to behave themselves by making it very easy to 'clock in' and 'clock out.' I told everybody that this is a time to be close to family - if your child wants to play ball in the middle of the day, then go ahead! Just clock out before you do. Get your 8 hours in and document your work. Thankfully everybody has responded we…
I do not understand (and that does not mean you are wrong; maybe there is no wrong or I am) how anyone conflates hours with productivity; you want me to do tasks a1-a10 this week; why is it relevant if I do those Thursday night in 16 hours or 40 hours spread over the week? As long as they get done and done well right? I cannot think which type of work would not work like that but cannot think of any so how is it related to ‘hours behind the screen’? I have tried these things in the past as well with my colleagues over the years and the ‘bums on seats’ only invites people to work slower (to fill the time and not have to do more work) which in turn indeed invites the use of spyware to see if they are working.
Now we have tasks; if some superhuman does them in 5 minutes instead of 40 hours; glory to her. Obviously that does not happen, but 30 vs 40 does sometimes and that is fine with me; stuff gets delivered, people are happy. I also have a few guys who get nothing done one week and over-perform the next; as long as I know that, it is fine. Weekly sprints are overrated anyway imho.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it tied to time, instead of deliverables? I mean, if I work extra hard to get the days work done in 4 hours, why can’t I leave early compared to a co-worker who is working less focused and more slowly? I get that it’s not easy to set good milestones, and to keep it fair in terms of making sure everyone has approximately equal work, but I feel the same problems exist with required work “time” especially since i…
I limit our employees work to 40 hours a week so we don't have burn out. I want people to work hard and then go home. So far, so good: Our employees are constantly coming up with better ways of doing things - with less stress, hassle, and annoyance. Over the last three years, our works has gone from suffering 40 hours to an enjoyable but hard-working 40 hours. Our retention rate has gone from 40% to 95%.
As a company owner, I've resisted the temptation to do this. We did make it easy for our employees to behave themselves by making it very easy to 'clock in' and 'clock out.' I told everybody that this is a time to be close to family - if your child wants to play ball in the middle of the day, then go ahead! Just clock out before you do. Get your 8 hours in and document your work. Thankfully everybody has responded we…
I am not a child nor an inmate, and can therefore be trusted not to try and game the system to do as little work as I can possibly get away with. I shoot for eight hours. If things go past nine hours without a specific source of pressing urgency, I don't feel uncomfortable asserting my work-life balance. If I really get into the zone and have a super-productive day I don't feel uncomfortable logging off after seven hours.
Whereas if I'm on a clock, I'm watching the clock, constantly. I have trouble entering a deep-work headspace. I feel guilty and second-guess myself every time I stand up for a minute. I'll subconsciously space out at my desk more often because "I'm putting in the hours".
Everybody's different, I just wanted to add a data point. I'm somewhat ADD and if I'm forced to be either completely on and tracking the minutes or completely off, instead of jumping back and forth like I naturally do, my productivity tanks.
As a company owner, I've resisted the temptation to do this. We did make it easy for our employees to behave themselves by making it very easy to 'clock in' and 'clock out.' I told everybody that this is a time to be close to family - if your child wants to play ball in the middle of the day, then go ahead! Just clock out before you do. Get your 8 hours in and document your work. Thankfully everybody has responded we…
Why is it tied to time, instead of deliverables? I mean, if I work extra hard to get the days work done in 4 hours, why can’t I leave early compared to a co-worker who is working less focused and more slowly? I get that it’s not easy to set good milestones, and to keep it fair in terms of making sure everyone has approximately equal work, but I feel the same problems exist with required work “time” especially since i…
Once you make a deliverable the metric, work interaction and innovation suffers.
Say Bob finishes assigned Task-A in six hours. However Alice is struggling with her Task-B and could do with some of Bob's Java expertise. But in a deliverable-driven environment, Bob's done and clocks out. See ya Alice!
Or Alice is waiting for an informal reply from Trent, but Trent's reply is not a manager-assigned deliverable so he doesn't bother responding. He wants to press ahead and get Task-C finished so that he can clock out.
Instead of focusing on deliverables, most employers therefore focus on 'time dwelling' in the hope that people will interact and share the work burden.
As a company owner, I've resisted the temptation to do this. We did make it easy for our employees to behave themselves by making it very easy to 'clock in' and 'clock out.' I told everybody that this is a time to be close to family - if your child wants to play ball in the middle of the day, then go ahead! Just clock out before you do. Get your 8 hours in and document your work. Thankfully everybody has responded we…
Why is it tied to time, instead of deliverables? I mean, if I work extra hard to get the days work done in 4 hours, why can’t I leave early compared to a co-worker who is working less focused and more slowly? I get that it’s not easy to set good milestones, and to keep it fair in terms of making sure everyone has approximately equal work, but I feel the same problems exist with required work “time” especially since i…
one of the key points of employment is that i get s reliable salary regardless of my performance. sure, if my performance is continuously very bad then my employer may want to make an adjustment (or let me go) and likewise if my performance is good i may expect a raise.
in general that stability of income is more important than the ability to go home earlier. because the latter means that i have to work more if things don't go well because deliverables are often hard to define. in IT at least. what do you count? lines of code? number of issues closed?
one week i may close a dozen issues, the next week a single task may have stumped me, requiring me to do days of research.
deliverables reslly only work on a large scale: "finish this project" or for a sysadmin: "keep the servers running". my customer or employer doesn't care how many hours i spend on that. if there are no problems then i am free, or i may get a bonus for closing a project early.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no incentive to find ways to accomplish more or better other than personal drive then, though (and personal drive eventually wears thin on its own, imho). If you have to work 40 hours, even if you get everything done early (in which case you gotta take the next task from the list, a never ending grind -- when do you get to celebrate a job well done?), even if you're head isn't in it (maybe you're not feeling…
I think I often push work without realizing it, but I feel that often I'm done around 16.00 or before lunch. If I know I have to be there anyways, I might as well goof off a little. If no-one cared about the hours but I just had hard deliverables every day/week/month, I'd work much faster so I can go home earlier. Depends on the project, too. Some I'm more interested in than others.