[quote=deadzone][quote=Coronita][quote=XBoxBoy][quote=deadzone][quote=XBoxBoy]In a crazy twist relevant to this thread, I found out today that about 1/3 of our development staff is working on a “side-project” in their “spare time” while working from home. Something they hope will allow them to quit and create their own startup company. Of course upper management knows nothing about this.
It’s a fascinating idea to me that maybe companies suddenly start loosing work from home employees because they’ve had enough time to pursue their start up dreams… Suddenly your employees are your competitors![/quote]
Doesn’t surprise me at all. Like I keep saying, this work at home concept is clearly unproductive and ripe for abuse. Management not having any visibility into their employees whereabouts is not sustainable. Anyone who thinks this can continue forever is in fantasy land.[/quote]
If you only look at it from the employer’s point of view I agree with you, but I’m fascinated with the idea that in the next year or two we could be seeing an explosion of new startups. These are people who used to think they needed to go to the office every day and work a job. Now they have been working from home for the last year and found they like it. The boss is making noise about getting people back into the office and these folks are thinking about an alternative to what they used to do. It could be really interesting to see this unfold.[/quote]
As a boss, if your workers are finding a way to get what you thought would take 40hrs/week to get done what they are getting done in 20hrs/week and moonlighting the rest of the 20hrs/week. That’s not their fault. That’s your fault and your poor management for giving them 40 hours to get it done when it only would take 20 hours…or that’s the fault of your shitty company that makes their workers waste 20 hours/week in useless meetings, when it only takes about 20 hours/week to do the real work.
I’ll be honest. Working from home, there were times many times I was dialed into “status meetings” that lasted hours while I was changing my oil, picking up my kid from school, dropping them off, or washing my car…My contribution was the standard 10 minute status update from mobileland, and the rest was listening to every other bean counter bloviate. If you have more than 5 people in a meeting and it lasts longer than 20 minutes, it’s, it’s going to be a waste of time. People check out at the 20minute mark and if you can’t get to the point within that window, the rest people will just be mentally masturbating. It’s going to be a waste of time. At the end of the meeting, there was no decision made that was any better than before the meeting. The only thing that was accomplished was my car was clean, an oil change was done, and my kids got to go see their friends or attend a school event without the need of juggling a carpool.[/quote]
I generally agree with you about the meetings. But beyond that you are full of it. If you are working for me I’m paying you to contribute to my business, not take care of personal affairs. If you get done with your tasks in 20 hours then either 1. you did a half ass job, or 2. you need to ask your manager for more tasking or 3. preferably a motivated employee will take the initiative and find more things to do that contribute to the team such as taking lead on new projects, helping out teammates who are struggling, etc.[/quote]
Actually, no I’m speaking the truth of american run companies by incompetent people that magically survive getting laidoff and fired.. Take this example.
So at 9:30 AM Project Manager J decides to hold a meeting for 1.5 hours with every department head in my company. The purpose of the meeting is to talk about how we should organize our scrub teams. Department A has 15 people and currently wants to organize into two scrum teams of 7 and 8 respectively with each team dedicated to project A and project B.. Department B has 15 people and want to organize one big scrub team of 15 people where tasks of project A and project B feed into 1 scrum team, since Department is a platform/shared services team. Department C is a team of 8 people where management thinks it’s a great idea to have dedicated teams for each project, but since department C is understaffed and and has 4 different projects. That would be about 2 dedicated people per team. My department is 18 people and my engineers and I discussed how we want to tackle doing 24 apps on two platforms across 4 customers, and we figured the best way to do this is to do a hybrid approach in which we have 1 product backlog, 1 scrum team but two team leads handling 2 different verticals and interfaces with everyone else.
The purpose of this 1.5 hour meeting was to try to reach alignment with 1-size fit all across all department on how to organize the scrum teams so that everyone is the same, despite we all have all work different. I participated in this meeting for the first 10 minutes and gave them my opinion: every team is different, and every team should organize based on what they seem fit…And each team should appoint someone to attend 1 cross functional sync up status meeting twice a week so that we can make sure we have alignment….Then everyone else debated and got into a pissing match on which organizational structure was better.
I made a bet with my engineers on my team that 1.5 hours later, we would end up going off and each department would do the same thing. Meanwhile, I told everyone else to go get some beer/boba/ice cream, and just stay dialed in… I did my oil change on my X5, ND miata, NA miata, and my audi dialed into Zoom on mute.
At the conclusion of the meeting….Every department left and continued to do with what they were doing, the project manager decided to hold another meeting 1 week later, 1.5 hours, to see if we can get alignment….
Now this is roughly a 300 person company…It’s way worse at a 600-1000+ company that I’ve worked at… Similar thing happens at at a large defense company and especially in the public sector. The public sector is especially known for its inefficiencies. That’s why when private sector employees take on a public sector job for the first time, the first month, they probably want to slit their wrists…
This is also why at some of these companies, people end up wanting to work at a small startup. Because a small startup cannot be this moronic, or if they are, they won’t be around much longer, in which case if that’s the case (like a pets.com), you don’t even need to show up to work most of the time and be worried about being fired because all the executives won’t be around when the startup goes under anyway….back to the point of what this guy in the beginning was doing.
There’s a lot of dumb startups with dumb ideas with dumb management and dumb employees. And if you recognize that, it’s entirely possible to be on their payroll getting paid well for doing very little work with very little consequences of showing up. And theoretically if you scale this approach to multiple companies at the same time, you could in theory make a good deal of money in a short period of time what it would take a normal worker 7-8 years to do, maybe longer….
My boss almost made me do this recently by dropping all technical phone screen and interview requirements to fill mobile engineers in the interest of getting the headcount filled. I refused and got reprimanded for it, but I didn’t want to end up with someone that didnt know how to code.
But in all seriousness, if I attended every single meeting on my outlook calendar that I’m scheduled for. I could fill up my work day every single day M-F just attending useless meetings after meetings and not get anything done….Some hours, I’m doublebooked for useless meetings. more than half are useless sync up meetings, or status meetings….
The 3 biggest time wasters in a company are
1. Endless meetings and powerpoints (Elon was right)
2. Sales make a sales on a product we don’t have.
3. Incomplete product requirements, and back and forth between product management and engineering to figure out exactly what to build.
