The best people

If you ask managers what makes their company special, you'll often hear that they have the best people.  "Our people are what make our company great."  Or, "We only hire the best people so that's all we have here."

You might reasonably dig a little deeper and ask how they know theirs are the best.  Only two of their possible answers make any sense:

1. They have a rigorous screening and hiring process.
2. They pay top dollar for the top talent.

Any other answer is merely hand-waving and not serious. But, really, how effective are even these two reasons?

Most of the companies I've run into that use the" selective hiring" argument didn't seem that selective.  In fact their hiring process ran pretty much like everyone else's: cull through piles of resumes looking for key words, then bring candidates in for interviews with three or for employees.  If everyone's doing it, it can't be special.  This argument really claims that they, the interviewees, are master talent scouts, asking penetrating interview questions, but does that claim have any basis?

That leaves the dollar strategy.  The best-known adherents of this philosophy are... Enron and Wall Street.  Enron is of course out of business.  Wall Street would have been out of business if not for a giant government bailout.

If you're a manager and you give me the "best people" line, I'll seriously wonder how great the company could be.

Unlimited vacation

I've been noodling over this idea of unlimited vacation.  It appeals to my feeling that people should manage themselves. 

And this argument really resonates:

In Freedom, Inc. Gordon Forward of Chaparral Steel talks of the danger of ”managing for the 3%.” In a large enough organization, there might be a couple of people who would take two or three months’ vacation–but if a vacation policy is the only thing holding them back from that, they’re probably “vacationing” at their desks anyway. And so the policy is concealing the problem with that “3%,” not eliminating it.

This relates to the idea that, if you're hiring correctly, then you won't have abuse.  It makes me fear that I might have hired the wrong people.

But just recently I met a guy who actually works at a company where they have unlimited vacation.  He pointed out a critical factor that I completely overlooked: company culture.

In his company, everyone pressures everyone else not to take vacation.  If you ask for a block of 2 weeks off, they'd laugh at you.  You'd have to explain it to a lot of people, because it would keep coming up.  Even a short vacation doesn't go unnoticed.  "Must be nice to have a vacation.  What, not enough to do?"  It's public humiliation.  The company culture doesn't allow for violations. 

My new friend finds that he takes less than 2 weeks off in total every year.

At my company, many people take 2 week blocks off every year.  (In fact, it's a requirement for systems security.)  You get 3 or 4 weeks, and if you don't use it all, you carry it over and have additional time the next year.  It becomes your right to use it.  This seems normal to me, because that's what I've always had.

Would the social pressure work in my company?  On the whole, no way.  It's too big, and it's tough to change the culture.

On the other hand, there's frequently pressure to work long hours.  It usually emerges as joking jabs -- "Wow, you're leaving at 4:50?  I mean, before 5???" -- but underlying it is the general expectation that people work long hours at investment banks.  That starts with the bankers and trickles down.

So, in my group, if we had an unlimited vacation policy, it might very well turn into a vacation deprivation policy. 

In retrospect, it's almost surprising that more companies don't go to unlimited vacation.

The perfect solution for every case

...does not exist.

I have long been an opponent of offices.  Managers sometimes need them for sensitive meetings, but lots of conference rooms solves that problem, and for more people. 

Meanwhile, the local social life of information usually dies at a door divide.  Microsoft is a big proponent of offices, and look where they are.  I say get the managers out into a cube like everyone else. 

But lately, I've been wanting to talk on the phone standing up, because it helps you project your voice and convey energy.  Guess what?  That would bug the crap out of everyone around me, and if I'm facing the wrong way, out of everyone on the floor.  If people see you standing at your cubicle while talking, they will generally assume you're some attention-starved narcissist, which you might be if you actually subjected the floor to your phone calls in a booming voice.

So now I'd like an office, even a shared one.  (I'd also like a stand-up desk while the request line is open.)

Working hard

Some people work over a hundred hours a week.  Like our national budget, that's a number so large that it's hard to grasp.

These days, I have 11 hours left every weekday after preparing for, commuting to, and being at work.

On an average day, I give myself
* 7 hours for sleep (assuming I sleep the minute I hit the pillow)
* 1 hour for exercise
* 1 hour for the kids and putting them to bed.
* 2 hours for everything else: mostly talking with the wife and doing household chores, but also tv, paying bills, reading, internet, etc.

Not a huge amount of free time; as you might expect, I watch very little TV.  Still, at this rate, I work 10.5 hours a day, or 52.5 hours a week. 

I could decide to skip exercise and sleep only 6 hours, then use those 2 hours for working.  I would operate a lot less effectively, but that would get me to 62.5 hours a week.

I could decide to destroy my weekends, and pull the same schedule on both Saturdays and Sundays.  My wife would be unbelievably upset, and I wouldn't get to see my sons' baseball games or eat any meals with them or take them to the zoo.  And that would still only get me to 89.5 hours a week.

To get to 100 or 110 hours, I'd have to decide to never see my kids or wife, and let my recreation and contributions to the home disappear.


I don't do those things, so I'm not as strong in my job as I could be (though I do sometimes work longer than 10.5 hours, and sometimes a bit on the weekend).  Or, I could take those extra 50+ hours and do a whole new job, start a new company, 50 hours being the equivalent of another full-time job.  (So, don't let anyone ever tell you that they can't do what they truly want to because they have to work.  The job isn't the prob.)

But that's the choice I make.  Working hard explains 80% of the variation in results.  It's a simple rule to keep in mind when you're thinking about what you want to do and how you're going to get there.

"The real challenge of outsourcing"

From Seth Godin's Meatball Sundae:

It's clear to me there are only two paths.  One path is to take every repetitive, by-the-book task in your organization and outsource it or mechanized it.  The other path is to take every repetitive, by-the-book task in your organization and give the people who do that task the freedom, the incentive, and yes, the imperative to do something that cannot be outsourced.

Either what you're doing is repetitive, in which case you ought to outsource it, or it's homemade, insightful, and filled with initiative and judgement, in which case you can charge for it.

Too often, managers try to have it both ways, and end up with clever, skilled people who move on due to boredom, or "idiots" who can't do the job.  Their failure to make a strategic choice ends up in a bad personnel result.

Similarly, software development -- including app support -- should be thought of similarly.  Programmers, almost by definition, should not be doing something twice.  Give the clever, skilled ones the freedom to minimize the mundane and repetitive.  And if you still have a lot of it around, you've probably kept the wrong ones.