Comment by ChadNauseam a day ago
> It's not about productivity at all.
> WFH forces employers to compete. It gives a lot of power to employees, because they can [...] work fewer hours, moonlight for multiple companies, etc
Probably "working fewer hours" and "moonlight for multiple companies" has negative effects on productivity that employers would like to avoid.
It's definitely not more productive per hour than 40. And if you're moonlighting another 30 hrs that'll definitely decrease your productivity at work.
Again, it depends. Maybe they have more pride in their job or despise their company less, who knows.
And I don't mean productivity per hour. Lol. No, I mean absolute.
An employee working like a dog will get less work done than one just working normally, probably. Because most of the work is negative, so it doesn't add to the work done pile, it chips away at it.
Eventually, I would think, you reach a point where an employee is less productive than no employee at all. Seems impossible to be working 100 hours a week and be getting less than nothing done, but if you're actively making the product worse or creating debt, that's how I would classify that.
I've already kind of made it clear here where I stand on this, but I gotta tell you, you really do sound a lot like management.
Do you really think your superstar programmers are well and truly doing intellectual work, the kind of work that produces business value, from the time they hit the coffee machine at 9AM to the time they grab their briefcase to go home at 5PM?
If you believe this, I think you might be interested in bringing the Bobs in to discuss making our T.P.S. reporting process more efficient. They have thoughts on coversheets.
In Deep Work, Cal Newport posits that even the most disciplined, high performers can do work that requires really focused attention for a max of four hours per day. He's a computer science professor, not exactly "management."
And these days, for a lot of knowledge workers there's a pretty strong case that anything which isn't this "deep work" can probably be automated.
So yeah if I'm paying you a full time salary I want those four hours. Without necessarily rendering judgment on what a moonlighting clause should or shouldn't look like, if I'm not getting those four hours, I don't want you on my payroll.
It really depends. I believe and apply a lot of Cal Newport advice, and benefit greatly from it. But I also see in my daily life how just being close to people you work with, and (crucially) being a short walk away/floor from people in other groups, creates immense value by helping unclog processes and especially by creating new ideas and products that wouldn‘t otherwise exist.
First, nobody cares what you want. Second, do you pay for those 4 hours adequately, guess what if you don't? Even if you do, are you OK with 2 hours today and 6 hrs tomorrow? How about a year of 1 hour days and then a 24 hour period that fixes all the problems for last 2 years?
The Internet tough guy strikes again, as if employment is not a voluntary contract between two consenting adults. This militant attitude is always good for a laugh... hate management if you like, but if you think no employee ever worries about what their manager wants, sounds like you've never held a job.
Not really sure why I am even responding to this amazingly stupid line of discussion. I mean if you absolutely hate the idea of having a boss (I know I did) then there is a solution for that - start your own company! It's not as easy as being a badass on the Internet, sure, but you might have to look at both sides of the argument and you might even end up getting rid of that chip on your shoulder.
Let me quickly go count my years of experience, will have to use all my digits and extremities, might be a minute.
I don't think you got the point behind the comment. We do not have a good way to quantify effort, thus we ask for a fixed set of time in chairs, tickets closed, etc that's the best we can come up with.
I’ll attempt a steelman and say, no, employees are not doing deep work from 9–5, but I could see being in an office 9–5 setting the stage for a lot of deep work to be done. Moonlighting for another company I could especially see as detrimental to focus at work.
The nature of modern offices pretty much prevents deep work.
You're not going to get deep work when you pack people like sardines into neat rows of desks, where pretty much at any time someone within one row away is going to be in a meeting - conducted of course over teleconferencing software. Or some people will talk (honestly, being in the office mostly translated to chit-chat for me).
Deep work with an open office? Dont make me laugh. Please for the love of god bring back cubicles.
The steel man is that in the office you get cross team pollination organically. Team lunches, talking about an idea with another team on how to do something better as in that moment the idea came up. This happens more often in person than remote.
Does it need 5 days a week in the office? Absolutely not. 1-2 is plenty.
> Deep work with an open office? Dont make me laugh. Please for the love of god bring back cubicles.
Or doors.
25 years ago, Microsoft Redmond had a slogan: "Every dev a door".
In early 2000s, it began to be two devs per room. We all know what happened since. Open offices save facilities concrete money per seat. Productivity lost from lack of deep work is not a line item anyone knows how to track.
The "every dev a door" plus "pair programming" was shown by studies from groups like Pivotal Labs as being optimal for working code, but ... and a big but ...
Companies intentionally optimize for things other than working code. You get what you measure and they measure what's easy instead of measure what matters.
// See https://lethain.com/measuring-engineering-organizations/ but also https://lethain.com/good-eng-mgmt-is-a-fad/
I don't expect someone to do deep focused work from 9am to 5pm.
But at the same time, I don't expect them to spend their 9-to-5 working for another company at the same time.
As a founder, who respects the 9-to-5 and supports WFH, if I'm paying for 8 hours of work, I want 8 hours of output. Not 4 hours of output, and then you working 4 hours for another job.
If multi-jobbing becomes a thing, then WFH becomes untenable because at least in the office you can be monitored.
To be fair, you're either paying for hours or for output, because I assure you you are not paying staff accurately for their output. You can of course sack someone who outputs notoriously little, but if you get output exceeding your average "8 hours of output", you shouldn't care if someone made it in 1 hour or 16, or at least you wouldn't be able to tell.
I'm using "output" as quoted in context, it's such a nebulous measure unless you're specifically buying a product.
I’ve hired remote employees, made them come, offered stimulating work, 5% above their requested pay with mentions that I could double it in one year, but I could never get them to the smartness and clarity of analysis they had during the interview. After 6 months they were clearly winging it in <1hr a day and exhausting my team lead, who didn’t think they were moonlighting for several companies. I did: Their progress had entirely stalled and their performance was negative.
I fired both the employees and the manager. This “remote employees don’t moonlight” is a union trope.
> 5% above their requested pay with
Not enough to move the needle. 25% would move the needle.
> with mentions that I could double it in one year
They didn't believe you, or didn't after a short time working there. So it didn't move the needle.
More so if they're experienced. Similar mentions of prospects are common in interviews, and rarely followed through. You eventually learn to be skeptical of them, while rolling with it, just in case.
Also, if you might be willing to pay double their requested salary, they start realising their value on the open market is much higher than they'd previously thought, or could be with a little presentation and experience.
On the other hand, if you'd put it in the contract that their salary will double after 1 year, subject to well-defined criteria and a history of actually doing it with existing employees, then they'd believe you, and that would move the needle a lot.
From your story I speculate you were right to fire them, but you never figured our how to get the best out of them. In recent years it's possible you were subject to employment fraud, as clarity of analysis can disappear if it's a different person doing the work than the person answering interview questions.
Progress that's entirely stalled or negative can happen for many other reasons than moonlighting, and many other reasons than not putting enough time.
I've been fully remote for 5 years, partially remote for 15. Being remote removes many sources of stress for me. I don't moonlight.
The one thing that decreases my productivity, in some positions, is bad management. Of course, that was already the case when I was fully office-based.
Instagram ragequits remote working.
Atlassian is a dumpster fire, they run shit engineering since about 3 years.
Give me the secret sauce to being productive with remote employees. Maybe some have found it, but apparently paying above the employee ask, offering to double the salary in case of success, sending them to conferences and spending a lot of human time with them gives me the “evil employer” category on most forums.
Yeah, I know “Treat them even better!” is, again, the word of the union guy, but in most cases, the employer has to eat a shit sandwich.
>offering to double the salary in case of success
have you doubled anyone's salary? if not, it can come across as an empty promise you won't fulfill
>sending them to conferences and spending a lot of human time with them
do they want and benefit from these things? or do they distract them from their productive work?
>in most cases, the employer has to eat a shit sandwich.
not really, you were able to fire who you wanted to fire easily. it also seems that you didn't consider other factors for why the employee didn't work out. does your interview process poorly select for people who will do well in the role? are there other possible explanations for low productivity than the employee having a second job?
I doubt it, productivity is an equation that's very complex for knowledge workers.
For example, is 80 hours of work a week more productive than 40? If you're working an assembly line, probably.
If you're a programmer, definitely not. You will write more bugs, make more mistakes, and churning out code doesn't mean much. Any monkey can write code, but writing maintainable code is hard, and reading that code and actually choosing to maintain it is harder.