I'm a believer in the 3-hour work-day. "4-hour work week" is impractical for most jobs. 40 hours is a reasonable average, but expecting anyone to put in an 8-10 hour contiguous block (that often ends up being ~11, including commute) is inhumane. Why, on the one 55-degree, sunny day in January that (by the weather's lack of concern for us) lands on a Tuesday, should people be stuck inside during that four hours of nice weather?
At least, if I were running a business, I'd plan on a 3-hour workday. First priority: get us to a point where we can survive on a 15-hour time commitment from each person. Project planning is based on that assumption. This puts slack in the schedule and reduces the slippage problem, because people working 9 hours per day in a "crunch" are pushing at 3x the planned rate, yet still working at a sustainable pace.
However, I'd only hire people who had enough interest in CS and software-- and, as importantly, whatever business I was in-- that they'd naturally fill to 40-60 (based on their ability) hours. I think people should leave the office before dark, but I'd want to hire the guy (or gal) who spends his/her stray hours thinking about and working on technology, even if I don't collect direct benefit. Think of it as "65% Time". You're not obligated for more than 15 hours per week, but you really don't fit if you aren't constantly looking to learn more.
I'd also have:
* an expectation that people eat lunch together. That's not to say you can't duck out to have lunch with a friend a few times per month, but your default behavior should be to eat with colleagues, not alone in a hurry. Definitely don't eat at your desk. (This may be my "Ah, yes" New England ancestry showing, but I really dislike eating at desks. To me, it's like eating in a car. You do it occasionally out of necessity, but you're supposed to feel bad about it.)
* 4:00 Tea, with snacks and board games. This isn't because I'm a nice guy, but because it gets people sharing ideas and encourages extra-hierarchical collaboration and mobility, and that makes both project quality and communication better. The somewhat devious thing here is that, after Tea's over (of course, it would never be called "over" because people are free to go) they'd have a lot of new ideas to try out and prove, so a lot of people would want to stay late anyway to experiment with the ideas they discussed over Tea.
I like your company website. Funny thing is, I thought the tab was on French but the copy on the page was English! Then I clicked the EN tab which looked recessed to me, and suddenly the text switched to French. Am I the only person who has ever seen it backwards like this? I'm seriously curious!
> an expectation that people eat lunch together. That's not to say you can't duck out to have lunch with a friend a few times per month, but your default behavior should be to eat with colleagues, not alone in a hurry.
Ah, yes, the "nobody ever really wants to be alone" supposition. Having lunch by myself, or at least in a non-work context, breaks the day into two "at-work" chunks, allowing me to start semi-fresh in the afternoon. Most days I need that break from other people for a while, and would certainly not want to work someplace that tried to take that respite away.
See, I would build my company so that your at-work chunks are alone.
I don't buy into this "people are best in teams" cargo-cultism that's actually an excuse to buy shitty, cheap office space. People need a little bit of social interaction, but the actual work must be done alone, preferably in a private office (I fucking hate open-plan). So, if your work time wasn't satisfying your need for privacy and being alone, then I'd be failing.
If a specific person's needs for alone time were such that the person desired to eat alone, that'd be fine. I just wouldn't want a culture where everyone eats at a desk.
Serious question: Why aren't you building a startup right now?
You have all of these theories about how a company should be run, you hate managers, you're a top .0001% programmer, etc.
It seems that being a founder is the perfect position for you.
Don't you want to validate your assumptions? If a flat, open-allocation model really is the best way to run a startup, you might be on to something huge here. You're clearly passionate about this...what's stopping you from making it happen?
Well, first of all I never claimed to be a top-0.0001% programmer. Possibly plain-old top-1% if we interpret programmer literally.
If a flat, open-allocation model really is the best way to run a startup, you might be on to something huge here.
Actually, that's a misconception. Startups tend to need a constrained open allocation: yes, everyone can work on anything important to the company, but the latter must be defined conservatively to ensure focus. As firms get larger, the open/closed allocation decision becomes more formalized and there's a clear right vs. wrong way to make that call.
I am certainly considering, for the long term, that I'll probably be starting a company at some point. It might not happen now, it may not even happen this decade, but I probably will reach a point where that's the best next step.
I think you should definitely consider doing this sooner rather than later.
From reading your comments, it looks like you make the claim that:
1. Most startups are horribly mismanaged and are run incompetently by VCs/MBAs.
2. You have a radically different strategy for running a startup that makes engineers significantly more effective.
If so, this represents a tremendous opportunity for you. A startup run on your model, if your assumptions are correct, would have a massive - possibly several orders of magnitude - competitive advantage, and could have a very meaningful impact on the business world as a whole.
At the very least, I'd be curious to see a startup bring you in for management consulting and see how they do in a few years.
Anyway, kudos for taking the long view. It's rare to see people plan things many years or decades out in our social media addled age.
If I was working for you, I'd wonder why I should put my interest in CS / software in the hands of your company. If the necessary minimum to work for a paycheck is 3 hours per day, I'd work 3 hours per day and spend the rest of my time doing my own projects at home or in a place of my choosing.
This has at least two advantages:
- I get the benefits of whatever I create (e. g. sales)
- I choose the projects that I want to work on and I never ever have to justify anything to anyone.
Your plan works only if people are as passionate about the stuff your company does as you are without having any interest in pursuing their own ideas. Developing own ideas in a company environment and outside of it are two entirely different things.
I believe employment ends up in a Nash Equilibrium. The most rational thing to do for an employee is to work the minimum amount of time required for a paycheck (and considering working overtime mostly for career advancement). For an employer, the rational thing to do is to somehow "motivate" people to work more on company-related stuff, because it makes the company more money.
To align interests, you give employees a meaningful ownership stake, or at least profit-sharing. If you hire people who are already interested in your field/industry, you make it easy for them to put their best efforts toward your shared goals.
This isn't sneaky. Some (many!) people want to work hard (and expect to be rewarded for success) but prefer to avoid taking all of the risks personally/handling the janitorial work of a business by themselves too.
Offer a good balance, and remember that regardless of what you require from your staff, they always volunteer the most important parts.
Hiring is hard, and these kinds of conditions make it even harder. But getting it right is transformative.
Some (many!) people want to work hard (and expect to be rewarded for success) but prefer to avoid taking all of the risks personally/handling the janitorial work of a business by themselves too.
Exactly. If you're older than 25 and it's no longer socially acceptable to mooch, you recognize that personal financial risk is toxic sludge to be kept out of your life if at all possible.
Why do people take it on when forming businesses? They have no other choice. Bank loans require personal liability, VCs run a reputation economy that's almost certainly illegal.
However, you can give people an environment where they can be truly "intrapreneurial" (this doesn't work in most companies for political reasons, but it can in an open-allocation environment where doing work is more important than controlling it) and participate in the upside (profit-sharing, bonuses, increasing interestingness of work) partially but don't have to take on any personal risk. People won't leave such an environment lightly.
If I ever end up calling the shots in a company (which is unlikely, because I'm +3 sigma of anti-authoritarian) I would make it a place where people would generally rather implement their ideas there (with the resources and people available) than on their own. Of course, they'd be free to do either one. But I'd try to create an open-allocation environment where people would rather go to work and build something with the great people there and capture a smaller percentage of the gross profits, than go off on their own but have to corral resources and people all over again. If I'm not providing synergy and making them more productive/effective per unit of effort than they would be on their own, then I'm failing and they have right to leave (and should).
Employment has multiple equilibria, I believe. You can invest almost nothing in employee career advancement, and then they (metaphorically) take whatever isn't nailed down. (I'm not saying they're unethical, but that they focus solely on their advancement because no one else will, and will spend 6+ hours per day on side projects or Coursera if they can. I'm the same way, so I'm ethically OK with this.) Or you can invest a lot of their careers and, yes, some of them will take what they learn from you and go off and do other things-- that's a good thing, because not everyone is built to stay at the same company for 30 years-- but the people who stay are likely to pay you back multiply.
At least, if I were running a business, I'd plan on a 3-hour workday. First priority: get us to a point where we can survive on a 15-hour time commitment from each person. Project planning is based on that assumption. This puts slack in the schedule and reduces the slippage problem, because people working 9 hours per day in a "crunch" are pushing at 3x the planned rate, yet still working at a sustainable pace.
However, I'd only hire people who had enough interest in CS and software-- and, as importantly, whatever business I was in-- that they'd naturally fill to 40-60 (based on their ability) hours. I think people should leave the office before dark, but I'd want to hire the guy (or gal) who spends his/her stray hours thinking about and working on technology, even if I don't collect direct benefit. Think of it as "65% Time". You're not obligated for more than 15 hours per week, but you really don't fit if you aren't constantly looking to learn more.
I'd also have:
* an expectation that people eat lunch together. That's not to say you can't duck out to have lunch with a friend a few times per month, but your default behavior should be to eat with colleagues, not alone in a hurry. Definitely don't eat at your desk. (This may be my "Ah, yes" New England ancestry showing, but I really dislike eating at desks. To me, it's like eating in a car. You do it occasionally out of necessity, but you're supposed to feel bad about it.)
* 4:00 Tea, with snacks and board games. This isn't because I'm a nice guy, but because it gets people sharing ideas and encourages extra-hierarchical collaboration and mobility, and that makes both project quality and communication better. The somewhat devious thing here is that, after Tea's over (of course, it would never be called "over" because people are free to go) they'd have a lot of new ideas to try out and prove, so a lot of people would want to stay late anyway to experiment with the ideas they discussed over Tea.