

Employees should be masters of their own time - timf
http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2009/03/employees-should-be-masters-of-their.html

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YuriNiyazov
eh. Any time someone uses a phrase like "is in the best interests of the
company" I think of the movie "Office Space".

You see, every company has a culture, and culture is much more than slogans.
If from the very beginning the employee felt like he couldn't speak up
"because it was not in his job description" then there's something deeply
wrong about the culture, slogan or not.

~~~
umjames
Yeah, I was hoping to find an article about giving your employees more
autonomy and letting them work on projects that interest them. The title was
slightly misleading to me.

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djahng
I work at a company where this ideology is implemented. There are no
"managers", and we are expected to manage ourselves.

The company has divided itself into 2 camps: 1) Design guru - this person does
not need to collaborate with anyone (i.e. the mechanical engineer is perfectly
competent at designing electronics) because they already know everything. They
don't speak to anyone else in the company until they mess something up, at
which point they just ask someone else to fix it for them.

2) The other group is perfectly capable of collaborating and working with
other people. This group gets things done elegantly and efficiently.

In other words, if group 1 and group 2 were given the same task, group 1
people would end up with a kludge that took twice as long to design than group
2.

So what's the balance? When interviewing job candidates, how do you determine
what kind of employee you will be getting? What do you do about the people you
already hired?

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lsc
The problem is that many good people are just as confident and stubborn about
subjects they know nothing of as about subjects they know a lot about. Sure,
having a company full of people who know themselves is the best answer, but
that's hard. your field is much wider if you can deal with arrogance.

I have had the problem of good technical people asking me to rewrite my
business plan.

One way of dealing with that kind of arrogance is to have upper management
that lets each person make the decisions they know the most about. It requires
good management, but it means that you can hire people who do not modify their
confidence level based on their experience.

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jodrellblank
_in any situation it is your responsibility, using your best judgement, to do
what you think is in the best interests of the company._

Including firing your numpty colleagues and terrible customers:
<http://www.christopherhawkins.com/06-13-2005.htm#78>

?

