
For Workers, Less Flexible Companies - 001sky
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/20/business/for-workers-less-flexible-companies.html?hp
======
patio11
Anecdotally: while the NYT suggests that two employees who are
indistinguishable from one another make it easier to grant them flexible
hours, I think that tactically, you're much, much more likely to get flexible
hours (along with "anything else you want") if _nobody_ substitutes for what
you do.

This is also likely underlying the observation "a lot of firms quietly offer
better-than-standard flexibility to a small section of their employees." Of
course they do, for exactly the same reason that they quietly offer better-
than-standard salaries. Somebody with something they wanted said "The price of
us working together is X, Y, Z, and I work from home 2 days a week." and the
firm said "Cool, we can live with that."

~~~
yummyfajitas
If you like academic papers, there is a great one by Claudia Goldin. Her topic
of interest is gender pay gaps (boring), but it goes into detail on pay
nonlinearities which is quite interesting. Basically, she goes into a lot of
literature and does some work herself showing that for many jobs, work output
is a nonlinear (e.g. y=x^2) function of hours worked.

A nonlinear pay function is generally related directly to nonlinear work
output. Her working example is pharmacists - you can easily swap two half-time
pharmacists for 1 full time one or vice versa.

On the other hand, consider your top trader - his job is keeping the entire
strategy in his head (roughly a 30 hour/week job) and being around when the
market is open (another 35 hours/week). You can't replace him with 2 30
hour/week traders, each of whom keeps half the strategy in their head and are
available half the time.

[http://www.aeaweb.org/aea/2014conference/program/retrieve.ph...](http://www.aeaweb.org/aea/2014conference/program/retrieve.php?pdfid=1103)

Flexible hours will, of course, be more prevalent in jobs and industries where
Output(hours) is a linear function.

(Gender pay gaps are not intrinsically boring, but the inherent "turn of your
mind because politics" makes it far less interesting.)

~~~
protonfish
I would assume "nonlinear" output means that their productivity increases the
more hours they spend. Any job requires ramp-up time, some more than others,
but it does not mean the output in non-linear. All your example illustrates is
some jobs (like software development) can't be brute-forced by hiring more
people irrespective of skill - two mediocre programmers are not a replacement
for one good one.

~~~
elemeno
It means that the person's output is not simply a multiple of the number of
hours that they work, but that for each unit of time they work their output
increases compared to the previous unit.

For example:

    
    
        Linear
        output = time * k
    
        Non-Linear
        output = time ^ k
    

In practice it means that for jobs that are linear, it doesn't matter how many
hours any individual works as long as the total hours worked remains the same
- assuming that they're all of the same skill level. Doctors, for example, are
mostly shift workers so the output of one doctor working for 12hrs is pretty
much the same as two doctors working six hours each.

For a job that has non-linear output, two people of the same skill who each
work six hours, will be less productive than one person of the that skill
working twelve hours. Easy enough to see:

    
    
        12 ^ 1.5 = 41.6
        2 * 6 ^ 1.5 = 29.4
    

In that case, splitting the job between two people results in an output that's
70% of the output of that job being done by one person.

Basically, it's saying that many workers are not fungible assets, no matter
that they share the same level of skill.

~~~
pixelcort
Another thing to consider (for software engineers at least) is hours per day,
vs days per week.

It can take a few hours to ramp up productivity and get in the zone. On the
other hand, in a well organized team if a few people take a day or two off,
not much would be lost.

------
themodelplumber
It's painful to see how inflexible some of my clients are with their
employees. Those that do claim to offer flexible work are clearly holding back
in other areas, such as fair pay (for women especially, but everybody in
general) and benefits. The turnover rates at these places are just as bad as
you'd imagine--they have an amazingly hard time retaining talent. What's left
is a core group of cowering individuals who seem to become love-it-or-leave-it
evangelists.

Having worked for a similar business before leaving to start on my own, it
still hurts to think about all the people there who were medicating their work
issues, and the speech disorder I started to develop from the unnecessarily
punitive environment. A doctor friend told me he was really proud that I quit
that job from a health POV. The speech disorder went away almost immediately
after I gave notice.

This was a company of 35 employees that was making profits of around 40
million a year, IIRC.

~~~
brandon272
What kind of speech disorder was it, if you don't mind my asking?

~~~
toomuchtodo
My guess would be a stutter; I have seen this in high-pressure work
environments.

------
yaddayadda
My current company allowed me to set my own hours and location when I was
contracting for them. When I went full time, there was a verbal understanding
that I would be onsite _more_ and work _more_ regular hours, but that I would
still have significant flexibility. In reality, if I come into the office at
9:01 the program manager throws a fit. And if there's a big winter storm and I
could either (a) spend 3 hours commuting each way for 2-3 hours at the actual
office or (b) doing 8-9 hours of actual work from home, he still insists I
come into the office. So yep, the company says it's flexible, but not so much
in reality.

~~~
noonespecial
The "program manager" my not understand quite how your deal was worked out and
just be an old fashioned butts-in-the-seats manager who still believes that
his job is simply to make people come in.

His superiors might be very upset if he ends up prompting you to leave. They
may have no clue this is going on. Talk to the original people and tell them
it's not working out.

~~~
yaddayadda
Ahh, if only it were so simple.

The program manager wasn't initially aware of the arrangement. When I
mentioned it to him, he basically threw a professional fit along the lines of
"To get work done I need you here when everyone else is here." He'll even
readily admit that I got plenty of work done while contracting and setting my
own hours and location - enough that he and the company wanted me salaried -
"but it's not the same now". The execs that I negotiated with don't have much
backbone and won't stand up to him or our owner. They are well aware of the
situation, and when I go through them and leave the PM out of scheduling,
they're always okay with whatever I say I'm going to do (I don't even bother
asking, I just tell them); after the fact, he'll huff and puff for a while,
but he never actually says anything explicitly. Unfortunately, he and I work
very closely together, so I don't often have the opportunity to go through the
execs.

The night before a particularly harsh snowstorm, I even had a conversation
with him about working from home the next day. We talked about what I could do
from home, I literally showed him the printouts of the background material
(and had digital copies on our office server and on my laptop), and he said he
was okay with it. When I wasn't at the office shortly after 9:00am the next
morning he started calling me. Even though I had already been working for
close to an hour and sent him updated files showing what I had already
completed, he wanted me to drive in.

To add to the frustration, we frequently have to travel for work. Of course,
no one, including the PM has a problem with work done remotely in those
situations.

~~~
noonespecial
I don't know your situation, but the good thing about spineless uppers is that
they are often as unwilling to work _against_ you as they are _for_ you. This
PM is not actually this irrational. He behaves this way because hes become
accustom to getting away with it. I don't know how much you "need" the job,
but I'd try just telling him how its going to be and then sticking with it.
Unless he has direct firing authority (that he actually has the political
capital to use), he'll likely complain to upper management and get the same
disinterested shrug you received. "He seems like a good employee, I'm sure you
can work it out".

Caveat emptor of course. I have a sample size of 2 in my personal life and its
worked for me once (but wonderfully so). The other time, it got me out of a
bad situation that I should have been working harder to leave anyway (with
good references even).

~~~
yaddayadda
I've debated doing just that, but in the end the environment and expectations
have become completely toxic, so it's more important for me to find another
job. Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of constraints, so
I'm putting my energy into my own start-up.

------
VLM
My flex time experience going from 5 8s to 4 10s:

No rush hour means daily time away from home went from 8 + 1 lunch + 2 times
(1) commute = 11 hours to 10 + 1 lunch + 2 times (.33) commute = 11 hours 40
minutes. So I'm trading 40 minutes per working day away from home, for a 3 day
weekend every week...

Also I'm sure you won't be surprised that only driving to work 4 times instead
of 5, saves me nearly 20% of my commute expense, which does add up over time.
That's 40 miles a week, which is about 1.3 gallons of gas or the IRS thinks
its worth $22.40 per week or well over a thousand bucks a year posttax lets
call it "two grand per year" pretax.

I work at home on occasion due to winter weather or illness or whatever
reason, and that's pretty nice. I would work at home much more other than
local interdepartmental jealousy type issues that prevent it. Organizationally
I already work with people all over the country and once you're 500 miles from
your "closest" coworker (by some metric of closeness, I guess) then no one
cares what office you're in or if you're at home. Obviously this doesn't work
at one site open plan startups, but its OK for a megacorp size employer.

------
hndl
I'm going to begin working remotely soon (I joined early and have worked with
the CEO and other core folks before, so it wasn't that hard). Do HNers have
any advice (financial, work-life balance etc)? I'm going to be earning in the
US while I live in Antwerp, Belgium.

~~~
patio11
I'd make a conscious effort to overcommunicate. Our weird little monkey brains
don't handle the case "There exists another monkey in another time zone. He's
part of the tribe! I would sure like to pick his nits!" all that well. You're
going to miss out on a lot of the spontaneous happenings around the office
which both create/solidify social bonds and _also_ lubricate the important,
consequential decisions for your work.

It helps to have companies which are used to working with remote people, since
they evolve e.g. email / Hipchat work cultures rather than "I think I'll just
walk down to Bob's desk and ask him about that" cultures. If you're not in one
of those, push for the cultural changes you'll need, while recognizing that
that will be tough.

I also had the time zone issue working against me, like you will. I'd sign
into Hipchat (or whatever it was) when I started my "work day", say "Here's
the plan for today", work my day, and then verbally sign off in the evening.
This meant that every morning when folks got to work they'd see "Oh yeah,
that's right, Patrick is indeed working with us, even though I'm not seeing
the artifacts of that work in front of me."

A company I worked at had an institution of telling everyone in the company
every Friday "Here was the plan for the week . Here's what I actually did.
Here's what I'm doing next week." That's a great institution for all knowledge
work, but it's particularly important if you're essentially a black box. I
tended to overcommunicate in those -- e.g. not "I prototyped the tour." but
rather "The focus of this week was implementing the tour. I spent most of
Monday and Tuesday looking at Javascript frameworks. See this page on the Wiki
for my thoughts. I eventually decided on $CLIENT_SENSITIVE_INFO_ELIDED_HERE
and started whiteboarding the actual tour on Wednesday. Thursday I had a
meeting with Bob about actually deploying it. Current status: prototype is
working in the testing environment, working on tightening up edge cases,
anticipate shipping to production next Friday as planned."

Minor note about working from home: I seem to be much more productive when I
successfully sustain something approaching a normal schedule. I generally do
my best work when I can chunk the day up. Pre-breakfast is family time, dish
hitting sink through lunch is email time, context change to a cafe, cafe time
is for writing, context change back to home, home time before dinner is
programming time, "Honey dinner's ready" means the day is over unless there is
something on my calendar for the midnight shift.

~~~
VLM
"I tended to overcommunicate in those"

I found a clipboard, pen, and paper to be the simplest, easiest to use, and
highest productivity system for this. Split the paper up by day and make sure
to fill the fraction of a page each day, that's about right. Work on it
through the day and its no big deal.

There is some politics involved, you don't want to explain later, perhaps at
review time, why "contemplated use of XYZ technology" was not implemented.
Never write down anything except what you actually completed. Your examples
are good. If you don't want to use AngularJS never refer to it by name unless
you can't avoid it.

~~~
dennisgorelik
"Never write down anything except what you actually completed."

I disagree.

Documenting and sharing failures is important too. It's useful to look back
and analyze sources of mistakes, misjudgments and inefficiencies.

It's also important to know for the manager to know that implementing
{successfulTask} was actually fast, so it would be low cost to implement it
next time.

~~~
VLM
May be a language impedance mismatch rather than actual disagreement.

Everyone on both sides of review time knows that "considered the use of
AngularJS" only minimally requires 10 seconds or so. So writing that down
doesn't mean much. However, a completion like "implemented a helloworld class
AngularJS demonstration, and determined for X,Y,Z reasons it would be
inappropriate for project Q" would be totally valid.

There are also corporate culture issues, nobody here gets a bonus for stuff
that doesn't work, so it might be useful to separately document that data,
but...

Another corporate culture issue relates to coddling, some employers are like
the mother duck with the ducklings following her and others are like the
building trades. Some places promote useful career advice and training so
discussing failures might lead to training, experiments, etc. On the other
hand some places just don't care, much as I really don't care if my plumber
doesn't like a certain brand of pipe wrench.

~~~
dennisgorelik
When stated that way -- I agree:

1) State your "unsuccessful" tasks as completed accomplishments ("learned
XYZ").

2) Do not include "learned that we should not use XYZ" into your "give me my
bonus" pitch.

------
sitkack
I think successful companies will start to differentiate themselves to workers
via flexibility first working arrangements. Productivity measured by
visibility will fade into the background as we use systems that retain more of
our behavior data. We will in the next five years have a holistic view of how
organizations function via transparent ambient metrics, like measuring stress
level from vocal markers in a voice chat. That is one thing about pervasive
data collection and automatic processing, it won't be subjective and it can't
be gamed.

I know I have been on unproductive teams and had wonderful, enriching
experiences on others. It would be nice if the digital ai manager could
automatically determine who works best together and build those schedules.

Team management will I think, fade into the software.

Knowledge organizations that do not embrace a future of lower hours and more
flexibility will be relegated to sections of the industry that turn out clones
of clones (Zynga, PSDtoWeb, turn key CRUD web apps, etc).

Ernest and Young seems to get it.

------
eshvk
I have worked at two companies where people working remote is not an
exception. Both companies started off with a strong tradition of distributed
teams where it makes sense to build a culture that is centered around the fact
that some co-workers will be in different time zones and also in a different
physical location. Everywhere else, remote/WFH sort of works. But mostly
doesn't.

