

501/anti 501 are symptoms, not the disease  - Buddy_D

tl;dr You are not a factory worker, stop working like one. And if you are starting a tech company don’t model it after a factory.<p>I’m a fan of Hacker News, but I view it from afar. It’s like a strange other world and I’m just a voyeur. I’m a tech entrepreneur, but I live outside of the US. I’m not trying to bump my valuation to get bought out by a giant. But a lot of great information is shared on Hacker News, and I like you guys, even if I don’t always understand you. :-)<p>The 501 manifesto and the anti 501 response strike me as really amusing. I know where the 501ers are coming from. I used to be a coder in the trenches. I also understand the anti-ish response, because as soon as you write a manifesto people will come running to trash it. It’s just a risk you take when you write a manifesto. And now here I am to tell you that you are both wrong. And dammit that puts me dangerously close to writing my own manifesto.<p>What you are experiencing is the death throes of the industrial era ‘factory worker’ mentality that has been carried over to an ‘office worker’ mentality and stretched to the point of ridiculousness when applied to ‘knowledge workers’.<p>The vast majority of you are knowledge workers. Highly skilled (we hope), well trained, creative problem solvers. You are paid to solve problems with code. You are craftsmen and artisans yet you are being used like no skill, brain dead, button pushing assembly line workers.<p>You will sit in the cube and be creative from 9am to 10:30am, then you will stop being creative and be attentive while we have a meeting on something inane for an hour and a half. You will then go eat lunch and return to your cube on time to commence with the creativity again. Ignore your dumb ass coworkers that are still playing high school games. Ignore the weird lighting and the noise. Ignore the distractions. Be creative dammit. Oh and by the way we own you, your free time is ours, anything you create is ours, and our needs come before your family and loved ones.<p>To me it looked like you had two choices: Care a lot about whatever the company is/does, sacrifice yourself and burn out doing everything you can to support it, or give up, just become the factory worker, do a fine job and punch out at 5:01.<p>But I decided to go a different way. I decided to scrap the factory worker mentality all together. Think about the best work you have ever done, I bet it wasn’t in the office. For me it was always either hunched over my laptop at 3am or at a coffee shop kicking around ideas with other people. Now that I am the guy making the decisions why was I falling into the same trap that everyone else falls into, even though I know it’s a trap? Because it’s safer. If I did it like everyone else and failed you can’t blame me, right? Fuck that. I want the best work I can get from my crew. Not the best work I can get between the hours of 9 and 5 while surrounded by distractions. I am an idiot before 10am but on fire from midnight to three am. Why would I force myself to do important things at 9:30 am? One of my business partners is best from 6am to early afternoon and then becomes useless. Why don’t we as a business and development culture pay attention to these things? Because we are hanging on to some outdated industrial era assembly line ideal. Henry Ford wanted conformity so his people were as interchangeable as his parts. But the difference between one factory worker’s output and another’s probably only varies by ten percent. My best work is so much better than my worst work that it’s worth building a new system to get as much of my best work as possible. The same goes for you.<p>I started with myself. I stopped going to the office. I started working in the places I was most comfortable. I started paying attention to when I was creative, when I was distracted, when I was effective. I took notes. I watched my output and then I remade my life around it. Guess what? It worked. That time in the afternoon that I used to find myself distracted and on facebook or mindlessly surfing, I now spend that time with my kids at the park. The hour and a half that I am answering emails and arranging my schedule each day, I do that while having coffee with my wife. You know that line between WORK and LIFE I just took it away. Guess what? My life got better. I was happier, my family was happier, and my output was higher quality.<p>So I did the same for the people that worked for me. It isn’t easy. Some people have been trained their whole lives to be factory workers without knowing it. It is really hard for them to give up that crutch. But when they ‘get it’ they do better work and are happier people. And as the boss that’s exactly what I want.
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rprospero
I have to admit that my experience has been the exact opposite. I've seen the
whole flex time system work best when everyone is an interchangeable factor
cog and completely fail when people are useful knowledge workers.

My hypothetical example would be writing a search engine. You have two
brilliant knowledge workers. Alice is a brilliant algorithm specialist who has
a new way to sort lists in O(1) time. Bob is a genius data center guy who can
split anything across any number of servers. The only problem is that Alice is
a morning person who works best from 7am to 5PM, while Bob's brain doesn't
even start until 4PM, though he'll still be wide awake at 2AM.

Alice understand the theory behind parallelization, but she doesn't have the
experience to truly write great code on the massive scale you need. Bob can
find his way around a tree, but the fiddly details of O(1) search are beyond
him. Thus, you really need both of them working together to make any progress.
However, they're only together for an hour and Bob's always deadlocked by his
inability to get answers from Alice while she sleeps. Similarly, Alice can
answer his e-mails in the morning, but anything she write before Bob arrives
will have to be thrown out because it won't scale properly.

Now, if the office forces them to work from noon until nine, then you'll get
nine hours of work out. Granted, for four of those hours, Alice will be tired.
Bob will be tired for another four. Still, if they can even work at a quarter
capacity during those times, you're still getting three times as much done,
while simultaneously giving both employee's back a full hour in each day.

How do you handle a situation like this?

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Buddy_D
Thanks for the reply. :-) This is the beauty of this approach, you would
handle this situation with flexibility. This isn't, and shouldn't be, an all
or nothing scenario. If these two people need to connect for a project to
succeed they work together to find the best way and times to do so. I've never
hit a situation that was unsolvable. Sometimes they take a little creative
problem solving, but we always get there. And in general I think my crew feels
happy to take the extra steps to make it work because the system is so
flexible to their needs.

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Buddy_D
This is my first submission to Hacker News, I was trying to keep it concise.
(even though it may seem wordy) I'm happy to share more details about the
process if people are interested.

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damoncali
_I started paying attention to when I was creative, when I was distracted,
when I was effective. I took notes._

This I find interesting. Your story resonates with me, but I have not taken
the step of systematically identifying when I am worthless vs when I'm "on
fire", as you put it.

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desipenguin
If spouse is working, and children go to school, then most likely family
members are also "out" for better part of 9-5, so even if you might be "free"
during those times, your family may not be. That is why 9-5 works for (most)
families (I think)

BTW, if you are replying emails when having coffee with your wife, how is that
"family" time ?

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peacemaker
You make some good points and I strongly agree we need to move away from the
old fashioned factory worker mindset. I watched a TED talk recently discussing
that this is a symptom of the education system. Modern education is designed
to create these so called 'factory workers' who switch on at 9am and off at
5pm. That kills the creative side of people, something that is vital for
knowledge workers. I think this is the talk:
[http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_crea...](http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html)

~~~
Buddy_D
You are absolutely right and Ken nails it in that TED. :-)

