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Comment by znq | Hacker News Reader

At Mobile Jazz (7 years old now) and Bugfender (4-5 years old now) we always had the rule, that people could choose to work as much as they want and when they went. As long as the output and quality was there. Obviously to achieve high quality output you need to be there at certain times (overlap with other team members) and you need to do a certain amount of hours. The problems we had because of this are almost no-existent (specific people that then ended up not staying very long in the company) and the advantages by far outweigh the "loss of control". In the end myself as a business owner and managers have far less stress by trusting people and empowering them to do great work.

With this framework, people will take breaks whenever they feel like. They go doing sports, play with their kids, run errands. They even take whole days off to go surfing or skiing. And I really don't mind. Because I do the same.

But then, if a server goes down late at night, people all the sudden show up by themselves and fix problems. Also on a rainy Saturday or Sunday, people will all the sudden be online and working.

Give people the opportunity to be in charge of their own work schedule, give them the responsibility, make them feel that they're actually responsible and they will shine.

We also just released our company handbook which goes in a lot of detail on how we run a 20+ people remote business:

* https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook (landing page, if you want to get email updates)

* https://mobilejazz.com/docs/company-handbook/mobile-jazz-com... (direct link to the PDF)

EDIT: Added some more details

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How do employees know when good is good enough? When things get stressful and overwhelming at work, I look to my contractual hours per week and remind myself not to overdo it.

This is actually the downside of these "you decide" plans and why I absolutely hate "unlimited PTO" policies. Whenever it's up to me I end up taking less vacation than if I just had an allotted amount. People shortchange themselves because they don't want to inconvenience their team. And as an added insult, the company gets out of paying you for unused vacation when you finally burn out.

When I worked a Geckoboard they had a great system where you had unlimited paid time off, but you had to take at least 25 days off each year.

This, combined with colleagues visibly taking advantage of the time off available, helped ensure a healthy approach to unlimited time off.

>When I worked a Geckoboard they had a great system where you had unlimited paid time off, but you had to take at least 25 days off each year.

Thats doing it right. Or pay people for the vacation time they don't use.

I would expect that paying people for unused vacation would incentivize employees overworking themselves leading to reduced quality of output. In a sense, I expect that it would magnify the existing issues with unlimited PTO. It seems like this would be neither good for employee or employer.

Most companies only let you bank so many pto (Paid Time Off) hours and carry them over year to year. I think this came about because of accounting change where employee hours are considered a liability (Hours/Money owed for nothing in return), but I might be wrong on that.

As a result employees can't just bank their vacation hours and get a big payday when they leave. It tends to only take a couple years to get up to the max, and you end up with "use it or loose it" pto.

It's been accounting rules for a very long time. It's pretty much Accounting 101. If you accrue liabilities that you're obligated to provide (either in the form of employee time off or pay-out upon departure), that's a textbook liability.

Which is why employers almost always cap in some form or another; the exact mechanism is partially determined by state law.

I worked for a company once that, during a bad spell, eliminated an accrual cap to encourage people to bank vacation. The result was that a not small number of people who weren't really into taking vacation just let their balances balloon. The company eventually forced people to work down their balances.

>Hours/Money owed for nothing in return

From the business perspectice services rendered previously is "nothing", because you can't get any more value from that

People are technically already paid for their unused PTO when they leave a company with an allocated PTO/year (although this may vary between states). That was one of the reasons why I chose my current company, because I figured I'd make a little 'extra' money leaving after a year without taking any PTO. Personally, I did end up feeling a little burned out so I opted to actually start using my PTO, but it's nice to have the freedom either way.

What does it mean that you had to take 25 days off? What would they do to you if you didn’t?

> they don't want to inconvenience their team

This is is why it's important for team members to explicitly encourage each other to take breaks and vacations. I've often told a coworker, "stop working! Take a long weekend!".

I've seen companies set minimum time off, which can certainly simply the problem. (At risk of the Dilbert situation: "you need to get this done by end of year, and also take two weeks of holiday".) But ultimately, I think that's a road to this sort of cultural approach. Once people around you are taking time off, it becomes easy to justify taking time off. (And so, like most cultural things, you'd better have management doing it first.)

The best UPTO environment I've ever seen had managers who asked about time off in one-on-ones and pushed people who said "none" to take more. It also had a lot of acceptance for 'aimless' PTO; justifying your trip to the Andes is easy, but people take PTO more consistently if no one's expecting a better story than "sleep late and run some errands" or "play a new-release game".

> Once people around you are taking time off, it becomes easy to justify taking time off. (And so, like most cultural things, you'd better have management doing it first.)

Also once teams and management get used to people taking time off, the business processes also become more resilient to people missing for a week or two and taking PTO becomes less of a problem for everyone. Suddenly someone missing for a week is just not a big deal.

I'd never considered this explicitly, but it's an excellent point.

It occurs to me that Google somewhat famously adds artificial downtime to their services to make sure no one is relying on 24/7 uptime. I don't want to reduce people to server-equivalents, but I'll bet high vacation rates are a pretty good way of making sure no one relies too much on individual knowledge. Even from my personal experiences, lots of things get documented when the person who knows them well is heading out of town and there's a sudden scramble to formalize that knowledge.

You're generalizing based on your own behavior, but not everybody behaves that way.

I'm exactly opposite, and had no problem taking PTO when I worked at a company with an unlimited plan. Now that I have limited PTO again I hoard it and take less time off.

I don't feel inconvenienced when others take PTO, and I don't expect my taking PTO to inconvenience them.

The problem is, if it's not codified in law, there is no consistency. One person's gloriously well managed Unlimited PTO policy (congrats!) is another person's peer pressured non-usage.

"Unlimited PTO" is a marketing farce, no more, no less. If you want people to take 25 days a year off, give them 25 days of PTO and be on the hook for the liability if they leave. If you want to give them more time than that through an approval process, offer it! But don't say it's unlimited, because it isn't. And if you don't want one of your business perks to be pointed out as fraudulent, don't advertise it as such.

> The problem is, if it's not codified in law, there is no consistency.

A poorly codified policy is an implementation problem, and will be a problem for both limited and unlimited PTO policies.

> "Unlimited PTO" is a marketing farce, no more, no less. If you want people to take 25 days a year off, give them 25 days of PTO and be on the hook for the liability if they leave. If you want to give them more time than that through an approval process, offer it! But don't say it's unlimited, because it isn't. And if you don't want one of your business perks to be pointed out as fraudulent, don't advertise it as such.

The entire point is that the employer doesn't care how many days off people take each year. Employees can be responsible for deciding that for themselves. Some people don't want that extra responsibility, and I'd agree that they probably won't like unlimited PTO policies.

It would be ludicrous to outlaw unlimited PTO policies just because some people don't like them.

  The entire point is that the
  employer doesn't care how many
  days off people take each year.

Of course they do. Just they call it "abusing the policy" or "not getting your work done" and don't tell you what the lines you shouldn't cross are.

> Of course they do. Just they call it "abusing the policy" or "not getting your work done" and don't tell you what the lines you shouldn't cross are.

I don't know how many times I need to repeat this, but if your company doesn't communicate expectation it's a problem with the company, not with unlimited PTO policies in general.

If there's a trend that's affecting the industry as whole, and if most places are abusing that trend, then it's worth looking at the trend to see what's going not. It's not very helpful to say what you're saying when statistics speak otherwise. It's very lazy to say "it's an implementation problem" and is not giving the question enough thought.

So where are these statistics? All I've seen in this thread, and others on the topic, are anecdotes. If people are going to complain about how it didn't work for them then it's only fair to mention how well it worked for the company I was at.

I also disagree that my comments haven't been helpful. There's a difference between the concept of "unlimited PTO" and any particular implementation of it, and it's important to know where a problem is coming from. Perhaps there should be regulations around it, but getting rid of it entirely, as suggested elsewhere in this thread, isn't the answer.

We wouldn't ban all cars because one brand is unsafe, so let's not get rid of all unlimited PTO policies just because some companies do it wrong.

>All I've seen in this thread, and others on the topic, are anecdotes.

Great observation! Statistically, there are more anecdotes in this thread with employees with negative experiences with good ones. I think that's a great starting point.

And, as usual with self-reporting, accept that folks with experiences on the extreme are more likely to be motivated to speak up.

I don’t know about you, but any time off (even when unlimited) is still subject to approval by my manager.

If I take one day off 30 times a year nobody raises an eyebrow, but if I take 30 days off in one go it might.

> It would be ludicrous to outlaw unlimited PTO policies just because some people don't like them.

I can appreciate this opinion if you've had a good experience with an Unlimited PTO policy, but regulation isn't for the best experiences. Unlimited PTO is an HR/Marketing dark pattern.

EDIT: > It's disappointing so many people want to ruin things for everybody because they've worked at crappy companies in the past.

@jlarocco: I am disappointed you prioritize protecting your arrangement than the well being of others at crappy companies. As I mention in my other comments in-thread, you can still arrive at something similar to "Unlimited PTO" while still instituting regulations to prevent worker abuse (minimum PTO days issued + a process to request additional days). I do not understand the disdain for regulation that simply enforces what is being offered.

There has to be a limit somewhere though.

Say I booked the entirety of June off this year. Are they still cool with that? How about if I also decide I'd like July off too. That's an extreme I know but there's a limit somewhere.

I thought this was common sense, but can't you just ask? "Unlimited PTO" does not mean "do whatever you want". Your manager can deny requests when you have limited PTO, too, so I don't see what you're getting at.

FWIW we did have somebody take an entire month off to visit family in China. He was responsible for tons of code and functionality, and it worked fine because management knew about it and planned around it.

If you can't handle the responsibility, don't ruin it for everybody, just go work somewhere else.

I agree with you. I've seen people take 8 weeks for a similar reason. Over that time period they checked in, fixed a few bugs related to work they had done but were generally gone.

In a strict PTO environment that would have been almost impossible for them to do.

Some people are going to respond and be upset that they want to work exactly 8 hours, get exactly 41.5 hours of PTA and get paid that way. That's fine, although I hope they are giving the company back money for browsing HN.

I on the other hand like the freedom and flexibility that unlimited PTO provides along with a flexible work schedule. Do I end up working more? Probably, but I have way less stress. I much prefer working that hour on a rainy Saturday instead of the beautifully sunny Friday.

I've never worked at a place with unlimited PTO. I don't know. This is me asking :P

Only ever worked at UK companies where we get 5.6 weeks PTO as standard. Never had a request denied as long as I've given 2 weeks notice of a long'un

You're probably requesting with a degree of sense.

If you requested your 5.6 weeks off all at once and over an go-live date that you were 100% responsible for, you might receive a request to see if you could move those holidays a bit later

Booking those whole two months wouldn't even blow through standard 25 day allotment of PTO :) Which makes it even more obvious just how shortchanged you get with unlimited.

Unlimited PTO is not so much a marketing farce, though the ways it's promoted are. However, since it doesn't involve accrual and payout it's more of a tax scam on the back of employees (natch).

As a manager at various companies in the US, it's often been a struggle to get people to take their allotted PTO. And to get people to take 2 weeks off? Very infrequently. I had to make people take their PTOs.

Our European team colleagues? Not so much.

As others have mentioned, having a company minimum is a good idea. But you can also just give it to yourself: pick a number and make sure you take that many days off.

Current place I work has unlimited PTO, and I really like it. You do need to be careful not to fall into the trap of not using it, though.

I don’t understand this. Why would you not use it? There would be so many days where I just wake up and go: ‘No... not today.’ and stay in bed.

Then there’s still normal vacation trips to consider.

I can easily see myself using 40 days of PTO in a year.

With unlimited PTO and flexible schedule, I take way more time-off. Never will I give up my health, time-off for co-workers, they aren't family or friends, they are co-workers, who will replace you if you die tomorrow.

If I am on a limited PTO plan, California law guarantees me the right to cash out my unused vacation days when I leave the company.

It seems to me like it would be fair for companies to offer unlimited PTO as long as employees can cash out unlimited money when they leave. But for some reason, this is not often offered.

I currently have the most joyous of "unlimited PTO" policies. There's something in the handbook, which isn't that great, but I've been told that it's just there for documentation and we have no 'real' policy. YAY!

At trivago you can decide how many days to take off in a year, but German law stipulates that you have to take at least 24 (2 per month). One of my co-workers tried to never take vacation and HR made him stay home for all of December!

I've just started my first job with unlimited PTO, and I've never understood complaints like these. I can see how it isn't as amazing as a naive what's-on-the-tin reading would imply, but it seems to me that you can just set your bar at what a normal amount of vacation would be, plus a little bit if you feel like, since they're marketing it as "unlimited PTO". Eg, decide that three weeks is an appropriate, comparable amount, and then take three weeks off.

As I mentioned upthread, I've never had a job where I didn't work when and how much I wanted, go into the office when I felt like it, etc etc. I'm subject to the same pressures you describe, but it turns out they're really easy to handle: keep a rough eye on how many hours you're working.

The other day they had a rare beer release I wanted to go to in the middle of the day, on a Friday. I didn't have any meetings, so I "WFH" and worked 3-4 hours that day and spent the rest of the day drinking and getting dinner with a couple funemployed friends, including checking my email and responding to important ones for a few minutes every couple hours during the workday. I could've (and have in the past) written off those four lost hours of work as coming out of my effective productivity, but since this is a new job and I'm trying to hit the ground running, I just made it up in dribbles of an hour or two over the next week.

The dirty secret when people talk about being pressured at work is that 90% of the time, your employers are relying on you to do the work of pressuring yourself. If my employer wants me to work extra and go above and beyond, I make sure that it's explicit and metaphorically "on the record". Pulling all-nighters during crunch time or forgoing vacation for a long time should be banked as something you can draw on, giving you cover for taking a longer vacation or working shorter days after crunch time.

It's really up to you to set your work life balance, and the fears most people have about the consequences of doing so are largely (but not entirely) illusory.

The one major caveat here that I haven't ever had to face is if you're both at an abusive company and highly replaceable (eg feel like you couldn't get a similar quality job). In this case of effectively having a better job than you'd otherwise get, the power dynamic is markedly shifted and employers can get away with a lot. The only saving grace in this situation is if your more in-demand coworkers have healthy attitudes about work/life balance, since it's hard for management to crack down on individuals in a way that's perceived as unfair.

Come back in a year and tell us how this went.

Unlimited PTO can turn into unlimited working if your boss is really "good".

They don't, and there's a massive cultural imbalance. Buddy of mine works for a upto company in Portland but his colleague got a talking to for gasp taking 2.5 weeks off in a year. I too work for a up to company but I ALSO have a legally guaranteed minimum 21 days off a year.

There's ALWAYS a limit. Try taking a year long holiday and see how that goes. With UPTO the limit is up to your manager.

In an employment "at will" state(Oregon is one), there really is no such thing as a set amount of days. You could get 15 days off and be fired for taking 4 days off in the year.

So even if you have a set number of days, your manager can still fire you for taking them. Your manager can fire you or not fire you for any reason. So you could take 30 days off and not get fired if your manager doesn't want to.

With "at will" employment there really aren't any concrete rules in play. Everything is just at the discretion of the employer. Regardless of the employee handbook, PTO or really anything. You could be fired for coming in too early. Coming in too late. Not working on the weekends. Working on the weekends. Probably even something as silly as gaining too much weight. Really anything unless it is within a few specific protected classes such as race or sex.

The only variable that exists is whether or not the terminated employee would qualify for unemployment benefits.

Edit: I should mention this is US specific as most US states have "at will" employment laws.

You could get 15 days off and be fired for taking 4 days off in the year

For doing something that is specified in the employment agreement? Pretty sure that would fall under fraud/misrepresentation.

Absolutely not. I would encourage you to look into "at will" employment law in the US. The employee may have a case for receiving unemployment benefits in that situation, but it is completely within the legal rights of the employer to do that in the US if the state has employment "at will".

I would encourage you to look into "at will" employment law in the US

What makes you think I haven't, are you saying that there is no fraud exception? You don't go into any detail to support your "absolute" confidence.

It would be stupid though. They are better just firing for no reason.

Sure, but my point was that guidelines to expected pto help to make it clear what would be generally ok or not. Also unlimited pto means no cash out if indeed you are fired.

I think that where having a team comes in handy. When I used to be a freelancer I had exactly that problem. Being a perfectionist. But when working with a team, doing shared product testing and code reviews and other kind of evaluations gives over time a very clear measurement of what "the standard of good enough" is. And I guess that's different for each company. We definitely strive for excellent quality, but certainly not by sacrificing people or team happiness.

For me, having a clearly stated PTO policy saves me so much anxiety that I don't mind the minor(?) reduction in flexibility.

I'm mildly affected with Asperger's. There are many aspects of workplace culture that are obvious to other people, but which I take a long time to clue in regarding. This has included figuring out the reasonable boundaries for unlimited PTO in the past, especially when it required having to "read" my manager to figure out the acceptable timing and quantity of PTO.

My current employer strikes the perfect tone for me: they offer unlimited sick/family leave, but ask that we shoot for approximately N days of actual PTO per year. (Where N is clearly stated.)

I would hate that environment. I don't want to have to guess if I'm doing enough. I don't want to guess if I'm working 20 days more a year than another employee or 10 days less. I just want a negotiated amount of time off. If it's 10 days a year or 50 days a year at least know I can take them off 100% guilt free. If it's "take as much as you want" there will always be those who abuse the policy and those who under utilize.

What if 'enough' is not time-based? What if you just have to make sure that new versions are deployed and the service stays up and isn't being hacked? If you can do that with 2 days/week, more power to you. Or maybe you put 6 days/week in at the outset, as an investment so that in a few months you'll be able to work a lot less?

> Or maybe you put 6 days/week in at the outset, as an investment so that in a few months you'll be able to work a lot less?

There are two outcomes in that situation.

1. Great, so you've gotten Service Foo stable! It now needs minimal dev attention. Since there's no shortage of work that needs to be done, and you've got 3 days/week free, it sounds like you're free to work on Service Bar, in addition to Service Foo.

2. Great, so you've gotten Service Foo stable. Now that it needs half the development attention that it used to, we no longer need a full-time person on it. Since we don't have any more work, we're laying you off (Or, in a fairy tale, where, for whatever reason, your manager values your contributions for what they were, laying one of your co-workers off.)

Personally, I prefer outcome #1. I'm paid to be at work, and do things, and if I get my work done faster then estimated, I'll get more work. And that's fine. The alternative is much worse.

I think there's a happy medium. I have a personal target of 4 days/week (or equivalent), and so I don't mind optimizing existing work, and then taking on additional work, as long as it averages out to this healthy balance. I have found that the best motivator for me is a manager who is able to say "you've done great work, you can relax for a bit, take some time off". I'll work hard for them, knowing they have my back and I don't have to fight and scrape for well-deserved rest. If they won't say that, and will just let me work as much as I can, then I start making clear boundaries around my work; and overall I am less motivated to make things better.

I have never had a job that doesn't work like this (or rather, that I didn't treat like this) and frankly, it's a huge red flag for me to see an engineering job that doesn't. Given that engineering can require long periods of focused work, it's beyond me that a company would step in and decide the manner in which you get it done. Tangentially and less convincingly, I don't see a reason why if I'm twice as talented as someone else and want to work half as much, that shouldn't be okay, and we should be similarly compensated for having similar productivity.

It's to the point where it reminds me of jobs that force you to dress up in a certain way: I can't imagine your workplace respects you if they're enforcing how you get your work done or what you're wearing.

I should be clear that there are situations in both cases where it can actually make sense: anyone working customers doesn't get to decide that customers are irrational for judging attire, so dress codes are reasonable in that case. Similarly, if your work heavily involves constant communication, then enforcing work hours can make sense too. But there are a TON of jobs that enforce rules like work hours and dress code for no reason other than lack of trust and respect for their employees, and I just hope I continue to avoid ever being in a position like that.

Yes this sounds good. Have you noticed a risk of people over-working because of the lack of hours? Or feeling bad about taking vacations? (Something I've felt while having unlimited vacations).

As you are saying that, as the business owner/manager you do the same, I think it shows a great example and helps people feel they actually can do this.

The opposite might also be very true, where if the manager is working harder than what is expected/accepted, people will follow and do the same too. Do you think that is true?

The problems we see is when people are overloaded because of bad planning on our side or customers asking for too tight deadlines and we wanting to be nice and help them achieve it (again our fault). Then people actually tend to feel pressured doing more for the company's sake. Which is sometimes ok in my opinion and also appreciated when there's an emergency, but we try for it not to become the rule.

Regarding owners/managers working less, I see it the same as you: leading by example. And generally I don't see a problem with that, as everyone is mostly working very responsibly (in our case). However, what we've noticed over the years is that it still needs some people with a global company vision and also visionary mindset to push the company to new frontiers and help people to look beyond what they're currently working on and to think outside the box.

> The opposite might also be very true, where if the manager is working harder than what is expected/accepted, people will follow and do the same too.

I think this is a serious risk for unlimited PTO. It's easy to miss, because well-meaning managers are least likely to notice the problem. Sure they were busy and came in all year, but they genuinely wanted their reports to take more time off!

In that sense, it almost has to be a responsibility at the management level; visibly booking time off and disconnecting is part of making a PTO policy usable for everyone else. Fortunately, it's the sort of responsibility that also helps keep management and founders from burning out or already being exhausted when crunches do hit.

> Remember, work has to be fun. We value employees who live rich and rounded lives. We run a flexible workplace, and we have ever since we were a blacksmith shop that shut down whenever the waves were six feet, hot and glassy. Our policy has always allowed employees to work flexible hours, as long as the work gets done with no negative impacts on others. A serious surfer doesn't plan to go surfing next Tuesday at two o'clock. You go surfing when there are waves and the tide and wind are right.

From Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard.

Your handbook says you track work daily in Asana and have two stand ups. Along with an expectation to immediately respond to pings and vacation pre-approval is required. How does that fit into “work when you want”?

I don't work there, but it seems pretty clear to me.

Morning slack message (which isn't the same thing as a standup): "Hey, I'm going to do X,Y,Z today but I'm also going to run a few errands after lunch so I'll be MIA from 12-2 CET but available after until 6 CET".

"Work when you want" doesn't have to mean "I have no idea when you'll be available today".

> "Work when you want" doesn't have to mean "I have no idea when you'll be available today".

People confuse the two all the time! Flexibility and reliability have to go hand in hand, if you cannot be reliable when left unsupervised, you need to expect I cannot leave you unsupervised. On the plus side, when people are given this explanation they often self manage into a good routine.

But this is the problem. The current mindset is - as long as you are here, I trust you to do something productive.

The work-when-you-want is easily leading to a - show me the evidence on why I should trust you to have done something productive today.

It forces someone to just push for quick wins and avoid anything that is not leading to directly accountible results.

You should really know what you're doing all day. If you can't even summarize what you were doing all day, that sounds like a bad thing. The evidence is your story about what you actually did.

Here's a perfectly great update that didn't result in a quick win:

"I spent all day debugging that null pointer issue like we discussed. I thought maybe it was because the API was sending nulls across, but I looked at the logs and couldn't find any instance of that happening. I thought maybe it was a type coercion issue too, but I wrote a few tests to rule that out and it turned out not to be the case. Then I remembered reading about a memory corruption issue that sometimes happens in our runtime version, so I spent the rest of the day reading about the situations where that occurs and figuring out if it applies to us, but didn't get enough time to finish that up completely."

That's the thing - this works only when you have clearly task - solution based jobs. But when it is more creative and abstract this is not feasable.

You should still be able to recount what you did, past tense.

"This morning I sketched out three different possibilities for the new client check-in service. First draft of the spec is in progress, I expect to send it over to Jen and Andy tomorrow for their feedback."

"I made a dozen or so mockups for the new landing page. I have a couple more ideas I want to try out tomorrow, then I'll figure out what the best four or five are and show them to the team."

"Since we don't have any feature work pending right now, I've been experimenting on a branch with using $TOOL to do $THING better. It looks good because $X, although $Y might be a problem."

"We talked a while ago about doing $THING with the user's documents so they can $WHATEVER more easily, and I wasn't sure it was even possible. I've been looking into that today. It looks like there might be a way, so I'm continuing to investigate."

"We've wanted to replace $FRAMEWORK for a while now. I've identified the parts of it that we actually use, and I'm putting together a plan for what we can swap in and/or get rid of. It looks like, since we made $CHANGE last month, we can actually do most of it ourselves without much trouble."

That sure sounds like a day of productive work or a day of doing nothing being covered over with some made up fluff. One or the other.

Starting from the standpoint that your peers or reports are lying to you is never going to work. Treating people like kids means you'll get kid level responses.

If someone is lying, it will eventually come out. That fake report one day will turn into a week and eventually they will get fired. But, don't kill your entire team on the off chance that someone is trying to game the system.

Assuming that you really think that the members of your team are lying to you like this, it's easy enough to validate.

The first one says they're writing a spec. Well, three days later, where's that spec? Next one is producing some designs, so same. Sure someone saying "$TOOL/$NEW_FUNCTION/$REPLACE_FRAMEWORK just didn't work out", could be cover for "I was playing Pac-man all day", but if you ask for details, BS should become clear pretty quickly.

And again, that's starting from the position that you think your teammates are probably slackers who would rather lie than work. Which is not really a great position to hold, IMO.

It doesn't really matter which.

Look, if I'm leading a group like this, I'm going to have an idea of what your output is like in an average sense, both compared to your historical output and the group as a whole. If you blow off a day it's not really going to matter. (although I'd rather you tell me you needed to blow off a day than try and hide it, sure).

However, if you blow of enough days we're going to have a conversation about how your performance is dropping, and why, and discuss your ideas about how to turn that around. If it doesn't, we'll have another conversation, and so on. Eventually if none of this works we'll have a different conversation (about why you are leaving).

This doesn't actually have anything to do with reviewing daily/weekly reports. Those are for different things.

I'm really struggling to think of creative and abstract jobs that meet all of the following criteria:

1) Take place in a typical corporate setting--which is the context here, nobody's asking studio musicians to do stand-ups.

2) Have 0 artifacts of progress being made. Even brand design goes through iterations.

3) Are so abstract that it's impossible to distill your thought process into a small summary each day

If it's really impossible to summarize what you did all day, I'm going to question if you were actually doing anything at all.

"Big design up front" rarely works, even in abstract terms. I've learned that your point 2) is crucial - you have to force yourself to build "artifacts of progress" for actual progress to happen! Maybe there are some geniuses who can build whole programs completely in their heads, but my mind starts to run in circles if I try that. Whether drawings, prototypes, or just stream-of-thought notes, just continuously getting things out of my head speeds working a lot for me - and all of these can be turned into a summary of what I did today.

There are days when I'm trying to write (as in prose or a presentation) all day and the muses are not connecting, I do a lot of unrelated not-really "research," etc. And that's mostly OK. For a day. But obviously not for a week or weeks in a corporate setting. (And, if I really had a hard deadline, I'd crank out something serviceable. But I usually aim to do better than that.)

Oh, but it is.

With one of my customers, I had a week when I consistently reported "designing the new model for $thing-that-drives-our-product", sometimes additionally with "and I spend some time talking with $product-guy and $coworker about the design". As a side effect of the design process, I produced a bunch of concept documents and drawings, which once the overall goal was clear, I transformed into barebones interactive prototypes testing experimentally some design points. So the next week, my daily reports were "aaand, I also did this prototype to test out $design-concern" (to which the universal reaction was "oooh, shiny! <3"). Two weeks, zero code for the actual product, just couple pages of text and a lot of garbage JavaScript in prototypes.

This is how work sometimes look. A good manager will accept your vague description, trusting that something of value commensurate with time spent will come out from the other end. As long as you actually deliver, a sane manager will not mind.

(That said, if asked for details, I always could explain what my main concerns and areas of exploration were at any point in the design process. The story about what you were doing is proportional to how much work you actually put in. If you can't elaborate beyond "I was thinking about $X", maybe you weren't really thinking about it? Conversely, I find forcing myself to write down and structure my thoughts to be an excellent way to unblock myself when my mind is running circles, or feels like watching Netflix instead.)

> A good manager will accept your vague description

> As long as you actually deliver, a sane manager will not mind.

The problem is that these are very rare.

EDIT: If anything, the problem may be that the "bad manager" doesn't trust you. (Yes)

Well, I guess set up the bait by using the phrase "good manager".

Maybe I'm lucky, but for all the failings of various people I've worked under, I've met none who wouldn't understand it when some work requires more cognitive effort than code.

If anything, the problem may be that the "bad manager" doesn't trust you. But that's a completely different issue than them not understanding the concept of abstract work.

The creative people I know generate all sorts of artifacts that may or may not be used (designs, notes, research, etc..). They rarely sit at their desk all day just thinking.

> as long as you are here, I trust you to do something productive.

And this is a terrible mindset.

> The work-when-you-want is easily leading to a - show me the evidence on why I should trust you to have done something productive today.

No, start from the stand point of trust.

> It forces someone to just push for quick wins and avoid anything that is not leading to directly accountible results.

It does force someone to think about results, but not necessarily quick. Even a result that takes months, has many steps along the way that can be communicated.

this seems only one degree removed from a 9-5.

"work when you want" to me requires more than that. multiply your simple example to 2-4x a week, xN employees, that's a lot of noise

With freedom, comes responsibility. There needs to be some communication and information/knowledge exchange, otherwise it's difficult to coordinate and synchronize in a team of 20 people. Therefore updating other people via Slack/Asana is the minimum anyone should do in my opinion.

The two weekly stand-ups, one is actually work related (the team meeting) and people are encouraged to be there and not go surfing just during that specific hour and the other one is the MJ Weekly, where we just exchange personal and professional learnings for about 1 hour, which is a great way to get to know other people being a remote company.

That said, making those things "required" is not that bad compared to requiring people sitting 8 hours in an office. Again, my personal opinion.

This is very interesting, but I'm curious how it scales to higher levels of management. Of course, if the whole company is only 20-30 people, those higher levels don't exist. In a large company, a single low- or mid-level manager may have more direct and indirect reports than an entire small 20 person company, and a high-level executive may have hundreds or thousands of indirect reports. At this level, it seems to me like it may be possible to maintain this "work when you want as long as the work gets done" style of scheduling for developers at the bottom, but it feels like it would work less and less for managers and executives who will spend more and more of their time in scheduled meetings.

Of course, people whose workload consists of talking to or otherwise dealing with other people can't have flexible schedules like this. A cashier can't walk off, because there's a line of customers waiting to be served.

However, it can still in my opinion work for a large amount of people. Anyone whose job has parts that can be done alone (programming, compiling reports, writing articles...) can benefit from a more relaxed schedule.

Hey zqn, this is an awesome deck and post. In fact, I wrote this up on my blog as a case study in using content to attract talent: https://mattharney.com/2019/02/22/talent-magnet-in-action/

I think without systematic backstops to keep it below a certain number of hours there's a big risk to slide into more and more hours. Esp if you hire on someone who might visibly work a lot and get visibily rewarded for it - it puts a subtle pull on the group as a whole.

Yeah but this policy is not that helpful if high quality output is demanded at a fast rate. The same situation that forces someone to work overtime in a 5 day week is still present.

This is nonsense. People work for money, so clearly call out what is the expectation.

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