For Workers, Less Flexible Companies | Hacker News Reader

For Workers, Less Flexible Companies

nytimes.com

86 points001sky42 comments

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."

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...

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.)

Ties in well with Paul Graham's essay "Mind the Gap":

It may seem unlikely in principle that one individual could really generate so much more wealth than another. The key to this mystery is to revisit that question, are they really worth 100 of us? Would a basketball team trade one of their players for 100 random people? What would Apple's next product look like if you replaced Steve Jobs with a committee of 100 random people? [6] These things don't scale linearly. Perhaps the CEO or the professional athlete has only ten times (whatever that means) the skill and determination of an ordinary person. But it makes all the difference that it's concentrated in one individual.

http://paulgraham.com/gap.html

This Paul Graham's essay is hands down the best argument for libertarianism I have ever read. Yet, even if there are 3 orders of magnitude differences in productivity among different people (and I doubt that), this doesn't entirely account for some 7 or so magnitudes of wealth and income disparities we see in the real world.

The problem is, in modern society, almost nobody deserves to be paid for the work they do (I don't know about you, but my life would be exactly the same without Steve Jobs and random American athletes). We have automated almost everything, and the biggest chunk of productivity is due to capital (and innovations of our ancestors). So the question, how is this capital controlled and distributed, becomes central. (That's why many people here so oppose intellectual property - essentially the privatization of public information, which is analogous to land enclosures during 18th century.)

So I think, if someone genuinely thinks that people should be paid based on value which they personally bring to society, he shoots himself to the foot. This value is probably too small for a living wage. That doesn't mean the improvements are not useful; it's just all the low hanging fruits have already been harvested.

even if there are 3 orders of magnitude differences in productivity among different people (and I doubt that)

That's not very hard to imagine, at all. Take a guy who flunked out of 8th grade due to his inability to read. Point him at a computer. Ask him to fix a problem in a Ruby on Rails application which you've benchmarked an intermediate engineer at requiring 1 day. If the problem is solved within 1,000 days, he's within 3 orders magnitude of that engineer's productivity.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah -- "nonlinear" isn't wrong here, but a more precise term would be "superlinear" (or "disproportionate" or "super-proportionate"). IOW, what drives the result is that one worker with N hours does more than m workers each with N/m hours.

If you (bizarrely) had sub-linear ("under-proportionate") returns to hours worked -- like logarithmic or square root function -- then it would make sense to have as many workers as possible and work as little as possible.

For a lot of knowledge work I think it's closer to a bell curve, in that if you work too few hours you'll be swamped by overhead, but if you work too many hours, your per-hour productivity drops due to lack of focus caused by insufficient rest or dropping motivation. I thought it was common knowledge that overworked developers create more bugs, so I wonder how a trader is able to work 65 hours a week without performance suffering in the long run. Or could you rotate traders in a one week on / one week off cycle?

It is 38 pages long so I have to ask. Would you mind telling me what her inferences were as to this non-linearity and gender ?

Women work less than men and nonlinearity exacerbates the effect this has on pay. The more jobs become commoditized, the more gender equality and flex time we will have.

Presumably it also depends on whether the work can be time-shifted, and how far in advance you can make changes and still be 'flexible'.

A developer who wants flexible hours - probably fine, as long as the work gets done. An actor who wants to sometimes not show up at the theatre, or a doctor with patients' appointments, or a sales person who has meetings with clients? They're probably going to want to keep those commitments once they've been made.

Yes. And for some jobs, working half time for personal reasons cuts your productivity by far more than half.

To illustrate: Assume your time is spent 25%/75% for coordination/execution activities, respectively. If you cut your hours in half, you may end up working 25%/25% coordination/execution, which results in a net output 1/3 of what it was.

Of course that's just for illustration. In reality, maybe the time being cut out is full of bogus meetings and waiting for replies to emails.

And interruptions. Never forget interruptions. If I have serious work to do I'll push it off until Sunday then work Sunday and take comp time during the week. Get into the flow and go go go with no interruptions.

Its hopeless to do something large and complicated on Wednesday when the mean time between interruptions is about 15 minutes.

If I didn't have a Mon-Fri wife and some kids, I'd probably work 4 10s, Saturday thru Tuesday.

4 10s also helps because to put it bluntly most of the distractions will not be in the office at the start and/or end of my day, so I can get much more done.

Needless to say this is a direct slap in the face of the "open plan office" religious belief so this can be a bit controversial.

A lot of this is cultural. If I'm at work on Wednesday and everyone knows it, its utterly forbidden for me culturally here as a major violation of taboo to do anything other that totally drop everything I'm doing no matter what and immediately react / respond, no matter if phone, email, or (when we still used it) IM/SMS. Doesn't matter if its important or trivial. If its known I will not be at work on Friday or even if I just call in sick on Wednesday, even if its the same request from the same person, culturally its perfectly OK to let it sit until I arrive at work next week, unless its a total emergency and then they call me at home. Aren't people just crazy? Its a CYA thing where if I'm here there is no higher priority than instantaneous response not matter what under any circumstances, but being outside of work hours or out sick or on vacation is a perfect magical mirror-like CYA shield.

No, if coordination is one of the job activities, then it is also part of your job output. If not, then why doing it at all?

Athletes get paid to win games, not practice. A certain amount of practice and study may be necessary for good teamwork, even though it's not the desired output on its own.

As long as someone pays by the hour, that billable time includes whatever activities are required for work.

When company pays me only for the output, then I would be free to work from whatever place during whatever hours as long as I produce the desired output.

It mostly makes things a lot harder on managers, in order to make things easier on employees.

So it doesn't happen. Like anything else, clearly a little ease for the powerful is worth massive inconvenience of the less powerful.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

just call his bluff.

There are lots of other jobs out there. You don't need to work for people who break deals.

We all have constraints in our jobs and potential jobs; things such as location constraints (house, family, etc), specialty, and level. In my field, at my level, and in my geographic area, there really aren't a lot of jobs. Even more unfortunate, the 100% remote jobs in my field don't pay even remotely what I'm earning now (they are literally topping out at 1/2 of what I'm currently making). Employers in my field that allow 100% remote do so because they see it as a source of cheap labor, not high-quality labor. I am always looking, but so far I haven't found any comparable jobs that meet my constraints. At this point, my best option is my own start-up, which I'm working toward as fast as I can given my other obligations.

I'm in the same situation...

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.

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.

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.

Over communication is key. If at all possible, you should do a trip to the US at least once every 3 to 6 months and spend some face to face time with the folks you work with. This will help with the relationships immensely.

I've been working remotely for 6 months now (for a team I used to work onsite with) and it's been fine so far, though "overcommunicating" is the direction I need to start moving in. However, I think being remote would have been immensely more difficult if I hadn't already worked with the people face to face.

"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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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