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Comment by seanstickle | Hacker News Reader

I favor something more like a Results-Only Work Environment (http://gorowe.com/pages/rowe-standards), where the focus is on the results and not on how many hours are worked.

Too many companies (even startups) are conservatives and traditionalists in the sense of thinking that work needs to be done within certain hours and at a certain place, even when those are not drivers of the results.

I'm hired to deliver certain results, not to work a number of hours. If it takes me 10 hours or 40 hours to deliver those results, that's up to me, as long as the deadlines are hit and the deliverables are high-quality. And there's no reason to be in an office, unless the office is instrumental to achieving those results.

The focus on how many hours people should work is a fetish that reinforces a still-dominant 20th century office culture.

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I agree with you personally, but to play the devil's advocate a little:

>If it takes me 10 hours or 40 hours to deliver those results, that's up to me, as long as the deadlines are hit and the deliverables are high-quality.

If you are able to consistently deliver the required results in only 10 hours of "work", it's clear that any organization will slowly ramp up the required results more and more until you are working 40 hours a week.

How would you agree on results that are "enough for the company" that won't grow endlessly when they see you're only working 10 hours a week?

This is a cultural change that the company has to go through.

They're paying me for the results. Not for the hours.

Thinking that they'll "ramp up the required results more and more until you are working 40 hours a week" means that you're still thinking that you're paying for hours.

Still, it's the responsibility of all employees to improve the process that they work in, just as part of the company's continuous improvement. Which means that more/better results will be delivered over time anyways.

How do you agree on results that are "enough for the company" when you hire a consultant (assuming they're an intelligent consultant and don't charge by the hour).

The queues of things to do is always extremely long.

There are 1000 tickets in your JIRA queue. They then ask you, what can you do in the 2 week (or 1 week) sprint?

What do you say? Is it the 10 hour or 40 hour timeframe? That happens all the time in development, and people do a few things. They underestimate a lot or they write code that is 90%, where when bad things happen, it's ugly to clean up.

So the results are what you say you can do in your week of work. And of course, they will put the pressure of "but that's easy." Yada yada.

As a results oriented place, some companies pack in what you think is 80 in your 40 hour work week (a lot of companies will try to do this). So what happens then? You switch jobs?

As for improving the process, most engineers don't know exactly how. They speculate and guess, hoping to hit it right. It's really up to the people driving it to affect the company culture. Doing it as an individual within an organization is quite difficult.

That's what I've experienced at certain companies anyways, generally with management with less experience, tbh.

Let's be honest. Both a Results-Only Work Environment or a "9-5 in the office" environment try to pack as much into an employee's schedule as possible. That's not unique to ROWE.

Some of the answers to your questions are: well, what do you do now, and how can that be made better? ROWE isn't magic. It's just a recognition that pretending that you're paying for hours spent in an office is nonsense, and that we should talk about the work itself rather than the things that don't have to do with the work.

The old equation (fetishistically held to, even in the face of its absurdity) of TIME + PRESENCE = RESULTS typically takes the focus of the conversation, and we end up in conversations about who can work remotely, and how many hours people should put in, etc. Instead of talking about the stuff we're actually paid to deliver.

As for not knowing how to improve processes, I don't mean that we should just say to them "hey, go improve things." It's a crucial management responsibility to make sure that people know how to do this sort of thing, to teach them how, and to provide ongoing coaching in doing it.

> They're paying me for the results. Not for the hours.

True. But since "results" aren't exactly quantifiable, how can they get steady value for their money?

Is result A equal to result B or result Q? If results M, N, and O are all equal, how many M/N/O results does it take to earn one week's worth of paycheck?

What if they decide that they're paying too much for M/N/O results, and want at least 11 of those per week instead of the current 4?

What if you wait an entire week for the dumb assholes in the other department to deliver the specifications? Do you not get paid that week?

You're paid by the hour not because hours are the best way to measure accomplishments, but because it's easy to measure hours and difficult to measure anything else.

I feel for you. Apparently you don't have a boss who can define what they want from you. This is not uncommon, and we're struggling with that ourselves. We've all spent so many years with the belief that putting in hours is the work, that we don't really know what we've hired people to actually do.

All your questions are the same questions you have in an TIME + PRESENCE = RESULTS job. What if they decide they want 11 instead of the current 4. What if you wait an entire week for the other department? These are all still problems. Are you excusing yourself from dealing with them because you say "hey, 40 hours in and I'm done, bye!"?

It's not difficult to measure results of work that you hire people to do. It's hard to decide to start doing that though.

I'm all for the 'results based' work environment but I think measuring results of work that you hire people to do IS quite hard.

A great example is refactoring. Say you hired a dev and he delivered a product that worked but is written terribly (already a question there, how do you gauge that in terms of 'results'?). Now you hire a second dev to clean it up and make it maintainable. How do you evaluate when he has delivered the 'results'?

edit: I think the closest thing to a true results based workplace would be an early stage startup. Everyone is invested in the product and striving towards creating it, not just putting in hours. In those cases people usually end up working WAY more than 40 hours a week.

> A great example is refactoring. Say you hired a dev and he delivered a product that worked but is written terribly (already a question there, how do you gauge that in terms of 'results'?). Now you hire a second dev to clean it up and make it maintainable. How do you evaluate when he has delivered the 'results'?

Easy. Lines of code.

The first developer did an awesome jobs, many lines of code were written. The second one is a lousy hack, he earned about $50 (not $50k).

This is ridiculous of course, but it does show how even bad measurements are preferred over non-measurement.

this sort of give/learn/take averaged over multiple employees could redefine how much can be done in a week, or what the average rate per hour is, but in the end the time would be spent more efficiently. I believe that having a set number of hours will grow the workload to meet those hours, and that's inefficient in most cases. No studies to back this up, but I've worked in a lot of places, and the percentage of people that are actually trying to get done as much as they can [in a working day] is very low.

Forcing someone to punch a clock is definitely misguided. But work hours are a useful proxy for effort spent, provided you have good estimation of your pace. And being in the office not only puts you in a “work” frame of mind, but also promotes serendipitous sharing with your coworkers—swapping productivity tips, planning features, explaining systems.

So even in a quite results-oriented workplace, with almost total freedom over my hours, I still often choose to go into the office for about six hours a day.

Work hours are certainly a good proxy for effort spent. But companies don't (or shouldn't) pay for effort, they pay for results.

Take 2 people: one a talented auto mechanic, one is me (not mechanically talented). Give us both the task of changing all 4 tires on a car.

I take 8 hours. The mechanic takes 1. (Made up numbers, but you get the idea).

8 hours reflect my effort, sure. But you want the tires changed. If the mechanic finishes in 1 hour, great. That's what you're paying for — changed tires. Not hours.

Sure, but I would be equally happy to pay either of you by the hour if you set your rates according to your respective skill levels, because the price would come out the same. Also there is an implicit expectation of reasonable competence.

For example, hourly pay is quite reasonable in jobs that just need a competent body to fill a shift—i.e., where the only “result” you want is “the shift gets filled”. When I was working in a kitchen, I put in the same four-hour shift every time I went into work—prep, serve, clean. If I worked n shifts a week, I got kn dollars that week, fair and square.

I would also point out Richard D. Wolff's arguments about forming cooperatives instead of corporations.

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