Managing for Creativity

Dream on, sucker! by Seumas · 2005-07-17 09:56 · Score: 5, Insightful

Then along came "global resourcing" and the concept of "bribing" knowledge workers at all became unnecessary and said knowledge workers learned to be grateful that they still had a position at all.

Seriously, in a world where any and every position has, is or will eventually be outsourced, the entire concept of "bribing" an employee is anachronistic. Maybe if you have the name recognition of a Shawn Fanning and someone wants your name to bootstrap their venture capital process, but not if you're Joe-Average-Buying-Four-Dollar-Milk guy.

Today's "crude financial incentive" is "not being downsized".

And to continue harping on the ridiculousness of such an article in an outsourcing world, I have to ask - when you're outsourcing for one tenth the salary, do you really expect any of the outsourced people you're managing to be "creative"? I've worked with a number of them and however they may be in their personal life, when it comes to the job they're paid for, they are anything BUT creative.

This guy is one of those idealistic dreamers who has the misguided notion that you can employee people, treat them well, encourage them to be creative and non-comformist and original and not ditch them for the lowest bidder and somehow run a successful company in the long term. Learn a thing or two from today's top public-CEOs and start laying people off. Be a man! Send out some reduction notices! Cut some salaries! Freeze hiring and raises across the board! Freeze available training and education! Put the fear of outsourcing into your subordinates or you're going to end up on the garbage heap. In fact, it is downright un-patriotic to treat his employees like he is doing and promote those communist labor-friendly, creativity-inspiring warm-fuzzy propaganda ideas.

Completely off topic - what a name...Jim Goodnight! I can see the Abbot and Costello sketch for it, now...

Re:Dream on, sucker! by John+Seminal · 2005-07-17 10:19 · Score: 2, Informative

Seriously, in a world where any and every position has, is or will eventually be outsourced, the entire concept of "bribing" an employee is anachronistic.
Actually, if all employees were given stock options, and not just 1 share or some token, I bet there would be less outsourcing, or if there was, it would be less painful.

If I had 4000 shares of Walmart stock, and I worked for them as a programmer, I would feel much more incentive to work harder, because the better my company does, the better the stock does, and the more I make.

And if the day came where I could make more in the stock, if I was outsourced, than having the stock price fall and keeping the job, I would probably say outsource away. I would still have something to show for the sucess of the company.

Plus, if the workers are shareholders in a company, they have a say in how the company is managed. They can stop large lay offs, like what HP did today. Imagine if every employee of GM was a shareholder, and the total workforce had 30% of the stock. They could have stopped the 25,000 lay offs, they could have stopped factories from moving to mexico.

This article is asking how to have a productive employee. But all the mindfuck tricks a corporation can do, as soon as the employee believes they are expendible, and they have no security, no amount of any tricks can make a person work.

I'll give one example. There was a company I worked for 10 years ago. They went out of their way to provide very good free lunches in the cafeteria. They figured, people who ate at work would not go out, maybe they would work through lunch in their cubicles, and that a good nutritious lunch will inspire more afternoon productivity than an unhealthy lunch from mcdonalds. They were right. People grabbed lunch from the cafeteria and went back to the cubicles and worked during their lunch time.

But then the company laid off a few people.

People still ate the cafeteria food, but this time stopped working during lunch and started talking to each other. Everyone was worried, would they be laid off next.

Then the company said they did not have enough for a free lunch, but would offer it at a low price- $5. This is about the same time they said they were changing the health insurance, and that employees would have to contribute more. People said fuck it, and started going out. Now, you had people comming back from lunch 5-10 minutes late, and management was pissed off. Finding parking is a bitch.

Everything deteriorated.

One day, my manager came into my cublicle and introduced me to a consultant. He told me not to worry, my job was secure, but the consultant needed to learn what I was doing. 2 weeks later I got laid off.

And the only thing I showed the consultant is where the cafeteria is. I left him there as I went out to lunch with my other co-workers. I hope my ex-managers felt good paying the consultant $300 an hour to learn where the cafe was.

--
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Re:Dream on, sucker! by Seumas · 2005-07-17 10:24 · Score: 3, Insightful

Yeah, but employees know that options are worthless until they are fully vested. And if your dipshit of a CEO fuckwaggled the stock price down 95% sot hat what was a good million in options when you were hired was now worth less than the one-ply you wipe your ass on in the company bathroom, why would you even care about options?

Plus, while options from WalMart might not be so bad, you'd be insane to take options as any manner of compensation in the tech industry these days.
Re:Dream on, sucker! by asr_man · 2005-07-17 12:14 · Score: 2, Interesting

Put the fear ... into your subordinates or you're going to end up on the garbage heap.

If the kind of organization you want to run is one where the employees do what they do out of fear, you're welcome to it.

The rest of us will just do our best work, enjoy it, and placidly take the next step with our carreers when management starts serving that flavor of Kool-Aid.
Re:Dream on, sucker! by cduffy · 2005-07-17 12:26 · Score: 2, Interesting

Not all options take time to vest. I've got retention options, which take time to vest and go away 30 days after my employment terminates -- but then I've got compensation options, which are vested the moment I get them and stick around even if I leave the company.

And yes, I'm one of those people who's doing the insane thing and taking options in lieu of compensation at a tech company. There's a pretty decent chance I'll come out of it well, though -- and if not, the existant-though-small paycheck was enough to see me through the local economy's rough patch, and give me time to find contacts so that my next job search will be shorter than my last one.

Back towards topic, briefly -- the options are motivating, certainly: At their current rate I have enough to pay off more than half my mortgage, though selling the shares while we're privately held is difficult. If we do well... well, that'll be good, very good. The other part of my motivation, though, is ego: Having a chance to be in an organization where I, personally, can and do make a difference is what makes the difference to me (yaaay startups!) -- and this is the point where management's actions (and the respect or lack thereof implicit in said actions) comes into play. If we don't have money for perks, I understand -- it's a startup, after all, and we don't even have money for equipment or new personnel or proper paychecks for the folks currently on staff -- but its people (and the product we've developed) are what the company does have, and that needs to be understood.

At this point, then, it's not really about the immediate income, or extras, or such: It's about the pontential upside later, and the fun and respect inherent in the job now. And that works for me. (That said, we do have a company-stocked break room -- though two buildings ago, I and the other employees bought food out of our personal funds. Now, when something along those lines is done it's departmental-level -- we've grown to the point where instead of being one tribe we're split into groups, but there's still a reasonable level of comeraderie).

Oh, and that "dipshit CEO" issue you mention is the other nice thing about startups: We're small enough that we know where the CEO lives -- the folks who were around a month or so longer than me remember when the company was based in his house. We know where his office is (and his door's open), we know his wife, we know his kids, we go to his parties. We aren't nameless, faceless employees to him -- and if he were to screw us over, he'd hear about it.
Re:Dream on, sucker! by hax4bux · 2005-07-17 14:46 · Score: 2, Insightful

blah, blah, blah. My life is great, don't you wish you were me. blah, blah, blah.

My name is "hax4bux" and I've been contracting for 13 years. I want the money and I want it now. I hope you get rich, but I bet you don't.

I've had this conversation over multiple contracts, how I should share the vision and work for less because "we're all gonna be zillionaires". Golly, such a generous offer. I'll stick to invoicing you each week, and you don't have to worry about sharing your precious stock pool.

Oh, ya. I've contracted to a few startups (the ones w/funding) and that "dipshit CEO" is routinely a sociopath who doesn't give two hoots about you as long as he gets his way. If you do well, he will be moving and if you do poorly, he might be moving as well. But whatever gives you comfort.

Article not really about stock options by robla · 2005-07-17 09:58 · Score: 4, Informative

The article is really a reasonably interesting puff piece for SAS. While SAS seems like a very cool company (I'm guessing Google modeled themselves partly after SAS), the article stresses the reasons why you should offer lots of intrinsic perks (such as a ton of onsite services, such as medical staff, massages, dry cleaning, haircuts, and auto detailing), and doesn't talk much at all about avoiding extrinsic perks. So, if you are hoping to find the juicy bits about why stock options aren't very effective, well, don't look here.

Incidently, if you saw the 60 Minutes story about SAS, you can probably save yourself the time of reading this article. There doesn't appear to be much that wasn't covered on 60 Minutes. However, if you haven't heard of SAS, it is a very interesting summary. Perhaps this is a more accurate teaser, quoted straight from the article:

Based in Cary, North Carolina, SAS has been in the top 20 of Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For list every year it's been published. The employee turnover rate hovers between 3% and 5%, compared with the industry average of nearly 20%. The governments and global corporations that rely on SAS's sophisticated business-intelligence software are overwhelmingly satisfied: The subscription renewal rate is an astounding 98%.

Rob

Re:Article not really about stock options by Seumas · 2005-07-17 10:07 · Score: 4, Insightful

I'm constantly amazed at the crappy "perks" corporations pay for that their employees couldn't care less about. For isntance, my company offers a concierge service. This service arranges for other companies and businesses to come in and try to sell the employees shit that they don't want. And they arrange for employees to have free access to very important online resources, like an article about writing a proper "thank you" note.

I have a better idea. Have someone who gets my lunch so I don't have to leave the office for an hour and can have less stress dealing with traffic and lines and waiters. How often do I need to get my car fucking detailed for christ's sake? Instead, how about having someone who can help me find a quality babysitter or refer me to a great place to take the girl out for a romantic dinner and maybe throw in a corporate discount to boot. How about handling my personal mail and courier packages for me so I can just drop them off at a kiosk on my way into the office? How about offering career guidance or more education options instead of just paying lipservice to how important those things are and then putting a freeze on them to save money?

I have never used any of the corporate services (mental health experts? medical phone number? car detailing? dry cleaning? thank-you-letter tutorial? discount on granola bars from a local vending machine supplier at a special sell-shit-to-our-capitive-employees-day?) and I don't know anyone who has. How about stop stuffing your offering full of shit just to say you offer a lot and start ovffering fewer, MORE VALUABLE services that actually make a difference.

And you know, sometimes it's the small things. It's amazing what your workforce can do when they feel important and feel like they matter rather than constantly under the thumb of layoffs. Morale is important. Something as cheap as giving your employees free bagels and cream cheese once a week or donuts once or twice a week will make them feel like someone gives a fuck and like their contributions are valued. Otherwise they're likely to feel like they're just an unwanted burden and as soon as they can arrange to have you replaced by a cheaper drone, you're gone. Even if that's true, get the proper work you can out of the employee by installing loyalty... by treating them with little perks that make their work life enjoyable. After all, they probably will be spending at least 35% of their entire lifetime in your office...
Re:Article not really about stock options by techmuse · 2005-07-17 11:33 · Score: 3, Insightful

The reason that stock options don't work is that if you underpay someone, they will be unhappy. But if you pay someone enough, then increasing their pay has diminishing returns. Example. I pay a CEO $400,000 per year. They can afford just about anything they want. Now I pay them $5 million per year. Do they work harder or more intelligently? Nope. Same thing applies to other workers.

On the other hand, if you make your workers *happy*, they will work for *less* money. See university profs for an example. So many people want to be a prof that universities can afford to pay less - but only because lots of people WANT those jobs.

Happiness motivates. Too much money doesn't do much. Too little money demotivates.
Re:Article not really about stock options by bladesjester · 2005-07-17 12:01 · Score: 2, Interesting

I could point you to a certain company in Ohio that I interviewed at if you want. The work seemed interesting, they had daycare (and were getting certified to have kindergarten onsite), free cafeteria, free drinks, and some other things (dry cleaning, barber, massage).

However, the interview process left me completely unimpressed with the *people* and the way that they acted.

They contacted me for an interview (I'd never heard of them before that) and gave me a day to come up. I got there a few minutes early, but was then kept waiting for half an hour. I was then given the tour with some other people (who it turns out were all there for co-op positions, and that I was the only one they called up for a real position. This, according to one of the people I ran into randomly in the hallway was normal for there).

After that, they took us into a room in order to take a few programming tests and have lunch. While taking the tests, they had random developers come in and talk about the company while we were trying to work. In the midst of all of this, they came in and took you out to each of 3 other segments (HR interview, computer skills test -don't ask me why, and an interview with one of the development managers). When they came to take you, you were expected to immediately stop what you were doing and go with them. Add to this the fact that one of them "got sidetracked" with some things so I was left waiting for an hour in order to finish the interviews and was well past the time that they said the process would last.

To top it all off, they were in the middle of construction in order to expand the building, so there were jackhammers and all sorts of other things being used.

The coolest people that I met there were the HR person who contacted me initially (she was a fellow alum, rather supportive, and extremely nice. We even chatted via email after everything was over) and the one person who brought in the lunch, though she was nice for moderately selfish reasons *smirk*

The thing that really got me was that their VP that spoke harped on how his people "stayed until the job was done" and could sometimes be seen in the same clothes that they wore the day before if they were alerted to a bug. This translated to me that "we encourage our employees to work insane, unhealthy hours in order to keep up our bottom line" instead of the "we have dedicated people" that he wanted to make it sound like.

This suspicion was basically confirmed by a few of the people I talked to outside of the ones that were sent to see us. They all mentioned how busy they were, the hours they worked, and that they were always looking for "qualified developers".

Aparently they didn't think I was a qualified developer. May have been because I mentioned that I have a healthy work-life balance preference and that the consistant 70-80 hour weeks weren't accptable when I had to do them in college either (lots of work and a very full class load) but I did them out of necessity. All of this out of a company that claims to advocate such a balance. Go figure.

If nothing else, I did meet a couple of cool people that day. Shame I'm three hours away, though. The one who was interested for reasons other than being a fellow alum was rather cute. =]

--
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.

Creativity may come from within by autopr0n · 2005-07-17 10:00 · Score: 2, Interesting

But creative types would much rather work for a company that tried to 'bribe' them with expensive stock options then simply paid them a sallary and kept all the profits from their work for themselves.

--
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.

Re:Creativity may come from within by FlameboyC11 · 2005-07-17 11:18 · Score: 3, Insightful

Programming isn't creative? Writing code is all about thinking outside the box, how can you solve x problem?
Re:Creativity may come from within by Seumas · 2005-07-17 11:37 · Score: 2, Insightful

It's no more creative than being a caprenter, mechanic or any other number of standard professions. Sure, they all have to employ creative thinking (or, rather, problem solving) - but it's still within very rigid contstructs. And even when it comes to programming, most of the decisions are made by a small group and the grunt work is carried out by the rest of the crew.

Creative problem solving is not the same as being creative. Almost everyone in the tech profession is paid to have creative problem solving skills. Very few are employed to be creative.
Re:Creativity may come from within by mabinogi · 2005-07-17 11:52 · Score: 2, Informative

> And even when it comes to programming, most of the decisions are made by a small group and the grunt work is carried out by the rest of the crew.
Only if you work for a faceless mega corporation...

For the rest of us in medium sized organizations (1000 or so employees) - and particularly in the case of a non software company - there _is_ no rest of the crew.
The few programming staff they have cover pretty much all the bases, and are therefore frequently responsible for all parts of the design and implementation.

--
Advanced users are users too!

Most important part of the article by John+Seminal · 2005-07-17 10:04 · Score: 4, Interesting

Creativity can't be shoehorned between the hours of nine and five. The Muses don't always show up on time for appointments.

How true this is. I know, for myself, if you want me to work at 9am, you will not get the same productivity as if you let me work at 9pm. I was a night owl in highschool, a night owl in college, and I still am one today.

I have had some jobs, where I did nothing more than veg out at 9am, waiting for the coffee to kick in. It was a waste of time. The company paid me for those hours of morning work, and got very little back in return.

But just after lunch, I would have much more energy. The brain would start working. I was very productive. And what sucked about it was, by the time 4:30pm came, quitting time, I was deep in thought and work, and I did not want to leave. I was pumping out great results. If I was working on a database, it would be around this time that everything was comming together in my head, that I was able to play with lots of ideas at one time, to visualize what I was doing. Those hours from noon to 4:30pm flew by too fast! Contrast to the hours of 9am, which every second felt like an hour.

If only the managment would have asked me, when is work the best for you. I would have told them, let me start at noon and stay late. But they did not want to pay overtime, they had fucked up rules about who could stay on company property after a certain hour, so everyone had to go home.

--

Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."

Re:Most productive hours of the day can differ by Seumas · 2005-07-17 10:17 · Score: 2, Insightful

No-brainer jobs don't pay the bills.

If you don't pay the bills, you don't have the time or resources to pursue those more interesting things in your "productive" hours.

Creativity needs no management by Andrew+Tanenbaum · 2005-07-17 10:21 · Score: 3, Insightful

Management sucks the creativity right out of you

A better read: Hare brained, tortoise minded by EmbeddedJanitor · 2005-07-17 10:43 · Score: 3, Interesting

Creativity does come from within, but most corporations build an environment that is not condusive to creativity/innovation.

Task-oriented activities are suited to a typical corporate management model. You can monitor their progress set effective deadlines, describe them on papaer and outsource them.

Creativity (including intuative thinking) does not respond well to any of these. Intuition happens on its own schedule and attemptng to drive it harder kills it. It has been often demonstrated that people under stress/pressure are less likely to find innovative solutions. Threats, direct (fix it this week or you're fired) or implied (downsizing/outsourcing) work against innovation.

I know that from my own experience I very rarely make breakthroughs while doing what management would consider "work". I have figured out many things while doing something else: having a crap or a shower (no, not simultaneously), fishing, shooting hoops... perhaps they should pay me to do more of these.

I don't know much about SAS, but from what I understand they are a privately owned orgainsation that really does take care of their employees. This must be a far lower-stress environment that a corp with a quarter-by-quarter driven approach that treats their employees as expenses/resources.

--
Engineering is the art of compromise.

Re:Well, can you at least mod me up? by Seumas · 2005-07-17 10:45 · Score: 2, Funny

If the wife just drops her clothes, all she's getting is a sick look on my face.

I dunno. It usually does it for me when your wife does that.

A place for managers to start... by OSXCPA · 2005-07-17 11:00 · Score: 5, Insightful

Ok, you are my manager. Here's where you can start...
1. Judge me by my work, not be how many hours I put in. You wrote the job description - if I can do the work you need in X hours, why should I hang around my cubicle for X+n hours, especially when I use 'extra' time to try and figure out better ways to do our job, which you ignore?
2. Substance trumps form. This applies to not only work, but policy enforcement. Telling me that we use XX product, and because XX cost $YY and took KK consultants ZZ years to implement, it can't suck simply tells me the management team didn't know what kind of pit they were digging. My advice, to get out of the hole - stop digging first!
3. I'll dress the way you want me to and conduct myself by your standards of 'professionalism', as long as you don't treat me like a three-year-old until I give you a reason. Then, just fire me - don't fsck with me.
4. Don't fire people for exchanging their own information - i.e., if we want to talk about salary at lunch, that is our business, period, especially if we aren't on company property.
5. Recognize the utter stupidity of office politics, and no, that jerk from Finance will not become less of a jerk if I learn to golf so I can make nice-nice with him. In fact, it will get you sued and me fired when I put a five-iron through his thorax.
6. Keep the HR group away from me. I do NOT WANT another flier about the suicide hotline, nor do I care about our new marketing effort in Outer Namibia, and as far as Frank Jones, the new VP of Operations, New York, is concerned, re: promotion, well, good for him - I'll never meet him, and I don't think he wants to hear about my promotion either. Nor do I want to know about the class offered for "all professionals" held in San Francisco, that I can't go to because I am either not high up enough, or I don't sell for a living. You expect my work to be relevant to what we do. I expect the same sense of appropriateness and relevance as you do.
7. I realize we have a fiduciary duty to our clients. If you are really worried about my taking advantage of proprietary information, by all means, call the feds. In the meantime, my wife's 401K is NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS - we have no say in how it is invested, the trustee handles that. You should know that, being a large international bank.
8. Before you give me any static about how overworked any/everyone is, and how short on resources we are, how about firing that useless sack of cr@p you complain about so loudly at after-hours work functions? I know he's been here 15 years, and it would make upper management wonder "how did this bag of cr@p last so long?" when you have to justify canning the id10t, but trust me, it will be worth it.
9. Offering benefits and then implementing workplace policies that make it impossible to use them is the same as not offering them, except a whole lot more annoying. ("Gee, we would pay for your night-school classes, but we'll need you to work overtime for the next few months, then as needed after that - you're a professional, so I know you'll get the job done. What? No, we don't pay overtime or comp time, are you kidding?") Odd, how this sudden overtime need hit after I applied for tuition reimbursement...
10. Mandatory fun isn't.
Please note: The above have been aggregated from several different employers, so if you happen to know who I work for, and are a member of management, read #11...
11. Respect my privacy outside of work. Unless I slander you, flaming me at work over what you think I may have implied is unprofessional - yes, that word can apply to management too!

A little bit more about creativity by roffe · 2005-07-17 11:10 · Score: 4, Insightful

Robert Epstein (last to receive a Ph.D. from B.F. Skinner) lists four strategies for generating creative output. These are

Capturing: The main thing that distinguishes "creative" people from the rest of us is that the creative ones have learned ways to pay attention to and then to preserve some of the new ideas that occur to them. They have capturing skills. In other words, get a PDA and learn how to use it.
Challenging One way to accelerate the flow of new ideas is by challenging yourself--that is, by putting yourself in difficult situations in which you're likely to fail to some extent. A challenging situation is like an "extinction" procedure in the behavioral laboratory. We extinguish behavior when we withdraw the reinforcers that usually maintain that behavior. In challenging situations, a great deal of behavior goes unreinforced; it just doesn't work.
BroadeningIf you want to enhance your own creativity, take courses in subjects you know nothing about. Once a year, at least, take a course at a local college in the last thing you'd ever want to know about. Land's own breakthrough invention came about because of training he had in crystallography, chemistry, and other fields. The invention of Velcro, the modern theory of electron spin, and countless other advances were made possible because their creators had training in diverse fields. Steve Jobs recently made a point of how his training in caligraphy contributed to the intitial success of the Macintosh.
Surrounding Finally, you can enhance your creativity by surrounding yourself with diverse stimuli--and, even more important, by changing those stimuli regularly. Diverse and changing stimuli promote creativity because, like resurgence, they get multiple behaviors competing with each other. If you put a Mickey Mouse hat and pliers on your desk in the morning, your thinking will move in odd directions during the day. Call these items distractions, if you like; they are great reservoirs of creativity

Sometimes, though, I wonder about the opposite--how can I learn to quit being "creatve" and just get the damn job done? It's not that I ever get any original brilliant ideas anyway--all really great ideas I have had, I've found out were conceived by somebody else before me.

Anyway, here goes:

Capturing creativity

--
-- Rolf Lindgren, cand.psychol

Re:A little bit more about creativity by OSXCPA · 2005-07-17 11:19 · Score: 4, Insightful

A possible answer - if you are a singularly creative, producing person, hire a 'do-er' or team thereof who can take what you set up and explain and grind it out. Assuming you have the means to do that... Otherwise, try setting self-imposed limits, e.g., "I am not allowed to do (X very nice, imaginitive thing) until I implement (Y grindingly dull job done).

Works for me, but YMMV.

BTW - you may repeat great ides of the past, but hey - your timing might be better than the earlier implementation was. Think about all the stories of Steve Jobs seeing GUI, email and OO programming at Xerox PARC - he has even said, he didn't originate them, he implemented them and got them out for use when the time was right. (OK, many of the concepts were implemented by others along the way, but you get the point)

Cheers!
Re:A little bit more about creativity by roffe · 2005-07-17 11:34 · Score: 2, Interesting

Thanks for the advice!

As you hint at, the story about Jobs being originally inspred by Xerox is in fact a myth. Jef Raskin, then at Apple, had worked with the ideas both as a professor and as an employee at Apple. The purpose of the legendary visit at Xerox was to see what Raskin had talked about in action. You can read all about it at Raskin's Site

--
-- Rolf Lindgren, cand.psychol
Re:A little bit more about creativity by OSXCPA · 2005-07-17 11:45 · Score: 2, Insightful

I stand corrected. I had seen an interview with Jobs where he talked about the visit and the "6 things he saw there" that he took, and he went to pains to say he only understood 2-3 of them at the time. I don't recall him mentioning Raskin, but that was probably my memory gone bad. Thanks for the reply and correction - and the Raskin link. Good reading!

Key point, almost missed by OSXCPA · 2005-07-17 11:32 · Score: 2, Interesting

When I RTFA, I noticed something that struck home - the author discusses the difference between a company being held 'accountable' by customers vs. shareholders. I've frequently seen good managers make decisions they knew were bad, because the stock market is fundamentally concerned with the lowest common denominator - it doesn't matter if you can make more money for the year by taking an action that will cause earnings to miss expectations this quarter, but the markets will punish you. Your customers, however, only care about how good your product is - you have to make the best decisions you can at every step, or your product will fail. Look at large software firms who cling depserately to a shipping deadline... and ship buggy product. Before you mod this offtopic - creatives are about doing a good job. There is a conflict doing such a job in a public vs. private firm. The article points this up, and I emphasize it. Go redundant!

Flexitime rules by Anonymous+Brave+Guy · 2005-07-17 11:37 · Score: 4, Interesting

When I came back to my current job, I accepted the position on the condition that I could shift my schedule several hours forward from the usual "9-5". This not only makes me more productive when I am in the office, but let's me shave a couple of hours off my commute because I avoid rush hour. Win-Win for everybody.

It's interesting that one of the most highly regarded "perks" in every survey of geek staff I've seen for years has been flexible working hours.

At my current employer, we have quite a clever policy: the rule is you have to be in the office for at least 5 hours between 9am and 6pm every day, but other than that, you can work your 37.5 as you see fit, with common sense applying when it comes to organising meetings and the like. What this means is that you're guaranteed to be in the office for at least an hour of overlap with any of your colleagues in a given day, so you never miss someone completely. However, you can effectively take a half-day off without using leave, or go in before the morning rush and then leave mid-afternoon to pick the kids up from school, etc.

I'd say most of the guys' typical hours are somewhere between 9:30-5:30 and 10:30-6:30. We also have quite a few habitual early starters and a few habitual come-in-at-lunchtime guys. There are even some guys who change quite radically from week to week or even day to day, such as the guy next to me whose fiancee works shifts at a hospital, or one of the girls who finishes early-late-early-late to alternative picking her son up from school with her husband.

This is a great arrangement, and it was interesting that when we were bought out by a US corp a few months back, this was one of the Big Things everyone was adamant we would keep in the new contract. (We collectively made them rewrite it so we could.) Of all the other "perks" brought in by the corp, none has anything like the value of this one, and I'm not sure I actually use any of the others.

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Re:Flexitime rules by TheRaven64 · 2005-07-17 23:11 · Score: 2, Interesting

I worked at QinetiQ for a little while, and they had the policy that everyone had to be in between 12 and 2 (I think - something like that) if they were not claiming the day off (which you could do a small number of times a month if you had worked overtime, or if you wanted to use up some holiday time). This had the advantage that there was a time you could guarantee someone would be around if you needed to see them.
Apart from that, you could turn up whenever you wanted as long as you kept track of how many hours you spent on each project for billing purposes - easy for me, since I was only working on a single project.

It was quite a fun place to work, although they still have a civil service attitude to paperwork, so it's not the kind of place where I would like to be management-track.

I would say that flexible working hours are far more important in a global economy. I now do a lot of work with/for people in the US who are 5-8 time zones away. I can get an email with something to do in the morning and have it done by the time they wake up, but if I were working 9-5 then there would only be a very small window in which we could have real-time communication.

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9-5 Creativity by Regnard · 2005-07-17 12:18 · Score: 2, Insightful

Creativity can't be shoehorned between the hours of nine and five. The Muses don't always show up on time for appointments.

I can't agree with this more. In my job where I actually use both sides of my brain, creativity just doesn't have a schedule. The best thing I could do is set myself up for a "creative spark" -- surfing the web for things I like, or look at what the latest, although surfing can only do so much.

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Off topic... by xENoLocO · 2005-07-17 12:21 · Score: 4, Funny

... but damn, I would kill for his name at any party I've ever been to.

Her: Hi, I'm Stacy...

Me: Hi Stacy, I'm Mr. Good Night

**slap**

Ok, maybe not.... but the thought of it is cool.

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"The need to build the internet comes from something inside us, something programmed... something we can't resist."

Another idea by Anonymous Coward · 2005-07-17 15:39 · Score: 2, Insightful

Here's another tip: Stop trying to own your creative people. The most creative people are the ones who will be working for themselves in five years, and thus aren't willing to sign non-compete agreements, overly-broad NDAs, and contracts that say "we own everything you create whether you're being paid for it or not".

A Clean Code base! by moultano · 2005-07-17 17:00 · Score: 5, Insightful

If you are developing software in any capacity, personally I think nothing helps creativity more than a clean code base. When the biggest thing you associate with implementing a new interesting feature is the crap you have to go through to get it interacting with everything else, you aren't very likely to come up with good ideas and act on them often.

Get a hobby by cscalfani · 2005-07-18 02:31 · Score: 2

Don't waste time looking for creativity at work. If you have it great, but expecting it and being frustrated because it's not there is just a waste of time and energy. Companies don't care about your creative needs. They barely care about your work environment needs.

After about 20 years in this business, I finally got a hobby. One that fulfils my creative needs. Now I control it on my own terms, one hundred percent.

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