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Don't Let Your Boss Catch You Reading This
Stony Stevenson writes "iTnews is running a piece on the culture of cyberslacking in the business arena. Studies worldwide suggest employees spend about a fifth of their work shifts engaging in personal activities. Most of that 'wasted time' is, of course, spent online. From the article: 'A recent survey by online compensation firm Salary.com showed about six out of 10 employees in the United States acknowledged wasting time at work. About 34 percent listed personal Internet use as the leading time-wasting activity in the workplace. Employees said they did so because they were bored, worked too many hours, were underpaid or were unchallenged at work. Firms all over the world are concerned about potentially harmful effects of surfing they deem to be inappropriate may have on their company's image.'"
My employees are free to spend as much time as they want in the office surfing any site they want do: slashdot, porn, the anarchist's cookbook, whatever. It is useless to me to tell them what they can or can't do when they've met their personal goals for projects.
I also pay my employees differently than most consulting firms. We pay close to minimum wage, plus a very large bonus on each project. I've never had anyone quit, and I've never had anyone complain about their monthly paychecks. By offering a large portion of a project's profits, I know my employees won't waste my money (in salary), won't have to lie on their time sheets, and they'll do the best job they can do because they won't want to go and finish a punch list without pay or handle warranty work at a low rate. It is win-win, and a big reason why I'd prefer full 1099's than W2's if the IRS didn't prevent us from working that way.
When you're salaried or on wages, the employer has to focus a lot more on containing the employee and sending them in the proper direction, constantly. We have zero managers at my company, just consultants. It works fine. Our customers love us because we're 40% cheaper than others in the industry but we excel at handling their needs.
So this all lets me "not care" if an employee decides to spend all day long on the web, and only 1 hour on a project. If the customer is happy, and the work is good, and they do it quickly and correctly, they'll make a killing on the profit sharing, and they'll have a ton of free time to kill at the office if they want to be there. Our top employee works 2 days a week, I think, and earns a very respectable income. He can now spend 3 days at the office playing some MMOG, or go home and sleep. I could care less, the customers are happy.
No, we're not hiring.
When I first started at my office job during college, I was so used to being in the basic service industry that I didn't fit in right away. I was used to just taking a task, doing it, and immediately going back to the boss for the next thing. I didn't realize that the culture I was in was for slower progress on tasks and there wasn't a need to rush and be essentially managed by the boss every second of the day.
Just some things to think about. A lot of people don't realize that for a lot of American workers, and 8 hour day really means 8 hours.
This is more or less where my company stands on things...as long as you aren't looking at "innappropriate material" (porn and such) and you get all your work done by the end of the day, they don't care....you could spend 5 hours a day on the internet just screwing around, and as long as you finish everything assigned to you before the time you are supposed to leave, you won't ever be talked to about it.
Living With a Nerd
Management is usually exempt from these things.
Our old IT manager wanted his surfing taken out of the firewall logs so I happy obeyed.
Last year we get a call from our ISP that SPAM is coming from our site. I searched the logs to no avail, we found the PC doing the most surfing and my boss accused them of doing it on purpose. In the meantime, I kept looking at current packets going out....you've guessed it by now....the IT manager had the spam producer on his PC. He never noticed his anti-spyware/virus was out of date.
Lucky for me, I had in writing, his policy of exempting himself so it wasn't my problem.
Always get this weird stuff from your boss in writing because it will always come back to get you if you don't.
If management had to obey the rules of the lowly workers, the Internet would be free for all to use (as it is at my company now).
void r() { printf("recursion is "); r(); }
My company has an authenticating web proxy that users must use to access the internet, and they track personal web use in this way. We also have a VPN that can dial in to the corporate network from home, which is also authenticating but which traffic statistics, for obvious reasons, aren't monitored.
I've been so committed to slacking, as it were, that I committed significant time to creating a backwards web gateway for myself using an automated dial-in from home, which creates a remote ssh tunnel to my work computer that forwards certain port traffic back to a proxy server on my home network. So now at work I just set my web proxy to the localhost at the specified port and surf backwards through the VPN, only using our corporate web-proxy to do job-related surfing.
And all so I can slack. Never underestimate the laziness of a programmer.
I'm just guessing here, but...
When the network takes a dive, he's the one working nights and weekends to get it back up, while you're at home playing WoW or watching Firefly on DVD.
If he never puts in the time, then he is a slacker and I hope he gets canned. If he is like most other netadmins I know, he probably logs a crapload of time when everyone else is away, yet he's still expected to put in face time during the workday. In cases like that, he's probably judged on network availability and other metrics. When all is going well, he has slack time. When all is not going well, he could put in a couple hundred hours in a couple of weeks.
If I were your manager, I'd be wondering how you found time to look at your netadmin's time in the ticket logs if you are already so busy--just something to think about.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Agreed. The only time I can truly code for 8 hours straight is with a nice nap at around hour 4 and then back up and fresh at it. That's straight coding.
A lot of this job is research and "surfing" and "slacking" aren't the same thing. If I'm reading about a development platform that has potential, but has nothing to do with my current work, am I slacking? I don't think so. It's an investment in myself, and in turn my employer, for me to be a better developer across the board. You never know where you'll find a great idea that will change it all.
And then there is the recovery of a mind that's been stressed. Would a person take a break after a test? I would put forward that programming can be this intense sometimes. You haven't done anything physical but you feel spent when finished.
Very few programmers have longevity in the industry (beyond 10-15 years) because of the high stress level. Managers should be doing more to relieve this stress and keep their investments around. I never understood why computing throws away wisdom so easily, instead using green-horns who will work their brains fried just to impress the boss man. It may work in the near term, but long term it's detrimental.
That's why you need dual monitors, multiple desktops on each monitor, and your own proxy server
Damn right. I brought in a pc from home so I could have two computers at my desk. I've had two on my desk at home for years and it's pretty painful for me to work without having two these days. We are an all linux shop (except for workstations). Why we don't have linux workstations is beyond me. So I just had to bring in a linux desktop for the orfice. My pc has an openvpn connection to my home router which is also running squid. It's the perfect setup.Seriously, dual monitors allow people to work and play a lot better than a single-monitor setup. That's probably one reason why people are more productive with 2 monotirs - you can shove all the "personal stuff" to one side, and keep an ey on it without actually having to stop working on what you're doing.
I've been slacking at my job a *lot* lately. We even have this retarded timesheet system where you itemize every 15 minute block of your day to some project. If you don't book your 8 hours, it's deducted from your pay (even though we are all on salary), so naturally you book your time even if you aren't doing anything. Lately I've been doing about an hour of real work per day, and spending about 10 minutes filling out my timesheet. It really goes to show that no matter what system is in place, if someone wants to slack, they will slack, and get away with it. My brother is even a better slacker than I am. He got awards from his company and bonuses and everything. Mostly he played robotron and choplifter in mame. Oh, and xblast, and crack-attack are fun too.
The goal of computer science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it.
No, what he has is a communal office for independent consultants. They get paid by the job, but he runs the show - bringing in work and doling it out. It's a bigger-company with individual talents - good to keep clients happy (we have lots of support), but you get targeted experts. He makes money herding the cats. The pay thing is just to keep the government happy.
Bingo. There are two skills spheres I have always been concerned with in my entire business life (I started a successful BBS at the age of 13 with this same mindset):
1. Those who are risk takers and are able to penetrate a market or a project early. These folks are not the most responsible in the long term (that's me).
2. Those who are responsible and are able to carry projects through to completion. These folks are not risk takers (not me).
A successful business needs a combination of both. The consultants who work with me are usually type 2, in fact I have never met a type 1 individual who competes on my level. This isn't egotistic, it is just a fact since I've been looking for a replacement for years.
Herding the cats is exactly what I do. There are 1000 projects in our markets (primarily Midwest US, Southwest US, Poland and India) that I can't reach because I can't find a way to do them more efficiently. Yet when I know what my consultants CAN do, and what they HAVE done, and what they WANT to do, I can jump into a bid or a decision process and sell our talents and come in well under budget. Most of the type 2 people I know won't take the risk of NOT having work or the risk of collections or the risk of keeping customers as contracts in the future. I'm the king of expensive dinners, bid submittals, comparison summaries and collections. I even use factoring companies when necessary to keep the cash coming in, even at a 5-11% hit. Most consultants are good at doing their job and scheduling their responsibilities, where I am not, so we work very well together. If I could find another 2-3 guys like me (type 1), we could probably take on 600% more work, but it is difficult to assess someone's abilities in the grayer business actions that I perform versus what an actual consultant does.
What it all boils down to is that I don't see the point of earning 6-10x what my average consultant earns. In most years, I am the BOTTOM of the income chart at my own company, but I also like to keep capital within the company as much as possible. Happy employees = future stability. People don't quit if they feel like they are earning slightly more than they are worth, but they'll quit if they smell the potential of earning more elsewhere.