'Goofing Off' To Get Ahead?

theodp writes "His old day job at Gawker entailed calling BS on tech's high-and-mighty, but Ryan Tate still found things to like about Silicon Valley. In The 20% Doctrine, Tate explores how tinkering, goofing off, and breaking the rules at work can drive success in business. If you're lucky, your boss may someday find Tate's book in his or her conference schwag bag and be inspired enough by the tales of skunkworks projects at both tech (Google, Flickr, pre-Scott Thompson Yahoo) and non-tech (Bronx Academy of Letters, Huffington Post, Thomas Keller Restaurant Group) organizations to officially condone some form of 20% time at your place of work. In the meantime, how do you manage to find time to goof off to get ahead?"

Comments

Not making money = wasting money

[GeneralTurgidson]

The business owners I've worked with don't have a lot of patience for people who aren't being productive on their dime. In today's business climate, in most professions goofing off means overstaffed. Our current MBAs don't realize the future benefits of personnel enrichment.

Re:Not making money = wasting money

[jhoegl]

Ain't that the truth.
But then there is a balance to be made as well. You cannot overwork your workers, burning them out either.
otherwise you lose good people.

Re:Not making money = wasting money

[Kneo24]

What if you were paying someone by a set rate to get a project done. Would you want to pay them for that 20% of the time that they would be using to do nothing towards your project? Personnel enrichment is fine as long as its focused. I have experience managing people. You can't trust everyone to do something that would ultimately benefit the company without some supervision.

Re:Not making money = wasting money

[Anonymous Coward]

more on medical mal practice news at 11

Re:Not making money = wasting money

[grcumb]

The business owners I've worked with don't have a lot of patience for people who aren't being productive on their dime. In today's business climate, in most professions goofing off means overstaffed. Our current MBAs don't realize the future benefits of personnel enrichment.

First off, this problem has existed since forever. It was only formalised into doctrine, though, with the time-and-motion studies of the early 20th Century, and the introduction of business schools in the US. That was the point where people could talk about productivity in pseudo-scientific terms, making it okay to forget all other considerations, and to trust 20-something MBAs instead of experienced managers who'd worked their way up through the ranks and who actually knew the business.

There has always been a minority of bosses and business owners who recognise the limitations of an straight-up efficiency --> profit approach. In my professional life, I've stuck with those who realised that the best way to invest in the company was to invest in me, and not with those to whom I was only a cog in the wheel.

In my current job, I negotiated a 'Google' day. It actually took some explaining to make people realise that this wasn't a day off. It was a day in which nobody got to tell me what to do. In other words, for 4 days of the week, I work to other people's priorities, but on the 5th day, I decide what the priority is. Some of the time, it's work on outside projects (last week, it was an editorial for the local newspaper), but most of the time, it's work stuff that wouldn't otherwise get enough time from me - website refinements, code cleanup, automation scripts and other things that add value to the company, but not in a directly linear way.

Re:Not making money = wasting money

[Anonymous Coward]

You also can't expect the company to keep moving forward past the current projects if you're not willing to consistently take risks in letting employees try out something that may not work. That's what R&D is: investing in things that may not pay off, but are also the only way to advance the long-term prospects of the company using in-house resources. Unfortunately, American companies have redefined the research part of R&D to mean "go read up on what you need to do to get this project done."

Re:Not making money = wasting money

[ATMAvatar]

With technical workers, the management's job is to run interference against external distractions and help remove roadblocks. Your team should be largely self-organizing and self-motivating, such that you don't have to watch over them. Deviation from this is generally a failure in hiring, a failure in management, or both.

Re:Not making money = wasting money

[JaredOfEuropa]

I think the whole point is that it doesn't have to be particularly focused. The 20% might be spent on something innovative, on personal study of no direct benefit to the company, or it might be spent on catching up on some background tasks, beneficial to the company even though it doesn't contribute directly to the bottom line or move the little bars in some Gantt chart along. The time should be spent on something more or less related to the business, but the employee gets to decide how that time is spent, without supervision. Even if nothing of value gets produced by that employee in that one day a week, it can still make him a better motivated, smarter, more effective and less burnt-out employee.

It wouldn't work for everyone but I have seen it work for a lot more people than you'd think. At the end of the day you might find the benefits to the employees for whom it does work far outweigh the loss in productivity for those few who will really do nothing of any value whatsoever. If you find yourself at that stage, for gods sake do not try and optimize the scheme by introducing some supervision, detailed reporting, or a list of "acceptable" was to spend that time. Instead of killing the whole scheme that way, accept the loss in view of the larger gains.

Re:Not making money = wasting money

[Auroch]

Would you want to pay them for that 20% of the time that they would be using to do nothing towards your project?

Because productivity goes up when your workers feel appreciated, valued and cared for. Otherwise, why bother giving them sick days when they're sick? They're not being paid to be sick. Most companies have a wellness program (or employee assistance program) to prevent workers from becoming less productive DUE to all those other non-related-to-the-project issues.

Because no one works for a solid 8 hours on a high-level project without having peaks and valleys in their productivity. The 20% rule would help those peaks last longer when on-task. No one, no matter what you believe, works at their best for the entire day, every day, day after day. Sure, you pay them for work - do you measure quality or quantity? Don't you want your employees to be more productive? And if it cost you an hour of pay each day to make the other 7 extremely productive, don't you think that's a good trade-off?

Re:Not making money = wasting money

[wisnoskij]

Cheaper to burn out the old ones can get some new one for less then keep giving raises to your current employees.

Re:Not making money = wasting money

[rwa2]

I don't think having some self-directed time to do your regular job is really what the article was talking about. That's more "I'm the one in the middle of it and see what needs fixing better than you do"

Hey, even that I'd really appreciate. I'm always being pulled over by some management or other saying "hey, we've got deliverables you need to be working on" while I'm working on some process automation that would knock off huge chunks of time-intensive error-prone manual labor from our workflow.

But I guess whatever helps them complain about being understaffed helps them grow their org :-P

Re:Not making money = wasting money

[jhoegl]

That is ignorant thinking.
What if the new people you bring in fuck up more than the cost of the old?
This is more than likely and more apt to happen, also your security prevention has just taken a dump as well as projects, known issues, preventative... everything
So... enjoy your pat on the back while it happens, you just fucked the company.

Re:Not making money = wasting money

[Belial6]

Those are the words of incompetent management. Don't feel bad. Middle management in America is massively loaded with incompetent managers. Of course, incompetent middle management is ultimately upper managements fault.

Re:Not making money = wasting money

[JWSmythe]

    I'm pretty sure his statement was sarcasm.

    Unfortunately, I have seen businesses who believe it to be true. They don't live by the ideas of equal pay for the same position, and appropriately adjusted yearly increases. They'll keep an employee at their starting pay, and give token increases if the employee isn't completely burnt out but threatens to move on.

    I watched at one place, where a 5 year employee was still making his starting salary (approx $40k/yr), although he had increased responsibility significantly. New hires for the same role were being brought in much higher (approx $75k/yr). There was a contractual obligation to not discuss salaries, although it did happen.

    They worked him til he burnt out, then terminated him on fictional grounds. My state allows termination of an employee for anything, or as joked, you can be fired because the boss doesn't like your shoes.

    The new hires in that situation won't last long. I didn't keep up with them, so I don't know if they're still working with that company. I know their 40 hour week became a minimum 60 hours, and on a whim senior management would demand people work "until it's done", even if it resulted in people sleepily typing the wrong things and making bigger mistakes. Like, "oops, I meant fsck, not mkfs".

    Most likely, the new hires at $75k will be laid off for another fictional reason, when they find some others willing to do the job for less money.

Re:Not making money = wasting money

[countach74]

Like what's already been said, hiring the right people is key. Besides that, you assume that everyone needs to be told what to do and monitored constantly--and perhaps more importantly, you assume that micromanaging these people will actually solve this "problem."

Perhaps if management didn't assume the majority of their employees are completely irresponsible and child-like in nature, things would be better.

On the other hand, if one took a reasonable approach, the majority of management positions would make little or no sense and thus their existence largely invalidated. Let's face it, in most organizations, management is nothing more than glorified paper pushers, anyways... but they make a lot more money.

Re:Not making money = wasting money

[oatworm]

Short answer: Supervisors, which, contrary to popular belief, is not management.

Long answer: If you're operating within the same time span as your employees, meaning your deadlines are their deadlines and vice-versa, you're not management or, worse yet, you're not managing.

A supervisor has the job you're describing. They usually are a former veteran in the field, someone with sufficient domain knowledge in the industry to know when an employee is doing their job, when an employee that's capable of doing the job is sluffing off, or when an employee is simply incapable of doing the job regardless of how much you incentivize them. A supervisor isn't formally trained on how to supervise - chances are, they've been supervised long enough where they've seen what works from their predecessors, what doesn't, and guide their approach accordingly. In military terms, they'd be an NCO (Corporal, Sergeant, etc.). How much latitude they have, and how they motivate or monitor the employees, is defined by management, depending on business needs and corporate culture.

Management, meanwhile, is a formally defined skill with lots and lots of science behind it. Management's job is to provide differing levels of strategic direction for the company, depending on time span and objectives. The purpose of management is to make sure that each assignment provided to staff is part of a larger goal dictated by business needs and that each assignment is broken down and compartmentalized into appropriate-sized units, as dictated by the capabilities of each staff member or group. So, for example, a software architect might be assigned a multi-year software design project, while a starting coder would receive something fairly simple, like "Implement function X within the parameters Y specified here," with a deadline (implicit or explicit) of at most a week. To accomplish this, systems must be created, maintained, and monitored to ensure that there is consistent, positive output from the start of a project (or set of projects) to the end of one. When management does its job well, predictable, sensible output is the result (see recent iterations of Ubuntu and Windows, at least post-Vista). When management does its job poorly, the systems break down (see Longhorn, Apple in the '90s before Jobs reclaimed the throne, pretty much anything GM has done in the past 40 years). In military terms, management would be your officers (Lieutenants to Generals, depending on branch, of course).

Now, getting to what you were discussing, yes, it's true that Slashdot has more than its fair share of self-entitled 2%ers (or people that wish they were 2%ers and want to be treated accordingly) that think they should be given a six-figure paycheck, a well stocked lab, and a fridge full of caffeine so they can change the world, and view any failure to accommodate that vision as "poor management". In reality, that might be the start of an effective system of production, or it might not - depends on who's working for you and what you're doing. However, as GM learned the hard way in the '60s and '70s (and Toyota learned by studying Deming, who knew better as far back as the '30s), even "unskilled" labor benefits from frequent job reassignments, variety in work, and occasional moments to stop and think about the bigger picture. This doesn't mean letting the employees turn the company into a re-enactment of the "Lord of the Flies" (or whatever you want to call the excesses of the now-legendary Dot Com bubble 'companies'), but it does mean treating them as stakeholders that should be interested in the success of the company and whose opinions should be respected and rewarded when they lead to improvement and growth.

From a management (or even supervisory) standpoint, this means that, if your system calls on lots of yelling, screaming, and berating to get employees to do something they don't want to do, your system is going to only return just enough to avoid further yelling, screaming, and

Re:Not making money = wasting money

[Hyppy]

I have a few too many business degrees and miscellaneous related credentials, so I have some clue what I'm talking about.

The GP is right on this one. Technical and other professional workers are generally to be left to their own devices. Micromanagement is only to be used on those with little experience and job knowledge, or specific cases of a problem employee. This has been thoroughly studied and well-known in the (educated) business community for decades.

Re:Not making money = wasting money

[HereIAmJH]

What if you were paying someone by a set rate to get a project done. Would you want to pay them for that 20% of the time that they would be using to do nothing towards your project?

If you are paying a set rate, then technically you aren't paying for ANYTHING beyond the delivery of your project. You aren't paying for time, you are paying for performance. It doesn't matter if they spend 10 hours a week or 100 hours a week on your project if they meet the deadline.

Re:Not making money = wasting money

[Compaqt]

Hiring the right people? As in the top 2%, right?

Well, what about the other 98%?

That's what the guy is talking about. It should be quite obvious that not all companies can hire "the right people" (meaning the top 2%).

And it's not necessarily "assuming your workers are childlike". Much of the time, workers are crying out for some management interaction where they can find out how a given feature is supposed to be implemented as opposed to just winging it.

Re:Not making money = wasting money

[Stiletto]

Wow, that was... actually a great reply. I agree that now that you mention it, I'm conflating managers and supervisors. My only response to that oversight would be that in many companies, those two roles are played by the same person or groups of people.

The point I was trying to make was not the difference between those roles, but the fact that SOMEBODY has to herd the cats and make sure they're all running in the right direction. And these cats are NOT all going to be from the top 2%. Too many Slashdotters imagine this fantasy office, with a bunch of really smart, self-motivated techies all working diligently with a shared mind to produce an awesome product. Nobody is underpaid. Nobody is confused about the product's requirements. Nobody is overworked and can't finish their assigned tasks this week. Everybody has equity or a huge stake in the company's success. They all commute to work every morning on a unicorn too, because these companies are extremely rare and small.

In the real world, you've got a bunch of workers who can barely get their assigned tasks done. They are sloppy. They don't understand the product they're making. Many are hard working, but aren't naturally talented, and make mistakes. They have kids who are sick, or have stress outside of work. In other words, they are not idealized genius super-workers. Products don't simply leap from their fingertips onto store shelves, flawless, perfect for the market, selling itself. You need managers (and supervisors, thanks) to make sure they are productive and are achieving the company's goals.

For 99% of companies out there, you can't just punt and say, "Well, just hire the very very best!!"

Goofing off

[girlintraining]

In the meantime, how do you manage to find time to goof off to get ahead?"

By always looking busy, never telling the manager what I'm working on until it's done, and reporting I'm capable of doing less work than I actually am. Then, when I exceed expectations, my manager loves me, and when I deliver shiny new toys, the rest of the department loves me.

That said, in many other countries and corporate environments, tinkering would be encouraged... but in most jobs here in the good ol'US of A... you're supposed to be just smart enough to do your job, and not so smart you realize your manager's a moron, your company is unethical, and your coworkers make more than you.

Re:Goofing off

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah pretty much this. In my research job, everyone keeps a research 'bank'. You need to control how much you report out to management. Some weeks you get a ton of shit done and you can hold some back. However, you really really need to write it down somewhere. It sucks doing something then forgetting about your effort and nobody ever knows.

Re:Goofing off

[bickerdyke]

By always looking busy, never telling the manager what I'm working on until it's done, and reporting I'm capable of doing less work than I actually am. Then, when I exceed expectations, my manager loves me, and when I deliver shiny new toys, the rest of the department loves me.

Don't we all do this shtick?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9SVhg6ZENw

snicker snort

[drinkypoo]

"His old day job at Gawker entailed calling BS on tech's high-and-mighty,

His old day job at Gawker entailed bullshit sensationalist commentary on other people's blog posts. Because that's what gawker does.

20% Time: The New THINK?

[theodp]

Back in the day, Thomas Watson made the case for THINK-ing: "And we must study through reading, listening, discussing, observing and thinking. We must not neglect any one of those ways of study. The trouble with most of us is that we fall down on the latter -- thinking -- because it's hard work for people to think, And, as Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler said recently, 'all of the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think.'"

Why companies don't do this

[bigsexyjoe]

... and probably why google doesn't have this policy anymore...

If an employee has a great idea not directly related to their work, then they probably won't want to give that idea to their employer. And why should they? Your company makes it's money by underpaying you for your work and ideas. Your company realizes this so they don't give you free time to work on your own ideas. In fact, most employers don't even encourage you to learn things that can't be quickly applied directly to your work. My employer doesn't really want me to bring any new technologies into the codebase.

I would love to work for an employer who had that policy, but it's a little too kumbaya to be realistic. We are employed in a capitalist system. And capitalism is the war of all against all.

Re:Why companies don't do this

[magamiako1]

There are a lot of intricate reasons as to why corporate policies do not carry over to acquired companies. The decision could have very well been the guy in charge at the acquired company.

Re:Why companies don't do this

[eulernet]

I attended a conference about how Google engineers work.

You are right about the 20%: it's not encouraged anymore, but it seems that you can ask for it.

Google manages people with Excel, and managers rate them every year (trying to fire 5% of their employees, aka the underperformers), it's a very tough environment.

I realized that the 20% was used to buy social peace, because Google's culture is internally very competitive, and not about goofing off at all !
Given that the 20% are not pushed anymore, the turn-over will probably increase (and it will not be limited to the underperformers, but the brilliant minds who will prefer a less competitive environment).

I believe that innovation stopped when they closed Google Labs.
This sent a message to their developers: if you have a good idea, it's better to create your own startup and sell it to Google.
And I'm sure that's what happens now !

Re:Why companies don't do this

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously?

I'll admit I don't work in Mountain View, and I'm not ignorant enough to assume that my experience in one Google office speaks for the entire company, but this nonsense about Google's work environment, apparently deduced from a fucking conference (did I read that right?), has got to stop.

First, a few facts. Yes, "Googlers" bitch about things-- but that's to be expected in any work environment. No, it isn't perfect and unicorns don't spring up when ever you're stressed out, but all things considered it is an amazing place to work. Aside from the well documented perks are some other rarely discussed things that make the org special. It is a remarkably flat organization (I work outside of the US, but I can, and have, openly contradicted/disagreed with the head of our country, with no ill effect). With extremely rare exception the senior management are all, at the very least, extremely competent. The aforementioned head of the country has his flaws, but the man knows the company, knows the products, has an amazing attention to detail and not even his worst enemy would claim he isn't damn good at what he does.

If I need a tool to get a job done-- Google just fucking gives it to me. I wanted a new laptop, I had one in 5 minutes. I wanted a reliable way to get internet while going out for a client meeting, had it in 2 minutes. No one logged this crap-- in fact, the person who gave it to me asked a few weeks later if I could return it at some point. My wife has to compile a business case, call the Prime Minister, and check with the CEO of Lenovo before her org will think of giving her a laptop (which will almost invariably be a piece of shit), I returned mine because I wanted a better GPU (took a week to be delivered).

Yes it is a group of high achievers (what do you expect?), and yes it can be difficult to get ahead/be noticed in such an environment, but progress in your career is not a given, it depends on your ability and while Google isn't perfect at this, it is as close as I've seen to a "meritocracy".

Again, I'm not here to shill for the company. It isn't perfect, and they've not mastered a lot of these things (promotion cycles are a bit wonky, politics certainly do exist, etc), but the levels of it are SO marginal compared to anywhere else I've worked, and I genuinely feel that the company cares about my well being. In sum, it's a fantastic place to work-- and your conference is full of shit.

One last thing. This is the first org I've worked at that values engineering above all else. Engineers have perks that I don't have (though I can jump through hoops to get them), and in general, are held up as the pinnacle of the company. I've worked for other tech firms where the engineers were treated like absolute garbage, and no one cared at all about what it is they did/do. It's refreshing, even for a non-engineer, to see an emphasis on the people who build the products. If you think that's a terrible environment, well, do tell me where you work and I'll consider applying.

Re:this is bullshit

[TENTH SHOW JAM]

Move closer to work. If they are paying you an hourly rate for the first 8 hours, work 8 hours. If they want more, inform them that an overtime payment is traditional. Social lives are overrated, but handy for making connections to get a leg up. Your address book is more vauable than your CV.

I too work for the military industrial complex and have all those alpha types in my address books. If I see them doing dumb, they get an email pointing it out politely. (It's just possible they might not have thought of all the consequences.)

Guess what. I am in exactly the same boat, and choose to control my life. The workplace actually prefer me to only work 8 hours as I work all 8 of them and come back ready to do it again instead of thinking how tired I am. They don't mind me goofing off occasionally because the last time I did, I saved the section $3M per annum.

As for tuna and ramen? Take time out and have a real lunch. The time away from your desk is refreshing. The vitamins and minerals will do your body good.

QUIT WHINGEING AND TAKE CONTROL

Re:Goofing off to get ahead?

[girlintraining]

Well if that's all it takes, I have a former coworker who's about to be elected President of the United States

Your former coworker believes god lives in a nearby solar system, wears magical underwear, that the Garden of Eden was in Missouri, and that when he dies he's going to become a god?

Re:MBA's aren't against R&D ...

[Kneo24]

That's easily countered with them learning a language that would benefit the company.

I'd love to be a consultant selling this

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

Oh the many ways I know how to slack. I knew it'd come in handy some day, or I wouldn't have trained it so much.

Re:MBA's aren't against R&D ...

[Dodgy G33za]

Progress and tracking?

Yep, you certainly sound like a recent MBA grad...

Good people do this anyway

[spaceyhackerlady]

Creative people are curious, and anybody who is any good has toys to play with and side projects on the go. A good manager will encourage a bit of goofing off...sorry, personal research. Good people do so anyway, and if it's on company time, the company may be able to make some money out of it.

Not every side project will be a winner, but if you don't try, you will never know. One of mine got a security guard fired. Another became a key test tool. Another looked like a good way for the company to make lots of money until our marketing person screwed it up. :-(

...laura

Not necessarily

[cultiv8]

I work for a small-ish 100-person "web consulting" firm. About 6 months ago we opened an office in Philadelphia that I manage and I thought it would be funnier than hell to steal the owner's Bob's Big Boy statue (which lived in the break room) and take it up to the new office. So late one night, after a company-wide happy hour and a few drinks, I grabbed one of the janitors and had him help me carry it to my car. I left notes behind (eg. "After 10 years of living in this break room, I decided to explore the world and sow my wild oats. Goodbye company"), posted pictures in the break room of Bob in random places (eg. LOVE statue, Rocky statue, Italian market, etc), and generally teased the company's owner about the loss of Bob. Soon enough the owner found out it was our office, and while he was upset at first, the camaraderie it brought to the organization as a whole more than outweighed any concerns he had.

The statue still sits in the Philly office, and is still quite the conversation topic. :)

Its the people silly!

[node159]

The problem I see with this as a manager of a reasonably sized team of what should be highly qualified people is that this only really works with the right people, the kind of self motivated, highly competent people who would work for Google and the like. If you try to apply this to your standard run of the mill software developer (as I can attest from experience), the cost/benefit ratio is very low and you end up with mostly goofing off rather than anything useful. From experience it is much more effective to try and empower the team, allow them to give input into what they think is important and enable them to work on the things that have clear or potential benefit, rather than writing a blank check, which with, if you don't have Google type people, tends to just get squandered.

Love to hear other opinions on this, as I do see the potential benefit, just don't see it happening with your average Joe developer.

Re: Tell me what to do

[TaoPhoenix]

Sometimes there's a fine line there, where you can't boldly tell management "you can't tell me what to do" because that risks emotional tones later. I've made a little progress by dividing work into "types of priorities" which I add a splash a bit of humor on by color coding. Example: Today you are given This Emergency To Get Out The Door. Code Yellow, right? But then This Bigger Emergency shows up and now That Needs To Get Out The Door. Code Red. Okay, so far so good. But now it gets silly. This Even Bigger Catastrophe Needs To Be Dealt With Right Now.

Really?! We already have a Yellow and a Red going. So I called it Code Purple, with nods to old Defense projects, and Royalty.

It's like the math branch dealing with infinities. Laymen get disoriented fast when you have "unlimited natural numbers", which are unlimited, then the "bigger set of unlimited real numbers", then the even bigger set of whatever it is when you allow the imaginary ones in.

So getting back, after you solve the Code Purple and the Code Red, you sometimes have to remind managers that under all the chaos and rubble the Code Yellow is there. And - wait for it - *after the Code Yellow you need time to clean up the rubble left over from the Code Purple and the Code Red.*

It's that cleanup that everyone misses. Made a custom 1-off of some document? Port the general changes back to the master template and re-post the template. Made a management change in policy? Propagate the results of that change across all the typical documents that use it. Update the company database/shared resource with the new info. Tag the 5 obsolete copies of something as Do Not Use.

It's not that I'm lazy...

[operagost]

Peter Gibbons: The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.
Bob Porter: Don't... don't care?
Peter Gibbons: It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation? And here's something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now.
Bob Slydell: I beg your pardon?
Peter Gibbons: Eight bosses.
Bob Slydell: Eight?
Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.