A manager once told me something that stuck with me. "20% of your paycheck is for doing work, 80% of your paycheck is for being available with context."
It often feels like the way companies/teams/tasks are structured causes employees to waste time or be a lot less productive than they could be. But it turns out that, for companies to scale beyond a certain size, the winning recipe is (depressingly):
* Fungible employees are more important than productive employees. It's incredibly risky to rely on the specialized abilities or knowledge of any single employee. Keep your bus factor high.
* It's OK if your employees are kept "idling" most of the time, as long as they're available when you actually need them. In most white collar industries, demand for labor is extremely bursty.
This is one reason companies are so reluctant to adopt irregular work schedules. It works fine for (small) companies that are OK with relying on competence/specialization and accepting small bus factors, but it breaks the strategies larger companies use to scale.
> It's incredibly risky to rely on the specialized abilities or knowledge of any single employee.
That's just true. And the risk goes both ways. There's an ideology in administration, let's call it "anti-Deming" since I guess it's the most descriptive, that believes that risks only go one way.
The funny thing is that for minimizing their bets on individual contributors that are plentyful enough to hedge each other they automatically go and maximize their bets on management, focusing on a single person's skill to solve anything.
That's the core message of Slack. Do not operate at peak efficiency, it will hurt you when you can least afford to be hurt.
Don't mistake effort for value. An employee who is grinding 24/7 isn't necessarily more productive than one who is doing only 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.
This isn't the dimension of productivity I'm talking about. I would be 10x more productive if I didn't have to do code review, didn't have to coordinate with other people when they wanted to use my systems (or vice versa), etc. However, I acknowledge that, in practice, this would actually be bad for my employer. It's better (for them) if I operate at 10% productivity and it won't be catastrophic if/when I leave.
It often feels like the way companies/teams/tasks are structured causes employees to waste time or be a lot less productive than they could be. But it turns out that, for companies to scale beyond a certain size, the winning recipe is (depressingly):
* Fungible employees are more important than productive employees. It's incredibly risky to rely on the specialized abilities or knowledge of any single employee. Keep your bus factor high. * It's OK if your employees are kept "idling" most of the time, as long as they're available when you actually need them. In most white collar industries, demand for labor is extremely bursty.
This is one reason companies are so reluctant to adopt irregular work schedules. It works fine for (small) companies that are OK with relying on competence/specialization and accepting small bus factors, but it breaks the strategies larger companies use to scale.