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Donnerstag, Mai 31, 2007
Gedanken zur Arbeit
Ich hab nun auch nen Delicous Account, und da sammelt sich ne Menge an; ich versuche dann für mich, die interessanten Dinge auch später aufzuarbeiten.
Paul Graham (mirror) hab ich vorher noch nicht gekannt, aber er ist wohl jemand wie Joel und er sagt ein paar bedenkenswerte Dinge zur Arbeitswelt, die mir zumindest gefühlt richtig vorkommen:
Business must learn that people work a lot harder on things they like. That’s not news, but the structure of business doesn’t exemplify this.
People don’t switch to open source because they want to hack the code. People switch to Firefox because its better. Microsoft can’t pay people enough to build something better than the people who are building it out of love.
Blogs and open source software are made by people working at home. The average office is a miserable place to get work done. What makes them done are the very qualities we equate with professionalism. The average office environment is to productivity what flames painted on the side of a car are to speed. Start-up environments are more like home work environments. This is probably the most productive the company is ever going to be.
The reasons companies have fixed hours is that they can’t measure productivity. The idea is that if you can’t make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun. If they’re not having fun, they must be working! If you could measure what people really did, you wouldn’t care when people worked.
The bigger problem is that the people pretending to work interrupt the people who are actually working. With so much time on their hands, they have to take up the slack with meetings. Meetings count for work, just like programming, but they’re so much easier.