Essays

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Maybe it's not a coincidence. Maybe some aspects of professionalism are actually a net lose.

To me the most demoralizing aspect of the traditional office is that you're supposed to be there at certain times. There are usually a few people in a company who really have to, but the reason most employees work fixed hours is that the company can't measure their productivity.

The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can't make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun. If employees have to be in the building a certain number of hours a day, and are forbidden to do non-work things while there, then they must be working. In theory. In practice they spend a lot of their time in a no-man's land, where they're neither working nor having fun.

If you could measure how much work people did, many companies wouldn't need any fixed workday. You could just say: this is what you have to do. Do it whenever you like, wherever you like. If your work requires you to talk to other people in the company, then you may need to be here a certain amount. Otherwise we don't care.

That may seem utopian, but it's what we told people who came to work for our company. There were no fixed office hours. I never showed up before 11 in the morning. But we weren't saying this to be benevolent. We were saying: if you work here we expect you to get a lot done. Don't try to fool us just by being here a lot.

The problem with the facetime model is not just that it's demoralizing, but that the people pretending to work interrupt the ones actually working. I'm convinced the facetime model is the main reason large organizations have so many meetings. Per capita, large organizations accomplish very little. And yet all those people have to be on site at least eight hours a day. When so much time goes in one end and so little achievement comes out the other, something has to give. And meetings are the main mechanism for taking up the slack.

For one year I worked at a regular nine to five job, and I remember well the strange, cozy feeling that comes over one during meetings. I was very aware, because of the novelty, that I was being paid for programming. It seemed just amazing, as if there was a machine on my desk that spat out a dollar bill every two minutes no matter what I did. Even while I was in the bathroom! But because the imaginary machine was always running, I felt I always ought to be working. And so meetings felt wonderfully relaxing. They counted as work, just like programming, but they were so much easier. All you had to do was sit and look attentive.

Meetings are like an opiate with a network effect. So is email, on a smaller scale. And in addition to the direct cost in time, there's the cost in fragmentation-- breaking people's day up into bits too small to be useful.

You can see how dependent you've become on something by removing it suddenly. So for big companies I propose the following experiment. Set aside one day where meetings are forbidden-- where everyone has to sit at their desk all day and work without interruption on things they can do without talking to anyone else. Some amount of communication is necessary in most jobs, but I'm sure many employees could find eight hours worth of stuff they could do by themselves. You could call it "Work Day."

The other problem with pretend work is that it often looks better than real work. When I'm writing or hacking I spend as much time just thinking as I do actually typing. Half the time I'm sitting drinking a cup of tea, or walking around the neighborhood. This is a critical phase-- this is where ideas come from-- and yet I'd feel guilty doing this in most offices, with everyone else looking busy.

It's hard to see how bad some practice is till you have something to compare it to. And that's one reason open source, and even blogging in some cases, are so important. They show us what real work looks like.

We're funding eight new startups at the moment. A friend asked what they were doing for office space, and seemed surprised when I said we expected them to work out of whatever apartments they found to live in. But we didn't propose that to save money. We did it because we want their software to be good. Working in crappy informal spaces is one of the things startups do right without realizing it. As soon as you get into an office, work and life start to drift apart.

That is one of the key tenets of professionalism. Work and life are supposed to be separate. But that part, I'm convinced, is a mistake.


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