That quote comes from an essay by Paul Graham on what large companies can learn from
open source and startups. I really enjoyed this essay on the way companies change
as they grow more professional and dignified, particularly the parts dealing with
Workspaces. I’ve always had a problem with the idea of Work Hours for people in a
professional field. If you enjoy what you do, then you don’t have set work hours.
Work hours are mainly for people you can’t trust to get things done, but another dysfunctional
aspect of large companies is that you have dead weight. In comparison, if you work
for yourself, you do not have a set schedule, you work as much as you have too to
get things done, and if they are done then you use your time however you see fit.
But as soon as you start working for someone, there becomes an automatic level of
distrust between the employer and the employee.
Excerpt: 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.
Excerpt: 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.
Excerpt: 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.”
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