I’ve been working form home for quite some time now, in the beginning I lived alone and I worked from home a few days a week. Working the balance in an office with real people. I found I was far more productive when I was in an home than in an office, mostly let’s face it, because people had to pick up the phone to interrupt me.

Recently things have changed, my partner had a little baby girl and we’ve moved. The house is bigger and I now have a room which I use almost exclusively as my office, which is a good thing because previously I’ve been working from a series of one bedroom flats and that just wouldn’t work now.

Headphones and a door that closes

I have both and think they’re infinitely important. My daughter is very young but between myself and Becca there is the policy that if the door is closed I’m busy. Unless someone is bleeding to death I don’t want to know- we treat the closed door much like we’d treat it if I was working in an office half an hours commute away, if it wouldn’t be important enough to call me away from work in the car, then it’s not important enough to call me away from work here.

Sometimes, even with the door closed there can be a fair bit of noise and things to distract me, I have a good pair of headphones which acoustically seal me off from the rest of the world.

Working Hours

I try to keep my working hours 9-5, just as I would with any job. Mostly because that’s when everyone else is working and if I need to talk to someone, or if they need to talk to me they’re most likely to try. I’m pretty flexible about it though and unless I need to deliver something I’ll sometimes take a few hours off during the day to do the dishes, go do the recycling (everyone else goes on the weekend, but it’s almost always quiet weekday mornings) or just spend some time with my daughter to give my partner a break. I make the time up evenings and weekends, but for the most part you’ll find me adhering to the same schedule as the rest of the world - I just get to stay in bed while the rest of you commute.

Works for me

Working from home works well for me, it takes discipline but to be honest it’s not as hard as some people would like to make you think. Also for those bosses out there that don’t trust staff to work from home - if you can’t trust them not to bunk off at home, you probably can’t trust them not to bunk off in the office either.

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I’ve seen a lot of posts recently about how to go about hiring hackers. Well not just recently, it seems to be common thing people ask, because it’s one of the hardest things to do. You’re using an interview, or even a series of interviews to try your best to determine if the person is going to be up to the task.

The problem is of course, you’re really just determining if the person interviews well, or if they’re the graduates that they’ve got good marks. The real problem is of course neither of the two matter because neither of them have much if any bearing on how good a coder a candidate is going to be.

The problem is exacerbated in a startup because unlike some of the more successful bigger players you really can’t afford to take people on a trial basis for 6 months. What can a startup do?

There are a lot of universities that run placement programs for their students, programs allowing them to get real industry work experience. I’ve also worked in companies that made it a policy to hire students for internships then offer the best jobs once they’ve graduated. It was a great way to get talent.

What if you need to hire to fill a more senior role, or you’re not hiring at the right time of year? Student internships usually start once at the same time every year so unless you’re looking for fill a role then, you’re shit out of luck.

I’ve toyed with the idea of a ‘hacker camp’, getting all the candidates together, and paying them to work as consultants on a project - then hiring the best into permanent positions. All the candidates need to be free to work on the project, and a lot of people would be pretty scared to leave a job to take part and some jobs would prevent them from working on the project, so running it over a weekend might be a good idea, but it limits the scope of your project. You’d also still need to have interviews, to make sure you were getting candidates who were really interested in the job, and also to weed out any candidates you knew were totally unsuitable.

I think it’s important that a ‘hacker camp’ should produce something at the end of the weekend and you should get as much of your existing staff involved as possible. To make the cost easier to swallow you could even go so far as making the deliverable a new feature or part of your existing product but that’s not as important as actually delivering something, because that will be the bottom line when it comes to integrating them into your team.

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After reading this post what Jamie said hit me as well:

This is when I realized how trained I was in the processes at my former workplaces. This email would have been delayed until it was perfect[...] After fixing this there would be another thing and then another thing. A 2-day project would drag on for a week of redesign, approval, and development[...] It’s one thing to read Getting Real [...] It’s another thing to actually practice the principles. [...] That part is trickier than you think.

I don’t think it’s just Jamie and I don’t think it’s just his former workplaces. We’re all trained to make excuses not to launch, it’s endemic in the culture of most organisations. We endlessly pay lip service to the principals of release early and release often, agreeing in principal
with the principals - but put very little of them into practice.

A manager’s role is to facilitate an organisation’s march towards better - all too often it’s a weak manager that needs constant input on projects and at the root it’s fear of inadequacy on their part that builds a culture of ass covering. It’s obvious that at 37 Signals they don’t suffer from being crippled organisationally when executive decisions need to be made but executives are absent. Their staff are trusted to make decisions and they’re empowered to release better features.

When your last change was ready to deploy, when it was better than what was there, did you release it? If not, how long did it take you to get from that point to actually releasing it and how many people had to give final approval?

Why not empower your staff with a simple test - Is it better than what we have? No flow charts, no organisational hierarchy; just a simple question.

Coders, desginers even your support staff actually want to take pride in their work, the want to do a good job. As a manager you’re meant to make that easier, but what if you don’t want to - how would you go about breaking someone’s will and what would a completely demoralised staff member look like, want to find out?

Start by micromanaging them

Assume from the start that they’re incompetent, they won’t get it right and make absolutely sure they’re told every task they need to do. Make sure you tell your staff in minute detail how you want it to look, how big you want it, what colour and how they should discuss it with customers - because let’s face it, the fuckers aren’t capable of figuring it out themselves.

Free will is alright in religion, but not in this workplace!

Make sure you’re ever vigilant and make sure you’re giving each member of staff a list of things they need to do. Of course there are things that will crop up and they’ll need to address those as well, but don’t allow it to impact your lists - you are the boss and your will, will be done.

The key to true micromanagement lies in the process, or more to the point in creating a process. When something slips through, there is a failure or anything breaks down it’s because of a procedural failure, the only solution is to fix the procedure, with a new one. Creating a new process allows you to have complete control without requiring you to interact on a case by case basis; though that is highly recommended, because as we made clear earlier - the fuckers just aren’t capable on their own.

For the advanced, micromanaging further can be a worthwhile challenge; take a task you’ve assigned and make sure you’re staff are aware of each step that you need them to complete. Basically micromanage your micromanaging! Tell them what to do and how you want them to do it, tell them in detail and make sure they know you’re doing this because it wasn’t done right last time and we just can’t afford any more mistakes.

Documentation is key

We all know that documentation is important, but only a gifted few are able to take it to the next level. If you’re in charge of anyone for the love of god, cover your ass. As in the wild if you’re the alpha male (or female) you need to defend that position, show any weakness and someone will certainly try to unseat you - make them document their worth, then use it against them!

As you micromanage processes and create new ones you’re handed a golden opportunity for documentation, new spreadsheets, new flow charts and new forms to fill in!

Make it pointless

It’s not meant to be about something that is easy for the staff - this is about you. Make sure the documentation is unweildly at the very lest - shooting for downright maddeningly pointless is of course the ultimate goal if you want to truly demoralise people.

Timesheets are a great starting place. But they should never list time on task - they lying bastards always just add them up to make a full week work, even when you know they’re bunking off. Make they list the time they started, then the time they finished a task and make them do it in a separate document for each task. Another great place is a call logs and error reports - make them document it all!

Make it feel like they’re justifying themselves

Make sure that when someone is filling out documentation, especially things like timesheets, they’re aware the true intention of the activity is to justify themselves. Make sure you say, and repeat, things “They’re kept on file for management review, internal accounting and cost/benefit analysis”. That’ll keep ‘em on their toes.

Make them justify themselves

Use the documentation in meetings - they knew you were going to even if you said you wouldn’t. Haul them out during a performance interview and you’ll have everything you need to keep costs down.

Advanced documentation

• Make sure it’s on paper, as we can’t trust these computers
• Even better, mandate they fill in a spreadsheet, print it and then file it
• Even better, mandate a more detailed format, update a communal spreadsheet (stored on a shared drive and only accessible by a single user at a time), print it, then file it.

That was fun, where to from here?

Now that you’ve moved away from the traditionally held position that lower level tasks should be delegated down the chain of command so you can focus on the higher level tasks, start complaining that your staff are useless. Tell them that they can’t seem to accomplish anything without you hand holding them. Put pressure on them, make them sure that THEY are holding up business development.

Hire them a new boss

You need help, your staff are useless so create a new tier of management. Hire someone from outside to help you better manage your staff. Even better, bring someone from a different division into the team and put them above the team members.

The above is satire, I wouldn’t actually suggest you do any of that if you want to have a happy productive workplace. To a greater or lesser degree I or people I know have been guilty of some of them but it isn’t based on any real concrete experience.