Dear Employers

Dear Employers,

It’s time to embrace your position in the world. It’s 2008, not 1958. You’re no longer a cubbie hole for a select group who will stay until they retire. You’re a stepping stone. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; it allows for a more fluid workforce where new ideas flow faster and reach new heights.

It’s not you. It’s us.

XOXO,

Terry

I think employers in the next decade will learn to embrace the concept of a career that spans multiple workplaces. The guys who say, “hey, you know what? after you work here for a while, your resume will be significantly improved,” will be the ones who you talk to during your job interview.

Money is one big reason workers don’t feel as obligated to their employers. People change jobs to get good raises (that’s how I started making enough so Sara could stay home).

I think one of the often overlooked impacts of this is how it affects culture. As employees feel less and less bound for life with their employers, it’s important for the employer to understand that a good work environment will keep people around longer.

If you’re requiring developers to wear slacks and button up shirts, show up promptly at 8AM, take a notepad to lunches because lunches are meetings, provide bad benefits, only offer a week of vacation a year, charge for sodas, or only hire boring & stupid people, your days are numbered. Smaller companies are able to do more with less because of new technologies and open source software.

Where do those smaller companies come from? Most people would say “someone has a good idea,” but I think it’s more that everybody has a good idea, and eventually someone gets so fed up with the corporate bullshit culture that’s overtaken the US and starts their own shop. See: 37Signals.

Work should be fun. It’s taken a long time to get around to that, at least in the US, but it’s coming. Thanks to our generation of lazy and selfish folk who use technology way better than the previous generation, the young folks right out of college are starting to call the shots.

Big companies have figured this out. At IBM, there’s no dress code for most departments. I saw a guy walking into one of the labs in sandals and a bathing suit. IBM doesn’t even have a vacation policy really any more; just clear things with your manager, and try to be available when you can.

Where I work now has the same vacation kind of policy. Get your work done, have fun away from work when you can, but don’t hate your job.

Nobody wins when employees hate their jobs. I’ve had 2 jobs that I’ve hated. It ruins everything. Your home life is worse because you’re dreading going back to work. Your work is worse because you hate your job. You hate your job because the work you’re doing is boring. It’s a crazy cycle that can spin until either someone gets fired, a company goes under, or someone quits. I’ve been smart enough in both occasions to quit.

The first place I quit, I really didn’t contribute much work. I doubt I was missed, it just looked bad for the boss because of the high amount of turnover. The second job that I hated I quit, I know I’m missed. When you hinge all of your work on one person you set yourself up to get pretty screwed. And I quit, so obviously they got somewhat screwed.

Another tenet of embracing the stepping stone mentality is that, unlike above, you don’t want to put all of your eggs in one basket. You want to make sure that employees feel valued but don’t hold all the value. Knowledge transfer, documentation, redundancy and good relationships are all key to this. Ideally you have someone who writes down what he’s done, who’s willing (and is given explicit time by the employer) to share that knowledge, allowing for it to be kept in several heads. If that’s not possible during the employment, it’s important to maintain good relationships, because otherwise that knowledge is either lost or incredibly expensive to retrieve.

So, stop having 15-year reward plans, employers. Keep things immediate, and make them good. Give us vacation. Give us bonuses. Give us good benefits. Give us good work hours. And we’ll treat you great in turn, delivering significantly more productivity than our predecessors.

[In case anyone's curious, I'm in no way bashing my current employer. They're awesome. Any specific anecdotes that are negative are from previous employers. Yes, at ST I only had 1 week of vacation a year. And no sick days. I'm glad I left.]

Hi, My Name’s Pastor Bob*

And I spew bullshit that my congregation eats up.

I think there’s a lot of problems with religious groups, and at the root is that they all ask an imaginary friend for help and give him/her credit even when nothing happens (“some of god’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers…”).

That said, another issue with these groups is the credibility they lend to their leaders. Pastors and preachers and cardinals and popes can say whatever they want, and it often goes unchecked, happily swallowed by their respective congregations. 

Case in point: We host a Christian small group at our house. I wouldn’t usually participate, but they’re doing a 10 or 12 week or so marriage study, and while I don’t care for the religious part, I am pretty passionate about keeping my marriage in good shape.

Last night was the 4th class, and up until that point the guy on the DVD had seemed pretty normal and reasonable, not calling atheists bad or anything. Until last night. It was then that I found him telling everyone listening that people who accept evolution “believe we evolved from apes,” “think women are more evolved,” and are “giving pills to boys to fix them [to be more like girls].”

Well, that’s a holy load of bullshit. First, off, while it’s true that we evolved from something like an ape, we didn’t evolve from modern day apes. So let’s get that straight. Not to cavil, but the way it’s often expressed makes people think that we’re direct descendants of orangutans. Which we’re not. We’re cousins, coming at some point from the same ancestor. 

Next up, what does it mean that “women are more evolved?” If taken on a literal sense, that would mean that women are consistently breeding with their ancestors, or that women descended from men. What? No.

In all likelihood, maybe he meant “more adapted,” which is equally stupid. More adapted in what sense? In the workplace? Better at rearing children? Better at birthing children (ok, you’ve got me there, there’s only been one pregnant “man” to date)? Only someone stupid enough to, I don’t know, rationalize the holocaust by calling “artificial selection” “natural selection” would think something like that. 

Lastly, I don’t know who’s giving pills to boys to make them more like girls, but that was the first I’d heard of it. More likely, it’s some bullshit taken out of context or just made up. Neither of which would be out of your everyday nut’s playbook. 

Crazy people are crazy, independent of their religion (or lack of it). The difference is that religious people who spout hate or commit atrocities are often let off the hook – because god made them do it. So, organized religion rants aside, let’s not make hasty generalizations about groups of people based on some uninformed or fringe case. Most Jews don’t subject their sons to Rabbi-fellatio; most Muslims don’t bomb buildings or sew their daughters’ girl parts shut; most Mormons aren’t okay with marrying 10 year olds to adult men; most Christians don’t want their children molested.

Sadly, I think this concept is lost on most people attending churches, and they happily accept whatever vitriol leaks into the speaker’s microphone. Groups are only characterized by their extremes. While this lends itself to some more legitimate points in debates around groups that breed extremism (which is any religion), on your everyday person it’s not a valid critique.

Kthx.

*Insert your favorite religious leader’s name here

Goals

On Friday, I had a talk at work (which I’m loving, btw) with my boss. It slightly revolved around goals, but was mostly just laying out how the two of us would work together.

That’s not really related to this post. Actually, it isn’t related at all. Oh well. I changed the subtitle of this blog to be non sequitur, so if you’re reading this, you deserve it.

I’ve often thought about things I’d like to do before I die, and then recently I’ve been thinking more about where the Earth came from and how people get so convinced that someone put them together like legos. I was thinking about that earlier tonight while rocking Nate to sleep, when I thought it would be eye-opening to go to Africa.

My only fear is that I’d be eaten by lions. That’s not in jest. When I say “go to Africa,” I mean camp out in the wilderness for some extended period of time. I’d be thrown in the mix with the rest of the world, but instead of some environment like Austin where the rest of the world are techies who don’t usually require much reflection, it’d be next to buffaloes, lions, hyenas, snakes, elephants, hippos, and lots and lots of grass. 

At the same time, I think it’d do a lot to remove the idea that humans were put here separately and specially. We’re just animals, who happen to be smart enough to form large civilizations. The problem is, while living in a large civilization, it’s hard to accept that. It’s hard to think that the world wasn’t just made for our consumption.

I think understanding exactly where I am in the food chain would do a lot to focus that understanding. 

I’ve got a lot of other things that I’d like to do before I die, but I don’t think they’re nearly as exciting or worth writing about. Or I lost my list. Take your pick.

The Bet

Sara wants to find out the sex of our baby before it’s born. I don’t. So, she and her sister came up with the idea that she could find out and everyone would know but me, and thinks that it will somehow be a surprise when the baby is born.

Obviously, I disagree. I’m convinced there’s no way that I can be kept in the dark for that long. Now, I understand that if I tried to keep myself in the dark, I could maybe lie to myself and stay uncertain, but it’s no longer about that. Now it’s all about proving that I’m right, and that I was tragically overlooked by the CIA as maybe the best intelligence agent in the world.

So, to make things interesting, there’s a wager. 3 months from when Sara finds out the sex of the baby, I’m going to tell everybody what it is, and how I know. I’m essentially locking in to my answer. Nobody will confirm or deny it, but everybody will silently, begrudgingly, acknowledge that I’m right. Because I’m super cop.

So, if I guess wrongly (and I’m using the word “guess” here a little liberally, it’s not a guess, but rather a precise analysis), Sara gets a day out, away from the kids. I’ll be taking care of both of them.

When I’m proven correct, though, then I get to attend the Texas Tech bowl game, provided it’s in Texas. If it’s not in Texas, then I get to sit at home and drink beer and watch the bowl game without having to juggle kids.

So, the bet is set. I’ll post an update when the bet starts (when Sara learns the sex), and then when I announce my decision. I’m a little worried about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle here, but I’ll take the risk.

Morale++

@Meezy tweeted the other day asking if employee morale should be valued, and if so, why, and how. I don’t follow anyone who said “no,” but I figure the question deserves more response than 140 characters. Or a multiple of 140 character blurbs. Anyways…

Employee morale is what drives an organization. It’s directly proportional to an organization’s performance, though the effect will appear slightly lagged. Too many bad financial quarters, and employee morale goes down. Too many bad managers, and a company’s performance declines. 

I had a boss who said that he didn’t believe in motivation, and that it only comes from a person’s drive to succeed, but that’s bullshit. There’s a reason that I did no work at company V and why I worked incredibly hard at company O, and I doubt it’s my own age or drive. I had 2 days off between the jobs. To say that motivation is out of control is to surrender a fight that you have to win to be successful, which is arguably why company V lost 5/6 of its developer team in under a year. 

To improve morale, it’s good to have an accepting environment that breeds cult like mindshare. That doesn’t mean squashing dissenting ideas, but everyone should love working with each other. There shouldn’t be anyone who’s viewed as inferior or stupid – those people break an organization back into reality. You want everyone to be happy that they’re getting up to work with competent people.

So, here’s a list of items you can do to fix morale, in my not-at-all-humble opinion:

* Beer : It seems simple, but it’s a nice sign of a more lax work environment. The majority of us in the workforce don’t appreciate military environments (regardless of your affection for the military itself). We’re also grown ups. The majority of us appreciate alcohol. Keep it available for good achievements or just random Fridays.

* Casual dress code : I know this list will seem along the lines of my ideal employer, but I think keeping up morale is something I want in an employer, and these are obvious ways to do it. Again, don’t tell us how high our socks need to be or how many buttons we need to have on our shirts. For those of us who work in offices or cubes and don’t deal with clients, why can’t we work in sandals and caps? If we work better that way, doesn’t it make more sense?

* Challenge us : Employees take jobs to have a good time. Part of that good time comes from solving difficult problems. Keep the problems in breathable workspaces and timeframes, but don’t put off things because they might be difficult. Embrace the difficult stuff, because that’s where innovation happens. Nobody cares about easy shit. 

* Treat us like adults : This probably encompasses several of my other items. Like I said, we’re adults. We know how to get our work done. We’re trustworthy. If you don’t think that’s an accurate description, then you have a shitty work relationship with your employee. When we arrive, when we leave, what we do during the day, what we do on our vacation, really should be 2nd to the idea of getting work done. If we show up for meetings but then only spit out work at 3am in the morning, that shouldn’t be an issue as long as it’s at an acceptable pace. Power hungry bosses like to treat their employees like kids, which isn’t good for morale (I’ve already gone through that and left the house – what’s to keep me from doing the same with you?)

* Recognizing that it’s your responsibility to retain employees : I think this is a catch-all for the things people will think I’ve missed. It’s your job, as an employer, to retain employees. If they leave, it’s because of you most of the time. It means you weren’t paying enough for the environment you were producing. Think of things that you do that you think are important but aren’t vital to the running of the company, and interfere with your employees more than it needs to. Cutting down on those might help a lot.

That’s all I thought of off the top of my head. Feel free to leave your suggestions for keeping morale up in the comments.