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murlough23
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« on: September 26, 2011, 03:52:28 PM » |
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Vlad!, your work environment sounds much more amusing than mine. I just had to explain to someone (a customer, not a co-worker) where the "straight up and down slash" was on the keyboard. I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry.
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Vlad!
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« Reply #1 on: September 26, 2011, 04:30:29 PM » |
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My company was founded by engineers and is fairly well-known, at least in tech circles, for being a great place for engineers to work (and it's probably not the one you're thinking of). A lot of the trappings of larger, more "professional" companies are conspicuously absent: we have no dress code and an extremely lax code of conduct, there's no real policy on work hours ("try to make it in for meetings and get your work done" is the quasi-official answer to all attendance-related questions), and each individual is given a lot of responsibility (nobody tracks my attendance, I don't have a timesheet, I can almost always work on what I want to when I want to, if I feel like I need to buy something to make me happier/more productive, I can do so and then expense it without having to jump through any hoops, etc).
It's not all roses, though; a lot of blatant misbehavior gets overlooked, which contributes to a very emotionally callous culture. And as the company grows (we are growing very rapidly), some of the wild-west culture is being replaced. IT recently installed a web filter, for instance, and while it's nice to know that the guy in the cube next to me is probably not looking at pornography, the fact that I can't go to damnyouautocorrect.com because it has damn in the URL is stupid and paternalistic. And so of course now everybody has set up an encrypted proxy so they can browse whatever they want without anybody filtering it or even being able to snoop on it.
Work is not really my passion these days (I'm more of a "work to live" than "live to work" kind of guy), so I appreciate the fact that it pays the bills and doesn't bug me when I'm at home, but for those who are super passionate about work there are also many opportunities to advance. I enjoy the work, my co-workers are on average smarter than I am so there's lots of growth opportunities, and I am extraordinarily blessed in a number of ways. It's not perfect, but it's about as close as I could reasonably hope to achieve, which is good enough for me.
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
rms
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murlough23
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« Reply #2 on: September 26, 2011, 04:58:53 PM » |
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We've faced some growing pains from an initially lax/trust-based system slowly getting overrun by draconian rules due to others abusing the system, so I know what that feels like. many other branches of our company do actually enforce web filtering, not just for lewd material, but even going so far as to block MySpace, Facebook, etc. (My group in particular actually has a good reason to visit those social networking sites, since we're often asked to design our sites to be social media-aware and facilitate easy sharing of our content on those sites, etc.) Having had to design profanity filters myself (for such things as spacecraft naming contests), I'm amazed at the sheer number of possibilities for false positives that make it such a tricky task. We've had to set up alternate URLs for some of our sites due to users having overly protective filtering software, making it a problem when someone working at an elementary school wants to visit a site with the domain name "marsexplorer" or "deepimpact".
I still enjoy the work I do a great deal. I'd rather not have to work at all if given the choice, but if I have to be stuck somewhere 40 hours a week, this is a good place to be stuck and good people to be stuck with. I enjoy and try my best to uphold the honor system we still mostly have in place here regarding things like Internet usage. (I'll take brief breaks here and there to post on FB, message boards, etc., during the day, but any time I "waste", I make up for at some point by going home a little later, so all my work still gets done on budget and before the deadline. I also eat lunch at my desk most days.)
The only thing that makes work a pain is the bureaucratic stuff like timekeeping and training that eats up time which could be spent on doing the work itself. probably unavoidable, but the sheer number of obstacles placed in the way of doing these things efficiently (due to others who have tried to cheat the system in the past, which is always amusing when it's something like Ethics Training) is probably the #1 reason I find myself wanting to tear my hair out here in my cubicle.
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Vlad!
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« Reply #3 on: September 26, 2011, 05:16:41 PM » |
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(Topic split due to walls o' text)
One of the awesome things about my job is that nobody asks me to fill out a time sheet or account for my time at all. My deliverables speak for me, and so I can spend as much time as I want browsing the web. This is especially good considering that a lot of the things I have to do involve a decent amount of sitting around and waiting (try building an entire OS kernel and then installing it in a virtual machine. It's about 5% actual work and 95% waiting for stuff to complete). And the software development business is notoriously cyclical. When we're rushing to get a release out the door I may be putting in solid 9-10 hours a day of work, but then when we're between releases I might spend the morning writing a spec, send a couple of emails, and then spend the next two hours playing Rock Band on the Wii before heading out early. We obviously try to plan things so that this evens out and I'm doing a reasonable amount of work most of the time, but sometimes that just doesn't happen.
And I guess that's what I like the most about my job: it's results-driven, and they don't spend a lot of time caring about what I do so long as I deliver the right results. They don't try to control my life or who I am, they just give me fat sacks of cash and ask me to produce some code for them in return. This is what a job should be like, and I appreciate it that they get it as much as they do.
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
rms
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Aaron
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« Reply #4 on: September 26, 2011, 06:50:11 PM » |
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employment - I needs it!
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murlough23
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« Reply #5 on: October 05, 2011, 04:25:32 PM » |
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It might just be me, but I get reasonably paranoid when work dries up and I'm spending my day killing time. If you see a lot of lengthy posts from me during a weekday, that's probably what's going on. it doesn't mean that I'm slacking off - usually that I'm waiting for others to catch up to whatever I just finished so that I can get rolling again, or else all of my attempts to track down whoever's giving me my next marching orders have failed. But my mind has this weird drive to always be doing something productive, so even when it's perfectly OK to do something like play a game for half an hour, I still feel slightly guilty about it.
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RedcoatJones
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« Reply #6 on: October 07, 2011, 11:02:09 AM » |
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You want some of my workload, then? I've picked up 3 new clients in the past 1.5 months. Which is great for job security, awful for sleep, stress and sanity.
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murlough23
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« Reply #7 on: October 07, 2011, 11:23:13 AM » |
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You want some of my workload, then? I've picked up 3 new clients in the past 1.5 months. Which is great for job security, awful for sleep, stress and sanity.
Nope. Because as soon as I pick them up, 3 of my existing clients will suddenly come out of the woodwork and all want something major done by the same deadline. |
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Vlad!
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« Reply #8 on: October 07, 2011, 11:56:01 AM » |
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It's nice to not have clients :D
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
rms
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RedcoatJones
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« Reply #9 on: October 18, 2011, 08:53:15 PM » |
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I really do enjoy working with 6 or my 7 clients. But that one takes up more angst and time than the others sometimes.
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spacebrat311
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« Reply #10 on: December 08, 2011, 05:18:09 PM » |
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I need one of them job things. I've been looking for a year. Ugh.
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sup.
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Aaron
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« Reply #11 on: December 08, 2011, 05:26:13 PM » |
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I need one of them job things. I've been looking for a year. Ugh.
me too! |
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