The problem with working for home is that the person who gets half of what you do done, but stays in the office, is more visible to the higher ups. So you want everyone to work from home and meet when needed, rather than half and half.
In 2011-2012 I had one guy actually consistently take credit for what I was doing because I would work at my place and show up once a week with deliverables (there was a hardware part to the job, and I'd rather use my small workshop built next to my home if I can).
Essentially he told everyone that he was the team leader for the project, and people started to believe him. All he did was walk around the offices and make powerpoints.
He kept telling people that he needed more men and resources to complete the project... all the while, me and another guy were doing good on the project (about on budget, a little ahead of schedule).
Eventually this guy's whining, intended to give him a little empire, is heard by one of the actual bosses. We get called in to explain why we're behind and need more people.
And that's where the crazy thing happens. We show up with the first batch of production devices -- not even prototypes -- and do a full demo, and say "this has actually been ready to field test for a couple weeks now". Great, right? Except... everyone was so used to talking with the douche guy that they didn't really pay attention to us. So we got a dressing down for being late (douche said "it'll take two months for this to be ready to go unless I get two more guys on it"), with the finished product happily beeping and logging data on the conference table!
I felt like Galileo before the Conclave. These were scientists and scientific administrators, believing some twerp's word over their own eyes.
I work from home and it's less than half and half for our team. But working from home doesn't mean you don't communicate. Email, Document collaboration, Regular VC all contribute to the visibility of your work. No one can take credit for my work because I'm extremely visible through multiple channels. I don't even show up at the office more than once every few months.
Visibility doesn't have anything to do with being in the office. It has everything to do with communication and you can do that with a VC pretty much as easily as you can face to face.
It's worth noting that, in a lot of companies without an established work-from-home culture, you need to over-communicate in order to compensate for the lack of physical presence in the office. As the saying goes, when you're out of sight, you tend to be out of mind. Therefore you always have to remind people that you're in front of your computer or on the phone busting your ass, instead of watching TV or taking a nap, which is what people assume you're doing by default because that's what they would be doing if they were at home.
Github checkins, Hipchat comments, JIRA tickets opening and closing, emails, texts, etc. If you work from home I recommend :
1. Overcommunicating, which also creates documentation
2. Leaving an audit record, like a time log
3. Going to as many office social functions as possible. You can up your visibility as much with one party as you can with ten days in a cube.
This is exactly right. When someone asks the question what was "Joe" doing yesterday there should be at least one person who can say "I was working with him via {email,chat,phone,VC} on that thing we had discussed earlier." Or... "Oh, didn't you see his email? He sent out that design doc for further discussion" or some other variant. Even in companies with an established work from culture it's important to communicate frequently and with detail.
That requires the other parties to realize this, too. You can send all the emails you want, have all the video chats you want, and IM to your heart's content, and it'll be worthless unless your boss is receptive to it.
And it works the other way. If you are in the office all the time, but no one knows about you or what you are doing or were you are at, the same thing can happen.
So being at home is completely irrelevant to this story, except that it may make it slightly easier.
I generally call these guys "non producers". Not much value to add to a project yet always seem to be hanging around either taking credit, giving input where its not needed, and usually both.
I would throw most project managers in that lot as well as non hands-on middle managers. I'm finding there's an additional skill that engineers/programmers/producers need to obtain in dealing with these types and their politicking and not letting them run you over during tech projects. I believe it falls out of the normal realm of what we call "people skills".
I have stopped calling them "non producers" and started using the term "counter producers". Not only do these types of people not help, they are almost always a hindrance to the completion of projects.
To me, this speaks bigger to your work culture and processess es - what tools were you using to host meetings and have conversations verbally?
Assuming the right toolset, having a strong voice and impaact in a company is not impossible from a remote position.
Yes, there is real value to face time, and I agree with you on some level - but only given the proper tools and a company that respects them. Given your example, it sounds like you didn't get the attention you deserved.
If senior management are sufficiently preoccupied with other things and some Machiavellian schemer is sufficiently preoccupied with increasing their own influence over the organization, it's entirely possible that no level of detailed daily status updates and well-structured regular webconferences can undo the amount of FUD the schemer can spread by having water-cooler chats and asking "quick questions" of exactly the same members of management that don't read the status updates.
And at the risk of stating the obvious, watercooler chats can have non-negative outcomes in other situations too!
What I think is unique of the linked article (yup, I read it all and it was really interesting and related to my startup) is that the type of work being done by the telecommuters is easily measurable: they are telephone operators. So it is quite simple to compare the number of successful calls (depending on what the company is about) made by people both in site or telecommuting.
Be smart.
Let others know your progress.
Send emails (showing completed work) at 6:25 AM.
Let others understand you can be productive while they're commuting.
If they cannot understand, find someone who can, he/she will have the usual doubs, but will get it after a while.
I see how this could be a problem. Luckily where I work, everyone is a remote. And I think this is something to watch out for, make sure remote working is embedded in company culture before accepting the role.
Well, it sounds like it was embedded in NASA culture, but this guy was able to brainwash the bosses because he was nearby. It's political games like this that make remote work nearly impossible. Did you notice the brainwashed victims were actual scientists? Good luck with your better culture.
There've been a number of psychological studies that show that face-to-face interactions build trust, regardless of the contents of those interactions (unless they're emotionally negative). When you're facing different stories from two people, one of whom you trust and one of whom you don't, who do you think wins?
This is also why many startups insist on people not working remotely. Startups frequently need to make decisions on very low information, such that the only conceivable reason you'd have for following through on the decision is trust.
But it's easier to "do" office politics if you can talk to someone over lunch, than if you only interact with someone by email.
The lesson for me there was to assume that not everyone has the mission's interest at heart.
My problem was that for me getting on base was a 2 hour commute, and I had 90% of the gear I needed to do my work rihgt at home -- it got more done to work from home and only show up to deliver prototypes for testing, or use the "big boy" machine tools.
Office politicians, like the Twerp of NASA (though he probably has a better title now), are most excited about some combination, I bet, as it leaves the culture more vulnerable to attack.
He did get a management job. At a Denny's. He didn't last very long in there. I will gladly admit to being very happy to see him in there. He must have recognized me because he sort of hid in the kitchen the whole time.
Sounds like a major lack of leadership - the kind of thing that happens in a college project.
This kind of behavior, to me, speaks to me of dysfunctional management and I think it's probably good in the long term to get out of that kind of situation.
Lesson to be learned: You can't ignore others on the team. You can't have clear separation of duties without strong management or a good working trust relationship. Both of these are weakened if you're remote most or all of the time and the culture doesn't reward/support remote workers.
This is exactly analogous to what has happened with the part of a hugely successful computer / cellphones / etc maker I work for in Cupertino, in engineering. 5 years ago it was a wonderfully productive environment; since, it has filled with do-nothing middle manager detritus, who deeply impede results, and quell enthusiasm, perhaps the most damaging detriment. Thankfully, this hasn't happened across the entire company.
Honestly, I was not expecting that punchline. The story really sounded like you were working in a typical "change the world" startup with flexible hours and some just hired frat boy manager took credit for your work. This I could see happening in such an environment but not...NASA.
Good point. It's always better to be there when decisions are made (unless you're important enough that people are scared to keep you out of the loop!).
I feel for you but may I dare say that some fault lies with you, for letting the douch take credit. You should've stopped him before he got out of control.
Maybe (probably) you're more skilled than I am at office politics but it's hard to find that point before "out of control" where you should say something. If you do it too early it comes off as petty; too late and it's already too ingrained.
Probably. Thing is, I was just elated at doing NASA stuff and just threw myself at the technical side of the project without paying attention to much else. I mostly only showed up on base when something cool was happening (In my defence, it was a 2 hour commute each way).
Didn't mean to really fault you. Just sucks that some douchebag caused you harm and ultimate NASA too.
Many many years ago I worked at a badly run startup. One dude was made a manager over us and started trying to shake things up. One thing he wanted was documentation (although mostly it was to prepare let go some people). So I wrote up one page document, really simple stuff (no formatting at all) and put up on fileserver.
Few days later I happened to see a printout of a documentation lying around. It had been printed to show higher up that IT was improving process. Content was what I had written. Word by word. It was in better formatting, with tables to separate creator, date etc. For the creator, the manager had put in his own name. There's no mention of my name AT ALL.
ENCOM MX 16-923 USER #0176825 06:00 INFORMATION
VIDEO GAME PROGRAM: SPACE PARANOIDS
ANNEXED 9/22 BY E. DILLENGER
ORIGINAL PROGRAM WRITTEN BY K. FLYNN
THIS INFORMATION PRIORITY ONE
END OF LINE
Add this to the printout? :)
But yeah, had that happened to me a few times too. One time it was at a conference (Open Science Summit), the same douche guy decided to do a presentation on my tech as if it had been developed under him. So I pushed past security, turned off the projector with the powerpoint, went on stage, slammed the microphone down, and did my presentation by shouting. Got a fair amount of applause.
Couldn't he have just done something similar as well if he worked remotely though? You always get e.g. people that are much more noisy about what they've achieved over email so everyone gets the impression they've achieved more that quieter ones. Isn't this more about him taken advantage of success being measured incorrectly?
It's much harder to pull off remotely. This is manipulation, and a physical presence with inflection, body language, and the ability to consistently inject into every open moment is very important to its success. While it'd be possible to pull such a con over IM, unless your bosses are complete morons, it's probably too difficult.
An excellent system: In my 50.000-people company, everyone was required to work 1 day per week from home. It ensures everyone is involved in finding good solutions for the VPN, the chat, VC and work visibility. It also shift the prejudice of "working less" away from the teammate. Of course it's not an immediate solution if some remote workers aren't in the same city, but it makes them more legitimate.
I think that this is a general problem with WFH. You'll get 3-5 times more done, because most office environments are horrible and anti-productive, but you're basically stepping out of the political fight. There's so much nonverbal subcommunication that you'll miss about who's viewed as a top performer, who's not, who's ascending and who's not.
The social environment of most workplaces is Meritocracy By Assertion. It has to conceive of itself as a meritocracy but the politically successful people are always most able to make themselves seem to have the most merit. No one ever said, "I'm promoting this guy because of his political success". And yet... over time, what we see is that non-WFHers rise up the ranks, because it's just such a political environment to be in the office during normal working hours, and, in general, when they get to the top, they're hostile to the whole concept. So then you have places like Yahoo where, even if you don't care about climbing the executive ladder, you have to adopt behaviors of those who do (namely, avoiding WFH).
The really depressing thing to learn about organizational politics is that, while they're a grind for hard-working, decent people, they're actually fun for psychopaths. About 95 percent of people will be utterly miserable if they have to spend 90 hours per week in a packed, open-plan environment. The other 5%, mostly psychopaths, thrive on that shit, like the creatures that live in deep-sea thermal vents (extremophiles). It energizes them.
You see this in The Wire. Stringer Bell doesn't love "The Game" (meaning criminal enterprise). He plays it because he's good at it and is trying to work his way out of it, but Marlo (and, to a lesser degree, Avon) is a natural gangster just as much as McNulty and Kima are natural cops. Natural office politicians are the 5% who don't start to fade and fail when subjected to 90-hour weeks in open-plan bullpens, for the same reason that polar bears don't mind ice. Eventually, though, an organization ends up full of natural politicians and has lost the whole "vision thing".
Most organizations think that it's valuable to "be tough" and schedule meetings during weird hours and cram developers together and set unrealistic deadlines. But the people who thrive in such environments aren't "the best" in terms of the ability to get work done. They're the natural politicians who thrive in that sort of environment.
Did you really just assert that the only people who thrive in "packed, open-plan environments" are psychopaths? What about extroverts, people who get energized by social contact? Are they all psychopaths?
Also, when you refer to how "most organizations" think it's valuable to be tough, you're going against the bulk of organizations I've worked with. I'm going on close to 50 organizations now that I've worked with in some capacity. I'd say less than 10 had that mentality.
I'd guess that extroverts are, on average, about neutrally buoyant in the open-plan environment. They don't get hit as hard as introverts but it doesn't energize them.
Introverts are drained by open-plan offices, extroverts learn to adapt and tolerate them, people in between the two extremes are slightly drained but blend in. No one really likes working in one, except for the psychopath (or the clueless 23-year-old who believes the hogwash about it being "collaborative").
The thing is that most decent extroverts still hate office politics. They have a greater need for social interaction than introverts, but they don't thrive on meaningless noise, environmental chaos, or a complete lack of privacy.
So while an extreme introvert is drained after 2 hours in an open-plan office, the extreme extrovert can spend 8 hours in one, no problem. He might be less productive but he doesn't go home exhausted. The psychopath, however, is energized by a politically intense environment. Most extroverts dislike office politics; psychopaths love that shit.
So your beliefs/guesses/hypotheses state here are that:
1. Open plan offices are damaging to all, except those:
a. Who mistakenly believe in the collaborative nature of open plan environments. By believing they enjoy working in them.
b. Are extroverted. They gain no benefit, but are not hurt.
c. Are without sociopathic. (Stealing the corrected language choice from your comment below.)
2. Extroverts who tolerate office politics are indecent. (The inverse of the statement that starts the third paragraph.)
3. (Through inference via there connection in the third paragraph:) Politics is meaningless noise, environmental chaos, and/or a lack of privacy.
4. Sociopaths are energized by office politics.
I find most of these flawed in one way or another, but I'd like you to confirm that my reading is correct before I address each in detail.
I find your perspective judgemental, somewhat narrow and (ironically) un-empathetic and I think a debate about it could be enlightening.
Point. I wouldn't use the word "sociopath" there, but it's possible to be low in empathy and still not a bad person.
That's actually a skill in the corporate environment because snooty clubs (like an executive suite) generally look for non-stickiness, i.e. "you get just me". People who communicate, "I'll leave my friends at the bottom unless you ask for them", tend to get promoted faster than those who are seen as a risk of bringing in less-wanted friends.
Can you please not do this? Michael is a valuable member of this community, and while he subscribes to a certain narrative, I for one find his comments to be intelligent and insightful. If you're going to disagree, do so respectfully without taking cheap potshots. Thanks.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Gandhi
Each step, if you keep your integrity intact, is hard: probably a 90% cut. It's easy to be laughed-at or opposed by doing something wrong or stupid. It takes at least some charisma to get past "they ignore you" while doing what is right.
You can get to ridicule with a terrible Youtube video, and the next level (opposition) is easy if you're willing to do the wrong thing: just become a criminal. It takes work to get to the opposition level while remaining in the moral right.
That said, I think it's much more of a multi-level dynamic. You get one response from people in power and another from the rest.
I think the progress is more like this: Level 0, people just ignore you. Level 1, people in power ignore you but the hoi polloi/useful idiots (who support the people in power) ridicule you and a few intelligent people out of power realize that you might have something to say. Level 2: people in power recognize you as a threat, and try to magnify the ridicule among the hoipolloi (while appearing to "stay out of it") but this can also increase your support. Level 3: people in power try to mobilize the useful idiots to fight (rather than just ridicule) you. (They themselves don't fight.) Level 4: people in power recognize their deteriorating position as your popular support increases (i.e. their attempts to heap ridicule on you actually buy sympathy and publicity). They'll either try to buy you out, or fight bitterly in a last-ditch effort that may destroy them and may destroy you. Usually you get the former, and it's up to you whether you take a deal or keep fighting. Level 5: you win.
The adversity that I get from certain ex-Googlers and HN personalities is somewhere around Level 2.25, maybe 2.5. I've had people try to fuck with my employment in the past, but I've managed to succeed in spite of them.
Getting from 2 to 3 is a big jump, and it's slow to happen because the people in power are afraid that you might be right and turn the masses (i.e. get to level 4-5). It's easy to ask the masses to ridicule someone; asking them to fight that person is demanding a commitment, and if the person being opposed is actually right, the more intelligent people within the masses will turn... and the useful idiots, though late to follow, will either be isolated (and disempowered) or themselves turned. So the preference of power is, strongly, to ridicule rather than oppose. Opposition is admission that ridicule didn't work.
Second quote, the authorship of which will probably never be uncovered:
"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people."
HPMOR also addresses it, in a more accessible way:
> Professor Quirrell had remarked over their lunch that Harry really needed to conceal his state of mind better than putting on a blank face when someone discussed a dangerous topic, and had explained about one-level deceptions, two-level deceptions, and so on. So either Severus was in fact modeling Harry as a one-level player, which made Severus himself two-level, and Harry's three-level move had been successful; or Severus was a four-level player and wanted Harry to think the deception had been successful. Harry, smiling, had asked Professor Quirrell what level he played at, and Professor Quirrell, also smiling, had responded, One level higher than you.
In 2011-2012 I had one guy actually consistently take credit for what I was doing because I would work at my place and show up once a week with deliverables (there was a hardware part to the job, and I'd rather use my small workshop built next to my home if I can).
Essentially he told everyone that he was the team leader for the project, and people started to believe him. All he did was walk around the offices and make powerpoints.
He kept telling people that he needed more men and resources to complete the project... all the while, me and another guy were doing good on the project (about on budget, a little ahead of schedule).
Eventually this guy's whining, intended to give him a little empire, is heard by one of the actual bosses. We get called in to explain why we're behind and need more people.
And that's where the crazy thing happens. We show up with the first batch of production devices -- not even prototypes -- and do a full demo, and say "this has actually been ready to field test for a couple weeks now". Great, right? Except... everyone was so used to talking with the douche guy that they didn't really pay attention to us. So we got a dressing down for being late (douche said "it'll take two months for this to be ready to go unless I get two more guys on it"), with the finished product happily beeping and logging data on the conference table!
I felt like Galileo before the Conclave. These were scientists and scientific administrators, believing some twerp's word over their own eyes.
And that's the story of why I quit NASA.