Category: work/career

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Surprising danger of being good at your job – Business Insider

All that leads to a problem: High-self-control people feel more burdened by their work relationships than their less-disciplined peers. They sacrifice more for the coworkers, the researchers found, even when those sacrifices come at the expense of their own goals. And that same dynamic plays out in romantic relationships. Being reliable is draining.Which doesn’t mean go-getters should stop go-getting. The benefits of high self-control still far outweigh the costs.But managers (and coworkers and romantic partners) should take note: If you take those high-self-control people for granted, you may risk losing them. While relying on go-getters might be a good short-term strategy — they’ll get stuff done — in the long run, Koval suggests, they “might become dissatisfied with this burden we’re placing on them.”Accordingly, it’s essential to recognize them for their (probably underestimated) efforts. They need to feel “a return on the effort they’re putting in,” she says.

Source: Surprising danger of being good at your job – Business Insider
 
 

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Richard Branson Is Right: Time Is the New Money | Inc.com

I want to work for a company that adopts this.

 
Richard Branson just announced he would be giving Virgin employees unlimited vacation. He’s either nuts or knows something others have yet to discover: You’ll make more money if you give people their time back.
Why We Trade Time for Money
The Industrial Age taught us the only way to make money was to trade time for it. The deal was clear, and always the same: You give me eight to 10 hours of your day, and I’ll give you some money. But in the Participation Age, something new is emerging. Companies are realizing that when you give people back their time, they will make you more money. It seems counter-logical, but it’s really quite intuitive. As usual, Branson is moving on an idea that traditionalists will only discover by watching him and the other early adapters in action.
Why Would Unlimited Vacation Work?
Why give up on a vacation system that’s been in place for 170-plus years? Because it was a bad idea then, and with a work force that did not grow up in the shadow of the Industrial Age, it’s an even worse idea today. Almost no one under 40 can relate to a time-based system that makes no sense in a results-based work world.
Branson didn’t figure this out; he’s actually a late adapter, which makes a lot of the work world archaic and completely out of touch with how to make money today. Fewer than 1% of U.S. companies give unlimited vacation. In fact, America gives the second-lowest amount in the world, behind only South Korea.
The data is in: When you give people control of their time, they make you more money. W. L. Gore Inc., the pioneer in rejecting the Industrial Age, is a $3 billion company with 10,000 stakeholders. They’ve had unlimited vacation since the 1960s and continue to grow exponentially.
via Richard Branson Is Right: Time Is the New Money | Inc.com.

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rePost::You can not buy ideas or talent – 37signals

Not so with ideas or talent. These are the purchases of aspiration: Imagine if we took that scrappy idea with those underpaid, hungry champions, and we gave them all the resources in the world. They could paint all the colors of the rainbow and still have pixie dust left to spare!Turns out that good ideas and strong talent is as fickle as it is seducing. As soon as you start making big-company compromises, the good idea turns average, and the average turns into a write-off.Same goes with strong talent. As soon as they have to deal with three layers of reporting, quarterly budget cycles, and swing-door managers, they turn off the creativity and head for the exit. The latter part might take from three months to two years, but it will happen.

via You can not buy ideas or talent – 37signals.

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FTS 2012 01 02

FTS in my definitions is Fuck That Shit or Fuck This Shit, the words are too common and near for the win that they probably are widely used,
 
The rant today is due to having two managers to report to.
Two managers with different management styles who seem to never talk to each other.
Two managers who need to be reminded that you have other deliverables.
 
This is a recipe for mediocrity. Having to do lots of stuff with almost the same deadlines.
 
Let it be said that I don’t actually hate my managers far from it. It’s the situation that we are all in that is the reason for this. Fuck This Shit.
One day when the FTS days get too often too much the FTS becomes FTS I Quit.

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rePost::I am a programmer | jacquesmattheij.com

It is probably best to strive for a balance between job satisfaction and pay, and not to worry too much about the titles. Worry about whether or not your work brings you pride, whether it is interesting, and whether it brings a smile to your face when you think about it, or when you tell others about it. About whether or not what you do is meaningful and whether it affects peoples lives in a positive way. If you do feel that your title is a major factor in how much you earn or are appreciated you may want to ask yourself if you’re working in the right place and on the right stuff to begin with.
Pay is important, but above a certain level you’ll find that job satisfaction is literally priceless.
I am a programmer. And I’m proud of that.
via I am a programmer | jacquesmattheij.com.

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Passion Versus Professionalism :: Gamasutra – Features – The Designer's Notebook:

They’re not mutually exclusive qualities, of course. One of the best examples of passion combined with professionalism was Vincent Van Gogh. There’s a lot of shallow psychoanalyzing about Van Gogh — “his paintings are so distinctive because he was mad,” and so forth.
But Van Gogh was no naïve artist operating on raw talent and passion alone. If you read his letters, you discover that he was a well-educated scholar of art, much influenced by the ideas of others.
His passion kept him going when nobody would buy his works, but it was his professionalism — his endless desire to learn more and do better, that exploited his talent to its fullest. Van Gogh’s early works didn’t amount to much. It was his growth as a serious, thoughtful, professional artist that turned him into what he became.
In fact, his bouts of madness had nothing to do with it; they disturbed his thinking and prevented him from painting. If anything, his work is all the more impressive because he was able to do it in spite of, not because of, his illness.
It’s time for a moratorium on recruitment ads that demand passion. It sounds cool, but ultimately, it’s meaningless except as an excuse for demanding long hours and offering poor benefits. By itself, it’s not much use to development companies, either.
Passion is no guarantee of talent or even basic competence. Ability, pride, discipline, integrity, dedication, organization, communication, and social skills are much more useful to an employer than passion is. And they’re more useful to you, too.
via Gamasutra – Features – The Designer’s Notebook: Passion Versus Professionalism.

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rePost :: ::Why Engineers Hop Jobs

Well I’m as unreliable, lazy, and entitled as the next guy, but that’s not why I’ve hopped jobs in the past. People in my generation have a very low tolerance for bullshit, and software engineering, in general, is a very high bullshit career. If you couple that with the standard load of bullshit you would get from a non-technical Harvard MBA type boss — like many CEOs that you find trying to get rich in Silicon Valley by hiring some engineers to “code up this idea real quick” — it’s no wonder that a good engineer will walk off the job after his one year cliff vesting.
As an engineer, you are told that you’re “lucky to have a job”, because there are “a hundred people lined up outside, ready to take it”. (As chance would have it, there are at least a thousand lined up to take the job of rich prick who tells people what to do). This backlash is the product of diseased thinking. A CEO who makes an engineer work 80 hours a week is a driven entrepreneur, but an engineer asking for a comfy chair is a prima donna. So, when we are up to our knees in golf-course, martini-lunch bullshit, don’t be surprised when we jump ship for a higher salary.
via Why Engineers Hop Jobs.

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rePost :: NUMMI | This American Life

Was listening to this episode of This American Life and what hit me was how much these autoworkers were proud of their work. I hope we can all have this attitude towards what we do.

A car plant in Fremont California that might have saved the U.S. car industry. In 1984, General Motors and Toyota opened NUMMI as a joint venture. Toyota showed GM the secrets of its production system: how it made cars of much higher quality and much lower cost than GM achieved. Frank Langfitt explains why GM didn't learn the lessons – until it was too late.
via NUMMI | This American Life.