An Ideal Employer
I fell down a rabbit hole and found an interesting article that reminds me of the intangibles that led me to working here. Sam at CodeOdor.com writes about the Top 6 Non-Monetary Features I Want In An Employer.
Truly food for thought if you are looking for a new job or currently interviewing with a new employer.
The list that really strikes a chord with me is the comment left by Rob Wilkerson. A reprint below, since I can’t link directly to his comment:
Wow. Something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, so here comes a bit of stream-of-consciousness:
1. Interesting work. Yeah, I know it looks like a blatant rip-off, but I want – and frankly expect – to enjoy my work more often than not. I’ve _often_ taken pay cuts (albeit relatively minor ones) to do interesting work. This one’s non-negotiable.
2. Trust. Again, another rip-off, but another must. Trust me to administer my own machine. Trust that he company will get (usually far) more than the required 40 hours from me when I’m not chained to my desk. Trust my management to spot abuse. Trust me to spot abuse by those who report to me.
3. Flexibility. This dovetails nicely with trust, but allow me to come and go – within reason – as I please. Understand that when I’m working from home, I’m _really_ working from home; I’m not “working from home”. Understand that when you see me reading feeds rather than writing code, it’s not whimsical. I’m reading stuff that will, hopefully, make me better at what I do because I enjoy what I do and because I’m a professional.
4. Casual Atmosphere. I’m a developer. I spend most of my day at my desk engineering and coding solutions. I’m not in board meetings. Don’t make me dress to impress. There’s no one to impress. Don’t tell me that dressing professionally makes me act more professionally. The fact that I’m a professional makes me act professionally. That I’m wearing jeans and a t-shirt doesn’t confuse me into thinking I’m hanging with buddies at a bar. I recognize the office scenery. Seriously.
5. Productivity Focus. You tell me what you need done. As long as I’m getting it done satisfactorily, don’t jerk me around about the fact that I left a little early last Thursday. Put down the abacus and the time sheets.
6. Competent Management. I can live with incompetent co-workers because I can avoid them for the most part. I can’t live with incompetent management. My rules for managers follow: know what you don’t know, be okay with what you don’t know, understand that I don’t expect you to know everything, recognize that 90% of your job is to know who to ask when a question arises about one of those things you don’t know and then trust my input when I’m asked about the things that I know. Simple.
A lot of these things boil down to this: treat me like an adult and like a professional unless I do something to indicate that I’m not one or the other.
Posted by Rob Wilkerson
I think these are reasonable demands, but sadly it exists in too few work places. When I interviewed for my job here, my immediate supervisor seemed to embody all of these ideas. The real disappointment came later, when I realized that the higher ups did not.
Have anything to add to the discussion? Stop by and leave a comment.
Philosophy on Advertising
The purpose of this site is mostly personal. It logs a history of my mistakes and my journey of learning along the way. I hope that the occasional solutions I post to problems I come across will help you along the way, too. I will not promise to post often. Instead, I promise to post quality content that will be worth the time needed to read it.
About once every six months I receive an offer to post advertising on this site. The offers usually end with me saying no. The sellers are often astounded that I would refuse their offer. (Maybe it’s because the purpose of my site is about more than making money, so they are surprised I won’t agree to peanuts for pay.) Some of them consider me an ad snob. If it helps them sleep at night, that’s okay.
When I look at an offer, I prefer advertising do three things:
- Be useful and relevant to you.
- Be honest. No link cloaking. Affiliate links or referral links will always be labeled.
- Be respectful to you. I don’t appreciate ads that insult people. It’s a manipulative, underhanded way to get people to click on it.
I have yet to find these three requirements in an offer. Most of it has to do with my low traffic and that’s fine with me. There are very few ad-free, useful web sites left. I hope to remain as one of those havens, until the day someone approaches me with an offer that meets all three demands.
The Unglamorous Side of Rocking the Boat
I don’t know if this applies to anyone else. This is my story about the pickle I’ve gotten myself into.
I have done a fair job of shaking things up for the Web department. I have even converted a few people in other departments into thinking a little different when attempting to solve a problem. Instead of asking How do I bull doze my way through this problem and knock it down? (Yes, some of them still think the answer is to work more and more overtime.) I see more people asking How can I reasonably solve this issue without overworking myself? What’s the real issue here?
Some of the trouble with our department was disorganization. So much time was getting wasted (when doing web site updates, for example) because a web site had too many files to search through. No one deleted anything. Everything was kept, but never archived. Or in the case of new web sites, there wasn’t a central location to send new clients when they wanted to look at designs. Looks were e-mailed to individuals (until the style gallery was set up!).
Other problems involved upgrades. Some of it was software upgrades that we needed, others were upgrades to the process of how we built stuff. We managed to get our tools upgraded (most of it was software, some of it was training) and also used new methods to build stuff. Sale books take less time to build. New web sites take less time to build. Converted web sites take less time to maintain.
So we began the long haul of fixing and improving the web sites. This is where the 99% perspiration comes in. We are on the trailing, last small percentages of sites that have not migrated to Dreamweaver. We are on the last messy set of web sites that are not yet converted to CSS layouts. And because these projects have existed so long, the finish line feels miles away.
After experiencing the process of closing a project I know this is the most difficult part. Like wood shop in high school, it’s hard to get excited about cleaning up after your pool table is built, when you’re tired and dirty and bored. To top it off, I know I have to keep going until it’s done. No one else is responsible for seeing this to its end because it was my idea. I’m cursing my overzealous past self (for now, until it really is complete!), but I know I’d do it again.
The funny part comes when I realized I can’t keep myself motivated to finish a project “for the good of the company.” It sounds sweet and altruistic, but what really makes the midnight oil burn is pure selfishness. I claim ownership of it, ugly parts and all. No one else cares if I finish it, because it wasn’t their idea. Lots of people helped in the beginning, because it was interesting and I happily credit my co-workers for their support. But towards the end, I’m the only one cares. I wouldn’t be the first to lay a project or idea in the graveyard. But if I want others to believe my ideas are legitimate and workable, I have to prove it.
What about you? What gets you to the finish line?
Reading worth mulling over
I suppose at first it was simply shock. I have seen my great job turn itself on its head into something I loathe, in very short order. It started with the realization that I was putting off work by surfing the Internet and finishing nothing. No, it wasn’t the typical time stealers that Merlin Mann talks about in his multi-part series, Making Time to Make, although it was an interesting set of reading. I had already cut out all of the pointless garbage that was wasting my time; my problem was, I was wasting time on purpose, overwhelmed because I don’t like doing pointless, boring, repetitive work. It makes me scream uncontrollably.
After more time reading around the web, I found The Alternative Productivity Manifesto and very heartily agreed that we are not being rewarded for becoming more productive. Instead, companies become ever more greedy and expect ever more output. I decided to get back to work, but create self-imposed limits. Just because I am capable of working like two people, I no longer choose to do so. I am not getting paid like two people, I am not allowed to cut my work day in half. So now I work a steady pace (no matter what) and find I am much less stressed and feel a bit more in control of my day.
The root of my problem has to do with learning how to deal with a difficult person. This person had me seeing flames within the first thirty seconds of speaking to me, no matter the time of day or mood I was in. A gentle reminder about Dealing with Difficult People centered my universe and put me back at peace.
Now I put my nose to the grind stone and do the sucky work during the day, knowing that at night I can go home and continue a project I find much more rewarding (more about this in the future). Even though there are currently obstacles at my job, I’m working on becoming remarkable despite it. What inspires me now are a few other peers who have already become remarkable, by unabashedly following their interests and dreams.
The Photo Department Revisited
The Good
I did not realize part of the Photo department’s problem was multiple versions of the same photo. All I saw half a million photos listed on a single server, with a count close to 750,000 photos in total on all the servers. It didn’t occur to me that the most basic file management solution was not used. So what’s the good news? With the new hardware and software, it taught the ladies in the Photo department to think differently about how they organize and manage their photos. Since they knew it would only be a short amount of time before they would max out their new computer and software capabilities, they looked at their work and asked themselves, How can we make the best use of our new stuff? How can we make it last?
Their first answer was learning to let go of the old and outdated photos. The breeders shouldn’t be allowed to use photos (of a cow) that are six years out of date anyway. It throws the idea of ethics and honest representation out the window! After they quashed the outdated photos, they moved on to keeping only a single, working copy of an animal. Yes, there was only the most recent picture of that cow, but in the past it came in six different flavors: a black and white version, a color version, the original version that was sent to them, the new version with the ugly fence PhotoShopped out of the background…you get the idea. Now they hold only the final version.
The results? 500,000 animal photos have been condensed to a slimming 57,700 and counting. (They are still in the process of adding the new animals from this past breeding season).
The Bad
If they had given up storing outdated photos long ago, they would not have needed a dedicated search machine. Now they have a very expensive dedicated search machine that sits and gathers dust, because the finder window works just fine (again). I wish I could have caught the larger problem in the first place, but I wonder how much good that would have done. (And I am not sure the Photo Manager would have gracefully accepted the idea that a peon was pointing out a flaw in their work.)
The Ugly
If our company leaders were tuned in to their employees needs, this problem would not have happened at all. At the risk of sounding like the insubordinate brat that I am, upper management deserved the extra cost for the dedicated search machine simply because they were not paying attention to their duties. Had they been aware of the photo department’s issues in the first place, they could have found alternate and less costly solutions. Really, though, I think it turned out for the best. The heavy price tag was an excellent catalyst to motivate the photo department into thinking forward.
