5 min to read
What I learned from DHH
David Heinemeier Hansson
After reading a few articles and DHH’s book Rework as well as It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work and Remote: Office Not Required I had some thoughts.
- Company culture is not parties/retreats that’s hanging out, company culture is the set or rules employees apply to problems, clients, each other at the company. Knowing how to act when the client asks OT etc.
- Start off with a single day remote, work it up. If performance is good go to another country.
- Having less overlap is better, i.e. 4 hours because it gives 4 hours to concentrate.
- Constantly asking what you’re working on keeps you from working on it.
- No need to fill the day with ‘management stuff’. Management likely doesn’t require full time hours so no need to fill time with idle work/meetings.
- This is a marathon, not a sprint. There are many projects, cannot sprint on everything o/w you are constantly sprinting.
- Mixing retirement lifestyle with work lifestyle. Not wait until you’re done with your job to enjoy life.
- International team means you have perspectives from different countries. i.e. week starts on sunday in USA but monday elsewhere => useful when creating an online calendar
- Long time employees are well suited for remote work because they know everyone and how everything works.
- Equal pay for equal work. Even though you live in cheap place you still get big place salary. This will keep you from leaving.
- Pay to solve a problem 1 week if out of work, 2 weeks if working already. Don’t make them do it for free. You don’t do work for free.
- Have some of top brass work remotely so people with influence can identify problems with remote work and fix them.
- The best workers are the ones who put in sustainable hours in the long term. Not too much, not too little.
- Only way to motivate is to make people work on stuff they like with people they like, not rewards or punishments.
- Allow month long sabbatical for employees with 3+ years at company. Necessary to recharge.
- Remote nomad. Once established can work remotely. Don’t wait until you retire to travel the world. Just need to overlap for a few hours a day with coworkers.
- Most startups nowadays are obsessed with the open office environment, and it’s nearly impossible to find companies that do not implement this type of layout.
- they want an “open and transparent culture” worst possible setup for actual work,
- You don’t have to look far to find plenty of research on the subject- and quite frankly, there is simply no debate here. There is no evidence to support the hypothesis that open office layouts foster a more collaborative environment.
- It’s hard to estimate how many startups are being held back by the obsession and group think around the open office environment.
- There is also the cost to the mental health of the employees who are subjected to these mad houses every day
- DHH: “The open office plan is a tyrant of interruption, a deep loss of privacy, and the death of productivity”
- I force myself to be up early and rush to work, feeling ill prepared
- I try to focus and be effective in the morning, but struggle and the day is off to a bad start, killing my mood and momentum
- I’m tired in the afternoon and cannot work effectively at my peak work time. I drink tons of coffee trying to kickstart my productivity
- I go home when I’m finally starting to get going
- I am restless in bed and can’t sleep because I drank too much coffee and I’m worried about getting up early
- By the end of the week I am tired, frustrated, angry, and disappointed with my performance
- It’s a vicious cycle which has been hugely detrimental to my mental health and well being.
- You should be measuring the output of your workers, not the amount of time you can see them sitting in your office
- I refuse to work in a place with such a cynical view of their employees.
- If you really think your employees will not be working if you cannot look over their shoulder to check, you have the wrong way of looking at the relationship with your employees (especially at a startup)
- You should be hiring people who are engaged by their work and believe in the company’s mission. If people slack off when you aren’t watching them, your company has a disease, and you have discovered a symptom
- You cannot treat this symptom and expect the disease to be cured.
- Remove the safety nets and let the bad actors fail
- some employees do not do their best work from home, or simply don’t like it. That is fine — but you should trust your employees and treat them like adults. Let them make the call for themselves. Remove the training wheels and let them fail. If they cannot succeed in a hands off environment, do you really think babysitting them is going to work?
- Bad actors in an organization will figure out what the rules and the process are and follow them to a letter. Then they’ll find a way to slack off within these boundaries.
- Even if we wanted to, we can’t write a rule that will magically make people engaged.
- We have to compel them by building a workplace they love and can do great, meaningful work in.
- Without tons of rules and process, it becomes very obvious who cares about the organization and who does not, thanks to the lack of rules & process and not because of them.
- It’s the same reason that communism does not work nearly as well as capitalism — things work best when you give people freedom as individual actors.
- If you are looking at your employees through the lens of “I can’t give these people freedom and autonomy to do work in the best way they see fit:” You should consider finding different people for your organization instead of pursuing an authoritarian regime.
- obsession with “hard work” is founded in a pessimistic view of natural state of humanity being lazy loafers
- Effort is not accomplishment
