kottke.org posts about working
People throw away thousands of losing tickets at off-track betting parlors every day. Except that some of those losing tickets are actually winners. This is where the stoopers come in.
For the past 10 years, Jesus Leonardo has been cleaning up at an OTB parlor in Midtown Manhattan, cashing in, by his own count, nearly half a million dollars’ worth of winning tickets from wagers on thoroughbred races across the country. “It is literally found money,” he said on a recent night from his private winner’s circle. He spends more than 10 hours a day there, feeding thousands of discarded betting slips through a ticket scanner in a never-ending search for someone else’s lost treasure.
How Aaron Swartz hires programmers.
To find out whether someone’s smart, I just have a casual conversation with them. I do everything I can to take off any pressure off: I meet at a cafe, I make it clear it’s not an interview, I do my best to be casual and friendly. Under no circumstances do I ask them any standard “interview questions” — I just chat with them like I would with someone I met at a party. (If you ask people at parties to name their greatest strengths and weaknesses or to estimate the number of piano tuners in Chicago, you’ve got bigger problems.) I think it’s pretty easy to tell whether someone’s smart in casual conversation. I constantly make judgments about whether people I meet are smart, just like I constantly make judgments about whether people I see are attractive.
(via df)
In The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office” and the followup The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk, Venkatesh Rao dissects and analyzes the American version of The Office to a degree I hadn’t thought was possible.
After four years, I’ve finally figured the show out. The Office is not a random series of cynical gags aimed at momentarily alleviating the existential despair of low-level grunts. It is a fully-realized theory of management that falsifies 83.8% of the business section of the bookstore.
Even if you’re only an occasional viewer of the show, this is worth reading through, especially if you work in an office environment. (thx, zach)
Some folks from the web magazine Double X wondered what it would be like to drink as much in the workplace as the characters do on Mad Men. So they spent the day getting hammered and tried to do some work. The results are somewhat different than on the show.
Every seven years, Stefan Sagmeister closes his design studio for a year of focused R&D.
Every seven years, designer Stefan Sagmeister closes his New York studio for a yearlong sabbatical to rejuvenate and refresh their creative outlook. He explains the often overlooked value of time off and shows the innovative projects inspired by his time in Bali.
So says Caterina Fake:
We agreed that a lot of what we then considered “working hard” was actually “freaking out”. Freaking out included panicking, working on things just to be working on something, not knowing what we were doing, fearing failure, worrying about things we needn’t have worried about, thinking about fund raising rather than product building, building too many features, getting distracted by competitors, being at the office since just being there seemed productive even if it wasn’t — and other time-consuming activities. This time around we have eliminated a lot of freaking out time. We seem to be working less hard this time, even making it home in time for dinner.
I would likely give the same advice, but I wonder if it’s actually true. Perhaps working hard/freaking out was exactly what was needed at the time, whether or not it seems efficient or correct in retrospect. You need to travel that road so you can find a better way the second time around.
That was the question asked over on Clusterflock, with the following anecdote offered as a starter:
I increased [my boss’s] sugar intake by one spoon at a time and generally left a couple of days in between changes. I kept going until I was bored. I guess part of me wanted her to notice, but she never did. Not even the amount of sugar we were getting through. Anyway, I eventually got her up to 23 spoons of sugar in a cup of tea — yeah, 23! She never said a word and always finished the cup.
Reminds me of some of the stuff that Jim does to Dwight on The Office. At my first job out of college, some coworkers of mine and I found a Mac OS extension that decreased the size of the screen by a pixel or two each time the computer booted. I don’t think we ever installed it on anyone’s computer; just imagining the reaction was good enough.
Paul Graham on the difference between the “maker’s schedule” and the “manager’s schedule”.
When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.
Graham is right on about this.
Update: Gina Trapani adds:
As a freelancer, I get lots of requests to “grab coffee” (as Graham describes) with folks who are just interested in seeing if working together is a possibility. Whenever that happens, my heart sinks. If I’m on deadline or deep in a programming project, grabbing coffee midday with someone I don’t know and might not have any good business reason to talk to changes the tenor of the entire day. When I can, I usually I turn down these types of speculative meetings because the costs are too high-but I always feel bad about it, and never know how to word my response. (Generally I say, “Sorry I’m just too busy.”)
A common misconception about freelancers is that they can do whatever they want whenever they want, but that’s not actually true if you want to get anything done. Large chunks of uninterrupted time is the only thing that works.
CNNMoney tells us about seven great companies to work for. For instance, a Colorado brewing company gives their employees free beer and company ownership.
After one year of work, each employee receives an ownership stake in the company and a free custom bicycle. After five years every employee enjoys an all-expenses-paid trip to Belgium — the country whose centuries-old beer tradition serves as a model for the Fort Collins, Colo., brewery. Oh yeah, and employees get two free six-packs of beer a week.
Tyler Cowen on how to keep your job. Click through to see which of the following is most effective:
1. Make your boss aware of all your recent accomplishments at work.
2. Butter up your boss with compliments.
3. Tell your boss you’d be willing to accept a pay cut to keep your job.
Cliff Kuang traces the evolution of office designs from the open factory-like floors of Frederick Taylor to the present era of semi-private pods.
Scott Berkun shares how great managers get that way.
8. Self aware, including weaknesses. This is the kicker. Great leaders know what they suck at, and either work on those skills or hire people they know make up for their own weaknesses, and empower them to do so. This tiny little bit of self-awareness makes them open to feedback and criticism to new areas they need to work on, and creates an example for movement in how people should be growing and learning about new things.
(via world airmail links)
Peter Merholz asks: is your company designed for humans or fleshy automatons?
We’re placed in hierarchical org charts, remnant of railroad and factory operations of the 19th century, and find ourselves in silos that prevent us from collaborating with our colleagues.
We’re given job titles with an explicit set of responsibilities, and discouraged to perform outside that boundary.
Time has a list of ten ideas that are changing the world right now. This is not a typical mindless list (e.g. green energy! um…more green energy)…there’s some good stuff here. Jobs Are The New Assets asserts now that making money with money (i.e. stocks and property) while you sit on your ass all days doesn’t fly, your job is your main source of income and financial stability.
All the while, we blissfully ignored a little concept economists like to call human capital. The cognition you’ve got up there in your head — your education and training — it’s worth something. We can extract value not just from our homes and our portfolios but from ourselves as well. The mechanism for extracting that value? A job. “The income you earn from working is like the stream of interest income you might get from owning a bond,” says Johns Hopkins University economist Christopher Carroll. “Think of it as a dividend on your human wealth.”
Michael Lewis recently said something similar in an interview for Big Think.
When you think of making money, think of what you do for a living, not the financial markets.
Amortality is my favorite entry on the list. It’s a more general version of the Grups theory put forth in New York magazine three years ago. An amortal person is someone who lives a similar lifestyle all throughout their life, from their teens to their 80s.
For all the optimism about how science may prolong life, mice and humans keep turning up their toes. No matter how much the government bullies and cajoles, amortals rarely make adequate provision for their final years. Yet even as faltering amortals strain the public purse, so their determination to wring every drop out of life brings benefits to the private sector. They prop up the tottering music industry, are lifelong consumers of gadgets and gizmos, keep gyms busy and colorists in demand. From their youth, when they behave as badly as adults, to their dotage, when they behave as badly as youngsters, amortals hate to be pigeonholed by age.
Liz Danzico turned a malapropism into a useful word. Mentornship, n.
Internship for the bright or advanced individual under guidance of a more senior practitioner. No making copies or coffee.
I love this idea, although I’ve never been a believer in interns fetching coffee or doing the shopping at Staples. The bright-but-junior person sees obvious educational benefits from the arrangement but so does the senior practitioner; they get high quality work and access to a sharp beginner’s mind. With the right people, the mentornship would likely morph into a collaboration before too long.
Update: Mentornship technically isn’t a malapropism, it’s a portmanteau word. (thx, dave)
Michael Lewis talks a little about his writing process.
I’ve written in awful enough situations that I know that the quality of the prose doesn’t depend on the circumstance in which it is composed. I don’t believe the muse visits you. I believe that you visit the muse. If you wait for that “perfect moment” you’re not going to be very productive.
The Big Picture collected a bunch of photos of people at work, spinning silk yarn, on a shoe assembly line, sanding and buffing an Oscar statue, checking flour-making equipment, inspecting cigars, assembling model trains, and making toilet bowls.
Aaron Swartz has some interesting thoughts on non-hierarchical management in the workplace.
A better way to think of a manager is as a servant, like an editor or a personal assistant. Everyone wants to be effective; a manager’s job is to do everything they can to make that happen. The ideal manager is someone everyone would want to have.
Instead of the standard “org chart” with a CEO at the top and employees growing down like roots, turn the whole thing upside down. Employees are at the top — they’re the ones who actually get stuff done — and managers are underneath them, helping them to be more effective. (The CEO, who really does nothing, is of course at the bottom.)
Swartz also quotes a friend who believes that people who act like jerks in the workplace are not worth the trouble.
I have a “no asshole rule” which is really simple: I really don’t want to work with assholes. So if you’re an asshole and you work on my team, I’m going to fire you.
I have worked with (and near) several assholes in my time and I’m convinced that firing one unpleasant person, even if they perform a vital function, is equivalent to hiring two great employees. The boost in morale alone is worth it.
Update: A recent episode of This American Life called Ruining It for the Rest of Us covered the asshole in the workplace thing.
A bad apple, at least at work, can spoil the whole barrel. And there’s research to prove it. Host Ira Glass talks to Will Felps, a professor at Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands, who designed an experiment to see what happens when a bad worker joins a team. Felps divided people into small groups and gave them a task. One member of the group would be an actor, acting either like a jerk, a slacker or a depressive. And within 45 minutes, the rest of the group started behaving like the bad apple.
(thx, scott & david)
In a 10-minute video, Randy Nelson, the Dean of Pixar University, talks about how Pixar hires. One thing they look for is people who are interested rather than interesting.
As a general rule, meetings make individuals perform below their capacity and skill levels. This doesn’t mean we should always avoid face-to-face meetings - but it is certain that every organization has too many meetings, and far too many poorly designed ones.
— Reid Hastie, behavioral scientist
The Daily Routines blog collects stories about interesting people organize their days. For instance, Thomas Friedman “can’t wait to get [his] pants on in the morning”. Neither can we! Reminds me of rodcorp’s How we work. (via snarkmarket)
More on the Saigon Grill saga: the owners were arrested yesterday on over 400 counts of “violating minimum-wage laws, falsifying business records and defrauding the state’s unemployment insurance system”.
“Like so many restaurants across New York City, Saigon Grill was run on the backs of its workers,” Mr. Cuomo said in a statement. “These workers allowed the business to thrive, and in exchange they were allegedly cheated out of wages, fined for ridiculous reasons” and, he said, “pulled into a painstaking ploy to cover it all up.”
(thx, nick)
Love this.
A federal judge has awarded $4.6 million in back pay and damages to 36 delivery workers at two Saigon Grill restaurants in Manhattan, finding blatant and systematic violations of minimum-wage and overtime laws.
We live right around the corner from one of the SGs and have avoided eating there despite the decent and close Vietnamese food. The fired workers were out in front of the place protesting for months and months…it’s great to see hard work pay off like that, particularly when the protestors probably couldn’t actually afford to be out there.
Some people now work at walking desks, standing-height desks outfitted with treadmills.
To the uninitiated, work-walking sounds like a recipe for distraction. But devotees say the treadmill desks increase not only their activity but also their concentration. “I thought it was ridiculous until I tried it,” said Ms. Krivosha, 49, a partner in the law firm of Maslon Edelman Borman & Brand. Ms. Krivosha said it is tempting to become distracted during conference calls, but when she is exercising, she listens more intently. “Walking just takes care of the A.D.D. part,” she said.
One work-walker lost 16 pounds doing two hours of work-walking over a two-month period.
Update: Walking desk + addictiveness of World of Warcraft = 100 pound weight loss. Of course, he estimates that he gained 60-70 pounds playing Warcraft and eating Hot Tamales. (thx, johan)
Update: Walking desk footage on YouTube. (via get fit slowly)
If you live and work in Los Angeles and have an average commute, you spend 72 hours a year in traffic. That’s enough time to read War and Peace once, get through Wagner’s The Ring Cycle almost five times, or watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy almost eight times. The page includes stats for other cities too.
Update: A closer read, a bit of arithmetic, and several emails have convinced me that the 72 hours is not the overall commute time but the time spent sitting motionless in traffic. (thx, everyone)
How to be a good intern. This list works equally well for advice on how to be a good employee, manager, or CEO. “There are no stupid questions” is good advice no matter what. (via swissmiss)
Picking a subject from his upcoming book, Malcolm Gladwell talked about the difficulty in hiring people in the increasingly complex thought-based contemporary workplace. Specifically that we’re using a collection of antiquated tools to evaluate potential employees, creating what he calls “mismatch problems” in the workplace, when the critera for evaluating job candidates is out of step with the demands of the job.
To illustrate his point, Gladwell talked about sports combines, events that professional sports leagues hold for scouts to evaluate potential draftees based on a battery of physical, psychological, and intelligence tests. What he found, a result that echoes what Michael Lewis talks about in Moneyball, is that sports combines are a poor way to determine how well an athlete will eventually perform as a member of their eventual team. One striking example he gave is the intelligence test they give to NFL quarterbacks. Two of the test’s all-time worst performers were Dan Marino and Terry Bradshaw, Hall of Famers both.
A more material example is teachers. Gladwell says that while we evaluate teachers on the basis of high standardized test scores and whether they have degrees and credentialed training, that makes little difference in how well people actually teach.
Four chefs talk about how their kitchens are laid out in this month’s Metropolis. Here’s Dan Barber talking about his role at Blue Hill at Stone Barns:
At the same time, I don’t think the cooks look at me as a real community member. I’m not that cozy paternal figure. I’m always doing different things, and it creates this atmosphere where the cooks are on the balls of their feet. They’re thinking, Where’s he going next, what’s happening next? There’s a little bit of confusion. I think that’s good. It’s hard to articulate, because you think of the kitchen as very organized; and, like I said, the more control you have, the better. But a little bit of chaos creates tension. And that creates energy and passion, and it tends to make you season something the right way or reach for something that would add this, that, or the other thing.
The other chefs are Alice Waters, Grant Achatz, and Wylie Dufresne. The one thing they all talked about is the importance of open sight lines, both between the dining room and kitchen and among the chefs in the kitchen.
Clothing libraries loan clothes out for free (or a small fee) to unemployed people for job interviews or to expecting mothers so they don’t have to buy a whole bunch of maternity clothes. Great idea. (via magnetbox)
A thoughtful memorandum from the archives of the RAND Corporation as they contemplated designing a new building for the optimal accomplishment of work in 1950.
This implies that it should be easy and painless to get from one point to another in the building; it should even promote chance meetings of people. A formal call by Mr. X on Mr. Y is the only way X and Y can develop such a tender thing as an idea — the social scientists have taught me to use X and Y in that bawdy manner. If the interoffice distances are to be kept reasonable, the building must be compact. It need not be circular; a square is often a good substitute for a circle, and even a rectangle is not bad, if the aspect ratio does not get out of hand.
The memo’s author even gets into lattice theory in attempting to keep inter-office travel times down. As a contemporary example, Pixar’s office in Emeryville was designed to bring the company’s employees randomly together during the day:
I was the first person from the group of journalists to arrive, giving me plenty of time to look around the lobby, which is actually a gigantic football-field length atrium, the centerpiece of the entire building.
As it was explained to me later, Steve Jobs originally proposed a building with one bathroom, something that would drive foot traffic to a central area all day long. Obviously, they’ve got more than one bathroom in the building, but just standing there and watching as everyone arrived to start their day, it was obvious that Jobs had managed the feat.
The mailboxes, the employee cafe, and the common room where all the games are all open into that atrium, and people lingered, talking, exchanging ideas and discussing the various projects they’re working on. It seemed like a fertile, creative environment, and I felt like Charlie Bucket holding a golden ticket as I examined the larger-than-life Incredibles statues in the center of the atrium and the concept paintings hung on the walls.
(thx, jean-paul)
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