On Sun, 29 Nov 2009 20:02:24 -0800, the infamous "DGDevin" scrawled the following:
There is also a thing called "down time", say, when an employee hands in a report and is waiting for the boss to read it and let them edit it, etc. They jump on the Internet and look for xmas presents while waiting, since they have nothing else to do for the company at the moment. This keeps the employee busy and their morale high. It's good for the company. When said employee has other business they could attend to but they spend company time online, that's an ethical breach.
-- Some days, it's not even worth chewing through the restraints.
At the Widget Factory, workers wee expected to make 100 widgets each every day. Anything less than 85 would get you a warning, three warnings you are out.
Stan goes to hs bench at the start of the shift. He takes a quick break and is back in the allotted time. Takes lunch and promptly return. At the end of the day, he is able to make 90 widgets, the best of his ability.
Richard punches in on time but is usually a few minutes late getting to his bench. Every half hour he is out taking a smoke break. At lunch, he is the first to wash up, last to return. More smoke breaks in the afternoon. He alow wanders down tot he supply room sometime chatting with othersa long htee way. At the end of the shift he is washed up and standing at the time clock, first to punch out. At t he end of the day, he's made 120 widgets, yet some call him a slacker because he is always away from his bench so much. .
Big Boss says Richard is no longer alllowed to wander away. He goes from
120 Widgets to 99 per day but Big Boss is happy because Richard is now a steady worker.
New model Widget II is starting production. No one knows how to make it. Richard ignores those trying. Engineer that designed part comes and tries and fails after a day. Bring in tooling man at big bucks. He too fails after a half day. Everyone but Richard goes to lunch.
Ten minutes later, Richard puts perfect Widget II on my desk and asks, "is it OK if I go down to the storeroom?" Yes, you can and you can have a smoke too.
Richard is his real names and he made parts on a Pines tubing bender better and faster than anyone. He worked in spurts so no, your argument that he could produce more if he stayed at the machine were proven wrong time and again. Many people are best productive if just left alone to do their jobs.
Sounds like Big Boss is the kind of guy who stands by his window with watch in hand noting who comes in 30 seconds late but he's not there when the guy goes home at 2 AM.
OK, I see your true story and raise you two true stories.
I had a good friend who was a radio engineer. He was responsible for all things technical for a number of radio stations. Everything from the transmission towers, the transmitters themselves and anything electronic in the place. And he was very good at his job. He was some kinda electronic genius from an early age. He had it in his genes.
A moron, managerial type was hired at a radio station he was working at. He noted that Marty was spending a lot of time drinking coffee and playing cards in the conference room. Which he immediately interpered as some form of laziness. So he set out to find all kinds of stupid grunt tasks for Marty to perform so "he could earn his money". Marty tried to explain to him that he followed a strict routine to keep the station on the air and insure uninterupted service. But drone manager was not impressed with facts or logic.
Soon, the predicted disaster struck. Marty was out running errands for the drone manager when the radio station went down. It took almost an hour to contact Marty because the drone manager wanted to save money by taking away his car phone. This was pre cellular phone days. And it took another hour or two for Marty to drive to the transmission tower and replace a huge tube in the transmitter.
And this is precisely the kind of thing he did on a regular basis before drone manager showed up and tried to "save money" and make Marty "earn his money". He got called on the carpet and elequently explained his procedures that were gutted by said drone manager. Drone manager was not fired, but he was stripped of all powers over Marty. Marty returned to his usual routine and the station never went down again as long as he worked there.
Story number two.
Had a friend named Mike. He was a radio operator in the navy aboard an aircraft carrier. He worked the evening shift. He brought a pillow to work. He slept most of the night. Every so often he would get a call on the radio. It was a routine thing to insure that all communications were working well in case operations needed to be started up. So Mike would just sleep untill that call came in. He would wake up, take care of biz and promptly go back to sleep.
Well, it had to happen. He got a young, fresh out of school officer in, who objected to his "unmilitary" approach to his job. Mike was very good at his job and tried to explain to young, brash officer why he did what he did. But young brash officer just had to assert himself and gave Mike the oldest grunt job in the Navy, scrubbing floors.
Sooooo....., Mke scrubbed the floors and ignored the call coming in. Which was easy to do, since Mike scrubbed the floor in the radio room and was sent out into the hall way to scrub those floors. He probably would have ended up scrubbing the whole ship down if this idiot officer would have been allowed to continue this lunacy.
Mike got called into the CO's office the next day to explain why he did not answer his radio calls. He explained what happened. The CO was shocked that this idiot thought scrubbing floors was more important and "more military" than insuring the readiness of the carrier battle group to conduct operations.
Idiot officer got reprimanded and Mike went back to his regular routine the next night. He brought his pillow to work each night after that. And nobody gave him any trouble after that.
Also posted from work.
And I have to make a personal call now to see about a present for my honey.
I think you've got it. But it is interesting that I got a lot more response to the afterthought on frequent flier miles than to the main thread of shopping during working time.
As for those who thought I worked in a sweatshop, I was a computer programmer for about 45 years. The last 15 or so as self-employed. I went in when I felt like it, worked at home when I wanted, etc.. The rare times when I conducted personal business at work, I got it approved first. And as a freelance, I deducted any such time, and any long lunch hours, from the hours billed.
I was thinking that it seems doubtful that many real slackers take up woodworking as a hobby. It looks like a lot of work! Not only that, one soon finds that it's more difficult than it looks! :)
There is a *big* difference between a salaried person and a contractor. Charging a contract for personal time spent is (almost always, but I'm sure someone will find an exception somewhere ;) fraud. Salary, at least in theory, has nothing to do with the actual time worked.
Has much to do w/ circumstances and workplace culture and how hours are scheduled.
I've been in professional offices where rigorous hours were expected for everybody including both departure as well as arrival. In that environment, there's no room for personal time other than the mandatory, short time to deal with stuff like answering the reminder phone from dentists' office or home on the sick kids or whatever...
OTOH, I spent quite a long time (>20 yrs) in another organization that was laisse-faire about individual hours as long as there was sufficient overlap w/ colleagues that all necessary interactions occurred on a timely basis. There, folks worked their own schedule and routinely worked far over the "base 40" on own volition even accounting for personal time taken while at the desk[1]. Abuse would be fairly easily observed as it wouldn't take long before an excess of nonproductive hours would show up in that individual's output. Individual timesheets and logs were required to be kept as backup documentation although never routinely scrutinized; only the reported hours on the bimonthly timecards were routinely used.
When self-employed and billing by the hour, obviously meticulous attention to billing only hours actually working for the particular client is mandatory.
[1] Part of that was owing to the fact that while this was a quite large overall organization it was (at that time still) 100% employee-owned; hence, there was an inherent self-rewarding financial incentive to do well financially for the company as it was essentially working for oneself.
At a big blue widget factory, there was a software type who'd been criticized steadily by his boss for his un-engineering approach to writing software, for working on an erratic schedule, for showing a strong preference for /little/ computers, and for his unstructured approach to problem-solving...
On the way out of the widget factory one Friday evening, the guy was stopped by his boss' boss' BOSS and asked how the current project (scheduled for completion six months down the road) was going because it was crucial that he be able to use at least a draft version of the package under development to produce a division budget early the next week. After about two minutes of increasingly stressed conversation, the two parted - the 4th level manager to his car, and the software type back into the factory.
The rest of his department had already left, and the computer room was locked up tight, but there was a lab with a minicomputer open. The geek called his wife, told her the situation, and sat down at the keypunch.
By six o'clock Monday morning the code was complete, test data had been generated to exercise every part of the package, the package had been verified bug-free, and was ready to crunch real numbers to produce a real budget. Each program's card deck was rubber-banded and laid out on a work table. The cards would have made a stack between five and six feet high. It was time for a coffee break.
On the way to his desk from the coffee machine, he left a note on the
4th level manager's desk that, as far as he could tell, the software was ready for a live data test. Back in his own office he got a yellow pad, put his feet up on his desk, and sipped coffee while he made notes about some possible ways to improve the existing package - until his boss stopped by to confirm information that he'd completed the package over the weekend. He was visibly upset and asked the software type to come to his office...
...where he chewed the guy out for screwing up the development schedule and "trashing" the department's mission. Even with the door closed, everyone within fifty feet could hear him shout: "You SOB - if I thought I could make it stick, I'd fire your ass! Now get outa my office!"
Very tired and very pissed, he went back to the minicomputer lab where he returned the rubber bands to the box they'd come from and tossed the decks of loose cards into the waste basket. That done, he returned to his desk and consigned his wadded notes to the trash basket and was wondering how he was going to make it through the day when the 4th level manager appeared and offered coffee and an invitation for an immediate one-on-one in /his/ office.
It turned out he already knew the whole story (presumably that's one of the reasons one is promoted to that level at that factory) and he managed sufficient gentle persuasion to convince the geek to dig the cards out of the trash and put the (unsequenced) decks back in order before reporting back to him.
When the geek reported back, he was told that the loud-mouthed manager had already been replaced, and that he would never manage another project at that widget company. His last words on the matter were: "Thanks for all your work. Now go home and get some rest - you look like hell."
Later that day (while the programmer slept) the package turned out what was submitted to widget headquarters as the division's annual budget.
This particular widget company's top management didn't like the idea of major applications being run on little 32K minicomputers, so they spent to have three (other) departments spend two years re-implementing that same software to run on "real" computers. When they were done, the only noticeable difference was that the runtime had increased from four hours to eighteen hours.
The *theory* is that you're paid to do a job and measured on that, rather than the number of hours sitting at a desk. In theory, theory and reality are the same. In reality, they're different.
When I worked for IBM no one ever looked at my hours. I could come and go as I pleased. The only rule was that if I wasn't going to show up management should know about it, preferably ahead of time. THe last decade or so I was there, working from home was perfectly acceptable though again, management had to know how to get ahold of you.
: Dave, did you happen to notice the thread topic? : : I shouldn't have to explain this, but the point was that the miles didn't : belong to me. So it would have been unethical for me to keep them. Are you : with me so far? Now, for extra points, contemplate this: the people at : Lockheed who found them in their possession then had an ethics problem of : their own to solve. I hope - I really do - that they solved that problem in : an ethically sound way. : : Ethics. You could look it up.
Preachy aren't we, Tom? I'll stand my ethics next to yours anytime, Tom.. I flew enough in my later years with Southern Pacific that I made Silver Elite with Continental. SP was happy for us to keep the frequent flyer miles. And while nobody ever stated the company's philosophy [to me] I always felt like that since we were the "road warriors" [so-to-speak] who left our families and homelife behind for the benefit of the company, often for a month at a time, they were happy for us to have the extra perk. So, Tom, it begs the question, "Why would Lockheed NOT want their employees to have them as an extra perk? And, you've still not answered the original question, what did Lockheed [corporate] do with them? Throw them away?
... Nowhere I ever worked (engineering) didn't have a listed set of office hours as part of the employment arrangement whether there was a formal contract agreement or simply as part of the package of information personnel provided during hiring and/or orientation. "Theory" was there was sufficient complexity in the work to keep one occupied those hours...or more... :)
As noted in another thread, I've been in organizations that were at both extremes (as well as in the middle) on actually keeping track or paying attention to _when_ the hours were worked altho I've never been in one that didn't keep track of which projects one was working on simply for cost management and control; even in internal R&D organizations. It would seem only if one was in a group that had only a single mission and top-level budget could that not be required to have any handle whatsoever on costs. And, of course, if one is working on projects that have end-customers such as power nuclear reactors for specific utilities, its clearly required to know which project gets billed appropriately. And, of course, if one were working defense or other gov't-funded contracts the paper reqm'ts to satisfy DCAA were significant irrespective of the employer's bent w/o that "motivation".
While not technically self employed, I worked as a contractor for Lockheed Martin for a year. I regularly billed them for the 65-70hrs/ week worked. I wasn't paid an overtime multiplier but at my regular hourly rate that would just have been a further embarrassment. ;-)
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