Kristin wrote:
> What I object to is that it is the very best and brightest in a company
> (nhot the secretary type "stuipd end users") who need to be so MANAGED and
> CONTROLLED. It is like you were in nursery school. If I get job offerfs I
> think will will want to read the company's usage policy (usage policies
> are normal i know) before accepting. anyone bright enough to be offeneded
> can probably go off and work independently, consult or what not, because
> the most skiled and valuable, why should they have to submjit to an
> organization with a lot of nasty rules?!!!!!??
First off, I'll register a token protest of the term "stupid end users", as
it's not terribly polite.
Second, it's debatable as to whether programmers *are* necessarily the "best
and brightest" of a company. It takes a lot of different areas of knowledge
to make a company run well. Marketing, sales, customer service are all as
important as the technical knowledge a company has to offer. If the
customers don't know you're there (marketing), won't buy from you (sales) or
get sick of dealing with you (customer service), it doesn't matter how much
better your end product is, because it's going nowhere. I've dealt with
some (by no means all, or even a majority) engineers and programmers and
technicians that have an unrivalled knowledge of their field combined with
the absolute worst social and/or business skills I've ever seen.
That said, I don't think it's necessarily treating people like they're
babies, or controlling them, to say, "Keep the surfing to lunch breaks", or
"Don't use company phones for personal business". The legal protections
afforded by such policies are alone sufficient to make them a no-brainer (I
won't even insult your intelligence by going into detail about why you'd
want to prevent your employees from surfing porn sites on the job). If a
programmer doesn't want to work for a company that makes him spend some time
at work actually working, he can (a) quit and look for another job or (b)
suck it up and do his job. He's not chained to the desk, and no one is
going to send the bloodhounds out after him if he decides to find another
employer.
I'll point out that I have made some conscious choices about the degree to
which I enforce the rules for my team. I feel that I've got a good idea
about the level of supervision they need to work at their best, and they are
all adult enough to know how much they can get away with. Thus, I'm not
going to jump all over someone if they take advantage of a lull to open a
browser window to quickly check the news, or if they make a brief call to
take care of some personal business when there are no other calls coming in.
The technicians that haven't been able to figure this out don't last.
Personally, I'd rather work for a more laid-back company, and it'd be great
to be able to surf all I wanted at work without checking behind me for "The
Man", but that job hasn't come my way yet, and to be brutally honest, I
don't hold much hope it'll happen. Corporate life isn't the greatest, but
I've managed to carve myself a nice niche at Broadwing Communications, and
it'll do until I can open my game store (at which point I'll work longer
hours for less money and more stress, but I'll at least be doing it for a
boss I can handle - me.).
Adam C. Lipscomb
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
ICQ# 32384792
