I was always fascinated by these kind of things and I always wondered why they are necessary, as I had never had a job in the past 15 years where you couldn’t open a sports page once in a while. Or better said, where someone would expect you sit 6-8-10 hours in front of the computer and churn code without interruption. Or go outside and check the scores on your phone
You have to bare in mind this appears to be an Indian site and a lot of companies in India have a very different culture to that of the Silicon Valley (or even London).
A few years back I worked for a company who had a UK branch. The boss at the UK office was generally nice enough, but very strict about what was allowed at the office. We managed all IT from the Danish office, and would notice that a certain hours in-bound traffic would increase a lot.
When we look into why we figured out that it was a few guys, working insane hours, who where streaming Champions League while working. Technically not allowed at the UK office, but the decision from the Danish IT Manager: "Fuck it! If they're still at work they should at least be allowed to watch a game".
Never had that as an issue in India as well for me. No one has questioned what I do in my desk or my computer, even in some of the large consulting companies.
This is mostly true for services companies (TCS, Infosys, etc). A lot of restrictions are there because clients demand it. It is borne out of fear of data breach. So these companies goes few steps ahead and impose blanket ban of lot of things e.g can't plug USB devices to company provided laptops, No permissions to install anything (except whitelisted software).
On the other hand, new age product companies/startups are similar to Silicon Valley.
I worked for Microsoft about 10 years back. Unfun workplace. I thought it would be so fun to work there. I fought and got through three interviews. The team seemed cool initially. By week three I knew I had made a mistake. These people seemed so stodgy, so incapable of having a bit of fun. So utterly by the book. They almost seemed unable to deviate from the script. There was a sense of fear in the air that took a month or two to sense. I swore then I'd never work for another massive IT company and left after 6 months. I now focus on non-profits and I couldn't be happier. I get to work on cool projects that I often come up with. If I think I can build or code something better than what we have, I'm given the green light to do a working prototype. What more could I ask for? Sure, the pay is lower. But I work 8 hours and go home. There are no laborious crunch days trying to get something out the door. No meticulous, nasty meetings where everyone is playing one-upmanship, or buzzword bingo with gems like "synergistic" or using stupid phrases like "we tuned x and boom goes the dynamite", no talk of cross-functional team spearheading, no sharing an office with people who won't stop farting despite the nasty looks and obvious can of Glade.
Give me a task, a deadline, a budget, and get out of the way. I have rarely asked for a software license. I can do most things with FOSS/Linux. I may ask for a Raspberry Pi to prototype something or a slice of a VM for Ubuntu Server. These things cost almost nothing. I truly enjoy getting things done with minimal resources. It's fun working within contraints like RAM, hardware specs. I could see how embedded work would be fun in this regard.
With everything in life--it depends on the team you work with. I work for a Fortune 50 company and in my first role the team was a lot of fun. We had Slack and the memes were borderline for a work environment but it was a high trust team. I switched to a new department and I feel like I work for the federal government. It's like there's a fear around expressing any emotion. There are pros and cons to each situation.
I used to work for a startup and that culture was a lot of fun at first but the "blow investor money on catered lunches every day but you can't hire more engineers" mentality seemed very childish to me. I learned that I like the middle ground.
Some entrepreneurs running their own companies find the idea of even a minute of employee's time they are paying for being spent on anything other than their actual tasks infuriating.
I agree to you but they often think they are paying for an entire work day of focused working. As to me, I actually find the idea of 8 hours (or even 6) of uninterrupted (even if we don't count bathroom and lunch breaks) focused working absurd. It would require taking meth or enormous will effort. To me it seems all the time of pure focused work (unless it requires almost no mental processing) per day can only add up to 4 hours or so. IIRC there even is a scientific paper supporting this.
I think before the open plan office frenzy it was quite normal. By the way, I discovered most of my friends WFH now and don't plan to quit, so maybe we can treat open-plan offices as a crazy fashion that appeared, persisted in spite of multiple studies showing it's bad for everybody (including micromanaging bosses), and now no longer makes sense as those who can WFH.
I remember in 2016 when Leicester won the premier league, pretty much everyone in a fairly large office (100+ people) just stopped working to watch one of the games on. I had to go to the toilet at some way through it, but just put it on the radio on my phone so I wouldnt miss anything. I didnt realise though, that for whatever reason the radio was about 5 seconds behind, so ditched even using it after hearing the entire office shake with cheering, and then the radio telling me 5 seconds later why.
Cricket is a very long sport (up to 5 days for a test match) and quite often you don't actively watch it so much as keep an eye on it while you go about your day.
When we actually used to go to office, we always replaced the CI/CD screens with live cricket feeds all over the office. It was much less distracting than opening a tab on your machine, and you could still stay updated with just a glance. As an exciting match would draw close to the end though, people would pay much more attention to the screens than their work.
Modern problems require modern solutions. I hope your boss isn't on HN. If my team wanted to check the scores it wouldn't bother me - I hired people not robots.
Within reason, of course, since at the end of the day you do pay them to run your business. But I've had plenty of workplaces that would have football matches on a TV if need be. And I've spent plenty of time playing mario kart on the clock as well.
Nice work! Reminds me of the old days of the 'Boss Key' in most games of the 80's. +1 on the suggestion to actually make this a VSCode extension so you can have it running in a tab in your actual workspace and check it from time to time.
Growing up I had a game which had a "Boss Key" in that showed a spreadsheet and some pie charts, I remember wondering why you'd want a fake business looking screen in a game that disappears if you press any key. So many mysteries that remained unanswered before you could ask the internet.
I remember dad's computer at work had Leisure Suit Larry on it with a boss screen. Must have been mid 80's. Also that golf game that spoke to you (I think the Simpsons riffed on it).
Probably most PCs were in offices at the time so it makes sense I guess.
I switched VS Code theme to light to avoid attracting attention (as most of our screens are mostly white normally) when using it occasionally while my job had nothing to do with VS Code (or any code at all). Everyone procrastinates. I wrote some code for sake of procrastination, instead of using social networks like normal people do. Some may probably call this "ill-intent".
Sounds like a bad idea. While I don't agree with the job agreements that claim any work you do on your personal computer outside of work hours belongs to the company, it would be hard to claim such code should not belong to the company if you do it during work hours.
You don't have to claim the code if nobody knows it exists in the first place. It was not anything I ever meant to show anybody. Just small utilities for myself, meant to actually improve my productivity.
Long ago I had a college job doing data entry for a tiny long-distance carrier. We had hourly quotas, etc. and had to retype the information into several different backend systems. One day I dug up a manual and discovered that there were a copy/paste commands available on the terminal we were using. I could get through my quota in 40 minutes. I showed this to my supervisor who told me “we’re paying you to type not to play around on computers”. For the rest of the summer I took a nice long coffee break every hour.
The second part of that sentence, probably omitted by your boss “… play with computers. The same way we are charging our client for a highly unoptimised process where we charge by person/hour, don’t make it look like it can be done more efficiently or I’ll fire you”
I was once a temp worker hired to transfer a bunch of records from an old, terminal-based mainframe into a newer Windows-based app for an insurance company. I spent about an hour doing so and then went and asked the supervisor if their IT department had an old copy of Windows 3.11 lying around (this was Win 98). 3.x had the "macro recorder" that would capture everything - including mouse movement. They did.
I practiced highlighting all the fields, switching apps, and pasting the data. You could only play back at maybe 3x original speed. Then I started my macro running. I had estimated that I could have done it manually in about three days; the macro would do it in about 30 hours and not screw up any of the data along the way. Told the supervisor what I'd done and asked to be paid for two. She said yes and offered me a job on the spot; too bad I was starting med school in a month.
In highschool math, we were learning LRAM, RRAM, and MRAM - where you estimate the "area under a curve" by making rectangles and then summing their area. A very interesting technique but very manual to calculate.
I wrote a program from scratch on my TI-82 to calculate the answers and my math teacher said "You wrote the program yourself, so you can use it during the exams. You still have to show your work manually, but it sounds great to check your work."
This was a pivotal moment in my path to becoming a software engineer. :)
Ditto. During my college internship (1999), I worked the night shift for a certain very large OG domain name registrar. We had a nightly quota of about 200 domain names to take from being registered to the vanilla configuration. Since this was a Unix environment and I was actually learning shell scripting in college at the time, this was the perfect opportunity to script. I received permission from the greybeard running the servers to proceed with the caveat he vetted the code before making it executable. I went from taking almost 5-6 hours to doing my quota in mere minutes. My boss learned of this and told me to keep it a secret from the other techs. He then put me to work writing code to paginate reports and other things. On my last day at the job, I shared the code with everyone.
If I'm honest, I very likely have un-diagnosed ADHD or am on the spectrum at some level. I'm most assuredly OCD. I often have an easy time getting my own office over other techs because I'm willing to sit in what amounts to a broom closet
with no windows to escape the nasty, overhead fluorescent lighting prevalent in most office settings. My username should give a hint. I love overcast skies, dark offices, and dark terminal windows and IDEs. Strangely enough, I cannot stand dark theme browsers setups. Surfing the web with a dark theme seems almost like wading through fog.
Might be because dark browser themes are rarely complete enough. There's always something off; last time I tried to theme a fully dark Firefox, I couldn't get the address bar text to be light with a dark background.
If your job prevents your from taking your mind off temporarily off of a task, then this is nothing short of abuse.
I cannot focus on the task for more than 10-20 minutes, then I take few minutes break, sometimes more. If I couldn't do that, I wouldn't get any work done because quickly my brain would sort of shut down.
I've been through this many times - manager would get me to a meeting room and say "people complain that you are browsing the internet rather than working". I'd say "do I deliver on time?" the answer would be "yes". That would be the end of it. I would also say he or she should talk with those who reported this, whether snooping on other workers is a good use of their time.
Nonetheless nice project! I remember doing similar thing to browse Reddit ages ago ;-)
I loved that prog, I used to use it all the time - I was often on site as the IT person in non-IT companies and would have downtime etc but didn't want to look like I was lazing around and seeing as I just wanted to read forum threads etc it worked brilliantly in keeping me looking respectable.
yeah, but why do you want to hide that you browser this cricket stuff in the first place? Does someone constantly watch what's going on on your screen?
Reminds me of the PhD Comics "Emergency button" (http://phdcomics.com/, bottom right) redirecting to a fake journal article and a similar tool for Tinder redirecting to a spreadsheet.
In the case of PhD Comics is clearly an inside joke (I guess). For other tools I find it a clearly desired yet not the most honest feature.
There was a computer game I played a bit at a kid that had a "boss coming" mode. It'd cover the screen with fake progress bars and messages like "updating spreadsheets" and "compiling estimates" or something. Clearly meant as a jokey easter egg, but fun.
The original Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (1987) had a 'boss coming' key. It showed a spreadsheet bar graph thing, that looked like 'work' although if you looked at the labels it had columns for different condom types like "plain", "ribbed" and a couple of others.
Back in the days I remember the manual (or help file or something) for some submarine simulator game containing an "emergency key" that brought up a spreadsheet screenshot.
Can't remember the name though, but it was on a Mac in the 90ies sometime so before Mac OS X.
Just goes to show the difference in work cultures. Here in the UK I could quite happily have the match up on another monitor, nobody would bat (pun unintended) and eyelash. I'm not sure I could do that with a game that requires more oversight though, test cricket, especially, is slow to watch. Fun though!
I'm not sure that's "UK" specific but probably more office/company/leadership specific..
I don't live in the UK..
For the 2018 World Cup my department repurposed several meeting room TVs to stream matches and folks could gather in those rooms to work while watching the games.
Work still got done on time.
At the same time, a friend who worked down the street forwarded me an all-team memo from his boss that warned employee sick day requests would be "extra scrutinized" during the World Cup. So yeah.. Leadership.
Worked at a place where the boss made everyone uninstall iTunes when it first came out because he considered it distracting to listen to music all day.
At almost all of my previous jobs we were allowed to either watch World Cup games at the workplace, or go home during the game if we weren't interested. It felt fair to everyone, and work still got done. It helps that the countries where this happened were Germany, Brazil and Argentina.
In preparation of Ind vs Pak World Cup semi-final in 2011, about 125 people had applied for a leave (me included!) in a 150-person company I used to work in. The management eventually decided to stream the match in office.
My previous job just had the sports playing on the displays around the office. If you couldn’t see one from your desk, IT would wheel over a portable meeting TV with sport on it for you. If it was a notable event, and you didn’t even want to pretend you were working, there’d be a stream in one of the auditoriums with audio.
They had to pay a pretty hefty license for the whole headcount of the office, and they whole thing started because one team leader wanted to watch EPL. It was a pretty great place to work tbh.
2018 World Cup...the owner's son at the place I was working at was going through a stage where he "liked soccer" (we are in the US), and in some sort of attempt to look cool or something, he streamed the games in the lunch room on projectors, at the collaboration table TV's, and they allowed employees to stream the game at their desks.
After the first day, the rest of the company complained enough about the speed of the internet that we had to block it on the firewall.
> the rest of the company complained enough about the speed of the internet
That’s why you stream it to only one conference room (or a small number). By making it explicitly approved for those rooms, you can limit the people who are doing it more clandestinely. Then you only take the bandwidth hit for a smaller number of streams.
Even if you don’t want to encourage it, the better managers would accept that it’s going to happen and then try to minimize the impact.
The US often has the same issue with the first couple of rounds of the NCAA mens basketball tournament. There are 32 games over the first two days (Thursday and Friday) starting at noon. The internet at work has always gotten slower on those days.
The CBS online stream even has a “boss mode” with a fake spreadsheet.
During the last Winter Olympics, IT asked people to please watch on a projector or a common screen in the office, since it took such a toll on the network when everyone had their separate stream.
At a previous job I held a decade ago the network team purchased several TV tuner cards & a DirecTV subscription. They then set up IP multicast, gave the Helpdesk the DirecTV remotes, and set up a Wiki page with instructions on how to watch & a schedule of upcoming special events.
At Blue Shield of CA, they used a web filter to block all websites that were for "Entertainment purposes" (back in 2015). Even music streaming wasn't allowed across the whole company. We ultimately just streamed music/things on our phones, etc but it was one of the more absurd IT policies for a company of grown adults.
Indeed, I used to work on a trading floor where they'd show cricket on the wide screens. The game is so slow it kinda lends itself to that. You can concentrate, then turn your head when there's a wicket.
At a previous employer we had a pool table which was well used by almost every level of the company. People would regularly disappear for 20 minutes to play a couple of games.
On a whole I think it was probably neutral or even a positive for productivity. If my project manager wanted to talk through something he'd usually appear over my shoulder and just say "pool?". Similarly other people on the team when struggling with something would do the same and use the time to loosely discuss the issue (often in rubber duck fashion) or just take a few minutes to think about something else which was often enough to get things moving again.
Shit, man, foosball ain't no joke, I can't talk while doing that!
We used to have a table at Oracle, inherited from the SUN acquisition. Managers never used it, maybe because they were mostly women. We had some furious tournaments though, where I discovered that French people play it with balls made of cork - for a slower and more technical game.
Ah yeah, I probably should have mentioned that almost the entirety of the conversations would happend while waiting to be next in line for a game, or post match.
There is little to no coherent speech that happens during those intense 5-8 minutes
I really didn't think anyone would have difficulty understanding what was meant here...
Ofcourse the lunch break was ours to do with as we pleased. That wasn't the point.
Rather the point was that no one ever raised any issue with a group of the professional developers playing video games inside the office. And sometimes for longer times than just lunch.
That does speak to the type of people who were managers there. They realized that this was a close group of friends who were honing social and coordination skills that would feed back positively into the team's work.
I advice leaving the snarky tone at the door next time.
It can usually only backfire on you.
This. Bringing up UK in this context is inherently implying that it is the country one lives in that is responsible for the quality of work culture. In particular, it implies the work culture in UK is by default better than in India. That's just bad.
And if someone doesn't get that, just replace that with "Here in Germany" or "Here in the USA" and you instinctively understand the notion of nationalism this transpires.
Sure, I get that. I live in the UK though, I didn't want to put the company I work for, it's that simple. The original poster was in India, which is known for a little more strict conditions, also.
I've also never needed to use any obfuscated interface to check on scores etc, anywhere I've worked here.
There is a certain culture in the UK that it is OK to monitor the cricket scores. I have seen this multiple times. Test cricket is a 5 day event, so you do not need to monitor too closely in most situations
This can also be company or department specific. I remember when we moved, I encouraged and actually pushed that we arrange everything in a full privacy mode, regardless of where you stay and how many people are in the office, no one can see your screen or desk without coming up behind you. It's funny how other departments in our same company have a clear hierarchy, where the boss has full privacy and everyone under him needs to have their screens placed that they are visible at all time/when entering the office. The funniest, or maybe saddest was another dev team that forced everyone to face the walls around each office, so the screens are always public.
I'm not a huge cricket fan but there's something so pleasant about having Test Match Special on a crackly longwave radio in the background when I'm working. I'll be sad when they shut AM radio down in the UK even though it's probably impossible to listen in cities at this point.
Yeah, I'll probably end up doing something along those lines although I reckon it'd probably be cheaper to knock up a little circuit to generate AM from the analogue audio output rather than using an SDR.
In high trust environment nobody cares what you are doing -- you are trusted to manage your time to produce results best you can. You are given a challenge and you figure your way to deliver results. We are all adults and we understand different people work differently but most people are unable to keep focus uninterrupted for 8h straight, day after day.
In a low trust environment management thinks they can improve productivity by banning activities that have nothing to do with work.
The reality is that banning everything else than work is not causing people to do more work. It just causes them to work longer but slower. Or be more inventive about avoiding work. Or just staring at the screen with your mind blank (I have been there). Also not care to manage your time better, look out for risks, improvements, etc. And then if they are any good quit after 2 years so they don't get bored to death.
Do you really want to pay your developer by the hour? This is just as stupid as paying by LoC.
Unfortunately it's more difficult for senior leaders to trust engineering because it's more difficult for most senior leaders to understand how effective their engineering team is versus how effective they should expect them to be.
You would never expect this level of micromanagement for sales because it's clear when salespeople are or are not performing. Who cares if a salesperson is only working 10 hours a day if they're bringing in more revenue than any of their peers? Everyone in leadership can see that.
However when an engineer is a top performer that's not necessarily clear. What people see are the bugs that get created, deadlines met vs not met, how quickly inquiries are responded to, etc...
This sounds legit at first sight and I thought so in the past, but as I gain more experience I find it is just an excuse.
I thought a lot about entire topic. I think excuse comes from our internal necessity to think as being better than others. I mean, if I was promoted to manager it must necessarily mean I am better than others?
And so a lot of managers persist telling that excuse to themselves (even if not consciously) that they are better and so can be trusted to do things but other people that are "under" them aren't.
Some other thoughts:
* Trusting somebody necessarily means becoming vulnerable to them. Yes, if you trust an employee it is possible they are going to cause damage. The solution is not to stop trusting employees but rather fire employees who can't be trusted.
* Trust does not mean blind trust. You can still trust people to make good decisions but then expect them to be able to explain it and to verify these decisions. An example of low trust: require lengthy process to approve software license for developer tools. High trust: allow developers to get any piece of software they need, automatically. As them to write down rationale when they request the license. If you request software honestly and can explain what it is needed for you don't have to worry and you can get it immediately.
* I believe most people want to do good. But when they are not being trusted they rationalize doing bad work (and sometimes they are really prevented from doing good work altogether).
* I have worked for a lot of companies, most with very low trust environments by some with high trust. Observing new employees joining taught me that people change when they join the company to fit the culture. People who join high trust environment mostly try to be have responsibly (within their abilities). People who join low trust environment mostly become automatons who feel they can't change anything (because they are not trusted/expected to do so).
* If you are a senior leader of a non-trivial organization, you have no other way than to put trust in your employees because there is no way you can enforce/verify everything. In low trust environments leadership puts trust in their management. In high trust environments senior leaders put trust in all their employees and use managers to detect and remedy faults in the process.
At a previous office, I sent a video to someone. Some time later, I asked if they had seen it yet. They had not. It turns out that team didn't watch videos during working hours, but my team did.
Reminds me of a script I wrote a few weeks ago. Basically it listens to Google Chat notifications via D-Bus and plays my phone's alarm clock sound when someone DMs or mentions me. In my case it was meant for when I wanted to take a break without blocking people who needed me though (not high-tech sleeping on the job ^^).
I think this is hilarious. And let's be honest here. Getting a score feed like this is much less distracting that launching a browser and visiting some site and somehow ending up on Facehook.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] thread> the fact that you had time to build it means you need to keep the job at the company you work with ;)
When we look into why we figured out that it was a few guys, working insane hours, who where streaming Champions League while working. Technically not allowed at the UK office, but the decision from the Danish IT Manager: "Fuck it! If they're still at work they should at least be allowed to watch a game".
On the other hand, new age product companies/startups are similar to Silicon Valley.
I used to work for a startup and that culture was a lot of fun at first but the "blow investor money on catered lunches every day but you can't hire more engineers" mentality seemed very childish to me. I learned that I like the middle ground.
Good for you!
But do you really not realise that other people work under less favourable conditions than yourself?
It's weird for me that someone with technical skills to build a proper web application would have to be subject themselves to the latter one.
This is good because you can have the window open all day on one of your screens without it obviously being not work. Cricket.com.au has a similar option which emulates a spreadsheet https://live.cricket.com.au/bossmode/2836/51513/western-aust...
Let's talk about males in the workplace, and web filters.
Isn't it funny how web filters almost never block sports sites?
I worked with a woman who raged about this and was convinced that "People magazine is blocked, but ESPN isn't? It's because men built web filters!"
Interesting perspective.
[0] - https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=KavinDes...
Probably most PCs were in offices at the time so it makes sense I guess.
Reminds me of those old MS-DOS games that often had a "boss key" which switched the game display to some fake spreadsheet.
This might be just a fun joke. At my previous job we had a company-wide shared folder with some stealth Excel games [1], my boss loved them.
[1] https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/6-iconic-games-recreated-micro...
I practiced highlighting all the fields, switching apps, and pasting the data. You could only play back at maybe 3x original speed. Then I started my macro running. I had estimated that I could have done it manually in about three days; the macro would do it in about 30 hours and not screw up any of the data along the way. Told the supervisor what I'd done and asked to be paid for two. She said yes and offered me a job on the spot; too bad I was starting med school in a month.
I wrote a program from scratch on my TI-82 to calculate the answers and my math teacher said "You wrote the program yourself, so you can use it during the exams. You still have to show your work manually, but it sounds great to check your work."
This was a pivotal moment in my path to becoming a software engineer. :)
OCD: The idea of having some apps dark and some light (some apps, let alone websites don't support dark themes) feels horrible.
Sun: shining bright from the back, straight into my monitor, good luck reading anything with a dark theme.
I cannot focus on the task for more than 10-20 minutes, then I take few minutes break, sometimes more. If I couldn't do that, I wouldn't get any work done because quickly my brain would sort of shut down.
I've been through this many times - manager would get me to a meeting room and say "people complain that you are browsing the internet rather than working". I'd say "do I deliver on time?" the answer would be "yes". That would be the end of it. I would also say he or she should talk with those who reported this, whether snooping on other workers is a good use of their time.
Nonetheless nice project! I remember doing similar thing to browse Reddit ages ago ;-)
A comedy at it's finest.
For context, the original fake VSCode was made by Pieter Levels ( https://remoteok.io/vscode ) - which isn't mentioned in this project.
The joke is that his main product, remoteok, was a single index.php file for a long time.
In a world where people spend too much time thinking of tech stacks, the dude was banking on a single php file.
Next step, create a VBA macro that drops the results into Excel worksheet, for those more tasked with Office activities.
In the case of PhD Comics is clearly an inside joke (I guess). For other tools I find it a clearly desired yet not the most honest feature.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKmRkS1os7k
Can't remember the name though, but it was on a Mac in the 90ies sometime so before Mac OS X.
I don't live in the UK..
For the 2018 World Cup my department repurposed several meeting room TVs to stream matches and folks could gather in those rooms to work while watching the games.
Work still got done on time.
At the same time, a friend who worked down the street forwarded me an all-team memo from his boss that warned employee sick day requests would be "extra scrutinized" during the World Cup. So yeah.. Leadership.
All leave applications were cancelled :)
They had to pay a pretty hefty license for the whole headcount of the office, and they whole thing started because one team leader wanted to watch EPL. It was a pretty great place to work tbh.
After the first day, the rest of the company complained enough about the speed of the internet that we had to block it on the firewall.
That’s why you stream it to only one conference room (or a small number). By making it explicitly approved for those rooms, you can limit the people who are doing it more clandestinely. Then you only take the bandwidth hit for a smaller number of streams.
Even if you don’t want to encourage it, the better managers would accept that it’s going to happen and then try to minimize the impact.
The CBS online stream even has a “boss mode” with a fake spreadsheet.
On a whole I think it was probably neutral or even a positive for productivity. If my project manager wanted to talk through something he'd usually appear over my shoulder and just say "pool?". Similarly other people on the team when struggling with something would do the same and use the time to loosely discuss the issue (often in rubber duck fashion) or just take a few minutes to think about something else which was often enough to get things moving again.
At previous employers me and my team would sometimes do a few rounds in a team pve videogame at lunch, without anyone ever having an issue.
These things, if done in moderation, builds good team cohesion and spirit.
We used to have a table at Oracle, inherited from the SUN acquisition. Managers never used it, maybe because they were mostly women. We had some furious tournaments though, where I discovered that French people play it with balls made of cork - for a slower and more technical game.
There is little to no coherent speech that happens during those intense 5-8 minutes
Ofcourse the lunch break was ours to do with as we pleased. That wasn't the point.
Rather the point was that no one ever raised any issue with a group of the professional developers playing video games inside the office. And sometimes for longer times than just lunch.
That does speak to the type of people who were managers there. They realized that this was a close group of friends who were honing social and coordination skills that would feed back positively into the team's work.
I advice leaving the snarky tone at the door next time. It can usually only backfire on you.
And if someone doesn't get that, just replace that with "Here in Germany" or "Here in the USA" and you instinctively understand the notion of nationalism this transpires.
https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=86181
https://www.dlineradio.co.uk/articles/building-an-am-transmi...
In high trust environment nobody cares what you are doing -- you are trusted to manage your time to produce results best you can. You are given a challenge and you figure your way to deliver results. We are all adults and we understand different people work differently but most people are unable to keep focus uninterrupted for 8h straight, day after day.
In a low trust environment management thinks they can improve productivity by banning activities that have nothing to do with work.
The reality is that banning everything else than work is not causing people to do more work. It just causes them to work longer but slower. Or be more inventive about avoiding work. Or just staring at the screen with your mind blank (I have been there). Also not care to manage your time better, look out for risks, improvements, etc. And then if they are any good quit after 2 years so they don't get bored to death.
Do you really want to pay your developer by the hour? This is just as stupid as paying by LoC.
You would never expect this level of micromanagement for sales because it's clear when salespeople are or are not performing. Who cares if a salesperson is only working 10 hours a day if they're bringing in more revenue than any of their peers? Everyone in leadership can see that.
However when an engineer is a top performer that's not necessarily clear. What people see are the bugs that get created, deadlines met vs not met, how quickly inquiries are responded to, etc...
I thought a lot about entire topic. I think excuse comes from our internal necessity to think as being better than others. I mean, if I was promoted to manager it must necessarily mean I am better than others?
And so a lot of managers persist telling that excuse to themselves (even if not consciously) that they are better and so can be trusted to do things but other people that are "under" them aren't.
Some other thoughts:
* Trusting somebody necessarily means becoming vulnerable to them. Yes, if you trust an employee it is possible they are going to cause damage. The solution is not to stop trusting employees but rather fire employees who can't be trusted.
* Trust does not mean blind trust. You can still trust people to make good decisions but then expect them to be able to explain it and to verify these decisions. An example of low trust: require lengthy process to approve software license for developer tools. High trust: allow developers to get any piece of software they need, automatically. As them to write down rationale when they request the license. If you request software honestly and can explain what it is needed for you don't have to worry and you can get it immediately.
* I believe most people want to do good. But when they are not being trusted they rationalize doing bad work (and sometimes they are really prevented from doing good work altogether).
* I have worked for a lot of companies, most with very low trust environments by some with high trust. Observing new employees joining taught me that people change when they join the company to fit the culture. People who join high trust environment mostly try to be have responsibly (within their abilities). People who join low trust environment mostly become automatons who feel they can't change anything (because they are not trusted/expected to do so).
* If you are a senior leader of a non-trivial organization, you have no other way than to put trust in your employees because there is no way you can enforce/verify everything. In low trust environments leadership puts trust in their management. In high trust environments senior leaders put trust in all their employees and use managers to detect and remedy faults in the process.
10 wickets...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tw9sQmmfqWg