Paul is at it
His latest essay is about how the business world can learn from Open Source. Usually I'm a quick disciple of what he says but this time around I'm a bit skeptical. He starts by saying that amateurs are often better than "professionals" - quoted because he spends some time defining both "amateur" and "professional." Although I love the idea that amateurs can be as good as professionals, it makes me think of professional sport and how stupid it would sound if I said amateur basketball players are better than professionals. In some cases this can be true, but more often than not it is false. The people who work on Open Source software, although they aren't paid directly for their work, usually have jobs in related fields that give them the skills and means to do so.
In the middle of the essay he's trashing the modern work place:
"The average office is a miserable place to get work done... The atmosphere of the average workplace is to productivity what flames painted on the side of a car are to speed. And it's not just the way offices look that's bleak. The way people act is just as bad."
"The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can't make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun. If employees have to be in the building a certain number of hours a day, and are forbidden to do non-work things while there, then they must be working."
Don't get me wrong; I'm not a big fan of office space. I've always thought it would be cool to be involved in a start up company that operated out of a house or apartment. Come to think of it, now that I'm in the Midwest, it would be cool to work in a basement somewhere...
When I first started working in South Dakota, there were a few occasions where I could have pushed to "work from home" in SoCal. But it was much more effecient for me to be onsite - available to answer questions when necessary and able to keep track of how things were progressing directly instead of sparse "updates."
And I don't like office people too much. There's a lot of ridiculous posturing that goes on around here, the kind that reminds me of the kind of high school portrayed in a film like Clueless. The rich kid who has a VC [and won't wash his hands in the bathroom], the airhead that dresses to impress, the woman with zombie eyes who watches soap operas at lunchtime, and the blowhard that inflates his chest as he pours his coffee in the break room. The more I think about them, the more I dislike them.
But after spending time both working in a conventional office and at my apartment, I have the ability to see the upside of creating a separation between work and home. Distraction is probably the biggest not to mention the fact that when you work at home people sometimes have a harder time discerning when you are working and when you are relaxing. In a perfect scenario perhaps I'd have a space in my home reserved for "work" but that perfect scenario is a way off. Meanwhile, the office is the most effecient route.
I think Graham misses out on some simple theory of organizations: that different organizations have different organizational cultures and this identity is linked to what makes them productive. One type of culture is "the baseball team," and this is the type Graham and other developers like to talk about and compare themselves to. This organization builds itself around talent and those inside succeed or fail based on it. No matter the seniority or "credentials" or work location, you live and die by what you can do. Another organizational culture is "the academy," a place where people are groomed within each position for further career advancement. The academy has a lot of structure and succeeds or fails on the basis of how well this structure is mapped out. Big companies like Intel are academies: you've got to be smart to get in but once you're there they work hard to specialize you and make it a better and better place to be the longer you're there. The last type of culture that I remember is "the club." This is the one which most programmers are likely to disdain because a person in a club is not evaluated on productivity or skill, but on how well they fit in. I'm sure there is some emotional intelligence involved in making oneself likeable, but for the most part a club is just a place to get things done based on how much people like you. At my university the student senate was a club, and in most arenas politics has nothing to do with anything but being well liked. Sure, there's smarts and strategy, but if people don't like the tie you're wearing and your fake southern accent, you can't succeed.
So when it comes to looking at businesses and what they can learn, one has to take into account the nature of the company first. Open Source concepts will apply much more to baseball teams than to other organizations. And in many large organizations where people are broken into groups that can operate like baseball teams, there will be some nuggets of wisdom.
I think the challenge for people like Paul and myself, is to see and appreciate organizations that are outside the baseball team model. Even tougher than this is to reflect upon our weaknesses and realize that what gets things done in the world goes far beyond being really smart and having good ideas. For example, I'm no good at administrative work. But administrative work is critical if you have to work with other people. Another thing I'm not good at is talking to managerial people who don't care about technical details. But the reason they aren't focused on technical details is because they are focused on strategy, which is something a lot of technical people can't see.
If there was a draft for my future start up, I'd take a clever programmer from Microsoft over some of the really smart amateurs I know because they'd be better at getting the job done. I'd take the fratboy, even though I wouldn't want to talk to him too much, over the geek to do the sales work. And I'd take the most down to earth, practical, literal person to do the operations work over the most gifted hacker/artists I knew. I'd want a lot of talent, but not the 2004 US Men's Olympic basketball team.
1:29:43 PM 
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