God's Company

Thursday, March 01, 2007

No, I won't be talking about anything religious here. Maybe somewhat inspiring, but it depends on how fervent you are when it comes to your beliefs at work. Actually while I'm typing this, I'm waiting for a program to load and yes, this post maybe somewhat related to how I feel right now.

Anyway, in case you're still not working, let me give you a briefer. Normal, non-shifting office work usually starts around 8-10 in the morning, depending on your company policy and usually ends after 9 hours including lunch. So technically, you should be out anytime between 5-7 depending on what time you came in.

Technically.

That's basically saying "theoretically I can kiss my elbows because it's mine."

The 8 hour daily work is more of an ideal than an actual statistic. This is true specially for project-driven work like engineering work, IT work, publishing work and civil works.

There's this necessary evil called overtime that gets in the way. I say it's necessary because sometimes you just have to catch up with the slipping schedule.

Sometimes.

Sometimes, the excess time tends to sound so regular the following eccentricities start developing around the office:

- After leaving at 7 in the evening even if the time in is 830, your officemates go "wow, leaving early?"

- And after leaving at that time, you blush a little. Because you yourself think it's early.

- And for some reason you dont even realize that youre arleady thinking leaving ON time is actually a sign of being a bad employee.

True story.

So anyway, there's this book by Scott Adams called Dilbert Pricinciple. In it, he describes a perfect company standard called OA5. The framework's premise is simple. It's based on two things:

- Nobody wants to work. If people did love work, they wouldn't be doing it for money.
- The less time you are in an office, the more happier you get.

So that's why the framework is called OA5. Out At 5 (in the afternoon, preferrably) states that employees coming out exactly 9 hours after they come in, is the perfect setting for happy employees.

By perfect I mean, it doesnt exist in this world.

But this evening, I was working in a software development company as an exchange developer when I realized there are such companies. The office opened at around 10 and then when the clock hit 7, all people in the office stood up, greeted each other goodbye, and promptly left.

The office was closed 15 minutes later.

Not even in sappy romantic movies starring Sandra Bullock have I seen such a perfect ending.

I think I cried a tear or twenty.

God must love that company. They know how to rest on the seventh day hour.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

if you blogged less in the office, and worked on something else during "compiling". And there are IT companies that has employess that has employess working the regular 8 hrs/day 80-90% of the time. Haha, you are such a cry baby.

Anonymous said...

Vern, you OBVIOUSLY don't know the nature of work in IT or engineering. Saying that you can work 80-90% of the time is like saying that your mind can handle taking a board exam daily. Heck, doing that would probably even be easier.
Imagine being a developer of a printer driver for Linux that will run in a system located inside another device (sorry, can't divulge the specifics for this device). Now imagine if the printer manufacturer won't release the set of instructions that can be given to the printer just because they themselves already developed the drivers for the more common usage of their printers - meaning they already provided the Windows driver for the printer. But you can't use their drivers for your specific system. So now, you're forced to do some reverse engineering - print a specific test page using the Windows driver, capture the stream of electrical signals being sent to the printer and convert it to a binary file, read through the 40 kb binary file and try to figure out just what part in that file says that the margin is supposed to be 2 cms. If you watched Matrix, that's like reading from the streaming green gibberish that a woman just passed by the left side of Neo. Now, try doing that for 2 servings of 4 hours, for 5 straight days of the week. If you can do that, then go volunteer to be tested in cognitive labs of Princeton University coz you might just prove that it was wrong for scientists to conclude that the attention span of a extraordinary human being can only last for 3 hours.

Anonymous said...

So now you know why Google has such a working environment... It's to prevent their developers from going to a mental institution with a straight jacket as a uniform. (-;
For us who don't work for such magnanimous employers, we're forced to find other means of relaxing our minds so that we can improve our throughput. d=

Anonymous said...

haha, hi kyle, I do work in IT... and I'm also working another job after I get out of the office. It's not so much about the money, but both jobs are so much fun to me. And kyle, I did work for an OEM. A word of advice to you, create a lot of testing programs. A lot of tasks can be automated. (you think of the diff ways to do this). Also, back track. most printer systems copied their system from somebody else. if you can identify basically what ASIC chip the printer uses it could be possible to use a previous driver you had already written. If you are going to steal somebody's technology, do it in style. And yes, google is a miracle, make the most out of it. It while I was searching for something regarding public static functions when I chanced upon this blog. just a little pissed though that this blog had such a high rating for the said search key.

 

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