Desk Perception

Someone at work (Roger - not from my team) told me about an encounter he had with his manager's boss (Rory) earlier. On this particular day, a lot of the team was working from home, a fairly common occurrence around the Christmas period, as people have family over and children are home from school. The guy from work had been working all day, when he left to attend a meeting with his area manager (which is Rory's boss). The meeting was just him and the area manager, who wanted to check in on how things were doing. During the meeting he got a phone call, which he didn't answer, given the seriousness of the meeting that he was in.

Afterwards, he checked his phone to find it was a call from his manager's boss. He returned to his computer to find an email from him, "Where are you, you haven't been at your desk all day?!" He said he had been at his desk all day, except for that one meeting, only Rory wasn't even around to see him. So he confronted him and asked why he sent that email. Rory responded that it gave a bad impression when he wasn't at his desk. Roger said that he was at his desk the entire day, except when Rory's boss asked him to meet him. Rory said that their project manager came by and asked where everyone was, and it looked really bad that nobody was around.

The whole being seen at your desk thing seems common at other offices, based on what I've heard from my other friends. Some people have strategies like leaving a spare coat on your chair, or a spare pair of glasses on your desk to make it look like you haven't gone home. In some cultures, it looks really bad for you to arrive after your boss, and/or leave after your boss. So you're left to surf the Internet, while hoping your boss leaves before you have no choice but to get take-away for dinner as you won't have enough time for your commute home and to cook dinner.

This kind of work culture seems to achieve nothing but to burn people out. I'm sure at the start, you get more productivity out of your workers, but this kind of work is not sustainable. People need to rest and recharge. They might be working 10 or 12 hours, but I doubt they're doing productive work for 10 or 12 hours. I don't think the mind can stay focused for that long, it's too draining. If you try to push someone to continue, the quality of their work will go down, and they'll start to make mistakes, which will require even more work to fix.

I've heard the game industry is like this as well. You work crazy hours to meet a deadline and get your game shipped, only to get shifted to another game that is also way behind its deadline, and the cycle continues.

As I was listening to Roger's story, I felt horrified. In fact, he told me that a lot of people on his team are on the verge of quitting, two of them already have interviews lined up. So from the point of view of trying to get more productivity from his team, Rory's track record is looking pretty bad!

I've worked for Rory before, and he was almost never at his desk. In fact, I saw him at the cafe more often than I saw him at his desk. However, there's a developer on my team who shows up early and leaves late. He never hesitates to volunteer to help out on the weekend, and is happy to be on call. Whenever he asks if I'm willing to stay back late, or do some support work on the weekend or a public holiday, I'm 100% willing to do stuff. Whenever Rory asks, I say yes because of his position in the hierarchy, but I resent him for it. So I don't think I have an issue with being asked to work additional hours, but I feel like the person doing the asking should be willing to do the same himself.

That being said, Rory is always on top of his emails, and will answer his work phone even when he's on holiday overseas, but it's usually just to delegate something to someone, or demand to know why the team hasn't fixed something that broke one minute ago. He constantly cracks the whip, and is very stingy with money, so he never celebrates the team's achievements with a lunch or anything. I know it sounds like a first world problem, "I worked hard on this project, and my boss didn't reward me with a free lunch," but the thing is, people are being asked to go above and beyond, and make sacrifices in their life, and they don't even get acknowledged for it.

Is that kind of high-pressure work the norm? I don't know if I could work in those conditions for the rest of my life. Thankfully, as things currently are, we aren't under that much pressure.