Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab
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@scottalanmiller said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@Minion-Queen said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@scottalanmiller is right. We really try to make our work not be "Job". A job is something you go to, to pay the bills and may not love your job.
Even now that I am mostly management, still have a lab that I play in to keep my skills up. I don't get to do this very often and generally I am just playing with small pieces of software but I still do it, cause I want to. I tend to still be working from my phone when I am out in a bar listening to my favorite band or sitting at home watching a movie. Heck I can take the whole day off away from my desk but still work just cause I can. I don't need to disconnect to have a life because I can have both.
Right... we don't want people to not disconnect from work. We want them to never disconnect from life.
This is a good way to look at any job... But sadly, most of them require their people to be there in their office, taking up space because... My current employer and my previous one have been (were) great about letting me take care of life when it happened.
When I had my cochlear implant done, I actually got to work from home for a week. I got more done in that week than the entire previous three.
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@dafyre said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
This is a good way to look at any job... But sadly, most of them require their people to be there in their office, taking up space because... My current employer and my previous one have been (were) great about letting me take care of life when it happened.
NTG goes much farther. It's not just about things like being able to deal with life when needed, it's about not stopping living. What that means is different for different people, but like for me, it's never not being with my kids and getting to live all over the world and I am just as likely to be playing a video game at 10am as I am at 9pm. There is no "work time" or "not work time", it's all just life.
We don't shut down Facebook or avoid taking personal calls. We don't stop talking to family and start talking to work. There aren't the hard breaks.
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@scottalanmiller Sounds great
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@scottalanmiller said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@dafyre said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
This is a good way to look at any job... But sadly, most of them require their people to be there in their office, taking up space because... My current employer and my previous one have been (were) great about letting me take care of life when it happened.
NTG goes much farther. It's not just about things like being able to deal with life when needed, it's about not stopping living. What that means is different for different people, but like for me, it's never not being with my kids and getting to live all over the world and I am just as likely to be playing a video game at 10am as I am at 9pm. There is no "work time" or "not work time", it's all just life.
We don't shut down Facebook or avoid taking personal calls. We don't stop talking to family and start talking to work. There aren't the hard breaks.
Yeah, I get that. It sounds like how I was at my last job... I seemed to work all the time, and handle life all the time... There was no real "off-time"... I actually enjoyed that part of the job. What made it so rough was that I was the only one on call like that, and it got old being out in town with my wife and having to come back home (home was on campus) because a big wig needed a new mouse for their laptop at 3pm on a Sunday afternoon.
If they had let me and one or two of the other full timers have a share in that, it would have been awesome... I lacked that "Cloud of Support" (tm) that you guys have.
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@scottalanmiller said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@guyinpv said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
I don't think there is anything inherently "wrong" with that, in fact it's scientifically healthy to do so.
I don't agree with the science there. They can't measure what we are talking about, you'd have to produce some pretty significant research on that one. Remember, we are looking for people who feel like they never go to work. It's accepted science that the need to cut loose and go home is itself a problem, a problem that we've solved by and large. The science you are talking about is people needing to disconnect from the stress of work. Instead of letting people disconnect, we look for people who never have it. Which is even healthier still.
Needing to disconnect and go home is a band-aid... a means to making the negative of work not so bad. We don't want to band-aid, we want to avoid the problem altogether.
It sounds a bit like you're saying that people who feel the absolute need to cut off work and make clear delineations between work and home life, are perhaps not meant for that work in the first place?
Like if someone doesn't enjoy doing the work and tinkering with no real lines between work time and free time, then perhaps they don't really like the career?
Also this brings up a side point. Perhaps some people feel the need to cut off, not necessarily from IT or tech, but from the demands of a boss? If my job is "you do this stuff for 8 hours a day" and I'm somehow made to feel like I need to continue doing more of the stuff on my free time, there is this sense that my boss is still controlling me in some way even after I leave the office.
I think when people say they need to unplug, it's unplug from the company/boss/control of the work environment, rather than unplugging simply from tech and learning things. It's unplugging from customers and demands and tasks lists and emergency emails with ALL CAPS subject lines.
When you talk about how NTG does things, you earlier mentioned being salary. Regarding that, how do you gauge "on the clock" hours from off the clock? How do you know when there seems to be too much "home life" and not enough "work life"?
This can perhaps be rewritten as, what do you expect from employees as far as time required for their pay? Are there days where they just play games all day and put off menial tasks for after dinner? Do you expect certain turnaround times if a person happens to be out? What if they are out ALL the time and it's a habit that they are always immersed in family life when work comes calling?
How do you control, or perhaps encourage that proper work/life balance so NTG gets their fair share and personal stuff gets its fair share?I'm asking because the major benefit of the 9-5 that we know exactly what's expected of us. We know exactly what is meant by being lazy or late or unproductive. And it's within certain hours.
In a free-form job where times are all over and work/life mingle all day long, how does one gauge their performance? See if there were a "slow" time and I didn't have much to do, I'd probably go nuts thinking I was being paid for nothing. On the flip side if it got super busy and the wife didn't like me up till midnight all week, I'd begin to feel overworked. How do you play out that balance so employees don't feel "controlled" or under pressure, but also you get out of them what is required for the job?
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@guyinpv said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
It sounds a bit like you're saying that people who feel the absolute need to cut off work and make clear delineations between work and home life, are perhaps not meant for that work in the first place?
Like if someone doesn't enjoy doing the work and tinkering with no real lines between work time and free time, then perhaps they don't really like the career?
Absolutely, that's the idea. Your career is a HUGE part of your life. You should love it. Not only will loving what you do make you more successful at it, it makes your life so much better. There are few pieces of life advice that I could possibly give someone that to do something that makes you happy. If you hate your job, or even just dislike it, you will have an unhappy life. You are lucky if your job is just 25% of your life hours, it's normally closer to 40% of your awake hours. Don't spend that time wanting to leave and be someplace else!
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@guyinpv said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
Also this brings up a side point. Perhaps some people feel the need to cut off, not necessarily from IT or tech, but from the demands of a boss? If my job is "you do this stuff for 8 hours a day" and I'm somehow made to feel like I need to continue doing more of the stuff on my free time, there is this sense that my boss is still controlling me in some way even after I leave the office.
I think when people say they need to unplug, it's unplug from the company/boss/control of the work environment, rather than unplugging simply from tech and learning things. It's unplugging from customers and demands and tasks lists and emergency emails with ALL CAPS subject lines.
I can understand that. And I'd treat it the same way, if your boss makes you unhappy, consider making a change. Life is way, way too short to have most of it suck. You should not have to spent the little free time that you get recovering from how crappy the rest of it is.
Some people have no interests and hate anything that involves thinking or doing anything, at some point, people can't be helped. But for the majority of people, finding something that we enjoy, can do and can do in a happy environment is worth nearly anything.
One of the most important lessons that I learned from working terrible jobs in high school was to never do those kinds of jobs again. Learn a skill that you love and make yourself able to not have to be subject to bad working conditions. The only reason that bad bosses can exist in any frequency is because willing staff let them.
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@guyinpv said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
When you talk about how NTG does things, you earlier mentioned being salary. Regarding that, how do you gauge "on the clock" hours from off the clock? How do you know when there seems to be too much "home life" and not enough "work life"?
This can perhaps be rewritten as, what do you expect from employees as far as time required for their pay? Are there days where they just play games all day and put off menial tasks for after dinner? Do you expect certain turnaround times if a person happens to be out? What if they are out ALL the time and it's a habit that they are always immersed in family life when work comes calling?
How do you control, or perhaps encourage that proper work/life balance so NTG gets their fair share and personal stuff gets its fair share?I think the easiest answer is "we don't." But more poignantly let me ask you, how do you do the same thing if you have people clock in and clock out? The number of hours sitting in the office tells us nothing useful. So I don't see NTG lacking a tool that other businesses have, it's just that we've reduced a red herring that most depend on.
Hours worked is a terrible gauge for anything outside of factory labour. What if they are idle at work, or thinking about non-work things, or just terrible at their jobs? Or what if they are thinking about work at home, or amazingly efficient, or get the most done when they don't work normal hours?
You are asking how much time people are expected to do. But we don't work off of time. The very idea that everything has to be timed is something that we don't have. We do have necessary coverage for phones and stuff, and that has hours because we need to know what phone will ring where, of course. But even that is pretty grey. Are they watching TV, reading a book, playing with kids and only around in case the phone rings? Does it matter?
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@guyinpv said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
I'm asking because the major benefit of the 9-5 that we know exactly what's expected of us. We know exactly what is meant by being lazy or late or unproductive. And it's within certain hours.
I don't agree, I think it makes things harder. If you have a 9-5 you have one totally useless, but all controlling metric of "be in the office, physically from this time to that time." But it is not based on anything useful, like productivity or work being done or doing a good job. It doesn't connect the people to their value. It just makes doing so harder because you are forcing people to not enjoy their lives, while doing nothing to guarantee that they are being productive (and often almost guaranteeing that they are not.)
It makes it so much harder to figure out who is doing a good job versus doing what their boss or hours are forcing them to do, which might not be useful.
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@guyinpv said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
In a free-form job where times are all over and work/life mingle all day long, how does one gauge their performance?
How do you if you have set hours? Productivity is productivity, the set hours are a red herring, but one that people have to be paid for, regardless of productivity.
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@guyinpv said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
See if there were a "slow" time and I didn't have much to do, I'd probably go nuts thinking I was being paid for nothing. On the flip side if it got super busy and the wife didn't like me up till midnight all week, I'd begin to feel overworked. How do you play out that balance so employees don't feel "controlled" or under pressure, but also you get out of them what is required for the job?
I think you have these kinds of problems in an hourly job, too. But this isn't anything unique, all professionals (doctors, lawyers, engineers, IT, scientists, etc.) have loose hours, it's actually generally accepted as a requirement of the term professional. White collar work is expected to be gauged on what is accomplished, not how long someone sits in a chair. With hourly, you still have the problem that if you are idle that you feel that you are being paid to do nothing, for example.
People have to be able to regulate their own time. But we are all grownups, it's just part of adulting. Be productive, don't be ridiculous, take time when you need it, put it in when you can. We all love the job, no one wants to avoid it. That's why we look for passionate people. If it doesn't feel like work, you don't have this "avoiding it" reaction. But you also want to get things done.
Having a spouse that doesn't support you... there is no answer there. Your family needs to understand that you are trading off guaranteed hours for a better, happier life. All people who work white collar jobs face this if their spouses come from a blue collar world, I've seen it a lot outside of IT. Someone having to turn down huge pay and better hours because their spouse will freak out if they aren't home at exactly 5:15 on the dot, every day, no exceptions. They feel that every minute over 40 hours that isn't predictable is time being stolen from them, even if in the long run it is more money per hour, less stressful, better stability and fewer hours overall. There is no cure for that, you need a spouse that's on your team and understands both what is best for you individually and for your family. Likewise, you need to understand if your happiness, the quality of your work and the total time that you have with them is what is important for your family or if getting home at exactly the same time and earning less and being unhappy is what they need. It's legitimate either way.
One of the things that I love about what I do is that I am home with my wife and kids all day, every day with only rare exceptions that I go see a vendor, client or visit the office. I get so much more family time than normal dads. I mean like 100x more time. But my work is not predictable. My wife and kids have to understand that when I'm needed or I'm productive that that has to be allowed or else we have to give up the 100x more time and better life options. The trade offs are enormous. But not everyone thinks that happiness, money, health, flexibility, time with the family, freedom of location and other benefits are worth not having guaranteed time off. That sounds crazy to those of us who love the flexibility, but average people actually will accept all of that in order to punch out and go home, guaranteed.
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I love the fact that I can just spend time with family when they come in from out of town. Or @art_of_shred and I can just take off for the day cause it is quiet. The balancing out how much we work isn't a problem because fires always come and lots of times we work 18 plus hour days when that happens. But the days of quiet balance it out.
I only have one employee (that is not IT) that works a normal 9-5 schedule and then disconnects. Everyone else could be working from 6am -2am or 8am till oh I will take a 4 hour lunch today. Freedom does come with a costs some times when it feels like the hours are never ending. But all in all in balances out in the end.
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@scottalanmiller said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
One of the things that I love about what I do is that I am home with my wife and kids all day, every day with only rare exceptions that I go see a vendor, client or visit the office. I get so much more family time than normal dads. I mean like 100x more time. But my work is not predictable. My wife and kids have to understand that when I'm needed or I'm productive that that has to be allowed or else we have to give up the 100x more time and better life options. The trade offs are enormous. But not everyone thinks that happiness, money, health, flexibility, time with the family, freedom of location and other benefits are worth not having guaranteed time off. That sounds crazy to those of us who love the flexibility, but average people actually will accept all of that in order to punch out and go home, guaranteed.
@Minion-Queen said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
I love the fact that I can just spend time with family when they come in from out of town. Or @art_of_shred and I can just take off for the day cause it is quiet. The balancing out how much we work isn't a problem because fires always come and lots of times we work 18 plus hour days when that happens. But the days of quiet balance it out.
So much this. I don't homeschool, so my kids are not home all day like @scottalanmiller's are and @Minion-Queen's was. But the ability to just stop and be with family whenever I want is so huge to me.
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@Minion-Queen said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
I love the fact that I can just spend time with family when they come in from out of town. Or @art_of_shred and I can just take off for the day cause it is quiet. The balancing out how much we work isn't a problem because fires always come and lots of times we work 18 plus hour days when that happens. But the days of quiet balance it out.
I only have one employee (that is not IT) that works a normal 9-5 schedule and then disconnects. Everyone else could be working from 6am -2am or 8am till oh I will take a 4 hour lunch today. Freedom does come with a costs some times when it feels like the hours are never ending. But all in all in balances out in the end.
It's also way easier to disconnect and relax when you know no one is looking for you, the fires are out, things are at peace... then dropping things in the middle and worrying about them or knowing that they are waiting for you in the morning or whatever.
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@scottalanmiller said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
But more poignantly let me ask you, how do you do the same thing if you have people clock in and clock out?
Depends on the business I suppose. We have obvious issues like business hours of operation, where our shipping personnel and customer service has to be expected to be working. Shippers have to do their thing also based on the schedules of the shipping truck drivers for deliveries and pickups.
The phones have to be answered during set business hours.
People who need priority shipping or rush services, we have to be there.
Finance people have to do their work within a workflow so that they do their thing before order processing can do there thing, so it's impossible for the finance guy to do freeform schedule when other people depend on his work to be done first.The list goes on.
All of that stuff up there, sure, you can call it blue collar, administrative, etc. But it all wraps up nicely when you can just say "everybody be available from this time to this time". That way all the workflows and processing happens when it's supposed to and work is performed at consistent times and schedules.
I understand you make the point that white collar professionals don't really work in these types of positions. But then again, is there no such think as a white collar professional finance manager? If their work has to be done by 8:30am, then it has to be done, whether set hours or freeform. This is a time constraint no matter how you slice it.
I can understand when a person owns a business and leases office space or a storefront, they want butts in the seats. What good is having a nice office if freeform employees don't spend much time there and prefer to do most work from home or even a coffee shop?
I can see why a boss wants to be able to call at 2:30pm and know without doubt he's got an employee in a chair who will answer and do what he says immediately.I can see why it would be somewhat annoying if the boss wants something done and has to round-robin calling people to find someone who isn't indisposed on a date or at the movies in the middle of the afternoon and thus has to wait 2 hours to get a task done.
I'm not arguing cause I think the freeform way is bad, cause it actually sounds lovely. I work best at night for example, I'm a night owl. I'm crummy in the morning and need a kick to get in to gear. I would love nothing more than being able to break up my day with a family lunch or a matinée or hit the gym to get a refresh. I'd love switching to a night schedule where I can work from after-dinner to 11:30pm or something and wake up at 9 or 10. It's just the way my body works.
Anyway I guess all I'm saying is, there are perks to both, perks for both the business owners, or the employees.
I would love to work from home, but if I'm working for a local business and a boss controls my time, then I want that time slot limited and to unplug from them the rest of the time. I don't want to go from feeling under control from 9-5 to being under control ALL the time which is how our salaried people felt. This is probably the boss's fault.
Freeform would only work for me if I get to be self-directed and don't have to feel like I'm on call. I've done on call, it's nearly panic-inducing. Making sure my phone is charged at all times and is near me with the ringer loud. Never forget to have it next to me in bed. Leave on the buzzer instead of turning it off in the theater. Always a small worry that it will ring at any moment. Warning people "if I get a call I have to run", etc. Having it on the counter next to me in the shower even.
That type of on-call situation is stressful. If I make one mistake and say I'm driving out the woods and don't have signal and don't realize it, then horror of horrors someone tried to contact me for an hour and now I have a black mark on my "performance report" for slow turn around time. It's just a horrid way to live as far as what I just described.
I guess at the end of the day it all boils down NOT to how passionate someone is about their work, but rather how controlled they feel within the company. I actually have a boss who often belittles people and is condescending, but of course, they are the boss, you just put up with it. With a boss like that, there is no better thing than being able to "unplug" and ignore them for the next 16 hours, irregardless of how much I love the work. And no worse thing than to have to hear their voice at 7:30pm when I'm having dinner with the family.
I guess I need a new job, hahaha, but I still love the work.
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@guyinpv said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@scottalanmiller said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
But more poignantly let me ask you, how do you do the same thing if you have people clock in and clock out?
Depends on the business I suppose. We have obvious issues like business hours of operation, where our shipping personnel and customer service has to be expected to be working. Shippers have to do their thing also based on the schedules of the shipping truck drivers for deliveries and pickups.
The phones have to be answered during set business hours.
People who need priority shipping or rush services, we have to be there.Absolutely, availability is still needed. But just because someone has clocked in does not imply that they are working, doing their job, doing their job well, being productive or making the company money. All of the challenges of determining if they are really working remain, that they need to be there certain hours is above and beyond that.
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I've never had a home lab and I'm better than most people I hire, or have worked for, or many I have met (but I've also met a lot of people way more knowledgeable and talented @scottalanmiller being one of them). Having said that, I do remember almost everything I do and read better than most people, so it's just genetic cheating anyway.
I think though I'd be suspicious of someone who didn't have a homelab because they had the attitude of "that's my job, I don't want to have to do that when I'm not at work," I despise this kind of thing. If you don't like it, get a different job, especially if your in tech. I have a whole story about this kind of attitude, and I won't get into it here, other than to say: if you don't love what you're doing, you suck at your job, and I mean that is universal in IT, no exceptions.
If you ever say "that's what I do at work, I don't want to do that when I am at home" or whatever, please quit your job and go work doing something else, I can tell you without a doubt you don't know what you're doing.
Plus also, they're just jerks, only pretentious dimwits act that way.
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@tonyshowoff said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
I've never had a home lab and I'm better than most people I hire, or have worked for, or many I have met (but I've also met a lot of people way more knowledgeable and talented @scottalanmiller being one of them). Having said that, I do remember almost everything I do and read better than most people, so it's just genetic cheating anyway.
Your company is your own lab, though.
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There was a time when I didn't have a "home lab", because the company put their production stuff in my home, for example.
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@scottalanmiller said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
@tonyshowoff said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:
I've never had a home lab and I'm better than most people I hire, or have worked for, or many I have met (but I've also met a lot of people way more knowledgeable and talented @scottalanmiller being one of them). Having said that, I do remember almost everything I do and read better than most people, so it's just genetic cheating anyway.
Your company is your own lab, though.
I guess that's true, but even prior to that. I've irritated some IT people just because I read tutorials, KB articles, forum posts, etc one time and then remember it forever, and even on this forum I have easily gone back to exact things people have said and called them on it. I'm not bragging though, I do realise there is a varied amount of training and knowledge people need, so I'm not like Samuel Johnson and assume everyone else who doesn't remember as well as I do is stupid and unworthy. There's a lot of talented people with even poor memories as well, since many times problem solving has less to do with memory, and more to do with... well.. problem solving. Fortunately I have skill at both, and try to pass along my garbage by participating in places like ML and SW to save others the time.
