I can't remember if it was on HN or reddit, but there was a comment//post about how a job site operated similar to this.
To heavily paraphrase over the gist of the second-hand account from the boss: "Our workplace will be rule-free until people start abusing it. When someone goes overboard, a rule against their abuse will be created under their name which will be applicable to everybody; if you think that rule bullshit, go thank that person and a talk with your manager will always be welcome. We do this out of respect for you, our employees; you have our trust until you prove we don't."
I'd never, ever consider working a place like that, as it places the power in the hand of managers who may decide something I consider perfectly reasonable is "abuse", and use this "under their name" bit to harass people. Which means I can't evaluate if the company will be a decent work place or a sweatshop.
To me, this is disrespectful to employees in the extreme. It shows a total disregard for the power disparity that exists, which makes rules more important for clarity for employees than for the company.
If they wanted to be respectful to their employees: Set rules, and create a mechanism for asking for exemptions and be lenient with the.
Otherwise they're asking me to trust that they will not abuse their power.
You'd rather they set rules than treat people like grownups? You say the proposed way of treating people like grownups can be abused. You are correct in that, but you forget that "rules plus a mechanism for asking for exemptions" can also be abused, and has been, often.
I would rather work at a company with few rules than one where there is red tape around everything. For example, at my current company I don't even have root access on the machines I develop on, and I have to submit tickets to IT to get anything installed or changed. One time I asked them to install Docker and was met with suspicion. IT said they would investigate, and months later it is still is not installed.
I am currently a contractor//temp at a particular company. I am there to do particular work in order to support the real people doing their real jobs for The Company.
Often times I come against some form of permissions issue which prevents me from doing my job because of my non-real status. Because of red tape and nothing else I promise you, nothing about "but proprietary data" or anything like that. It may be root access to a specific computer, it may be casual access to a particular online processing system. "Oh, just go to the group github and... oh, you can't. Let me find a thumb drive and the latest release..." or "Can you access the group's shared data access website yet? ... but, we filed a bug about your access for this a few months ago, and still nothing? Are you sure? Can you try again and send me the error and cc IT?" ... and so on. Everyone's frustrated; I do what I can, push it up the chain, make the noise to maintain hope for improvement.
That's fine, but "no rules unless you mess up" is very different, because it forces you to basically try to second guess what a number of different managers will consider messing up.
Ask yourself why your current company has that rule, and consider if they could do it in a more practical way without making you guess. E.g. put dev servers on a separate network segment.
Stupid rules are worse than no rules, but if you join a place with stupid rules at least you know what you're going to. Because in reality there are rules in the "no rules" place too - they're just unwritten conventions you have to learn by trial and error.
Why do you feel like you need root access? In my experience, there are pretty much zero real reasons for a dev to need that level of access in a company that has an IT dept. IT may have good reasons not to let you mess around. If you want more access, I suggest you have a conversation with them and make a good business case for why it's a good thing. If you can't, then you probably don't need it and they would be right to deny it to you.
Because I'm a developer and I need to install things to develop. For whatever reason, the vast majority of windows packages require admin to install.
If you think it's great that I have to open a ticket to IT every time I want to update VSCode or install Python or Node or whatever, that's good for you, but I find it cumbersome and annoying and would rather work for a company that gives me root and trusts that I won't install viruses.
I read your previous comment as you wanting access to the servers that your code will run on. I'm guessing from the reference to VSCode that you're talking about your local work machine, so I apologise for my mistake and I agree, you should have trust from your company to look after your own work machine as you see fit.
Yes, my local work machine is completely locked down by corporate IT. They have a list of "pre-approved" things we can install like Chrome and Firefox and Notepad++, but everything else requires a ticket...
I'm a bit ambivalent about this. On the one hand, rules are stupid and red tape is one of the most annoying things about offices. On the other hand, rules also protect the employees from bad managers. If everything is allowed until "someone goes overboard", this basically allows the managers to make up rules after the fact to punish people they don't like.
> rules also protect the employees from bad managers
To offer the other side of the coin: I am currently working in a situation where the rules are protecting bad managers against employees.
My current manger is clearly lacking in "good" manager skills, and his direct manager is protecting him. A group of my coworkers is working together "to survive" the both of them. Hopeful questions about re-orgs are asked, regular private meetings about sub-group self-reliance are held. "I'm worried about ageism", "I've lost total hope with this manager", "I'm in survival mode", and similar quotes are regular weekly features.
The team has clear and obvious elevation in productivity and moral when the manager is absent [vacation, off-site business, sick, whatever]. The manager's manager doesn't want to hear it; "just work together" type of "advice". Yea ok that's been tried for a long time now, it's time for departures or re-orgs and those are the solutions at this point.
I am a big believer in "That government is best which governs least." I raised two 2xE sons (gifted plus special needs) and one of the best things I did was to only create minimal, very logical rules that they could respect and understand.
For example: "I need to be able to walk to the dresser and closet without hurting myself so I can put clothes away." This was clear and sensible instructions for deciding for themselves where they could leave toys out and where they couldn't. The reason for it was also readily grasped and something they could agree with. It wasn't just abstract "I am in charge, you will do as you are told!" type BS.
"There are rules, but we don't tell you what they are. It is up to you to guess. Once the group think moves too much in wild direction, we will pick up someone we don't like and make him/her an example"
It's sometimes called organizational scar tissue. But what about making it an organizational scab instead? Have the damage-control rules in an organization be time-limited? Those freedoms people keep abusing would get repeated temporary restrictions and eventually a permanent ruling, but one-time problems would not weigh down the organization forever.
I'm starting to get metaphysical about IP leases. (Request, grant, revokation, expiration.)
As in: leases are a cure all for all of societial and organizational woes. I'm having trouble articulating my thoughts. But the basic notion is give all the cruft a TTL, after which the cruft cleans itself up.
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Want a new tax, or tax break? Sure. It expires in 36 months. Want an extension? Then ask again and we'll reassess.
Want to bring dogs into the office? Sure. Let's try it for 6 months.
Want to provision a new customer of a critical service? Sure. Here's your token. It expires in 2 days.
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Hat tip to Bill Joy, Jini, JXTA, etc for lifting the lease notion up the OSI stack.
Hat tip to The Utopia of Rules by David Graeber for describing how organizational scars/scabs come to be.
I'm not yet sure how, if ZeroTrust Networking extends this model, metaphor.
I'm not sure I would want to operate in a country where the tax situation was likely to change drastically from one term to another. If I need Tea Party people to agree on frequent tax extensions, even the sensible/proven ones, I see nothing but zigzag and uncertainty instead of actual, planned forward progress.
If lease times are predictable and actually honored by the government, I'm pretty sure people would handle it.
That said, maybe tax reform is not the right place to try this idea. But I like it WRT regulation, and especially office rules - having an expiration date helps not getting stuck with obsolete regulations.
I hear ya. My state’s progressives have been trying to end ~500 tax breaks for years. Whereas reauthorizing taxes, budgets, appropriations is a cyclic fight, these frikkin tax bresks are untouchable. My notion is to apply the rules, mechanics to both ends. Wishful thinking, I know.
This reminds me of the "no pictures at your desk rule" at a company I contracted at. everyone was allowed to have pictures at their desk until the guy put up a hundred pictures from his side photography business.
To heavily paraphrase over the gist of the second-hand account from the boss: "Our workplace will be rule-free until people start abusing it. When someone goes overboard, a rule against their abuse will be created under their name which will be applicable to everybody; if you think that rule bullshit, go thank that person and a talk with your manager will always be welcome. We do this out of respect for you, our employees; you have our trust until you prove we don't."