Unfortunately, there's another camp that (with credible arguments) claims that task-estimates are almost always meaningless. If you buy into that camp, and if someone under-delivers, it doesn't tell you anything about whether or not they are performing poorly. They could simply be the victim of an overly optimistic task-estimate. As a manager, what are you going to do then?

This is pretty much the double-edged-sword in the NoEstimates movement. Either you judge people purely on the basis of results, and end up punishing people who are victims of poor task estimates. Or you don't judge people at all, and watch as people take advantage of the situation to slack off as much as they want. Or you judge them on the basis of hours-spent-at-work, which will then induce the same complaints we see in this thread.

This is largely because people cook up all kind of bull-crap work just to keep busy and have it look like the equivalent of 'moon-landing' just happened.

Over years I have seen this phenomenon play out in every major company. The absolute worst I have seen is a whole team of 10-20 members dedicated to build that would be the equivalent of cron + ftp, implemented in super verbose java written and rewritten to make class hierarchies as complicated as possible to make it look big, and then have it projected as the biggest project ever. The team went to bag a lot of bonuses and promotions. Stuff like this is why goal based evaluation don't work.

Also look at: http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

The entirety of his argument has one data point: he has a friend who is a lawyer who thinks his job is useless for society.

The book company could then buy a standard product as a simple cost, while the security company attaches direct revenue to effective security.

I guess the IT/security company would need to run your infrastructure to be able to set up monitoring and such?

That can still be hard to accurately measure. You can measure, of course, how much revenue was attributed to sales of the product developed by the team, but how much of that is attributable to the team's work and how much is attributable to company-wide marketing and how much is due to company image developed by public experience with products developed by other teams is...not always readily obvious. (And, of course, then you have teams that aren't devoted to particular products or which provide company-wide services supporting product teams, but not directly generating revenue -- unless, of course, you organize your company so that accounting, HR, marketing, etc., are all broken up and product-team specific.)

Of course, if you measure by the entire company a lot of that uncertainty gets washed out.

I'm guessing that's true for a lot of areas in a large company. What about the department that takes care of buildings or HR for example?

This would become far less efficient if we didn't all keep mostly the same hours.

Face-to-face time is invaluable to me, but almost exclusively for brainstorming/working through difficult problems. But this can be a small minority of the week, and can happen opportunistically (when someone is available).

Maybe you should look into technologies like email that allows people to send messages that can be responded to when the person has the time.

Isn't it a given that very few companies actually are hiring the top 0.01%? Unless you really need the absolute world best, you're probably going to do fine hiring local people who can work together closely.

I (in North America) had to interact with a team member in Australia for a short project, and if either of us needed the other for something, we effectively had to find other work to do while waiting for the other to actually be awake and/or at their desk.

Fortunately I've only ever worked one place where that was super-useful, and only briefly. Got three novels read while also completing my work and doing a bunch of other work that I probably didn't need to, in ~2 months' time.

It's employees who get screwed by this - if their managers are too concerned about waste, they can't do anything like read a book or go for a walk, so they're on Facebook and Reddit, which are much less effective as breaks from focused work.

Either that or results-based work doesn't actually help us get things done faster than traditional work (_i.e._ it's snake oil) and at best it'll limp along providing little benefit to anyone but the people selling books about it.

So either it will fail/stagnate because it doesn't improve productivity, or it will become the new norm and we'll just have enough results expected of us that the effect on workers is at best indistinguishable from traditional work (businesses that fail to fill up the free time with more work will, generally, lose to those that do)

That hasnt been my experience. My employer doesnt care how or when throughout the week I get something done. Just once a week I state what I accomplished and what I am working on now. We still have deadlines, just no constant helicoptering. Its obvious when a project seems behind and I need to allocate extra hours to accomplish it.

It does result in plenty of flexibility and free time.

Constant checkin's, helicoptering, and meetings are nothing but an impediment to productivity IMO. If your company needs that as part of their workflow they prob need to reassess their hiring process (not hiring A players) and communication processes.

9-5 isn't the 'optimal'. It's simply what is 'most common' for a diurnal society. Nobody is driving around town looking to get a hair cut at 3am and staring at an IDE from 1pm-5pm trying to solve a bug isn't making you any more efficient than thinking about the problem while cooking an early dinner.

Humans do suffer fatigue - both mental and physical - and proper lengths of rest helps both kinds.

I posit that happier employees are more likely to trend their work/life balance in favor of work if they enjoy their work and enjoy their company. Unhappy employees will skirt by on the bare minimum required knowing that hiring/training a new employee isn't worth the cost of firing them.

http://ageofem.com/