Comment by asgard1024 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by asgard1024 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

While I quite agree with the idea, it rests on the assumption:

"leaders also need to create a culture in which employees do not have every waking moment of every day committed to project work"

Unfortunately, I am currently in situation where is lot more project work than people (and I wonder, is it different elsewhere?). In that case, I don't think the approach the author describes quite works unless you have a dedicated person who keeps track what needs to be done and prioritizes (i.e. project manager).

Because when I work on something I want to work on it with highest possible focus, not being bothered to asses what other work has to be done. So I would prefer (which is not my current predicament, sadly) some other person tracking everything and telling me - hey, this thing has higher priority than what you're doing right now, perhaps you should switch tasks. The point is, he should make the calculation that I should switch, not me.

(Perhaps this is a reason why preemptive multitasking won over cooperative multitasking on the OS level?)

There are some, who in ambition to lead (or work on highly visible projects), will step up and take on new things – meanwhile skimping on their core responsibilities and deliverables.

Are these the people we want to promote into leadership roles?

What about people who have a light load during a cycle (due to specialization), like to tinker with things in their 'spare' time, or would rather tradeoff their core and do something different?

Seems reasonable for an internal tool or process to help the team - not a necessity, so if nobody wants to do it, no big deal. If people are excited about it, it'll get done along with their core responsibilities.

The other case is giving people the opportunity to hand off their normal load (that may be uninteresting to them) to head up some project or initiative that would have to be assigned to someone anyway. In the latter case, isn't it better to have someone who's interested doing it than have that person doing uninteresting work while an uninterested person heads up the project?

Not sure why are you replying to me, it's entirely different question.

I don't have a problem with people working on new things. The question of leadership - I think it's a little fuzzy. OS kernel decides what process gets to run and what not, but it's not like you can call it a "leader". He just does it on basis of processes' priorities, which may well be set by individual processes themselves or something else entirely. (And I am actually fan of direct democracy - where the leader designation is pointless, but that doesn't mean - in such system - you can't have project manager telling you what you should work on, as is obvious from the OS analogy.)

Maybe not, but IS is the people who actually end up getting promoted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com