How to kill a company's morale in one easy memo | Hacker News Reader

How to kill a company's morale in one easy memo

technocrat.net

209 pointsmcantor127 comments

From the comments:

My sister used to work for a large multinational that pressured people to come in on Saturdays. The employees would come in but they would work on personal tasks like paying bills and balancing their checkbooks. It was all for appearance and it just pissed off the employees. She left the company after this pressure started. Part of her Saturday "work" was looking for a new job.

In my experience this is par for the course. Sure, you can force employees to spend more time in the office, but past a certain point they'll just find ways to satisfy your crazy demands only in the most technical sense possible.

It's a case of misplaced metrics. I can't find the name of the paper or the researcher, but I believe it's been shown that when you try to reward/punish some metric of productivity, invariably the employees will begin to maximize that metric, perhaps at the expense of productivity.

Measuring number of hours in the office is not a direct measurement of productivity, and these employees were meeting the metric, but only costing the company money, not making it any.

Incentive structures are tricky.

>I believe it's been shown that when you try to reward/punish some metric of productivity, invariably the employees will begin to maximize that metric, perhaps at the expense of productivity.

After years of direct involvement in measuring productivity, I would accept that as a general axiom. I've likened it to badly applied wallpaper: push down a bubble and it just pops up somewhere else.

So what would you say are the best ways to measure productivity?

I would say the best way is by the outcomes, by the results. By productivity - be it units produced, share price, value added...

Productivity is not = hours worked.

Yeah but that gets pretty vague pretty fast.

How do you measure a programmer's productivity when you can't estimate exactly (and sometimes not even close) how much work something should take?

I have not seen a software project where there is not enough work for somebody.

What I've found useful, and which worked reasonably well for teams which have been working over a period of time together is to collectively estimate complexity of tasks that must be completed.Say on a scale of 1-5. That gives you a reasonably agreeable scale of measurement (not a universal scale, but the one that the team accepts). As time progresses, you see how many such tasks are completed by any person in a given time frame.

Not that this is foolproof, or that it works right from the beginning of a project, but over a period of time, you tend to get a good sense of how productive each member is.

[Edit: Typo fixed]

Sounds pretty decent, although there is still the problem that it doesn't tell you if someone is slacking off or is simply not very fast.

Nor does it tell you anything about the quality of the work produced. Sometimes a job half done is worse than a job never started!

I'd say "don't bother". The very act of measuring changes employees' focus from getting the job done to gaming the system. The more that management focuses on the metrics, the more that people are driven to secondary and even tertiary efforts to look productive, rather than spending their energy just doing their jobs.

It triggers an arms race of workers seeking ways to mask their activities and management building ever-more elaborate and invasive metrics to capture them. The end result is that everyone spends so much time and energy on administration that the output of real work actually falls - along with both employee morale and management confidence.

I found myself nodding my head in recognition when I read the excellent essay on lesswrong.com about spammers trying to game PageRank. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1339704

That confirms my bias, which is that it can't be measured directly and the metrics that people try it with usually do more harm than good. But it's very interesting coming from someone with "years of direct involvement in measuring productivity".

Something akin to productivity measurement isn't completely useless, but it should only ever be used: a) to identify and address systematic problems, as opposed to scrutinizing individual performance; and b) in rare cases to identify extreme outliers - but managers should be aware enough of what their employees are doing to know who those people are already.

Unfortunately, that kind of approach doesn't lend itself to a productivity measurement team seeking a high profile for its activities. Nor does ostensibly objective, non-punitive measurement stay that way - it's just too tempting for managers to use it as a stick.

I've been working on different projects for the past couple of years, and frankly I'm glad to be out of the productivity game.

Even if the metric is a direct business metric that it's manaagement's job to optimize (like profitability or number of users)?

I've always thought it would be interesting to see the results if half of everybody's salary (including the CEO and the toner refill guy) was paid by dividends from shares of the company held in trust for this purpose. As in, every year, everyone's pay goes up/down by the same (relative) amount.

What if, in addition, the shares held in trust were a closed pool, requiring employees to give up part of their bonus share to any new employees hired? The expected net outcome of hiring on profitability would then have to outweigh the decreased income from a (very slightly) reduced share of profits.

I'm not certain that this is the ideal system of incentives (i.e. there might be local minima one could get stuck in), but it would certainly be an exciting experiment...

Dan Pink would suggest that if you're trying to drive performance by tweaking monetary incentives, you're doing it wrong. http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

I read of it via Joel Spolsky:

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20081001/how-hard-could-it-be-si... which cites a Harvard chap's book as a reference, and

and http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000070.html which seems based on his experiences at Microsoft.

  It's a case of misplaced metrics. I can't find the name 
  of the paper or the researcher, but I believe it's been 
  shown that when you try to reward/punish some metric of 
  productivity, invariably the employees will begin to 
  maximize that metric, perhaps at the expense of 
  productivity.

You may be thinking of the Hawthorne Effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

This effect is a lot less pronounced in physical labour based jobs, it's harder to portray that your doing things in these jobs. Sure overall your productivity may be down over long hours but the extra time worked makes up for this.

To take this to the extreme I'd say the place you get most value for pushing extra hours is a production line where an employee is repeatedly preforming one simple task.

Actually I would say this is core to the whole issue. Management is still largely stuck in the mindset of a physical labor world. With physical labor if you force people to work 12 hour days you really will get close to 12 hours of work because as long as the body can swing a pick it can... swing a pick.

The brain doesn't work like this, you can't push the brain past a certain point consistently.

Management needs to catch up to the times. We don't pay CEO's millions of dollars to over see a bunch of people swinging picks.

I believe it's known as Campbell's Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_Law

Thank you. That sums it up pretty concisely, though not very precisely.

I wonder if Goodhart's law is more apt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodharts_law

My first programming job after graduation had a paid Saturday requirement that crept in a couple of months after I started. I think I was the only one that said no to it. I didn't even think twice about the decision and Mondays felt a lot better from my perspective.

And you are no longer there.

No longer being there is a good thing.

What I found ironic in the post is that the CEO wants to implement a time-card system, but also wants his employees (probably a lot on salary) to work extended hours. I'm not sure how it is in the US, but here this would result in the company paying a shit-ton out at year end in banked time.

Forcing your workers to do overtime and work a half-day on saturday would land a company paying near to two-months wages at year end for all its employees if they weren't careful. This would have killed an IT company for sure back in 2001.

It depends on their contracts. If the contracts make them exempt workers (meaning they don't get overtime even if they work >40h, which almost certainly was the case) and also require them to work at least 40 hours a week or have the difference counted as vacation time, then the time cards could be used to ensure that the employees are meeting the 40 hour minimum, but the company wouldn't owe the people anything even though they were now measuring that some of them were working, say, 50 hours a week.

My understanding is that if you dock people part-days for not showing up, you can get in trouble if you don't pay time and a half overtime, even if your dudes are 'exempt'

I'd actually like to take a step back from the hate-fest going on in the comments here and evaluate this. Before you downvote me, at least read what I have to say.

This email is a classic example of poor communication. It's very clear that the guy is frustrated and is taking it out via an emotional response. However, we don't know the whole story here, do we? From my reading, it sounds like this has been an ongoing problem for awhile now. Keep in mind that this was in 2001, not exactly an easy time to be running a software company. I can imagine the frustration of running a large company with thousands of employees and seeing a lack of results, coupled with evidence of employees not spending much time at work. What would you do in such a case? Not necessarily with regard to the email, which I think we can all agree was in poor taste, but with regard to the actions he says he's going to take.

Additionally, we don't know if this memo did in fact kill morale at the company. We know that the company has done well over the last nine years, and that Mr. Patterson was recently honored as one of the best bosses in the country. The Wikipedia entry specifically mentions the metric of great performance relative to compensation, so he's obviously creating value.

I guess my point is that everyone makes mistakes, especially when they're frustrated and facing a large problem. And make no mistake, managing a software company with several thousand people in 2001 would be a challenge. I'm not saying this was the right approach, but what exactly would you do? And more importantly, if you've never faced management at that scale, why do you think it would be more effective than his approach?

I was thinking something similar.

In the startup world we know that the strongest motivation is internal, and that despite the cultural expectation of long hours, we can't really force the issue. Instead we have to hire people that are internally motivated by passion for what they do, and a desire for greatness. If, in a startup, you have to crack the whip you've probably already failed.

In the corporate world you don't have the luxury of hiring only the best and brightest most internally motivated people. There's the law of averages for one thing, but also there tends to be a lot more grunt work, bureaucratic overhead, and the individual has much less opportunity to make a difference anyway. There are good reasons for these things; once you have a profitable, repeatable business, bureaucracy and processes ensure the money keeps coming in and mistakes are learned from on an institutional level, there is less incentive to innovate because the risk-reward structure is completely different.

Despite the fact that we know this is bad for morale, we don't know that morale and intrinsic motivation were getting this company anywhere. It's entirely possible that the low-level employees were losers (in the Gervais principle sense) with no personal stake in the company other than to milk it for a paycheck. If that's the case then perhaps motivation by fear is a legit management strategy. In other words, even though it may be true that brilliant hackers would never put up with a managerial environment like that, maybe they never would have worked there anyway.

Instead we have to hire people that are internally motivated by passion for what they do, and a desire for greatness.

I think you're missing an important part of the picture: Startup employees generally want to get rich too. If the startup they work for does phenomenally well, that should happen.

In the corporate world, not only does an individual have less opportunity to make a difference, they usually get pretty much no payout even if they do something really outstanding.

What struck me about the memo, is the constant references to 'the problem', without ever defining what the actual problem was. People not working long hours might be a symptom of a problem, but it is not a problem in and of itself.

You ask how we'd tackle the problem, but I don't know how anyone can answer that without knowing what the problem actually is.

This might have been communicated, or evident, outside of this memo, but it sounds like he's trying to fix a problem that doesn't necessarily exist, based on questionable metrics.

Or what's far more likely is that there was a problem that did exist, we just don't know what it was or the context because only got this one memo.

I can imagine the frustration of running a large company with thousands of employees and seeing a lack of results, coupled with evidence of employees not spending much time at work.

I just want to shove in that it's not a case of "not much time", employment is a business transaction between adults - a contractually agreed amount of time for an amount of money.

If the employees are putting in the time they and their employer agreed they would, it's not fair or accurate to say it's "not much" time.

If the contract is specified by results instead, then the employer also has no right to say "not much time", only "not good enough results".

Whatever the problem is, I would bet that this memo doesn't solve the problem in any way, just makes it worse. No serious person should ever write "The pizza man should show up at 7:30 PM to feed the starving teams working late." And I seriously mean never.

"We are getting less than 40 hours of work [...]" implies that it's the minimum, so I guess that's what's in the standard employee contract. But "NEVER in my career have I allowed a team which worked for me to think they had a 40 hour job." implies he wants a tired, unmotivated, angry person to do work for him.

What would I do? Take a look at the actual issues. If employees are not at work during the time they should, just because they got used to that - first warn, then after some time find the biggest offender and fire him/her (based on not doing the time agreed in contract) to show the rule is executed. But I don't believe that's the reason - there's no point in holding a meeting late at night, because people will just sleep until that time, or do something completely unrelated. You cannot make anyone do work. Just for fun - you can try the most trivial method - 5 why-s. Try to think of 1 scenario that starts with "bad results" and is fixable at step 3/4 by forcing employees to stay at work for additional time. (in most cases you'll find bad project organisation, strange scheduling policies, conflicts of interests, etc.)

If they don't want to stay the standard hours at work, there's an underlying problem somewhere. If they don't want to stay additional hours at work, there's nothing you can do legally, apart from providing incentives (and that still doesn't guaranty that they will do any more work).

Also the guy SHOUTS in the email. Outside of internet, if you have to start shouting to make your point, you lose respect / have weak communication skills / you're probably wrong - it doesn't help you win the argument anyways.

Why do I think I could do better? Because I can identify a list of things that would make me leave the company asap, if my manager was acting that way, which is exactly the opposite of what he wants to achieve.

To get where the author of this memo got (CEO of a publicly traded corporation), work essentially has to be your life. I mean, your #1 priority, ahead of friends, family, fun, and everything else. I have never seen an example of such a person at the helm of a large, multinational corporation, who does not, generally, appear to fit that description. This memo illustrates the total disconnect between that sort of person, and the other 97% of us for whom work ranks a distant 5th-10th on life's list of priorities.

So, in some sense, it's understandable. Inexcusable, but I at least get the place from where this sort of vitriol is coming from. He really thinks he can get people to care as much as he does. In some ways it's amazing that he made it so far while remaining so deluded.

And the irony might be that he gets a company that outwardly looks exactly like he wants. The sheep willing to conform will stay and others will move on. Now I'm not saying anything about productivity, that's another question then.

Have to say that as the leader of the company he's failed abysmally.

>My measurement will be the parking lot: it should be substantially full at 7:30 AM and 6:30 PM....The lot should be half full on Saturday mornings. We have a lot of work to do.

His response is about bullsh!t metrics - not about the work. There's not one mention of productivity, of not meeting targets, of poorly performing staff. The management may, or may not, be doing so - but the sole defining reason for his diatribe is the lack of attendance during what he perceives as reasonable work hours (~65hours/week).

Why wasn't the focus on not meeting targets? on improving productivity? on making progress?

When a person says exactly what they are thinking, and it comes out horribly -- but accurately -- it's not "poor communication," it's "poor being."

"I think this parental type action SUCKS. However, what you are doing, as managers, with this company makes me SICK. It makes sick to have to write this directive. I know I am painting with a broad brush and the majority of the KC based associates are hard working, committed to Cerner success and committed to transforming health care. I know the parking lot is not a great measurement for 'effort'. I know that 'results' is what counts, not 'effort'. But I am through with the debate."

This part proves that this guy is the worst kind of douchebag: one that knows what he is doing is stupid and heavy handed, and yet does it anyway.

On the company's web site there's a page about him (he's the CEO): http://cerner.com/public/Cerner_2.asp?id=27586

In that it says: "Cerner associates extol Neal for his passion and foresight, his ability to drive change within organizations, his entrepreneurial spirit, and his candid, uninhibited conversational style."

So that's just a candid, uninhibited conversational style :-)

Note that that message was sent in 2001. If you chart CERN against the NASDAQ over the last 10 years you'll see that the memo hasn't hurt company stock price one bit.

http://www.google.co.uk/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=...

Looks like their stock price was pretty volatile in 2001. Is it really likely then that employee action was the reason for a 20% drop?

Are you defending this guy?

No. I'm pointing out that he may be a total ass, but it doesn't seem to have hurt his company.

I appreciate you pointing out that it doesn't seem to have hurt company, although its very like that it did in other unmeasurable ways.

Your post seemed to excuse his actions as if its just his style.

Yes, but you didn't present evidence that he didn't hurt his company. You presented evidence that he didn't hurt the company so badly that it didn't grow, but not that he didn't hurt the company.

> You presented evidence that he didn't hurt the company so badly that it didn't grow, but not that he didn't hurt the company.

Since no one has presented evidence showing that he hurt his company....

In my book, you don't get to complain about the quality of someone else's evidence unless your evidence is better. And no, "self-evident" doesn't count. YMMV.

At the risk of getting meta, I was complaining about the quality of the evidence for the assertion. I never made any assertions about the company suffering in any way because of this guy.

in past 10 years the stock has grown at an annualized rate of 19%, weathered 2008 crash extremely well and has doubled since crash. The guy is also still at the helm at the age of 60. He might be the worse a*hole possible, but whatever he's doing seems to be working pretty well.

Without intimate knowledge of the company's workings, plans and actions in those past 10 years, that logic is post hoc ergo propter hoc. The only thing we can say for sure is his jackassery didn't hurt the company as much as a rational person would think it might.

He's commenting on the truth of certain statements.

Are you saying we should gloss over some facts just to make the guy look even worse than he already does?

Nope. I'm saying, "Are you defending this guy?"

By conflating making true statements about the stock market (good) with defending assholes (bad), you create an environment hostile to truth.

I was genuinely curious.

When did you stop beating your wife?

Sure. Why not?

The morale of the company was supposedly "killed" after that email and the evidence used was a drop in stock price, but a little investigation shows that the stock price is actually fine. Therefore, any accusation that the CEO is ineffective appears to be false and deserves to be defended against.

That's speculation. They've done better than the NASDAQ, but how do you know they couldn't have done better without the memo being sent out?

Of course you're right, but that's a pretty high standard to hold him to. You'd have to say the same thing about CEOs who behave in a way you support, too. ("Yeah, their stock improved after he started treating employees with respect, but how do you know they couldn't have done better without that change in behavior?")

I think the moral of the story is that stock prices are a pretty bad way to gauge employee morale.

I'll refine that one step further: stock prices are a bad way to gauge anything reliably ... except stock prices.

And the CEO in question probably has optimizing stock prices at a higher priority than optimizing employee morale.

Well, here's one clue from Google Finance's weekly price data: in the three weeks before he sent the memo the price had dropped from $29.407 to $21.063 - a 28% drop. Oddly enough, the 3/23 Friday close of $17 (just after the memo went public) marked the bottom of that stock decline. A month later the stock closed up at $21.55.

Generally speaking, warm fuzzy bosses don't mean spit to a stock's price, while layoffs can sometimes improve it. The perception that a division's managers are ineffectual, however, could hurt a lot. The story that a CEO was starting to kick managerial ass could improve investor's assessment of the company's chances. Certainly the price data supports the argument that the CEO's actions stopped the price erosion.

I watched a Midwife trying to enter my partners test results into what I believe was a CERNER system at my local hospital. It was painful. The UI is text based, looks pre windows 3.1 and breaks all the basic rules of UI design. Evidently, they also had more serious technical issues under the hood: http://bit.ly/4vLPtE http://bit.ly/9NQKi8 It took them months to sort this out and wasted a huge amount of the medical staff's time. I personally experienced the problems with appointments disappearing. Also, the nurses were having to print out test requests and give them to patients to take to appointments with instructions about what they information they needed to bring back because they couldn't make the requests through the system or access the results of the tests they had requested.

In short, I don't think the success of this company is based on the quality of its software or the timeliness of its delivery. Maybe this is always a problem where the end users are not the customer. The company that builds the system is chosen based on tenders from a few suppliers. As a consumer of a system like this it's hard to identify what you are actually buying. The purchasing of such a system will be managed by a senior executive who will have little experience of the pitfalls of the system in use before they are contractually committed to paying out significant sums of money. There is no market connection between the quality of the software and the end users. I suspect that companies make money in these markets by gaming the bidding process and milking every loophole in the contract to add extra time and cost, not by actually producing a better quality product than their competitors. It's not just a public sector purchasing problem either. Just look at any large construction project, these are also typically be late and over budget. Is there some kind of 'complexity threshold' at which point the market is not driving the quality or cost of the product because you are not sure what you are buying and for how much?

So, basically customers buy their product using other people's money.

It did cause the stock to drop a bit for a while, and caused some negative publicity - including a NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/05/business/stinging-office-m...

The e-mail message was leaked and posted on Yahoo. Its belligerent tone surprised thousands of readers, including analysts and investors. In the stock market, the valuation of the company, which was $1.5 billion on March 20, plummeted 22 percent in three days.

....

At the end of the week, as the stock fell, Mr. Patterson sent out another e-mail message to his troops. Unlike the first memo, it was not called a Management Directive, but rather a Neal Note. It was both an apology to those he offended and a confirmation of the work-ethic problem within the company.

So much for theories about Karma, etc.

EDIT: To be more clear, there is no such thing as Karma outside of ones self. If you can be a total douche bag like this guy and not feel bad about it, then nothing bad is going to happen to you because of it.

Looks like someone needs to read The Mythical Man Month.

(I know TMMM is about specifically software engineering but for a CEO to think that bums on seats==productivity is fairly depressing)

On a aide note - Americans! Move to Europe! Our economy is collapsing too but we're having a much better time watching it happen...

your last line there was the funniest comment I've read on HN in years. thank you!

We got this:

"Recognizing that many of you may have childcare obligations that may create a personal challenge for you please seek approval from your manager to deviate from the above and don’t allow your personal schedule to take priority over your need to support your team’s efforts to service the customer."

A lot of people where I work didn't particularly like the tone of that.

Translation: "Kids are important and stuff, but keeping customers happy is what matters."

"You're supposed to be helping OUR people! What about our stockholders? Who's looking out for them? HUH?!" --Gilbert Huph

I wonder if the reason that they get voted as a 'great place to work' is because the company consists mostly of people that haven't worked anywhere else (or it's just a comparison to other businesses in the KC area)?

I had someone I knew in college go off to work at Cerner in ~2003, and I remember that at the time they had a fairly good rating as a good place to work, but that most of their new hires were recent grads (at least on the software end of things).

The fact that the CEO sends emails with subject lines such as " MANAGEMENT DIRECTIVE: Week #10_01: ..." (with "directives" numbered by week and sequence) should have been warning enough.

update: Google Finance and Reuters show that the Chairman and CEO of Cerner in 2006 is still in the position today. Looks like their stock has recovered from this "20% drop nicely": http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:CERN

The comments imply the original memo was from 2001.

But Neal Patterson, the author of the memo, is still the CEO and chairman of the board. http://www.cerner.com/public/Cerner_2.asp?id=27586

Neal Patterson isn't only the CEO of Cerner, he's also the Founder.

Am I the only person who saw the line about the parking lot being half empty at 8 and 5 and thought, "Oh, that's consistent with a normal distribution of people working 10 hour days with a couple hour variance in arrival times"?

I thought there was going to be a punchline about the CEO not realizing that they'd laid off 50% of staff.

Given that the memo was a rant aimed at managers over problems that dated back a year, I took it to mean "You guys are working hard on things and leading by example, right?"

I've had a couple of bosses who worked hard and expected the managers to work hard too. They were also bosses who believed in sharing the wealth when the company succeeded. Which makes me wonder how many pieces of the puzzle (like his apology/clarification memo) we're not privy to.

Hmm... sounds like this issue could be solved if everyone stopped car-pooling.

+1. Your comment may look like a "witty reply," but it hints at the futility of measuring results so indirectly. Cars in the parking lot != results.

To be fair, that was addressed in the letter.

Which, to be fair, only makes the guy seem more out of touch with reality.

Or if everyone just left their cars at work and took public transit/carpools the rest of the time.

Or, if they bought a $500 lemon, left it taking up space in the company parking lot and kept commuting as usual. In that case, are the $500 tax-deductible?

I like your idea better.

Don't encourage them! Car parks have proven to be one of the most reliable indicators of whether I want to work at a company. On arrival for interview, I take a look around.

If there are lots of nice cars, it's a good sign that the company is doing well and compensates its staff accordingly.

If there are lots of older cars, it's probably a geek-friendly start-up atmosphere, not making much money yet, but everyone's in it together.

If there are a small number of very expensive cars in reserved spots for senior management, and in the few other spaces available there are lots of old cars, IME there is a 100% probability that I will not want to work there.

If people start doing things like car pooling, this almost perfect way to avoid wasting several hours in an interview for a job I'm never going to accept anyway will be spoiled, and I'll have to find some other obvious prejudice to use! :-)

> If people start doing things like car pooling, this almost perfect way to avoid wasting several hours in an interview for a job I'm never going to accept anyway will be spoiled, and I'll have to find some other obvious prejudice to use! :-)

What do you do? Get to the parking lot, look at it, and then just call them and say, "I've decided not to interview with you"?

I've never actually done that, but all the evidence suggests that if I ever interview for an employee position again, I should...

I'll call some BS on the stock price affect... after some quick Googling this article seems to pinpoint the exact date:

http://www.healthdatamanagement.com/news/4296-1.html

Comparing CERN stock vs the S&P500, Dow Jones, and a related company ECLP and MDRX will show that all of them tanked the same week, and all of them recovered quite well within a month or so.

The link above is actually about the effect this memo had on the stock price. To quote:

A blunt e-mail message from Cerner Corp. CEO Neal Patterson about the work ethic of some employees caused the company's stock value to fall sharply last week. The company acknowledges the harsh tone of the message could have caused investors to question if the company was in crisis ... After the e-mail was posted on a Yahoo! bulletin board last week, the stock fell nearly 20% on March 22-23, including 15%, or $6.13 per share, on March 23. Patterson threatened installing time clocks, discontinuing an employee stock discount program and cutting staff by five percent, a morale blow at a company that prides itself on good employee relations. He told managers they had two weeks to get their units in shape, or "pack your bags." In a March 23 interview with the Kansas City Star, Patterson said threatening measures are not being pursued, but he continued to voice concern about work ethics in some segments of the company. He also sent out another e-mail apologizing for the harsh tone of the first one.

It would be interesting to see the apology email.

From mildweed's comment in the CalTech thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1455037

Just idly curious, but why did people upvote my attribution comment?

It's a behavior we wish to encourage.

By the way, isn't this what working for Apple is supposed to be like? Except that when you do get to go home, you can't even discuss what you were working on during the day.

Edit: downvote if you must, but info on the work/life balance at Apple is preferred.

In April of 2010, Forbes magazine named Patterson fourth on their annual list of "America's Best-Performing Bosses"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Patterson

Doesn't excuse being an horrible asshole.

It is just a business, nothing personal :-)

Finally he could have said it more nicely and clearly: "if you work for me, you're expected to have no family life, no personal life, to be manic crazies who live and breathe for their work only ."

The memo's almost ten years old. Maybe he learned from the reaction he provoked?

Depends on your point of view. It certainly is excused if you're a Cerner stockholder, right?

As an IT guy hailing from the general area that Cerner calls home, I can honestly say this is where hackers' souls go to die.

Man this is terrible management and exactly the type of thing that just asks for backlash.

Where's the students of history? When you create a police state like this in a company, control will be lost, morale will fall and productivity crashes. Abusing your force only makes it worse.

While I agree that it asks for backlash - do we actually know what happened? It seems like the company's doing decently, so I'm not sure the students of history will have much to work off of.

More talking about actual history such as 19th century Europe.

However this memo is dated as August '06 so we can assume that it happened sometime earlier that summer. From this google finance chart: http://bit.ly/ar1PSo it shows the massive dip the company took in July of the same year.

Aside from all that, actions like this will bite you in the ass in one form another. I doubt many visitors to hacker news hold CEO Neal L. Patterson in high regard after this.

Actually, other comments mention 2001.

Guess I need to re think my argument then eh?

At least Greenspun took into account the need of his engineers' air to be humidified.

Never confuse movement with action.

I wonder why he's such a jerk.

I can't imagine treating the folks in my department that way. I don't want to own their souls. I hope that they consider the work that they do here enriching, and I also believe that in partnership we make a better department as well as better lives for all of us. I'm proud that our people lead fulfilling lives that include much more than banging out code.

Somebody who wants people to dedicate their lives to their jobs; indeed, someone who seems to want to live in a world where people act that way, is just a mystery to me.

This memo is really from 2003 according to one commenter on the Technocrat page claiming to have worked there. If thats true, Cerner stock is up over 600% since - Dow is up 16%. Well...

Hypothetically...

The memo would certainly kill morale at most places I've been. The corrective actions being asked for are completely wrong.. but this is aimed at middle management.

Read the beginning of the memo - not the end. If the parking lot is largely empty at 8am and at 5pm..... and workers are expected to work a standard 40 hour week, that's an indication that something might be wrong.

One can also assume that if the organization was functioning correctly and middle management was doing it's job - the CEO wouldn't give a rat's a about the parking lot - because he'd have the metrics in front of him to say "Damn, that KC facility is doing awesome! Every other facility should be learning from these guys.". Instead, something prompted him to feel that the place was slacking, and seeing an empty parking lot at 8am AND 5pm is a pretty good indication that people aren't even putting in minimal working hours. Fair enough. (And if he's completely wrong - middle management should be able to manage upwards correctly and explain to him why he's wrong, why everyone is car-pooling and why the metrics and results are best-of-class, so he should just back off)

Sounds like this guy must have had an unfortunate convergence of: A late-night viewing of Glengarry Glen Ross. A fight with his wife. A bottle of JD.

This is a CEO of a company that wants to get a product out the door. Sometimes that's not easy. He's basically using the tools at his disposal. It sounds like he's given his team a year, and they still haven't delivered. An email like this can sometimes shake out the non-performing team members and lead them to quit. In a company with 7,600 employees - I'm pretty sure not every one is a star performer.

Anyways, I've worked for a CTO who basically was a raving lunatic. Every couple of months there would be some kind of a blow up. But, looking back, we also did some amazing work under him, and created a cutting edge service still used 6 years later.

From the NYT article on this event [1].

>It made Fortune magazine's lists in 1998 and 2000 of the 100 best companies to work for in America.

Why do people still cite this ridiculous report? It's had both Walmart and EA in the list. Both companies are about as bad to work for as is possible as a professional in a first world country.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/05/business/stinging-office-m...

I imagine it depends a lot on what you do. Fortune magazine targets rich manager type people so I'm assuming they mean best companies to work as a highly paid manager. I have no reason to believe that Walmart or EA (the actual EA, not one of their game studios) couldn't be great companies to work for if you're a senior manager in charge of major aspect of the company. If I was a global logistics guy, Walmart might very well be at the top of my list of companies I'd like to work for.

That blog layout is really hard to read. There isn't enough structure around the text and too many similar fonts or font sizes are used.

Expectations of having employees stay until 7:30 when they're payed to stay until 5... how did we get there?

At risk of sounding like a complete asshat to apparently everyone else on this thread, a 9:00 - 4:00 workday is what I had in kindergarten. If I were running a company with this issue I'd consider it a big problem too.

The CEO should be required to go to Kansas City and work alongside the employees who he thinks are slacking off. That includes being in by 8am, staying late every night, and coming in on Saturdays. Everyday, he cannot leave until all of the employees leave, and while he's there he must help do the actual work that needs doing so badly. He cannot leave Kansas City until the productivity levels rise to his liking.

After all, if he thinks this is reasonable for his employees, he should lead by example.

Have you ever been around senior management of a larger company? Everyone I have met works at least 10 hours a day, and often more. Except for vacation days perhaps, but even then they are still tied to the laptop and phone.

Yes, but I'm sure it's ultimately their choice. Does the board of directors or stockholders send the CEO a memo that his car is not in the parking lot long enough for their liking?

If the CEO wants to work him/herself into an early grave, that's his/her choice. But to force employees who, let's face it, aren't going to be able to enjoy the fruits of their labor like the CEO will, to give up large portions of their personal time to improve the wrong metric? That's unreasonable.

Agreed. This reads like the ranting of some fossil that clamors for the 'good ol' days' when everyone used to be married to their job. This is apparently one of the best places to work in the country, according to ComputerWorld: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/349873/No._52_Best_Pl...

Concur. I've seen upper management at my company doing 70 hour weeks routinely, while their staff meanders along without so much as mandatory overtime. It's a combination of ambition, dedication, different incentives, a tighter identification with the company itself . . . I'd think twice before taking that path in life.

Wow. I'd never work there. If I did, I wouldn't work there for much longer. We work on the principle of letting people manage their own time. When there's stuff that needs doing, it gets done but there's always at least some time off afterwards to make sure people can recover from late nights or weekends.

"We Make Health Care Smarter"

But we apparently don't check for spelling or grammar.

Agreed. It reads like someone who is so fried from overwork he can't spell anymore. Not a good advertisement for working 70 hr. weeks.

maybe they all started biking to work?

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