Rails employee expected to spend 50% of his time doing what he desires | Hacker News Reader

Rails employee expected to spend 50% of his time doing what he desires

jamesgolick.com

23 pointscawel9 comments

I could say we're doing 100% time in my company. We don't have offices or office hours, and no micro-management. Myself and the other coder/designer do what we do because we want to, and because we're damn proud of designing the best damn product (and making a good bit of money at it).

I've found, in practice, that I do my best work when doing what I really want to do. So, being the project manager as well as a programmer, I've set up the management structure so that we commit to doing 6 user-visible items per week (split into 3 mini-iterations, times 2 people). Our business guy (who happens to be the CEO, sort of.. but we don't like titles) is happy, since he get (at least) six new things to show users and get feedback on each week. We're happy, since we get to spend our time working on the bits that we really care about, or that we feel need attention, whether visible or not.

In practice, I work extremely hard on this business, but not because of working hours. As an example, on Saturday I spent about half a day doing a fairly significant refactoring of a part of our Flex code. This morning I spent a few hours building a connection status monitor. All of these are tasks that could take forever if they were "official" tasks in a more structured environment, but because I want to do them they take comparatively little time, and are literally given birth to in a rush of caffeine and enthusiasm.

Anyway, boiling it down to a point: if you've done your hiring (for lack of a better word) right and motivated your team well, you can just set things up so they'll spend 100% of their time doing whatever the hell they want, and you'll get brilliant results. The minute you find yourself counting hours, you've failed miserably.

Based on recent experiences, I suspect he's more likely to spend 50% of his time getting a production deployment environment set up.

Is this still the state of Rails Deployment these days? I thought they had improved it over the past couple of months.

No, it's not. The grand parent poster is just spreading FUD.

If only I was. I'm an experienced developer and unix sysadmin and it still took two full-time days to get a working production-grade rails system installed on top of ubuntu.

I'm no rails guru, but I still thought that was an incredible amount of time to be spending installing and configuring things.

Well, what can I say. I was in the exact same situation about a year ago and it took me about 4 hours to set up a whole new Ubuntu server with Rails, nginx, Mongrel, MySQL, deployment via capistrano, Subversion, etc. That was the first time, nowadays I can install that stack in about 2 hours tops (manually).

Methinks you should upgrade your tool kit if it took you two days to do this.

Not really news. Many real open source influencers get hired by companies to work on their ideas 100% of the time.

Seems like a bad deal for him if the results of his 50% time is owned by mr gloslick.

If you spend time to contribute to the Rails community, you can easily find consulting jobs and get to keep 100% of your work (without the middleman). I'm not sure I understand the story here.

If you spend time to contribute to the Rails community, you can easily find consulting jobs and get to keep 100% of your work (without the middleman). I'm not sure I understand the story here.

I think the idea here is that the company is taking on the risk of finding actual work for him. If you are freelancing, sure, you have 100% of your time to do whatever you want. But you also need to eat, and that means you waste time hunting down jobs, taking specs, communicating with clients, etc. If you work for a company, someone else does that and you just do the work as it's assigned. The rest of your time is for open source stuff.

I am in a situation like this. Sure, my time is billed at $175 an hour, and I only see a small porition of that. But usually I have about 90% of my time to work on open source projects, and I get the same paycheck (and insurance benefits) every month.

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