If you were to take a look at my resume, you’d probably wonder why anybody would hire me… In the past three years I’ve had 4 jobs. Luckily for me, every job I left, I left for a good reason, and I could explain those reasons to the satisfaction of the next employer. But I’m not writing this to talk bad about previous employers, but rather to share a little of the knowledge I’ve gathered along the way (and supplement that with other people’s of course). Of course, this is all mostly relevant to development jobs, but I’m sure other people could take from this what they will.

Reasons My Jobs Sucked

There’s a lot of nit-picky things I could say here, but I won’t, I’d rather stick to the broad topics…
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Yeah, that’s right. The fine folks over at 37 Signals (creators of Backpack, Basecamp, Campfire, and more) have decided to try a few different things to “be one of the best places to work, learn, and generally be happy”, namely 4 day work weeks. I’ve seen quite a lot of posting about this announcement in my travels, and I didn’t really want to bother posting it again, but I just can’t help myself.

It sounds cool enough, and they have some really good rationale behind it, but I personally don’t see the need for it. The way I see it, most of the cool companies I’ve worked for have just gone by an even simpler rule: Make sure you get your work done, and do what you got to do afterwards. Beyond that, if you or your employees are TRULY passionate about the work that’s being done, the work week becomes irrelevant. I know that I’ll personally get engrossed in a project when it’s something cool, and work on it every moment I have.

So, I think the better solution to keeping people happy is to not work on things that suck… as much as possible. If your projects aren’t stupid or a waste of time, then you won’t have to worry about productivity, it takes care of itself. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not really knocking these guys, it just seems like a superficial proposition. Most of us don’t have the money to play around three days a week anyway.

They do have some other really good ideas that I agree with like funding their employees extra-curricular interests and discretionary spending accounts. They’ve got a lot of good things to say, so why not check out their article and let me know what you think?

37 Signals: Workplace Experiments