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Gas prices at the local pump have exceeded $3.00/gallon for the first time in my life.  Though a lot of this is inflation, we're actually approaching 1981 gas prices in real terms at this point.  There are the usual calls for investigation of "price gouging," "windfall profits," etc., as well as for cutting gas taxes.

This is all irrelevant.  The problem is one of simple supply and demand.  The supply of oil has not increased much, because OPEC controls most of the cheap (relatively speaking) oil, and oil prices are still too low to warrant the use of the world's largest oil reserve, Canada's tar sands.  (Canada contains more oil than the Middle East, but it's not profitable to extract it unless you know oil prices are going to reach levels like today's, and -- here's the kicker -- stay there.)  Demand, on the other hand, has skyrocketed outside the United States.  Fifteen years ago, China's streets were choked with bicycles -- now they're choked with cars, and China is really big.

People don't realize how much China is growing.  Take a look at this.   How much construction does it take for a country to need that much cement?  Think about that -- ten times the construction as is going on in the United States.  A lot of that cement goes to laying roads for cars, too.

There's no "price gouging" -- prices are high because supply and demand makes this current high price the profit-maximizing point.  And if we tax "windfall profits" when things go well for the oil companies, are we going to give them "downturn subsidies" and hand them billions of dollars when things go badly for them?  Why punish them when profits are "too high" but not pay them when profits are "too low"?  It's the profit from the upswings that enables companies to endure the downswings.  Business isn't always a smooth line going up and to the right.

Supply will go up on its own eventually, but it won't help prices -- because it's the high prices, per se, that cause the supply to go up.  Higher energy prices are here to stay.  Environmentalists should be cheering -- this is the one thing that can actually get people to conserve energy.  Of course, most of them aren't cheering, because they have to put gas in their cars, too.

There are two ways to lower how much gasoline you need.  (Note that doing so does not necessarily reduce demand for oil -- after all, oil is needed for other things, like making plastic, and different uses require different compounds from the oil.  In other words, we might need just as much oil to make the plastic we use even if we just threw away all the compounds that make gasoline.  But I'm not talking about "energy dependence" and money flowing to the Middle East -- I'm talking about the expense we as individuals incur to pay for gas.)  One is to use alternative fuels, and the other is to require less energy.

Alternative fuels sound like a great idea, but they're just not ready.  And by "not ready," I mean "still more expensive than gasoline."  As the price of gasoline increases, of course, "alternative" fuels will become mainstream.  But until then...

Ethanol: it comes from corn, so it's "renewable."  But... it burns cooler, so you get only about half as many miles per gallon.  This means that you need to refill the tank twice as often.  And while $2.41/gal ethanol is cheaper than $3.00/gal gasoline, it's not when you need twice as much of it.  Also, it's corrosive, so you need a new car that's designed so that the ethanol doesn't eat the fuel lines.

Methanol: it comes from natural gas, which is also a limited resource.  And it takes a lot of it -- the fuel economy is even worse than ethanol's.  $2.89/gal looks decent until you notice you're getting 14 MPG in a subcompact.  And it's just as corrosive as ethanol.  Also, though it burns quite cleanly, the process of producing it releases carbon dioxide, so environmentalists only like methanol if we can somehow conjure it ex nihilo instead of actually producing it.

Compressed Natural Gas (CNG): this is actually a reasonably viable fuel.  You get decent fuel economy, and it only costs about $1.20 for an amount with equivalent energy to gasoline.  The problems here are relatively simple: you need a car designed for it (that has a huge fuel tank that can contain 50 gallons of 3,600 PSI vapor) and an infrastructure where you can refuel.  Currently these are lacking (though Honda does make a mass-produced CNG Civic, and there are a few CNG refueling station.)  The problem is that natural gas is just as limited as oil (in principle; we have more of it right now) and is also in demand for other purposes.  If everyone used CNG as fuel, it might well stop being so cheap.  Also, the government would probably slap a big tax on it like they do on gasoline and double the price.

Biodiesel: burning vegetable oil in a diesel engine.  You can get cars that do this today (mainly from Volkswagen), and they get 45 MPG.  The fuel's not cheap ($3.40/gal), but if gas prices go up much more, it'll start being cheap by comparison.  Also, the fuel is primarily a waste product from other processes, so there's not much demand for it.  Problems?  Well, at freezing temperatures it has the consistency of wax -- and thus is only suitable for warm climates unless you want to leave your car plugged into an electric heating system all the time when it's not running. Still, like CNG, this at least is a viable fuel, even if it's not for everyone.

Electric: this looks great on paper.  Electric cars have good acceleration, and can go 200 miles on the amount of energy in a gallon of gasoline.  Coal-fired electricity is so cheap you could drive from New York to Los Angeles on $60 of it.  What's the catch?  Umm... you have to stop and recharge for at least an hour every 80 miles.  Ouch.  Batteries are extremely heavy, so putting in bigger batteries doesn't help much (what you gain in available power you lose in weight, so the range still doesn't go over 100 miles total -- or 50 miles round-trip.)

Hydrogen: It has promise.  Hydrogen fuel cells are like superior batteries; they produce no emissions.  And hydrogen can be produced from seawater.  It takes about $11 worth of coal-fired electricity to make enough hydrogen to have the energy of a gallon of gasoline, but you can go 41 miles on that.  This really is a case of technological immaturity -- the theoretical capacity is much greater.  Of course, you still have to figure out how to store tens of thousands of cubic feet of hydrogen in your car.  Someday this may actually be useful (unlike ethanol and methanol, which will never be), but that day is a long way off.

So alternative fuels are, for now, out.  What's the other option?  Reduce demand for gasoline by driving less.  The environmentalists tell us, "Fight urban sprawl!  Live in the city where you can walk to work!  Ride a bike!  Carpool!  Use public transportation!"  And we, consistently, respond with, "No, I don't want to."

When it comes to getting to work, driving individually seems to be the national preference.  Despite the expense, people still prefer it over these alternatives.  We don't want to live in the city, we want to live in the suburbs.  If we're going to be in a car for an hour, we want to be there by ourselves, not with some yahoo from work.  And if we wanted to walk or ride a bike, America wouldn't have the health problems it does.

The problem here is that we're thinking in overly limited parameters.  The way to reduce the energy cost of the commute is not to provide new, less-pleasant ways to commute -- it's to reduce the need for commuting.  Corporate America's attachment to the centralized, monolithic office, where people can be watched, produces this need.  Support for alternative working arrangements could be championed as a way to reduce the need for energy.  If everyone (obviously an unreasonable goal) telecommuted only one day a week, we'd reduce gasoline requirements by 15%.  While we won't reach that in the near term (so far progress seems slow, and more importantly, a substantial number -- probably a substantial majority, actually -- of jobs are unsuitable for remote work), even a few percentage points could make a big difference in U.S. demand for gasoline.

It's one thing to try to get people to change their habits to something less appealing (e.g. riding a train or a bicycle) in order to serve some greater good.  It's quite another to encourage people to do what they wanted to do anyway.  People are much more receptive in such a case.

How much good would this do, from an environmental, world-peace, global warming perspective?  Oh, not much, probably.  But who cares?  If I can enlist the awesome lobbying and cheerleading power of the environmentalist, world-peace, hippie folks to achieve my objectives, it sounds good to me.  They're much better than I at getting corporations and politicians to kneel to their will.

Posted by Grant at 09:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The cubicle (or "systems furniture," as no one actually calls it) has to be the most reviled piece of office furniture ever created.  Ostensibly for fitting more office workers into a smaller space without compromising productivity, what the cubicle actually accomplishes is to create a work environment that produces the illusion of productivity, while actually making its occupants unhappy and possibly unproductive as well.

The primary message a cubicle sends is "you are being watched."  Walls that block no sound and wide openings instead of doors mean that you can't have phone conversations (and are forced to listen to everyone else's), and that you must be constantly aware that anyone walking down the hallway can see precisely what you're doing.  The book Workplaces of the Future called them "bright satanic offices."  We've created a panopticon workplace, and seem surprised that people feel like they're in a prison.

It's an open secret that almost no one in IT actually spends every moment of their workday working.  People (especially people with ubiquitous Internet access, which in IT is almost everybody) take impromptu breaks, check news sites, read blogs, look up sports scores, etc.  The openness of the cubicle environment seems to aim to eliminate all that, by making it obvious when people are not productive.

But this underestimates people's desire to get away from work for a moment.  People still do the same things they'd do in a private, enclosed office -- only now they do it with an eye over their shoulder (or stick a convex mirror on their monitor.)  Instant messenger clients include a "boss key" to quickly hide conversations.  How much stress is introduced into the workplace this way?  After all, now instead of just being unproductive, people get to be unproductive and worried as well.

The unfortunate fact is that the apperance of productivity is generally valued a lot more than actual productivity.  Actual productivity is sometimes difficult to measure -- but whether or not someone's surfing the web when the boss walks by is obvious and memorable.  The office workers know this, so they try to maintain the appearance of productivity all the time, regardless of if they're actually productive or not.

The problem here is that the managers designing offices are trying to figure out a way to make people work harder and more consistently.  After this much time in the IT industry, I've come to a different conclusion -- everyone has an individual level of productivity, and only they can change it.  What's more, everyone has an individual working style, and "an 8-hour block with a 30-minute lunch break" is not the preferred style for all (or even most) workers.  Anything done to attempt to force people into greater productivity instead forces them into greater attempts to disguise how their working style differs from the "norm."  And the time and effort used in this disguising doesn't come out of slack -- it comes out of work.  This isn't to say that people's productivity can't be improved -- it most certainly can.  But this has to be done by providing incentives to be more productive, and those incentives only work on people who want to be more productive.

Instead of spending 6 hours working and 2 surfing the web, if you make that employee feel he has to maintain the illusion of productivity all the time, he'll spend 5 hours working, 2 surfing the web, and 1 hiding the fact that he spent 2 surfing the web.  But he's rewarded for the illusion of productivity he creates, in a way he'd likely never be rewarded for actual productivity.

The biggest problem, from a my perspective, is that unproductive time spent at work is wasted.  It's not that people want to spend 2 hours surfing the web -- it's that they want to spend 2 hours doing something other than work, and the requirement of appearing productive means that they can't use that time on something useful.  They'd rather read a novel, or play a video game, or go shopping, or sit down with their families... but none of those activities have a "boss key."  In requiring people to work for a fixed number of hours under observation, we don't get more productivity -- we get the same amount of productivity for the company while destroying the worker's ability to produce for himself.

Indeed, some of my most productive time at one of my jobs was when I was sharing an office with a friend.  Using breaks to talk to someone I actually enjoyed talking to (as opposed to most coworkers -- while I've always liked my coworkers and gotten along well with them, in general I feel no desire to socialize with them about non-work matters) rather than pointlessly surf the web seemed to make the time "count for more" and make me better able to go back to productive work quickly.  And for me, the truly ideal person to talk to during such breaks would be my wife -- hence some of telecommuting's appeal.

People who work outside of the office environment (whether that's from a home office, from Starbucks, or wherever) are freed from having to maintain the illusion.  They can work, and not work, as their own preferences dictate.  Sure, there are some people who would never get anything done working from home -- but they usually know this.  They know that there are too many distractions for them at home and they wouldn't be productive, so if they were choosing a workspace "on their own" they would probably choose to go to some other environment to get work done (one of my friends uses the local library.)  They can work whatever hours they choose, subject only to the relatively lax requirement of being reachable via phone or email during some approximation of business hours.  And if those hours happen to be "30 minutes of each hour for 10 hours"... so be it.

"But, then they're not working an 8-hour day!" is of course the objection.  Here's the thing, though -- I bet that worker isn't working an 8-hour day in his cubicle, either.  Managers need to measure, not the amount of work time, but the amount of output a worker produces.  What does it matter if Mary only works 5 hours if she accomplishes as much as Bob does in 8?  Why should Jim get a raise for working 12-hour days if he only accomplishes what Fred does in 6?

Unfortunately, measuring output is hard.  You can't measure a programmer based on lines of code he writes -- some lines of code are harder to write than others.  You can't measure a tester based on bugs found -- when I was working on stress and performance at a software company, I would sometimes take a week or more to find, isolate, and identify a fix for a single bug (usually some hairy multithreaded race condition), during which time someone testing, say, UI components might identify dozens of bugs.   We'd both be doing a good job, just at different tasks that require different metrics.

This said, I am not delighted to waste an hour or two of my day because a manager can't tell if I do good work or not.  If a manager doesn't know who is and is not productive on his team he is failing to manage, just as a college professor who has to grade based on attendance is failing to teach.  If you can pass the class without showing up, then either the teacher isn't very good or the bureaurcracy put you in a class you never should have been in.  Likewise, if you can not do your job, routinely, without your manager noticing then either your manager isn't very good or your job is unnecessary.

It seems at least some people are noticing (from Fortune magazine):
If working at home is now part of the zeitgeist, one very large employer that seems increasingly tapped in is the U.S. government. Congressman Frank Wolf, a Republican whose Virginia district is home to many federal worker bees, has made telecommuting his pet project. "There is nothing magic in strapping ourselves into a metal box every day only to drive to an office where we sit behind a desk working on a computer," he told a congressional committee.

Wolf sees telecommuting as a way to decrease traffic, reduce air pollution, increase productivity, and frustrate terrorists. In 2004 he launched a campaign to penalize government agencies by docking funds if they fail to support telecommuting. Now the SEC, the State Department, the Department of Justice, and four other big agencies are required to offer every eligible worker the opportunity to telecommute.  [...]

Coming to the office for meetings and in-person collaboration is still important, of course, but as Brand points out, "People are realizing they don't need face-to-face time all the time."

It's a start.  Who'd have thought change would begin in the government?

Posted by Grant at 08:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Why is the life of the modern IT worker an endless series of not only mind-numbing but also amazingly useless meetings?  Why is it I can be more productive at home, telecommuting, than I can in the office, a place ostensibly designed for the purpose of work? 

I blame Microsoft Exchange.  Back before Exchange and its precursor Lotus Notes, scheduling a meeting was hard.  You had to call or email everybody, and try to find a time that would work for everyone.  Alternately, you could autocratically declare a time if you had sufficient authority, and just accept that some people wouldn't show up.  Meetings were mainly a periodic, scheduled thing -- you knew the project plan meeting was Wednesday at 2:00, the team meeting was Monday at 8:00, and your meeting with your manager was on Thursdays.  There weren't many, and those there were tended to have pretty large groups at them.  But now, thanks to groupware like Exchange (you probably know it as the Outlook calendar) and Notes, everyone can see everyone's calendar, so scheduling a meeting is quick and effortless.  The result is not just more meetings, but the creation of the ad hoc meeting -- the meeting you can't plan around because nobody bothers to schedule it until the day or even the hour before it happens.  This is impossible for telecommuters.

The technology aimed to solve a problem -- it was too difficult and inconvenient for people who needed to schedule meetings to do so.  The failure is that it worked too well -- it eliminated the transaction cost for scheduling a meeting.  I can now, in 5 minutes, take an hour of time from 10 people by scheduling a meeting with them.  Since I can see their calendars, they're even robbed of most convenient excuses.  If it took me two hours of phone calls to call all those people and arrange things, I might not even bother.  What's more, I can now easily schedule meetings with numbers of people that would have been quite impractical the old way.  Yet in my experience, the usefulness of a meeting is inversely proportional to the number of people attending it (yet its length seems to be directly proportional to attendees.)  The technology has created a new problem -- too many meetings.  This is one of the major reasons I actually get more work done in 5 hours at home than I do in 8 hours at work -- at home, I can work on things that are important, and when someone has a question, they send me an email I can answer in 5 minutes instead of scheduling an hour-long meeting.

To free workers from their commutes, we must kill the meeting.  Now, while I imagine I could easily get a cheering mob of office workers to joyfully chant "Kill the meeting!" (I've yet to meet someone who likes meetings), actually doing away with it is more difficult -- constant ad hoc meetings have become a major part of company culture in the American workplace. One possibility is that the only way out is through -- perhaps technology can solve the problem it created.

The latest buzzword in groupware and office applications is "presence."  Thanks to an in-development project called Istanbul that I used while at Microsoft, Windows Messenger now integrates with Exchange, to connect your IM free/busy information to your calendar (i.e. IM marks you "Away" during meetings on your calendar, etc.)  The idea is to make IM free/busy information a virtual indicator of if you're available or not.  If you open a Word document in Office12 (the next version of Office) in an Exchange-enabled environment, the sidebar has the IM icons for the other people who have worked on the document, complete with if they're available or not.  You can dispatch IMs to them right there with questions about the document, and they'll get the IM with links to the document so they can see what you're talking about.  If they open it, they get the same view you're looking at.  You can share the document and edit it simultaneously, while also able to IM chat (or voice chat, if you have PC headsets, or even videoconference if you have webcams.)  In other words, you can have an ad hoc meeting without leaving your desk.

This is not without its share of problems.  Just what we need -- one more way to be distracted by other people while you're trying to get work done.  It'll probably lower productivity overall -- every context-switch kills about 15 minutes of productivity, and people being able to IM you about document questions results in constant context-switching.  But... it does create virtual presence.  This sort of system allows telecommuters to do the virtual equivalent of dropping into each other's offices carrying a printout.  And since offices will blindly adopt it whether it's good for productivity or not -- just like they did with shared calenars -- it'll be out there in any case.

Posted by Grant at 07:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm somewhat amazed by this Newsweek article (via MSNBC) about "Extreme Commuting" -- people who commute over two hours, both ways, to work.  There are apparently 3.4 million of 'em.

That's a really long time.  Specifically, it's 11.9% of the entire week spent commuting to work, or 17.8% of waking hours, assuming you sleep 8 hours per night, which I'm guessing these people don't.  After you take out work and sleep, it's 22.7% of all uncommitted time, and an even higher fraction when you consider that a lot of "uncommitted" time is committed, to things like eating, showering, brushing your teeth, etc.  And that's all for a two-hour commute -- some people in this article have commutes of 3 hours or more (186 miles into LA, for instance) they make every day.

Robert Putnam, author of "Bowling Alone," found that every 10 minutes added to your commute decreases by 10 percent the time you dedicate to your family and community. [...] And Georgia Tech researchers found that every 30 minutes spent driving increases your risk of becoming obese by 3 percent.

And what's their solution to this?  Why, doing more during your commute, of course!  Eating, applying makeup, talking on cell phones, checking email, and otherwise increasing your risk of dying in a car accident.  Indeed, some even seem to want it:

One in five said they like their "alone time." Just don't try selling that to their spouses. "My wife hates my commute," says Sam Wyant, 27, who drives 60 miles to his job, "but I value that Zen time."

"Zen time"?  Two hours sitting in traffic?  This is incomprehensible to me.  Doesn't he have anything to do?  I can't help but think he must be one of the people who, when he does get home, watches TV for four hours.  I can't imagine wanting to waste any time commuting.  If I wanted to go for a drive, I'd go for a drive, and my destination wouldn't be work. I also can't imagine wanting that much time away from my wife every day, but that's because my wife is wonderful.

The number of big cities with more than a fifth of their households living 20 miles or more from the urban center has tripled since 1970, according to Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies. And even as jobs move to the suburbs, commuters continue to drive away from them. "It's a game of leapfrog," says commuting expert Alan Pisarski. "Jobs are moving out to the suburbs to be near skilled workers, which enables people to move even farther out."

The most common response to all this tends to be decrying "urban sprawl" and advocating "smart growth" measures (i.e. zoning regulations that essentially take people's property without compensation.) 

But herein lies the problem -- people want the sprawl.  Well, not precisely -- but they want to live in low-population-density areas.  Every "smart growth" measure is an attempt to create higher population density -- this won't do any good if what people want is the lower density that the suburbs offer. 

For $400,000 last year, he moved his family of five into a 3,000-square-foot home, twice the size of the place they used to have closer to the city. The trade-off: he now spends three to six hours a day on the road. "I love being out in the middle of nowhere," he says, "and seeing no people around."

"Smart growth" won't let him be out in the middle of nowhere.

So are we stuck with ever-lengthening commutes, rising gas prices, pollution, and gridlock, as people's irreconcilable desires to work in the city and live in the country clash?  Well, we don't have to be -- but breaking out of it requires a cultural shift, not a government intervention.

Ten years ago, at the beginning of the .com boom (damn, that sentence makes me feel old), we kept seeing breathless prophecies (e.g. Free Agent Nation) that soon we'd all be self-employed businesspeople and telecommuters and web entrepreneurs.

It didn't happen.  And there are a variety of reasons it didn't.  For one, the technology wasn't ready.  Videoconferencing over the Internet -- for that matter, audio conferencing -- was unreliable and cumbersome.  VPN (remote access) was unheard-of.  Security had not moved past the M&M stage (when an enterprise's security is entirely based on the perimeter firewall -- like an M&M, it's crunchy outside, but soft on the inside.)  Opening up such an environment to any significant number of telecommuters would simply not work, from both a functionality and security/risk perspective.  Second, people (managers) weren't ready for the idea of employees they couldn't check up on every day.  And third, people were still attached to "organization culture" -- the idea of working at one company for years, even decades, and building your entire career in a single organization.  Steady, predictable income was the order of the day.

However, I think it can happen now, and that we can see the elements that are capable of leading to it, at least in some limited spheres (however, they're the spheres I care most about.)

First of all, the technology is ready now.  Audioconferencing is seamless -- VoIP services like Skype and Vonage are now nearly as reliable as the landline telephone system, and cheaper, too.  Videoconferencing is not quite so seamless, but it's a stable enough technology that it gets used for porn -- and the software they use for porn is years behind the more advanced business videoconferencing software.  Group collaboration tools (e.g. annotations in Word and Excel) are available, though most people haven't bothered to learn to use them.  And Internet bandwidth has reached the point where widespread use of these tools will not choke the entire network with traffic.  Businesses don't use dialup anymore.

Second, even if the "free agent nation" didn't happen, it did put itself into the national consciousness, especially among young people in the tech industry.  Sure, not everyone can be a .com millionaire, but everyone knows it's possible, enough that people saying they operate a website as their occupation are taken seriously without a second thought.  And the organization culture has been obliterated -- a generation that's spent the last ten years doing contract work with known termination dates, getting laid off during the .com bust, and changing jobs for personal advantage (the average time spent at a single job in the tech industry is only 18 months) has no concept of company loyalty.  We are not loyal to our employers, nor do we expect them to be loyal to us.  Now, that's not to say that we want to harm or betray them -- only that we're not all that  attached to them if something better comes along.  We don't feel that our employer "takes care of us" -- we feel that it gives us a check every two weeks, and each one buys our loyalty... for two more weeks.

The other major cultural shift is outsourcing.  Managers have now gotten used to having some employees -- generally low-paid contractors -- working for them in entirely different countries, often time-shifted 8 hours or more, and sometimes with a language barrier.  By comparison to that, an American working across town is outright convenient.  At least the local telecommuter is in the same time zone, has a high-bandwidth connection, and if absolutely necessary can come to a meeting.

So why doesn't everyone telecommute?  Well, some jobs are of course outright impossible to telecommute to (e.g. auto mechanic, hairdresser, retail sales.)  And some people would never want to do such a thing anyway (either because they want the social environment of the workplace, or because they know that they are unable to be productive at home due to distractions.)  But the stated reason managers don't want knowledge workers to telecommute is generally meetings -- they need you to be present for meetings.

There are some other problems that need to be solved.  One is cost-sharing.  When an employee has to commute to work, he pays the costs -- $5 or more of gas every day, $5-10 for parking, and $0.20/mile of wear on his car -- entirely by himself.  Employers will sometimes chip in for parking, at best.  A commuter is costing himself up to $300 a month in commuting cost, plus 10 or 20 or more hours per week, but all of this costs employers nothing (except unhappy employees.)  Telecommuting, on the other hand, often does cost employers money -- while they generally pay nothing toward employees who do incidental telecommuting (i.e. working 8 hours and then signing in after work to do more work -- not that I can really comprehend doing this, but people do it), full-time telecommuters are often supplied with a PC and broadband connection.  This seems more expensive to employers, even though it's cheaper overall, because they're paying a share of the cost.

The biggest problem, though, is that presence is easier to measure than performance.  Managers have an easier time determining if an employee is "working hard" (i.e. has his butt in a chair for over 8 hours) than working well.  In an office environment, often things are a team effort -- one person slacking is not obvious unless they do it a lot, and even then it's obvious to the coworkers picking up the slack, not the manager.  The coworkers generally don't go to their manager and say "Bob's a lazy bum," because it looks like passing the buck, and Bob will just deny it anyway.  This is the same (stupid) reason why college professors take attendance.  I always thought that any college professor that took attendance was admitting failure -- they were showing that their class was so easy or so useless that the only way to get people to show up was to grade them on it.  Managers who measure presence are doing the same thing.  The problem is that they generally don't realize they're doing it -- they don't mean to measure performance by presence, but people working late sticks in their mind in a way that people producing good output does not.

It's getting better, but we're still not to where people thought we'd be by 1995.

Posted by Grant at 07:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)