Summer in the city
Traditionally, summer is a chance for most of us to de-accelerate and de-compress, given that most of our web properties users and most of our business partners and customers are too, doing the same thing. Summer provides the chance to toy around with some ideas ( R&D playground galore ), revisit some issues that were not really that important to begin with just because the spirits are high. All in all, deviate from the norm and sometimes even go wild.
Alas, this is not true for this summer. Too much work piled up during winter+spring, more keeps on piling ( clearly, contradicting the de-acceleration metaphor I used earlier ) and, as if that wasn't enough, summer time is severely affecting the collective productivity and thinking capacity of the team. After all, it is summer - the beach, parties, nights out, you get the picture.
For the past few days I have been working on a updated new component for our Switch framework. It is bound to take a few more days until it gets to the point where I will even know if its going to work. In the mean time, our bugs/features tracking system's list is growing by leaps and bounds, our individual TODO lists ( everyone has his own preferred way to keep track of things ; many of them are aggregated back to that system ) are over populated, demand from every front is rising ( which of course is great, from a business perspective ) and, sometimes, all that you can do is stare at the ceiling as if it ( the ceiling ) will somehow help you deal with those issues. It never does, at least not directly.
We need to get more people (job openings) and find a way to deal with the summer. Preferably, get some more smart folks aboard so that even summer won't be able to affect our karma.
John, you can work remotely. Automattic works like that :)
Mark, i think a great idea would be to take the team out for a night or two and buy them drinks. You can also lose the dress code (if any) in the office. You can also start a cocktail party every Friday evening where people would stop work like an hour earlier and start drinking, relaxing etc.
Talk to your HR department and let them check who has bdays during summer. Considering the team's size and possible candidates, throw surprise birthday parties for member of your team.
Anyway.. information overload again :)
As a former Phaistos Networks emploee, I can report the
following:
- Dress code? whats that? You can go wearing slippers and swimsuit
if you wish (atleast as a programmer / developer, since you have no
contact with clients).
- Taking the team out was a regular habbit. I don't know how it
looks like now (3 years later), but my guess is that not much has
changed.
- If you are lucky (or unlucky, depending on your prespective)
enough to be working for the office in Mires, the beach (Matala,
Kalamaki and many others) is just 10 minutes by car. Do I need to
say more? (just like it is with my office in Rhodes ;) )
- There used to be no (or, atleast, almost none) bossy additude by
anyone in charge.
and...
hmm... dude... can I come back???
Just kidding :)
Tsevdos John 15/6/2007 8:49
I wish you had offices in Athens (or even better in P.Faliro) ;-)