firelock

There is nothing wrong with employees expressing their opinions to management. I know our team nearly universally desires to continue to WFH. As their manager I know that they are more productive and happier, why is this a bad thing? I think businesses who ignore WFH will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage in the future. You can fight the future, but the future will always win.

I just ordered a Backbone One for my son. It will be a good opportunity to try out Game Pass. He doesn’t play as many online shooters anymore so I don’t think a little lag with Jedi Fallen Order or the Halo single player campaigns will be that big a deal.

If Apple offers this it will be essentially a “desktop” iPad aimed at artist studios, designers, architects, etc.

I citpeks said:

Rayz2016 said:

Wow. FileMaker got real expensive real quick. 

FMP hasn't been "cheap" for a long time, at least in terms of perpetual licenses.  The real kicker is when they decided to target business users, and adopted a subscription model.  That resulted in an individual perpetual license jumping from a couple hundred to $540.

d_2 said:

I sure miss the original FileMaker, I used it professionally in the early 90’s  - it was very intuitive yet powerful, and did everything I needed (and more) - I have tried the options on the Mac App Store without any luck meeting my needs 

As did I, for internal company solutions, not as a developer for hire.  Started with 2.1.

After that, I continued to use it for personal purposes, at least until jumping off the train due to the update costs, even long before they jacked it to $540.

It's a lament I've heard from other former users in the same boat.  Know and like the program, but the high cost couldn't be justified for personal use.  And with the business shift, they kissed off such users altogether.

This pricing structure seems like a mistake to me. FMP is still a niche product, probably more so now than it was in the early 2000s when I used it. It’s strength was that tech-savvy non-developers could purchase it for a few hundred dollars and tinker together some really awesome custom solutions. Then they would convince their boss to buy a bunch of licenses for the whole office to deploy it. It’s now priced at a level where no one is going to buy it individually just to try out. It would instead have to be purchased with a specific business purpose in mind and multiple licenses. For a product this niche it doesn’t seem like a winning approach.

I’ve got news for all of you who think that seeing “butts in chairs” is the best metric of productivity: It isn’t. If you don’t have a way of telling if someone is productive remotely, then you don’t have a way of telling if they are productive in the office. And monitoring when they log-in and how much time their computer is active is not a good way of determining this either. Instead, managers and supervisors should have clear goals, tasks and expectations for each employee that are  tracked in a project management system. If they achieve these metrics they are productive. If they don’t, then they aren’t. But what time they logged in on their computer and number of keystrokes recorded on their computer is irrelevant to this determination. In fact it puts a lot of undue pressure on employees to make sure that they are doing meaningless busy work so that keystrokes metric is met.

I’ve been managing people for more than 30 years and some of the least productive people would always end up logging the most time on projects. Also, some of the most productive—and profitable—people spent the least time on a project. I had a designer who could create an amazing logo for pretty much any idea that you had in just a few hours. The fact that she only logged a few hours on a project didn’t make her less productive than another designer who spent all week working on an inferior idea. Whenever we are able to release people who we know are less productive, project hours go down dramatically and usually we are able to shorten the timelines. In other words, often the employees who logged the most hours were actually reducing efficiency rather than getting more done.

Knowledge work is not the same as factory work. In a factory there is simple and fixed formula for how many widgets each employee can make an hour, therefore the more hours at work equals the more widgets made and the more profitable the company is. However, knowledge-based and creative work doesn’t work that way and never has. We have to get out of, as Seth Godin put it, “the factory mentality.” If a knowledge worker says that they can get more done and have a healthier work-life balance working remotely, then employers would be wise to listen to them.

I don’t know who wrote this petition at Apple. Maybe they are just “whiny malcontents.” I will only observe what others have which is that companies that allow for greater remote work flexibility will have a competitive edge over those that don’t in the future. They will get the best job candidates and they will be able to have lower expenses due to their not building billion-dollar campuses that are really monuments to executive egos.