When clients (and bosses) go bad...

What's it like to work at your company? Is anything beyond 8 hours a Big Exception, or does leaving at 5 PM evoke the "working a half-day again?" crack… In all my various jobs, from independent contractor to start-up employee to one of the thousands at the big monolithic tech company, I've worked in every conceivable tech scenario. But the worst are the ones that become slaves to their clients--often driven by the fear of losing one.

And fear leads to underbidding. And underbidding leads to… pulling all-nighters to make an impossible deadline on too few resources. (And the dark side is in there somewhere.) I love users, but as they say on the plane: you must put on your own oxygen mask first. You can't take take care of users if you or your employees are exhausted and stressed. On Maslow's hierarchy, empathizing with users comes after sleep.

I've seen too many startups begin with the promise of freedom, passion, and good intentions--only to end up exchanging one kind of "prison" (working for demanding bosses) for another--working for overly demanding clients. I've seen some companies become slaves to the client's whims because we had "too many eggs in one basket", allowing clients to exploit the fact that you need THEM much more than they need YOU. And then there's the company that's looking to sell or go public, promising everyone that "if you just work really hard for the next three years, we'll all make a ton of money." (Assuming you lived through the process.)

So why is it that some companies have such an unhealthy relationship with their clients (which means an equally unhealthy relationship with their employees)? It's not like we won't work our butts off for the right reasons, but when it becomes standard to put in 10 hour days and work at least a part of every weekend, simply to keep up with the insane deadlines, our creative energy drops to zero. You're getting labor but no passion. Productivity with no creativity. And we'll switch jobs in a nanosecond if we get the chance. The worst is when you're expected to work like a dog and the culture discourages complaining or even questioning.

There is at least one industry that has the right idea about the times when you have to put in long hours... Hollywood. Or at least the parts I worked in, which were post-production, games, advertising, and marketing. In the motion picture world, where your project manager is called a "producer", when they asked you to work the long hours, at least you were treated like a tempermental star who needed to be pampered ; )

In the Hollywood model, even the programmers usually got the diva treatment when the company really needed you to stay late. At most tech companies, on the other hand, when you have to work late, your manager springs for pizza, vending machine soft drinks, and maybe take-out burritos. But the Hollywood firms I worked for usually passed around the gourmet restaurant menus, if you worked beyond 7 PM. More surprising, they would also do whatever was necessary to make my daughter happy about my working late (as a single parent). They'd "send a car" to her school, bring her in to the facility where we'd have dinner together (whatever she wanted), take her to the ultra-luxury private screening theater (telling her how "Steven Spielberg sat right in that same chair yesterday...") and let her watch previews and early cuts from movies that nobody outside the studio had ever seen. (One of my all-time favorite employers then was BLT, a motion picture advertising agency, but I also loved working for the now-defunct kid's game division of Virgin--Virgin Sound and Vision, under the best creative producer/manager I've ever worked for, Tom Mott)

Ideally, a better way to treat employees is to try to avoid putting them in that spot ever. But things happen, and we understand that there will be times when we (the workers) just can't get it done during normal business hours, and the schedule just can't slip. Still, the difference between being expected to put in the long hours and being worshipped for doing it cannot be overstated. If we want to make happy users, we have to be happy. Our employers/managers/clients need to accept that, and act accordingly. If you're making us work late all the time because of lousy management, that's inexcusable. If you're making us work late because you're greedy and just want as much business as you can (im)possibly handle, that's inexcusable. But if you need us to work late because things happened that nobody predicted, or because this demo means something drastically important to the company, for which we will also be rewarded... then sure, we'll be willing to pitch in. But spend the extra few bucks to treat us as well as your clients. You should be wining and dining us, not them, when you're asking so much from us.

And as the tech employment market starts to tick up ever so slightly, it's becoming less and less of an "employer's market" again. I don't care about the Aeron chair, but I do care about having a life beyond work. If you can't make your business model work without promising your clients a miracle (which we're expected to pull off), change your business model! And when you DO ask us to go our ass off again, a little worshipping goes a long way ; )