The great Narayan Murthy whom I rever a lot once sent a letter to Infosys staff about ‘working late’. He doesn’t believe in working late(now you know, why I rever him) as this spoils the company culture and creates a lot of other problems like false satisfaction and inflated expectations. I agree! Infact, I cannot agree more!
Narayan Murthy believes that most people stay late because of the coffee, surf, phone and other mind boggling facilities provided by the company. I sometimes wonder that how magical this coffee must be!But having said that, there are people whom I know, who have somehow found their way out of these temptations and prefer leaving early.But guess what! India is a democracy!
You do what others do, else you are not a team player.Somebody in the team will plan your work, somebody else will assist you and somebody will drive you crazy. You need all of them and you cannot do without them. In nutshell, if you go by your team, you are going nowhere, atleast not your home. The poor Narayan Murthy disciple is still at office.
I agree that staying late spoils the culture of the company but what if it is already spoiled. This is a vicious circle and I am a part of it. My life is calling me and I am at office!
Goofy
The great NRN was in Pune last month and though in the beginning he was emphasizing on the point mentioned by you but during the open house when crowd asked similar kind of questions then he was really swinging and swinging hard ... he started of by pointing that we Indians are "Kaamchors" and went on to question fellow Infosyians by pointing out the number of hours dedicated by them towards their work .. Though most of those points were reasonable but still 9:15 is the minimum :P... But yes i can understand the plight of the writer as I m experiencing the same thing (7 am to 8 pm :(...).. :)
ReplyDeleteHey! It's good to hear that NRN was in Pune after the disheartning news of him finding a succesor.
ReplyDeleteIt's great that you got to listen to his views. I hope he will come hyderabad too.
Moreover, 7 am to 8 pm is an atrocity to say the least and i know it's very difficult for you to fix this thing.
This is the same that I want to highlight.Sometimes company will have offices in desserted areas wherein travelling kills a lot of time or sometimes your lead doesn't do the proper allocation of work which makes you work at the eleventh hour whereas you were free almost all the day.
I guess we can have a software for work allocation too. After all at the end of the day we all are resources and can be utilised in the same manner as an operating system utilises its resources.
Speaking like a true s/w engineer ... gain whatever u can from ur stay here ... after all u r a budding entrepreneur ,all this will help u in making ur own firm a better one and more employee friendly .... & ofcourse more logic driven ....
ReplyDeleteHmmm...Can't agree more!!! i would like to gain not only from my experience but yours too!:) Keep posting!!!
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