2021-08-24 16:50:48
I like tolerant people, and believe I am quite a tolerant person myself. Here's a thought (*) from today.
Personally, I don't pay much attention to holidays, or even weekends, in my own life. My philosophy is and remains that if what I'm dedicating my life to doing professionally is not worth my time and attention on a weekend, why should it during the "standard" business hours?
That said, I relentlessly and unconditionally respect the personal time of others.
Vacation? You have fun, I won't bother you at all. Weekend with kids? Enjoy, and, if you need a break and you see me online, I'd gladly chat with you about what you have in mind, but, from my end, you'd never receive any ask to have some "urgent" work done.
Want to trade some biz day to get an extra day off? Sure thing, I'd cover you best I can, and, rest assured, if anything goes wrong it'd be my responsibility — just make sure to get the job done, and we'll handle everything else in a BAU fashion.
Taking this further, I actually enjoy it quite a bit that most of the people I work with are very much used to taking weekends off to disconnect from work 100%. (Most of my peers these days are Canadians and Brits, which most certainly helps.)
In a way, I like to think I'm a big contributor to the culture where anyone can be off at any time, and the whole hive would still perform as it should. It just never crossed my mind that such a mindset should apply equally to myself, because, yes, as I said above — I like what I do, and I don't see the point in working on something that would not excite me enough to get [parts of] it done over a weekend or on a holiday.
Interestingly, this topic relates to an old debate about hiring "superstars".
On the one hand, from a purely corporate setting, hiring superstars is a terrible idea, as they are hard to replace, tend play by their own rules, and would, at times, strongly demand something that the organization has committed to provide, but, for organizational and other reasons, is unable to provide at the time. From these grounds yours truly is making a terrible mistake by refusing to "lay low" and pretend to be part of the "tribe", quite valuable yet perfectly replaceable. (**)
On the other hand, superstars are who help shape the culture, after all, and I firmly believe that good leadership consists of people who can not only find and hire the "right" superstars, but also a) trust them enough to form and sustain the "lead by example" culture, and b) retain them, so that those people feel empowered to keep making those changes, in ways that, quite frankly, do not always follow the chain of command, or the playbooks, or the overall "best corporate practices" of the company.
Thanks for all the congrats btw, two years and flying smoothly at PokerStars!
(*) prompted by the fact that in the past two weeks, more than once, I had calls with someone in their pre-5am. "You sure? It's damn early on your end of the world?" "Hey, no worries, I'm already enjoying my coffee at the computer, so why not, it'd make my morning."
(**) just realized while writing this that last two times I actually interviewed for a job (~2 years ago and ~3 years ago) I sincerely argued that my attitude is to never try to be irreplaceable, but rather to be perfectly replaceable — just in the right cohort of people, who are relatively high paid and relatively hard to recruit.
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