What We can Learn From open Source, by Paul Graham (Author of Hacker and Painters)
August 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2005.)
...We may be able to get a fix on these underlying forces by triangulating from open source and blogging. As you've probably noticed, they have a lot in common.Like open source, blogging is something people do themselves, for free, because they enjoy it. Like open source hackers, bloggers compete with people working for money, and often win...
...they can't pay people enough to build something better than a group of inspired hackers will build for free......The New York Times front page is a list of articles written by people who work for the New York Times. Delicious is a list of articles that are interesting. And it's only now that you can see the two side by side that you notice how little overlap there is.
... [one] thing blogs and open source software have in common is that they're often made by people working at home. That may not seem surprising. But it should be. It's the architectural equivalent of a home-made aircraft shooting down an F-18. Companies spend millions to build office buildings for a single purpose: to be a place to work. And yet people working in their own homes, which aren't even designed to be workplaces, end up being more productive.
...the reason most employees work fixed hours is that the company can't measure their productivity. The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can't make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun. If employees have to be in the building a certain number of hours a day, and are forbidden to do non-work things while there, then they must be working...
...for big companies I propose the following experiment. Set aside one day where meetings are forbidden-- where everyone has to sit at their desk all day and work without interruption on things they can do without talking to anyone else. Some amount of communication is necessary in most jobs, but I'm sure many employees could find eight hours worth of stuff they could do by themselves. You could call it "Work Day."
...The other thing I like about publishing online is that you can write what you want and publish when you want. Earlier this year I wrote something that seemed suitable for a magazine, so I sent it to an editor I know. As I was waiting to hear back, I found to my surprise that I was hoping they'd reject it. Then I could put it online right away. If they accepted it, it wouldn't be read by anyone for months...
...Google is a rare example of a big company in tune with the forces I've described. They've tried hard to make their offices less sterile than the usual cube farm. They give employees who do great work large grants of stock to simulate the rewards of a startup. They even let hackers spend 20% of their time on their own projects...
...At the moment, even the smartest students leave school thinking they have to get a job. Actually what they need to do is make something valuable...
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