I'd be careful with this: this "democratic" budgeting has a similar feeling to "democratic" scheduling--that situation where you tell people to work "whatever hours they like." Everyone sees everyone else putting in extra hours "for the good of the team", and so you get a team slowly whipping itself into a death-march no one actually wants or needs, and resenting anyone who tries to just stick to the (healthy!) 9-to-5. Similarly, in this situation, I'd strongly bet on there being a ratchet effect, where salaries are voted down in tough times, but not voted back up in good times.
Like most democratic systems, checks and balances are probably useful. I would expect the CEO (or relevant manager) to veto a salary that was unhealthy for the company. It was implied as much when the author indicated that he checked the company's numbers before telling the team the average salary would be used. Also, the very transparent nature of the company's finances in this example also helps a democratic process work smoothly.
I would love to see experiments similar to this salary experiment in the vein of 4day/week Nhrs/day. I'd guess that schedules may be shifted so that some people cover different four day periods, and one interesting side effect might be fewer interruptions in the office on Mondays and Fridays. As an early-in-the office kind of person, I find that the first slice of uninterrupted hours in the morning are often the very most productive.
In general, I tend to be most productive doing actual programming when I'm in the office and it's fairly empty. That is, whether I'm in before most others or in after most others.
However, I have multiple roles and tasks, only one of which is development.
I definitely get a lot of insight during the regular day from fellow coworkers, and tend to do more "operational" (not developing) work better when I'm alongside peers than when I'm there alone late. It's also the kind of work where multiple people looking at one thing really helps, since one person might miss something important and another might notice something important.
So I think it depends on the kind of work you're doing and how you like to work. And that is partially why letting employees work when they want, and even choose where they work, can lead to them being more productive in general, at least as long as you can trust them to choose a schedule that makes them productive instead of one that lets them be lazy.
I know that I have about 5ish hours of good programming work in me a day. I know that I like to take a 45ish minute lunch. I know that I have some admin type stuff to do on occasion.
So, sign me up for a 6 hour day and you'll get my full attention all day. I won't "need" to spend time on HN or twitter or whatever to kill time because I'll be fresh enough to work all day.
Also, because i believe there is a hell of a lot more to life than work, we'll work 4 days a week.
I wish we were more actively working towards such a world. Instead, we keep getting caught up in political discussions about how people who don't work are lazy.
Depends on who is working, what they're working with etc.
After about 7 hours of coding, I feel my code starts slipping off. Also, I code better at night. I know people who can't code for more than 6 hours a day or their work gets shitty.
I usually code 6 to 7 hours a day, and I take my friday afternoon (or part of it) and night off. This sometimes means working just the morning and the first half of the afternoon, and sometimes means working until 4am on the Thursday and then not working at all on Friday.
I think when you have great people on your team, that love their work (Not their jobs. Their work), it gets eaasier. This people will do their best, and that can't be measured in hours. That's why a fixed schedule actually sucks and many, many people don't like it.
Do you not have an hour of "administrative" or "meeting" work to get you to at least 8 hours? I find that my non-coding overhead is easily an hour a day.
It actually originated from shift work. It used to be two 12-hour shifts, and then Carnegie and others realized three 8-hour shifts were more productive.
That's easily solvable. Make the instruction, "Work whatever hours you like with a cap of x hours. Cap cannot be exceeded unless exceptional circumstances happen."
Those aren't necessarily your best guys. Those guys might have to work more because they are spending too much time messing around, and not being productive.
Personally I like to give it as much as a can for a solid, honest, 8 hours and call it a day. This way I can give it my all everyday, and still get the R&R I require.
I don't think there's much correlation between how much someone works and how good they are. I like to think I'm pretty good, and I work 8 hours a day, and some of my coworkers are also great and work more than that. I generally value my work/life balance a lot and really don't like exceeding 8 hours a day/40 hours a week (and can feel my productivity drop after roughly those amounts of continuous work), but this is probably mostly a personal matter.
I don't let other people's working longer hours than me affect me, though, because I know that my total productivity would decrease if I worked longer hours. If that's not the case for other people, or if they like work so much that they want to do more of it, or if they are bored in the evenings/weekends and want to dabble in something, that's great for them.
I think the factor that helps is that I don't have management that will say "yeah, but X worked 60 hours a week and you didn't", but I'm pretty up-front about that anyway, and just stand my ground.
All that having been said, I do find the US work ethic a bit crazy. Working crazy hours isn't good, and the amount of hours worked per week isn't usually proportional to productivity.
Or they work best alone and seek their solitude off normal work hours, producing code with no shared ownership, effectively creating a liability for your company.
