Trust

I was visited by a history teacher from Victoria School, Mr Khoo and I brought him and another of his friend around the campus. We had many discussions and I felt that the following was worthwhile to record down:

I was asked the question about my working hours and my response was the hours are flexible in the sense that you can come and go anytime you want as long as you are there for meetings and you get work. Personally, I had never had the feeling that I had no work to do because there is never ending engineering work to do and I have to prioritize what is more important than others (here it is basically which work results in the most impact factor since that is what my performance is based on).

I have the freedom to choose what projects or areas to work on because managers have the job of ensuring that people under them are motivated so that they can perform as best as their ability. But for the system where there is so little structure to work, it would require managers to give constant feedback about how everyone is performing and to identify the under-performers and help them improve. This also means that people are asked to leave when they are under-performing consistently (the mentality I guess is that since they hired the best, people should be performing with the constant feedback) and sadly, the happened to a few people that I know of. Yishan wrote a nice writeup on quora: https://www.quora.com/Engineering-Management/In-a-growing-tech-company-what-are-the-most-valuable-things-on-which-an-engineering-manager-should-spend-time/answer/Yishan-Wong

Everything boils down to trust.