Even when not learning anything specific about a job, future employers value X years of experience at doing Y metrics. So far it does not seem to have any diminishing marginal utility in their eyes, despite that it does have in real life. You learn everything you could ever learn about Microsoft CRM in 3 years but they still prefer someone with 7. OTOH somewhere between 10 and 20 years it may get weird for future employers if you did not do anything different nor get promoted.
There is often a lot of undertime i.e. screwing around on the Internet at work, because you were hired to bring a specific skillset inside a company which they did not have before and they don’t always need that. Largely, Firm Theory suggests that hiring as opposed to subcontracting is a way to reduce transaction costs, like you don’t have to negotiate about the price before every single task you give to an employee and we know it from Fukuyama that DISTRUST is a huge transaction cost. For this reason, I see constantly that businesspeople rather hire someone 40 hours a week than to have external consultants do it taking a random amount of time but often just averaging to 5-10 hours, because they don’t trust externals.
I don’t either. I know the shenanigans I was forced to do when I was a consultant and I constantly call them on this shit when I am now the customer and negotiate with them :) For example if they are ERP consultants like SAP, Oracle, NAV, they often do unpaid work like fixing bugs in the standard software because they cannot tell a customer that please pay €2000 for fixing a fault in a product I sold you. The customer will say do it for free and try to bill it to the software “manufacturer” of whom you are a reseller of. Customers often see software having the same kind of warranties as manufactured products, not legally, but ethically. So consultants work 2 days for free to fix a stupid bug, and then the next time you want a bunch of new fields and reports they will sell 2 days for “analyzing requirements”. That is the shit I call them on :) Because I used to do the same.
Anyway, this INSOURCING due to distrust in subcontractors, consultants results in undertime i.e. bored and Redditing at work.
In a high-context culture, employers will often not set up clear rules to that. They will just wink wink let’s pretend you are working here when I can guess you are not. The price is, that when you are overutilized, you do overtime without extra pay as a way to make up partially for the days when you just warmed a seat in the office. Nobody says this openly, but if you complain about overtime, they may be looking into monitoring your internet traffic the next time you are underutilized. And you don’t want that probably.
Obviously, using undertime at work to learn new things and making prototypes is a good solution. Assume that they own it, but if it is mainly a learning project, let them own it, then the value is not in the product but in the experience.
My experience (3 European countries):
Even when not learning anything specific about a job, future employers value X years of experience at doing Y metrics. So far it does not seem to have any diminishing marginal utility in their eyes, despite that it does have in real life. You learn everything you could ever learn about Microsoft CRM in 3 years but they still prefer someone with 7. OTOH somewhere between 10 and 20 years it may get weird for future employers if you did not do anything different nor get promoted.
There is often a lot of undertime i.e. screwing around on the Internet at work, because you were hired to bring a specific skillset inside a company which they did not have before and they don’t always need that. Largely, Firm Theory suggests that hiring as opposed to subcontracting is a way to reduce transaction costs, like you don’t have to negotiate about the price before every single task you give to an employee and we know it from Fukuyama that DISTRUST is a huge transaction cost. For this reason, I see constantly that businesspeople rather hire someone 40 hours a week than to have external consultants do it taking a random amount of time but often just averaging to 5-10 hours, because they don’t trust externals.
I don’t either. I know the shenanigans I was forced to do when I was a consultant and I constantly call them on this shit when I am now the customer and negotiate with them :) For example if they are ERP consultants like SAP, Oracle, NAV, they often do unpaid work like fixing bugs in the standard software because they cannot tell a customer that please pay €2000 for fixing a fault in a product I sold you. The customer will say do it for free and try to bill it to the software “manufacturer” of whom you are a reseller of. Customers often see software having the same kind of warranties as manufactured products, not legally, but ethically. So consultants work 2 days for free to fix a stupid bug, and then the next time you want a bunch of new fields and reports they will sell 2 days for “analyzing requirements”. That is the shit I call them on :) Because I used to do the same.
Anyway, this INSOURCING due to distrust in subcontractors, consultants results in undertime i.e. bored and Redditing at work.
In a high-context culture, employers will often not set up clear rules to that. They will just wink wink let’s pretend you are working here when I can guess you are not. The price is, that when you are overutilized, you do overtime without extra pay as a way to make up partially for the days when you just warmed a seat in the office. Nobody says this openly, but if you complain about overtime, they may be looking into monitoring your internet traffic the next time you are underutilized. And you don’t want that probably.
Obviously, using undertime at work to learn new things and making prototypes is a good solution. Assume that they own it, but if it is mainly a learning project, let them own it, then the value is not in the product but in the experience.