My husband works for Google and AFAICT their policy is “show up on time for important meetings, get your work done, otherwise we don’t care.”
I am already aware of this, and I’m not sure why it appears as if I’m unaware of how things work at companies like Google? Given the distinction between categories I highlighted in the above comment:
There is a big difference between an employee who works semi-irregular hours and misses irrelevant meetings and one that goes completely off the grid without any warning when they are being relied upon to do a specific task.
Most startup employees are not PR people, and “scheduled news appearance” is a relatively small fraction of what PR people do.
I chose an infrequent but very clearcut scenario in order to function as a good example of someone being relied upon and dropping the ball. Pointing out that it is rare is fighting the hypothetical, like saying you wouldn’t pull the lever in a trolley problem because it might get you arrested.
If you find this hypothetical unsuitable, perhaps one of the following would work better:
The head programmer on a team taking a spur of the moment vacation the week before the next software release deadline.
The sysadmin/whoever not returning phonecalls for a few days when a software bug locks out all users from the app.
The team lead who was meant to be giving a presentation to the CEO to show the new design/whatever decides to take a long lunch and is an hour late.
The CEO who repeatedly ducks calls from his investors because he is averse to explaining why quarterly growth metrics took a nosedive.
The new hire who reads the unlimited vacation spiel and decides to take a three month vacation post-induction so he can “take time to recharge in order to become more productive” on the employer’s dime.
I’m not even saying one of these examples will get someone fired, just a repeated pattern of behaviour like this.
There is also the point that people who have these jobs know this on some level, and even if they are unreliable in social situations they do not behave like that when they don’t think they can get away with it.
The point I’m making is there are situations where reliablity definitely does matter (e.g. commuity projects/voluteer run events), and a widespread norm of people behaving like it doesn’t is greatly hindering the ability of those projects to operate.
Whether reliability matters socially is a little more open to dispute, and I’ll grant that it is reasonable to have reached different conclusions, as my attempts to suggest it does are gestures in the direction of There Are Rules Here.
I am already aware of this, and I’m not sure why it appears as if I’m unaware of how things work at companies like Google? Given the distinction between categories I highlighted in the above comment:
I chose an infrequent but very clearcut scenario in order to function as a good example of someone being relied upon and dropping the ball. Pointing out that it is rare is fighting the hypothetical, like saying you wouldn’t pull the lever in a trolley problem because it might get you arrested.
If you find this hypothetical unsuitable, perhaps one of the following would work better:
The head programmer on a team taking a spur of the moment vacation the week before the next software release deadline.
The sysadmin/whoever not returning phonecalls for a few days when a software bug locks out all users from the app.
The team lead who was meant to be giving a presentation to the CEO to show the new design/whatever decides to take a long lunch and is an hour late.
The CEO who repeatedly ducks calls from his investors because he is averse to explaining why quarterly growth metrics took a nosedive.
The new hire who reads the unlimited vacation spiel and decides to take a three month vacation post-induction so he can “take time to recharge in order to become more productive” on the employer’s dime.
I’m not even saying one of these examples will get someone fired, just a repeated pattern of behaviour like this.
There is also the point that people who have these jobs know this on some level, and even if they are unreliable in social situations they do not behave like that when they don’t think they can get away with it.
The point I’m making is there are situations where reliablity definitely does matter (e.g. commuity projects/voluteer run events), and a widespread norm of people behaving like it doesn’t is greatly hindering the ability of those projects to operate.
Whether reliability matters socially is a little more open to dispute, and I’ll grant that it is reasonable to have reached different conclusions, as my attempts to suggest it does are gestures in the direction of There Are Rules Here.