maladroit4u

I'll do my job if you do yours

2014-03-08

Recently, my employer's CEO requested that each employee provide three ideas for improving profits over the course of this year. Submitting the ideas was mandatory. This meant that, in addition to working my full 40+ hours aa a web developer, Mr. CEO wants me to do his job as well and hand-weave grand concepts to make the company wealthier.

Why should I, a web developer, be doing this? My job is to develop (minority of work) and maintain (majority of work) the websites for the company. I am not trained or compensated for developing profitable business ideas and plans. Yes, I could probably come up with something but it will take a non-trivial amount of time that either places me in overtime or causes a deficit of quality/quantity in my web development work. If I wanted to develop business plans, I would develop and execute them for my own business -- not one that I get no commission from regardless of the success or value of my submitted plans. I could ask Mr. CEO to go ahead and fix that bug that prevents users from removing the final payment method saved on their account. He could probably do this, after much time and pain. But is that the best use of his time? Me doing his job certainly isn't the best use of mine.

Here's an idea to increase profits: stop wasting $('hours of thought on business ideas' x 'hourly wage of non-business-oriented employees').

So, just because you have some power you can exert over your employees doesn't mean that it's wise to do that. I'll do my job if you do yours and lets skip the part where we switch.