Great response, you articulated a lot of my thoughts here much better than I could have. Creating different rules for different people is insidious. It's very very difficult for an individual to know whether or not they are an actual 10x-er, so everyone will just trend toward following the rules made for 10x-ers.
Physical face-time with your team is also very important, and there is some cognitive load on the rest of the team when you have to remember which days someone is supposed to come in, etc.
I'm not a fan of part-time, but obviously there are certain roles/companies in which it turns out to be an ideal situation. Of course, I know amazing designer who really does make this work well for herself and her company; however, I worry that she's the rare exception ;)!
To do this would make acquisitions all but impossible, if every last whim was adhered to. No company does that, not zynga, FB, google, no one.
Especially in Zynga's case, when they are quite used to people having side projects. What the author didn't mention was that Z has a standard Prior Inventions addendum. I should know, our company was acquired by Zynga, and 100% of the offer letters were accepted. Several of us had prior works and side projects, including my cofounder, and we simply listed them.
What he wanted sounds like some specific addendum that called out his app and maybe made some forward looking promises about it... Or... Something.
That may be true, but perhaps not? The Broad (in Kendall Square) just sent out this email: Dear Colleagues, As many of you may be aware, there has been a catastrophic leak in the water supply serving Greater Boston, and at present is dumping approximately 8 million gallons of water per hour into the Charles River.
Governor Deval Patrick has declared a State of Emergency, and has issued a "boil water" order for some 30 cities and towns. Even though the City of Cambridge maintains its own water supply, there are cross-connects, and as such you should not consume any of the water, including the coffee, at any of the Broad's facilities until further
notice.
Yeah, just venting frustration, I obviously do care - it bothers me.
And the idea that games have some kind of special power that other things don't have is exactly the kind of bogus thinking I was trying to talk about. Almost EVERY piece of entertainment, especially mass entertainment, is designed to make you love it/spend your money/come back/buy the tshirt/tell your friends/get the happy meal.
Sports are built, and largely exploit, the innate sense of tribalism that our brains have developed. Fiction, whether comics or movies, is designed to make us feel a stronger and purer set of emotions (whether sexuality or comedy or power) than we can readily get at the drop of a hat on a Thursday at 7:30pm. It's a crack shot of an emotion that we want to feel.
It's just no one talks about it that way. Because it's okay to say, "I want to laugh, I'm going to a comedy instead of actually talking with my friends and engaging with them and telling jokes." Whereas doing the same with a game is somehow horrific.
