DEC's No Output Division Memo (1982) [pdf]

http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/DEC/dec.bell.no_output_division_C-I_TF;productivity_review.1982.102630376.pdf

by zhte415 • 11 years ago

82 40 11 years ago

archive.computerhistory.org

radoslawc2• 11 years ago

NOD should be by default in every big company

danieltillett• 11 years ago

I am in two minds about this. It is great to build a culture where nobody is fired, but at the same time if the weight of carrying dead wood gets too high - well you go the way of DEC.

On top of this a lot of dead wood is not dead wood in a different environment - it might be better all round to let people move on to new opportunities.

cbsmith• 11 years ago

I think you don't understand how NOD's work. It's a soul crushing experience that is far worse than firing people and giving them layoff severance.

driverdan• 11 years ago

It is great to build a culture where nobody is fired

No it isn't. You should be firing people who don't pull their weight and everyone should know about it.

dragonwriter• 11 years ago

It is great to build a culture where nobody is fired

It is great to build a culture where you never need to fire anyone because you are good enough at hiring, and at placing, moving, and counseling (a two-way process!) those you have hired to be able to effectively utilize them. And, if you've done that, then its good to actually not fire anyone.

But, outside of that, I don't see the value of a culture where nobody is fired; especially if it achieved through internal segregation where it cannot avoid being visible to people within the organization that the "not firing" is largely a charade.

paulajohnson• 11 years ago

For a while in the 90s Japanese companies had NODs for exactly the same reason Olsen gives: they didn't want to admit that they were firing people. The form varied, but typical examples would be an assignment to guard a tree or wait in a specified room for someone to give you work. The idea was to enforce isolation, boredom and loss of status to the point where the unfortunate employees would voluntarily quit; a kind of 9-5 solitary imprisonment.

Its actually a really brutal method of downsizing without paying redundancy money. Be careful what you wish for.

radoslawc2• 11 years ago

Yes I've heard about it. It was even mentioned in "Silicon Valley" TV series. I guess it did the trick before internet era. Now you can be paid for looking at cute cat pictures whole day ;) Joking aside I was skeptical about this being a way to force someone to quit, but after some unbelievable boring projects I totally get this. You just cannot for longer time periods just play billiard, table football, browse HN.

Jedd3• 11 years ago

In Japan I think the phrase is called Window Gazing -- the employee / victim is provided an office with a nice view (presumably of things they could be doing instead of draining resources from the company) and left to draw their own conclusion.

In Australia many years ago -- early to mid 1990's -- we had a spate of large public organisations being privatised, with a predictably large number of HR casualties. There was typically a brief queueing system, as some token effort at redeployment was considered ... but in reality once you'd been side-moted to a Window Gazer role, you know precisely where you stood.

The phrase used locally was 'being led into / sitting around in Flight Deck' -- that being the name of the frequent flyer awards club of one of our two major airlines at the time. (That airline's completely gone now -- make of that what you will.)

justin_hancock• 11 years ago

It is brutal and in some countries, likely to result in a law suit as it can be construed as 'Constructive Dismissal'. Extraordinarily damaging to the person on the receiving end. Its better to do it the right way, make the position redundant, and enable everyone to move on.

philjohn• 11 years ago

Or the New York Department of Education "Rubber Rooms" - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/22/new-york-teachers-p...

davidgerard• 11 years ago

This is known in Anglophone countries as "constructive dismissal", and is not a good idea if your area has anything resembling employee rights. It is treated as equivalent to firing someone, but will generally be taken as constituting malice by deliberate creation of a hostile work environment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal

sumsted• 11 years ago

We had something similar at a company I worked at. The NODers figured out that they could work jigsaw puzzles all day and no one would bother them.

leoc• 11 years ago

It seems that Konami is still at something similar: unwanted software developers are assigned to blue-collar jobs. http://www.giantbomb.com/articles/report-reveals-restrictive... The Giant Bomb article describes it as a punishment, but I assume that the main intention is to have the programmer take the hint and file his resignation.

cafard• 11 years ago

Interesting and amusing, but pointless task forces aren't what ruined DEC.

sqldba• 11 years ago

What did?

Jedd3• 11 years ago

This is a profoundly complex question. Or, rather, answer. : )

Everyone knows one Ken Olsen quote, though few people know it's taken hugely out of context[1] - it was quite prescient at the time (and the next few decades) though with a bunch of RPi / IoT / HUE gear in my home now, perhaps he was wrong after all.

Mind, his anti-TCP position is almost as naive / famous -- but aligned with several other CEOs of large organisations that are still with us.

Is there ever a single sound-byte-able response to the question 'what killed company X?'? Probably not. Perhaps they backed the wrong architecture. Or they naively went up against Microsoft (a very different beast to the cuddly MS of today). Or they disrespected their customers just a wee bit too blatantly. Or their QA dropped unforgivably (or at least uncompetitively) low.

[1] http://www.snopes.com/quotes/kenolsen.asp

A_Beer_Clinked• 11 years ago

Nice find. Relatedly I found this brief history of DEC: From: http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Digital_Equipment_Corp.asp...

There was virtually no organizational structure during Digital’s early years because Olsen was committed to creating an environment much like the research labs at MIT. A temporary position as liaison between MIT and IBM in 1959 convinced Olsen that the hierarchy at companies like IBM did not allow for creativity and the flow of ideas.

Sound familiar to anyone here?

versteegen• 11 years ago

Judging by the complete lack of information on Google beyond copies of this memo, I would guess that the idea was never taken up.

spacecowboy_lon• 11 years ago

Its not excessively hard to make people redundant especially in the USA I don't see the issue that DEC management have here.

dded• 11 years ago

It was part of DEC culture, not US culture.

ch_123• 11 years ago

I seem to recall reading somewhere (I can't recall where unfortunately) that Ken Olsen was averse to letting people go, and when DEC was forced to downsize in the 90s, the redundancy packages were so generous that it cost the company more to lay people off than to retain them.

TravelTechGuy• 11 years ago

That reminds me of a discussion we had when I was working for * (one of the large tech companies in Silicon Valley): The conclusion arrived at was that if a freak meteor would hit our campus and take out just middle management, the rest of the company could come in tomorrow - hold a mandatory memorial service - and go on with their work, with higher productivity.

OliverJones• 11 years ago

Late 1980s joke: "How many people work at DEC?" "About a quarter of them."

Pay increases were a percentage of each group's payroll. Several groups had CTs (corporate turkeys). These were highly compensated people with a dotted line relationship to Dr. Bell's No Output Division. The deal was, they could work on NOD projects to their hearts' content, but they should not expect raises. That allowed the raise budget to be spent on the other folks.

For a while they had a policy that poor performers had their performance reviews delayed. This meant that you couldn't tell if it was you yourself who was incompetent, or your manager. (Incompetent managers often were late doing performance reviews for their people.)

Now all that's left is the Digital Credit Union. It's sad; they had many great people and some great products.

shiftoutbox• 11 years ago

DEC Sounds a lot like ConEddison, NYC's utility company . To bad they don't have a Gordon Bell .

13of40• 11 years ago

I used to work at a fairly big software company that was on about version 6 of a product with a 2 or 3 year ship cycle. They'd spent years trying to get away from the waterfall model, but there were still gaps on the order of maybe 8 months between ship cycles where the teams had nothing to actually work on. (To clarify, what does your QA team do while all of the PMs and architects are off designing stuff and devs are barely scratching out prototypes in the dirt?)

As a result, they would have these planning drives where everyone would get mobilized to work out details for the next release's engineering system. Dozens of committees would be formed, meetings held, PowerPoint decks produced, the Director and his staff would hold tense weekly meetings and curse and growl at each other over graphs and spreadsheets of "progress".

Then finally, the big day would come, day one of the new engineering system, and ----- crickets. A week later everyone would have forgotten the buzzwords and names of the initiatives and would be back to waterfall.

DonHopkins• 11 years ago

At Sun they would promote those people to Vice President in Charge of Looking for a New Job.

DEC's No Output Division Memo (1982) [pdf]

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