Wednesday, December 16, 2009

What it means to be a boss

After starting the internet venture, this is one of the critical questions that I have been asking myself constantly.
When you are working for someone, it is very easy to just follow instruction, get it done well, then get paid. On the other hand, when you are a boss, you have to come up with the instruction, no body is telling you what to do, and you have to pay everybody first and hope there will be little left for you...... to pay the remaining bills.

I must admin it is not fun being a boss. I have a team of developer and a part time helper and sometimes it is just too much effort to explain the task. Partially because they are working for someone (me) and when you are working for someone, unless there is an incentive tight to performance, most employee would just do the minimum and call it done.

This means as a boss, I will have to constantly monitor the quality of their work.
I did try to implement performance based payments but since I have a limited budget, this is more easily said than done.

As for developer, I tried to structure the milestone payments in a way that if everything is done according to plan AND ON TIME, the payments will be made. Perhaps I should add AND QUALITY WORK from now on……

As for the part-time helper, I am lucky enough to find someone who is self motivated and easy to work with. I have no complaint so far but to be fail our relationship just started and it may change dramatically as time pass by (she may demand higher pay after 6 more months…. Who knows).

So, this is just one aspect of being a boss; try to figure out how to deal with people who work for you.

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