[kmuzykov]

>>This means treating people like adults who can be informed of anything if they want to.

This is where everything breaks. Most people are not willing to behave like adults, they lie about their illness, when they simply partied yesterday, every end-developer unwittingly lies about time to complete a task and you have to correct him and so on.

In and ideal world (or in some perfect company) maybe everything works as you described (e.g. complete openness and etc.), but in a real world everybody lies.

[sstone]

There are people who never grow up and behave irresponsibly. The first example, people who party and lie about being sick can easily be detected by their peers and removed from the group when their partying stops them from doing their share. If however they pretend to be sick or in any way evade some things at work, but do perform, it is not the worker who is the problem, but something in the way the company operates.

The other example on developers estimates has more to do with people being optimistic in estimates by nature. Another cause is misaligned interests where a developer gets payed the same if he is on time, misses a deadline or does the work before the deadline and gets more work for reward. When the incentive is direct, a customer gets his update on time and pays the next years support fee which in turn gets the developer more money and the developer can connect these, there is no problem with estimates or deadlines. This is ofcourse hard, but doable easily through openness.

It boils down to being surrounded by people you trust. If someone can't be trusted it is a huge waste to manage them. Finding responsible adults is hard, but in the long term brings more value, not just in terms of €€€ but in a better balance between work and life. Life is too short for squeezing productivity from losers.

[kmuzykov]

Unfortunately life is to short to wait for a person you can fully trust and then starting your own business.

It is better to start with few people to be honest with and try to squeeze productivity from others than waiting through your life to find a enough good persons to work with. If you don't do nothing you usually do not meet much people and thus have a little chance of meeting someone valuable. But if you do work with what you have, you start getting publicity and more good persons visit your company, and you can pick. Even with that approach you cannot have a company of completely honest employees/partners, because even if you do think so one day, they can be the ones lying and you just didn't find that out yet.