The weirdest thing is that I've worked at places where I couldn't get other people to move fast enough to stay busy.
That is, if I tried to work at 80% utilization I'd always be arguing with people to get them to pick up the pace.
Once I decided to work at 40% utilization I found I got along better with people. My boss bitched me out once for "not being fully committed" but he quit the next month, so things went on for another year when my new (absentee) boss told me that we ought to let the guy who has temper tantrums all the time get his way because I'm more flexible than him... A recruiter called me the next business day and I was outa there..
What I did in a previous situation like that went:
Phase 1: Get angry at people being slow.
Phase 2: Write tool to make slow people incapable of being slow.
Phase 3: Profit.
Phase 2 keeps you busy in while the slow people are slow, so you don't get as angry. Then in phase 3, the slow people become irrelevant so they don't frustrate you anymore. Plus you get recognition for improving the efficiency of the office.
Excel with VBA, I was an infantry officer at the time. I made VBA tools for every station in the tactical ops center.
Given the nature of the work, I don't see how I could turn that into a business. Also the software was completely amateur; I went to study software when I found out I liked better coding than being an infantryman, as a consequence of this.
oh, right. this is also really good advice. after learning how to write a yacc grammar, it's really easy to trick "non-technical" people into doing their own programming with with domain-specific languages. JBehave also looks useful for this purpose.
That is, if I tried to work at 80% utilization I'd always be arguing with people to get them to pick up the pace.
Once I decided to work at 40% utilization I found I got along better with people. My boss bitched me out once for "not being fully committed" but he quit the next month, so things went on for another year when my new (absentee) boss told me that we ought to let the guy who has temper tantrums all the time get his way because I'm more flexible than him... A recruiter called me the next business day and I was outa there..