I honestly don’t know why the tech industry continues to capitulate to leaders like this who obviously, and loudly, mistreat and dehumanize their employees by insisting that if you are not obsessed and willing to put in incredible energy into someone else’s project that you are bad. It does not follow that people should be obsessed with someone else’s business that they won’t be properly compensated for. No matter how many times someone rich says it, it will never be true.
I will say, however, that this is an extremely popular position with the rich and powerful. From startups to big consulting firms, there was not a single company in SF that I worked for that did not echo this. From PC saying how proud he was that we did not hire more engineers at Stripe while people were pulling 60+ hour weeks for months at a time, to engineering managers explaining how they slept under their desk while they were working at Facebook, to Big 3 consulting firm partners exhorting 22 year olds to work 80 hour weeks being screamed at by misogynistic clients in cities across the globe, the song remained the same.
What I've found is that you should be building teams where you "give a shit about the people". That doesn't mean that we don't work hard and that we don't tackle interesting problems. It does mean that we plan for the long term and pace things accordingly. That you make opportunities for people to grow both technically and in their career. That we succeed as a team and not due to the rock-star behavior of one or two individuals.
My experience is this builds high-trust teams that are resilient, adaptable and often product even better work than teams who over-index on the domain space. They bring diverse perspective and have significant less turn-over which is a compounding effect. While the tech stack or product you built is important, in the end it was the team that created it and where you should invest if you want to continue to see success over time.
A lot of the time when I see people produce really crap code it's because they just don't care. They show up for work and anything that meets the minimal standards is fine with them. There's no passion or interest in doing more than absolutely needed. This isn't about "hours worked", but about passion and trying to make whatever you're working on the best it can be. You can do that perfectly fine in just 40 hours/week.
But yeah, some people seem to conflate "passion" with "work your ass off for 60+ hours/week", and that's just silly.
This doesn't even begin to address the casualties from burnout, which can lead to depression, stress-related health issues, and suicide. How much compensation is worth that?
In the finance sector, which is almost literally swimming in money, I never understood why they didn't just hire more people and instead preferred to work the talented people they attract half to death.
If we don’t want toxic cultures, then we all need to prioritize that when job searching.
You are renting your skills to an entity that needs your skills for an agreed upon rate for a certain amount of time. If another employer offers you a better situation and your current employer doesn’t counter with a better offer you leave. The rules are simple and your employer knows how to keep you if they really want you.
Getting a job is not like joining a gang or a fraternity where you are first promised a community and good life and then the money is just a formality, but that’s what people seem to see it as. Rest assured, it should always be about the money first. Money is what I’m all about and my career isn’t any worse off for it nor have I ever had to work myself to the bone for no reason just to please the company gods.
There is a massive gap between the output of passionate people who go the extra mile to provide original solutions in the highest quality way versus people who watch the clock and press buttons on a keyboard. The biggest problem is how to achieve maximum talent. The solution is ownership and setting high standards, not compensation.
Ownership means allowing some control of product decisions and connecting compensation to product performance. The product staff must be willing to work hard because there is a clear connection between their effort and their rewards. This is more like a commission than a salary or equity package.
If founders really want to instill that mentality for the long term they will earn a slice off the top while driving product strategy just like a sales manager. That redirects energy away from the founders and investors back toward the thing driving revenue.
One of my interviewers opened with the cliched "Why do you want to work for us?". I laughed out loud and said "You are the ones who called me here, why do you want me to work for you?"
I'm not usually that snarky, but I couldn't help it this time. Working relationships work both ways, and some companies need to be less full of themselves.
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/05/business/stinging-office-...
I personally don't think this is "dehumanizing" or unfair, since the whole point is to explicitly opt in for such a life. There are enough people out there who want to dedicate a lot of their time to working on a team or mission they care about, and OP's narrative is great at selecting for people like that.
When I was in PE, I was the 25 year old shouting at some 45 year old CEO (with the license of my firm's MD) for BSing around. Fun times, but that was a very exceptional circumstance.
I want to add only that the people who are good at pretending to give a shit in interviews are sometimes low-level sociopaths who are good at faking things, whereas people who actually give a shit often come off as stiff because they take the interview more seriously.
Maybe the hatred stems from that there exists a large pool of engineers that are passionate about their work and are okay not measuring their work as "hours per week". And that makes the pool of engineers that don't want to do that look not desirable.
It’s extremely hard to give a shit about Yet Another Middleware CRUD CRM Layer Corp.
There’s a fine balancing point between working a bullshit job (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs) and recognizing that no, the B-Ark (https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchan_Ark_Fleet_... ) is a bad idea, we really do need telephone handset sanitizers.
Don’t fall for the trap that says that only the sexiest sounding jobs are OK—for one, what that means varies by the talents and interests and skills of the workforce. For another, it’s going to bias you towards treating, e.g., janitors as subhuman, and that way is the path to a very bad place.
What makes work satisfying is, to a large but not total extent, a function of the mutual respect the employer and employee have for the humanity of the employee. Some jobs are just bullshit. Some aren’t. All jobs have a certain amount of toil.
You’ll get people who give a shit about the work when your work isn’t bullshit, and about the job when the culture at work respects them.
We programmers tend to prize the code that we write for other programmers: the compilers, the kernels, the libraries. But most of us will work for customers who do real-world things, whether that's watching a movie or checking in patients at the dentist office or tuning their guitar. So our software is usually incredibly dull to us as programmers, but of crucial interest to our users.
This doesn't have to be management consultant BS. You can't just fake caring about customers. Be sincerely interested in making their lives better, even though what they do isn't what you as a programmer have devoted your life to.
Do you have any more thoughts about this point? In my own life I’ve seen some of my friends with hotshot jobs develop this sort of mentality, and I sort of don’t know what to make of it. I want to be like “this is a toxic attitude to have!” but at the same time I can’t make a better argument than it’s immoral and without janitors we’d all be dead.
This is a corollary. The inverse would be "hire people who don't give a shit."
“I started a company and I’m totally wild about it. It is my life. If it is not your life too then you don’t belong here.”
Founders are supposed to be obsessed with their company. (Though I question that too.) But demanding everyone else at the company be just as obsessed is doomed to hire children and sycophants and drive off professionals who have seen this movie before.
I assume he's diluting his own equity to make sure everyone has as equal of a stake in the company? That's the only way I'll accept this statement.
If you think of it in terms of babies and babysitters, it's clearly absurd to expect the babysitter to bend over backwards to help your child outside their paid duty. Yet the founders can't see it.
Eventually he might grow or has to grow out of it.
I question it too. As a cofounder, I strive to destroy this sort of attitude. Doing my part by example to establish that culture.
Proper incentives entice employee engagement.
Sounds like someone full of himself. I’m never going to work more than 8 hours a day for a company, preferably less even. I still get more stuff done in those hours that I do work.
I care a lot about what I do, but I’m not going to destroy myself or my life for someone else’s company. Already did that for the military, never again.
The fetishization of a youthful founder, the ridiculous interview questions, and as I personally made the mistake of doing a phone screen with them before learning some of this, the recruiter admitted that their compensation was “startup compensation” aka we want the smartest people who are dumb enough to work for half the money.
And the cherry on top of course is that the world changing product they are building is, wait for it, labeling data. It’s basically YCs version of Poes Law where it sound like satire but it’s actually real.
Now, it's -possible- this guy means just, have you -ever-, because, sure, there have been times I've been really excited about something and spent a lot of time on it...but I don't think that's fair either. Even those times, for my own stuff, I did better stepping away from it and coming back the next day.
>>> What’s the hardest you’ve ever worked on something?
Lead-up to the holiday season as an employee of an ecommerce startup.
>>> How many hours were you working a week?
Way, way, way too many.
>>> When were you the most unmotivated in your life?
The entire following year!
Go for an early stage startup with meaningful equity or just go for a more stable, profitable company.
Scale seems like a cool company with an interesting product, but let's be honest, rational people here - they aren't curing cancer, creating art, or landing on Normandy Beach. This seems obvious to any self-aware person. So why all the bravado?
We have a slight issue with 'identity' in the US. I need to read more Tocqueville before I really start espousing any diagnostic on the psyche of the US but...
This type of mindset is what occurs when someone searches for their identity and meaning then places that whole 'life's worth' in the form of businesses or enterprising endeavors.
It can be broadly characterized as externalizing one's identity, which is painfully likely to fail or let you down in some way. In its most extreme forms, it's really a mental disorder (bordering the wildly high-functioning creative schizophrenic) that the Startup Zeitgeist has hailed as 'how to innovate' and find your 'life's work.' The disorders become evident once one sacrifices all of self at the alter of this 'give a shit' goal - burn out is not the goal of human life.
I'll say I'm recovering from this mindset and have a fonder appreciation for what it means to foster a community (be that business, HOA, religious group, friend group, etc) that allows you to have a 'life's work' that gives you resources to flourish in ways you never thought you could.
The instinct for tribalism is strong and that tendency is aided by the cheerleading that's done at all-hands meetings and other motivational internal meetings. I have met more than a few people who were long term employees who were genuinely gung-ho about their employer but they had a rude awakening when the the business needed to do layoffs for the first time.
Having had many interviews and a couple of jobs where my passion for the company seemed to be far more important than the quality of my experience, etc., yes.
So there's definitely something genuine to it, but many more have to fake it. I am working at a place where you don't have to fake it nearly at all and very happy about it...
Think about it... it might seem unfair, "unfair" towards e.g. me. I'm usually only passionate if the work happens to be very interesting for me in particular, otherwise I'm going to do good work with passion about quality/etc., but only 9-6, after which I'll go be passionate about other things.
But, I've worked with quite a few engineers similar to me in ability, or better, who would totally work 14 hours a day for no reason, no pressure or crunch. If a business had a choice, why would they hire me over these guys?
IMHO, if someone has not once wanted something in their life and worked really hard to get it then that does raise an eyebrow. It doesn't have to be a job. It could be an instrument, sport, extra ciricular, school project, volunteer work, or really anything. If you haven't, it means you either have never wanted to achieve something or didn't want to put the effort in to try.
Life happens and at some point we all make it to a point we are comfortable. So I think it's unfair to expect that out of a 45 year old with two kids. But if you get to be 45 without having really tried at something... well it's a bit sad.
At my company one of our most important values is "live the life you love". For each person we try to understand how the company can help them achieve their personal goals.
If someone wants to work a ton of hours to get promoted as fast as possible, we support that. But if they want a balanced life we support that too. We have people that are close to retirement that want to work half time. We support that. If people want to work remotely, we support that. Some people really want to work in an office. We support that. One person wanted to buy a ranch, another wanted to write a book, many people want to start their own companies.
We are running a marathon, not a sprint. We monitor people's hours and have a discussion if their hours are regularly at too high a rate (some people like it). We know that they will eventually burn out, will start to make bad decisions etc.
I don't want to be party to a cult where people's every waking moment revolves around the company. I dont want people to be obsessed with what we do, though I do want people to have fun. I dont need to wring every ounce of profitability out of the company at the expense of the people.
I mountain bike before work, sometimes leave work to kitesurf if the wind is up, work on another startup on the side, go to most of my kids' presentations, take them to afterschool activities where I stay and watch etc. I want all of my employees to be able to do those things too if they want.
https://twitter.com/alexandr_wang/status/1332059634606112768
The guy wants his company to be more of a cult than a value producing service. Makes sense.
People who care do put in more of their effort and get better results, but you have to give them an incentive for them to care. If your company fails, they get fired. But if your company grows and becomes 10x more profitable, their wages don't move. That's a great recipe for people doing the absolute minimum to not get fired.
This guy wants people who care more about him and his company than for themselves. "Ask not what your company can do for you – ask what you can do for your company"
Even more important than hiring people who give a shit is not breaking them. Throw enough bullshit hurdles in their way, treat them unfairly, or show that you don't care for long enough, and they will stop giving a shit, and you just reduced the value of that worker at least by a factor of 2, if not more. Even if they still put in the same number of hours.
It's the difference between doing what's right vs. doing what's rewarded. If you have people who just do what's right, you don't need a strict reward system. Once you push them towards only going after your rewards, your reward system better be 100% aligned with what's good for the company (spoiler: it isn't anywhere near that), or you're screwed.
When I was a poker player, I learned that playing less meant earning more (per hour). Focus can only be sustained on the top-level for so long. When I played poker, I cared a lot.
When I started working later, I noticed the same thing. The quality of focus is simply less. It's still valuable enough to produce something, but not to produce something top of line. Simply test yourself on the first hour with a difficult problem and on the eighth hour. Your first hour self will run circles around you.
So I can imagine that there are very attuned HR professionals that know this and see this and want to take advantage of this. Rare they may be, I'd be one of them if I'd work in the field.
Where the article completely falls down in is how to measure “giving a shit”. There’s plenty of people that work long hours, get rewarded well but ultimately just create mess after mess that someone who cares about clean, simple code then cleans up after them.
A culture that just values attendance is most likely going to have a negative impact on the motivation. I remember a situation where a delivery lead shouting “nobody leaves the office before this bug is fixed” leading me to question the values of a client.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that gimmicks like pool tables in the office and slides make an iota of difference to someone that gives a shit about software.
What does make a difference is a culture that encourages initiative, values transparency and pragmatism. These are the kinds of things you want hear when being interviewed. How many hours did you work will/should turn the real talent away...
Now, I have competent and organized managers, and they help me push code with high efficiency, which is satisfying, but in a very different way than one that is more tied to my identity.
From a management point of view, you really do not want to hire a person who gives a shit if you are a shitty manager, let's say top quintile, (statisically, if you are if you are manager, you are), because when that person leaves, and they will, it's not going to be any fun for you.
> 1. they give a shit about Scale
Most companies I interview for, I, shall we say, don't give a shit about at application and interview stage. Sure, they may seem like a good fit (tech and remuneration), and I try to fit if it kinda feels good after a couple of interviews. Yes I try and understand their business, methodologies, treatment of staff (am I on call?, what's that worth?) etc
But to expect me to arrive at a series of interviews with total commitment and "giving a shit" (which I read as hand-my-life-and-all-my-free-time-to-you). Nah, fuck off.
You're just another company, it's up to you to make me give a shit wanting to work for you.
Annecdote: Been employed at what I thought would be a nice company to work for ~five months, it's turned out well, now I give a shit. It doesn't work the other way around, otherwise you seem like a cult.
And whilst at this new company I really do "give a shit", I don't allow it to trap me and will happily tell them at which point I don't "give a shit" any more and the reasons why.
I doubt I’m along in this. Am industry you’re interested in, you’ll probably do great. A specific company? That tests qualities that aren’t often that important to your job.
But by all means, do hire people who give a shit: people who give a shit about their professional skills, about their self-respect, about the quality of their work and about being good people. Eventually, if your company is good, they will give a shit about that, too. You'll know it's working when they try to change a decision because they care more about doing the job right than they do about your feelings.
That really requires some sort of reciprocal "company cares about you", and that's hard to guarantee. Especially when you're hiring the generation that saw their parents lose out on the things like pensions vs 401k, layoffs as regular events, etc.
Exactly! Pride in one’s work is what you want. Hiring people who care about your company when, for most people, it’s another notch in their belt, means that your hiring pool is severely constrained and you’ll pass over many people who take pride in their work (and who would therefore benefit your company tremendously).
Stop pretending your company is anything more than a capitalist endeavor that pays people for their time.
There are some studies that say working 5 hours a day is more productive than working 8 or 10 or 16 like this idiot is suggesting.
As you get older you realize a mission statement is a means to cajole the more inexperienced to buy into your widget or service. Those who have seen it all before know it's bogus BS to try to burn people out. I come in, do my job, then clock out. It's not about 'giving a it', it's about living life and work isn't life.
I work hard to be a good engineer, and I work hard to be a good employee in the way I interact with and support my coworkers.
Recognize where you have influence and where the best place to make those investments are. It’s usually NOT for the whole company.
I went through way too many voluntary crunches (both for work and personal stuff, like game jams) to not see how they deteriorate my health. And occasionally I'm still putting myself into more, it's somewhat addicting. I need to finally get myself tested for ADHD.
In this light, I'm not sure if my answers to the posed questions would satisfy the recruiter looking for someone who "gives a shit". I used to think it was worth it, I'm not so sure anymore.
I completely understand the need for people who "give a shit". I don't really understand people who are able to work without "giving a shit". I can't. But remember that if you're looking for people who "give a shit", it's now your responsibility to not abuse them for it. They will often put their work over their health. You shouldn't let them, otherwise your company is not worth giving a shit for.
He essentially lucked into VC funding by exploiting sweatshop labor while riding a hyped ML/AI market. It's a testament to how messed up this industry is.
So you mean that you're looking for unbalanced people? I don't get how being obsessed about a product equates to long term success for an employee in your company. To me it's more like a recipe for burnout.
What's the employee turnover at Scale?
Does that work if the candidate is obsessed not by something but by someone?
2-intellectual work does not translate to how many hours you put in.
even this however does not guarantee people will give a shit, a sane person however might...
Step 1. Create jobs that enable people to have a quality life.
Step 2. Ensure people feel like they're building a career they can take beyond your company.
Step 3. Give them reasons to stay, so they feel like working for you is the best option available to them.
This is just silly. 5 hours of intensely focused, silent, eyes-glued-to-monitor-and-keyboard work beats the conventional 8 hours of work involving socializing/chatting with coworkers over the cubicle, making phone calls, checking in on people, walking around an office, taking breaks, etc., which itself seems to lead to approximately the same 5 hours of actual work... just with much less intense focus (intense focus which is mentally draining).
To quantify work output merely by time fails to appreciate the much more important factor involved in work: efficiency.
Working 5 hours, intensely, is draining. This author is silly for failing to realize that there's a reason Google engineers are allowed to work 11am-4pm: because they're competent, efficient, responsible, and probably don't waste much time (otherwise I don't see how they'd be employed there-- one of the most sought after & selective employers in the world)
I'm not a big fan of the current state of the world where people hop careers every couple years and are always looking for new opportunities continuously. It's driven by extreme corporate greed which is way too skewed in the wrong direction. I always thought there was something nice about lifetime or career companies. Again, if both employer, management, employees and community can create a culture and company that is in balance in all aspects, the author's position is justified in my opinion.
However, it's it's just empty words that maintains the status quo of Silicon Valley, then I don't agree with the author. We need less selfish egotistical thought leader CEOs following the trends and more down to earth and humble leaders who want to do meaningful work.
Now we equate "giving a shit" to how many hours you put in. Should we just go back to counting lines of code to view effort?
https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Scale-Reviews-E1656849.htm...
[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Scale-RVW3...
[2] https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Scale-RVW3...
I honestly can’t tell if this is satire or not.
But then I read the title and learned that the author equals those qualities to ”being part of a cult” and ”being obsessed about work”. Pretty much the stereotypical startup founder that consciously scam young people out of their waking hours in exchange for an illusion.
I've seen too many times to count management completely squashing out any passion that employees might have for the company or product. The most common ways I think are micromanaging and soliciting feedback / ideas then completely ignoring it. Both will immediately have your employees checking out and saying to themselves "fine, I'll show up, do what I'm told, then clock out at 5."
So if I went to Scale, sat around for 12 hours and spent 7 on Hacker News, I would achieve as much as the Google employee but somehow be differentiated according to Scale.
Agree with your point though, giving a shit is not about how many hours your work, it’s about how much you care.
Just wait for your first RSI my young friend, and then we will talk again ;)
I'm really curious how he feels like about holidays, I assume people in Europe cant't give a shit having 4-6 weeks of holidays yearly, right?
These Googlers that work 11-4 probably either used to give a shit, or still give a shit, but when you care deeply about your work and the company gets in your way or doesn't share your passion, it's an awful and demoralizing place to be.
So quit, you say. But you can't because you give a shit and you really, really want the company to succeed and do great things.
"Giving a shit" is orthogonal to working long hours. As a part of my job, I hire people and one thing I tell all candidates is: "I expect you to care about your work. This does not mean that you have to work evenings or weekends. But while you are working, you should care about doing a good job."
It's certainly partially about believing that you are working on the right thing, but mainly about believing the craft matters.
This statement shows how anti-worker this guy is. Good on such a Googler.
If you encounter a leader (like this guy) that thinks working hard for 8 hours a day is bare minimum (like this guy), do _not_ give them your labor if you can avoid it. You only have one life, so don't waste it making guys like this far richer than they would ever make you.
I hope plenty of BigCo and startup (especially Scale) employees are shaving hours with no repercussions thanks to Covid remote work. Such a huge effective hourly wage bump, and the only things harmed are corporations and their leaders (abstractly and relatively.)
He's using it in an ironic[1] sense to mean that they really do care. This is similar to BBEdit's tagline[2], "it doesn't suck," which, read literally, doesn't mean it's good.
[1]: contrasting with expectations and norms
I think maybe ‘not giving a shit’ existed as a turn of phrase first, and ‘giving a shit’ is sometimes used (incorrectly in the grammatical sense, but ok in the colloquial sense) as the complete negation/opposite.
No, just no. It's not absolutely always worth it. Especially when you "give a shit about it" and then find it really wasn't worth it. That's really bad.
Also, giving a shit is not a dichotomy. I don't just give a shit about either everything or nothing at all.
Give me a reason to give a shit about what you do in particular. Unless you are measuring one's capability to give a shit in absolute terms, which is very hard to assess in terms of productivity gains.
- change the way something works
- make money to achieve a goal now or in the future (pay rent vs. fund kid's education)
- support a friend
- make a change in the workplace or the industry
- develop experience and a career, further a craft
But it's almost never "make your business succeed at the expense of other parts of their life."
---
> The uncomfortable truth is that most people don’t give a shit. For example, it’s absolutely shocking that the common paradigm for engineers at Google is to come in at 11am and leave at 4pm. In no world can you be working 5 hours a day and be giving a shit, and so the conclusion is that very little meaningful work gets done at Google. Maybe a bit of a hyperbole, but not far from the truth. That culture is broken.
This guy is basically giving a performance review on people he doesn't know doing work he's unaware of based on a single metric. The ego involved here is indescribable. I would never, ever work at Scale.
The funniest one I managed to see was:
"Jeff Bezos probably says the same stuff here: `Why don't my warehouse workers just give a shit? I even gave them free pee bottles!` Is Scale the next Amazon?"
At the end of the day, what makes me feel good is leaving the workday feeling like I got good work done with a good team, and we all tried our best because we care about what we’re doing, instead of just punching the clock. I’m not crazy or indoctrinated, that’s just what makes me feel satisfied by my work. But people are different and value very different things, so I’m glad there are companies that work well for each type of person.
Sad to see this kind of shit from a YC funded CEO.
I care greatly about the quality and effect of my work (I hope most people do and have the privilege to) but definitely it's more important to me that my employer also "gives a shit" about me.
While I do see amazing merit in that statement, from an experiential and rational standpoint I disagree with it. Though, believing this won't harm the company too much as it is a very action-oriented statement and leads to a bias of action. That doesn't make it true though.
I've seen plenty of people doing good work when they don't give a shit. It's more rare than doing bad work, which is more common.
Really, the only thing I haven't seen is that people become so desperate or passionate (or both) that they become very lateral/creative in their solutions. That's the only thing I haven't seen "not giving a shit" people do. I've seen this time and time again. And it's quite simple why: people that don't give a shit don't become desperate or passionate about the things they don't give a shit about. So they never go into that lateral/creative mode. Perhaps the only exception is highly lateral/creative people that do it by default.
The thing is, creative/lateral problem-solving is not always needed and sometimes even counter productive. At my current job, I've noticed that me giving a shit is actually putting me into harms way, because I become creative and want to meddle with too many things. Whereas, when I shut up and not give a shit, do what I told and think a bit with them for the future, that seems to work a lot better for them.
Obviously, that's just anecdata and companies are diverse. But the author mentions this like it is a rule and as a rule (heh!) the majority of things are most likely never to exist as a rule! You make a general sweeping statement, it takes one counter example to shaken it.
Trying to find candidates that are passionate about the company before they join doesn't seem right. If we're only aware of how the company appears from the outside (press releases, company website) how are we supposed to have a real attachment to what the company truly is? Best case scenario is them being attached to how the company markets itself, which isn't a great approximation. That said, there might be something here I can latch onto into the form of:
1. Hire people passionate about something.
2. Promote people passionate about the company.
However, I still see some problems with the above. I would need time to chew on it before basing any personnel decisions around it.
People do not say "that's a job I won't give a shit about, so I should apply!"
People do very often say they left their jobs because of their managers. That means at best they felt like unappreciated employees.
I might give a shit about the mission, in as much as you can give a shit about the trite verbiage assigned to, in essense, the general thing that's supposed to increase shareholder dividends. But the mission is very frequently lost in the minutia of doing one's job. Does the mission relate to how I'm going to fill out this change management form? No; the change management process isn't based on the mission, it's based on its own thing. I give a shit about the change management process. If I only gave a shit about the mission, I might say, "screw change management!" And then I wouldn't be very good at my job.
And "giving a shit" based on who's interpretation? I can tell you that I give far too much of a shit about how my company works, and if I voiced this frequently, people would be absolutely sick of me. My manager sometimes reminds me - in the nicest terms - to calm the fuck down about the work. You don't want the whole company filled with people like me, because they'd drive each other bonkers. A few of us are nice for variety, and to pop up occasionally and say, "Hey, do we have a central place we can put all this documentation rather than a lot of independent places?" And then calm the fuck down and focus on just writing the damn docs.
You should want people to care, in a healthy way, both about the thing they're working on and the way in which they work on it. But you should never want them to be obsessed.
Obsession, n: Compulsive preoccupation with a fixed idea or an unwanted feeling or emotion, often accompanied by symptoms of anxiety.
If you want this for your employees, you need to get a grip and re-evaluate life.
So many things wrong with this.
Firstly, hours in != output. At my last job, we had several guys working 60+ hours / week whose output was miserable. I put in 5-6 hrs / day and was easily 2-10x as productive as them.
Secondly, work/life balance is real. As a lead, I tell my team they should absolutely not be working over 40 hours, and I won't do so myself unless I've fucked something up that's mission-critical. I'd advocate for a shorter workweek but my boss is very old school.
Thirdly, I don't think you can put in long workweeks and be productive long term. Most people just waste time when they work longer, and their productivity goes down, not up, and their mistakes go up. In dev, especially at startups, a single mistake can cost you your business. Do you really want exhausted workers in your codebase?
The truth it you should work however much you feel comfortable for the money you're getting. That's different for everyone. But if I can provide several million in revenue growth with a few hours of effort per day, then I figure I'm more than paying for myself. If you're willing to work 80 hours while getting paid the same as if you work 40 and being as productive as working 20, that makes you stupid and servile imo, not dedicated.
Maybe some Googler would like to comment on this?
But in the groups I have worked for, solid full days are the norm, and somewhat rarely you have to really dig in and work a bit more, and even more rarely, you have so much slack that you can go hone early. But generally people nearly always put in full days.
"But we serve millions of people, and among those are people who might need us to take a different approach to this webapp for accessibility reasons. Sorry guy, Brad who's on vacation and decided on this pointless project to help him get promoted needs this done by X date and your opinion isn't in line with his"
Good decision making, forethought, and acceptable risk taking are much more valued by me than "ok with working 80hr weeks".
"Why do you want this Job"
I grew up dreaming about studying for half a decade to write JavaScript, why else!
Also, as others have mentioned, companies/leaders need to give people something to "give a shit about". For some people that may just be working on "High quality training and validation data for AI applications", but I imagine for most people that's probably not quite enough to make them excited about work. But, who knows? :shrug:
Hmmm.. hard to imagine a nearly trillion dollar company chugging along nicely without a majority of people "giving a shit". The author seems to conflate working long hours with productivity and caring about a company. Don't you hate it when CXOs don't realise that they are in the knowledge economy where people have different styles of working and different schedules /shrug
1) Carrying an entire 75ft tree in pieces from my backyard to my front yard. 2) 10 hours maybe 3)wood needed to be moved 4) when looking at the pile of wood I have to move 5) the resulting stack of wood in front of my house 6)yup, been stronger ever since those few days a few months ago
Is it really just the one question "how many hours did you work?" that has everyone up in arms? Ok, let's find another way of saying that? BTW, it probably isn't an important question, and it's up to the company to set the culture around work hours.
However, I will say that for many companies, hiring people who give a shit, doesn't have to mean hiring for people who give a shit about your grand vision. A QA engineer doesn't need to be passionate about what the product does for a customer (though it's nice), but you want them to be passionate about QA.
We should all be passionate about the craft/task we do. The nice thing is, even if you find something you would absolutely hate doing, there are people out there who would love that very thing.
I learned this when I was younger, working in the event space, and a guy who was working for me was a housekeeper at a hotel as his main job. He loved it. I couldn't understand how, and he explained that he went into the room knowing the task, he had 10 things he needed to check off the list, if each of those 10 things was done perfectly, he was confident the guests would be happy with the cleanliness of the room. It's as if the thought of what he was cleaning or the things he was going to run into never crossed his mind. This is the task, focus on the task, love the process.
I actually was the same when I was a busser (clearing plates at a restaurant). I guess I was somewhat passionate about the mission of the joint, which was that we wanted patrons to have a good time. Part of that means clearing up the dishes promptly, with a smile, and have fund with the guests. I don't ever remember thinking about that constant mess I was cleaning up, wiping left over food into the bin, etc etc. I gave a shit because...well, it was easy to give a shit.
Maybe there's something to that, make it easy for people to give a shit. If they're not into YOUR mission, help them find or work on THEIR mission.
I posted it on HN as I liked the points in the article. The points in the post are reasonable provided there's fair equity for the employees (which I believe is disclosed prior to joining - I have no knowledge about dilution, preference etc). I also agree with the commenters on HN that it doesn't make much sense when there's no equity.
But there are too many comments making the same/similar point.
I personally find what Alex is doing is inspiring, running a 200 person company (ref: article) at 23 is remarkable. I also applaud his courage to publicly share what he thought was best advice.
I might get downvoted for this but I couldn't not say this.
I’m 47 now and I completely understand. Over time, I realized that there was life outside of work. Kids were actually fun to hang around, and my wife is my best friend. Not my job, and not my coworkers, the wife I chose to spend time with actually is fun to spend time with.
I get what Alexandr is saying, I really do. Except for the CEO bit, I had the same world view 25 years ago. And it’s a good world view for that age. However life will change, our experiences will broaden, and I feel he will probably have a completely different idea 20 years from now.
> The points in the post are reasonable provided there's fair equity for the employees
Give a shit about your employees first, and you will find employees that give a shit about you. Asking them to centre their lives around your company when you will easily sacrifice them at needs is deeply flawed.
That's why you don't understand. Long story short, employee's equity is worthless because it will always be reduced to nothing by dilution/preference and even if the company grows a hundred fold.
There are only two people who benefit from a (very) successful company, the founder and the investor.
The first point of the article, that the founder expects employees to care about the company as much as him, is delusional. Folks here understand that because they've been burned before.
There's no reason for employees to care so much about a day job because they will get nothing beyond their regular salary. If anything they are risking quite a bit by working for a smaller company.
I think voicing your opinion and having food for thought is more valued on HN than most other communities I see. Whether that food is negative or positive, is simply another flavor.
While I voiced my disagreements with this article, I value the discussion (and to some extent the article). Whether I view an article as good or bad, in most cases I value the discussion much more than the article :P
I'm happy you submitted it :)
Running a company is a different skillset from getting to the position.
Even working “only” 5 hours/day, not including weekends, would make work the single most time-consuming item in my life (excluding sleep).
Most software in the world is utter trash and I at least partially blame maniacs like this guy who keep people up hacking on it until they fall asleep. I wish more people would do what most people think of as "work" from 11-4 and spend their mornings and evenings thinking about how to do that work _well_ instead of just faster.
Given the founders naivety and pig-headedness, i could have guessed.
People generally give a shit about themselves, and often their families and friends. Less about their work.
Here are some questions the author asks in interviews to get at the quality of shit-givingness:
- What’s the hardest you’ve ever worked on something?
- How many hours were you working a week?
- Why did you work so hard? Why did you care?
- When were you the most unmotivated in your life?
- What’s the thing you’re the most proud of?
- Do you think it was worth it?
These are pretty good questions to ask in general, except the one about hours working. Not only will the answer be easy to misinterpret, but asking the question gives the impression that you might care more about hours worked than results. As someone who gives a shit, that would turn me off.
However, hiring such people has the problem of identifying them. I don't fare particularly well in interviews; most of the opportunities I have excelled in happened via internal movements.
I have difficulty when coupled with bosses that have the attitude but don't have the necessary chops because accepting shitty decisions by the way of "I'm-getting-paid-why-do-I-care" is quite difficult (though this becomes easier with age/perspective). Giving shit also has impact on stress level of the employee in situations when wrong choices are made.
Heh, you think I’ll give a shit working over 8? Odds are you’re company is uninteresting the product or efforts you’re working on are uninteresting and time isn’t going to make give more or less of a shit about it. I’m not meaning this to target OP specifically, this is how I feel about majority of jobs I see and work.
They want to be resourced enough with other workmates that they can be effective at their job without sacrificing their personal life.
The first half of the article is right - but it takes a complete nose dive when the true intent comes out. It's not people who 'give a shit' the writer want. It's people who will chase money as points, and do anything to increase their points. That's who the writer truly wants.
Pursuing scale does not mean starting immediately with scalability in mind. It means creating a scalable business model, that is able to scale in subsequent stages.
That means that in the beginning you will have to iterate quickly to find that formula, aggresively discarding ideas (and therefore code) and moving fast.
But that's not sustainable. Once you've found that formula, then you have to rebuild it solidly so that it's secure, performant, scalable and reliable.
Oh weird. I work exactly what I’m paid to work. I thought that made me an adult but I guess it means “I don’t care”
I’d love to see more companies that give you a reasonable work life balance so that they can continue to benefit from you giving a shit long term. Let me be clear I know nothing about Scale in particular but I have seen other places where the insidious version of the advice here becomes a hiring funnel that churns through passionate workers burning them out.
Just plain not true. Provable so, over and over and over again. Not other way to say it; this guy is talking utter shit.
This question immediately tells me the recruitment process is done on my side. The answer is hire more people.
As a developed society we need to make it illegal / strongly penalized to work more than 40h/week on average. Calculated monthly, no carry-over.
Children need our time, other activities beside work are needed in order to stay healthy.
Companies like to pick the most talented people with lowest selfesteam who will allow themselves being manipulated into working 60h weeks.
Plenty of people prefer to work long hours (I know I did for two decades before having kids, as in genuinely enjoyed (almost all of) it.)
I’m glad the government isn’t here with a clipboard telling me what I can and can’t do with my life at every turn.
(I’m all for setting a max beyond which overtime must be paid to hourly workers (as now) and for setting reasonable caps that can’t be required by the employer to be exceeded, but if a worker wants to work long or hard, they should be able to choose that, IMO.)
If you say, hey why aren't you solving more problems then on lighter days, then that sounds like some jerk taskmaster dictating a rate rather than someone concerned with solving problems.
I want to hire someone who is good at what they do and brutally honest that they're taking the job because they need to feed themselves and take care of their loved ones and have enough free time left to finish their instrumental guitar record or whatever.
If I know my senior dev doesn't give a shit, then I need to establish a manager/lead who does give a shit. If I have someone who does give a shit, then I have to spend less managing their shit.
Ahaha, sounds like the writer is young. What we are actually doing is playing the long game. We do care, but we are optimizing for not burning out, so we can have a larger ‘area under the curve’ of giving a shit.
Real life has taught me one thing about losers that talk like this. 99% of the time it means they expect more work than they are willing to pay for. Bonus points if they can have some sort of legal (read slavery) leverage over you.
In what world is this necessarily true?
The “what will you do to work here vibe” might work for inexperienced fresh grads but is something others will avoid like the plague. It seems like there no employee leverage at scale.
o How many hours were you working a week?
o Why did you work so hard? Why did you care?
o When were you the most unmotivated in your life?
o What’s the thing you’re the most proud of?
o Do you think it was worth it?"
PDS: These are some great interview questions!
I would also add:
o Tell me what your future goals are?
o How do you think your future goals would/could relate to this company?"
o What do you think this company can do for you to help you achieve those goals?
o What do you think you can do for this company, to help us achieve our corporate goals?
Etc., etc. -- but the interviewer must first establish at least a little bit of trust, rapport, safety, etc., if they are to have any hope of an answer that contains a high percentage of candor, because after all, there is a potential job and there is a potential income at stake...
But, all in all, some great interview questions!
o How many hours were you working a week?
If your work environment is routinely 60+ hour weeks, that's probably a useful pair of questions. As an interviewee, I'd definitely be taking those as a red flag that you expect a lopsided work-life balance.
Google is a giant company, so surely somewhere there are some people who behave this way—-among a hundred thousand employees and hundreds of groups you will find at little bit of everything. But in the groups I have worked for, solid full days are the norm, and somewhat rarely you have to really dig in and work a bit more, and even more rarely, you have so much slack that you can go hone early. But generally people nearly always put in full days.
- giving a shit doesn't matter
- creativity doesn't matter
- how hard you work doesn't matter
- self educating doesn't matter
- energy and enthusiasm don't matter
- having built stuff on your own doesn't matter
What matters:
- can you implement bubble sort?
- can you implement a red/black tree?
- can you do this coding test?
Look, employees don't need to be obsessed workaholics, but being really interested in your job and motivated and willing to do great work matters, and employers, for the most part, ignore these factors and focus on technical skills. And worse, in many cases their technical assessments are misguided anyway and don't really give insight into how good someone is as a software developer.
Ya, that isn't things going "right". That's things going wrong. Or a failure of planning.
They’ll outsource your job if they can, claiming a foreign worker will work harder and care more, when in reality they’re able to act like tollbooths on bridges to America extracting what they can from people who want to escape their country.
lol!
Lots of hours at this place eh?
>What’s the hardest you’ve ever worked on something?
What happened to work smart not hard? Also what exactly does it mean to work hard as a developer?
>How many hours were you working a week?
Hours again eh? Sounds like this place has absolutely no work-life balance and just burns everyone out. To whose benefit? Oh right only the benefit of the CEO.
>For example, it’s absolutely shocking that the common paradigm for engineers at Google is to come in at 11am and leave at 4pm. In no world can you be working 5 hours a day and be giving a shit, and so the conclusion is that very little meaningful work gets done at Google.
This has to be the dumbest thing I have read in ages.
Google has a market capitalization of 1.2 trillion. They have extensive research into how to treat employees to maximize their productivity. If you think google is doing it wrong, you are indeed the one doing it wrong.
> lack of office attires
You can tell this guy has a dress code. Even General Motors the place of 10 layers of bureaucracy discovered they dont need a dress code.
Working for this guy sounds like a nightmare.
There you have it. Come on, by now we all know what this “caring” or “giving a shit” stuff is about. Just say you want people to work hard, long hours. Just say that.
Maybe you can stop forcing engineers to jump through hoops to pass your stupid l33t testing questions? You might think you’re hiring the smartest guy, for the cheapest price, but instead of getting a good engineer that can write solid code, you get a code monkey that throws shit into your engineering process. Think about that for a moment.
Maybe you can set realistic deadlines? And readjust them as the requirements change in midstream.
Maybe you can hire managers that understands the complexities of software development? So they can actually manage effectively for a change.
Maybe you can avoid putting your employees through death marches to solve some arbitrary business problem?
Maybe you can get rid of your stupid open office seating arrangement, thereby forcing your most valuable employees to sit in such close proximity to one another? Thank god for Covid-19! That finally put a check on this stupid business practice.
Maybe you can stop viewing your employees as a cost center, and start to view them as an asset? Since the job of the engineer, is to help automate some process, he is actually reducing labor needed elsewhere, which costs you actual money if you had to pay an analyst to do it. The engineer automates this part of the job. And once you have a system in place, the initial investment pays for itself.
Maybe you can stop doing stupid employee ranking scenarios, like your stupid Stack-Ranking game, where your goal is to kill the bottom 10% regardless. This pits your best employees, your assets, against one another, in a Lord-of-the-Flies fight to the death challenge. This is not a very good scenario to engender loyalty from your best employees, again, your best assets.
Anything else?
No one is forced to work for such a company. There are many low/mid paying comfortable jobs you can do that suit your personality.
The reality is that drive and effort. How you redistribute rewards is another thing.
Should a founder mentality be expected amongst early employees at a certain equity level? Why wouldn't someone want to hire someone who had that mindset, and then appropriately compensate someone for that?
From crunchbase: "Scale, which accelerates its customers' AI development by democratizing access to intelligent data [...] After dropping out of M.I.T. to become a teenage tech lead at Quora, Alexandr founded Scale in 2016 and became the youngest entrepreneur ever... [etc.]"
So nothing that is revolutionary, new or (IMHO) interesting so I imagine this post was written after having maybe hundreds of interviews with senior engineers, really not being too psyched about the companies offering.
Funny enough, when I apply for contracts instead of employment I never got asked the question what makes me passionate about the business. In many ways, recruiters seem to be more professional with freelancers than when interviewing potential employees, even though the cost of a freelancer is usually higher.
My advice when you want generally interested people is: hire juniors and hire for seniors as shepherds, figuratively speaking. Unless you have something that people care about (which is usually outside the B2B market) that's a better bet than to assume that anyone senior really would give a shit about your business model.