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Hire Family People

37signals.com

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Re: Hire Family People

#11

Post by DaniFong »

slapshot wrote: post #7

I'm just going to point out that this sets a troubling precedent. If one firm thinks it's legitimate to discriminate in favor of mothers with children, that suggests that being a parent is an acceptable basis on which to discriminate. It opens the door to people thinking about whether somebody is a mother in making hiring decisions. That's troubling on a lot of levels, and in some states illegal. EDIT: apparently the…

Laws or not, in the startup world there's a lot of discrimination when it comes to hiring decisions.

Re: Hire Family People

#12

Post by dhh »

sanj wrote: post #3
veritas wrote: post #2

I'm not complaining but is it 37signals week?

I believe that David came away from Startup School with a heap of new ideas that he's been talking about back in Chicago.

You're exactly right. Startup School was a great way to collect some thoughts that had been scattered for a while. A real energy boost.

Re: Hire Family People

#13

Post by pg »

Even if people with kids were more productive per hour, that's not enough in a real startup. The empirical evidence is pretty clear on that. I can't think of a successful startup whose founders didn't, in addition to being smart and determined etc, also work long hours.

Re: Hire Family People

#14

Post by alex_c »

After a contractor decided on a radical life change and moved to a different country, leaving us without anyone with his skill set, my old manager used to joke that he should only hire people who have a mortgage, because they'll never leave on their own.

Funny as a joke, but a bit chilling when it's given as real advice.

Re: Hire Family People

#15

Post by dhh »

pg wrote: post #13

Even if people with kids were more productive per hour, that's not enough in a real startup. The empirical evidence is pretty clear on that. I can't think of a successful startup whose founders didn't, in addition to being smart and determined etc, also work long hours.

I think the reason for that is more one of risk. Starting a new company is a lot more risky than being an employee of one. And if you have a family to support, you're less likely to be willing to take on big risk.

So I absolutely agree that it's easier to start a company when you're single and have no obligations because you can tolerate much more risk.

Update: Seems that the original argument changed from "if kids are so great, why aren't more founders parents when they start their business" to "kids might make you more productive during regular working hours, but you need more than just regular working hours to start a business".

I'm happy to offer my thoughts on the second argument as well. I think people working on startups generally work way too much and the ones that succeed don't do so because they put in 14-hour days.

At 37signals, our "startup" (Basecamp) got off the ground on a 10 hour/week programming budget and designers who were busy doing client projects. For the first year, it wasn't the sole focus for the company.

We believe those constraints were instrumental in their way they shaped Basecamp and thus part of the success of the company.

Doesn't mean that there might not be other businesses out there where working lots and lots of hours can be beneficial somehow, but I think that it's a fallacy that you need to work crazy hours to succeed. I do believe that others believe this, though, I just don't think it's healthy or beneficial.

All of this is somewhat tangential to the original argument, though, which is that you shouldn't be afraid of hiring family people. Who should start a company is a great debate as well, though.

Re: Hire Family People

#16

Post by nostrademons »

pg wrote: post #13

Even if people with kids were more productive per hour, that's not enough in a real startup. The empirical evidence is pretty clear on that. I can't think of a successful startup whose founders didn't, in addition to being smart and determined etc, also work long hours.

But it does apply to founders. Nearly everyone interviewed in Founders at Work remarked that constraints breed creativity. That focus is one reason startups can kick the ass of big corporations.

It's just that it's possible to overconstrain the solution as much as underconstrain it. In the early stages, there's so much work to do that if you try to add kids to the mix, you don't even attempt it. As the startup gets more developed (or if you start with a simple enough problem), the amount of work needed becomes manageable enough to juggle with family life.

Same goes for having a day job. It worked for Joshua Schacter, Pierre Omidyar, and Steve Wozniak, because the focus of having only so many hours available disciplined them to work on products they could do in those hours. And the economy was such that not many other people were working on those products, so they ended up dominating their niches. But it fails for many, many other entrepreneurs, because the problems they could solve within those constraints had already been solved by hundreds of other people.

Re: Hire Family People

#17

Post by pg »

dhh wrote: post #15
pg wrote: post #13

Even if people with kids were more productive per hour, that's not enough in a real startup. The empirical evidence is pretty clear on that. I can't think of a successful startup whose founders didn't, in addition to being smart and determined etc, also work long hours.

I think the reason for that is more one of risk. Starting a new company is a lot more risky than being an employee of one. And if you have a family to support, you're less likely to be willing to take on big risk. So I absolutely agree that it's easier to start a company when you're single and have no obligations because you can tolerate much more risk. Update: Seems that the original argument changed from "if kids a…

(If this exchange is confusing to anyone, it's because dhh was replying to my comment while I was still editing it.)

But in reply to the second half: while 37Signals may be a counterexample to the rule that startup founders need to work long hours to succeed, there seem to be a lot more startups that did than didn't.

Different people presumably have different points at which spending more time on something makes the result come out worse. Probably this also varies with the type of work. So it could be that when person = dhh and work = product design, 10 hours per week is a reasonable limit, and when it's someone else and the work = writing database software, the limit might be 70 hours per week.

In the absence of any other evidence, you have to assume that successful startup founders knew what they were doing, and that if they worked long hours it was because it paid off for them.

Re: Hire Family People

#18

Post by pg »

jimbokun wrote: post #5
sanj wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that David came away from Startup School with a heap of new ideas that he's been talking about back in Chicago.

I believe he has decided to take the opposite position to pg on every point about how to start a business and see how well he can argue it. Which is a healthy thing for Hacker News, I think, getting other perspectives.

Actually there wasn't anything in DHH's talk that I really disagreed with, except the use of the word "startup" for the kind of company he was describing. There's already a word for companies like Italian restaurants: businesses. A startup is a very specific kind of business: one that starts small but could grow very large. Only a fraction of the 30 million businesses in the US are startups.

I think what made people think DHH's advice was relevant to startups was that he was talking about starting a business to write software, which is also what most startups do. But structurally the kind of small business he was talking about was more like a landscaping company or a shoe store or a restaurant. Which is a perfectly legitimate thing to do; it's just not a startup.

Re: Hire Family People

#19

Post by [deleted] »

pg wrote: post #13

Even if people with kids were more productive per hour, that's not enough in a real startup. The empirical evidence is pretty clear on that. I can't think of a successful startup whose founders didn't, in addition to being smart and determined etc, also work long hours.

[deleted]

Re: Hire Family People

#20

Post by pg »

nostrademons wrote: post #16
pg wrote: post #13

Even if people with kids were more productive per hour, that's not enough in a real startup. The empirical evidence is pretty clear on that. I can't think of a successful startup whose founders didn't, in addition to being smart and determined etc, also work long hours.

But it does apply to founders. Nearly everyone interviewed in Founders at Work remarked that constraints breed creativity. That focus is one reason startups can kick the ass of big corporations. It's just that it's possible to overconstrain the solution as much as underconstrain it. In the early stages, there's so much work to do that if you try to add kids to the mix, you don't even attempt it. As the startup gets m…

Nearly everyone interviewed in Founders at Work remarked that constraints breed creativity.

That doesn't mean that they make you net better, though. If they did, you could prove by induction that the ideal strategy in a startup would be to work an arbitrarily small amount of time per day.

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