241–250 of 543 posts
But we can compete–and win–on flexibility. And then the following part describes: In 2020, Sid left Gumroad to start his own creator economy company, Circle, together with former Gumroad coworker Rudy Santino I fail to see this as any competitive advantage since Gumroad's "employment" approach literally incubated a competitor.
Quite frankly, this doesn't seem sustainable. There's only so much high-visibility/high-value work. When your headcount is large relative to "desirable" work, people will compete for the "desirable" work. They will lie about the 60 hours of work they did last week, and tell you that it's the culturally-normative 20 hours of work, because it makes them look like 3x engineers.
> expecting responses within 24 hours... we can compete–and win–on flexibility
Including in SRE / ops roles, where people need to be on-call?
Let's be clear about something here. You have a headcount of 25, and ostensibly nobody is full-time. It's certainly possible to avoid internal competition at that size, with the right culture. But can you really avoid adding headcount? Can you really protect your culture from the opportunists, the cutthroats, the workaholics? How large can the kibbutz grow before the workers' paradise is no longer so sunny?
an open source project like Rails. Except it’s neither open source, nor unpaid. Do people still think of big, successful open source projects as unpaid? Rails, for example, was created at Basecamp/37Signals. Most Linux contributions come from companies like IBM. Or am I the one who's out of touch?
The ingress-nginx maintainer just stepped down today because nobody would fund his work. https://twitter.com/aledbf/status/1347273455448842240?s=20
openfaas is also unfunded and a large project with many commercial end-(ab)users. https://www.openfaas.com
Matt Holt behind Caddy gave up after years of struggle and managed to sell out to a company.
My take on OSS maintainers - https://blog.alexellis.io/the-5-pressures-of-leadership/ - see "2. Pay"
My team got laid off a few months ago and after experiencing remote working this is the only kind of work arrangement I'd be happy to apply for. 40hrs a week of remote working does not allow for a lot of freedom, ~20hrs sounds amazing. Really hope more companies start to adopt this.
Personally, unless there is some clear and dramatic advantage to a scheme like this, or it is enforced by law or collective bargaining pressure, I think it is unlikely to ever happen. I hold this belief because I am now convinced that too many agents within companies care less about profit and success than they do about straight-up owning people. Forcing people to spend their time at work is as close to actual slaver…
I completely agree with this, but I'm not sure this is necessarily beneficial for companies (compared to potential alternatives). In the end, the quality of their products benefits from happier employees, whatever "happier employees" means.
When I switched jobs from contracting at a FAANG to working for a worse company it was mostly due to bad mood in general. The job wasn't interesting anymore and I would feel like a well-paid slave. It felt like everything, including the house I was living in, was tied to or revolving around my job. It felt like I didn't have anything, except the job and what came with it.
Had they offered a part-time option with half the money or so, I probably would have stayed and started making the steps I'm making now as unemployed towards improving myself (more physical activity, side projects, volunteering, working on my mental health)
It doesn't have to be all the companies though, it can just be a few and then a few more. Gitlab and now Gumtree definitely stand out to me as one of the very few companies I'd be happy to work with and that's because of their approach to work.
His insights on how to live and work better and making me think if my little startup can follow some of these ideas.
> When someone new joins the company, they do what everyone else does: go into our Notion queue, pick a task, and get to work, asking for clarification when needed... Instead of setting quarterly goals or using OKRs, we move towards a single north star: maximizing how much money creators earn. It’s simple and measurable, allowing anyone in the company to do the math on how much a feature or bug-fix might be worth. Qu…
So why overcomplicate things?
> When someone new joins the company, they do what everyone else does: go into our Notion queue, pick a task, and get to work, asking for clarification when needed... Instead of setting quarterly goals or using OKRs, we move towards a single north star: maximizing how much money creators earn. It’s simple and measurable, allowing anyone in the company to do the math on how much a feature or bug-fix might be worth. Qu…
Why isn't there enough high-value work? One of their organizing principles seems to be that it's okay to do something that seems fun or that creators are asking for, so why should that stop being a guide for people who enjoy the work they do and enjoy listening to customers?
> When someone new joins the company, they do what everyone else does: go into our Notion queue, pick a task, and get to work, asking for clarification when needed... Instead of setting quarterly goals or using OKRs, we move towards a single north star: maximizing how much money creators earn. It’s simple and measurable, allowing anyone in the company to do the math on how much a feature or bug-fix might be worth. Qu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Some of it is a quirk of the American health care system. Probably more to do with Britain’s Factory Act of 1833 and follow up Act of 1844.
No country is in a vacuum... popular movements spread across borders and as the population of one country achieves something, their neighbours start demanding the same and so on... according to Wikipedia, the huge decline in working hours seen in the 20th century was mostly due to unionisation and legislation in response to popular demand. Today, the US and the UK seem to be pretty typical compared to other countries…
In all honesty, I would have though reduction of hours was due to automation and the advent of machinery, but I found this quote interesting...
When a labourer,” said Mr. Ashworth, a cotton magnate, to Professor Nassau W. Senior, “lays down his spade, he renders useless, for that period, a capital worth eighteen-pence. When one of our people leaves the mill, he renders useless a capital that has cost £100,000.” Only fancy! making “useless” for a single moment, a capital that has cost £100,000! It is, in truth, monstrous, that a single one of our people should ever leave the factory! The increased use of machinery, as Senior after the instruction he received from Ashworth clearly perceives, makes a constantly increasing lengthening of the working-day “desirable.”
I work for a large SaaS company with hundreds of engineers and a very healthy revenue. It's widely acknowledged that the company would continue to function exactly as it is now for a very long time if they fired 95% of the staff. Heck stability and uptime would probably improve due to fewer deployments/no new feature adds. So the graph with declining expenses and increasing revenue isn't at all surprising. The proble…
> if a competitor takes interest in your space and has a large war chest, you'd be powerless to compete with them If that were true, every single company that had more money to spend would always win. But that's not what's observable. There seem to be other factors at play that don't always center around money. > no new company that starts with the environment you are describing is going to be successful. That would…