251–260 of 287 posts
Whenever I read something like this I roll my eyes and assume the person writing it is either pretty junior or the specific founder type who has weirdly dysfunctional expectations about why their employees work for them. I think a lot of this stems from the bizarre culture of the SF tech world, but outside that bubble people do not really think about their jobs in this way. I emphasize _job_ here. The best devs I've…
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Let's set aside value judgements. After all, I don't know that small startups are optimal any more than you know that they aren't. Hopefully, what we can agree on is that small startups are different from large companies, even those with teams. Given that, someone who LIKES their small startup for whatever reason may feel it's lost its lustre when it evolves into a large company. For those people, this article offers…
Or, it gives a guide for the problems to avoid and figure out strategies to solve for to avoid that path. But, yes, if the article were written that way, I would have agreed with it more. But it wasn’t :-)
I really like the approach of Netflix of 10 years ago when it was still small. They hired mature people so they could get rid of processes. Indeed, they actually tried to de-process everything. As a result, things just happened. Non-event was often mentioned and expected in Netflix at that time. Case in point, active-active regions just happened in a few months. A really easy to use deployment tool, Asgard, just happ…
Do you think this is thanks, at least in part, to the fact that Netflix is a rather narrowly defined product? It is a library of content and it streams to your screen. In the places I've worked, the product is poorly defined. Not because we've neglected to define it, but because it's novel and amorphous and nobody knows what it should be, let alone what it will be. Netflix on the other hand, in my view, has a clear g…
Whenever I read something like this I roll my eyes and assume the person writing it is either pretty junior or the specific founder type who has weirdly dysfunctional expectations about why their employees work for them. I think a lot of this stems from the bizarre culture of the SF tech world, but outside that bubble people do not really think about their jobs in this way. I emphasize _job_ here. The best devs I've…
In my experience people that claim otherwise are just getting less out of work than they could. Kind of a waste of 40 hours a week.
(Sure, bad situations exist etc. etc. but that’s just true of everything.)
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I would say you can generally (from my experience >95% of the time) identify a bad hire in roughly a month, mostly in two weeks and then give yourself / them additional two to be very sure. We just hired for a management position a couple of month ago and I could tell from the very first meeting that it was a bad hire. I made sure with my team that I’m not totally wrong and then communicated my doubts to the C-Level.…
If you can tell from the first meeting, why was this person even hired in the first place? The only time i experienced something like that was when the CEO hired someone without asking anyone else to vet them.
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Honestly, european common approach of "trial period" is better for this. Details vary, but for example in Poland you can (simplified case): 1. Hire for fixed-length term of a year 2. First 3 months of that are "trial period" - you have minimal paperwork for firing during that time, effectively no chance of lawsuit (if someone brings a lawsuit that gets far enough for any paperwork to reach you, you have much worse th…
The problem (I’m not in Poland but I’m in Berlin, which also has strict rules about firing long term employees) is that senior talent has a lot of choice of where to go to so why should they bother with a place that would only give them a 1-year contract at first?
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Ray Dalio talks about this in his book "Principles." The specific advice he offers is "hire slowly, fire quickly."
Terrible advice (from a broadly terrible book, I hasten to add). The reason that this is terrible advice: if you "fire quickly", it is because something is either grievously wrong (a mishire) or you are firing based on limited evidence. If the former, you have a hiring problem, not a firing problem; if the latter, you will generate a fear-based culture. Now, if you're running a prison, a fear-based culture may be exa…
I also wonder what their actual competitive advantage was. My guess is Dalio himself had a good way to think about economic questions, and that they used not-too-simplified computer modeling before most others.
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Just browse /r/sysadmin and the sheer number of people with a Messias complex, it’s just stunning. “Yeah so three of my colleagues got fired so now I’m doing the work of four people, but my boss won’t listen to me when I say I’m overworked”. Professional people would likely been gone before the firings, but if this situation would have arisen, they would have set boundaries and negotiate what work is and isn’t done w…
Depends on how everything else is going, but being one person doing the work of four is great if you handle it well. If you do what you can get done, and go home at a reasonable time, it's great. You don't have to worry about justifying your position, or trying to find work to do, you've got a bunch of stuff. You can pick from your choice of tasks, cause there's a ton of stuff. You don't have to bother with knowledge…
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Depends on how everything else is going, but being one person doing the work of four is great if you handle it well. If you do what you can get done, and go home at a reasonable time, it's great. You don't have to worry about justifying your position, or trying to find work to do, you've got a bunch of stuff. You can pick from your choice of tasks, cause there's a ton of stuff. You don't have to bother with knowledge…
If those other fired people did anything substantial it’s an illusion to think you can take that work on. Otherwise the firing was justified as one person can apparently do the work…
Whenever I read something like this I roll my eyes and assume the person writing it is either pretty junior or the specific founder type who has weirdly dysfunctional expectations about why their employees work for them. I think a lot of this stems from the bizarre culture of the SF tech world, but outside that bubble people do not really think about their jobs in this way. I emphasize _job_ here. The best devs I've…
My father is an orthopaedic surgeon and he definitely thinks about his job as much as I think about mine. My cousin is a cardiovascular surgeon who also does. Another cousin is a lawyer and she does too. A friend I met through another friend is a school vice-principal and he does too.
All of these people have family and friends who love them and who have hobbies that they spend time on.
I think people like this would just prefer to work with others like this. And so they write these things advertising that this life exists.
The market for engineers is pretty hot right now. To any junior engineer who wants to love their job, I'd say go for it. You have at least 40 h a week dedicated to your vocation. That's enjoyable.
Many people don't treat this 40 h as an enjoyable time of their life. But the reward is you have 40 more hours of enjoyment per week. Just remember that hard work and outcome are correlated at less than 1.