A note I sent to YCombinator • Hacker News Board

Re: A note I sent to YCombinator

#41

Post by jernfrost » Mon, Jul 23, 2012, 3:07 PM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #40

dclapp wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, one last thing. Richard Branson, a business genius, said "Praise people and they flower; criticize them and they wilt." So praise and cheerlead and mentor relentlessly. And, like the best baseball managers, put people in positions where they can succeed. I could go on... :>)

My Bangladesh team actually tell me the opposite; they want critique, not praise. If they get praise they will stop working as they feel they over delivered. Guess it depends on where your people are and what culture they are from.

I believe there is some subtlety to this. As a Norwegian I notice Americans co-workers often crave more praise and positive feedback than say Northern European co-workers. Americans also more actively give praise. However that doesn't mean that Northern Europeans don't like to be praised. But one needs to feel that the person giving it is honest about it. I try to give praise when I know people have performed better than is normal for them.

I know myself that I find it just irritating if I get praise for mediocre work, which should be plain to see for anybody who care that it isn't anything special.

I don't know Bangladesh culture but I would expect that there would be similar mechanisms at work. They don't want unwarranted praise. They wanted when they have performed well.

I am guessing because from when I lived in the US, there was one thing I could find common ground among all other foreign students whether they were Japanese or Spanish and that was that American optimism and positivism is a bit alien to everybody. Don't misunderstand I think it is quite admirable that Americans are so positive and can-do attitude. The rest of the world could certainly learn a bit from that. But as with most things there is always a flip side of the coin.

Sometimes Americans seem to hit the wall of reality a bit too hard because optimism was running a too high compared to what was realistically possible.

Re: A note I sent to YCombinator

#42

Post by gwern » Mon, Jul 23, 2012, 3:18 PM UTC

> ps -- All this we work really hard bullshit? As if it is a merit badge or something? Your fundees should realize that the very best code written in this century was written for the space shuttle. And the folks who wrote it, without going into too much detail, worked 40 hour weeks. And were not allowed to work more than that. Period. It is no fun to win if you don't play by the rules. A 40 hour week is a good rule. I suspect that a 36 hour week is a better rule. :-)

This is a bad example. The Shuttle code is a extremely narrow, well-specified piece of functionality where they had many years to work on and refine it using formal methodologies like Z specifications (IIRC) and I don't even remember how many millions of dollars the _Fast Company_ article said was spent developing the code over the years.

Every single one of those qualifiers and adjectives is likely to be false in a startup context.

Re: A note I sent to YCombinator

#43

Post by happywolf » Mon, Jul 23, 2012, 3:24 PM UTC

A lot of pointy-hair bosses, especially in Asia (I am now working in China) assume longer working hours = higher productivity. In other words, they are having the 'factory mindset' whereby an hour not working is equal to an hour of productivity loss. However this assumption won't work for R&D, especially anything related to software.

Re: A note I sent to YCombinator

#44

Post by yalogin » Mon, Jul 23, 2012, 3:54 PM UTC

To add insult to working like a dog, most companies now say "they don't track vacation" and paint it as an incentive trying to imply employees can take as much vacation as they want. The reality is because of peer pressure no one takes a vacation. I for one stay as far away as possible from such companies.

Re: A note I sent to YCombinator

#45

Post by mpeg » Mon, Jul 23, 2012, 4:14 PM UTC

I want to work for you.

Coming out of two startup sales, I have to say if you want to make money you shouldn't be an early employee anyway; you should join when the company is willing to pay good money.

Re: A note I sent to YCombinator

#46

Post by neilk » Mon, Jul 23, 2012, 4:47 PM UTC

> I suspect that a 36 hour week is a better rule. :-)

According to a lot of sources, including Tom DeMarco's PeopleWare, 35 hours a week is the only sustainable pace for intellectual work. Plus or minus a few hours, maybe.

But that was about stable companies. I'm not sure that startups are trying to be sustainable.

Arguably a startup is really exploring a space of possibilities, searching for a profitable niche. So probably delivering crappy code that delivers three features is better than producing one solid thing. I've been on the cleanup crew for a couple of acquired startups, as well as products that were developed in 20% time at large corporations and grew into larger teams. My impression is that code quality barely mattered to their initial success. So I'm not sure what the optimum workload in a YC-style startup should be.

Also, we have to modify DeMarco et al's advice for a team composed of two or three twentysomethings. It seems likely that their stamina is going to be well above average and their knowledge and experience is going to be well below. So perhaps they are playing their cards right to bet on stamina.

Re: A note I sent to YCombinator

#47

Post by katravax » Mon, Jul 23, 2012, 6:27 PM UTC

dclapp wrote: post #13

david_shaw wrote: post #3

These are some great insights, and well worth the read. I think that at a core level, many of us -- especially in the managerial world -- understand that working people to death, especially technical people, never works out well. The adage of "work smarter, not harder" is absolutely correct. Just like it's better to write five lines of algorithmically beautiful code than a hundred lines of obfuscated spaghetti, it's…

What you call crunch time is what I call poor project management. I started out as the managing editor of a daily newspaper. We shipped an entire product every day. We never slipped, we never missed a daily deadline… Just like every other daily newspaper. And there was never a OMG OMG crunch time as the daily deadline neared. If you manage a project correctly, when the deadline arrives you'll be sitting around tellin…

To be fair, making the average daily newspaper is a different kind of project than how most software is made. Print is mostly a fixed process with few creative unknowns. You know how long it takes for something to get through editorial or advertising, how long it takes to lay it out or drop in a replacement, what time the printer needs the layouts to be able to get the final papers to distribution, and what price and time are involved in special features or changes, like spot color or losing some number of copy inches at the last minute. But much of software is something new, the automation of some process or creation of efficiency. Software projects, almost by definition, have some of the players doing something they've never done before. Parts of the processes are similar, but software and daily print projects aren't really comparable for most of the cycle.

Re: A note I sent to YCombinator

#48

Post by ph0rque » Mon, Jul 23, 2012, 6:27 PM UTC

vorg wrote: post #36

> A 40 hour week is a good rule. I suspect that a 36 hour week is a better rule. By saying "36 hour week" instead of "35-hour week is better", you're showing a bias that better working hours means working less days or taking longer weekends (i.e. 9 days every two weeks), rather than less hours per day (i.e. 7 hours a day). Certain types of people (including you I guess) would prefer the extra day as reward, other typ…

Maybe he meant 6, 6-hour days?

Re: A note I sent to YCombinator

#49

Post by tluyben2 » Mon, Jul 23, 2012, 7:18 PM UTC

jernfrost wrote: post #41

tluyben2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Bangladesh team actually tell me the opposite; they want critique, not praise. If they get praise they will stop working as they feel they over delivered. Guess it depends on where your people are and what culture they are from.

I believe there is some subtlety to this. As a Norwegian I notice Americans co-workers often crave more praise and positive feedback than say Northern European co-workers. Americans also more actively give praise. However that doesn't mean that Northern Europeans don't like to be praised. But one needs to feel that the person giving it is honest about it. I try to give praise when I know people have performed better…

It is common here in Northern EU to see Americans as almost 'crazily optimistic'. Like you say (and this goes especially for the very 'sober' people like the Dutch and scandinavians); the first time you run into Americans in real life it's really jikes. You look SOO good, that's SOOO GREAT what you do etc. I (from Netherlands) got more compliments in one week in the US than I ever did in the Netherlands my whole life (that's probably not true, but I felt like that). So as we are very sober, those compliments are rapidly filtered and then they are not compliments anymore. But on the other hand, I do admire it more than the other side of not getting compliments mostly and I like the optimism much more. I do like well founded criticism but I believe that's different than what my BD colleagues want.

It's interesting to see the differences anyway.

Re: A note I sent to YCombinator

#50

Post by applefanner » Mon, Jul 23, 2012, 8:36 PM UTC

I had an interview with a YC company. They were going to bring me on board with a low salary, lots of equity, and a seven day work week, with what seemed to be 8-10 hours a day. But hey, they have a cool office and free food!