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Hire People Who Care (2020)

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Re: Hire People Who Care (2020)

#71

Post by Paracompact »

ZunarJ5 wrote: post #39
paulcole wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice what would an employer caring look like to you?

You know what caring looks like. You experience it in your personal relationships every day. The disconnect isn't knowledge, it's incentives. The practical answer is straightforward: predictable schedules that people can plan around, living wages that are indexed to the COL, transparent paths for advancement, respect for work-life boundaries, investment in employee development beyond immediate productivity needs (i.e…

> Once conditions change, watch how quickly that 'caring' evaporates.

I work in a tech field, but not quite the "pamper you with massages and ice cream sundaes" part of it. I am profoundly uncomfortable with the cultural deception at those types of places.

Re: Hire People Who Care (2020)

#72

Post by awesome_dude »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #52
paulcole wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice what would an employer caring look like to you?

Employer who pays themselves less than they pay their employees.

That's a foolish metric - the employer is usually making money through asset accumulation (the business that they own is worth more)

Cash compensation isn't very reliable.

Re: Hire People Who Care (2020)

#73

Post by cosmotic »

oceansky wrote: post #9

"How many hours were you working a week?" Funnily enough, hearing this question is a huge red flag for me. It signals they value work hours more than quality delivery.

I thought the same thing. The moment the article equated 5h work day to not giving a shit, they lost me.

Re: Hire People Who Care (2020)

#74

Post by throwmeaway222 »

atoav wrote: post #59
throwmeaway222 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah they're literally paying you money so they don't have to.

No, they are giving you a tiny fraction of the cake you earn them. The fact is that you are there to make them money.

I guarantee you, if you were running the company you work at, there might be a few here and there that you truly care about, but the vast majority of your workers are workers.

Re: Hire People Who Care (2020)

#75

Post by cyberax »

hinkley wrote: post #68
cyberax wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhm... No? Founders typically also have common stock. Preferred stock is for investors.

I'm pretty sure that's not the case, but I've never heard of a early or even founding engineers getting preferred stock. Which is just a roundabout way then of saying that they want to appear like they care, but they don't actually. You will become math to them at the point where they get rewarded and find out your reward is more work.

Sorry, but you're wrong.

"Preferred stock" is not really "preferred", it has a lot of limitations that common stock doesn't have. But it does have preference during liquidation and/or secondary market tender offers.

There are ways that founders or major stockholders can use to screw the minor stockholders, but preferred stock does not protect against them at all.

> Which is just a roundabout way then of saying that they want to appear like they care, but they don't actually.

If people are giving non-trivial amounts of stock in a company where they work is "just math", then I don't know what else you want.

Re: Hire People Who Care (2020)

#76

Post by cam_l »

In a somewhat misguided defence of the OP, he actually makes two points.

Giving a shit about your work is the second point. Without any other comments suggesting the alternative, I assume this is second in order of importance. And as there are only two points I would take that to mean the second point is the least important.

His first point is to give a shit about the company. This being the most important point probably explains the accusations of late payments and wage theft from former employees and contractors against the company. They just weren't putting the company first!

As an aside, I have been thinking of this in relation to the 3 laws, as in a sense, executives see workers as robots, and I think the 3 laws mesh quite nicely with corporate directives.

1) A robot (employee) may not injure the company or allow the company to come to harm;

2) A robot must obey their manager unless it conflicts with the First Law;

3) A robot must protect its own existence (in the company) as long as it does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

The work doesn't really come into to it, unless it is a subset of the 3rd law.

Re: Hire People Who Care (2020)

#77

Post by thedevilslawyer »

I'll take the opposite side of the comments and the body of cynical people here.

It absolutely matters to care about the problem you're solving. A team of people with a skill level of X that cares about a problem will be better in both performance and in general culture and being around than a team with a skill level of 2X that consists of mercenaries.

I learned it the hard way. When I was asked to set up a team of 14-16 engineers, I first went the latter way. The interviewing was difficult and the bar was higher, but the people who were there were focused on what they could get out of the role. Circumstances led to a reset, and the second time around, I built a team that optimized for caring about the problem. I started with the two people I liked working with in the initial group because they liked the problem statement. I had to lower the computer science performance bar to build the team to size. I also had a budget left over for other purposes, as we didn't need to pay for 2X performance, and the team was heavier with younger folks.

We delivered the goals in three months. More importantly, working with people who have a shared purpose, rather than "getting mine," is just a better place to be. I had to spend time skilling up some people, but they did it in a month!

Since then, I've always optimized for being around "mission-driven" people, rather than "mercenaries." Sometimes you need that 5X skill set, in which case a limited-time contractual helper is probably better, but the team has a soul.

Re: Hire People Who Care (2020)

#78

Post by FreakLegion »

hinkley wrote: post #68
cyberax wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhm... No? Founders typically also have common stock. Preferred stock is for investors.

I'm pretty sure that's not the case, but I've never heard of a early or even founding engineers getting preferred stock. Which is just a roundabout way then of saying that they want to appear like they care, but they don't actually. You will become math to them at the point where they get rewarded and find out your reward is more work.

It's the case. And the kicker is that if you understood the tax games we play with startup stock, you wouldn't want preferred shares.

Why? Because common shares have their price set by a 409A valuation, which through the first few rounds of funding especially will be a small fraction of the preferred share price, set by agreement between the company and its investors. Cheap common shares make early exercise practical, so you can file an 83(b), not worry about AMT, and benefit from the QSBS tax exclusion after five years. Cheap common shares also mean you capture most of the value of preferred shares as gains, rather than having it as basis, out of the gate, since in a successful exit preferred shares are simply converted to common.

What companies that care actually do is offer early exercise, so employees who want to can take advantage of the QSBS tax exclusion, and give 10-year exercise windows with ISO->NSO conversion, so employees who decide to leave aren't forced to exercise or forfeit their options within 30-90 days. There's a lot of uninformed talk about preferred shares on HN, and you really ought to ignore it.

Re: Hire People Who Care (2020)

#79

Post by forty »

GEBBL wrote: post #21

Is it common that folks are going into work at 11am and leaving at 4pm? I thought America had a crazy work hour culture

They work a lot of days (they have very few paid leaves compared to EU in general) but not a lot of hours per day (from what I could see working at French/American companies)

Re: Hire People Who Care (2020)

#80

Post by sam_lowry_ »

I actually do care. I am also emotionally involved. Bad code makes me feel bad, I am ecstatic about good code.

I am deeply saddened when I see people making the same mistakes over and over again.

This attitude negatively impacted my career on more than one occasion.

I am now doing a relatively low-pay work for the public services. My job is cleaning the Augean stables of decades-old Java code, but I feel better than shitting crappy code for the unicorn that none needs in the industry that should not exist.

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