51–60 of 95 posts
I wonder how you get people to believe in a mission if scepticism forms an inherent part of the culture. I‘m talking about the UK specifically. I feel like it would be very difficult to get the English guys and girls on my team to take our "mission" even remotely seriously.
Another important aspect about retaining good employees is to help them through their failures. The longer an employee stays at a company, the more likely it is that they will screw up. No one has a 100% track record. Good management teams recognize this, and should have plans to guide faltering employees back on the right track.
For example, if someone accidentally deleted a production database and there's no backup, they didn't screw up, the team screwed up for not having backups and for encouraging working in production.
The author recommends having a mission so employees feel like they're working for a greater good. So is this why every job on Hacker News goes something like "Help us change the world of [industry]," where [industry] can be something as banal as t-shirt printing or pizza delivery? If you don't believe me, here are some examples from the jobs board: Mobile Hacker? Come work with the team that's reinventing farming Sim…
The prospect of changing something is often what attracted the founders to the idea in the first place. The most successful founders are not usually in it just for the money. If they were they'd have taken that $50 million acquisition offer on the way up.
Then you have a rolling system where there's enough overlap that when employee #6 leaves, employee #9 or #10 can take up the slack pretty quickly.
I suppose it's not easy to "time" your hires because it's so hard to find the right fit, but if you can hire a reasonably good fit within a 2-3 week recruitment window then you can space them out.
The other advantage is that the earlier employees gradually get more staff to train and delegate the work to, so they will feel actively involved in relieving themselves of the 60-80 hour/week pressure and meanwhile their equity is continuing to build up.
I'm not a start-up founder (yet), so this may be fundamentally flawed thinking. Any comments?
I think the author misses one important factor in employee retention - work / life balance. If a start-up hires a bunch of employees, everyone will be tempted to trade work for life in favor of "rocketship growth". In essence, they believe in the mission of the company so much that they are willing to sacrifice their mission for themselves. Companies who are empathetic to employee needs stand a much better chance of…
In essence, they believe in the mission of the company so much that they are willing to sacrifice their mission for themselves. In a SV scale-to-the-moon startup, you hire cult members, not employees. You want them to work for minimum wage and equity only. Sometimes that means hiring people who are naive but can be manipulated in the right directions versus experienced people who have done it all before.
Then, based on past HN articles, you proceed to do your best to scam them out of the equity you gave them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that about the time to fire them all and replace with cheaper recent grads? A CRUD app doesn't need a decade of experience.
I don't know if you are being sarcastic, but I find your attitude despicable. I hope I never get to work for you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dating is absolutely horrible for men in the south bay. That 1 hour barrier puts many brakes on even getting a date with all the single women live in SF and the north east bay area. SF is where all the other young people are. The south bay is suburban families.
It's chicken and egg, innit? If there was an economic incentive for people to live in San Jose (say, the tech scene was revitalized from actual startups as opposed to the Adobe/Cisco/eBay/Yahoo!/IBM dinosaurs, and Pinger), then there would be greater demand for SJ to densify, and have attractions, and thus invite more young people to live there. But because young people don't want to live there as it is, companies ar…
The author recommends having a mission so employees feel like they're working for a greater good. So is this why every job on Hacker News goes something like "Help us change the world of [industry]," where [industry] can be something as banal as t-shirt printing or pizza delivery? If you don't believe me, here are some examples from the jobs board: Mobile Hacker? Come work with the team that's reinventing farming Sim…
Maybe I am misreading your post, but not a single one of the YC companies is solving a problem as easily mocked as "pizza delivery" (which, in reality, is really simplifying food acquisition to reallocate those hours to something more productive than waiting in line).
Healthcare and farming are two hugely important sectors. Home services are a major productivity win.
I think these basics are most important: * don't constantly push to have your employees stay late * if you need your employees to travel, while they're away don't pressure them to work more than their usual work day. * don't disrespect and be a jerk to your employees * provide reasonable sick and vacation benefits
* Automatically raise their pay every year. It doesn't necessarily need to keep up with market, but they need to know that they aren't being suckers by staying at the job.
edit: ok, perhaps not screwing me. but if you know I can make significantly more elsewhere, you shouldn't act shocked when I take the opportunity...
Another very important factor in retention not mentioned here is better understanding the aspirations of those people you're considering bringing on to your team. A person's response to questions like, "What are you most interested in professionally?" and, "How do you see yourself developing career wise?" becomes a blueprint for what to do organizationally to retain them. Sometimes the simplest approach is the best:…
The problem is that candidates see "What are you most interested in professionally?" and "How do you see yourself developing career wise?" as questions with right or wrong answers that will get them hired. "Send someone highly trusted over to clean my house every week" could be a great thing that lets me concentrate more on the rest of my life, but saying it during an interview would paint me as weird.
The problem, of course, is that by advertising this information, candidates would basically be saying that they're not getting nurtured in this way by their current employer. It's would be a public notice that they're not that happy at work.
I was trying to avoid any sort of "pitch" in this comment thread, but you've set me up too nicely: My startup, Mighty Spring (https://www.mightyspring.com), makes a passive, anonymous job search platform. Candidates post this exact information: what interests them and their career goals, along with their qualifications, which employers browse and use to decide who to interview. The anonymity makes it possible for candidates to safely reveal this info to employers. Also, that this info is available up-front helps to increase employment market efficiency and expose candidate/employer matches that really are great fits for both sides.
We're currently in private beta, but send out invites regularly. Feel free to email me (addy in profile) if you've got any questions!