how do these children like idiots get funded and be in charge of 200 ppl? this mindset is criminally short sighted..
Hire people who give a shit
161–170 of 342 posts
Re: Hire people who give a shit
#162This article is a great way to weed out people with families. Or hobbies. Or any sort of life outside of work.
Re: Hire people who give a shit
#163And the inverse: have a business which is worthy of shit-giving. It’s extremely hard to give a shit about Yet Another Middleware CRUD CRM Layer Corp. There’s a fine balancing point between working a bullshit job ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs ) and recognizing that no, the B-Ark ( https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchan_Ark_Fleet_... ) is a bad idea, we really do need telephone handset saniti…
> For another, it’s going to bias you towards treating, e.g., janitors as subhuman, and that way is the path to a very bad place. Do you have any more thoughts about this point? In my own life I’ve seen some of my friends with hotshot jobs develop this sort of mentality, and I sort of don’t know what to make of it. I want to be like “this is a toxic attitude to have!” but at the same time I can’t make a better argume…
A person's job is largely dependent on their own value system. The worth of a person does not correspond to how much that person values career prestige. It is easy to believe the opposite when you value career prestige highly.
Re: Hire people who give a shit
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
The financial incentive structures are also pretty skewed. Upside for founders is much, much higher than employees. Proper incentives entice employee engagement.
The downside is also much bigger for founders. The board will cut the founder pay when times are tough, long before they touch rank-and-file employees, because they know you value your equity. The other folks can walk.
Nothing stops a founder from walking away. Plenty of founders sell their shares to investors/cofounders in order to cash out.
Boards are typically stacked in the founders favor, so any reduction in pay would be the founders own decision. Which makes sense, because they want to keep the company that they have significant equity in alive.
Re: Hire people who give a shit
#165Not a native speaker, but for me "giving a shit" doesn't sound like you really care for something. Ok, it's (maybe) better than "not giving a shit", which is nothing at all, but it's not much more than the bare minimum...
Yes, to "give a shit" or a "damn" means to care marginally more than not caring at all.
He's using it in an ironic[1] sense to mean that they really do care. This is similar to BBEdit's tagline[2], "it doesn't suck," which, read literally, doesn't mean it's good.
[1]: contrasting with expectations and norms
Re: Hire people who give a shit
#166Maybe my opinion is atypical compared to a lot of the comments here, but I'm of the belief that if you treat your team members not just fairly but well, invest in them, genuinely care about them, and trust/empower them, then the overall sentiment of the article makes a lot of sense.
I'm not a big fan of the current state of the world where people hop careers every couple years and are always looking for new opportunities continuously. It's driven by extreme corporate greed which is way too skewed in the wrong direction. I always thought there was something nice about lifetime or career companies. Again, if both employer, management, employees and community can create a culture and company that is in balance in all aspects, the author's position is justified in my opinion.
However, it's it's just empty words that maintains the status quo of Silicon Valley, then I don't agree with the author. We need less selfish egotistical thought leader CEOs following the trends and more down to earth and humble leaders who want to do meaningful work.
Re: Hire people who give a shit
#167People have all kinds of motivations:
- change the way something works
- make money to achieve a goal now or in the future (pay rent vs. fund kid's education)
- support a friend
- make a change in the workplace or the industry
- develop experience and a career, further a craft
But it's almost never "make your business succeed at the expense of other parts of their life."
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> The uncomfortable truth is that most people don’t give a shit. For example, it’s absolutely shocking that the common paradigm for engineers at Google is to come in at 11am and leave at 4pm. In no world can you be working 5 hours a day and be giving a shit, and so the conclusion is that very little meaningful work gets done at Google. Maybe a bit of a hyperbole, but not far from the truth. That culture is broken.
This guy is basically giving a performance review on people he doesn't know doing work he's unaware of based on a single metric. The ego involved here is indescribable. I would never, ever work at Scale.
Re: Hire people who give a shit
#168“Giving a shit” seems to be entirely focused on whether they are putting in hours. I notice that nowhere in the 6 questions is there anything that would assess what was achieved. So if I went to Scale, sat around for 12 hours and spent 7 on Hacker News, I would achieve as much as the Google employee but somehow be differentiated according to Scale.
If that Google employee spends the same proportion of their time on Hacker News as you then you’re definitely achieving more. Agree with your point though, giving a shit is not about how many hours your work, it’s about how much you care.
>>> you’re definitely achieving more.
Quite the opposite in fact.
The google engineer could work few hours and make life better (or worse) for a billion people.
The startup engineer has little impact in comparison. For this company specifically it's probably near zero, it's basically outsourcing like mechanical turk.
I personally recall moving from a small startup to a Fortune 50. I could spend half the time in the office and achieve a hundred times the outcome, easily.
Re: Hire people who give a shit
#169The comments here at HN are quite harsh imho and I feel bad for possibly ruining someone's day. Is there a way for me to delete the submission? I posted it on HN as I liked the points in the article. The points in the post are reasonable provided there's fair equity for the employees (which I believe is disclosed prior to joining - I have no knowledge about dilution, preference etc). I also agree with the commenters…
What you’re seeing is the response of The Hacker community. The most wise thing you can do is listen, especially if you disagree.
Re: Hire people who give a shit
#170This article is megalomaniacal. Insisting that your company with 200+ employees will only hire people who will work themselves to the bone without any mention of how those people will be properly compensated is wild corporate propaganda. I honestly don’t know why the tech industry continues to capitulate to leaders like this who obviously, and loudly, mistreat and dehumanize their employees by insisting that if you a…
The fact is that you need people to have this collective delusion to work really hard and care about something, before value can be created. This kind of work ethic and commitment is what virtually every company that you admire today has required to get where it is today.
I personally don't think this is "dehumanizing" or unfair, since the whole point is to explicitly opt in for such a life. There are enough people out there who want to dedicate a lot of their time to working on a team or mission they care about, and OP's narrative is great at selecting for people like that.