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Hire people who give a shit

alexw.substack.com

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Re: Hire people who give a shit

#231

Post by hinkley »

teh_klev wrote: post #187

This article is utter bollocks. I tried hard to read to the end without laughing out loud, in particular this about candidates: > 1. they give a shit about Scale Most companies I interview for, I, shall we say, don't give a shit about at application and interview stage. Sure, they may seem like a good fit (tech and remuneration), and I try to fit if it kinda feels good after a couple of interviews. Yes I try and unde…

The places where I cared a lot about the company ahead of time have in the majority of cases been among the worst interviews I’ve done.

I doubt I’m along in this. Am industry you’re interested in, you’ll probably do great. A specific company? That tests qualities that aren’t often that important to your job.

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#232

Post by blackrock »

Perhaps you should perform a self-reflection first?

Maybe you can stop forcing engineers to jump through hoops to pass your stupid l33t testing questions? You might think you’re hiring the smartest guy, for the cheapest price, but instead of getting a good engineer that can write solid code, you get a code monkey that throws shit into your engineering process. Think about that for a moment.

Maybe you can set realistic deadlines? And readjust them as the requirements change in midstream.

Maybe you can hire managers that understands the complexities of software development? So they can actually manage effectively for a change.

Maybe you can avoid putting your employees through death marches to solve some arbitrary business problem?

Maybe you can get rid of your stupid open office seating arrangement, thereby forcing your most valuable employees to sit in such close proximity to one another? Thank god for Covid-19! That finally put a check on this stupid business practice.

Maybe you can stop viewing your employees as a cost center, and start to view them as an asset? Since the job of the engineer, is to help automate some process, he is actually reducing labor needed elsewhere, which costs you actual money if you had to pay an analyst to do it. The engineer automates this part of the job. And once you have a system in place, the initial investment pays for itself.

Maybe you can stop doing stupid employee ranking scenarios, like your stupid Stack-Ranking game, where your goal is to kill the bottom 10% regardless. This pits your best employees, your assets, against one another, in a Lord-of-the-Flies fight to the death challenge. This is not a very good scenario to engender loyalty from your best employees, again, your best assets.

Anything else?

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#233

Post by 29athrowaway »

Startups are companies with a scalable business model. Unlike regular small businesses which do not necessarily meet this definition.

Pursuing scale does not mean starting immediately with scalability in mind. It means creating a scalable business model, that is able to scale in subsequent stages.

That means that in the beginning you will have to iterate quickly to find that formula, aggresively discarding ideas (and therefore code) and moving fast.

But that's not sustainable. Once you've found that formula, then you have to rebuild it solidly so that it's secure, performant, scalable and reliable.

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#234

Post by wyclif »

arp242 wrote: post #209
wbronitsky wrote: post #121

This 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…

I think the way the author expands on it isn't too great, with questions like "How many hours were you working a week?" and "obsessed person". However, I do think there's sense in the general premise of "hire people who care about what they do", but this doesn't need to translate to "work your ass off". A lot of the time when I see people produce really crap code it's because they just don't care. They show up for wo…

Agreed—I had a mixed reaction, having worked for a FAANG. There are nuggets of truth there, the biggest one being "A recruiting team that looks like a college admissions office is certain death for a startup." That is undoubtedly true IMO. But toward the end it goes off the rails, with the stuff about working 5-hour days revealing a lack of commitment and indifference. The reason why Google engineers can work 5-hour days is because they are a large company, not a startup, and they can direct resources more efficiently than a startup and devote engineering hours to core problems instead of startup-style "all hands" processes. So IOW, if engineers are working 5-hour days, does it really surface not giving a shit? I'd say "it depends." It depends on whether you are a startup or a Big Corp, and it depends on the company culture and workflow. I don't think it's an A/B indicator of passion for the company or the product.

Overall though, this post left a bad taste in my mouth, and I could only keep thinking that I'd never want to work at Scale.

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#235

Post by rushabh »

torgian wrote: post #111

Lol. You can’t work only five hours a day _and_ still “give a shit”, according to the article. Sounds like someone full of himself. I’m never going to work more than 8 hours a day for a company, preferably less even. I still get more stuff done in those hours that I do work. I care a lot about what I do, but I’m not going to destroy myself or my life for someone else’s company. Already did that for the military, neve…

The article does not say you need to work long hours. It only says 5 hours does not cut it.

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#236

Post by dsr_ »

teh_klev wrote: post #187

This article is utter bollocks. I tried hard to read to the end without laughing out loud, in particular this about candidates: > 1. they give a shit about Scale Most companies I interview for, I, shall we say, don't give a shit about at application and interview stage. Sure, they may seem like a good fit (tech and remuneration), and I try to fit if it kinda feels good after a couple of interviews. Yes I try and unde…

I am very much in agreement here. At interview time, no prospective employee should care very much about your company; if they do, it's either insincere or pathological. If you're asking them for loyalty at interview time, that's a big blinking sign that you don't know what loyalty is.

But by all means, do hire people who give a shit: people who give a shit about their professional skills, about their self-respect, about the quality of their work and about being good people. Eventually, if your company is good, they will give a shit about that, too. You'll know it's working when they try to change a decision because they care more about doing the job right than they do about your feelings.

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#238

Post by arolihas »

heavyset_go wrote: post #136
ditonal wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scale AI is an embarrassment to YC in general, as the founders embody every negative trope we’ve come to associate with the worst of the scene. The Youtuber Joma Tech has an excellent takedown on the sheer arrogance of their founder. https://youtu.be/HTXTVfBCeSY The fetishization of a youthful founder, the ridiculous interview questions, and as I personally made the mistake of doing a phone screen with them before le…

The founder's comments on the YouTube video are just so embarrassing.

Where are they? I don’t see them

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#240

Post by ngokevin »

wbronitsky wrote: post #121

This 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…

This mirrors the sentiment of many people on HN are heavily against the idea of doing anything more than 9-5, and prefer to live the relaxed engineer life collecting paychecks and tending to their microbrews.

Maybe the hatred stems from that there exists a large pool of engineers that are passionate about their work and are okay not measuring their work as "hours per week". And that makes the pool of engineers that don't want to do that look not desirable.

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