Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where are they? I don’t see them
One of them is a pinned comment, but they also made others.
Oh I was looking for Alexander’s comments, I didn’t realize Lucy was a founder. Yeah that’s pretty bad.
Hire people who give a shit
251–260 of 342 posts
Re: Hire people who give a shit
#252This 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…
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Re: Hire people who give a shit
#253> 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.
Heh, you think I’ll give a shit working over 8? Odds are you’re company is uninteresting the product or efforts you’re working on are uninteresting and time isn’t going to make give more or less of a shit about it. I’m not meaning this to target OP specifically, this is how I feel about majority of jobs I see and work.
Re: Hire people who give a shit
#254This 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 d…
I've worked way over 9-5 for ~months a few times and I usually feel very unhappy with my decision for months afterwards.
If you are just an engineer, there is no point. You are just burning yourself out to make someone else's dream come true, or get your boss promoted, or get your director their bonus. Maybe you will get promoted, or a better rating. Even when I've seen that outcome I was still unhappy with it.
Any company will always have an endless backlog of work and burning it down faster doesn't do anything. IMO you should only do it when financial or career incentives are very well aligned.
I don't know if I've ever met another person who is truly (not for resume/career/money purposes) "passionate" about the kind of software people get paid to write. Most software is really boring. Even for software that isn't, it looks boring once you've seen how it works.
Re: Hire people who give a shit
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not confined to SV nor to tech. It's very common in the finance industry as well, but the worst is arguably in health care, where patients can literally die due to mistakes or lack of enough attention by overworked doctors and nurses running on an extreme lack of sleep. This doesn't even begin to address the casualties from burnout, which can lead to depression, stress-related health issues, and suicide. How…
>> I never understood why they didn't just hire more people and instead preferred to work the talented people they attract half to death. I think that a small number of talented people that will work themselves to death will be much more effective than a large group willing to work reasonable hours.
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Re: Hire people who give a shit
#256This 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…
Well to be fair, this author was only 2 years old when this disaster happened, posting it here for anyone not familiar: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/05/business/stinging-office-...
What a jerk, this memo was totally inappropriate. I wonder how many suits it resulted in, that sounds like a rather hostile work environment
Re: Hire people who give a shit
#257I find it funny that the author is concerned about Scale being the kind of company people join for brand rather than "substance". He never mentions the biggest reason people join companies (esp. in SV): to get rich. It is true that undergrads will intern for company's brand and that makes sense b/c just having FAANG on your resume completely changes your job search experience. But most fulltime employees are looking primarily to maximize their pay + RSUs.
Also, as others have mentioned, companies/leaders need to give people something to "give a shit about". For some people that may just be working on "High quality training and validation data for AI applications", but I imagine for most people that's probably not quite enough to make them excited about work. But, who knows? :shrug:
Re: Hire people who give a shit
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 d…
I've seen many, many people (myself included) burned by putting in many extra hours (in terms of burnout, in terms of the effort going to waste because higher ups decided to change the schedule, in terms of not being appreciated when the situation reversed), while the number of times where people, in hindsight, said it was worth it has been quite few. Its not that people aren't willing to dedicate themselves to their…
I think this comment nails it. For me, I'm happy with a shared struggle towards some goal (though of course it cannot become the norm.) Pressure-Ease-Pressure-Ease cycles are also fine for me.
...but if all that results on a nice pat on the back while some salesperson or product manager gets promoted, then it isn't really a shared struggle anymore. Rewards need to be distributed to the entire team that struggled, not just the ones presenting the project.
Further, i think organizations need to understand that different people want different things. Consulting firms have a firm-wide up-or-out policy...but tech companies should probably subscribe to a up-or-steady policy where some choose to worker more intensely for growth while others choose to work normally and remain stationary.
Re: Hire people who give a shit
#259The amount of founder/CEO backlash on this thread is eye opening. The OP said many things, among which he talked about the effort required to put in to be a master in your craft.
No one is forced to work for such a company. There are many low/mid paying comfortable jobs you can do that suit your personality.
The reality is that drive and effort. How you redistribute rewards is another thing.
Re: Hire people who give a shit
#260The amount of founder/CEO backlash on this thread is eye opening. The OP said many things, among which he talked about the effort required to put in to be a master in your craft. No one is forced to work for such a company. There are many low/mid paying comfortable jobs you can do that suit your personality. The reality is that drive and effort. How you redistribute rewards is another thing.
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