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Hire people who give a shit

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Re: Hire people who give a shit

#291

Post by achenatx »

ingvul wrote: post #288
achenatx wrote: post #65

I strongly disagree with this post for my company. But that is great, it means there is a company for everyone. At my company one of our most important values is "live the life you love". For each person we try to understand how the company can help them achieve their personal goals. If someone wants to work a ton of hours to get promoted as fast as possible, we support that. But if they want a balanced life we suppo…

> We monitor people's hours... Here I stop reading.

we are a professional services company, so we monitor hours by default.

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#292

Post by xwdv »

justinclift wrote: post #289
xwdv wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been shitting all over people like this for a long time and trying to get people to see the light that a job is a job and nothing more, but then I get blamed for having a “mercenary mentality” and “not a team player”. You are renting your skills to an entity that needs your skills for an agreed upon rate for a certain amount of time. If another employer offers you a better situation and your current employer d…

> Getting a job is not like joining a gang or a fraternity where you are first promised a community and good life and then the money is just a formality ... On that note, there seem to be many tech companies which try to portray working for them as joining a community + good life + money (etc). To see examples of this, look at almost any tech company's "Careers" page, before it shows open positions. ;)

Yup, I often see such pages with photos of employees riding in speedboats, grilling at a barbecue wearing company shirts or rock climbing.

I’m not interested in any of those things. They are better off showing two businessmen shaking hands or stacks of money.

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#293

Post by EliRivers »

ngokevin wrote: post #240
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 d…

Let me explain where the hatred stems from.

The hatred stems from not wanting to spend all my life at work, doing work.

Seriously, the narcissism on display here. Take a day off from your own ego, and perhaps also reflect on the idea that if your special sauce isn't competence or experience or even just plain genius, but that you're willing to spend stupid amounts of time in the office, then you've written "sucker" on your forehead in that special ink only managers can see.

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#294

Post by EliRivers »

it is guaranteed that they will not do good work if they do not give a shit.

Just plain not true. Provable so, over and over and over again. Not other way to say it; this guy is talking utter shit.

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#295

Post by cosmodisk »

ngokevin wrote: post #240
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 d…

This is crazy. The reason it's pointless to go past 40h/week is because programming isn't a walk in a park. It's extremely mentally draining activity. The notion that that people need to work silly hours to be seen as valuable and productive belongs to the Victorian times. My takeaway from the article is that the guy patting himself on the shoulder because he asks how many hours people did in their jobs. One of my first jobs was in construction,where the director was outright maniac. I remember he gathered us all around himself, he stepped on a a few bricks and started pointing fingers to all of us saying we are thieves. Why? Because he saw a couple of guys having 35min lunch, instead of 30min..He accused us stealing his time.. The guy in the article is a modern version of my ex director,only in software industry.

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#296

Post by NateEag »

ska wrote: post #117
silentsea90 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would strongly recommend the latter. The former is playing the lottery. Even if you win, stock appreciation in big tech over 10 years beats the startup stock. Not to mention, you won't be at a no name startup for years to find out whether you won the lottery.

This makes sense from a financial point of view, but that's not the only factor people care about. I'd state it more like: Go to an early stage startup only if you'll still be happy with the experience if the equity evaporates.

_When_ the equity evaporates.

Statistically, that's the smarter way to think about it.

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#297

Post by kevinventullo »

throwdour wrote: post #220
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 nearly got whiplash when the author moved the threshold from "giving a shit" to "deeply obsessed".

Yes! I completely agree with the need to hire people who “give a shit”, but to me this means e.g.

  - Dogfooding

  - Fixing a bug even if your manager doesn’t notice

  - Proactively noticing strange system behavior and investigating

  - Actively contributing to strategic discussions; showing genuine interest in the problem space

  - Jumping in to help when the server mysteriously starts crash looping, even if you’re not oncall
All but the last one have nothing to do with working more hours. Even the last one is intended as an exceptional event, not a baseline expectation.

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#298

Post by aeoleonn »

"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."

This is just silly. 5 hours of intensely focused, silent, eyes-glued-to-monitor-and-keyboard work beats the conventional 8 hours of work involving socializing/chatting with coworkers over the cubicle, making phone calls, checking in on people, walking around an office, taking breaks, etc., which itself seems to lead to approximately the same 5 hours of actual work... just with much less intense focus (intense focus which is mentally draining).

To quantify work output merely by time fails to appreciate the much more important factor involved in work: efficiency.

Working 5 hours, intensely, is draining. This author is silly for failing to realize that there's a reason Google engineers are allowed to work 11am-4pm: because they're competent, efficient, responsible, and probably don't waste much time (otherwise I don't see how they'd be employed there-- one of the most sought after & selective employers in the world)

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#300

Post by heavyset_go »

alexpetralia wrote: post #194

I am sure the author will - impressively - read these comments and be further emboldened he was right all along. He appears to have limited capacity for self-awareness or self-doubt, which is to say, he exudes an impenetrable armor of self-righteousness. With that mentality, maybe he'll become President too.

This article feels like a response to the poor Glassdoor reviews his company received that said some employees were demotivated by the product they were developing because the platform simply outsourced work to 3rd world workers who, in turn, got paid in pennies. Good luck finding someone who cares deeply about enabling that.
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