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Hire people who give a shit

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Re: Hire people who give a shit

#311

Post by anonytrary »

vvanders wrote: post #196
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've worked in industries(gamedev) that bias towards hiring people who "give a shit". It leads to that passion being exploited into crunch time, burnout and all the fun things that entails. What I've found is that you should be building teams where you "give a shit about the people". That doesn't mean that we don't work hard and that we don't tackle interesting problems. It does mean that we plan for the long term an…

I went through this recently at a startup. I was extremely passionate about their mission and product at first. Company slowly started bringing in external management, and with them, all of their "battle-hardened" management practices. What once used to be a vibrant culture turned into one without transparency, with rampant bullying and "1-up" culture, perpetuated by the CTO (a naive bully, not a leader). They then used their product as a way to inhibit growth in engineering, despite claiming that the product was there to help us grow.

The lesson is that if the company shows me that they no longer care about me or my co-workers, and try to pit us against each other, then I immediately stop giving a damn about their mission and product. If you want your employees to "give a shit" then you absolutely must make it clear that you "give a shit" about them, and that they "give a shit" about each other. That startup has a lot to learn. Culture should be motivated by love, not fear. So I have to disagree with the viewpoint put forth by Scale AI.

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#312

Post by manigandham »

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…

That's a lot of silly assumptions. Everyone has their own passions. Sometimes that aligns with their chosen field of work and sometimes it doesn't. This isn't unique to software development nor is it wrong for those who just want to deliver the responsibilities they're paid for.

Unless "passion" is explicitly being compensated by the company, why would you expect others to freely deliver it? And if you're so passionate, why do you care? Focus on your ambitions and let others chase theirs.

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#314

Post by vmurthy »

"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"

Hmmm.. hard to imagine a nearly trillion dollar company chugging along nicely without a majority of people "giving a shit". The author seems to conflate working long hours with productivity and caring about a company. Don't you hate it when CXOs don't realise that they are in the knowledge economy where people have different styles of working and different schedules /shrug

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#315

Post by Viliam1234 »

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…

Some people would always produce crap code, because they simply don't care. But for others, it may be a reaction to how they are treated by the company. Making the code nice takes some time, and if the project is understaffed and people work overtime... you just want to get it done and go home, not take additional overtime to refactor it nicely.

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#316

Post by Viliam1234 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #267
preordained wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems logical, but I've yet to experience a software shop of any complexity where you can just plug people in and out with this mercenary approach. A year or two is when I notice people actually start adding significant value, and the really high value work when you get in tune with an organization's DNA maybe still years later. Companies need veterans. If it seems like someone can't even pretend to get invested…

> Companies need veterans. They pay for mercenaries, they get mercenaries. Rarely do companies pay for veterans, at least not good ones.

Also, there are many ways how you can "pay for" people: You can increase their salary. You can hire more of them, so that they don't have to work overtime. You can buy them better tools. You can rent a working space that actually contains rooms with doors. Etc.

Different people have different preference here. But if you have an open space, and zero budget for tools, and chronically understaffed projects, and the salary is kinda average... well, you send a loud message.

Try it the other way: let the veterans have their own room with doors, give them the tools they need, maybe reduce their work time to 6 hours a day while keeping their salary competitive... and most of them will be happy to stay.

Or be honest and admit that you prefer it the way you have been doing it so far.

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#317

Post by srtjstjsj »

908B64B197 wrote: post #306
kevinventullo wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You described a senior engineer. The last one is especially telling, especially if the debugging ends up documented somewhere/explained to the junior on-call.

Nothing in that list is absent from a good junior dev who is going to be a great leader in the future.

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#318

Post by sidlls »

enra wrote: post #87
ragona wrote: post #12

Yikes. I would never work for that person after reading that article. “I started a company and I’m totally wild about it. It is my life. If it is not your life too then you don’t belong here.” Founders are supposed to be obsessed with their company. (Though I question that too.) But demanding everyone else at the company be just as obsessed is doomed to hire children and sycophants and drive off professionals who hav…

He is 22 or something. It’s a common thing in founders in their early 20s, just out of college, to be overly obsessed about their work/companies. Eventually he might grow or has to grow out of it.

I think it's more likely he cashes out and becomes another "young prodigy angel/VC/investor".

He doesn't have the work experience to understand the problem domain well enough to build a company to solve it and he doesn't have the life experience to apply what work experience he has had. I'd bet the money I'll net after the lockup on an IPO I'm in that close to 100% of the value of "his" company was built on that bed of VC funds and their connections he lucked into.

He's a cute anecdote for the company's marketing--that's the entire sum of his value. He's not likely to build another company or achieve any further success outside the VC bubble.

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#319

Post by srtjstjsj »

ditonal wrote: post #124
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…

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…

Isn't that YC's ideal? That's the impression I got from over a decade of Paul Graham essays .

Re: Hire people who give a shit

#320

Post by sershe »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #21

I have a genuine question and I'm not trying to be snarky -- do people actually think this way in real life, or is it an elaborate social game of pretending to be more "passionate" than the next guy? Scale seems like a cool company with an interesting product, but let's be honest, rational people here - they aren't curing cancer, creating art, or landing on Normandy Beach. This seems obvious to any self-aware person.…

There are enough people in tech industry evidently passionate about work to work nights and weekends. I've actually seen all combinations on the spectrum of fun work / BS work (e.g. calling your engineers at night because something on a web page mostly used in the same time zone is not pixel perfect and being mad in the morning they were not available); young / old; and doing good work / crappy work while at it.

So there's definitely something genuine to it, but many more have to fake it. I am working at a place where you don't have to fake it nearly at all and very happy about it...

Think about it... it might seem unfair, "unfair" towards e.g. me. I'm usually only passionate if the work happens to be very interesting for me in particular, otherwise I'm going to do good work with passion about quality/etc., but only 9-6, after which I'll go be passionate about other things.

But, I've worked with quite a few engineers similar to me in ability, or better, who would totally work 14 hours a day for no reason, no pressure or crunch. If a business had a choice, why would they hire me over these guys?

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