The author of the blog graduated high school in 2014. I would really like to see his blog again in a few years to see if he still feels the same way about work. :)
Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
351–360 of 418 posts
Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean by "like this" and why in particular should that be avoided at all cost?
I can’t talk about it in detail yet. Short version, the rest of the team had to pick up all of the things that he wasn’t willing to do. It shifted more burden to everyone else for his benefit and created a terrible team environment.
> I can’t talk about it in detail yet.
So... don't?
Are you saying ftruzzi is like a person on your team in your last company and should be avoided? I don't see why you think he'd be "like that", what that'd mean, or really what value your comment is providing. I personally would love to work with ftruzzi!
Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
#353Interesting thought experiment! Let's take it one step further. Can the "pay what you want" value be negative? As a manager I would be responsible for providing you with a steady stream of interesting or meaningful work. I would have to structure the work to fit around your flexible schedule, shield you from doing the parts you don't like, and change it up if you start getting bored. But I would not be able to rely o…
You raise a very valid point and yes, it could be a net negative.
However, what I was trying to do here is to reach organizations or people that already work the way I'd like, so that work is already organized in a flexible/async fashion and the arrangement can be a net positive for them.
And I think you should apply the same reasoning to the definition of "interesting work" or "meaningful work". Try to see the big picture, from a bird's eye view: a piece of work can be interesting or meaningful even if it has boring parts. Almost anything has and we probably wouldn't be here as human beings if we couldn't handle that. Carrying sick people up and down the stairs is strenuous (and repetitive?) but can still be a net positive because you feel so good for helping them. Same goes for writing software or any other kind of work.
I think that, as a manager, you should not shield me from the boring parts of any work but you should make sure that my overall "working experience" is a net positive for "interesting" and/or "meaningful".
Thank you!
Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't read this as a signal he won't do the work. From his talk about the stuff he enjoys doing, I don't doubt it includes things that feel work-like. He just wants the work to be meaningful. That seems reasonable to me, and that's how I am. As long as there's some point to the work, I'm happy to do the tedious stuff all day long. I recently user-tested a job posting for a high-meaning job. [1] Some people were ver…
Thank you. Writing tests and documentation or diving deep into debugging hard issues is what I consider part of "good work" (and that I have also enjoyed doing), and I can't wait to do good work. It just has to be compatible with the rest of life. It's mostly the way we work that has to change rather than the content of the work.
It may be wise to explicitly describe in your post what you consider "good work", including tests, clean code, etc.
Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
#355A lot of people are saying "I would never hire this man".
You're looking at it wrong. The idea is to find interesting problems that have unknown amounts of ROI but should still be tackled by someone. Give him some cash and something interesting to chew and see what he comes up with. It's kind of like tending to a houesplant.
If he produces nothing of value, then fine you know the idea was probably a dud anyway, but you didn't have to spend any time on it. And if he does spawn something of value, you can take the work and have more qualified engineers work on it full time.
Personally, I find the best use case for people like this is to throw ethically questionable tasks at them. Stuff you shouldn't really have a full time employee doing, but would be perfectly fine outsourcing to a contractor who works off the books.
Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
#356When I found myself with a mandate and a budget in a previous company, I set out to hire a team. The health, happiness, and productivity of the team overall was my top priority. In terms of budget I didn't think in terms of what I got from any one individual contributor vs. what I paid. Rather, I assessed the cost of the total team vs. what the business was getting from that team.
Francesco's experiment seems to rely on an assumption that he can bow out of things that teams typically need their members to do (such as daily standups) if he accepts less pay, as if the team-level work could somehow be parceled out and evaluated in a piecemeal basis in terms of budget. The issue with that is that there is a level of engagement that is non-negotiable in a team. If I thought Francesco would act as a force function for the team and help them be more cohesive, faster-moving, and results-driven, then I would bring him on-board and pay him comparably to what I paid the other members of the team who were producing equivalent results. If Francesco decided that he didn't want to do the sorts of things that the team required of him to be an active and productive participant in the team effort, then to me Fencesco's value could very well be negative.
Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
#357It's almost funny how this is the polar opposite of what you often want when hiring. You're hiring to add manpower to tackle the kind of unexciting tasks that you don't naturally find people drawn towards from your existing team (and then, people's responsibilities expand, or they turn 'boring' work into interesting work by redefining the problem or attacking it on a deeper level). When you have a growing business, m…
If a company is trying to hire people to do the work that current employees don't want to do then it sounds like they have already hired the wrong people.
As a company grows, all sorts of new problems open up that your current employees might not be a great fit for. For example, you might not need a DBA when just starting out, but when your database reaches a certain size it might make sense to hire one. Or you might need to hire a middle manager once you reach a certain size - but all of your initial hires prefer individual contributor roles. Or maybe you need someone with a strong background in security to be able to pass an audit.
It doesn't mean that you hired the wrong people. Just that your needs are changing.
Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
#358I've asked dev shops to feed me work with no standup or meetings, just send the spec and answer my questions. Nobody will take the offer, even if I am willing to do 2 guys work for half a guy's pay. I have no way to explain this, but it seems like standup meetings are more important than anything to most employers. Best of luck, please post your results if you actually get work that wants output and not hangout time.
Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was able to pay off my mortgage about a year ago (I am in my late 30s), and work has taken on a new aspect for me. I feel a bit more comfortable challenging the status quo and trying to take on more "interesting work". With that in mind, I am still attentive to the fact I need to maintain a sustainable career for another 25/30 years.
Many people in my circle are proud of paying off mortgages, so I kind of assumed by default that it is a worthwhile thing. But looking at the numbers I'm not so sure: it seems much better in current market to cash out as much as possible and let that money sit in an index fund. I guess the main issues are some risks with downturns and/or liquidity.
Right, the best financial decision is usually to take advantage of low interest rates, carry the debt, and keep the money in diversified investments.
Yes, there's always the risk of a downturn or recession/depression that ruins that plan. And beyond that, there is often a great psychological benefit to being debt-free, even if that's not the best financial decision.
Re: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work
#360I very much appreciate the poster being upfront and taking his shot. From the point of view of a hiring manager though, why would he not think that the second OP stops finding the work interesting that he will just ghost?