

My Competitive Advantage: I Hire Artists - kes
http://chrisashworth.org/blog/2010/06/24/my-competitive-advantage-i-hire-artists/

======
nerme
It is a shame that so many employers have it in their heads that they need
100% of their employees lives. Why can't people work less hours for less
money? Why must they give all of their will-power? Why can't people have a job
with medical benefits, paid vacation but only work 3 days a week, with a
salary that takes in to account the trade-off?

I'm sure I could come up with some reasonable answers to those questions, but
I want to hear what you guys have to say.

~~~
natrius
An employee that works three days a week isn't worth 60% of the value of a
full time employee. More people will be required to do the same amount of
work, which means more communication overhead. If you still want full benefits
as well, you'd be lucky to get 40% of your full-time cash compensation.

~~~
lsc
I strongly disagree. If you hire someone part time who is only doing that type
of work for you, I believe you get /more/ than the value you pay for.

E.g. if you hire a programmer for three days a week and they go rock climbing
the rest of the time, You probably get about the same productivity as hiring a
programmer full time, and you don't need to pay them for the rest of their
time.

The thing is, so many problems are solved 'in the background' - When I hire a
knowledge worker, really, I'm paying for the background processes when they
are in the shower as much as anything else.

Now, things are different if you are splitting someone with another job of a
similar type, I think. In that case, if you are providing more interesting
work and/or better motivation, you can 'steal' some of the background
processing from the other job, but the other way around is also possible. (a
win win is also possible here; your guy can learn something one place and use
it at the other, etc... but it's less of a sure win, I think, as, say, hiring
an artist to work on your customer support when they are not doing art.)

Of course, if you are hiring someone for a rote job where performance doesn't
vary or matter, or where burn-out doesn't happen, none of this applies.

~~~
natrius
That's a good point.

------
wallflower
I met a restaurant owner recently and he says the best people he can hire to
be waitresses are mothers with kids in school. They are generally articulate,
intelligent, friendly. And they love being able to go home to pick up their
kids at 3pm after the lunch rush.

~~~
ciupicri
That's a good reason, but another reason might be the fact that they can't
afford losing their job because they have to raise their kids.

------
kees
I really would like to know what kind of 'financial software' it was that
Lucky Dave excelled in. It could be MS Excel.

Sorry for not adding anything meaningful to the discussion.

PS: This guy hired a user of his product. Nevertheless, this user was already
giving superb support to other users, without any external motivation. So he
hired a passionate customer, who already did some parts of the job. So if you
want to hire somebody, you should look at your customers and community first.
I think that is the lesson.

~~~
pradocchia
The productivity gap in Excel between casual users and power users is such
that it could be. 80K in NYC in the financial industry does not suggest a
high-end tool to me.

~~~
nandemo
Many tools used in the financial industry aren't really very high-end, but
people who are good at it get paid well because they're relatively scarce.

Still, 80k in NYC sounds like an entry-level position.

------
techiferous
Great article. But I wouldn't come to the conclusion that you should hire
artists. I would say that the lesson is that you should hire someone:

(1) smart

(2) motivated

(3) conscientious

and

(4) take very good care of them

~~~
ssp
No, that's watered down to the point that you are almost not saying anything.

The takeaway from the article, stated more bluntly, is that if you can be
flexible on the hours, then you can have (1)-(3) for cheap by hiring artists
or other people who need or want flexible hours.

~~~
masterj
Indeed, the company offering 80k per year likely thought it was hitting all of
the above points.

~~~
ahpeeyem
Yeah, to a corporation (and many - or most - business minds,) money is just
about all there is in terms of "looking after" someone.

~~~
Silhouette
I think that's an unfair generalisation.

To bad managers, it's only about money, but it has been very well documented
for a long time that beyond a certain point, salary is not particularly
important to a lot of people.

It is also well documented that most employees do value things like flexible
working hours, a few extra days of annual leave, and real support for training
in new tools and skills to keep up to date. We also tend to get offended when
companies try to take over life outside work in one way or another. Much of
this comes down to maintaining a healthy work-life balance, so employees can
enjoy the lifestyle they prefer without work interfering unnecessarily.

Smart managers recognise this reality, set their working conditions
accordingly, and reap the rewards. It's just a shame there are so few smart
managers around.

~~~
ahpeeyem
But I think that so often the 'options' management offer to work/life balance
are barely more than token concessions. This guy talks about accepting weeks
on end of leave at only 24 hours' notice.

It's a world away from "come in after 9:30am" or "here's a laptop and a phone,
now ur never not at work"

~~~
Silhouette
Exactly.

Bad managers actually think they're being generous with allowing staff to move
their day forward or backward by a half-hour to avoid the worst of the
traffic. This demonstrates such a staggering lack of perspective that it could
be a Dunning-Kruger case study.

Good managers, meanwhile, start from the premise that as long as the employee
is making a reasonable effort, getting the job done, and not putting any other
aspect of the business at unnecessary risk of harm, working arrangements can
be whatever everyone is comfortable with.

Basically, bad managers default to saying "no" on work-life balance issues,
while good managers default to saying "yes" and will say "no" only when they
have a clear business reason for refusing.

------
SwellJoe
This applies to _anyone_ who is really passionate. I've pretty much always had
the best luck with hiring people who do things for love, and just happened to
also want to make a living, so over time it's evolved to the point where I
don't even care about hiring full-time people, if I can get part-time from
someone who is amazing.

------
AndyKelley
I Hire Artists? More like, I Hired A Champion. IMO it was pre-mature
generalizing.

------
riffraff
while this is a great article, and it is probably 99% correct, isn't there
something wrong with generalizing from "I hired one artist with flexible time,
it was good" to "all hail artists flexiworking as the revolution to come" ?
(Or Did I miss the listing of other artists he hired in the article?)

With envy, a fairly flexible (sadly-)non-artsy worker

------
_pius
I really enjoyed the thinking in this article and I think there's a tremendous
amount of truth to it. It's surprising how often simple potential changes with
disproportionately large positive effects (e.g. loosening structure so that
creative people can, ya know, _work_ ) get dismissed because of dogma.

------
akkartik
+1. But surely one sample point doesn't generalize to all artists? Surely
there's a distribution of artist quality like there is for engineer quality?

~~~
prawn
Of course. And like I said in another reply, the key to LuckyDave isn't so
much that he's an artist, but that he's a brand champion - he has irregular
work and he's a major advocate.

------
dunk010
An interesting piece, to be sure. Some of the best programmer I know really
refuse to be tied down into doing anything they're not totally passionate
about. The article was a bit hyperbole-heavy for my tastes, though.

------
richcollins
I wonder what is unique to his product that prevents from solving the 6000
support emails a year problem with product / information improvements.

------
wazoox
As an artist myself, I fully understand this.

------
joshu
Hire your champions, your early supporters? This worked out great for
Delicious too.

