

Cheezburger Network doesn't show new hires the bathroom until they check in code - danshapiro
http://www.scottporad.com/2010/11/01/cheezburger-network-doesnt-show-its-new-employees-the-bathroom-until-theyve-checked-in-code

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niyazpk
This is all great and fun, you know, for the cheeseburger network. I am not
sure that companies like Microsoft or Apple would ever entertain an idea like
this.

There is nothing wrong with committing your code to the source control on the
first day, but there is nothing to be proud of it either. I personally would
like to get acquainted with my team-mates and stuff and go through some
company policies before pushing stuff to the production. Please don't make my
first day at the job more difficult than it should be. Also, not all code
bases are easy to even learn where to modify.

>>> The result will be happier, more empowered employees with an attitude of
ownership and a focus on productivity.

Again, why? What is wrong if you started committing code on the second day?

This is just a different approach, not always a better approach. If it works
for them, good. There are a lot of situations where this policy will lead to
disastrous results.

And I hope the title is just link-bait and not actually true.

[EDIT: removed the words "more serious" from the second sentence. See comment
from Scott below]

~~~
scottporad
@niyazpk: I resent this comment:

"I am not sure that more serious* companies...I mean with actual paying
customers and such."

Cheezburger has been a profitable business since inception. We have been
profitable every single quarter, and never had a quarter with negative cash
flows. Our revenues and profits are in the millions.

Very, very few startups can make that claim.

We operate three different lines of business: we sell advertising, we sell
merchandise (at <http://lolmart.com>) and we publish printed materials such as
books and greeting cards (<http://amzn.to/buztLM>).

I assure you that having fun and LOL is a serious business.

Scott

~~~
inboulder
"Cheezburger has been a profitable business since inception. We have been
profitable every single quarter, and never had a quarter with negative cash
flows. "

Oh come on now, how could you have negative cash flow? Your whole business
model is based around publishing content on the web you didn't create, (and
99% of the time probably don't even own the rights to), this is not exactly an
expensive business to run.

~~~
zavulon
Trust me, it's VERY easy to have negative cash flow, for any business

~~~
inboulder
Sorry, don't get me wrong, I understand it's easy to burn through cash.

My point is: I'm not sure why Cheezburger thinks it's impressive to set up
Wordpress blogs of other people's images without breaking the bank.

~~~
webwright
You don't think it's impressive? Go do it. I believe these guys are profitable
with a headcount of 20-30 people (many of whom are content moderators).
They've presumably built an ad-sales machine that works, a moderation machine
that works, and build some fairly sophisticated custom software as well as the
business analytics software behind it to measure/improve their sites. They've
also built a "market testing" machine where they launch speculative blogs and
measure their success/viability.

These guys have a GREAT growth curve and healthy margins- rare in the content
world. Heck, look at Reddit. Great company, soaring page views, barely
profitable.

I'm sure you're similarly unimpressed with Yelp? Threadless? Digg? Reddit?

~~~
inboulder
I don't think you understand my point at all. The pageviews Cheezburger garner
ARE impressive. That it is possible to run a business with very low capital
costs (based on wordpress blogs) fairly inexpensively (and thus grow or
_shrink_ organically) is NOT impressive.

------
raganwald
I read the OP a little differently than I read some of the comments.

Imagine you are brought into a messed up development culture with some
authority to make changes. You can't build the product from source, you can
only patch it. You can't build a test database from migrations, fixtures, or
whatever, there are "magic" development databases. And so on and so forth.

You think about things, remember this old post, and institute the following
goal:

"We must be able to take a workstation from email and appropriate access to
checking in a change in one business day. Document the steps, re-organize
development, everything so that we can sit down with any new hire and get them
to set everything up and commit a change on their first day."

It might be empowering for the developer. It might also be a forcing function
for fixing issues with your development environment.

------
Bostwick
More than anything else, I think this article shows how common sense is
forgotten in most organizations, and especially in large organizations.

The idea that people like to be productive and hit the ground running on their
first day is not new, exciting or bold. Yet, it's still noteworthy when it
happens.

I would have loved procedures like this when I started my current job. After
the HR benefits lecture, I was sat down at a computer and told to read
outdated and often wrong documentation for a week. My login account wasn't
active until two days after I started.

~~~
eru
I hope your outdated documentation was at least in a wiki (or similar) so that
you could correct it.

------
nck4222
Where does the title of the article come from? The article doesn't say that at
all.

All the article says is: "On Day One, a new employee is still trying to figure
out the location of the bathroom, for goodness sake!", so they assign new
employees a mentor to help them with everything.

EDIT: typo

~~~
Avshalom
Hell the title makes it sound like they withhold bathroom privileges until you
make a commit.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse

        echo '# John was here.' >> index.php && svn commit -m "I really have to pee"

------
SHOwnsYou
I'm sure they are joking about withholding bathroom access (you can get sued
for that).

But it does seem to me that doing this seems to serve the author's interest
more than the devs.

"How does it _feel_ to commit on your first day?"

"So, why was it awesome to do that? There’s something about that which
feels????"

It sounds like person would be excruciating to deal with.

I'm sure it's just me, but how much he glorifies his policy of first day
commits speaks to some larger issue.

I hope this doesn't offend (but I'm not sure how it cant) and I intend no
malice. But if my boss said that to me I would probably start looking for a
new job that night.

------
stevenp
Committing on day 1 at IMVU is also a really important part of our culture. We
want to make sure that new engineers hit the ground running and feel like they
have the ability to contribute right away. We celebrate it, because it's an
important first accomplishment. And new engineers who come from other places
(like Yahoo!, where I worked before) are thrilled to see a change on a
production cluster that has hundreds of servers, without having to go through
some lengthy release process. It's exhilarating.

------
sgt
Sounds like a suitable way to get junior developers started. As a senior
developer, it would never work for me. A document telling me how to set up my
development station, step by step? I'll find out how to set up my development
station and if I want to use vim instead of Eclipse, that's my choice.

Ofcourse, I'm not desperate for a job either, and I am used to setting the
terms revolving my development environment and the way we work, as opposed to
the other way around.

~~~
quicksilver03
I believe that no hiring process is perfect, so something like this could also
work as an additional filter for both junior and senior developers: those who
are unable to follow the instructions are poliyely shown the door on their
first day, instead of wasting more time of the other, productive members of
the staff.

------
djhworld
This is a bit silly in my opinion. On my first day at the past two companies
I've worked at I spent most of it setting up my computer and development
environment to adhere to the necessary things I needed for my role.

I don't think I actually started any real development for a few weeks to be
honest, those first few weeks were spent getting up to speed with the software
platform and framework I'd be working on, plus meeting a bunch of folks from
different departments etc.

~~~
yesimahuman
Which I think is a pain, and why I think their goal here is honorable.

Most places I've worked spend weeks trying to get you licenses or trying to
remember how to set up every little path in your IDE or whatever so you too
can start coding. It's a waste of their time and mine, and a waste of money.

------
iuguy
Our entire induction process takes less than half an hour. Is it rare to try
and have everything set up for the new hire before they start?

~~~
rue
Your induction _bureaucracy_ might take half an hour. The process hopefully
takes a bit longer, a week or so.

~~~
iuguy
I've had a bit of a think of this and you're right about settling in, but I'd
say it takes a bit less than you're suggesting as generally we start the
process early. If I get time I'll write a blog post about it.

------
random42
I am all for empowerment and making devs productive, but taking it to an
absurd level ( _making_ devs push code to production one day one) is not good.

Making employees feel empowered is much more than one day show. Hopefully, its
going to be a marathon, not a sprint.

~~~
zacharycohn
This isn't really an absurd level. They're talking about minor bug fixes or
simple error catches that no one has gotten to yet. They're not asking new
hires to design and implement an entire new feature on a full bladder.

~~~
random42
You are right.

My (Extremely badly put :() point was, why does it matter so much to make new
hires productive as a race to zero countdown? If a employee going to work at
an average for 2 years, to me, it feels OK to give them sometime to get
accustomed to new environment.

~~~
zacharycohn
I'd say it simply reflects the work environment. It's a lot more fun to go
home after your first day at work and have something to show for it. You,
after 8 hours of working at Company X, have already created or improved
something for them.

I'd say it's a lot more fun than going home thinking "Damn that was a lot of
paperwork. I hope I can get a computer tomorrow and start to work.."

------
VladRussian
sounds like a military bootcamp approach. It has been 200% proven to be
successful in producing effective soldiers. It may also work for young hires,
puppies, and it would serve as an effective way to filter out older ones who
are much harder to mold.

------
retroryan
Even if it is not the first day, I think the point is well taken that this
needs to happen ASAP. I have worked as a consultant at large corporations and
have seen developers go months without ever checking in code.

------
rhizome
_I’ll let you be the judge, but it sounds like developers enjoy being
productive on their first day._

Actually, I'm not sure those conversations prove the conclusion that you're
drawing from them. What I believe those quotes illustrate is that those
particular developers told the boss (boss' boss?) who came up with the policy
that they enjoy it. This is the way that conflicts of interest work, and _even
if_ Cheezburger has a well-established tradition and culture of telling the
Emperor he has no clothes, newbie employees are not really the best source of
that kind of information.

------
nhebb
What a coincidence, they don't show you funny cat pictures until you check out
100 ads. Didn't their site used to have content?

------
panacea
Best Cheezburger practices. What's the thing you do with the palm of your
hand... no not that one... I mean making contact with your forehead.

------
wildmXranat
Modify a comment block and access granted.

------
chr15
So Cheezburger Network is holding their new hires hostage until they get some
work done? This must be demoralizing, and I imagine it would leave a bad taste
in the mouths of new hires who expect an introduction to the work environment
first.

