

Hire Family People - breily
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/996-hire-family-people

======
mosburger
Thank you so much, 37signals guys.

I've always found pg's essays to be motivational and inspring, but there are
two things that always turn me off; 1.) I don't live in San Fransisco, and
probably never will, and 2.) I have a family. I often feel dismissed by PG and
his disciples. DHH's stuff gives me hope that there's still a chance for
"fogeys" (cripes, I'm only 33!) like me.

I have a feeling that, if I ever applied to YCombinator, my application would
end up in the wastebasket the moment they caught a whiff of the fact that I
have a wife and kids. Is that fair?

I stay up late into the night hacking after the kids go to bed, and I'm in the
office hours before other people are there so I can do some extra hacking. Am
I not motivated enough? Can I not be passionate? Perhaps DHH is onto
something. Perhaps balancing the challenges of work and family five you a
healthy dosage of time management and prioritization skills.

There are some interesting comments on DHH's site - several presumably young,
single kids are crabby and crying "discrimination!" (e.g., "Wow, that’s
actually offensive. And illegal in BC, Canada and I hope other enlightened
jurisdictions.", or the more eloquent "I’m single and you can kiss my ..."). I
wonder if these people have ever noticed that the discrimination often goes
the other way, _against_ the thirty-something parent crowd, too.

~~~
pg
_I have a feeling that, if I ever applied to YCombinator, my application would
end up in the wastebasket the moment they caught a whiff of the fact that I
have a wife and kids._

We don't ask on the application form if people have kids, nor as far as I can
recall have we asked anyone in an interview. The reason most of the people we
fund don't have kids is simply that most of the people who apply don't have
kids.

~~~
jsrn
> [...] most of the people who apply don't have kids.

how do you know if you don't ask?

~~~
tptacek
Not for nothing, but for a hiring manager, asking this question is a firing
offense. So is age, marital status, religion, or even any question about place
of residence apart from "are you capable of being on-site during core hours".

From a lot of unfortunate experience: tech people suck at following these
rules.

~~~
jcl
It's been noted in the past that Y Combinator in fact does ask for founders'
ages. Presumably it can skirt the hiring laws because it is funding a company,
not employing people.

~~~
tptacek
Why does YC ask for founders ages?

~~~
jcl
This thread suggests that they collect them for statistical purposes:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=116976>

------
pg
Even if people with kids were more productive per hour, that's not enough in a
real startup. The empirical evidence is pretty clear on that. I can't think of
a successful startup whose founders didn't, in addition to being smart and
determined etc, also work long hours.

~~~
dhh
I think the reason for that is more one of risk. Starting a new company is a
lot more risky than being an employee of one. And if you have a family to
support, you're less likely to be willing to take on big risk.

So I absolutely agree that it's easier to start a company when you're single
and have no obligations because you can tolerate much more risk.

Update: Seems that the original argument changed from "if kids are so great,
why aren't more founders parents when they start their business" to "kids
might make you more productive during regular working hours, but you need more
than just regular working hours to start a business".

I'm happy to offer my thoughts on the second argument as well. I think people
working on startups generally work way too much and the ones that succeed
don't do so because they put in 14-hour days.

At 37signals, our "startup" (Basecamp) got off the ground on a 10 hour/week
programming budget and designers who were busy doing client projects. For the
first year, it wasn't the sole focus for the company.

We believe those constraints were instrumental in their way they shaped
Basecamp and thus part of the success of the company.

Doesn't mean that there might not be other businesses out there where working
lots and lots of hours can be beneficial somehow, but I think that it's a
fallacy that you need to work crazy hours to succeed. I do believe that others
believe this, though, I just don't think it's healthy or beneficial.

All of this is somewhat tangential to the original argument, though, which is
that you shouldn't be afraid of hiring family people. Who should start a
company is a great debate as well, though.

~~~
pg
(If this exchange is confusing to anyone, it's because dhh was replying to my
comment while I was still editing it.)

But in reply to the second half: while 37Signals may be a counterexample to
the rule that startup founders need to work long hours to succeed, there seem
to be a lot more startups that did than didn't.

Different people presumably have different points at which spending more time
on something makes the result come out worse. Probably this also varies with
the type of work. So it could be that when person = dhh and work = product
design, 10 hours per week is a reasonable limit, and when it's someone else
and the work = writing database software, the limit might be 70 hours per
week.

In the absence of any other evidence, you have to assume that successful
startup founders knew what they were doing, and that if they worked long hours
it was because it paid off for them.

~~~
dhh
I fully agree that different businesses require different levels of input to
make it work. But this crowd seems to be mostly in the "web business" area, so
I think our example is at the very least relevant.

And we're saying here's an example of a web startup that didn't follow the
traditional wisdom of "long hours necessary for business success", which is
offered as one data point that perhaps "long hours" isn't the success
requirement as some might think it is.

Similar to the talk from SUS on Gmail's invitation system. Just because Gmail
used an invitation system and had success doesn't mean that using an
invitation system will give you success.

(BTW, as meta comment, I'm incredibly impressed with the level of discussion
here. It's so un-web like ;). Where are all the personal insults, the
trolling, and all that which we've otherwise come to accept must be part of a
open-for-all comment box. Very nice job!)

~~~
baltoo
(As a new member of this forum I'm a bit shy to add to this thread, but here
it goes anyway.)

I suppose you've both seen the writings of Alan Carter (<http://the-
programmers-stone.com/about/>) and it seems to me that it just might be a way
of getting these two seemingly differing viewpoints aligned.

If stress is the biggest factor then age or marital status might have very
little to do with it. At least directly. Married people might have learned to
handle stress well and younger people might be less affected by it.

That is to say, you both might have seen the "less stress affected" crowd and
drawn conclusions about it.

------
alex_c
After a contractor decided on a radical life change and moved to a different
country, leaving us without anyone with his skill set, my old manager used to
joke that he should only hire people who have a mortgage, because they'll
never leave on their own.

Funny as a joke, but a bit chilling when it's given as real advice.

~~~
marvin
I'm pretty sure that a lot of managers actually follow this advice
consciously.

------
slapshot
I'm just going to point out that this sets a troubling precedent. If one firm
thinks it's legitimate to discriminate in favor of mothers with children, that
suggests that being a parent is an acceptable basis on which to discriminate.
It opens the door to people thinking about whether somebody is a mother in
making hiring decisions. That's troubling on a lot of levels, and in some
states illegal.

EDIT: apparently the source has been revised to make it clear that the point
is just to look evenly at parents and non-parents; that's OK, but I'll leave
the comment above in reference to the earlier version.

~~~
DaniFong
Laws or not, in the startup world there's a lot of discrimination when it
comes to hiring decisions.

~~~
jrockway
And the laws are kind of weird. If you say you discriminate, but don't, you've
committed a crime. If you say you don't discriminate, but do, it's not a
crime. (I think the reality is that everyone discriminates in favor of "people
they like" anyway. It is somewhat scary that we have so many thought crimes
now.)

~~~
DaniFong
There are certain examples of hiring discrimination which are pretty clear
cut. I am not sure if the cases have been tested in court, however.

See for example
[http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20030430-000001....](http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20030430-000001.html)

The paper is "Implicit Discrimination." Marianne Bertrand, Dolly Chugh and
Sendhil Mullainathan; American Economic Review, 2005, 95(2), pp. 94-98.

if you have access. Unfortunately, I don't at this time.

The basic results are that a resume with a 'black' name versus a 'white' name
(and no other difference) are far less likely to fetch callbacks. Further,
there's no appreciable difference in callbacks for black candidates with
increasing skills, whereas there's a drastic increase for white candidates.

There are many other studies, and then there's my own, personal experience,
which I'm not about to get into.

~~~
hacklite
I presume you're referring to age/gender discrimination.

At least people generally recognize that sexism is wrong. There is a lot less
raised consciousness when it comes to ageism.

You start college early, and everyone says you're too young. And then later,
ironically, you find when you hit 30 that the thinking has recently shifted
when it comes to start-ups, so then you're too _old_.

------
veritas
I'm not complaining but is it 37signals week?

~~~
sanj
I believe that David came away from Startup School with a heap of new ideas
that he's been talking about back in Chicago.

~~~
jimbokun
I believe he has decided to take the opposite position to pg on every point
about how to start a business and see how well he can argue it.

Which is a healthy thing for Hacker News, I think, getting other perspectives.

~~~
pg
Actually there wasn't anything in DHH's talk that I really disagreed with,
except the use of the word "startup" for the kind of company he was
describing. There's already a word for companies like Italian restaurants:
businesses. A startup is a very specific kind of business: one that starts
small but could grow very large. Only a fraction of the 30 million businesses
in the US are startups.

I think what made people think DHH's advice was relevant to startups was that
he was talking about starting a business to write software, which is also what
most startups do. But structurally the kind of small business he was talking
about was more like a landscaping company or a shoe store or a restaurant.
Which is a perfectly legitimate thing to do; it's just not a startup.

~~~
dhh
I think that's a pretty narrow definition of a startup. Also, there are plenty
of businesses that start out small and then grow very large over time.
Actually, most large businesses took a long time to get there.

Say like foot locker or Zappos for a "shoe store" (both big business) and say
McDonald's or Olive Garden for a restaurant.

By the same measure, we're building 37signals to grow as well. Grow revenues,
grow customers, grow influence. We're just not that hooked on growing head
count or office space (which are often the most visible indicators of growth
for a private company and thus often mistaken as the only indicators).

To me a startup simply means a new business that's getting off the ground.
That business may well end up big one day and it may not, which is okay too.

I generally don't think that you can become a star by trying to be a star. I
think you just try to be the best at what you do and if you are, hopefully the
star part will take care of itself.

~~~
thaumaturgy
pg has been specifically keeping the definition of "startup" narrow, to
describe only the businesses that go through the two-guys-plus-vc-plus-
sleepless-nights-equals-fast-megabucks pattern that we saw in 2000. I think
that's the model he's most interested in, that he sees as the most dynamic and
rewarding.

Shiny.

That said, the things you describe closely match what I've wanted to pursue.
For me, and many others, it's the more rewarding, long-term way of doing
things. Your talk at SS08 was a huge breath of fresh air.

But, I don't think it's all that fair to dilute someone else's definition of a
startup with your own idea of what a startup is. It might be time to come up
with a different term, and let startup mean the thing that pg and the vc guys
and others want it to mean.

~~~
dhh
I think that's a hijacking of the word that's not helpful at all. And I don't
think that pg would argue that you can only call yourself a startup if you're
going for VC funding and a sale or IPO.

If so, there's an awful lot of tech companies that have been wrongfully
labeled as startups under this narrow definition. And you'd only be able to
call yourself a startup in retrospect once you saw whether you ended up being
a megabucks exit.

So 37signals would have been a startup if we sold to Google tomorrow, but not
if we kept on as an independent company just making money?

~~~
thaumaturgy
No, he might not, but getting funding of some kind is a pretty large part of
the kinds of startups that they /are/ talking about, because it makes it
easier to develop that massive, rapid growth that gets people's attention.
Likewise, a sale or IPO aren't the only ways to derive value out of the
startup, but they're the ones that get the most focus, because they're the
fastest way to get the desired results (lots of money). I think that this
point of view was pretty clear in several of the talks at SS08.

Do I necessarily think that that's the only kind of "startup" that exists? No,
not at all. (And I'm probably gonna get busted at some point for putting words
in pg's mouth.)

But, in a nutshell, no, they're not talking about the same kind of businesses
you are. Others have already made this point for me
([http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/2008/04/startup-school-
surfi...](http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/2008/04/startup-school-surfing-
wave.html)).

So, coming back and saying, "No, we're talking about two different approaches
to the same thing!" ... well, that's not helpful.

Again, my only point is that they're talking about a very specific sort of
model when they use the word "startup". If you think your model is the same
thing, I wonder how you'd distinguish between a startup and a "software
business", or "web venture", or whatever. (And, I think this point is getting
made by other elsewhere, not just in this thread but outside of news.yc.)

~~~
tptacek
According to Graham, "getting funded" isn't even a part of the plan for most
YC startups.

------
menloparkbum
In the startups I've worked for, the best systems administrators were guys
with 5-10 year old kids.

Experience actually counts for more in systems administration, so being older
isn't a disadvantage. Surviving the infant-toddler years hones one's skills at
managing interrupt-driven tasks and strange working hours.

------
wensing
Not to dredge up the past, but this refreshingly contrasts with Zuckerberg's
encouragement at Startup School 2007: 'If you want to found a successful
company, you should only hire young people with technical expertise'.
[http://www.texasstartupblog.com/2007/03/27/facebook-class-
ac...](http://www.texasstartupblog.com/2007/03/27/facebook-class-action-suit/)

------
aston
I assumed based on the title he meant "hire people from your family." Was
totally expecting an essay about the McAskill's at SmugMug.

------
sanj
I wonder if this would have been better accepted if the title was:

"Why it doesn't make sense to discriminate against family people"

------
cellis
I'll admit, DHH coming into Hacker News is a breath of fresh air, even if a
few of the 20-somethings here (including myself) can sniff out the psuedo-
defeatist , "statistically its not possible" scent it is tinged with. I think,
on the whole of things, pg isn't out to attract the type of people that want
to start the types of business DHH is talking about.

I think pg is set out to do the same thing VC's do (invest in outlandish,
maybe crazy ideas), albeit with a focus on extremely good hackers and with a
fraction of the budget.

What DHH seems to be implying is that you should focus on building something
that you can get paid for, right away, and throw away the big dreams. Which is
pretty much the opposite of pg.

~~~
sabat
Maybe I'm in the minority. I think DHH's arrival here is a big gust of foul
air.

Suddenly the arguments are getting out of control, and pg's participating.
Nitpicky, negative, petty debates.

I've read every DHH post that's appeared here in the past days, and every one
of them comes off like the work of a sophomoric contrarian who believes that
the minor success he's had entitles him to tell the world how to think.

I like this place better when positive, hopeful people are having
conversations.

This air just stinks.

~~~
asmosoinio
I have enjoyed the comments in this post, even if sometimes negative.

For example the PG's and DHH's discussion about definition of a "startup"
might seem like nitpicking when taken out of context, but I found it extremely
valuable.

~~~
sabat
Extremely valuable? Why? Because DHH deigned to comment on our little forum?
Can't be for any other reason: he's not saying anything interesting or useful,
anything less than obvious.

~~~
rms
Why do you care so much? It's not like DHH is going to be banned for saying
things you don't love.

------
thomasfl
This is music to my ear as a father of three, 40 yo hacker.

------
torpor
I've been a programmer since I was 12 years old, and have over 30 years
experience with technology companies - and yes, startups too .. I helped get a
few major 90's-era dotcoms up and running and many of them are still at it
today.

My experience is this: either you waste a _lot_ of time futzing around with
computers, or you make them do the work they need to do and get on with your
life. It has nothing to do with how old or young you are, or how many kids you
have. I am a very happy Father now - in fact, this is the greatest startup,
with the most rewards, I've ever been involved in - and I'm still applying the
same fundamental policy to myself as a programmer: get things done, don't futz
around with computers, make them actually do the work they're supposed to do.

It doesn't matter what "kind" of person you are, it matters only what kind of
things you make. I know 50-year old grandfathers who can kick royal Assembler
ass and still leave early at the end of the day, and I know 18 year old kids
who put the keyboard down after 8 hours and go do something else instead, as
well.

IMHO, this over-generalization about 'types of people' is a real curse. I
would say, don't do it. There are no 'types' of people in the computer world,
no matter how the ycombinator cultists want to pitch it to the world: there
are people who get things done, and people who don't.

Get things done. Get your code written, working, tested, and in the hands of
people who will actually use it. If you can't do this, then you will fail. If
you can, then rock on .. may your kids, now and in the future, always
appreciate this aspect of you as a person.

------
pkrumins
Those 37signals people are very, very arrogant. I don't like it. I disagree on
every post they have just by reading the title.

~~~
dhh
So someone is arrogant when you don't agree with them? And you don't even have
to know what they're saying to make that call, you just have to read a three-
word summary? What a unique path to expanding your horizon.

~~~
aditya
heh -- you did leave an open invitation for the trolls :)

~~~
abstractwater
Unfortunately, trolls are able to find invitations where there are none.

~~~
Trolls
'Scuse me, is this the kegger?

