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 are not obsessed and willing to put in incredible energy into someone else’s project that you are bad. It does not follow that people should be obsessed with someone else’s business that they won’t be properly compensated for. No matter how many times someone rich says it, it will never be true.
I will say, however, that this is an extremely popular position with the rich and powerful. From startups to big consulting firms, there was not a single company in SF that I worked for that did not echo this. From PC saying how proud he was that we did not hire more engineers at Stripe while people were pulling 60+ hour weeks for months at a time, to engineering managers explaining how they slept under their desk while they were working at Facebook, to Big 3 consulting firm partners exhorting 22 year olds to work 80 hour weeks being screamed at by misogynistic clients in cities across the globe, the song remained the same.
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 and pace things accordingly. That you make opportunities for people to grow both technically and in their career. That we succeed as a team and not due to the rock-star behavior of one or two individuals.
My experience is this builds high-trust teams that are resilient, adaptable and often product even better work than teams who over-index on the domain space. They bring diverse perspective and have significant less turn-over which is a compounding effect. While the tech stack or product you built is important, in the end it was the team that created it and where you should invest if you want to continue to see success over time.
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.
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 work and anything that meets the minimal standards is fine with them. There's no passion or interest in doing more than absolutely needed. This isn't about "hours worked", but about passion and trying to make whatever you're working on the best it can be. You can do that perfectly fine in just 40 hours/week.
But yeah, some people seem to conflate "passion" with "work your ass off for 60+ hours/week", and that's just silly.
Agreed—I had a mixed reaction, having worked for a FAANG. There are nuggets of truth there, the biggest one being "A recruiting team that looks like a college admissions office is certain death for a startup." That is undoubtedly true IMO. But toward the end it goes off the rails, with the stuff about working 5-hour days revealing a lack of commitment and indifference. The reason why Google engineers can work 5-hour days is because they are a large company, not a startup, and they can direct resources more efficiently than a startup and devote engineering hours to core problems instead of startup-style "all hands" processes. So IOW, if engineers are working 5-hour days, does it really surface not giving a shit? I'd say "it depends." It depends on whether you are a startup or a Big Corp, and it depends on the company culture and workflow. I don't think it's an A/B indicator of passion for the company or the product.
Overall though, this post left a bad taste in my mouth, and I could only keep thinking that I'd never want to work at Scale.
There's a weird cargo culting of hours worked vs productivity. Reminds me of Asian business practices (especially in Japan). Yet that should be a warning, not a model to imitate (remember how Japanese tech took over American one? I don't either).
He's right that a company should hire folks that care about their work and the company. The way to do that is with a stock comp. I still see tier 2 markets complaining they are getting tier 2 devs that don't care. But when I ask about stock comp they suddenly get defensive.
I wouldn't brag too much about "working harder than Google". Because that invites the comparison between the two companies at an equal stage in their respective growth (time, number of employee or funding rounds) and that doesn't really make Scale look good. He's really bragging that what Google can get out of an engineer in 5 hours, he has to do in 10+.
Agreed. Not to mention expecting people to work 60+ hours a week is direct discrimination against people who give a shit about their {mental health, diet, cardiovascular health, family, friends}.
A further problem for those of us who are adults with at least a decade or more of experience in this industry is that Wang is practically a child, and that means 100% certainty that he does not have the leadership experience to either convincingly swagger or lead a company. He needs to dial down the attitude on posts like this and learn from startup leaders who understand what success and healthy work/life balance looks like.
I hear he loves meetings. That's another huge red flag for me. This is a guy who demands late-stage employees be committed to his startup even though their shares will never vest (if they receive shares at all), and he promotes a culture of wasting the productive hours of the day on meetings. Run away, run far, far away.
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.
Definitely. I've been watching Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares in the last week or so (the less sensational UK version), and one thing that struck me is that in a number of cases you have decent or even good chefs who are demotivated, bored, have little or no responsibility, and have given up and produce crap results.
Sometimes even just a little injection of responsibility can revive the enthusiasm.
I've never seen people produce crap code because they don't care; it's always a lack of education, a last minute fix, or it's just declared crap code because it doesn't meet the reader's threshold for maintainable code, which is very subjective.
Exactly. Passion may be indicated by that time you stepped up for a 60 hour week in a given situation, but I'm not seeing anything where the author expects such strict dedication at all times. I simply read it as a plea to reduce the job-hopping culture of tech (and perhaps of other industries that are following suit because of tech).
I don't know what it's like to work at Google but can guess there is a preponderance of disengaged paycheck-grabbers. You want to avoid hiring people that are just in it for the money and will jump ship when something better comes up.
This is not confined to SV nor to tech. It's very common in the finance industry as well, but the worst is arguably in health care, where patients can literally die due to mistakes or lack of enough attention by overworked doctors and nurses running on an extreme lack of sleep.
This doesn't even begin to address the casualties from burnout, which can lead to depression, stress-related health issues, and suicide. How much compensation is worth that?
In the finance sector, which is almost literally swimming in money, I never understood why they didn't just hire more people and instead preferred to work the talented people they attract half to death.
Can confirm its creeped into a few automotive repair jobs I've had. I worked for a year at a famous chain of oil and lube stores with a blue and red sign that would do spot reviews. If you habitually declined to work overtime, didnt make it a point to upsell everything, or werent above a certain number of vehicle services per day then your hours were reduced.
Turns out not a lot of people were real excited to drain boiling oil from pissed off soccer mom SUVs all day for ten dollars an hour until their arms fell off for no benefits. anyone who was talented enough on day 1 eventually became a hung over burnout that stripped bolts and took a lot of smoke breaks.
>> I never understood why they didn't just hire more people and instead preferred to work the talented people they attract half to death.
I think that a small number of talented people that will work themselves to death will be much more effective than a large group willing to work reasonable hours.
Over what time frame? A year? Sure. But three years? Five? Ten? It's simply not sustainable for 95% of people. And it's unrealistic to hold everyone else to the standard of that 5% who are 1) naturally hyper-productive or 2) have little else going on in their lives.
The cynic in me wonders if the attempt to turn overwork into a virtue is just to keep people busy enough that they don't stop to wonder what it's all for in the end. Somehow everyone seems to have forgotten that the economy should exist to serve people, not people serving the economy.
Maybe, some companies seem to adopt the strategy of “hire talented 22 year olds out of college, work them until they burn out in two-three years and move on, hire more”.
Now that you mention this I've seen this pattern happen and it repeats. Usually all we see is the end: a medium blog telling us why they left so and so company. They always give a reason that sounds like someone is still figuring out why they left their "dream job" without ever getting to the core. This happens more with big companies like "Stripe" than we like to believe. We sell ourselves in the comments section on how great "Stripe" is to work at while employees are being crushed with 60 hour weeks.
It does show in the products. Great products like "Stripe" start out wonderful but in time slowly move away from that initial greatness into products that slowly get worse and the company lives on in a shadow of what they once were.
If you are doing anything more complicated than gluing a pair of APIs together, it is very likely that the marginal value of work past 60 hours is negative. Reaping what you coded during a 3am espresso binge is rarely a happy experience.
But yeah, if all you are trying to do is build out Facebook before some other social network gets there maybe it makes sense to pull 100 hour weeks.
Healthcare is dysfunctional. But there's a guaranteed demand for it so it's not allowed to fail.
There's lobbying by the AMA to keep a cap on residency spots to create artificial scarcity too. That partly explains the overworked schedule: it's either that or share the pie with a lot more professionals and earn less/have less bargaining power. So residency has turned into a kind of hazing ritual that selects for individuals that are more functional when sleep deprived.
I agree with most of what’s being said but I don’t think that it’s just that it’s a bad bargain. It looks like he’s saying, “will you work harder for the same money” and people are saying, “yes”. It makes him a jerk but he’s being fairly transparent about it. What’s really evil about it is it’s a Ponzi scheme of being crappy to other people. I think what’s really going on is he’s saying, “ I’m going to be crappy to you and in return I’m going to allow and expect you to be crappy to others.” As long as you can find more people to be crappy to you’re going to come out ahead.
He’s building a “generational” company for his heirs and inve-erhem sorry, “society”. Aren’t you motivated by that alone? If not, when was the last time you worked obscene hours for something? Because if you haven’t, you clearly don’t give a shit about anything (except ya know, work life balance, family, hobbies that have nothing to do with tech, etc)
If we don’t want toxic cultures, then we all need to prioritize that when job searching.
I have been shitting all over people like this for a long time and trying to get people to see the light that a job is a job and nothing more, but then I get blamed for having a “mercenary mentality” and “not a team player”.
You are renting your skills to an entity that needs your skills for an agreed upon rate for a certain amount of time. If another employer offers you a better situation and your current employer doesn’t counter with a better offer you leave. The rules are simple and your employer knows how to keep you if they really want you.
Getting a job is not like joining a gang or a fraternity where you are first promised a community and good life and then the money is just a formality, but that’s what people seem to see it as. Rest assured, it should always be about the money first. Money is what I’m all about and my career isn’t any worse off for it nor have I ever had to work myself to the bone for no reason just to please the company gods.
Loyalty isn't rewarded, at all, unless there's an additional reason for the reward that can be disguised under 'loyalty', where 'reward for loyalty' is pointed to as an internal marketing exercise to motivate the workforce.
As soon as the underlying reason(s) no longer exist, loyalty will be revealed to have evaporated.
I've seen it multiple times at multiple companies. A couple of which were employees of over twenty years with the respective companies. None of which were bad places to work, or in any way brutal with their employment policies or conditions.
That's just how it is.
The best thing to give a shit about is the quality of your own work. That will serve you well for now and the future.
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, it's a waste of time. Smart people who have a rap sheet of skills a mile long are cute, but I've personally found such peoples' dominant skill is marketing themselves...which I can't blame them for, but I think articles like this are the result of people being burned by the "mercenary" mentality.
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.
It’s not their responsibility to swear life long loyalty just because you need them. Especially when the second they are no longer needed a company wouldn’t hesitate to get rid of them.
Most software shops can’t have mercs because they aren’t built for it, they just assume people will stick around. If you want to run efficiently and confidently with mercenaries, get knowledge out of people’s heads and into robust documentation and architectural design records.
> Getting a job is not like joining a gang or a fraternity where you are first promised a community and good life and then the money is just a formality ...
On that note, there seem to be many tech companies which try to portray working for them as joining a community + good life + money (etc).
To see examples of this, look at almost any tech company's "Careers" page, before it shows open positions. ;)
I can empathize with the merits of this idea but I also agree that such cult worship of a business idea is absurd.
There is a massive gap between the output of passionate people who go the extra mile to provide original solutions in the highest quality way versus people who watch the clock and press buttons on a keyboard. The biggest problem is how to achieve maximum talent. The solution is ownership and setting high standards, not compensation.
Ownership means allowing some control of product decisions and connecting compensation to product performance. The product staff must be willing to work hard because there is a clear connection between their effort and their rewards. This is more like a commission than a salary or equity package.
If founders really want to instill that mentality for the long term they will earn a slice off the top while driving product strategy just like a sales manager. That redirects energy away from the founders and investors back toward the thing driving revenue.
It's a good question, and I think the article's author unfortunately brings two different things together:
i) People who are intrinsically motivated to do good work, regardless of who it is for. Personality psychologists call this quality conscientiousness, and it's as predictive of good outcomes as intelligence.
ii) People who are willing to sacrifice all other aspects of their life in their employer's interest.
Hiring type i people is an admirable goal. Hiring and taking advantage of type ii people is not.
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
All but the last one have nothing to do with working more hours. Even the last one is intended as an exceptional event, not a baseline expectation.
This is what I was exactly thinking by reading the first two paragraphs. But then he jumped on "Just must need to work 80 hours per week to do something meaningful" bandwagon.
One time I got approached by a recruiter from a startup. I wasn't actively looking to change jobs, but I accepted to go to an interview.
One of my interviewers opened with the cliched "Why do you want to work for us?". I laughed out loud and said "You are the ones who called me here, why do you want me to work for you?"
I'm not usually that snarky, but I couldn't help it this time. Working relationships work both ways, and some companies need to be less full of themselves.
The fact is that you need people to have this collective delusion to work really hard and care about something, before value can be created. This kind of work ethic and commitment is what virtually every company that you admire today has required to get where it is today.
I personally don't think this is "dehumanizing" or unfair, since the whole point is to explicitly opt in for such a life. There are enough people out there who want to dedicate a lot of their time to working on a team or mission they care about, and OP's narrative is great at selecting for people like that.
I'm curious. How many misogynistic clients actually scream at 22 year old analysts in MBB? I'd assume business norms would ensure some form of civility in meetings. I haven't heard from any of my MBB friends (who are mostly in India btw), of being yelled at.
When I was in PE, I was the 25 year old shouting at some 45 year old CEO (with the license of my firm's MD) for BSing around. Fun times, but that was a very exceptional circumstance.
Consultant for well over a decade now. I've worked with quite a few MBB kids over the years as well as with clients who previously hired them. I'd say it's fairly uncommon for clients to actually yell at the analysts on the ground, but it does happen. It's more likely that the MBB associate or engagement manager gets yelled at for various reasons. But it's a lot more common for the analysts to be told "do whatever the client wants" and end up working absolutely stupid hours to cover client demands that should have been pushed back on, on top of internal commitments to stay on the right side of the "up or out" funnel.
I never got yelled at in consulting, and honestly if the client is upset that’s the partner’s fault. Most of the time there wasn’t a lot of pushback because the partner knew what the client cared about. The exception was PE firms who would push back on certain assumptions.
I want to add only that the people who are good at pretending to give a shit in interviews are sometimes low-level sociopaths who are good at faking things, whereas people who actually give a shit often come off as stiff because they take the interview more seriously.
From my experience, the people who get hired are people who complain about corporate propaganda and don't work hard while what I considered hard working individuals are the ones who struggle to find work. Companies hire for mediocrity, not skill. If skill mattered, I would dedicate my life to a company. But it doesn't I so won't ever care.
If you think a company would swear life long loyalty in return to you just because you happen to have some skills, wait till you see what happens when they no longer have use for your “skills”. Never swear loyalty, it’s business, not the military.
I assume you don't have skills if you don't dedicate your life to it. I assume you have blah blah blah family blah blah blah memories in which you chose some something else over harnessing your skills. Something you can only do when when you have a job in the first place. You more or less defined mediocrity
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 don't want to do that look not desirable.
I've worked way over 9-5 for ~months a few times and I usually feel very unhappy with my decision for months afterwards.
If you are just an engineer, there is no point. You are just burning yourself out to make someone else's dream come true, or get your boss promoted, or get your director their bonus. Maybe you will get promoted, or a better rating. Even when I've seen that outcome I was still unhappy with it.
Any company will always have an endless backlog of work and burning it down faster doesn't do anything. IMO you should only do it when financial or career incentives are very well aligned.
I don't know if I've ever met another person who is truly (not for resume/career/money purposes) "passionate" about the kind of software people get paid to write. Most software is really boring. Even for software that isn't, it looks boring once you've seen how it works.
I've seen many, many people (myself included) burned by putting in many extra hours (in terms of burnout, in terms of the effort going to waste because higher ups decided to change the schedule, in terms of not being appreciated when the situation reversed), while the number of times where people, in hindsight, said it was worth it has been quite few.
Its not that people aren't willing to dedicate themselves to their work, in my experience, most people do go above and beyond; its that more often than not, they get nothing for it or even suffer negative consequences long term while spending their precious time and energy to enrich someone else and end up feeling exploited.
I think this comment nails it. For me, I'm happy with a shared struggle towards some goal (though of course it cannot become the norm.) Pressure-Ease-Pressure-Ease cycles are also fine for me.
...but if all that results on a nice pat on the back while some salesperson or product manager gets promoted, then it isn't really a shared struggle anymore. Rewards need to be distributed to the entire team that struggled, not just the ones presenting the project.
Further, i think organizations need to understand that different people want different things. Consulting firms have a firm-wide up-or-out policy...but tech companies should probably subscribe to a up-or-steady policy where some choose to worker more intensely for growth while others choose to work normally and remain stationary.
The hatred stems from not wanting to spend all my life at work, doing work.
Seriously, the narcissism on display here. Take a day off from your own ego, and perhaps also reflect on the idea that if your special sauce isn't competence or experience or even just plain genius, but that you're willing to spend stupid amounts of time in the office, then you've written "sucker" on your forehead in that special ink only managers can see.
This is incredibly naive. Another view is that enough engineers have been burnt enough by these founders that they got smarter. Not everyone is looking to tend their microbrew as you think.
This is crazy. The reason it's pointless to go past 40h/week is because programming isn't a walk in a park. It's extremely mentally draining activity. The notion that that people need to work silly hours to be seen as valuable and productive belongs to the Victorian times. My takeaway from the article is that the guy patting himself on the shoulder because he asks how many hours people did in their jobs. One of my first jobs was in construction,where the director was outright maniac. I remember he gathered us all around himself, he stepped on a a few bricks and started pointing fingers to all of us saying we are thieves. Why? Because he saw a couple of guys having 35min lunch, instead of 30min..He accused us stealing his time.. The guy in the article is a modern version of my ex director,only in software industry.
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.
I used to be that workaholic who worked crazy hours and had "passion" for the job. Thing is, it's not sustainable in the long run no matter how much you love it. It might be OK in your twenties. But you're not going to be doing that for four decades. You need to live a life outside work as well. Otherwise you'll be a burned out wreck with crippling RSI.
For the record, I did get crippling RSI in my early thirties and this forced a drastic reevaluation of my priorities. Eight years later, and the RSI is manageable but only because I completely changed my lifestyle. Part of that is only working a regular workday, and doing other stuff outside that time. Like running and mountain biking. I quit my "second job" as a Debian developer and general open source contributor because of that. I still do some, but it's strictly casual with no commitments. That's the price for not being physically crippled. You've got to consider your long-term health. Sitting at a desk is terrible for your body. Doing it in the evenings as well is even worse.
Regarding not looking desirable. I think you're a bit off about that. Sane people and sane companies do not work themselves and their staff to death. They want people to be able to work over the longer term, and not burn out. In most of the places I've worked at, working out of hours has been strictly frowned upon. If you can't do your assigned tasks within work hours, that indicates a management failure in assigning you too much work, or in underestimating how long it would take, or in overestimating your capabilities. There is a reason we do all of the sprint planning and backlog refinement. It's to ensure no one is over- or under-worked over the long term by having a consistent and (most importantly) sustainable workload. If someone did find themselves having to work longer hours, the first thing they should do is tell their manager and get the situation fixed. Not to pull out all the stops and burn the midnight oil.
The younger me would have been that person. But part of getting more experience is learning to say "no". No matter how much work you do, there will always be more work the next day. And you will rarely be thanked or acknowledged for going above and beyond the call of duty; ultimately you have to look out for your own self-interest as well as the interests of the company. Sometimes there are good reasons to work overtime, but that should never be a routine part of your existence.
My personal experience of people who work crazy hours is that they wear their "heroic" efforts like a badge of honour, but the work itself is often terrible. (And I include myself here.) When called out upon this during code review, you get excuses like "yes, but it was 2am on Saturday". "OK, but it's Tuesday now, why didn't you review it in the cold light of day and fix all of these obvious defects? We don't lower the bar just because you chose to work late while very tired."
It's extremely paraphrased and slightly exaggerated, missing some of the context (intentionally, because I don't want to break confidentiality).
It was an attempt to provide an example of why working long hours is not a good idea overall. More often than not, work done in a rush, while tired and sleep-deprived and not thinking straight, is of poor quality, and I don't think it's in our interest to lionise "heroic" performance when the end result is not acceptable. More often than not, they would have done a better job if they slept on it and picked it back up in the morning. Or, at the very least, carefully reviewed their work in the morning and fixed all the defects they introduced during the night. Ultimately, every code review needs to be held to the same high standard, and the circumstances of poor quality work should not be used as a justification for submitting or accepting bad work.
That's probably not the best way to frame it, but it's important to make people aware that they can't work 60 hours at the same quality of the first 30.
Even if they could, they'll either burnout, get promoted or leave within 24 months and then you'll need to backfill with multiple people.
Even as an evil manager, you're still better off stopping people from overworking, as you'll get more work overall from them at a sustainable pace.
Don’t fall for the trap that says that only the sexiest sounding jobs are OK—for one, what that means varies by the talents and interests and skills of the workforce. For another, it’s going to bias you towards treating, e.g., janitors as subhuman, and that way is the path to a very bad place.
What makes work satisfying is, to a large but not total extent, a function of the mutual respect the employer and employee have for the humanity of the employee. Some jobs are just bullshit. Some aren’t. All jobs have a certain amount of toil.
You’ll get people who give a shit about the work when your work isn’t bullshit, and about the job when the culture at work respects them.
One way to have a business worth giving a shit about is to care about what your customers do. To you, the programmers, it's Yet Another Middleware CRUD CRM Layer, but to your users, it's how they make their living or enjoy themselves in their time off. They care about what your software does for them.
We programmers tend to prize the code that we write for other programmers: the compilers, the kernels, the libraries. But most of us will work for customers who do real-world things, whether that's watching a movie or checking in patients at the dentist office or tuning their guitar. So our software is usually incredibly dull to us as programmers, but of crucial interest to our users.
This doesn't have to be management consultant BS. You can't just fake caring about customers. Be sincerely interested in making their lives better, even though what they do isn't what you as a programmer have devoted your life to.
this is a tangent, but every single time i have ever watched an end user use "my" code i have learned an incredible amount. Often, related to how to make a CRUD app that isn't horrible to use!
Decoupling devs from exposure to these sorts of experiences is a huge disservice. Just sitting and watching someone use your product for a few hours is incredibly illuminating.
That's why the number one tip for startups is to talk to users, including demoing your product. Turns out, it's not just a good idea for only startups but also any product at all.
> For another, it’s going to bias you towards treating, e.g., janitors as subhuman, and that way is the path to a very bad place.
Do you have any more thoughts about this point? In my own life I’ve seen some of my friends with hotshot jobs develop this sort of mentality, and I sort of don’t know what to make of it. I want to be like “this is a toxic attitude to have!” but at the same time I can’t make a better argument than it’s immoral and without janitors we’d all be dead.
I only have moral arguments for moral questions. Certainly the idea that humans, because they are human and for that reason alone, have inherent worth is not exactly new. It is seductively easy to start thinking you're above other people because of what you have, or what you know, or what you can do. It's not true, but a relatively dirty part of ourselves certainly wants it to be.
"The basis for determining the value of human work is not primarily the kind of work being done but the fact that the one who is doing it is a person." [0]
“And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.” [1]
A person's job is largely dependent on their own value system. The worth of a person does not correspond to how much that person values career prestige. It is easy to believe the opposite when you value career prestige highly.
> The inverse would be "hire people who don't give a shit."
That’s the complement. The inverse would be “Fire (or don’t hire) people who give a shit”. Also what you identified as a corollary is more accurately identified as the converse.
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 have seen this movie before.
I worked at a startup and I could tell that the founders viewed the company as if it were their baby. They wondered why their employees, the "babysitters", didn't give the same effort and attention to their baby as we did. That is, no weeks significantly past 40 hours, no responding to email after hours, etc.
If you think of it in terms of babies and babysitters, it's clearly absurd to expect the babysitter to bend over backwards to help your child outside their paid duty. Yet the founders can't see it.
As a founder, there is nothing I hate more than other founders expecting their employees to work 996 for them. It shows they don’t respect their employees time and abuse it for their will. Unfortunately, this seems common in the startup world. I also think that’s why VCs love young founders as well.
I got this vibe too. Now I know to stay away from this Scale guys if I'm looking for work one day. Work/life balance is just as important as taking pride in your work. Any mentally healthy individual knows that.
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.
The downside is also much bigger for founders. The board will cut the founder pay when times are tough, long before they touch rank-and-file employees, because they know you value your equity. The other folks can walk.
That's kind of the point: it's absurd to expect an employee--who doesn't see either the same rewards or the same risks as founders--to be as passionate about the company as the founders are. I'd go further--it's not just absurd, but astoundingly stupid and naive. It demonstrates a profound lack of both reasoning ability and experience.
Nothing stops a founder from walking away. Plenty of founders sell their shares to investors/cofounders in order to cash out.
Boards are typically stacked in the founders favor, so any reduction in pay would be the founders own decision. Which makes sense, because they want to keep the company that they have significant equity in alive.
I think you're talking about a company where things are going well. I'm talking about one where they've gone badly, and the founder has lost most control.
If the founder has lost most control, they also have way less equity. So way less reason to stick around. If things are going that badly, dump the stock, and GTFO, same as the smart employees are likely to do.
Also not good for the business. It means you attract people who pretend to care about it. So, people who can tell a good story, not those who will talk honestly to you.
it's not obvious to me that hiring good storytellers is a negative.
I think you can make the case that that's not the sole criteria or highest criteria you should seek, but I've seen remarkable longevity in companies where people are willing to fake it til they make it. (Longevity defined here as keeping people employed and keep raising money when needed. Not changing the world or anything.)
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, never again.
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.
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 learning some of this, the recruiter admitted that their compensation was “startup compensation” aka we want the smartest people who are dumb enough to work for half the money.
And the cherry on top of course is that the world changing product they are building is, wait for it, labeling data. It’s basically YCs version of Poes Law where it sound like satire but it’s actually real.
Love the video but I'm not sure I would consider this a takedown. His comment below the video reads:
> Guys I’m not salty, I’m sweet :3
> But for real, I think this company is super promising. Most FANG company have their own in-house system for hiring labelers, and I know that it’s extremely valuable for any ML team. Getting trusted, reliable and cost effective labeled data is not easy for smaller companies. I actually feel honored that I even got to interview for them in the super early stages.
Yeah; I know after about 6 hours I'm mentally exhausted and going to create more problems than I fix if I keep working. Much like physical labor at 8. I'm pretty sure research has also born that out, same as for physical labor.
Now, it's -possible- this guy means just, have you -ever-, because, sure, there have been times I've been really excited about something and spent a lot of time on it...but I don't think that's fair either. Even those times, for my own stuff, I did better stepping away from it and coming back the next day.
For those reading this article who might be tempted to a company like this: stay away! You’ll not get any meaningful equity, what you have will be quickly diluted, and as the company either starts its death spiral or “March towards profitability” you’ll be asked to work inappropriate hours and your commitment to the company will be questioned.
Go for an early stage startup with meaningful equity or just go for a more stable, profitable company.
I would strongly recommend the latter. The former is playing the lottery. Even if you win, stock appreciation in big tech over 10 years beats the startup stock. Not to mention, you won't be at a no name startup for years to find out whether you won the lottery.
If one doesn't care about the financial PoV, there are good enough reasons to go to a mid stage startup as well (clearer purpose, structure, product market fit etc.) over an early stage one.
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. So why all the bravado?
> "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?"
We have a slight issue with 'identity' in the US. I need to read more Tocqueville before I really start espousing any diagnostic on the psyche of the US but...
This type of mindset is what occurs when someone searches for their identity and meaning then places that whole 'life's worth' in the form of businesses or enterprising endeavors.
It can be broadly characterized as externalizing one's identity, which is painfully likely to fail or let you down in some way. In its most extreme forms, it's really a mental disorder (bordering the wildly high-functioning creative schizophrenic) that the Startup Zeitgeist has hailed as 'how to innovate' and find your 'life's work.' The disorders become evident once one sacrifices all of self at the alter of this 'give a shit' goal - burn out is not the goal of human life.
I'll say I'm recovering from this mindset and have a fonder appreciation for what it means to foster a community (be that business, HOA, religious group, friend group, etc) that allows you to have a 'life's work' that gives you resources to flourish in ways you never thought you could.
The real irony is that often the best work is only possible when you balance it with rest, family, and community. Writing for 12 hours a day probably isn't going to produce the next great American novel, so I'm skeptical that it will produce the next "great" startup either.
> "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?"
The instinct for tribalism is strong and that tendency is aided by the cheerleading that's done at all-hands meetings and other motivational internal meetings. I have met more than a few people who were long term employees who were genuinely gung-ho about their employer but they had a rude awakening when the the business needed to do layoffs for the first time.
Having had many interviews and a couple of jobs where my passion for the company seemed to be far more important than the quality of my experience, etc., yes.
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?
>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?
IMHO, if someone has not once wanted something in their life and worked really hard to get it then that does raise an eyebrow. It doesn't have to be a job. It could be an instrument, sport, extra ciricular, school project, volunteer work, or really anything. If you haven't, it means you either have never wanted to achieve something or didn't want to put the effort in to try.
Life happens and at some point we all make it to a point we are comfortable. So I think it's unfair to expect that out of a 45 year old with two kids. But if you get to be 45 without having really tried at something... well it's a bit sad.
I strongly disagree with this post for my company. But that is great, it means there is a company for everyone.
At my company one of our most important values is "live the life you love". For each person we try to understand how the company can help them achieve their personal goals.
If someone wants to work a ton of hours to get promoted as fast as possible, we support that. But if they want a balanced life we support that too. We have people that are close to retirement that want to work half time. We support that. If people want to work remotely, we support that. Some people really want to work in an office. We support that. One person wanted to buy a ranch, another wanted to write a book, many people want to start their own companies.
We are running a marathon, not a sprint. We monitor people's hours and have a discussion if their hours are regularly at too high a rate (some people like it). We know that they will eventually burn out, will start to make bad decisions etc.
I don't want to be party to a cult where people's every waking moment revolves around the company. I dont want people to be obsessed with what we do, though I do want people to have fun. I dont need to wring every ounce of profitability out of the company at the expense of the people.
I mountain bike before work, sometimes leave work to kitesurf if the wind is up, work on another startup on the side, go to most of my kids' presentations, take them to afterschool activities where I stay and watch etc. I want all of my employees to be able to do those things too if they want.
We call working long hours “heroics” at my company, it’s possibly a common term? I’m unsure. In any event, Heroics are strongly discouraged. There are people who do it, of course, but they get no special accolades for it and in turn they don’t do any kind of boasting about it.
I've also heard of "heroes" as referring to software developers that are seen as great by management because they're always working hard to put out fires (usually that they caused). Meanwhile those who write stable software and work normal hours are not praised because stability is not noticed.
Now that I think about it, I guess we're talking about the same thing.
Is this that dude who made a company that rehires cheap labor in the third world for $5/day to help with classification while his team sits back and gets all the benefits?
The guy wants his company to be more of a cult than a value producing service. Makes sense.
People who care do put in more of their effort and get better results, but you have to give them an incentive for them to care. If your company fails, they get fired. But if your company grows and becomes 10x more profitable, their wages don't move. That's a great recipe for people doing the absolute minimum to not get fired.
This guy wants people who care more about him and his company than for themselves. "Ask not what your company can do for you – ask what you can do for your company"
Criticism of the company's product seems pretty tangential to the blog post. Either way, the value provided comes not from the labeling alone, but from the platform it provides to be able to do so. If it were so easy, why don't these labellers bypass Scale AI entirely and make more money themselves?
"Time spent working" is a terrible metric for "gives a shit" and shows me that I wouldn't want to work at this place, but I agree with the general idea that people who give a shit are worth a lot of money.
Even more important than hiring people who give a shit is not breaking them. Throw enough bullshit hurdles in their way, treat them unfairly, or show that you don't care for long enough, and they will stop giving a shit, and you just reduced the value of that worker at least by a factor of 2, if not more. Even if they still put in the same number of hours.
It's the difference between doing what's right vs. doing what's rewarded. If you have people who just do what's right, you don't need a strict reward system. Once you push them towards only going after your rewards, your reward system better be 100% aligned with what's good for the company (spoiler: it isn't anywhere near that), or you're screwed.
> 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.
When I was a poker player, I learned that playing less meant earning more (per hour). Focus can only be sustained on the top-level for so long. When I played poker, I cared a lot.
When I started working later, I noticed the same thing. The quality of focus is simply less. It's still valuable enough to produce something, but not to produce something top of line. Simply test yourself on the first hour with a difficult problem and on the eighth hour. Your first hour self will run circles around you.
So I can imagine that there are very attuned HR professionals that know this and see this and want to take advantage of this. Rare they may be, I'd be one of them if I'd work in the field.
I agree with what you're saying, but not everything needs top quality focus. There are a lot of menial tasks you can do which don't require you to be super focused.
They also tend to get done very quickly. Or aren't actually worth doing.
I've yet to find a job, as an IC or manager, where I had 8 hours worth of tasks worth completing.
Oh, there's usually -work- enough for 8 hours, every day, if I want, but it's actually a negative effect to try and do so. It means I'm getting involved in decisions I don't have all the context on, am not responsible for, and am not empowered to actually change (and thus just getting frustrated and probably pissing someone off), or I'm trying to work on something that requires buy in from other people, that hasn't been prioritized for them, so is going to die on the vine anyway (and, again, frustrate me and piss them off).
I think the general idea of finding people who take pride in a job well done is a sound one and does often mean the difference between success and failure of a project/business.
Where the article completely falls down in is how to measure “giving a shit”. There’s plenty of people that work long hours, get rewarded well but ultimately just create mess after mess that someone who cares about clean, simple code then cleans up after them.
A culture that just values attendance is most likely going to have a negative impact on the motivation. I remember a situation where a delivery lead shouting “nobody leaves the office before this bug is fixed” leading me to question the values of a client.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that gimmicks like pool tables in the office and slides make an iota of difference to someone that gives a shit about software.
What does make a difference is a culture that encourages initiative, values transparency and pragmatism. These are the kinds of things you want hear when being interviewed. How many hours did you work will/should turn the real talent away...
retention is also a problem. Coming from a place where I gave a shit to a place where I only care about the product, but not in an way tied to my identity, it's so much more emotionally liberating. I check in, do my job, and leave caring to my side-projects. I was done in by management at the last place (half due to getting the short end of the stick in an necessary reorg, and half due to management incompetence of my new manager), and that is EXHAUSTING.
Now, I have competent and organized managers, and they help me push code with high efficiency, which is satisfying, but in a very different way than one that is more tied to my identity.
From a management point of view, you really do not want to hire a person who gives a shit if you are a shitty manager, let's say top quintile, (statisically, if you are if you are manager, you are), because when that person leaves, and they will, it's not going to be any fun for you.
This article is utter bollocks. I tried hard to read to the end without laughing out loud, in particular this about candidates:
> 1. they give a shit about Scale
Most companies I interview for, I, shall we say, don't give a shit about at application and interview stage. Sure, they may seem like a good fit (tech and remuneration), and I try to fit if it kinda feels good after a couple of interviews. Yes I try and understand their business, methodologies, treatment of staff (am I on call?, what's that worth?) etc
But to expect me to arrive at a series of interviews with total commitment and "giving a shit" (which I read as hand-my-life-and-all-my-free-time-to-you). Nah, fuck off.
You're just another company, it's up to you to make me give a shit wanting to work for you.
Annecdote: Been employed at what I thought would be a nice company to work for ~five months, it's turned out well, now I give a shit. It doesn't work the other way around, otherwise you seem like a cult.
And whilst at this new company I really do "give a shit", I don't allow it to trap me and will happily tell them at which point I don't "give a shit" any more and the reasons why.
The places where I cared a lot about the company ahead of time have in the majority of cases been among the worst interviews I’ve done.
I doubt I’m along in this. Am industry you’re interested in, you’ll probably do great. A specific company? That tests qualities that aren’t often that important to your job.
I am very much in agreement here. At interview time, no prospective employee should care very much about your company; if they do, it's either insincere or pathological. If you're asking them for loyalty at interview time, that's a big blinking sign that you don't know what loyalty is.
But by all means, do hire people who give a shit: people who give a shit about their professional skills, about their self-respect, about the quality of their work and about being good people. Eventually, if your company is good, they will give a shit about that, too. You'll know it's working when they try to change a decision because they care more about doing the job right than they do about your feelings.
I agree with the gist of hiring people that care about their craft, but asking them to care about the company is harder.
That really requires some sort of reciprocal "company cares about you", and that's hard to guarantee. Especially when you're hiring the generation that saw their parents lose out on the things like pensions vs 401k, layoffs as regular events, etc.
Too many times you give your all and when there is a bump you get flushed down the toilet, it’s not trust inspiring. Luckily I did found companies who cared, but it’s a minority. The best advice I can give is : make your company human. Give and take, be there for eachother, care. Sounds simple, but in my experience not many companies tick these boxes.
And companies who dare asking your consent to collect, retain, and share (with 3rd parties they like) everything about you from your teams chat to gene data.
I wish this passionate-about-the-company, corporate BS that is under the guise of new age feel good advice, fad goes away. The number of founders I have met who show the attitude that they are trying to change the world and I should be grateful to have a chance to work for them is astonishing. There is nothing wrong with having a business that doesn't change people's lives in a fundamental way. But don't sell me BS that your another social media app is going to change the world in a good way, while you, being a founder, take all the winnings and I, being an ordinary employee, have to overwork without proper compensation and feel good about it.
> I agree with the gist of hiring people that care about their craft, but asking them to care about the company is harder.
Exactly! Pride in one’s work is what you want. Hiring people who care about your company when, for most people, it’s another notch in their belt, means that your hiring pool is severely constrained and you’ll pass over many people who take pride in their work (and who would therefore benefit your company tremendously).
Stop pretending your company is anything more than a capitalist endeavor that pays people for their time.
He's full of it. I work for the paycheck and nothing more. My free time is mine and not for your company which I won't ever see a dime on. Founders are the only people who make money at startups if even that. I can get more RSUs at an established company that actually vest than a fancy notion that they might if I work like crazy.
There are some studies that say working 5 hours a day is more productive than working 8 or 10 or 16 like this idiot is suggesting.
As you get older you realize a mission statement is a means to cajole the more inexperienced to buy into your widget or service. Those who have seen it all before know it's bogus BS to try to burn people out. I come in, do my job, then clock out. It's not about 'giving a it', it's about living life and work isn't life.
One useful piece of advice that I have received is that there are tradeoffs in giving shit at work. This article mentions downsides of not giving a shit, but doesn't mention downsides of giving too much shit, that is, getting too emotionally attached to the work you are doing. Especially in big companies projects get cancelled or requirements change or managers assign work that doesn't even make sense, and if you are emotionally attached to your work when this happens it can cause interpersonal issues, low morale or unhappiness in general.
I give a shit and it's my weakness. I usually don't take days off until I really need them (and even then it usually takes others to actually force me to take them). I try to only work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, having a healthy balance of work and non-work etc., but I often fail and it then more often than not devolves into periods of ultra-focus and periods where it's hard for me to even do the simplest tasks - even though I really want to. I give a shit, so I need to take care of myself because when I'm unable to work, I feel really bad about it. Because I give a shit, you know - I currently work on stuff that I used to do in my spare time for years out of passion.
I went through way too many voluntary crunches (both for work and personal stuff, like game jams) to not see how they deteriorate my health. And occasionally I'm still putting myself into more, it's somewhat addicting. I need to finally get myself tested for ADHD.
In this light, I'm not sure if my answers to the posed questions would satisfy the recruiter looking for someone who "gives a shit". I used to think it was worth it, I'm not so sure anymore.
I completely understand the need for people who "give a shit". I don't really understand people who are able to work without "giving a shit". I can't. But remember that if you're looking for people who "give a shit", it's now your responsibility to not abuse them for it. They will often put their work over their health. You shouldn't let them, otherwise your company is not worth giving a shit for.
Imagine a 20-something thinking he's seen or experienced enough of the world--any of it--to go on like this.
He essentially lucked into VC funding by exploiting sweatshop labor while riding a hyped ML/AI market. It's a testament to how messed up this industry is.
> If someone is applying to Scale and has never been deeply obsessed about something before, then it’s a bad bet to think Scale will be the first.
So you mean that you're looking for unbalanced people? I don't get how being obsessed about a product equates to long term success for an employee in your company. To me it's more like a recipe for burnout.
I think a lot of employees end up not giving a shit because their employer don't give a shit in the first place. The culture is rotting up on both sides of the fence. Companies can't force people to give a shit because they surely know how to fake it if required to and companies can't change their principles because the sole principle, profit making cannot be changed. What sort of works is propaganda. There are always young people who are gullible to give their heart and souls for companies who don't really give a shit.
Some companies give a shit at the beginning but after becoming profitable they end up not giving a shit
"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."
This is just silly. 5 hours of intensely focused, silent, eyes-glued-to-monitor-and-keyboard work beats the conventional 8 hours of work involving socializing/chatting with coworkers over the cubicle, making phone calls, checking in on people, walking around an office, taking breaks, etc., which itself seems to lead to approximately the same 5 hours of actual work... just with much less intense focus (intense focus which is mentally draining).
To quantify work output merely by time fails to appreciate the much more important factor involved in work: efficiency.
Working 5 hours, intensely, is draining. This author is silly for failing to realize that there's a reason Google engineers are allowed to work 11am-4pm: because they're competent, efficient, responsible, and probably don't waste much time (otherwise I don't see how they'd be employed there-- one of the most sought after & selective employers in the world)
Maybe my opinion is atypical compared to a lot of the comments here, but I'm of the belief that if you treat your team members not just fairly but well, invest in them, genuinely care about them, and trust/empower them, then the overall sentiment of the article makes a lot of sense.
I'm not a big fan of the current state of the world where people hop careers every couple years and are always looking for new opportunities continuously. It's driven by extreme corporate greed which is way too skewed in the wrong direction. I always thought there was something nice about lifetime or career companies. Again, if both employer, management, employees and community can create a culture and company that is in balance in all aspects, the author's position is justified in my opinion.
However, it's it's just empty words that maintains the status quo of Silicon Valley, then I don't agree with the author. We need less selfish egotistical thought leader CEOs following the trends and more down to earth and humble leaders who want to do meaningful work.
I won't say I especially like it up to that point. But that was maybe because I was already doing the passion=hours translation in my head. But at least he's honest about it at that point.
”Extreme micro-management, incompetent managers don't trust what they don't know.”
This feels like an eye opener for me. Not in a negative way, but it explains why some get the praise of all the colleagues around them but never from the boss. Which also explains why priorities are sometimes out of whack.
I was sympathetic to the idea when I read the title. It is definitely better to work with people that both care about the future of the company and the quality of their work.
But then I read the title and learned that the author equals those qualities to ”being part of a cult” and ”being obsessed about work”. Pretty much the stereotypical startup founder that consciously scam young people out of their waking hours in exchange for an illusion.
The author is setting up himself for a lot of disappointment. I am not sure why he expects employee number n*100 who gets 0.1% equity (if at all) to give a shit about his company (that he himself most likely has a huge stake in). Also, it's comical he cites one of the most successful companies in the world (Google) and criticizes their work culture. That culture clearly works for Google since they are wildly successful.
The second half of this should be: "...and help them to keep giving a shit."
I've seen too many times to count management completely squashing out any passion that employees might have for the company or product. The most common ways I think are micromanaging and soliciting feedback / ideas then completely ignoring it. Both will immediately have your employees checking out and saying to themselves "fine, I'll show up, do what I'm told, then clock out at 5."
“Giving a shit” seems to be entirely focused on whether they are putting in hours. I notice that nowhere in the 6 questions is there anything that would assess what was achieved.
So if I went to Scale, sat around for 12 hours and spent 7 on Hacker News, I would achieve as much as the Google employee but somehow be differentiated according to Scale.
The google engineer could work few hours and make life better (or worse) for a billion people.
The startup engineer has little impact in comparison. For this company specifically it's probably near zero, it's basically outsourcing like mechanical turk.
I personally recall moving from a small startup to a Fortune 50. I could spend half the time in the office and achieve a hundred times the outcome, easily.
Alexandr Wang is 23 years old and he became tech lead at Quora 7 years ago (?!). I assume the guy has been pulling 90 hour workweeks since age of 12 or something.
Just wait for your first RSI my young friend, and then we will talk again ;)
I'm really curious how he feels like about holidays, I assume people in Europe cant't give a shit having 4-6 weeks of holidays yearly, right?
His linkedin says Tech Lead from 2014-2016. But it doesn't mean he was tech lead from the start. He could've become tech lead on his last 3 months at the company.
Great advice, but I'd add one thing - the company itself, the leadership, etc. also has to give a shit at the same level as its people.
These Googlers that work 11-4 probably either used to give a shit, or still give a shit, but when you care deeply about your work and the company gets in your way or doesn't share your passion, it's an awful and demoralizing place to be.
So quit, you say. But you can't because you give a shit and you really, really want the company to succeed and do great things.
The article starts off well, but then goes wildly wrong in the end.
"Giving a shit" is orthogonal to working long hours. As a part of my job, I hire people and one thing I tell all candidates is: "I expect you to care about your work. This does not mean that you have to work evenings or weekends. But while you are working, you should care about doing a good job."
It's certainly partially about believing that you are working on the right thing, but mainly about believing the craft matters.
The attitude of startup CEOs in my area is that you should be crazy about their company, and work for 45+ hours a week for a salary that's marginally higher than what you would make on a 9-5 retail job. Sorry, I don't give a shit about your SaaS.
He actually thinks and says that Google engineers only work 5 hours a day and says "so the conclusion is that very little meaningful work gets done at Google...Google is broken." This article reflects terribly on Scale and he should delete it.
> 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.
This statement shows how anti-worker this guy is. Good on such a Googler.
If you encounter a leader (like this guy) that thinks working hard for 8 hours a day is bare minimum (like this guy), do _not_ give them your labor if you can avoid it. You only have one life, so don't waste it making guys like this far richer than they would ever make you.
I hope plenty of BigCo and startup (especially Scale) employees are shaving hours with no repercussions thanks to Covid remote work. Such a huge effective hourly wage bump, and the only things harmed are corporations and their leaders (abstractly and relatively.)
Not a native speaker, but for me "giving a shit" doesn't sound like you really care for something. Ok, it's (maybe) better than "not giving a shit", which is nothing at all, but it's not much more than the bare minimum...
Yes, to "give a shit" or a "damn" means to care marginally more than not caring at all.
He's using it in an ironic[1] sense to mean that they really do care. This is similar to BBEdit's tagline[2], "it doesn't suck," which, read literally, doesn't mean it's good.
You’re 100% correct in your interpretation of the strict grammatical meaning.
I think maybe ‘not giving a shit’ existed as a turn of phrase first, and ‘giving a shit’ is sometimes used (incorrectly in the grammatical sense, but ok in the colloquial sense) as the complete negation/opposite.
> Do you think it was worth it?
For an obsessed person, it’s always worth it.
No, just no. It's not absolutely always worth it. Especially when you "give a shit about it" and then find it really wasn't worth it. That's really bad.
Also, giving a shit is not a dichotomy. I don't just give a shit about either everything or nothing at all.
Give me a reason to give a shit about what you do in particular.
Unless you are measuring one's capability to give a shit in absolute terms, which is very hard to assess in terms of productivity gains.
- make money to achieve a goal now or in the future (pay rent vs. fund kid's education)
- support a friend
- make a change in the workplace or the industry
- develop experience and a career, further a craft
But it's almost never "make your business succeed at the expense of other parts of their life."
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> 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.
This guy is basically giving a performance review on people he doesn't know doing work he's unaware of based on a single metric. The ego involved here is indescribable. I would never, ever work at Scale.
The post just deleted all of its legitimate criticisms from other users...now comments aren't allowed. What a joke.
The funniest one I managed to see was:
"Jeff Bezos probably says the same stuff here: `Why don't my warehouse workers just give a shit? I even gave them free pee bottles!` Is Scale the next Amazon?"
Just to provide a bit of the opposite perspective from what I’m seeing in most of the comments here, I appreciated the post. I know what it’s like to work with people who _care_ about what they’re doing, and what it’s like to work with people who don’t, and I (personally) would pick the former over the latter even if it meant more hours, less money, whatever.
At the end of the day, what makes me feel good is leaving the workday feeling like I got good work done with a good team, and we all tried our best because we care about what we’re doing, instead of just punching the clock. I’m not crazy or indoctrinated, that’s just what makes me feel satisfied by my work. But people are different and value very different things, so I’m glad there are companies that work well for each type of person.
The thing you're expected to "give a shit" about is whatever it takes to make Alexandr rich. Unless someone finds particular life meaning in building a specialized mechanical turk? Of course there's grifting from the military-industrial complex involved too: https://www.govconwire.com/2020/09/scale-ai-gets-potential-9...
The reception here is pretty bad and perhaps justifiably. There are some pretty scathing Glassdoor reviews that mirror the problems a lot of commenters are pointing out with this attitude. A lot of ex-employees "gave a shit" and they got severely burnt-out from it.
I care greatly about the quality and effect of my work (I hope most people do and have the privilege to) but definitely it's more important to me that my employer also "gives a shit" about me.
> it is guaranteed that they will not do good work if they do not give a shit.
While I do see amazing merit in that statement, from an experiential and rational standpoint I disagree with it. Though, believing this won't harm the company too much as it is a very action-oriented statement and leads to a bias of action. That doesn't make it true though.
I've seen plenty of people doing good work when they don't give a shit. It's more rare than doing bad work, which is more common.
Really, the only thing I haven't seen is that people become so desperate or passionate (or both) that they become very lateral/creative in their solutions. That's the only thing I haven't seen "not giving a shit" people do. I've seen this time and time again. And it's quite simple why: people that don't give a shit don't become desperate or passionate about the things they don't give a shit about. So they never go into that lateral/creative mode. Perhaps the only exception is highly lateral/creative people that do it by default.
The thing is, creative/lateral problem-solving is not always needed and sometimes even counter productive. At my current job, I've noticed that me giving a shit is actually putting me into harms way, because I become creative and want to meddle with too many things. Whereas, when I shut up and not give a shit, do what I told and think a bit with them for the future, that seems to work a lot better for them.
Obviously, that's just anecdata and companies are diverse. But the author mentions this like it is a rule and as a rule (heh!) the majority of things are most likely never to exist as a rule! You make a general sweeping statement, it takes one counter example to shaken it.
This sounds like a child wrote it. You should hire smart people who get shit done. Hire craftsmen. The whole thing about caring about the company is a joke without real equity. If you care about your work and do a good job then that is your contribution to the company. Engineers usually have 0 input into the direction a company takes so it's hard to care that much.
I agree with the second criteria but not the first. People with passion about something might bring that passion to work. In my experience, they're more likely to bring something they're already passionate about to work and make the rest of us passionate about it as well.
Trying to find candidates that are passionate about the company before they join doesn't seem right. If we're only aware of how the company appears from the outside (press releases, company website) how are we supposed to have a real attachment to what the company truly is? Best case scenario is them being attached to how the company markets itself, which isn't a great approximation. That said, there might be something here I can latch onto into the form of:
1. Hire people passionate about something.
2. Promote people passionate about the company.
However, I still see some problems with the above. I would need time to chew on it before basing any personnel decisions around it.
I don't give a shit about your company, because it's your company. I don't actually have a say in what's going on. I can't refuse to do what I'm told because I disagree with the direction of the company's mission. I'd get fired.
I might give a shit about the mission, in as much as you can give a shit about the trite verbiage assigned to, in essense, the general thing that's supposed to increase shareholder dividends. But the mission is very frequently lost in the minutia of doing one's job. Does the mission relate to how I'm going to fill out this change management form? No; the change management process isn't based on the mission, it's based on its own thing. I give a shit about the change management process. If I only gave a shit about the mission, I might say, "screw change management!" And then I wouldn't be very good at my job.
And "giving a shit" based on who's interpretation? I can tell you that I give far too much of a shit about how my company works, and if I voiced this frequently, people would be absolutely sick of me. My manager sometimes reminds me - in the nicest terms - to calm the fuck down about the work. You don't want the whole company filled with people like me, because they'd drive each other bonkers. A few of us are nice for variety, and to pop up occasionally and say, "Hey, do we have a central place we can put all this documentation rather than a lot of independent places?" And then calm the fuck down and focus on just writing the damn docs.
You should want people to care, in a healthy way, both about the thing they're working on and the way in which they work on it. But you should never want them to be obsessed.
Obsession, n: Compulsive preoccupation with a fixed idea or an unwanted feeling or emotion, often accompanied by symptoms of anxiety.
If you want this for your employees, you need to get a grip and re-evaluate life.
I am sure the author will - impressively - read these comments and be further emboldened he was right all along. He appears to have limited capacity for self-awareness or self-doubt, which is to say, he exudes an impenetrable armor of self-righteousness. With that mentality, maybe he'll become President too.
This article feels like a response to the poor Glassdoor reviews his company received that said some employees were demotivated by the product they were developing because the platform simply outsourced work to 3rd world workers who, in turn, got paid in pennies. Good luck finding someone who cares deeply about enabling that.
Firstly, hours in != output. At my last job, we had several guys working 60+ hours / week whose output was miserable. I put in 5-6 hrs / day and was easily 2-10x as productive as them.
Secondly, work/life balance is real. As a lead, I tell my team they should absolutely not be working over 40 hours, and I won't do so myself unless I've fucked something up that's mission-critical. I'd advocate for a shorter workweek but my boss is very old school.
Thirdly, I don't think you can put in long workweeks and be productive long term. Most people just waste time when they work longer, and their productivity goes down, not up, and their mistakes go up. In dev, especially at startups, a single mistake can cost you your business. Do you really want exhausted workers in your codebase?
The truth it you should work however much you feel comfortable for the money you're getting. That's different for everyone. But if I can provide several million in revenue growth with a few hours of effort per day, then I figure I'm more than paying for myself. If you're willing to work 80 hours while getting paid the same as if you work 40 and being as productive as working 20, that makes you stupid and servile imo, not dedicated.
> 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.
Never saw anybody do this. There might be some people who can get their part done quickly and are no longer interested in climbing the ladder, but that must be quite rare. People are not evaluated on the amount of time they spend in their chairs.
Google is a giant company, so surely somewhere there are some people who behave this way—-among a hundred thousand employees and hundreds of groups you will find at little bit of everything.
But in the groups I have worked for, solid full days are the norm, and somewhat rarely you have to really dig in and work a bit more, and even more rarely, you have so much slack that you can go hone early. But generally people nearly always put in full days.
I've tried giving a shit as an IC, and have basically learned and been told repeatedly that it's just a waste of time, and there's no point in caring about a company beyond what it takes to fullfill your responsibility as someone being paid or about your duties beyond how much the people in charge care about them. Startups in particular don't reward giving a shit about anything much at all, most of the time, but enterprises are no different. They reward getting tasks done quickly and measurably, in a way that poses little risk to the company, and that's exactly what this asshole is saying. There is almost no market for giving shit, and it's not worth your mental health to try.
"But we serve millions of people, and among those are people who might need us to take a different approach to this webapp for accessibility reasons. Sorry guy, Brad who's on vacation and decided on this pointless project to help him get promoted needs this done by X date and your opinion isn't in line with his"
The way I prefer to look at this is: hire people who you are comfortable giving a sizable stake of your company to. If properly motivated an employee can then decide what is "enough" and "too much" work.
Good decision making, forethought, and acceptable risk taking are much more valued by me than "ok with working 80hr weeks".
Hire people who give a shit about what they like to do, and hire them to actually do that. If you find people who actually care about the company beyond the extent the company cares about them, they're either mental or very naive.
"Why do you want this Job"
I grew up dreaming about studying for half a decade to write JavaScript, why else!
I find it funny that the author is concerned about Scale being the kind of company people join for brand rather than "substance". He never mentions the biggest reason people join companies (esp. in SV): to get rich. It is true that undergrads will intern for company's brand and that makes sense b/c just having FAANG on your resume completely changes your job search experience. But most fulltime employees are looking primarily to maximize their pay + RSUs.
Also, as others have mentioned, companies/leaders need to give people something to "give a shit about". For some people that may just be working on "High quality training and validation data for AI applications", but I imagine for most people that's probably not quite enough to make them excited about work. But, who knows? :shrug:
"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
1) Carrying an entire 75ft tree in pieces from my backyard to my front yard.
2) 10 hours maybe
3)wood needed to be moved
4) when looking at the pile of wood I have to move
5) the resulting stack of wood in front of my house
6)yup, been stronger ever since those few days a few months ago
I'm surprised how much negativity is in these comments and threads.
Is it really just the one question "how many hours did you work?" that has everyone up in arms? Ok, let's find another way of saying that? BTW, it probably isn't an important question, and it's up to the company to set the culture around work hours.
However, I will say that for many companies, hiring people who give a shit, doesn't have to mean hiring for people who give a shit about your grand vision. A QA engineer doesn't need to be passionate about what the product does for a customer (though it's nice), but you want them to be passionate about QA.
We should all be passionate about the craft/task we do. The nice thing is, even if you find something you would absolutely hate doing, there are people out there who would love that very thing.
I learned this when I was younger, working in the event space, and a guy who was working for me was a housekeeper at a hotel as his main job. He loved it. I couldn't understand how, and he explained that he went into the room knowing the task, he had 10 things he needed to check off the list, if each of those 10 things was done perfectly, he was confident the guests would be happy with the cleanliness of the room. It's as if the thought of what he was cleaning or the things he was going to run into never crossed his mind. This is the task, focus on the task, love the process.
I actually was the same when I was a busser (clearing plates at a restaurant). I guess I was somewhat passionate about the mission of the joint, which was that we wanted patrons to have a good time. Part of that means clearing up the dishes promptly, with a smile, and have fund with the guests. I don't ever remember thinking about that constant mess I was cleaning up, wiping left over food into the bin, etc etc. I gave a shit because...well, it was easy to give a shit.
Maybe there's something to that, make it easy for people to give a shit. If they're not into YOUR mission, help them find or work on THEIR mission.
The comments here at HN are quite harsh imho and I feel bad for possibly ruining someone's day. Is there a way for me to delete the submission?
I posted it on HN as I liked the points in the article. The points in the post are reasonable provided there's fair equity for the employees (which I believe is disclosed prior to joining - I have no knowledge about dilution, preference etc). I also agree with the commenters on HN that it doesn't make much sense when there's no equity.
But there are too many comments making the same/similar point.
I personally find what Alex is doing is inspiring, running a 200 person company (ref: article) at 23 is remarkable. I also applaud his courage to publicly share what he thought was best advice.
I might get downvoted for this but I couldn't not say this.
It should definitely be left up. It’s okay to have that world view at his age, and it is probably serving him well right now. I remember being 22-23 and wondering why everyone didn’t want to work 12 hours a day. Why were some leaving before 5, some came in late, some just in general did not give a shit. Here I was working hard not only to learn brand new systems, but build a disaster recovery plan, capacity planning, and production control scheme from scratch. And trying to finish my degree on the side. While I’m doing all of this, these shiftless people were making excuses about kids having to be places, or wives who wanted their husbands home, or people who always seemed to be sick. I didn’t understand.
I’m 47 now and I completely understand. Over time, I realized that there was life outside of work. Kids were actually fun to hang around, and my wife is my best friend. Not my job, and not my coworkers, the wife I chose to spend time with actually is fun to spend time with.
I get what Alexandr is saying, I really do. Except for the CEO bit, I had the same world view 25 years ago. And it’s a good world view for that age. However life will change, our experiences will broaden, and I feel he will probably have a completely different idea 20 years from now.
> Here I was working hard not only to learn brand new systems, but build a disaster recovery plan, capacity planning, and production control scheme from scratch. And trying to finish my degree on the side. While I’m doing all of this, these shiftless people were making excuses about kids having to be places, or wives who wanted their husbands home, or people who always seemed to be sick. I didn’t understand.
I think Brad Fitzpatrick described in Coders At Work or similar being frustrated about how people would clock out at the end of the day, when all his energy was invested in the company. And that it took him a while to realize that it comes with the territory of being a founder. You have a massive stake in the outcome, that employees aren't offered. The incentives are just wildly different, so it would be amazing if the behavior wasn't also wildly different. In fact, startup employees are often undercompensated, compared to their brethren at publicly traded firms.
> I get what Alexandr is saying, I really do. Except for the CEO bit, I had the same world view 25 years ago
Honestly I feel like if you're a founder of a company employing 200 people, you should have maybe just enough emotional intelligence to understand the motivations and incentives of most of those 200. Or be prepared to be replaced.
> The points in the post are reasonable provided there's fair equity for the employees
This is maybe a fair argument for a very small number of founding engineers, who start with multiple percentage points. The idea that it extends to employee 200 is a fantasy because you are asking them to commit to a degree that you will never be able to commit in them.
Give a shit about your employees first, and you will find employees that give a shit about you. Asking them to centre their lives around your company when you will easily sacrifice them at needs is deeply flawed.
>>> The points in the post are reasonable provided there's fair equity for the employees (which I believe is disclosed prior to joining - I have no knowledge about dilution, preference etc).
That's why you don't understand. Long story short, employee's equity is worthless because it will always be reduced to nothing by dilution/preference and even if the company grows a hundred fold.
There are only two people who benefit from a (very) successful company, the founder and the investor.
The first point of the article, that the founder expects employees to care about the company as much as him, is delusional. Folks here understand that because they've been burned before.
There's no reason for employees to care so much about a day job because they will get nothing beyond their regular salary. If anything they are risking quite a bit by working for a smaller company.
Personally, when I feel that a HN thread is too negative. Let them be. It's fine. In most cases, I don't think they feel bad. They simply express their opinion and are fine with expressing a negative one. You can especially tell when people reply to those people. While discussion may get polarized, it's still interesting to read on an intellectual level.
I think voicing your opinion and having food for thought is more valued on HN than most other communities I see. Whether that food is negative or positive, is simply another flavor.
While I voiced my disagreements with this article, I value the discussion (and to some extent the article). Whether I view an article as good or bad, in most cases I value the discussion much more than the article :P
He seems to be confusing working long hours with working hard. Those aren't the same thing. I would even argue they're in conflict with each other. Nobody does good work when they're "obsessed" with something. Obsession is a sickness. Everyone eventually learns that you need moderation (in all things) if you're going to be around for the long haul.
Most software in the world is utter trash and I at least partially blame maniacs like this guy who keep people up hacking on it until they fall asleep. I wish more people would do what most people think of as "work" from 11-4 and spend their mornings and evenings thinking about how to do that work _well_ instead of just faster.
Seeing the types of companies coming out of YC in the last few years, I can’t help but think their best years are behind them. Or maybe I am just older and don’t buy into their koolaid anymore.
> The uncomfortable truth is that most people don’t give a shit.
People generally give a shit about themselves, and often their families and friends. Less about their work.
Here are some questions the author asks in interviews to get at the quality of shit-givingness:
- What’s the hardest you’ve ever worked on something?
- How many hours were you working a week?
- Why did you work so hard? Why did you care?
- When were you the most unmotivated in your life?
- What’s the thing you’re the most proud of?
- Do you think it was worth it?
These are pretty good questions to ask in general, except the one about hours working. Not only will the answer be easy to misinterpret, but asking the question gives the impression that you might care more about hours worked than results. As someone who gives a shit, that would turn me off.
Being a person who does give a shit, having such people could be advantageous to the overall and long-term quality of the product.
However, hiring such people has the problem of identifying them. I don't fare particularly well in interviews; most of the opportunities I have excelled in happened via internal movements.
I have difficulty when coupled with bosses that have the attitude but don't have the necessary chops because accepting shitty decisions by the way of "I'm-getting-paid-why-do-I-care" is quite difficult (though this becomes easier with age/perspective). Giving shit also has impact on stress level of the employee in situations when wrong choices are made.
> 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.
Heh, you think I’ll give a shit working over 8? Odds are you’re company is uninteresting the product or efforts you’re working on are uninteresting and time isn’t going to make give more or less of a shit about it. I’m not meaning this to target OP specifically, this is how I feel about majority of jobs I see and work.
People who 'give a shit' want to do it long term. They want to work on something that will stand the test of time, that they can make meaningful contributions to.
They want to be resourced enough with other workmates that they can be effective at their job without sacrificing their personal life.
The first half of the article is right - but it takes a complete nose dive when the true intent comes out. It's not people who 'give a shit' the writer want. It's people who will chase money as points, and do anything to increase their points. That's who the writer truly wants.
Startups are companies with a scalable business model. Unlike regular small businesses which do not necessarily meet this definition.
Pursuing scale does not mean starting immediately with scalability in mind. It means creating a scalable business model, that is able to scale in subsequent stages.
That means that in the beginning you will have to iterate quickly to find that formula, aggresively discarding ideas (and therefore code) and moving fast.
But that's not sustainable. Once you've found that formula, then you have to rebuild it solidly so that it's secure, performant, scalable and reliable.
I generally like this advice but also worry that unsaid number 3 is “only hire people without boundaries who will fully devote themselves to your company until they burn out.”
I’d love to see more companies that give you a reasonable work life balance so that they can continue to benefit from you giving a shit long term. Let me be clear I know nothing about Scale in particular but I have seen other places where the insidious version of the advice here becomes a hiring funnel that churns through passionate workers burning them out.
Does this require government intervention/meddling though? Or said differently, “what are the downsides of banning this?”
Plenty of people prefer to work long hours (I know I did for two decades before having kids, as in genuinely enjoyed (almost all of) it.)
I’m glad the government isn’t here with a clipboard telling me what I can and can’t do with my life at every turn.
(I’m all for setting a max beyond which overtime must be paid to hourly workers (as now) and for setting reasonable caps that can’t be required by the employer to be exceeded, but if a worker wants to work long or hard, they should be able to choose that, IMO.)
You absolutely can give a shit and work all kinds of hours. The only important thing about working hard is logically analyzing a problem, implementing a solution, and presenting your work appropriately. Sometimes that takes two hours, sometimes it takes thirteen.
If you say, hey why aren't you solving more problems then on lighter days, then that sounds like some jerk taskmaster dictating a rate rather than someone concerned with solving problems.
I mean, if we're being honest, even I don't "give a shit" about what I'm working on beyond building something fun/cool that enables me to make a living.
I want to hire someone who is good at what they do and brutally honest that they're taking the job because they need to feed themselves and take care of their loved ones and have enough free time left to finish their instrumental guitar record or whatever.
Having mentored interns in the past the idea that certain academic institutions signal intelligence over others is flawed at best. This is anecdotal but one summer we got two - one from Harvard and the other from a US college I'd never heard of. One we went on to offer a job, the other struggled with basic coding and had to be taught multiple times how to open a PR.
I think of the devs I've worked with that can't seem to manage a kanban board themselves or speak up and ask cross-cutting big picture questions.
If I know my senior dev doesn't give a shit, then I need to establish a manager/lead who does give a shit. If I have someone who does give a shit, then I have to spend less managing their 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.“
Ahaha, sounds like the writer is young. What we are actually doing is playing the long game. We do care, but we are optimizing for not burning out, so we can have a larger ‘area under the curve’ of giving a shit.
I think you are a bit too harsh by calling him an idiot. To answer your question though, a lot of it probably came down to timing - the guy founded an "AI" company in 2016, so yeah.
Here's a CRAZIER!!! plan. Pay people enough to give a $hit.
Real life has taught me one thing about losers that talk like this. 99% of the time it means they expect more work than they are willing to pay for. Bonus points if they can have some sort of legal (read slavery) leverage over you.
A few years ago Riot Games turned me down for a position I was overqualified for because I’m not a hardcore gamer. I laughed it off because I knew that people who “give a shit” about the gaming industry expect to work 12 hours per day 300 days per year for a below market salary.
From personal experience this guys sales pitch is used to defend and glorify the worst work cultures. Having worked at a place for 12 years believing that my contribution was vital and necessary and then seeing that conception unwind in two months was the best education _ever_.
This was stolen from Atomic Object, then contorted. AO had this as one of its original five workplace tenets. But it was more like "help each other out". Last I looked, they changed it to "care deeply", which I guess is more PC.
This article has an exploitative undertone in the hiring process.
The “what will you do to work here vibe” might work for inexperienced fresh grads but is something others will avoid like the plague. It seems like there no employee leverage at scale.
This is exactly the kind of company I wouldn't want to work for unless they highly, highly reward me for "giving a shit" (aka working like a dog for the exec team to have a better exit when they sell the company).
What do you do when the founder doesn't give a shit? I'm talking about leaving early every other day, ignoring his employees, lying to customers, forgetting about "decisions" that were made only days ago...
>"o What’s the hardest you’ve ever worked on something?
o How many hours were you working a week?
o Why did you work so hard? Why did you care?
o When were you the most unmotivated in your life?
o What’s the thing you’re the most proud of?
o Do you think it was worth it?"
PDS: These are some great interview questions!
I would also add:
o Tell me what your future goals are?
o How do you think your future goals would/could relate to this company?"
o What do you think this company can do for you to help you achieve those goals?
o What do you think you can do for this company, to help us achieve our corporate goals?
Etc., etc. -- but the interviewer must first establish at least a little bit of trust, rapport, safety, etc., if they are to have any hope of an answer that contains a high percentage of candor, because after all, there is a potential job and there is a potential income at stake...
o What’s the hardest you’ve ever worked on something?
o How many hours were you working a week?
If your work environment is routinely 60+ hour weeks, that's probably a useful pair of questions. As an interviewee, I'd definitely be taking those as a red flag that you expect a lopsided work-life balance.
People who coast might. People who are vying for a promotion or good rating absolutely work much harder than that. Google keeps a high bar for talent, and such talent isn't the kind that is satisfied with chilling at work. Google is notorious for making it hard to get a promotion - you wouldn't hear that complaint from coasters :) Painting all Googlers in the same brush is one of the following:
1) Ignorant and immature, if coming from a place of ignorance
2) Malicious if intended to show big companies in a bad light to attract ambitious young people
I wouldn't be surprised if some people get away with it, especially if they reach a certain specialization in a core codebase and are okay letting their career coast. It is not "the common paradigm" as stated in the article (at least, it wasn't in the NYC office 2014-2016).
Google is a giant company, so surely somewhere there are some people who behave this way—-among a hundred thousand employees and hundreds of groups you will find at little bit of everything.
But in the groups I have worked for, solid full days are the norm, and somewhat rarely you have to really dig in and work a bit more, and even more rarely, you have so much slack that you can go hone early. But generally people nearly always put in full days.
I think most people do give a shit at the beginning of their career. Unfortunately, many companies do everything they can to make their employees stop giving a shit.
Look, employees don't need to be obsessed workaholics, but being really interested in your job and motivated and willing to do great work matters, and employers, for the most part, ignore these factors and focus on technical skills. And worse, in many cases their technical assessments are misguided anyway and don't really give insight into how good someone is as a software developer.
Creativity is reserved to founders and designers, they don't like competition. If you give a shit, you're going to quit over artistic differences. Working hard usually does more damage than working smarter. And finally, we wouldn't need coding tests if there was a reasonable standard for bare minimum programming skills.
> Creativity is reserved to founders and designers
Sadly for some of us, our creativity never manifests in a profitable way. If I had an idea worth anything and I found as engaging as most of my side projects, I’d probably try the founder route.
No, "culture fit" is the excuse used to reject people without reason, and it how companies ensure they don't employ people with different accents. "culture fit" is the synonym for "same as us".
Culture add is better than culture fit anyway. what can this person add to the character of our team that we don't already have? Insight from a completely different career field in their past? Dry humor? Brilliantly timed Star Trek quotes? I've found advising my subordinate leaders to look for culture adds instead of fits takes a lot off their backs when interviewing for things other than checking off the list of familiar technologies.
One of the fears of a technical downturn I have is that I might be forced to look for work with a CEO like this. They care nothing about you but ask that you care immensely about them. It’s like an abusive relationship where one person takes constantly and gaslights you into believing actually it’s good.
They’ll outsource your job if they can, claiming a foreign worker will work harder and care more, when in reality they’re able to act like tollbooths on bridges to America extracting what they can from people who want to escape their country.
>Ultimately, you’re searching for people you’d be willing to spend every waking moment with, since if things go right, there will be many long nights.
Lots of hours at this place eh?
>What’s the hardest you’ve ever worked on something?
What happened to work smart not hard? Also what exactly does it mean to work hard as a developer?
>How many hours were you working a week?
Hours again eh? Sounds like this place has absolutely no work-life balance and just burns everyone out. To whose benefit? Oh right only the benefit of the CEO.
>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.
This has to be the dumbest thing I have read in ages.
Google has a market capitalization of 1.2 trillion. They have extensive research into how to treat employees to maximize their productivity. If you think google is doing it wrong, you are indeed the one doing it wrong.
> lack of office attires
You can tell this guy has a dress code. Even General Motors the place of 10 layers of bureaucracy discovered they dont need a dress code.
Exactly my thoughts. This person glorifies toil for the sake of toil (and his profits).
Then he concludes that the "uncomfortable truth is that most people don’t give a shit" but companies should still hire people who do give a shit, leading one ask how would this reality work.
I suppose the good part in this case is that this cult-like mentality is public and would help some people to avoid Mr. Wang's company and look for something else instead.
There you have it. Come on, by now we all know what this “caring” or “giving a shit” stuff is about. Just say you want people to work hard, long hours. Just say that.
Perhaps you should perform a self-reflection first?
Maybe you can stop forcing engineers to jump through hoops to pass your stupid l33t testing questions? You might think you’re hiring the smartest guy, for the cheapest price, but instead of getting a good engineer that can write solid code, you get a code monkey that throws shit into your engineering process. Think about that for a moment.
Maybe you can set realistic deadlines? And readjust them as the requirements change in midstream.
Maybe you can hire managers that understands the complexities of software development? So they can actually manage effectively for a change.
Maybe you can avoid putting your employees through death marches to solve some arbitrary business problem?
Maybe you can get rid of your stupid open office seating arrangement, thereby forcing your most valuable employees to sit in such close proximity to one another? Thank god for Covid-19! That finally put a check on this stupid business practice.
Maybe you can stop viewing your employees as a cost center, and start to view them as an asset? Since the job of the engineer, is to help automate some process, he is actually reducing labor needed elsewhere, which costs you actual money if you had to pay an analyst to do it. The engineer automates this part of the job. And once you have a system in place, the initial investment pays for itself.
Maybe you can stop doing stupid employee ranking scenarios, like your stupid Stack-Ranking game, where your goal is to kill the bottom 10% regardless. This pits your best employees, your assets, against one another, in a Lord-of-the-Flies fight to the death challenge. This is not a very good scenario to engender loyalty from your best employees, again, your best assets.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the #unreasonable man" --George Bernard Shaw (b. 1856)
Why don't we talk more about how this company employs third world country workers in a "gig economy" model to even further compress wages and squeeze margins? How can one be proud and give a shit about a product like this?
The amount of founder/CEO backlash on this thread is eye opening. The OP said many things, among which he talked about the effort required to put in to be a master in your craft.
No one is forced to work for such a company. There are many low/mid paying comfortable jobs you can do that suit your personality.
The reality is that drive and effort. How you redistribute rewards is another thing.
There are plenty of jobs that pay better and don't require you to devote your lives to the company (incidentally, one of them is mentioned in the article). If a firm wants people who are obsessed with work, then that's their choice. However, I hope they recognize that they would also drive away plenty of talent with better options, so it's up to them to weigh the trade offs.
The comments here are really interesting. What is the equity level where one goes from thinking like an owner to being an employee? At what equity level does one feel the things in this blogpost maybe apply? 5%? 1%? 0.5%? If startup are power-law gambles, then 0.025% can still be a great outcome.
Should a founder mentality be expected amongst early employees at a certain equity level? Why wouldn't someone want to hire someone who had that mindset, and then appropriately compensate someone for that?
After reading the comments: I wouldn't grill the author too much about his idealistic views on things. He's 23 and got some media attention for exactly that attribute.
From crunchbase: "Scale, which accelerates its customers' AI development by democratizing access to intelligent data [...] After dropping out of M.I.T. to become a teenage tech lead at Quora, Alexandr founded Scale in 2016 and became the youngest entrepreneur ever... [etc.]"
So nothing that is revolutionary, new or (IMHO) interesting so I imagine this post was written after having maybe hundreds of interviews with senior engineers, really not being too psyched about the companies offering.
Funny enough, when I apply for contracts instead of employment I never got asked the question what makes me passionate about the business. In many ways, recruiters seem to be more professional with freelancers than when interviewing potential employees, even though the cost of a freelancer is usually higher.
My advice when you want generally interested people is: hire juniors and hire for seniors as shepherds, figuratively speaking. Unless you have something that people care about (which is usually outside the B2B market) that's a better bet than to assume that anyone senior really would give a shit about your business model.
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 are not obsessed and willing to put in incredible energy into someone else’s project that you are bad. It does not follow that people should be obsessed with someone else’s business that they won’t be properly compensated for. No matter how many times someone rich says it, it will never be true.
I will say, however, that this is an extremely popular position with the rich and powerful. From startups to big consulting firms, there was not a single company in SF that I worked for that did not echo this. From PC saying how proud he was that we did not hire more engineers at Stripe while people were pulling 60+ hour weeks for months at a time, to engineering managers explaining how they slept under their desk while they were working at Facebook, to Big 3 consulting firm partners exhorting 22 year olds to work 80 hour weeks being screamed at by misogynistic clients in cities across the globe, the song remained the same.