Doing a job hunt right now and im trying to assess "what's my day to day like" and it comes down to two factors: what are the people like, and what is the actual work.
I want to really like the people, as I've discovered my life is way more boring otherwise. I spend 8-10h/day working, I need to be able to laugh and make other people laugh and have interesting conversations. I'd love to make friends out of it. People often tell me don't rely on work for that, but the time investment is too steep not to use it as a social outlet.
I also want to know the actual work. Not the buzzwords, or the product name, or fast paced industry, but the actual initiatives for the next year. Crank out new features for mobile app? Not my skill set. Typical oncall rotation? Nah.
I'm shocked how many companies are willing to start the interview process immediately. I decline until I have at least an hour convo with who would be my manager.
As per the article, yes more blogging helps but how do I know it's genuine and not marketing bs? I don't.
I feel like this archetype (wanting to have fun, make friends, etc) is actually very common, at least around SF/SV. I bet you'll find it soon enough.
If I can be candid (and hopefully still amicable) behind my random-string username, I do have to say: I don't get the approach, though.
Can you help me understand? Why does it really matter if you can share dank memes with your coworkers or have fun little in-jokes?
Isn't it far, far more important to find out things like: How do people communicate? How do people disagree with each other? Are people able to separate emotions and ego from the team's work output and outcomes? What values does each person want to embody in the work that they produce? Are people willing to sacrifice momentary comfort for genuine personal growth?
Maybe I'm a grumpy old man. Maybe I've just been burned too many times by companies promising a "fun" work environment where "everyone is friends" -- only to discover what they actually mean is an environment where harmony and comfort are valued above all else. The net result (in my anecdotal experience) is an atmosphere of passive-aggressive collaboration and mediocre work, because even the slightest hint of disagreement is shut down brutally instead of being talked through and genuinely resolved.
I'm not really disagreeing with you, because, like I said, I've seen so many people who want what you describe. I only wonder: How does it work? What happens when a colleague treats you unprofessionally? What happens when one person is dragging down the team?
In your live/love/laugh philosophy, how do you have meaningful, uncomfortable, worthwhile conversations that result in a genuine, deep relationship forged through facing hard truths together?
To answer your question ‘how do we separate ego and emotions from our work outcome’.
Rarely are there people that are completely emotionless. Often when people say they are rational, it means they don’t have a good cognitive understanding of their emotions.
So, in the context of a work environment, I’ve found it’s very helpful to take in account peoples emotions when getting tasks accomplished. And like, there’s countless studies signifying the importance of emotional intelligence in the workplace.
Fun in-jokes are a way of getting to know a person in a casual way. This is really important, because knowing someone allows you to know their motives, what’s important, potential hurt points, etc.
This all becomes very relevant when there is an important issues to be addressed. I can adjust timing, who hears the message, context of the message, etc based on what I know about the person.
Eg, if during small talk, I find out someone has been up all night because their kid is sick. Sure, that kid is not my problem, but if I wait till they are more rested to tell them about an issue in their design it will be more likely to be resolved in a productive manner.
Thanks for the inquiry, I'd love to be convinced otherwise as it would really lower my requirements. I might not even want to leave my current gig! I think my original comment made it sound like I'm trying to have fun and get drunk with a bunch of SV clones. I'm not.
First, it's largely about the amount of time and energy spent at work. It's roughly most of my time and most of my energy. So if I have a multitude of near-term goals in life (make money, make friends, care for family, maintain my health, make art) and most of my bandwidth is spent pursuing one (money), then the rest of my goals suffer.
Second, the "make friends" is an important value of mine. I'm not talking about forced friendship from "fun" work events. I can't stand that. I mean working with deep and interesting people willing to open up about themselves. Currently everyone I work with has very little similar or interesting life experience (from college grind to big tech grind to family+kids). My attempts to break out of daily conversations about the weather and traffic fall utterly flat. It's often suffering through a difficult shared experience that brings people together, but my current remote-only and heavily silo'd work environment doesn't provide that.
My current slog is wake up, log-in, scrum, work remotely, converse with others only to further my work or their work, log off, spend a few hours of the evening alone, sleep, repeat. My approach to a job search would be a bit different if I had a partner, kids, network of close friends nearby, able to visit family without a plane ticket. Honestly a job in tech doesn't really fit what I want out of life anymore, but I'm over a decade into it, it pays SO well, and provides quite a bit of intellectual stimulation without have to do any legwork to get it. Just trying to make it palatable.
It seems like different people imagine very different things when they read/hear "wanting to have fun, make friends, etc".
I am also a grumpy old man, but I still want that "wanting to have fun, make friends, etc" in a job.
But, my picture of that is closer to your "having meaningful, uncomfortable, worthwhile conversations that result in a genuine, deep relationship forged through facing hard truths together" than "share dank memes with your coworkers or have fun little in-jokes"
The best friends I've ever made at work have been ones where we've faced adversity together and helped each other through it - often involving some black humour to keep us going.
I agree with you on this one. But it ("fun" or the impression of it) really used to be an attractive aspect early on in the career.
> Isn't it far, far more important to find out things like: How do people communicate? How do people disagree with each other? Are people able to separate emotions and ego from the team's work output and outcomes? What values does each person want to embody in the work that they produce? Are people willing to sacrifice momentary comfort for genuine personal growth?
I wish there was some easy way to gauge these in interviews. Seems like the only way to know this is knowing people who work at the company.
Yeah, I also used to value that sort of stuff when I was just starting out. Learned the hard way on that one.
> Seems like the only way to know this is knowing people who work at the company.
As far as I can tell, even this isn't enough. Is there some way you've been able to get a read on this just from talking to people who work at a company, before you start there yourself?
In my experience, the real litmus test is the first time there's a meaningful disagreement: team A wants XYZ architecture, team B wants 123 architecture, they've both got data and emotions backing up their approach, and they need to sit down and figure out what the right way to go is.
When done well -- in a healthy culture -- people are able to disagree, have a thoughtful debate about ideas instead of egos, put aside optics and performance reviews, and converge on a solution in the best interests of the broader company. To me, the ultimate sign of a healthy culture is that all the working relationships are genuinely stronger after something like this.
I'm about to start a new job, and these sorts of "crossing the Rubicon" moments are definitely on my mind. I've been told that "wrangling stakeholders" is an important problem to solve for my team, and I'm optimistic (and admittedly a bit nervous) about seeing how it'll all play out over the first 90 days.
> In your live/love/laugh philosophy, how do you have meaningful, uncomfortable, worthwhile conversations that result in a genuine, deep relationship forged through facing hard truths together?
That sounds like the kind of relationship I'd have with my spouse, sibling, or very old friend.
In those relationships, you can't avoid it. At work, I try to be mindful that ultimately everyone is there so they can feed their family and not get cold in the winter time. That's an uncomfortable truth, and everyone has to face it, so it's good to stay light and breezy when possible.
Enforced fun is its own kind of hell, I try to share only the most anodyne memes at work, and I have seen harmony overvalued, but harmony and comfort do have value. If I see a team where every decision provokes a lengthy and probing inquiry into values, and they weren't building a warp drive or cancer cure, I might be a bit put off. Is camel case vs snake case really so important? Disagreeing productively is an important skill, but so is picking your battles.
> Why does it really matter if you can share dank memes with your coworkers or have fun little in-jokes?
I probably put negative value on this. But I can’t work without emotion. Knowing there is someone who has deep awareness of what you’re doing, whom you can trust and occasionally lean on, and knowing you’re there for them when they need you, it makes the experience more human. Almost all the heavy-lifting stuff happens away from the office, in my opinion, unless you’re in 24/7 co-habiting start-up mode. And then you get inside jokes, as friends do, and have to suffer the dank memes.
To be clear, I don’t have this relationship with everyone I work with. But I do with some, it transcends the corporate containers we’re presently packaged in, and it makes the whole thing quite fun. (It helps when the people we work with tend to be deeply intelligent and interesting folks.)
Yes, I'm also quite an emotional person. I need to laugh and complain and work closely with others who can be vulnerable. Too many 8-10h days without and I get depressed.
Question I like to ask is 'what do you look for in candidates' - and assuming they have a bunch of people just like that working there already. Does a good job IME of proxying for culture.
I like the idea of being somewhat casually social with people I work with remotely or otherwise, but what I wouldn't rely on is those people becoming "friends", unless there's a series of other factors that exist whereby if we'd met in any other context, we'd have become friends anyway.
I don't think it's impossible to make long term friends with coworkers, but it just seems highly unlikely unless ad others mentioned, there's a solid shared struggle.
That's why if my social circle is lacking, I'll try and meet my coworker's friends.
> “If I haven’t responded to something that you’ve sent me, that’s probably because I’ve read it and don’t feel particularly strongly - so just make a call on what to do if you don’t hear back in a reasonable time frame.”
Surely there's a more effective protocol that works for an exec?
Even make a macro button for the exec that responds "dfps", so that:
1. sender is immediately unblocked and empowered when they get the "dfps", and
2. avoid accidents in which the exec would need to say something but didn't get the message, but sender assumed an "implicit dfps".
From what I hear, this is common behavior for partners at law firms (i.e. the folks that own the client relationship, much like the CEO owns the decisions made), and it's absolutely bizarre.
I notice that, nowadays, startups are emphasizing "work/life balance" much more than they used to. I'm sure part of that is because of the pandemic, which created strange new realities, where companies that had previously been workaholic and office-centric were forced to change by the historic events of the last 2 years.
But also, I think the trend had started before the pandemic. They heyday of valorizing a workaholic, 24/7 lifestyle was awhile ago, in the years after the 2008 crisis, when young people were trying to start their careers in very difficult economic conditions.
As one data point, which I think suggests the change, I've noticed how the comments have been changing, in regards to my book "How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps" which describes events that happened in 2015. When the book first came out, some people said "Lawrence should not have stayed so long at such a dysfunctional startup" but everyone who read the book seem to know about such workaholic startups. But lately the comments have been more doubtful. A recent comment on Amazon:
"Working regularly till 2-3AM? I've never seen that even among startups in co-working spaces. The boss screaming at employees at video calls, yet everyone just takes it and nobody immediately quits?"
I don't know who wrote that, but if they've truly never seen such things, that suggests to me that they've been working at places that have a healthy work/life balance, and I think such places (in the startup world) are more common now than 7 years ago.
I created the first rough draft of the book simply by copying-and-pasting text from Slack messages and email. Even after editing, 80% of the final copy was based on text written at the time of the incidents. There are no exaggerations in the book. And yet I think the culture I describe is fading away (which is probably a good thing).
The last few startups I've consulted with have all emphasized work/life balance, and I'd like to think that startups in general are moving towards supporting a more sustainable lifestyle for their employees.
Having said that, I recognize, the world will always have ambitious people who work 100 hours a week because they are trying to get ahead. The question, always, is whether such people have a right to ask others to also work 100 hours a week.
Three years ago I was at a company where the ceo called a special all hands to discuss work life balance, and his message was that we do not need to respond to slack/email on the weekends… immediately! Hahaha
A bit amusing to see the article and think "they really could have summed it up as "show, don't tell", aka the old sage writer's advice. :)
Some very good points made in the article, glad I read. I admit the personal instagram would be a huge turnoff for me since it shows ("shows") that there's not an expectation for work sphere and personal life sphere to be airgapped. Then again maybe that's the kind of person they're trying to filter out.
When I ran my bootstrapped company, I had lots of equity and little money. I couldn’t get people interested in the equity. They didn’t understand it & they certainly didn’t want it. I certainly couldn’t afford to pay market rates. Two things worked for me.
The first being I was hiring in 2010, and a lot of people where looking for meaningful opportunities that weren’t dead end minimum wage jobs. Honestly, this was probably the biggest factor.
The second thing was I offered training, health insurance, and sold the vision of how working for me was a great way to break into the industry & better paying jobs, which was true. I told people up front that we’d charge clients $100/hour & pay them $20/hour. I let them work at home with flexible hours, didn’t demand any sort of loyalty, and I generally left them alone if they were getting the work done. This type of opportunity was quite appealing to people who were the job-primary income earners & they were looking for a chance to start a new career. Several people who worked for me went on to work in the field themselves, and I was happy for them.
We've had really good luck just telling the truth. I'm 2 for 2 on targeted hires (where we found them and landed them) this year. Being radically honest really pays off when it comes to talent.
(you do have to have a good story and good place to work)
Two points: first, I look at their t-shirt statement about what they do and decide on the spot whether I am interested. Like a pitch deck. I don't even care what the job is, I'm just interested in the statement, "making X for Y's," and maaabeeey "with Z." That's 98% of what I need to know. Second, advice to a startup about how to attract you is like asking fish how to catch them, and they always say, "send more worms!" If I'm hiring for a startup, I need to find believers in my mission (or me) with a positive attitude and the minimum viable skills to execute on it - or people cheap enough I can afford to pay a second set of hires to finish what the first ones screw up.
If you will work for a fridge full of kombucha and some lottery tickets because your boss tolerates your alarming haircut, that's really amazing, but it seems like succeeding against a fabricated constraint. What do you win? You are basically haircut-rich, meaning a person who does surprisingly better than anyone observing their most apparent life choices would expect. I say this from some pretty cringey personal youthful experience.
Growth is attractive, you can't fake it, there is no substitute for it, money can't buy it, and everybody knows it when they see it. These tips are nice, but taken together, they're bike shedding.
It's weird, this is an advertisement for these companies, but I would only mainly care about point 4 ("the business"), and company values. The rest seem immature, like from the perspective of someone just leaving college looking for a job that really "vibes" with them, but don't know how to evaluate companies for real substance.
How "fun" / "x" a founder is likely won't correlate with the success of the business, in fact could be a negative. Teams change frequently from turnover especially in the bay area and especially in startups, so "the team" and these detailed team bios will quickly become stale. Same for the "culture" built on that team.
Your peer group return on investment is one of the strongest measures you can use to show value generation. Although most investors are familiar with this calculation, businesses that don't encounter it frequently could find it to be more complicated. The numbers and concepts of investing math are straightforward, but getting there needs extensive analysis, to reiterate.
Use the procedure outlined below to demonstrate to investors that you are adding value, whether you are assessing these indicators on your own or with the help of outside counsel.
At some point, it became acceptable to post hand-drawn diagrams with illegible handwriting. If you don't care about presenting information clearly, I don't care about what you have to say.
HR Tech company founder here. When you advertise a competitive salary in your job, you can expet 18% more people to apply for that job. This is across all job boards we've tried. Research is across 450,000 job applicants for 13,200 jobs:
Top 3 things you can do to get more/better candidates:
1. Include salary in job ads (and make sure it's competitive) 18% more applies.
2. Talk to every applicant as quickly as you can and certainly before resume screening 14.4% of resumes we checked had an inaccuracy that would have resulted in a screenout. By talking first, you can find and fix these problems and keep some very good talent in the pipe.
3. Remove unnecessary qualifications and preferences. Removing "degree perferred" where it doesn't matter can get 8% more applies. Removing bad technical requirements can make a huge difference, too. No one has 20 years of Docker expeirence.
>3. Remove unnecessary qualifications and preferences. Removing "degree perferred" where it doesn't matter can get 8% more applies. Removing bad technical requirements can make a huge difference, too. No one has 20 years of Docker expeirence.
Does this have a disproportionate effect along gender lines?
A YC founder I’m in the same WhatsApp group with said "I've seen roughly 10x the volume of high quality senior+ applications after doing this a few times now"
I want to really like the people, as I've discovered my life is way more boring otherwise. I spend 8-10h/day working, I need to be able to laugh and make other people laugh and have interesting conversations. I'd love to make friends out of it. People often tell me don't rely on work for that, but the time investment is too steep not to use it as a social outlet.
I also want to know the actual work. Not the buzzwords, or the product name, or fast paced industry, but the actual initiatives for the next year. Crank out new features for mobile app? Not my skill set. Typical oncall rotation? Nah.
I'm shocked how many companies are willing to start the interview process immediately. I decline until I have at least an hour convo with who would be my manager.
As per the article, yes more blogging helps but how do I know it's genuine and not marketing bs? I don't.