10 ms·

Right now it seems like there are two reasons for creating a company. One is for making a profitable business that creates wealth for the people invested. Two i

Right now it seems like there are two reasons for creating a company. One is for making a profitable business that creates wealth for the people invested. Two is for creating a product or service that customers need or want. These two revolve around servicing those invested, or the consumers of the product/service, or both. It's surprising to me that no one starts a company solely for creating an amazing place to work. A great workplace and work would be the product/service, and the employees the consumers of the product/service. Sure, you would have to have paying customers to fuel it, but that could always be secondary in some sense. Right now it seems like the workplace is secondary, so why not swap it? I'm sure there are a nice subset of people who would take less (even half) of their current salary just to work in a place that revolves around them and their experience working.. which is the majority of most of our days. Viable? Probably not, but it's interesting to think about and trying to imagine what that place would look like for you personally.

kbenson 10y ago
I think the reason it doesn't appear people are creating businesses to be a great place to work, is because if it's created for that purpose, you probably want to get as many people as possible working there to they can share in the happiness. How do you do that? Grow. From the outside, it can look just like any other company trying to grow. Are they adding perks because they need to attract talent so they can compete and grow for growth's sake, or are they adding perks because they think the employees deserve them and also just trying to grow?
ghaff 10y ago
You have to get pretty high up in salary level before at least roughly competitive salary isn't a tier one factor for most people. And, even then, salary is often taken as a proxy for overall value--see pro athletes, for example.
telotortium 10y ago
Don't forget these crucial categories: - Solving interesting (to the founders) problems - Social club (the most relevant to your proposal) - Ego trip - Nepotism - Tax dodge In all seriousness, I support your point that companies are founded for more than just to make money, even though (most) companies ultimately need to make money.
gnaritas 10y ago
> It's surprising to me that no one starts a company solely for creating an amazing place to work. They do, they're called lifestyle businesses and tons of people do them. You simply don't hear about them because the valley (thus VC money) is generally about Unicorns, not regular businesses.
- rhizome 10y ago
  They're also called names like, "Smuckers." http://www.marcgunther.com/sustainable-smuckers-its-all-in-the-family/ http://www.marcgunther.com/sustainable-smuckers-its-all-in-t... I bet there are a lot of amazing or pretty darn good places to work in whatever that 37 Signals thing is that interviews companies who have been in business for a long time. Found it: https://thedistance.com/ https://thedistance.com/
- DarkTree 10y ago
  Oh yeah you're right. I definitely hear about lifestyle business all of the time, but I was always under the impression that they were trying to sell you a lifestyle instead of a product/service. I didn't know they were actually trying to create the lifestyle for themselves.
  - saluki 10y ago
    On that note I have to post one of my favorite talks. @DHH Startup School 2008 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY Still inspiring, still relevant eight years later.
    - VelNZ 10y ago
      Thanks so much for this, as someone making just "a nice italian website in the web space", it's comforting to hear this rarely heard logical approach.
  - zeemonkee3 10y ago
    They're not trying to create a lifestyle, they're just running a small to medium sized regular business. "Lifestyle business" is just an idiotic Valley term.
my_first_acct 10y ago
I seem to recall that that was one of Joel Spolsky's intentions when he created Fog Creek Software ( https://www.fogcreek.com/about/ https://www.fogcreek.com/about/ )
- billpaetzke 10y ago
  Yes. In the early days, we were all about making a great place to be a software developer in New York City. Yep, that was all there was to it... I...decided to start a company with my buddy Michael Pryor. Making a nice place to work was our primary objective. We had private offices, flew first class, worked 40 hour weeks... The tagline was “building the company where the best software developers want to work.” Source: Figuring out what your company is all about [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/11/01.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/11/01.html]
tyre 10y ago
Businesses are a means to an end. Personally, we are building a company[1] to have an impact. Profit is part of that, since how large of an impact is correlated with the number of customers we can serve which requires certain fixed costs (e.g. salaries.) Profits also allow a company to weather market fluctuations and be free of the hype-cycles of investors. The product or service are equally means to an end. Building a CRM for local government isn't a goal in or of itself. We don't win when the code is shipped or even when the customer buys it, only when we affect change on the world. The one thing required to do that is people. And not just anyone is passionate about empowering public servants (which is pefectly fine.) So, in fact, creating a great place to work _is_ one of the few things we build the company around. At the end of the day, it all comes back to human happiness. Not the spurts of dopamine from Candy Crush or Snapchat, but real fulfillment. (Check out our values[2] and employee handbook[3] for how we put that into action.) When I was younger, my dad used to always ask me, "What is your goal in life?" I'd say stupid things like a Ferrari or a big house and he would ask "Why?" Because I wanted to drive fast or have room for toys and video games. "Why?" And so on... All of those "Why"s led to one answer: My goal in life was to be happy. Everything else is a means to that end. That's why a few of the things I listed in the original comment had little to do with product or profit. Build something you're proud of, for no other reason than that you have to live with yourself. Do the right thing. It's harder, but you'll make people, most of all yourself, happy. And if you die in 30, 40, or 2 years having made a bunch of people happy, I think that sounds pretty great. [1]: http://seneca.systems http://seneca.systems [2]: http://seneca.systems/values http://seneca.systems/values [3]: https://Github.com/senecasystems/employee_handbook https://Github.com/senecasystems/employee_handbook [EDIT] - added a story from my childhood
- lgieron 10y ago
  > Personally, we are building a company[1] to have an impact. Profit is part of that, since how large of an impact is correlated with the number of customers we can serve which requires certain fixed costs (e.g. salaries.) Profits also allow a company to weather market fluctuations and be free of the hype-cycles of investors. You don't need a company - the same goals can be achieved by a non-profit. The main difference between a non-profit and a company is that the company's owners are allowed to pay themselves dividends from the profit. If you don't care about that, you'd probably be better off with a non-profit.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
znq 10y ago
> It's surprising to me that no one starts a company solely for creating an amazing place to work. I know at least one company who did that: Mobile Jazz. I started that company in 2009, initially as a freelancer, because I wanted to focus on lifestyle, rather than business success and I wanted to surround myself with other smart people, but also such that have a similar philosophy in life. We're now a 20 people company with our HQ in Barcelona. However, everyone is allowed to work from wherever they want and (if it is planned properly in advance) also as much as they want. Some of us travel a lot. I've been "homeless" for 2 years now and spend most of my time living out of a camper van: https://i.imgur.com/qZy6Vkd.jpg https://i.imgur.com/qZy6Vkd.jpg One of our employees is currently taking 1 year around-the-world trip with his wife, not rushing, but settling down at least 1 month at each place in order to work comfortably. I've just met up with them in Bali. On top of our personal freedom and travels we also organize about 3 company events per year, which are voluntary to attend. Some examples: * Remote office in Thailand: https://mobilejazz.com/blog/working-remotely-from-a-tropical-island-in-thailand/ https://mobilejazz.com/blog/working-remotely-from-a-tropical... * Skiing in the Alps: https://mobilejazz.com/blog/why-we-decided-to-stop-the-company-for-a-week-to-enjoy-a-magnificent-winter-holiday-in-the-austrian-alps/ https://mobilejazz.com/blog/why-we-decided-to-stop-the-compa... * Summer Camp in the Spanish Pyrenees: https://mobilejazz.com/blog/work-life-balance-in-the-spanish-pyrenees/ https://mobilejazz.com/blog/work-life-balance-in-the-spanish... * Remote office in Cape Town (blog post pending) * Remote office in Martinique (coming up this fall) We pay everyone the same salary (a fair basic salary), but the interesting thing is that every quarter we share a huge chunk of our profit with everyone in the team through bonuses. We've managed to build an amazing team, hiring mostly through our personal network. Same goes for our clients. We are doing zero sales, but all the work we get comes through word of mouth. And we're constantly overbooked. We're fully transparent with what we do and even share it with our clients in a monthly newsletter. Now, the funny thing is, they love it. They sometimes even tell us, that they want to stop hire us and they want to start working for us ;-) By giving my team a lot of freedom and trust, they've learned how to be responsible and act as if would be there business. I can even trust them so much that I just took of a whole month from my role as the CEO and voluntarily worked on a sailing boat crossing the South Pacific from Micronesia to New Caledonia: https://goo.gl/KPXI21 https://goo.gl/KPXI21 Happy to answer any questions :-) EDIT: for completion, we're mostly a consulting/services company: http://mobilejazz.com/ http://mobilejazz.com/ - but we also run a couple of our own products, e.g. https://bugfender.com/ https://bugfender.com/ and https://mobilejazz.com/products/enterprise-push-technology https://mobilejazz.com/products/enterprise-push-technology
nostrademons 10y ago
Google tries (tried? it's been a couple years, and the culture was changing when I left) very hard to do that, and they actually have the money spigot to make it work (for the most part). The problem with the idea in general is that money usually flows from the party deriving the benefit to the party providing it. So if the company's top priority really was to provide a great place to work, then logically, the employees should be paying it to work there. Indeed, places that are often considered great places to work (Google, Palantir, Fog Creek, philanthropy, non-profits, education) are often notorious for underpaying their workers relative to where they could employ their skills elsewhere. If a company took this to the logical extreme - making the employees the consumers of the product/service - then it would cease to be "work", and would instead be a "hobby/internship/volunteer/education/experience".
- tyre 10y ago
  The last example you were looking for is "country club."
  - quaz3l 10y ago
    I think we could also go with coworking space!
- lazaroclapp 10y ago
  Aren't incubators, cooperatives and co-working spaces closer to what it is being described here? As in, the idea is to provide favorable working conditions for people / teams that are making money from their own efforts and who pay for that environment (in cash, membership dues, stock, whatever). The institution itself is in the business of giving the teams within it the best possible working conditions given available resources. However, the catch is that the income of the teams doesn't come from the institution, but rather the other way around.
- noname123 10y ago
  >If a company took this to the logical extreme - making the employees the consumers of the product/service - then it would cease to be "work", and would instead be a "hobby/internship/volunteer/education/experience". I think there are a few places where you can fight for this experience. One at a (extremely well-funded) University lab where you are paid a Software Engineer salary to work on computational research problems. Two at a (extremely lenient) company where you are allowed the freedom. like 50% time to take classes on company-time and company-dime and/or pursue your own open source projects that tickles personal intellectual interest, not the company's production needs. I will however add, being at a place that does offer a 20% time and tuition credit to take your own independent class of choosing, attend journal club/internal machine-learning and algorithm group classes or pursue a open-source project. It is very very hard to take the initiative because it's much easier just to cruise and do 80% of the work in the 100% allotted time. Especially after the first year of novelty of given the opportunity. So regardless of wherever your workplace, I think whether a person really pushes their own intellectual boundaries is more the person's aptitude to apply themselves than their work environment/culture.
bootload 10y ago
"It's surprising to me that no one starts a company solely for creating an amazing place to work. " An interesting dynamic of startups. You try to build a great place to work at, [0] and in building that startup you screw it up by building a bigger company. [1] [0] "Managing Software Engineers" ~ http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/managing-software-engineers http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/managing-softwar... [1] "ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up" ~ http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/ http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/
- slededit 10y ago
  The author of your first link has an obsession with overworking his employees. "If you see one of your best people walking out the door at 6:00 pm, try to think why you haven't challenged that person with an interesting project." "This means that if you want to follow the best practices of the industry in terms of design and architecture, the only way to improve speed to market is to have the same people working longer hours." Software development is inherently creative. Employees need external stimuli to be effective.
  - douche 10y ago
    It's generally the case that you can't work on anything truly interesting or challenging until after 6pm anyway -9-5 gets chewed up so badly by all the bullshit, meetings, email, and noisy salespeople yelling into their phones, that the real work can't get done until everybody goes home and some peace and quiet can be obtained. 3 hours of focused work with no distractions is worth at least 3 typical work days.
    - eru 10y ago
      Just say no to meetings. As an employee for your own calendar, and as a startup founder for the whole company.
      - disgruntledphd2 10y ago
        I block off three mornings a week, and all day Friday for "actual work". I like to start early, and have no desire to work till 9pm (sometimes it happens, but it will be at home and because I really want to finish something). Most people are pretty accommodating (and I work with lots of very noisy salespeople).
bonniemuffin 10y ago
I've "worked" on large volunteer-run art projects, and it's a lot like what you're describing. It's like a regular business with a hierarchy and people working various job titles, except that no one gets paid, and we're all just there for the delightful "work culture". We're inspired to bust ass, and we really do work incredibly hard; it's just that we get "paid" in personal fulfillment and camaraderie rather than in money. Unfortunately we haven't figured out how to turn this stuff into a revenue-generating vehicle that would allow our "staff" to be paid in actual currency.
igreus 10y ago
Have you seen public sector organisations?
ams6110 10y ago
I don't think you understand what business is at all if you think that making an "amazing place to work" can be the primary reason for starting a company. You have to create value that customers will pay for. They don't give a rat's ass about your workplace. See iPhone.
- saeranv 10y ago
  You have misunderstood the parent post.
joshkpeterson 10y ago
There are companies that do this. Typically they're smaller - you probably haven't heard of them.
dmead 10y ago
this is a terrible idea.
pjungwir 10y ago
I think it's completely viable, although probably less so with VC funds. I plug this book a lot on HN, but in Managing the Professional Service Firm, David Maister talks about how a firm has 3 goals that must stay in balance: profit, job satisfaction, and client happiness. If any part is neglected, things will fall apart. In the long run, job satisfaction is not even a "nice to have," because if your employees (or you!) are unhappy, they are going to be more expensive, and they will damage your customer relationships. I know personally as I am trying to get a development partnership off the ground, enjoyment of the work and the team is a huge consideration.
mooreds 10y ago
> no one starts a company solely for creating an amazing place to work. I have some friends who did exactly that. Their company is a small consulting firm that focuses on a rather uninteresting space (enterprise content management) but they have a small profitable company where hires are treated right. The "problem" with these kinds of companies is that you are never going to read about them on HN, they aren't a lottery ticket for the employees, and the work is not that sexy. However, I have several other friends who are employed by said company and have been there for years because it is a great place to work.
Corrado 10y ago
I've often thought about starting a think tank business that would be similar to this thought. Basically, it would employ people to think up new things, whatever they wanted, and then we would sell those ideas/patents. Sort of like Google's 20% time only at 100%. No idea if it would work, but it would be a great place to work.
- smaddox 10y ago
  Intellectual Ventures had done this. It only provides value to the employees/owners, though. Ideas/patents are worthless without the right person/people to execute.
collyw 10y ago
You are looking at the wrong jobs. My office used to be the rivers Inn and Oetz in the Austrian Alps, when I worked as a rafting guide and it was an amazing place to work. It just doesn't pay much.
SpaceCadetJones 10y ago
I wonder if a software shop structured as a co-operative would be good for this. Let the employees themselves control the workplace and set it up as they see fit. I know I'd personally be a lot more invested in my workplace if I had a direct voice in how it functions and the direction we move in.

kbenson 10y ago

I think the reason it doesn't appear people are creating businesses to be a great place to work, is because if it's created for that purpose, you probably want to get as many people as possible working there to they can share in the happiness. How do you do that? Grow. From the outside, it can look just like any other company trying to grow. Are they adding perks because they need to attract talent so they can compete and grow for growth's sake, or are they adding perks because they think the employees deserve them and also just trying to grow?

ghaff 10y ago

You have to get pretty high up in salary level before at least roughly competitive salary isn't a tier one factor for most people. And, even then, salary is often taken as a proxy for overall value--see pro athletes, for example.

telotortium 10y ago

Don't forget these crucial categories: - Solving interesting (to the founders) problems - Social club (the most relevant to your proposal) - Ego trip - Nepotism - Tax dodge In all seriousness, I support your point that companies are founded for more than just to make money, even though (most) companies ultimately need to make money.

gnaritas 10y ago

> It's surprising to me that no one starts a company solely for creating an amazing place to work. They do, they're called lifestyle businesses and tons of people do them. You simply don't hear about them because the valley (thus VC money) is generally about Unicorns, not regular businesses.

rhizome 10y ago
They're also called names like, "Smuckers." http://www.marcgunther.com/sustainable-smuckers-its-all-in-the-family/ http://www.marcgunther.com/sustainable-smuckers-its-all-in-t... I bet there are a lot of amazing or pretty darn good places to work in whatever that 37 Signals thing is that interviews companies who have been in business for a long time. Found it: https://thedistance.com/ https://thedistance.com/
DarkTree 10y ago
Oh yeah you're right. I definitely hear about lifestyle business all of the time, but I was always under the impression that they were trying to sell you a lifestyle instead of a product/service. I didn't know they were actually trying to create the lifestyle for themselves.
- saluki 10y ago
  On that note I have to post one of my favorite talks. @DHH Startup School 2008 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY Still inspiring, still relevant eight years later.
  - VelNZ 10y ago
    Thanks so much for this, as someone making just "a nice italian website in the web space", it's comforting to hear this rarely heard logical approach.
- zeemonkee3 10y ago
  They're not trying to create a lifestyle, they're just running a small to medium sized regular business. "Lifestyle business" is just an idiotic Valley term.

my_first_acct 10y ago

I seem to recall that that was one of Joel Spolsky's intentions when he created Fog Creek Software ( https://www.fogcreek.com/about/ https://www.fogcreek.com/about/ )

billpaetzke 10y ago
Yes. In the early days, we were all about making a great place to be a software developer in New York City. Yep, that was all there was to it... I...decided to start a company with my buddy Michael Pryor. Making a nice place to work was our primary objective. We had private offices, flew first class, worked 40 hour weeks... The tagline was “building the company where the best software developers want to work.” Source: Figuring out what your company is all about [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/11/01.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/11/01.html]

tyre 10y ago

Businesses are a means to an end. Personally, we are building a company[1] to have an impact. Profit is part of that, since how large of an impact is correlated with the number of customers we can serve which requires certain fixed costs (e.g. salaries.) Profits also allow a company to weather market fluctuations and be free of the hype-cycles of investors. The product or service are equally means to an end. Building a CRM for local government isn't a goal in or of itself. We don't win when the code is shipped or even when the customer buys it, only when we affect change on the world. The one thing required to do that is people. And not just anyone is passionate about empowering public servants (which is pefectly fine.) So, in fact, creating a great place to work _is_ one of the few things we build the company around. At the end of the day, it all comes back to human happiness. Not the spurts of dopamine from Candy Crush or Snapchat, but real fulfillment. (Check out our values[2] and employee handbook[3] for how we put that into action.) When I was younger, my dad used to always ask me, "What is your goal in life?" I'd say stupid things like a Ferrari or a big house and he would ask "Why?" Because I wanted to drive fast or have room for toys and video games. "Why?" And so on... All of those "Why"s led to one answer: My goal in life was to be happy. Everything else is a means to that end. That's why a few of the things I listed in the original comment had little to do with product or profit. Build something you're proud of, for no other reason than that you have to live with yourself. Do the right thing. It's harder, but you'll make people, most of all yourself, happy. And if you die in 30, 40, or 2 years having made a bunch of people happy, I think that sounds pretty great. [1]: http://seneca.systems http://seneca.systems [2]: http://seneca.systems/values http://seneca.systems/values [3]: https://Github.com/senecasystems/employee_handbook https://Github.com/senecasystems/employee_handbook [EDIT] - added a story from my childhood

lgieron 10y ago
> Personally, we are building a company[1] to have an impact. Profit is part of that, since how large of an impact is correlated with the number of customers we can serve which requires certain fixed costs (e.g. salaries.) Profits also allow a company to weather market fluctuations and be free of the hype-cycles of investors. You don't need a company - the same goals can be achieved by a non-profit. The main difference between a non-profit and a company is that the company's owners are allowed to pay themselves dividends from the profit. If you don't care about that, you'd probably be better off with a non-profit.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

znq 10y ago

> It's surprising to me that no one starts a company solely for creating an amazing place to work. I know at least one company who did that: Mobile Jazz. I started that company in 2009, initially as a freelancer, because I wanted to focus on lifestyle, rather than business success and I wanted to surround myself with other smart people, but also such that have a similar philosophy in life. We're now a 20 people company with our HQ in Barcelona. However, everyone is allowed to work from wherever they want and (if it is planned properly in advance) also as much as they want. Some of us travel a lot. I've been "homeless" for 2 years now and spend most of my time living out of a camper van: https://i.imgur.com/qZy6Vkd.jpg https://i.imgur.com/qZy6Vkd.jpg One of our employees is currently taking 1 year around-the-world trip with his wife, not rushing, but settling down at least 1 month at each place in order to work comfortably. I've just met up with them in Bali. On top of our personal freedom and travels we also organize about 3 company events per year, which are voluntary to attend. Some examples: * Remote office in Thailand: https://mobilejazz.com/blog/working-remotely-from-a-tropical-island-in-thailand/ https://mobilejazz.com/blog/working-remotely-from-a-tropical... * Skiing in the Alps: https://mobilejazz.com/blog/why-we-decided-to-stop-the-company-for-a-week-to-enjoy-a-magnificent-winter-holiday-in-the-austrian-alps/ https://mobilejazz.com/blog/why-we-decided-to-stop-the-compa... * Summer Camp in the Spanish Pyrenees: https://mobilejazz.com/blog/work-life-balance-in-the-spanish-pyrenees/ https://mobilejazz.com/blog/work-life-balance-in-the-spanish... * Remote office in Cape Town (blog post pending) * Remote office in Martinique (coming up this fall) We pay everyone the same salary (a fair basic salary), but the interesting thing is that every quarter we share a huge chunk of our profit with everyone in the team through bonuses. We've managed to build an amazing team, hiring mostly through our personal network. Same goes for our clients. We are doing zero sales, but all the work we get comes through word of mouth. And we're constantly overbooked. We're fully transparent with what we do and even share it with our clients in a monthly newsletter. Now, the funny thing is, they love it. They sometimes even tell us, that they want to stop hire us and they want to start working for us ;-) By giving my team a lot of freedom and trust, they've learned how to be responsible and act as if would be there business. I can even trust them so much that I just took of a whole month from my role as the CEO and voluntarily worked on a sailing boat crossing the South Pacific from Micronesia to New Caledonia: https://goo.gl/KPXI21 https://goo.gl/KPXI21 Happy to answer any questions :-) EDIT: for completion, we're mostly a consulting/services company: http://mobilejazz.com/ http://mobilejazz.com/ - but we also run a couple of our own products, e.g. https://bugfender.com/ https://bugfender.com/ and https://mobilejazz.com/products/enterprise-push-technology https://mobilejazz.com/products/enterprise-push-technology

nostrademons 10y ago

Google tries (tried? it's been a couple years, and the culture was changing when I left) very hard to do that, and they actually have the money spigot to make it work (for the most part). The problem with the idea in general is that money usually flows from the party deriving the benefit to the party providing it. So if the company's top priority really was to provide a great place to work, then logically, the employees should be paying it to work there. Indeed, places that are often considered great places to work (Google, Palantir, Fog Creek, philanthropy, non-profits, education) are often notorious for underpaying their workers relative to where they could employ their skills elsewhere. If a company took this to the logical extreme - making the employees the consumers of the product/service - then it would cease to be "work", and would instead be a "hobby/internship/volunteer/education/experience".

tyre 10y ago
The last example you were looking for is "country club."
- quaz3l 10y ago
  I think we could also go with coworking space!
lazaroclapp 10y ago
Aren't incubators, cooperatives and co-working spaces closer to what it is being described here? As in, the idea is to provide favorable working conditions for people / teams that are making money from their own efforts and who pay for that environment (in cash, membership dues, stock, whatever). The institution itself is in the business of giving the teams within it the best possible working conditions given available resources. However, the catch is that the income of the teams doesn't come from the institution, but rather the other way around.
noname123 10y ago
>If a company took this to the logical extreme - making the employees the consumers of the product/service - then it would cease to be "work", and would instead be a "hobby/internship/volunteer/education/experience". I think there are a few places where you can fight for this experience. One at a (extremely well-funded) University lab where you are paid a Software Engineer salary to work on computational research problems. Two at a (extremely lenient) company where you are allowed the freedom. like 50% time to take classes on company-time and company-dime and/or pursue your own open source projects that tickles personal intellectual interest, not the company's production needs. I will however add, being at a place that does offer a 20% time and tuition credit to take your own independent class of choosing, attend journal club/internal machine-learning and algorithm group classes or pursue a open-source project. It is very very hard to take the initiative because it's much easier just to cruise and do 80% of the work in the 100% allotted time. Especially after the first year of novelty of given the opportunity. So regardless of wherever your workplace, I think whether a person really pushes their own intellectual boundaries is more the person's aptitude to apply themselves than their work environment/culture.

bootload 10y ago

"It's surprising to me that no one starts a company solely for creating an amazing place to work. " An interesting dynamic of startups. You try to build a great place to work at, [0] and in building that startup you screw it up by building a bigger company. [1] [0] "Managing Software Engineers" ~ http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/managing-software-engineers http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/managing-softwar... [1] "ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up" ~ http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/ http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/

slededit 10y ago
The author of your first link has an obsession with overworking his employees. "If you see one of your best people walking out the door at 6:00 pm, try to think why you haven't challenged that person with an interesting project." "This means that if you want to follow the best practices of the industry in terms of design and architecture, the only way to improve speed to market is to have the same people working longer hours." Software development is inherently creative. Employees need external stimuli to be effective.
- douche 10y ago
  It's generally the case that you can't work on anything truly interesting or challenging until after 6pm anyway -9-5 gets chewed up so badly by all the bullshit, meetings, email, and noisy salespeople yelling into their phones, that the real work can't get done until everybody goes home and some peace and quiet can be obtained. 3 hours of focused work with no distractions is worth at least 3 typical work days.
  - eru 10y ago
    Just say no to meetings. As an employee for your own calendar, and as a startup founder for the whole company.
    - disgruntledphd2 10y ago
      I block off three mornings a week, and all day Friday for "actual work". I like to start early, and have no desire to work till 9pm (sometimes it happens, but it will be at home and because I really want to finish something). Most people are pretty accommodating (and I work with lots of very noisy salespeople).

bonniemuffin 10y ago

I've "worked" on large volunteer-run art projects, and it's a lot like what you're describing. It's like a regular business with a hierarchy and people working various job titles, except that no one gets paid, and we're all just there for the delightful "work culture". We're inspired to bust ass, and we really do work incredibly hard; it's just that we get "paid" in personal fulfillment and camaraderie rather than in money. Unfortunately we haven't figured out how to turn this stuff into a revenue-generating vehicle that would allow our "staff" to be paid in actual currency.

igreus 10y ago

Have you seen public sector organisations?

ams6110 10y ago

I don't think you understand what business is at all if you think that making an "amazing place to work" can be the primary reason for starting a company. You have to create value that customers will pay for. They don't give a rat's ass about your workplace. See iPhone.

saeranv 10y ago
You have misunderstood the parent post.

joshkpeterson 10y ago

There are companies that do this. Typically they're smaller - you probably haven't heard of them.

dmead 10y ago

this is a terrible idea.

pjungwir 10y ago

I think it's completely viable, although probably less so with VC funds. I plug this book a lot on HN, but in Managing the Professional Service Firm, David Maister talks about how a firm has 3 goals that must stay in balance: profit, job satisfaction, and client happiness. If any part is neglected, things will fall apart. In the long run, job satisfaction is not even a "nice to have," because if your employees (or you!) are unhappy, they are going to be more expensive, and they will damage your customer relationships. I know personally as I am trying to get a development partnership off the ground, enjoyment of the work and the team is a huge consideration.

mooreds 10y ago

> no one starts a company solely for creating an amazing place to work. I have some friends who did exactly that. Their company is a small consulting firm that focuses on a rather uninteresting space (enterprise content management) but they have a small profitable company where hires are treated right. The "problem" with these kinds of companies is that you are never going to read about them on HN, they aren't a lottery ticket for the employees, and the work is not that sexy. However, I have several other friends who are employed by said company and have been there for years because it is a great place to work.

Corrado 10y ago

I've often thought about starting a think tank business that would be similar to this thought. Basically, it would employ people to think up new things, whatever they wanted, and then we would sell those ideas/patents. Sort of like Google's 20% time only at 100%. No idea if it would work, but it would be a great place to work.

smaddox 10y ago
Intellectual Ventures had done this. It only provides value to the employees/owners, though. Ideas/patents are worthless without the right person/people to execute.

collyw 10y ago

You are looking at the wrong jobs. My office used to be the rivers Inn and Oetz in the Austrian Alps, when I worked as a rafting guide and it was an amazing place to work. It just doesn't pay much.

SpaceCadetJones 10y ago

I wonder if a software shop structured as a co-operative would be good for this. Let the employees themselves control the workplace and set it up as they see fit. I know I'd personally be a lot more invested in my workplace if I had a direct voice in how it functions and the direction we move in.