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I was a young employee during a recession, and finding work was difficult. When I landed my first job I was I was grateful and focused on ways I might make my w

by rrggrr 8y ago

I was a young employee during a recession, and finding work was difficult. When I landed my first job I was I was grateful and focused on ways I might make my work contribute to the company's bottom line, by pushing the limits of my job description and tasks to ensure my role impacted revenue and value creation. I appreciated training and feedback, but forced myself to deliver results autonomously through self-teaching and long hours. Perhaps it was because I grew up as the son of a small business owner, or because I worked throughout high school and college, I was closely attuned to the businesses needs and I delivered results that met or exceeded expectations. How do I know? Because as I look back on what is now a long career I can't recall ever having a performance review, a counseling session, or retraining. I only remember anticipating needs and delivering results. Today I have my own company and I try to hire the same type of person. It is a profile increasingly hard to find. Someone who "needs" a review is typically not a good fit for my management style, and someone who can anticipate the needs of my business I try very hard to retain.

drharby 8y ago
I aspire to have this attitude 10 years from now
tudelo 8y ago
It's not surprising it's hard to find. I think it helps if you are working in a place that rewards such initiative. In my experience, it is not always the case. How do you even screen someone for self-teaching and self-motivation by the way?
- bharam 8y ago
  Self-teaching can be measured through asking probing questions about what the candidate does to keep up with new developments in their field. Self-motivation is harder to get at, but sometimes it helps to ask about what the candidate looks for in a role.
make3 8y ago
you essentially want someone who can read your mind
- arcticbull 8y ago
  The best/worst advice I ever received was "you're doing a great job of what I ask you to, now I need you to do what I don't ask you to" -- at the time, it made no sense. Now, it's a core part of my work style. Developing autonomy is a very valuable skill, and I think that's what OP is driving at. It's also not something that'd been developed during my education. I agree that performance reviews aren't particularly helpful because feedback should be delivered as you go, in the moment, with actionable and relevant examples.
  - Swizec 8y ago
    > now I need you to do what I don’t ask you to Now I need you to make me want to. And no that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to reward me, often it’s enough to feel like I won’t get in trouble for going the extra mile, or that at the very least it will be noticed when I do. There’s only so often a person will give suggestions and extra effort to a lukewarm or negative response before they say fuck it and stop caring.
    - mindcrime 8y ago
      There’s only so often a person will give suggestions and extra effort to a lukewarm or negative response before they say fuck it and stop caring. Bingo. I'm happy to put in extra effort, go the extra mile, and try to make things better... until about the second time that my efforts go unacknowledged, unimplemented, unrewarded, etc. At which point, what you'll get from me is "exactly what I'm asked to do, and no more, no less" from there out.
    - iamcasen 8y ago
      That's exactly it. A boss can't ask for initiative, unless they offer autonomy. Autonomy means you might do things differently than your boss would, so they need to be open to listening to you and letting you direct your efforts in the best way you know how.
simplyinfinity 8y ago
How do you distinguish those people during interviews? Are there any specific questions you ask?
- StaticRedux 8y ago
  Not the Op but I hire the same way and there is some questions I like to ask to gauge people's interest in "getting things done". I like to ask about their passions outside of work. Video games? Sports? Communities they may be a part of? I am not looking for passions that align with the company, I am looking for passion itself. Does this person like to dig into the details and figure out how something works and how they can make it better or do they just like something and not show much deeper interest? Do they tinker or try to make things better on the things they are passionate about? Do they even have things they are passionate about? (You'd be surprised how many people can't really answer this question, even in casual conversation.) It's not full proof, but I've found that people that go the extra mile, people that are passionate and inquisitive and not always happy with the status quo, are people that are more likely to take the initiative when working on a project for me. At that point, it's my job to spark their interest in the product so they will (hopefully) apply that passion in the same way.
  - mindhash 8y ago
    >> I am not looking for passions that align with the company, I am looking for passion itself I used to think the same. But over time, i realised passion in other stuff doesn't correlate to passion at work. sometimes they end up being distraction. Also there are people who don't like to share much outside of work. I think more than passion, focus (esp. attention to details) is essential. Someone who understands depth of his/her work is likely to be better learner. For e.g. everyone can use an open source library but underlying working of libraries are explored by a few.
  - gowld 8y ago
    I'm passionate about caring for my family's needs but I'm not excited to go into detail about it with a stranger for an hour as a psychological test.
bitL 8y ago
> I try to hire the same type of person. It is a profile increasingly hard to find. Anyone with your profile should run their own business. It's unrealistic to expect somebody to work long hours, over-deliver for "maybe someday"-promises. People aren't as idealistic as they used to be because they were taken advantage of and learned from it.
- 6cd6beb 8y ago
  Anecdotal but I feel like I'm that kind of person but absolutely don't want to run a business. The worst case scenario of my own business is the whole thing crashing and me having to reorganize my life to accommodate whatever job I can find before my emergency fund runs out. The worst case scenario for being an employee is getting fired. Pretty much the same outcome but much, much harder to hit. If I want to start a family or just have a stable enough career to (essentially) never worry about going broke, I'll take the latter. That personality profile just makes keeping a job as simple as hitting the bare minimum requirements (which you habitually blaze past).
- kyriakos 8y ago
  Not everyone has the skills to run their own business. Some people prefer to be part of a team and not at the top of the pyramid. They get satisfaction by contributing.
  - bitL 8y ago
    It's in their best interest to acquire those skills, or keep being taken advantage of. A binary choice - that's the world we are living in right now.
    - skj 8y ago
      > or keep being taken advantage of Presumably they're getting paid for their work.
      - bitL 8y ago
        OK, you get paid but you have to slow down, play politics, form your/join a clique, because otherwise you become hated by all your colleagues for casting a shadow on them, then be driven slowly out of the company by hiding information from you and spreading rumors about you. In other words, you are wasting the most precious thing you have - time, where you could perform much much better, for some "standard salary". Is that a good bargain?
xenihn 8y ago
>It is a profile increasingly hard to find Only in an employee's market.
lacker 8y ago
Someone who "needs" a review is typically not a good fit for my management style. If your organization gets large enough, then out of necessity, you will have many different managers with many different styles. That is usually the point when a performance review system needs to become more formalized - it's important to be sure that in some ways, all managers are treating their reports similarly, even if it means some of them changing their default management style.
exelius 8y ago
No offense, but this is the kind of thinking that leads to workplace bias. Working styles like this tend to reinforce hiring single, young men who are otherwise unencumbered so they can work long hours and push the envelope of the job description. That leads to a lot of group think, and products that are built for a very small subset of users — so there is real business value in diversity. Reviews are important for someone with whom you don’t share a lot of built in cultural cues. Your experience with this working style has been positive, because you were born and raised speaking the jargon. If they come from a different background, they may not actually know what is important for the company because they haven’t spent their whole life interpreting these cultural cues. This is what we call a “blind spot” — you have had success with your working style, and start to assume it’s the only effective way to do the work. I promise you it is not, and as a manager you should be doing more to communicate needs/value opportunities to your direct reports. Your view of what those are may be different from theirs.
- bkirkby 8y ago
  He spoke about being a young man willing to put in the hours starting out to learn his craft. Yes, the young need to learn a lot after schooling just to keep up. After that, he spoke about figuring out how to provide the most value for the business. I've had a 25+ year career and can verify that everyone should follow this advice. Whatever hidden biases we are concerned about in the workplace, they all pale in comparison to the metric of fulfilling the purpose of the company. It took me a few years to realize that businesses were less interested in paying me because I was smart and could solve hard problems and more interested in how I could measure and move the purposes of the company. The only direct value a manager provides to a company is a regular calibration of employee purpose with the purpose of the business. This is best done with regular 1-on-1s, not through semi-annual reviews. There are other indirect things that a good manager brings to the table which mostly revolve around increasing employee happiness and satisfaction, but all of it pales in comparison to aligning employee and company purpose.
  - exelius 8y ago
    It’s all virtue-signaling in the end, and a manager from the same background is going to be more receptive to virtue-signaling from their own cultural background than from someone with a different background. Formal reviews distill virtue signaling into a standard process with explicit rules rather than an informal set of norms that individuals may or may not be aware of.
gav 8y ago
> I only remember anticipating needs and delivering results. Feedback is a gift. Without people around you to give honest, brutal feedback, you have no idea if you are really doing a good job or not. There's a great podcast episode from Adam Grant's WorkLife about criticism that's worth listening to: https://www.ted.com/talks/worklife_with_adam_grant_dear_billionaire_i_give_you_a_d_minus https://www.ted.com/talks/worklife_with_adam_grant_dear_bill...
internetman55 8y ago
That indicates to me that you're probably a bad manager When I was broke and had no connections, I was willing to work the way you described. Now that I have options, I'm not willing to expend that energy when I could save it for gym, girlfriend, self-education after hours, etc. If I'm broke and need to switch to another industry or you're paying me multiple times my next best offer I'll do that. Otherwise, no, my manager needs to do his job instead of asking me to do it for him That said I'm now entering a graduate school and am willing to do that in this context because I'm intrinsically interested in learning the applied math I'll be working on Software jobs, no You would probably need to hire people who are interested in running their own business im a few years and mentor them towards that end to get that kind of commitment in my opinion
agumonkey 8y ago
I fit this profile a bit, and it's hard to get hired because that quality is not a tag on a resume. Alas it even caused me harm in college, teachers weren't very welcoming my enthusiasm.
- john_moscow 8y ago
  Been there. Learn business or get hurt more. Sorry.
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    or move to the country side and enjoy peace of mind
gowld 8y ago
You find it hard to find someone who works as well as you do but wants to work for less than equal partnership? Interesting.
- TomVDB 8y ago
  Partnership has never been about who works the hardest. It's about who takes (or took) the most risk to get the business started. If the employer pays a generous salary for work done well, I don't see what the problem is.
john_moscow 8y ago
>It is a profile increasingly hard to find. Someone who "needs" a review is typically not a good fit for my management style, and someone who can anticipate the needs of my business I try very hard to retain. Blame the economic cycle. I would assume, your company is self-funded, profitable and being run with efficiency in mind. Unfortunately, in the current economy you just can't compete salary-wise with companies that focus on raising, bloating the headcount, raising more, playing hocus-pocus with the "cost of revenue" line and doing a spectacular exit. And as an employee, if playing a hipster infant who loves his boss and depends on him pays 2x more than hard work and initiative, well, I'm sorry to say that, but I'll go where the money is. That said, you might be able to find that type if you offer more equity or some revenue-based incentives or look into partnering with other small business owners rather than trying to find someone to work under you.
mdip 8y ago
> Today I have my own company and I try to hire the same type of person. You're getting a lot of crap for this statement ranging from it being a bias dog-whistle to it being an indicator that you're expecting too much. I didn't find either to be the case in reading what you wrote. My dad, too, was a business owner and growing up he pushed the same kinds of values onto me. He married my mom at 19, moved out of a two-bedroom house with 7 siblings (he never had his own room, slept on the living room couch), took a job as a union construction worker out of high-school, attended college up to his senior year but didn't graduate and ended up starting a manufacturing business supporting the automotive industry in Detroit. He's wealthy and retired, now. I started a few businesses, but decided against them over time and realized that I really didn't like the whole "running a business". I like to write software and learning about technology and programming. Anything that takes me away from that makes me less happy. The ancillary (taxes, accounting, management, etc) that owning a business entails wasn't for me. I "put in long hours"[0], but I like to spend those hours doing the one specific thing that I love doing and I'm paid well enough that I have no desire to strike out on my own in the hopes that I can make buckets more (but in the greater likelihood that I'll have less reliable income). As for the bias dog-whistle of these sorts of traits belonging only to white, young, men ... I find those statements to be curiously biased, as well. I have worked at several different companies on teams with women and men of both races and ages ranging from around 25 to around 57 -- yes, in tech, in Detroit. I haven't found that these traits vary based on race, gender or even age. The hardest working manager (which I wrote about in my last comment on this post) was almost 60, the guy I routinely went to when I desperately needed something to actually get "done" was a soft-spoken PoC gentleman of around 30 and when a technical project manager was forced upon me, I begged for a very overworked black woman on the PM team[1]. Anecdotal as my experiences are even social class wasn't a particular limiting factor -- I used to get advice from the "soft-spoken gentleman"[2] about kids and he revealed to me that he was the only of his brothers and sisters to go to college, that he's been pushing that on his kids and that his parents and his family ridiculed (and still ridicule) him for choosing to seek higher education. Sure, there's no denying that women (of a certain age) get pregnant and that this is a problem for some business owners. It's never been a problem at any of the places that I have worked, personally, but I can imagine it does happen despite it being both illegal (and morally wrong IMHO). Outside of that, I often wonder if the over-sensitivity to "bias" ends up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. My dad's company was interesting -- they were often the coordinator among several small business to outfit a large manufacturing operation. As a result, during my childhood, I spent a lot of time around a lot of small business owners. Every one of my father's many friends was a business contact and owner of some other outfit. Many of them were old enough to have grown up at a time when casual racism and sexism was normal, my father in particular. My parents raised us in a manner that when I first entered the real world, I was surprised that there were still people out there who thought that way. Growing up around these business owners I knew one thing about hiring, the concerns "Can the person do the job to the level I expect and at a price I can afford to pay them?" and "Good God, payroll taxes are expensive!" Of the business owners, only one had hiring practices that were unusual, and possibly illegal -- this was a manufacturer who had only women working at his plant. I'm not sure if it was intentional or it just worked out that way, but I do know that he synchronized schedules with the elementary, junior and high schools, the work was light-weight assembly, paid minimum wage, and AFAIK, all of his employees were former stay-at-home moms. [0] I do that a lot less, now, but that's mainly because the job that I have doesn't require that of me. That doesn't necessarily mean I don't put in long hours, I just put those extra hours into projects that I want to work on instead of projects that my job wants me to work on. [1] So did everyone else, which was why she was so over worked. [2] I know he reads HN so I'm avoiding his name on purpose -- he's still a friend and I don't have permission to tell this story. The "soft-spoken" bit comes from a conversation I had with him about being more assertive. He'll know who he is and can out himself if he wants to.
privacypoller 8y ago
What exactly is your management style then? A review doesn't need to be the typical corporate slog - it's simply feedback comparing reality with plans and execution. It let's you know if (a) your planning is any good and (b) your execution was successful. Looking for someone to "anticipate the needs of my business" is great, but how do you respond to someone who makes a mistake or pursues a strategy different from your ideal? Do you fire them on the spot like the emperor or learn from it. If it's the later, I got news for you; you're doing reviews. "I delivered results that met or exceeded expectations." Gee - wouldn't it be nice to know this without waiting 20+ years to look back and assess the entire composition of your career? It's also super handy to self-assess with the eroding benefit of time. The most brutal performance assessment I ever had radically changed the trajectory of my life, and looking back on others who stayed the same path shows it was ultimately net-positive for me. You seem pretty satisfied with how things have turned out, but just imagine what you could have accomplished with a little feedback, such a waste of potential...
rhizome 8y ago
I empathize with a lot of this, but man...you gotta tell people when they do a good job. By "good job" I mean that they did work that furthered the goals of the people who lead the company (since companies per se don't have goals).
Cakez0r 8y ago
Any way I can get in touch with you?
qz3 8y ago
It may be increasingly hard to find because employees see things differently now. It's a job market. My employer wants me to put in overtime and go out of my way to improve the company? Great, let's go. But I demand appropriate compensation. I think that's a reasonable position. My company treats me as a human resource, I treat my company like my client who writes checks for the work I put in.
bvc35 8y ago
It sounds like you want an employee to take on the responsibilities of a company owner without actually making them an owner, giving them stock, or giving them proper incentives. The problem is not with the labor market, it's with your sense of entitlement to your employee's skills. Employees no longer act the way they used to because modern companies more regularly dispose of employees when it suits them. If you want employees to act the way you want, either give them stock, pay them significantly more, or give them long term, multi-year employment contracts. If you expect to get something (employees going above and beyond) for nothing, you are entitled.

by rrggrr 8y ago

drharby 8y ago

I aspire to have this attitude 10 years from now

tudelo 8y ago

It's not surprising it's hard to find. I think it helps if you are working in a place that rewards such initiative. In my experience, it is not always the case. How do you even screen someone for self-teaching and self-motivation by the way?

bharam 8y ago
Self-teaching can be measured through asking probing questions about what the candidate does to keep up with new developments in their field. Self-motivation is harder to get at, but sometimes it helps to ask about what the candidate looks for in a role.

make3 8y ago

you essentially want someone who can read your mind

arcticbull 8y ago
The best/worst advice I ever received was "you're doing a great job of what I ask you to, now I need you to do what I don't ask you to" -- at the time, it made no sense. Now, it's a core part of my work style. Developing autonomy is a very valuable skill, and I think that's what OP is driving at. It's also not something that'd been developed during my education. I agree that performance reviews aren't particularly helpful because feedback should be delivered as you go, in the moment, with actionable and relevant examples.
- Swizec 8y ago
  > now I need you to do what I don’t ask you to Now I need you to make me want to. And no that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to reward me, often it’s enough to feel like I won’t get in trouble for going the extra mile, or that at the very least it will be noticed when I do. There’s only so often a person will give suggestions and extra effort to a lukewarm or negative response before they say fuck it and stop caring.
  - mindcrime 8y ago
    There’s only so often a person will give suggestions and extra effort to a lukewarm or negative response before they say fuck it and stop caring. Bingo. I'm happy to put in extra effort, go the extra mile, and try to make things better... until about the second time that my efforts go unacknowledged, unimplemented, unrewarded, etc. At which point, what you'll get from me is "exactly what I'm asked to do, and no more, no less" from there out.
  - iamcasen 8y ago
    That's exactly it. A boss can't ask for initiative, unless they offer autonomy. Autonomy means you might do things differently than your boss would, so they need to be open to listening to you and letting you direct your efforts in the best way you know how.

simplyinfinity 8y ago

How do you distinguish those people during interviews? Are there any specific questions you ask?

StaticRedux 8y ago
Not the Op but I hire the same way and there is some questions I like to ask to gauge people's interest in "getting things done". I like to ask about their passions outside of work. Video games? Sports? Communities they may be a part of? I am not looking for passions that align with the company, I am looking for passion itself. Does this person like to dig into the details and figure out how something works and how they can make it better or do they just like something and not show much deeper interest? Do they tinker or try to make things better on the things they are passionate about? Do they even have things they are passionate about? (You'd be surprised how many people can't really answer this question, even in casual conversation.) It's not full proof, but I've found that people that go the extra mile, people that are passionate and inquisitive and not always happy with the status quo, are people that are more likely to take the initiative when working on a project for me. At that point, it's my job to spark their interest in the product so they will (hopefully) apply that passion in the same way.
- mindhash 8y ago
  >> I am not looking for passions that align with the company, I am looking for passion itself I used to think the same. But over time, i realised passion in other stuff doesn't correlate to passion at work. sometimes they end up being distraction. Also there are people who don't like to share much outside of work. I think more than passion, focus (esp. attention to details) is essential. Someone who understands depth of his/her work is likely to be better learner. For e.g. everyone can use an open source library but underlying working of libraries are explored by a few.
- gowld 8y ago
  I'm passionate about caring for my family's needs but I'm not excited to go into detail about it with a stranger for an hour as a psychological test.

bitL 8y ago

> I try to hire the same type of person. It is a profile increasingly hard to find. Anyone with your profile should run their own business. It's unrealistic to expect somebody to work long hours, over-deliver for "maybe someday"-promises. People aren't as idealistic as they used to be because they were taken advantage of and learned from it.

6cd6beb 8y ago
Anecdotal but I feel like I'm that kind of person but absolutely don't want to run a business. The worst case scenario of my own business is the whole thing crashing and me having to reorganize my life to accommodate whatever job I can find before my emergency fund runs out. The worst case scenario for being an employee is getting fired. Pretty much the same outcome but much, much harder to hit. If I want to start a family or just have a stable enough career to (essentially) never worry about going broke, I'll take the latter. That personality profile just makes keeping a job as simple as hitting the bare minimum requirements (which you habitually blaze past).
kyriakos 8y ago
Not everyone has the skills to run their own business. Some people prefer to be part of a team and not at the top of the pyramid. They get satisfaction by contributing.
- bitL 8y ago
  It's in their best interest to acquire those skills, or keep being taken advantage of. A binary choice - that's the world we are living in right now.
  - skj 8y ago
    > or keep being taken advantage of Presumably they're getting paid for their work.
    - bitL 8y ago
      OK, you get paid but you have to slow down, play politics, form your/join a clique, because otherwise you become hated by all your colleagues for casting a shadow on them, then be driven slowly out of the company by hiding information from you and spreading rumors about you. In other words, you are wasting the most precious thing you have - time, where you could perform much much better, for some "standard salary". Is that a good bargain?

xenihn 8y ago

>It is a profile increasingly hard to find Only in an employee's market.

lacker 8y ago

Someone who "needs" a review is typically not a good fit for my management style. If your organization gets large enough, then out of necessity, you will have many different managers with many different styles. That is usually the point when a performance review system needs to become more formalized - it's important to be sure that in some ways, all managers are treating their reports similarly, even if it means some of them changing their default management style.

exelius 8y ago

No offense, but this is the kind of thinking that leads to workplace bias. Working styles like this tend to reinforce hiring single, young men who are otherwise unencumbered so they can work long hours and push the envelope of the job description. That leads to a lot of group think, and products that are built for a very small subset of users — so there is real business value in diversity. Reviews are important for someone with whom you don’t share a lot of built in cultural cues. Your experience with this working style has been positive, because you were born and raised speaking the jargon. If they come from a different background, they may not actually know what is important for the company because they haven’t spent their whole life interpreting these cultural cues. This is what we call a “blind spot” — you have had success with your working style, and start to assume it’s the only effective way to do the work. I promise you it is not, and as a manager you should be doing more to communicate needs/value opportunities to your direct reports. Your view of what those are may be different from theirs.

bkirkby 8y ago
He spoke about being a young man willing to put in the hours starting out to learn his craft. Yes, the young need to learn a lot after schooling just to keep up. After that, he spoke about figuring out how to provide the most value for the business. I've had a 25+ year career and can verify that everyone should follow this advice. Whatever hidden biases we are concerned about in the workplace, they all pale in comparison to the metric of fulfilling the purpose of the company. It took me a few years to realize that businesses were less interested in paying me because I was smart and could solve hard problems and more interested in how I could measure and move the purposes of the company. The only direct value a manager provides to a company is a regular calibration of employee purpose with the purpose of the business. This is best done with regular 1-on-1s, not through semi-annual reviews. There are other indirect things that a good manager brings to the table which mostly revolve around increasing employee happiness and satisfaction, but all of it pales in comparison to aligning employee and company purpose.
- exelius 8y ago
  It’s all virtue-signaling in the end, and a manager from the same background is going to be more receptive to virtue-signaling from their own cultural background than from someone with a different background. Formal reviews distill virtue signaling into a standard process with explicit rules rather than an informal set of norms that individuals may or may not be aware of.

gav 8y ago

> I only remember anticipating needs and delivering results. Feedback is a gift. Without people around you to give honest, brutal feedback, you have no idea if you are really doing a good job or not. There's a great podcast episode from Adam Grant's WorkLife about criticism that's worth listening to: https://www.ted.com/talks/worklife_with_adam_grant_dear_billionaire_i_give_you_a_d_minus https://www.ted.com/talks/worklife_with_adam_grant_dear_bill...

internetman55 8y ago

That indicates to me that you're probably a bad manager When I was broke and had no connections, I was willing to work the way you described. Now that I have options, I'm not willing to expend that energy when I could save it for gym, girlfriend, self-education after hours, etc. If I'm broke and need to switch to another industry or you're paying me multiple times my next best offer I'll do that. Otherwise, no, my manager needs to do his job instead of asking me to do it for him That said I'm now entering a graduate school and am willing to do that in this context because I'm intrinsically interested in learning the applied math I'll be working on Software jobs, no You would probably need to hire people who are interested in running their own business im a few years and mentor them towards that end to get that kind of commitment in my opinion

agumonkey 8y ago

I fit this profile a bit, and it's hard to get hired because that quality is not a tag on a resume. Alas it even caused me harm in college, teachers weren't very welcoming my enthusiasm.

john_moscow 8y ago
Been there. Learn business or get hurt more. Sorry.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  or move to the country side and enjoy peace of mind

gowld 8y ago

You find it hard to find someone who works as well as you do but wants to work for less than equal partnership? Interesting.

TomVDB 8y ago
Partnership has never been about who works the hardest. It's about who takes (or took) the most risk to get the business started. If the employer pays a generous salary for work done well, I don't see what the problem is.

john_moscow 8y ago

>It is a profile increasingly hard to find. Someone who "needs" a review is typically not a good fit for my management style, and someone who can anticipate the needs of my business I try very hard to retain. Blame the economic cycle. I would assume, your company is self-funded, profitable and being run with efficiency in mind. Unfortunately, in the current economy you just can't compete salary-wise with companies that focus on raising, bloating the headcount, raising more, playing hocus-pocus with the "cost of revenue" line and doing a spectacular exit. And as an employee, if playing a hipster infant who loves his boss and depends on him pays 2x more than hard work and initiative, well, I'm sorry to say that, but I'll go where the money is. That said, you might be able to find that type if you offer more equity or some revenue-based incentives or look into partnering with other small business owners rather than trying to find someone to work under you.

mdip 8y ago

> Today I have my own company and I try to hire the same type of person. You're getting a lot of crap for this statement ranging from it being a bias dog-whistle to it being an indicator that you're expecting too much. I didn't find either to be the case in reading what you wrote. My dad, too, was a business owner and growing up he pushed the same kinds of values onto me. He married my mom at 19, moved out of a two-bedroom house with 7 siblings (he never had his own room, slept on the living room couch), took a job as a union construction worker out of high-school, attended college up to his senior year but didn't graduate and ended up starting a manufacturing business supporting the automotive industry in Detroit. He's wealthy and retired, now. I started a few businesses, but decided against them over time and realized that I really didn't like the whole "running a business". I like to write software and learning about technology and programming. Anything that takes me away from that makes me less happy. The ancillary (taxes, accounting, management, etc) that owning a business entails wasn't for me. I "put in long hours"[0], but I like to spend those hours doing the one specific thing that I love doing and I'm paid well enough that I have no desire to strike out on my own in the hopes that I can make buckets more (but in the greater likelihood that I'll have less reliable income). As for the bias dog-whistle of these sorts of traits belonging only to white, young, men ... I find those statements to be curiously biased, as well. I have worked at several different companies on teams with women and men of both races and ages ranging from around 25 to around 57 -- yes, in tech, in Detroit. I haven't found that these traits vary based on race, gender or even age. The hardest working manager (which I wrote about in my last comment on this post) was almost 60, the guy I routinely went to when I desperately needed something to actually get "done" was a soft-spoken PoC gentleman of around 30 and when a technical project manager was forced upon me, I begged for a very overworked black woman on the PM team[1]. Anecdotal as my experiences are even social class wasn't a particular limiting factor -- I used to get advice from the "soft-spoken gentleman"[2] about kids and he revealed to me that he was the only of his brothers and sisters to go to college, that he's been pushing that on his kids and that his parents and his family ridiculed (and still ridicule) him for choosing to seek higher education. Sure, there's no denying that women (of a certain age) get pregnant and that this is a problem for some business owners. It's never been a problem at any of the places that I have worked, personally, but I can imagine it does happen despite it being both illegal (and morally wrong IMHO). Outside of that, I often wonder if the over-sensitivity to "bias" ends up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. My dad's company was interesting -- they were often the coordinator among several small business to outfit a large manufacturing operation. As a result, during my childhood, I spent a lot of time around a lot of small business owners. Every one of my father's many friends was a business contact and owner of some other outfit. Many of them were old enough to have grown up at a time when casual racism and sexism was normal, my father in particular. My parents raised us in a manner that when I first entered the real world, I was surprised that there were still people out there who thought that way. Growing up around these business owners I knew one thing about hiring, the concerns "Can the person do the job to the level I expect and at a price I can afford to pay them?" and "Good God, payroll taxes are expensive!" Of the business owners, only one had hiring practices that were unusual, and possibly illegal -- this was a manufacturer who had only women working at his plant. I'm not sure if it was intentional or it just worked out that way, but I do know that he synchronized schedules with the elementary, junior and high schools, the work was light-weight assembly, paid minimum wage, and AFAIK, all of his employees were former stay-at-home moms. [0] I do that a lot less, now, but that's mainly because the job that I have doesn't require that of me. That doesn't necessarily mean I don't put in long hours, I just put those extra hours into projects that I want to work on instead of projects that my job wants me to work on. [1] So did everyone else, which was why she was so over worked. [2] I know he reads HN so I'm avoiding his name on purpose -- he's still a friend and I don't have permission to tell this story. The "soft-spoken" bit comes from a conversation I had with him about being more assertive. He'll know who he is and can out himself if he wants to.

privacypoller 8y ago

What exactly is your management style then? A review doesn't need to be the typical corporate slog - it's simply feedback comparing reality with plans and execution. It let's you know if (a) your planning is any good and (b) your execution was successful. Looking for someone to "anticipate the needs of my business" is great, but how do you respond to someone who makes a mistake or pursues a strategy different from your ideal? Do you fire them on the spot like the emperor or learn from it. If it's the later, I got news for you; you're doing reviews. "I delivered results that met or exceeded expectations." Gee - wouldn't it be nice to know this without waiting 20+ years to look back and assess the entire composition of your career? It's also super handy to self-assess with the eroding benefit of time. The most brutal performance assessment I ever had radically changed the trajectory of my life, and looking back on others who stayed the same path shows it was ultimately net-positive for me. You seem pretty satisfied with how things have turned out, but just imagine what you could have accomplished with a little feedback, such a waste of potential...

rhizome 8y ago

I empathize with a lot of this, but man...you gotta tell people when they do a good job. By "good job" I mean that they did work that furthered the goals of the people who lead the company (since companies per se don't have goals).

Cakez0r 8y ago

Any way I can get in touch with you?

qz3 8y ago

It may be increasingly hard to find because employees see things differently now. It's a job market. My employer wants me to put in overtime and go out of my way to improve the company? Great, let's go. But I demand appropriate compensation. I think that's a reasonable position. My company treats me as a human resource, I treat my company like my client who writes checks for the work I put in.

bvc35 8y ago

It sounds like you want an employee to take on the responsibilities of a company owner without actually making them an owner, giving them stock, or giving them proper incentives. The problem is not with the labor market, it's with your sense of entitlement to your employee's skills. Employees no longer act the way they used to because modern companies more regularly dispose of employees when it suits them. If you want employees to act the way you want, either give them stock, pay them significantly more, or give them long term, multi-year employment contracts. If you expect to get something (employees going above and beyond) for nothing, you are entitled.