8 ms·

Cheezburger Network doesn't show new hires the bathroom until they check in code

111 points by danshapiro 16y ago

Bostwick 16y ago
More than anything else, I think this article shows how common sense is forgotten in most organizations, and especially in large organizations. The idea that people like to be productive and hit the ground running on their first day is not new, exciting or bold. Yet, it's still noteworthy when it happens. I would have loved procedures like this when I started my current job. After the HR benefits lecture, I was sat down at a computer and told to read outdated and often wrong documentation for a week. My login account wasn't active until two days after I started.
- eru 16y ago
  I hope your outdated documentation was at least in a wiki (or similar) so that you could correct it.
nck4222 16y ago
Where does the title of the article come from? The article doesn't say that at all. All the article says is: "On Day One, a new employee is still trying to figure out the location of the bathroom, for goodness sake!", so they assign new employees a mentor to help them with everything. EDIT: typo
- Avshalom 16y ago
  Hell the title makes it sound like they withhold bathroom privileges until you make a commit.
  - nuclear_eclipse 16y ago
    echo '# John was here.' >> index.php && svn commit -m "I really have to pee"
- brown9-2 16y ago
  Considering that the author of the article is the CTO of the company, I don't think we can take the title as a mistaken assumption.
niyazpk 16y ago
This is all great and fun, you know, for the cheeseburger network. I am not sure that companies like Microsoft or Apple would ever entertain an idea like this. There is nothing wrong with committing your code to the source control on the first day, but there is nothing to be proud of it either. I personally would like to get acquainted with my team-mates and stuff and go through some company policies before pushing stuff to the production. Please don't make my first day at the job more difficult than it should be. Also, not all code bases are easy to even learn where to modify. >>> The result will be happier, more empowered employees with an attitude of ownership and a focus on productivity. Again, why? What is wrong if you started committing code on the second day? This is just a different approach, not always a better approach. If it works for them, good. There are a lot of situations where this policy will lead to disastrous results. And I hope the title is just link-bait and not actually true. [EDIT: removed the words "more serious" from the second sentence. See comment from Scott below]
- scottporad 16y ago
  @niyazpk: I resent this comment: "I am not sure that more serious* companies...I mean with actual paying customers and such." Cheezburger has been a profitable business since inception. We have been profitable every single quarter, and never had a quarter with negative cash flows. Our revenues and profits are in the millions. Very, very few startups can make that claim. We operate three different lines of business: we sell advertising, we sell merchandise (at http://lolmart.com http://lolmart.com) and we publish printed materials such as books and greeting cards (http://amzn.to/buztLM http://amzn.to/buztLM). I assure you that having fun and LOL is a serious business. Scott
  - niyazpk 16y ago
    I apologize. I've removed the offending words. My argument stays.
  - silverbax88 16y ago
    If you are having people check in code on the first day, are you really serious, or just making up silly rules that will blow up when you are actually a company, not just "profitable from inception" (Man, have I heard THAT one before)
iuguy 16y ago
Our entire induction process takes less than half an hour. Is it rare to try and have everything set up for the new hire before they start?
- jthigpen 16y ago
  It's incredibly rare in my experience.
- rue 16y ago
  Your induction bureaucracy might take half an hour. The process hopefully takes a bit longer, a week or so.
  - iuguy 16y ago
    I've had a bit of a think of this and you're right about settling in, but I'd say it takes a bit less than you're suggesting as generally we start the process early. If I get time I'll write a blog post about it.
- zacharycohn 16y ago
  You'd be surprised. I think a lot of times new employee set up could be streamlined by emailing a list of questions to the new hire ahead of time (prefer osx/windows? this tool or that? etc). I know when there are new hires at my company it usually takes them about 1/2 the day to get their new computer ready to go (without any dev software installed). I think it could definitely be faster simply by putting IT in touch with the person sooner.
- momotomo 16y ago
  Our process can take up to 1-2 months before people have full systems access and everything bedded down. I've seen some new hires have literally zero access for up to the first three weeks.
  - Roboprog 16y ago
    Unfortunately, that was my experience recently. This article really spoke to me: show the new guy that B.S. is not going to be tolerated, and that we are going to make product, right away, aided by our processes, rather than crucified upon them.
random42 16y ago
I am all for empowerment and making devs productive, but taking it to an absurd level (making devs push code to production one day one) is not good. Making employees feel empowered is much more than one day show. Hopefully, its going to be a marathon, not a sprint.
- zacharycohn 16y ago
  This isn't really an absurd level. They're talking about minor bug fixes or simple error catches that no one has gotten to yet. They're not asking new hires to design and implement an entire new feature on a full bladder.
  - random42 16y ago
    You are right. My (Extremely badly put :() point was, why does it matter so much to make new hires productive as a race to zero countdown? If a employee going to work at an average for 2 years, to me, it feels OK to give them sometime to get accustomed to new environment.
    - zacharycohn 16y ago
      I'd say it simply reflects the work environment. It's a lot more fun to go home after your first day at work and have something to show for it. You, after 8 hours of working at Company X, have already created or improved something for them. I'd say it's a lot more fun than going home thinking "Damn that was a lot of paperwork. I hope I can get a computer tomorrow and start to work.."
- joezydeco 16y ago
  I just took it to mean "we train our new hires on day one on how to commit into our version control system". Nothing more. I mean, c'mon, it's not rocket science these days to get a devbox up and running and talking to a svn or git server.
- bstrong 16y ago
  I think the whole point is that being extreme about it turns it into forcing function to make sure that the dev setup process is extremely fast and easy. As soon as you start relaxing the timeline (to, say, pushing code in the first week) the urgency to keep the process fast disappears.
wildmXranat 16y ago
Modify a comment block and access granted.
rhizome 16y ago
I’ll let you be the judge, but it sounds like developers enjoy being productive on their first day. Actually, I'm not sure those conversations prove the conclusion that you're drawing from them. What I believe those quotes illustrate is that those particular developers told the boss (boss' boss?) who came up with the policy that they enjoy it. This is the way that conflicts of interest work, and even if Cheezburger has a well-established tradition and culture of telling the Emperor he has no clothes, newbie employees are not really the best source of that kind of information.
VladRussian 16y ago
sounds like a military bootcamp approach. It has been 200% proven to be successful in producing effective soldiers. It may also work for young hires, puppies, and it would serve as an effective way to filter out older ones who are much harder to mold.
SHOwnsYou 16y ago
I'm sure they are joking about withholding bathroom access (you can get sued for that). But it does seem to me that doing this seems to serve the author's interest more than the devs. "How does it feel to commit on your first day?" "So, why was it awesome to do that? There’s something about that which feels????" It sounds like person would be excruciating to deal with. I'm sure it's just me, but how much he glorifies his policy of first day commits speaks to some larger issue. I hope this doesn't offend (but I'm not sure how it cant) and I intend no malice. But if my boss said that to me I would probably start looking for a new job that night.
raganwald 16y ago
I read the OP a little differently than I read some of the comments. Imagine you are brought into a messed up development culture with some authority to make changes. You can't build the product from source, you can only patch it. You can't build a test database from migrations, fixtures, or whatever, there are "magic" development databases. And so on and so forth. You think about things, remember this old post, and institute the following goal: "We must be able to take a workstation from email and appropriate access to checking in a change in one business day. Document the steps, re-organize development, everything so that we can sit down with any new hire and get them to set everything up and commit a change on their first day." It might be empowering for the developer. It might also be a forcing function for fixing issues with your development environment.
djhworld 16y ago
This is a bit silly in my opinion. On my first day at the past two companies I've worked at I spent most of it setting up my computer and development environment to adhere to the necessary things I needed for my role. I don't think I actually started any real development for a few weeks to be honest, those first few weeks were spent getting up to speed with the software platform and framework I'd be working on, plus meeting a bunch of folks from different departments etc.
- yesimahuman 16y ago
  Which I think is a pain, and why I think their goal here is honorable. Most places I've worked spend weeks trying to get you licenses or trying to remember how to set up every little path in your IDE or whatever so you too can start coding. It's a waste of their time and mine, and a waste of money.
sgt 16y ago
Sounds like a suitable way to get junior developers started. As a senior developer, it would never work for me. A document telling me how to set up my development station, step by step? I'll find out how to set up my development station and if I want to use vim instead of Eclipse, that's my choice. Ofcourse, I'm not desperate for a job either, and I am used to setting the terms revolving my development environment and the way we work, as opposed to the other way around.
- quicksilver03 16y ago
  I believe that no hiring process is perfect, so something like this could also work as an additional filter for both junior and senior developers: those who are unable to follow the instructions are poliyely shown the door on their first day, instead of wasting more time of the other, productive members of the staff.
panacea 16y ago
Best Cheezburger practices. What's the thing you do with the palm of your hand... no not that one... I mean making contact with your forehead.
chr15 16y ago
So Cheezburger Network is holding their new hires hostage until they get some work done? This must be demoralizing, and I imagine it would leave a bad taste in the mouths of new hires who expect an introduction to the work environment first.
retroryan 16y ago
Even if it is not the first day, I think the point is well taken that this needs to happen ASAP. I have worked as a consultant at large corporations and have seen developers go months without ever checking in code.
nhebb 16y ago
What a coincidence, they don't show you funny cat pictures until you check out 100 ads. Didn't their site used to have content?
stevenp 16y ago
Committing on day 1 at IMVU is also a really important part of our culture. We want to make sure that new engineers hit the ground running and feel like they have the ability to contribute right away. We celebrate it, because it's an important first accomplishment. And new engineers who come from other places (like Yahoo!, where I worked before) are thrilled to see a change on a production cluster that has hundreds of servers, without having to go through some lengthy release process. It's exhilarating.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

111 points by danshapiro 16y ago

More than anything else, I think this article shows how common sense is forgotten in most organizations, and especially in large organizations. The idea that people like to be productive and hit the ground running on their first day is not new, exciting or bold. Yet, it's still noteworthy when it happens. I would have loved procedures like this when I started my current job. After the HR benefits lecture, I was sat down at a computer and told to read outdated and often wrong documentation for a week. My login account wasn't active until two days after I started.

eru 16y ago
I hope your outdated documentation was at least in a wiki (or similar) so that you could correct it.

nck4222 16y ago

Where does the title of the article come from? The article doesn't say that at all. All the article says is: "On Day One, a new employee is still trying to figure out the location of the bathroom, for goodness sake!", so they assign new employees a mentor to help them with everything. EDIT: typo

Avshalom 16y ago
Hell the title makes it sound like they withhold bathroom privileges until you make a commit.
- nuclear_eclipse 16y ago
  echo '# John was here.' >> index.php && svn commit -m "I really have to pee"
brown9-2 16y ago
Considering that the author of the article is the CTO of the company, I don't think we can take the title as a mistaken assumption.

niyazpk 16y ago

This is all great and fun, you know, for the cheeseburger network. I am not sure that companies like Microsoft or Apple would ever entertain an idea like this. There is nothing wrong with committing your code to the source control on the first day, but there is nothing to be proud of it either. I personally would like to get acquainted with my team-mates and stuff and go through some company policies before pushing stuff to the production. Please don't make my first day at the job more difficult than it should be. Also, not all code bases are easy to even learn where to modify. >>> The result will be happier, more empowered employees with an attitude of ownership and a focus on productivity. Again, why? What is wrong if you started committing code on the second day? This is just a different approach, not always a better approach. If it works for them, good. There are a lot of situations where this policy will lead to disastrous results. And I hope the title is just link-bait and not actually true. [EDIT: removed the words "more serious" from the second sentence. See comment from Scott below]

scottporad 16y ago
@niyazpk: I resent this comment: "I am not sure that more serious* companies...I mean with actual paying customers and such." Cheezburger has been a profitable business since inception. We have been profitable every single quarter, and never had a quarter with negative cash flows. Our revenues and profits are in the millions. Very, very few startups can make that claim. We operate three different lines of business: we sell advertising, we sell merchandise (at http://lolmart.com http://lolmart.com) and we publish printed materials such as books and greeting cards (http://amzn.to/buztLM http://amzn.to/buztLM). I assure you that having fun and LOL is a serious business. Scott
- niyazpk 16y ago
  I apologize. I've removed the offending words. My argument stays.
- silverbax88 16y ago
  If you are having people check in code on the first day, are you really serious, or just making up silly rules that will blow up when you are actually a company, not just "profitable from inception" (Man, have I heard THAT one before)

iuguy 16y ago

Our entire induction process takes less than half an hour. Is it rare to try and have everything set up for the new hire before they start?

jthigpen 16y ago
It's incredibly rare in my experience.
rue 16y ago
Your induction bureaucracy might take half an hour. The process hopefully takes a bit longer, a week or so.
- iuguy 16y ago
  I've had a bit of a think of this and you're right about settling in, but I'd say it takes a bit less than you're suggesting as generally we start the process early. If I get time I'll write a blog post about it.
zacharycohn 16y ago
You'd be surprised. I think a lot of times new employee set up could be streamlined by emailing a list of questions to the new hire ahead of time (prefer osx/windows? this tool or that? etc). I know when there are new hires at my company it usually takes them about 1/2 the day to get their new computer ready to go (without any dev software installed). I think it could definitely be faster simply by putting IT in touch with the person sooner.
momotomo 16y ago
Our process can take up to 1-2 months before people have full systems access and everything bedded down. I've seen some new hires have literally zero access for up to the first three weeks.
- Roboprog 16y ago
  Unfortunately, that was my experience recently. This article really spoke to me: show the new guy that B.S. is not going to be tolerated, and that we are going to make product, right away, aided by our processes, rather than crucified upon them.

random42 16y ago

I am all for empowerment and making devs productive, but taking it to an absurd level (making devs push code to production one day one) is not good. Making employees feel empowered is much more than one day show. Hopefully, its going to be a marathon, not a sprint.

zacharycohn 16y ago
This isn't really an absurd level. They're talking about minor bug fixes or simple error catches that no one has gotten to yet. They're not asking new hires to design and implement an entire new feature on a full bladder.
- random42 16y ago
  You are right. My (Extremely badly put :() point was, why does it matter so much to make new hires productive as a race to zero countdown? If a employee going to work at an average for 2 years, to me, it feels OK to give them sometime to get accustomed to new environment.
  - zacharycohn 16y ago
    I'd say it simply reflects the work environment. It's a lot more fun to go home after your first day at work and have something to show for it. You, after 8 hours of working at Company X, have already created or improved something for them. I'd say it's a lot more fun than going home thinking "Damn that was a lot of paperwork. I hope I can get a computer tomorrow and start to work.."
joezydeco 16y ago
I just took it to mean "we train our new hires on day one on how to commit into our version control system". Nothing more. I mean, c'mon, it's not rocket science these days to get a devbox up and running and talking to a svn or git server.
bstrong 16y ago
I think the whole point is that being extreme about it turns it into forcing function to make sure that the dev setup process is extremely fast and easy. As soon as you start relaxing the timeline (to, say, pushing code in the first week) the urgency to keep the process fast disappears.

wildmXranat 16y ago

Modify a comment block and access granted.

rhizome 16y ago

I’ll let you be the judge, but it sounds like developers enjoy being productive on their first day. Actually, I'm not sure those conversations prove the conclusion that you're drawing from them. What I believe those quotes illustrate is that those particular developers told the boss (boss' boss?) who came up with the policy that they enjoy it. This is the way that conflicts of interest work, and even if Cheezburger has a well-established tradition and culture of telling the Emperor he has no clothes, newbie employees are not really the best source of that kind of information.

VladRussian 16y ago

sounds like a military bootcamp approach. It has been 200% proven to be successful in producing effective soldiers. It may also work for young hires, puppies, and it would serve as an effective way to filter out older ones who are much harder to mold.

SHOwnsYou 16y ago

I'm sure they are joking about withholding bathroom access (you can get sued for that). But it does seem to me that doing this seems to serve the author's interest more than the devs. "How does it feel to commit on your first day?" "So, why was it awesome to do that? There’s something about that which feels????" It sounds like person would be excruciating to deal with. I'm sure it's just me, but how much he glorifies his policy of first day commits speaks to some larger issue. I hope this doesn't offend (but I'm not sure how it cant) and I intend no malice. But if my boss said that to me I would probably start looking for a new job that night.

raganwald 16y ago

I read the OP a little differently than I read some of the comments. Imagine you are brought into a messed up development culture with some authority to make changes. You can't build the product from source, you can only patch it. You can't build a test database from migrations, fixtures, or whatever, there are "magic" development databases. And so on and so forth. You think about things, remember this old post, and institute the following goal: "We must be able to take a workstation from email and appropriate access to checking in a change in one business day. Document the steps, re-organize development, everything so that we can sit down with any new hire and get them to set everything up and commit a change on their first day." It might be empowering for the developer. It might also be a forcing function for fixing issues with your development environment.

djhworld 16y ago

This is a bit silly in my opinion. On my first day at the past two companies I've worked at I spent most of it setting up my computer and development environment to adhere to the necessary things I needed for my role. I don't think I actually started any real development for a few weeks to be honest, those first few weeks were spent getting up to speed with the software platform and framework I'd be working on, plus meeting a bunch of folks from different departments etc.

yesimahuman 16y ago
Which I think is a pain, and why I think their goal here is honorable. Most places I've worked spend weeks trying to get you licenses or trying to remember how to set up every little path in your IDE or whatever so you too can start coding. It's a waste of their time and mine, and a waste of money.

sgt 16y ago

Sounds like a suitable way to get junior developers started. As a senior developer, it would never work for me. A document telling me how to set up my development station, step by step? I'll find out how to set up my development station and if I want to use vim instead of Eclipse, that's my choice. Ofcourse, I'm not desperate for a job either, and I am used to setting the terms revolving my development environment and the way we work, as opposed to the other way around.

quicksilver03 16y ago
I believe that no hiring process is perfect, so something like this could also work as an additional filter for both junior and senior developers: those who are unable to follow the instructions are poliyely shown the door on their first day, instead of wasting more time of the other, productive members of the staff.

panacea 16y ago

Best Cheezburger practices. What's the thing you do with the palm of your hand... no not that one... I mean making contact with your forehead.

chr15 16y ago

So Cheezburger Network is holding their new hires hostage until they get some work done? This must be demoralizing, and I imagine it would leave a bad taste in the mouths of new hires who expect an introduction to the work environment first.

retroryan 16y ago

Even if it is not the first day, I think the point is well taken that this needs to happen ASAP. I have worked as a consultant at large corporations and have seen developers go months without ever checking in code.

nhebb 16y ago

What a coincidence, they don't show you funny cat pictures until you check out 100 ads. Didn't their site used to have content?

stevenp 16y ago

Committing on day 1 at IMVU is also a really important part of our culture. We want to make sure that new engineers hit the ground running and feel like they have the ability to contribute right away. We celebrate it, because it's an important first accomplishment. And new engineers who come from other places (like Yahoo!, where I worked before) are thrilled to see a change on a production cluster that has hundreds of servers, without having to go through some lengthy release process. It's exhilarating.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]