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From a favorite HN comment: When there is a lot of money involved, people self-select into your company who view their jobs as basically to extract as much mon
by klenwell 7y ago
From a favorite HN comment:
When there is a lot of money involved, people self-select into your company who view their jobs as basically to extract as much money as possible. This is especially true at the higher rungs. VP of marketing? Nope, professional money extractor. VP of engineering? Nope, professional money extractor too. You might think -- don't hire them. You can't! It doesn't matter how good the founders are, these people have spent their entire lifetimes perfecting their veneer. At that level they're the best in the world at it. Doesn't matter how good the founders are, they'll self select some of these people who will slip past their psychology. You might think -- fire them. Not so easy! They're good at embedding themselves into the org, they're good at slipping past the founders's radars, and they're high up so half their job is recruiting. They'll have dozens of cronies running around your company within a month or two.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18003253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18003253
I'm guessing something like the dynamic described here was involved.
The silver lining here may be that he outed himself (literally) before he was able to build an empire of such incompetence.
- tootie 7y agoThat's not really it. Our company is small enough that I can talk one-on-one with the head of the tech department and I did give direct feedback about this person. That head of tech was responsible for the mishire, but also got rid of this person pretty quickly once all the feedback accumulated. My company is service-based and just over 1000 people. Timesheets equal billable hours. It's occasionally very pressurized and we lose people pretty quickly when there's a lull in work, but it also means that useless people have absolutely nowhere to hide.
- klenwell 7y agoIt sounds like your boss is making these decisions on his own without soliciting additional perspectives and feedback in advance as part of the hiring process. If so, that is a common pattern that, in my experience, leads exactly to these kinds of hires. But with a fire-fast approach, it sounds like your company can move fast on hires and be ready to contain the damage.
- Gravityloss 7y agoIf you hire people, you could ask or collect other kinds of feedback how your hire has performed (from someone else than themselves directly of course).
- MonaroVXR 7y agoI counter this I've never had good feedback, because of people that wanted a solution, but not from me and sometimes I would bring a solution that will cost less overtime. I have been bitten colleagues and it still hurts. Because they weren't that great with I.T. I rather show it off what I can do and what I need to work on. Than relying on somebody else. (Again I have been bitten by that.)
- dennis_jeeves 7y agoMy personal take on it is that a situation like that can be prevented from getting out of hand. But that requires a great deal of courage, often putting the entire business at risk. As a founder you will even come across as as a mean guy if you take on the task of enforcing integrity. Judging the integrity of people often means asking very hard probing, personal questions which I suspect is difficult for most founders. My own thoughts about this: https://realminority.wordpress.com/ https://realminority.wordpress.com/ Disclaimer: Not a founder myself, but have observed one at close range.