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This article is megalomaniacal. Insisting that your company with 200+ employees will only hire people who will work themselves to the bone without any mention o

This article is megalomaniacal. Insisting that your company with 200+ employees will only hire people who will work themselves to the bone without any mention of how those people will be properly compensated is wild corporate propaganda. I honestly don’t know why the tech industry continues to capitulate to leaders like this who obviously, and loudly, mistreat and dehumanize their employees by insisting that if you are not obsessed and willing to put in incredible energy into someone else’s project that you are bad. It does not follow that people should be obsessed with someone else’s business that they won’t be properly compensated for. No matter how many times someone rich says it, it will never be true. I will say, however, that this is an extremely popular position with the rich and powerful. From startups to big consulting firms, there was not a single company in SF that I worked for that did not echo this. From PC saying how proud he was that we did not hire more engineers at Stripe while people were pulling 60+ hour weeks for months at a time, to engineering managers explaining how they slept under their desk while they were working at Facebook, to Big 3 consulting firm partners exhorting 22 year olds to work 80 hour weeks being screamed at by misogynistic clients in cities across the globe, the song remained the same.

xwdv 6y ago
I have been shitting all over people like this for a long time and trying to get people to see the light that a job is a job and nothing more, but then I get blamed for having a “mercenary mentality” and “not a team player”. You are renting your skills to an entity that needs your skills for an agreed upon rate for a certain amount of time. If another employer offers you a better situation and your current employer doesn’t counter with a better offer you leave. The rules are simple and your employer knows how to keep you if they really want you. Getting a job is not like joining a gang or a fraternity where you are first promised a community and good life and then the money is just a formality, but that’s what people seem to see it as. Rest assured, it should always be about the money first. Money is what I’m all about and my career isn’t any worse off for it nor have I ever had to work myself to the bone for no reason just to please the company gods.
- BLKNSLVR 6y ago
  Loyalty isn't rewarded, at all, unless there's an additional reason for the reward that can be disguised under 'loyalty', where 'reward for loyalty' is pointed to as an internal marketing exercise to motivate the workforce. As soon as the underlying reason(s) no longer exist, loyalty will be revealed to have evaporated. I've seen it multiple times at multiple companies. A couple of which were employees of over twenty years with the respective companies. None of which were bad places to work, or in any way brutal with their employment policies or conditions. That's just how it is. The best thing to give a shit about is the quality of your own work. That will serve you well for now and the future.
- preordained 6y ago
  This seems logical, but I've yet to experience a software shop of any complexity where you can just plug people in and out with this mercenary approach. A year or two is when I notice people actually start adding significant value, and the really high value work when you get in tune with an organization's DNA maybe still years later. Companies need veterans. If it seems like someone can't even pretend to get invested, it's a waste of time. Smart people who have a rap sheet of skills a mile long are cute, but I've personally found such peoples' dominant skill is marketing themselves...which I can't blame them for, but I think articles like this are the result of people being burned by the "mercenary" mentality.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    > Companies need veterans. They pay for mercenaries, they get mercenaries. Rarely do companies pay for veterans, at least not good ones.
    - Viliam1234 6y ago
      Also, there are many ways how you can "pay for" people: You can increase their salary. You can hire more of them, so that they don't have to work overtime. You can buy them better tools. You can rent a working space that actually contains rooms with doors. Etc. Different people have different preference here. But if you have an open space, and zero budget for tools, and chronically understaffed projects, and the salary is kinda average... well, you send a loud message. Try it the other way: let the veterans have their own room with doors, give them the tools they need, maybe reduce their work time to 6 hours a day while keeping their salary competitive... and most of them will be happy to stay. Or be honest and admit that you prefer it the way you have been doing it so far.
NewOrderNow 6y ago
Or perhaps you are weak-mind? It's funny, hard working individuals are typically the ones who don't have jobs, while people who perpetuate mediocrity, like you, most like have jobs. Mediocrity is what people hire for. Not skill.
dangisawhore 6y ago
Or perhaps you are weak-mind? It's funny, hard working individuals are typically the ones who don't have jobs, while people who perpetuate mediocrity, like you, most like have jobs. Mediocrity is what people hire for. Not skill.
fakedang 6y ago
I'm curious. How many misogynistic clients actually scream at 22 year old analysts in MBB? I'd assume business norms would ensure some form of civility in meetings. I haven't heard from any of my MBB friends (who are mostly in India btw), of being yelled at. When I was in PE, I was the 25 year old shouting at some 45 year old CEO (with the license of my firm's MD) for BSing around. Fun times, but that was a very exceptional circumstance.
- mdorazio 6y ago
  Consultant for well over a decade now. I've worked with quite a few MBB kids over the years as well as with clients who previously hired them. I'd say it's fairly uncommon for clients to actually yell at the analysts on the ground, but it does happen. It's more likely that the MBB associate or engagement manager gets yelled at for various reasons. But it's a lot more common for the analysts to be told "do whatever the client wants" and end up working absolutely stupid hours to cover client demands that should have been pushed back on, on top of internal commitments to stay on the right side of the "up or out" funnel.
  - fakedang 6y ago
    So clients actually shout at consultants? Guess somebody's parents didn't raise them right.
- xivzgrev 6y ago
  I never got yelled at in consulting, and honestly if the client is upset that’s the partner’s fault. Most of the time there wasn’t a lot of pushback because the partner knew what the client cared about. The exception was PE firms who would push back on certain assumptions.
pmoriarty 6y ago
This is not confined to SV nor to tech. It's very common in the finance industry as well, but the worst is arguably in health care, where patients can literally die due to mistakes or lack of enough attention by overworked doctors and nurses running on an extreme lack of sleep. This doesn't even begin to address the casualties from burnout, which can lead to depression, stress-related health issues, and suicide. How much compensation is worth that? In the finance sector, which is almost literally swimming in money, I never understood why they didn't just hire more people and instead preferred to work the talented people they attract half to death.
- sgillen 6y ago
  >> I never understood why they didn't just hire more people and instead preferred to work the talented people they attract half to death. I think that a small number of talented people that will work themselves to death will be much more effective than a large group willing to work reasonable hours.
  - n0nc3 6y ago
    If you are doing anything more complicated than gluing a pair of APIs together, it is very likely that the marginal value of work past 60 hours is negative. Reaping what you coded during a 3am espresso binge is rarely a happy experience. But yeah, if all you are trying to do is build out Facebook before some other social network gets there maybe it makes sense to pull 100 hour weeks.
    - Schiendelman 6y ago
      Cut that number in half. Work over 30 hours might be negative.
      - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
        What's this based on?
Ihatelife2020 6y ago
From my experience, the people who get hired are people who complain about corporate propaganda and don't work hard while what I considered hard working individuals are the ones who struggle to find work. Companies hire for mediocrity, not skill. If skill mattered, I would dedicate my life to a company. But it doesn't I so won't ever care.
- xupybd 6y ago
  Life can get better. Don't give up don't give into the bitterness. What ever you're doing isn't working for you but you can change your situation. There is hope.
  - Ihatelife2020 6y ago
    Heard that for 10 years
- nowherebeen 6y ago
  I am rooting for you
  - Ihatelife2020 6y ago
    Lying isn't helpful. You most likely forgot already and looked at some memes while getting paid during this 4 day break
    - nowherebeen 6y ago
      It really isn’t my place to say since I have no skin in your situation, but I think you should consider talking to a friend.
- xwdv 6y ago
  If you think a company would swear life long loyalty in return to you just because you happen to have some skills, wait till you see what happens when they no longer have use for your “skills”. Never swear loyalty, it’s business, not the military.
pierremenard 6y ago
The fact is that you need people to have this collective delusion to work really hard and care about something, before value can be created. This kind of work ethic and commitment is what virtually every company that you admire today has required to get where it is today. I personally don't think this is "dehumanizing" or unfair, since the whole point is to explicitly opt in for such a life. There are enough people out there who want to dedicate a lot of their time to working on a team or mission they care about, and OP's narrative is great at selecting for people like that.
- crpatino 6y ago
  All great things were born out of great effort, but most great efforts do not lead to great things. The problem with these entrepreneurs that feel entitled to demand great effort from their employees is that they often fail to provide great visions to work towards. Passion is not a commodity.
vvanders 6y ago
I've worked in industries(gamedev) that bias towards hiring people who "give a shit". It leads to that passion being exploited into crunch time, burnout and all the fun things that entails. What I've found is that you should be building teams where you "give a shit about the people". That doesn't mean that we don't work hard and that we don't tackle interesting problems. It does mean that we plan for the long term and pace things accordingly. That you make opportunities for people to grow both technically and in their career. That we succeed as a team and not due to the rock-star behavior of one or two individuals. My experience is this builds high-trust teams that are resilient, adaptable and often product even better work than teams who over-index on the domain space. They bring diverse perspective and have significant less turn-over which is a compounding effect. While the tech stack or product you built is important, in the end it was the team that created it and where you should invest if you want to continue to see success over time.
- anonytrary 6y ago
  I went through this recently at a startup. I was extremely passionate about their mission and product at first. Company slowly started bringing in external management, and with them, all of their "battle-hardened" management practices. What once used to be a vibrant culture turned into one without transparency, with rampant bullying and "1-up" culture, perpetuated by the CTO (a naive bully, not a leader). They then used their product as a way to inhibit growth in engineering, despite claiming that the product was there to help us grow. The lesson is that if the company shows me that they no longer care about me or my co-workers, and try to pit us against each other, then I immediately stop giving a damn about their mission and product. If you want your employees to "give a shit" then you absolutely must make it clear that you "give a shit" about them, and that they "give a shit" about each other. That startup has a lot to learn. Culture should be motivated by love, not fear. So I have to disagree with the viewpoint put forth by Scale AI.
xivzgrev 6y ago
He’s building a “generational” company for his heirs and inve-erhem sorry, “society”. Aren’t you motivated by that alone? If not, when was the last time you worked obscene hours for something? Because if you haven’t, you clearly don’t give a shit about anything (except ya know, work life balance, family, hobbies that have nothing to do with tech, etc) If we don’t want toxic cultures, then we all need to prioritize that when job searching.
arp242 6y ago
I think the way the author expands on it isn't too great, with questions like "How many hours were you working a week?" and "obsessed person". However, I do think there's sense in the general premise of "hire people who care about what they do", but this doesn't need to translate to "work your ass off". A lot of the time when I see people produce really crap code it's because they just don't care. They show up for work and anything that meets the minimal standards is fine with them. There's no passion or interest in doing more than absolutely needed. This isn't about "hours worked", but about passion and trying to make whatever you're working on the best it can be. You can do that perfectly fine in just 40 hours/week. But yeah, some people seem to conflate "passion" with "work your ass off for 60+ hours/week", and that's just silly.
- wyclif 6y ago
  Agreed—I had a mixed reaction, having worked for a FAANG. There are nuggets of truth there, the biggest one being "A recruiting team that looks like a college admissions office is certain death for a startup." That is undoubtedly true IMO. But toward the end it goes off the rails, with the stuff about working 5-hour days revealing a lack of commitment and indifference. The reason why Google engineers can work 5-hour days is because they are a large company, not a startup, and they can direct resources more efficiently than a startup and devote engineering hours to core problems instead of startup-style "all hands" processes. So IOW, if engineers are working 5-hour days, does it really surface not giving a shit? I'd say "it depends." It depends on whether you are a startup or a Big Corp, and it depends on the company culture and workflow. I don't think it's an A/B indicator of passion for the company or the product. Overall though, this post left a bad taste in my mouth, and I could only keep thinking that I'd never want to work at Scale.
- dheera 6y ago
  Agreed. Not to mention expecting people to work 60+ hours a week is direct discrimination against people who give a shit about their {mental health, diet, cardiovascular health, family, friends}.
  - wyclif 6y ago
throwdour 6y ago
I nearly got whiplash when the author moved the threshold from "giving a shit" to "deeply obsessed".
- goblin89 6y ago
  If is possible to be deeply obsessed yet maintain work-life balance, restricting that obsession to working hours.
- kevinventullo 6y ago
  Yes! I completely agree with the need to hire people who “give a shit”, but to me this means e.g. - Dogfooding - Fixing a bug even if your manager doesn’t notice - Proactively noticing strange system behavior and investigating - Actively contributing to strategic discussions; showing genuine interest in the problem space - Jumping in to help when the server mysteriously starts crash looping, even if you’re not oncall All but the last one have nothing to do with working more hours. Even the last one is intended as an exceptional event, not a baseline expectation.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    You described a senior engineer. The last one is especially telling, especially if the debugging ends up documented somewhere/explained to the junior on-call.
    - srtjstjsj 6y ago
      Nothing in that list is absent from a good junior dev who is going to be a great leader in the future.
  - raztogt21 6y ago
    This is what I was exactly thinking by reading the first two paragraphs. But then he jumped on "Just must need to work 80 hours per week to do something meaningful" bandwagon.
marktangotango 6y ago
Well to be fair, this author was only 2 years old when this disaster happened, posting it here for anyone not familiar: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/05/business/stinging-office-memo-boomerangs-chief-executive-criticized-after-upbraiding.html https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/05/business/stinging-office-...
- ornornor 6y ago
  What a jerk, this memo was totally inappropriate. I wonder how many suits it resulted in, that sounds like a rather hostile work environment
austincheney 6y ago
I can empathize with the merits of this idea but I also agree that such cult worship of a business idea is absurd. There is a massive gap between the output of passionate people who go the extra mile to provide original solutions in the highest quality way versus people who watch the clock and press buttons on a keyboard. The biggest problem is how to achieve maximum talent. The solution is ownership and setting high standards, not compensation. Ownership means allowing some control of product decisions and connecting compensation to product performance. The product staff must be willing to work hard because there is a clear connection between their effort and their rewards. This is more like a commission than a salary or equity package. If founders really want to instill that mentality for the long term they will earn a slice off the top while driving product strategy just like a sales manager. That redirects energy away from the founders and investors back toward the thing driving revenue.
- hibbelig 6y ago
  What about those who are intrinsically motivated?
  - Veen 6y ago
    It's a good question, and I think the article's author unfortunately brings two different things together: i) People who are intrinsically motivated to do good work, regardless of who it is for. Personality psychologists call this quality conscientiousness, and it's as predictive of good outcomes as intelligence. ii) People who are willing to sacrifice all other aspects of their life in their employer's interest. Hiring type i people is an admirable goal. Hiring and taking advantage of type ii people is not.
ngokevin 6y ago
This mirrors the sentiment of many people on HN are heavily against the idea of doing anything more than 9-5, and prefer to live the relaxed engineer life collecting paychecks and tending to their microbrews. Maybe the hatred stems from that there exists a large pool of engineers that are passionate about their work and are okay not measuring their work as "hours per week". And that makes the pool of engineers that don't want to do that look not desirable.
- nowherebeen 6y ago
  This is incredibly naive. Another view is that enough engineers have been burnt enough by these founders that they got smarter. Not everyone is looking to tend their microbrew as you think.
  - Ihatelife2020 6y ago
    Hey
- dkersten 6y ago
  I've seen many, many people (myself included) burned by putting in many extra hours (in terms of burnout, in terms of the effort going to waste because higher ups decided to change the schedule, in terms of not being appreciated when the situation reversed), while the number of times where people, in hindsight, said it was worth it has been quite few. Its not that people aren't willing to dedicate themselves to their work, in my experience, most people do go above and beyond; its that more often than not, they get nothing for it or even suffer negative consequences long term while spending their precious time and energy to enrich someone else and end up feeling exploited. We need to stop glorifying exploitation.
  - TuringNYC 6y ago
    I think this comment nails it. For me, I'm happy with a shared struggle towards some goal (though of course it cannot become the norm.) Pressure-Ease-Pressure-Ease cycles are also fine for me. ...but if all that results on a nice pat on the back while some salesperson or product manager gets promoted, then it isn't really a shared struggle anymore. Rewards need to be distributed to the entire team that struggled, not just the ones presenting the project. Further, i think organizations need to understand that different people want different things. Consulting firms have a firm-wide up-or-out policy...but tech companies should probably subscribe to a up-or-steady policy where some choose to worker more intensely for growth while others choose to work normally and remain stationary.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
TomSwirly 6y ago
Hear, hear! I want to add only that the people who are good at pretending to give a shit in interviews are sometimes low-level sociopaths who are good at faking things, whereas people who actually give a shit often come off as stiff because they take the interview more seriously.
angarg12 6y ago
One time I got approached by a recruiter from a startup. I wasn't actively looking to change jobs, but I accepted to go to an interview. One of my interviewers opened with the cliched "Why do you want to work for us?". I laughed out loud and said "You are the ones who called me here, why do you want me to work for you?" I'm not usually that snarky, but I couldn't help it this time. Working relationships work both ways, and some companies need to be less full of themselves.

xwdv 6y ago

I have been shitting all over people like this for a long time and trying to get people to see the light that a job is a job and nothing more, but then I get blamed for having a “mercenary mentality” and “not a team player”. You are renting your skills to an entity that needs your skills for an agreed upon rate for a certain amount of time. If another employer offers you a better situation and your current employer doesn’t counter with a better offer you leave. The rules are simple and your employer knows how to keep you if they really want you. Getting a job is not like joining a gang or a fraternity where you are first promised a community and good life and then the money is just a formality, but that’s what people seem to see it as. Rest assured, it should always be about the money first. Money is what I’m all about and my career isn’t any worse off for it nor have I ever had to work myself to the bone for no reason just to please the company gods.

BLKNSLVR 6y ago
Loyalty isn't rewarded, at all, unless there's an additional reason for the reward that can be disguised under 'loyalty', where 'reward for loyalty' is pointed to as an internal marketing exercise to motivate the workforce. As soon as the underlying reason(s) no longer exist, loyalty will be revealed to have evaporated. I've seen it multiple times at multiple companies. A couple of which were employees of over twenty years with the respective companies. None of which were bad places to work, or in any way brutal with their employment policies or conditions. That's just how it is. The best thing to give a shit about is the quality of your own work. That will serve you well for now and the future.
preordained 6y ago
This seems logical, but I've yet to experience a software shop of any complexity where you can just plug people in and out with this mercenary approach. A year or two is when I notice people actually start adding significant value, and the really high value work when you get in tune with an organization's DNA maybe still years later. Companies need veterans. If it seems like someone can't even pretend to get invested, it's a waste of time. Smart people who have a rap sheet of skills a mile long are cute, but I've personally found such peoples' dominant skill is marketing themselves...which I can't blame them for, but I think articles like this are the result of people being burned by the "mercenary" mentality.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  > Companies need veterans. They pay for mercenaries, they get mercenaries. Rarely do companies pay for veterans, at least not good ones.
  - Viliam1234 6y ago
    Also, there are many ways how you can "pay for" people: You can increase their salary. You can hire more of them, so that they don't have to work overtime. You can buy them better tools. You can rent a working space that actually contains rooms with doors. Etc. Different people have different preference here. But if you have an open space, and zero budget for tools, and chronically understaffed projects, and the salary is kinda average... well, you send a loud message. Try it the other way: let the veterans have their own room with doors, give them the tools they need, maybe reduce their work time to 6 hours a day while keeping their salary competitive... and most of them will be happy to stay. Or be honest and admit that you prefer it the way you have been doing it so far.

NewOrderNow 6y ago

Or perhaps you are weak-mind? It's funny, hard working individuals are typically the ones who don't have jobs, while people who perpetuate mediocrity, like you, most like have jobs. Mediocrity is what people hire for. Not skill.

dangisawhore 6y ago

fakedang 6y ago

I'm curious. How many misogynistic clients actually scream at 22 year old analysts in MBB? I'd assume business norms would ensure some form of civility in meetings. I haven't heard from any of my MBB friends (who are mostly in India btw), of being yelled at. When I was in PE, I was the 25 year old shouting at some 45 year old CEO (with the license of my firm's MD) for BSing around. Fun times, but that was a very exceptional circumstance.

mdorazio 6y ago
Consultant for well over a decade now. I've worked with quite a few MBB kids over the years as well as with clients who previously hired them. I'd say it's fairly uncommon for clients to actually yell at the analysts on the ground, but it does happen. It's more likely that the MBB associate or engagement manager gets yelled at for various reasons. But it's a lot more common for the analysts to be told "do whatever the client wants" and end up working absolutely stupid hours to cover client demands that should have been pushed back on, on top of internal commitments to stay on the right side of the "up or out" funnel.
- fakedang 6y ago
  So clients actually shout at consultants? Guess somebody's parents didn't raise them right.
xivzgrev 6y ago
I never got yelled at in consulting, and honestly if the client is upset that’s the partner’s fault. Most of the time there wasn’t a lot of pushback because the partner knew what the client cared about. The exception was PE firms who would push back on certain assumptions.

pmoriarty 6y ago

This is not confined to SV nor to tech. It's very common in the finance industry as well, but the worst is arguably in health care, where patients can literally die due to mistakes or lack of enough attention by overworked doctors and nurses running on an extreme lack of sleep. This doesn't even begin to address the casualties from burnout, which can lead to depression, stress-related health issues, and suicide. How much compensation is worth that? In the finance sector, which is almost literally swimming in money, I never understood why they didn't just hire more people and instead preferred to work the talented people they attract half to death.

sgillen 6y ago
>> I never understood why they didn't just hire more people and instead preferred to work the talented people they attract half to death. I think that a small number of talented people that will work themselves to death will be much more effective than a large group willing to work reasonable hours.
- n0nc3 6y ago
  If you are doing anything more complicated than gluing a pair of APIs together, it is very likely that the marginal value of work past 60 hours is negative. Reaping what you coded during a 3am espresso binge is rarely a happy experience. But yeah, if all you are trying to do is build out Facebook before some other social network gets there maybe it makes sense to pull 100 hour weeks.
  - Schiendelman 6y ago
    Cut that number in half. Work over 30 hours might be negative.
    - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
      What's this based on?

Ihatelife2020 6y ago

From my experience, the people who get hired are people who complain about corporate propaganda and don't work hard while what I considered hard working individuals are the ones who struggle to find work. Companies hire for mediocrity, not skill. If skill mattered, I would dedicate my life to a company. But it doesn't I so won't ever care.

xupybd 6y ago
Life can get better. Don't give up don't give into the bitterness. What ever you're doing isn't working for you but you can change your situation. There is hope.
- Ihatelife2020 6y ago
  Heard that for 10 years
nowherebeen 6y ago
I am rooting for you
- Ihatelife2020 6y ago
  Lying isn't helpful. You most likely forgot already and looked at some memes while getting paid during this 4 day break
  - nowherebeen 6y ago
    It really isn’t my place to say since I have no skin in your situation, but I think you should consider talking to a friend.
xwdv 6y ago
If you think a company would swear life long loyalty in return to you just because you happen to have some skills, wait till you see what happens when they no longer have use for your “skills”. Never swear loyalty, it’s business, not the military.

pierremenard 6y ago

The fact is that you need people to have this collective delusion to work really hard and care about something, before value can be created. This kind of work ethic and commitment is what virtually every company that you admire today has required to get where it is today. I personally don't think this is "dehumanizing" or unfair, since the whole point is to explicitly opt in for such a life. There are enough people out there who want to dedicate a lot of their time to working on a team or mission they care about, and OP's narrative is great at selecting for people like that.

crpatino 6y ago
All great things were born out of great effort, but most great efforts do not lead to great things. The problem with these entrepreneurs that feel entitled to demand great effort from their employees is that they often fail to provide great visions to work towards. Passion is not a commodity.

vvanders 6y ago

I've worked in industries(gamedev) that bias towards hiring people who "give a shit". It leads to that passion being exploited into crunch time, burnout and all the fun things that entails. What I've found is that you should be building teams where you "give a shit about the people". That doesn't mean that we don't work hard and that we don't tackle interesting problems. It does mean that we plan for the long term and pace things accordingly. That you make opportunities for people to grow both technically and in their career. That we succeed as a team and not due to the rock-star behavior of one or two individuals. My experience is this builds high-trust teams that are resilient, adaptable and often product even better work than teams who over-index on the domain space. They bring diverse perspective and have significant less turn-over which is a compounding effect. While the tech stack or product you built is important, in the end it was the team that created it and where you should invest if you want to continue to see success over time.

anonytrary 6y ago
I went through this recently at a startup. I was extremely passionate about their mission and product at first. Company slowly started bringing in external management, and with them, all of their "battle-hardened" management practices. What once used to be a vibrant culture turned into one without transparency, with rampant bullying and "1-up" culture, perpetuated by the CTO (a naive bully, not a leader). They then used their product as a way to inhibit growth in engineering, despite claiming that the product was there to help us grow. The lesson is that if the company shows me that they no longer care about me or my co-workers, and try to pit us against each other, then I immediately stop giving a damn about their mission and product. If you want your employees to "give a shit" then you absolutely must make it clear that you "give a shit" about them, and that they "give a shit" about each other. That startup has a lot to learn. Culture should be motivated by love, not fear. So I have to disagree with the viewpoint put forth by Scale AI.

xivzgrev 6y ago

He’s building a “generational” company for his heirs and inve-erhem sorry, “society”. Aren’t you motivated by that alone? If not, when was the last time you worked obscene hours for something? Because if you haven’t, you clearly don’t give a shit about anything (except ya know, work life balance, family, hobbies that have nothing to do with tech, etc) If we don’t want toxic cultures, then we all need to prioritize that when job searching.

arp242 6y ago

I think the way the author expands on it isn't too great, with questions like "How many hours were you working a week?" and "obsessed person". However, I do think there's sense in the general premise of "hire people who care about what they do", but this doesn't need to translate to "work your ass off". A lot of the time when I see people produce really crap code it's because they just don't care. They show up for work and anything that meets the minimal standards is fine with them. There's no passion or interest in doing more than absolutely needed. This isn't about "hours worked", but about passion and trying to make whatever you're working on the best it can be. You can do that perfectly fine in just 40 hours/week. But yeah, some people seem to conflate "passion" with "work your ass off for 60+ hours/week", and that's just silly.

wyclif 6y ago
Agreed—I had a mixed reaction, having worked for a FAANG. There are nuggets of truth there, the biggest one being "A recruiting team that looks like a college admissions office is certain death for a startup." That is undoubtedly true IMO. But toward the end it goes off the rails, with the stuff about working 5-hour days revealing a lack of commitment and indifference. The reason why Google engineers can work 5-hour days is because they are a large company, not a startup, and they can direct resources more efficiently than a startup and devote engineering hours to core problems instead of startup-style "all hands" processes. So IOW, if engineers are working 5-hour days, does it really surface not giving a shit? I'd say "it depends." It depends on whether you are a startup or a Big Corp, and it depends on the company culture and workflow. I don't think it's an A/B indicator of passion for the company or the product. Overall though, this post left a bad taste in my mouth, and I could only keep thinking that I'd never want to work at Scale.
dheera 6y ago
Agreed. Not to mention expecting people to work 60+ hours a week is direct discrimination against people who give a shit about their {mental health, diet, cardiovascular health, family, friends}.
- wyclif 6y ago

throwdour 6y ago

I nearly got whiplash when the author moved the threshold from "giving a shit" to "deeply obsessed".

goblin89 6y ago
If is possible to be deeply obsessed yet maintain work-life balance, restricting that obsession to working hours.
kevinventullo 6y ago
Yes! I completely agree with the need to hire people who “give a shit”, but to me this means e.g. - Dogfooding - Fixing a bug even if your manager doesn’t notice - Proactively noticing strange system behavior and investigating - Actively contributing to strategic discussions; showing genuine interest in the problem space - Jumping in to help when the server mysteriously starts crash looping, even if you’re not oncall All but the last one have nothing to do with working more hours. Even the last one is intended as an exceptional event, not a baseline expectation.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  You described a senior engineer. The last one is especially telling, especially if the debugging ends up documented somewhere/explained to the junior on-call.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    Nothing in that list is absent from a good junior dev who is going to be a great leader in the future.
- raztogt21 6y ago
  This is what I was exactly thinking by reading the first two paragraphs. But then he jumped on "Just must need to work 80 hours per week to do something meaningful" bandwagon.

marktangotango 6y ago

Well to be fair, this author was only 2 years old when this disaster happened, posting it here for anyone not familiar: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/05/business/stinging-office-memo-boomerangs-chief-executive-criticized-after-upbraiding.html https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/05/business/stinging-office-...

ornornor 6y ago
What a jerk, this memo was totally inappropriate. I wonder how many suits it resulted in, that sounds like a rather hostile work environment

austincheney 6y ago

I can empathize with the merits of this idea but I also agree that such cult worship of a business idea is absurd. There is a massive gap between the output of passionate people who go the extra mile to provide original solutions in the highest quality way versus people who watch the clock and press buttons on a keyboard. The biggest problem is how to achieve maximum talent. The solution is ownership and setting high standards, not compensation. Ownership means allowing some control of product decisions and connecting compensation to product performance. The product staff must be willing to work hard because there is a clear connection between their effort and their rewards. This is more like a commission than a salary or equity package. If founders really want to instill that mentality for the long term they will earn a slice off the top while driving product strategy just like a sales manager. That redirects energy away from the founders and investors back toward the thing driving revenue.

hibbelig 6y ago
What about those who are intrinsically motivated?
- Veen 6y ago
  It's a good question, and I think the article's author unfortunately brings two different things together: i) People who are intrinsically motivated to do good work, regardless of who it is for. Personality psychologists call this quality conscientiousness, and it's as predictive of good outcomes as intelligence. ii) People who are willing to sacrifice all other aspects of their life in their employer's interest. Hiring type i people is an admirable goal. Hiring and taking advantage of type ii people is not.

ngokevin 6y ago

This mirrors the sentiment of many people on HN are heavily against the idea of doing anything more than 9-5, and prefer to live the relaxed engineer life collecting paychecks and tending to their microbrews. Maybe the hatred stems from that there exists a large pool of engineers that are passionate about their work and are okay not measuring their work as "hours per week". And that makes the pool of engineers that don't want to do that look not desirable.

nowherebeen 6y ago
This is incredibly naive. Another view is that enough engineers have been burnt enough by these founders that they got smarter. Not everyone is looking to tend their microbrew as you think.
- Ihatelife2020 6y ago
  Hey
dkersten 6y ago
I've seen many, many people (myself included) burned by putting in many extra hours (in terms of burnout, in terms of the effort going to waste because higher ups decided to change the schedule, in terms of not being appreciated when the situation reversed), while the number of times where people, in hindsight, said it was worth it has been quite few. Its not that people aren't willing to dedicate themselves to their work, in my experience, most people do go above and beyond; its that more often than not, they get nothing for it or even suffer negative consequences long term while spending their precious time and energy to enrich someone else and end up feeling exploited. We need to stop glorifying exploitation.
- TuringNYC 6y ago
  I think this comment nails it. For me, I'm happy with a shared struggle towards some goal (though of course it cannot become the norm.) Pressure-Ease-Pressure-Ease cycles are also fine for me. ...but if all that results on a nice pat on the back while some salesperson or product manager gets promoted, then it isn't really a shared struggle anymore. Rewards need to be distributed to the entire team that struggled, not just the ones presenting the project. Further, i think organizations need to understand that different people want different things. Consulting firms have a firm-wide up-or-out policy...but tech companies should probably subscribe to a up-or-steady policy where some choose to worker more intensely for growth while others choose to work normally and remain stationary.

deleted 6y ago

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TomSwirly 6y ago

Hear, hear! I want to add only that the people who are good at pretending to give a shit in interviews are sometimes low-level sociopaths who are good at faking things, whereas people who actually give a shit often come off as stiff because they take the interview more seriously.

angarg12 6y ago

One time I got approached by a recruiter from a startup. I wasn't actively looking to change jobs, but I accepted to go to an interview. One of my interviewers opened with the cliched "Why do you want to work for us?". I laughed out loud and said "You are the ones who called me here, why do you want me to work for you?" I'm not usually that snarky, but I couldn't help it this time. Working relationships work both ways, and some companies need to be less full of themselves.