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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

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.

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.