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How did you incentivize people to do what was best for the company rather than only for themselves? What percentage of it did they own? Why should they ignore t

How did you incentivize people to do what was best for the company rather than only for themselves? What percentage of it did they own? Why should they ignore their own self-interest in favor of your company's long-term success? There's a weird cognitive dissonance I've run into where career advice from most people on HN boils down to "Companies don't care about you. Optimize your own total comp. Jump ship when opportunities come up. Don't bother with loyalty." And then on the flip side you have founders who expect employees to act like the company is their family, but with zero reason to do so. I think there must be a better way to get employees, and especially executives, to care about a company's long-term success rather than about quarterly goals and near-term comp. I'm not sure what that is, but I think it might need to be related to shares in a profit-sharing plan rather than traditional equity shares.

neom 2y ago
Long term thinking + high quality story telling. Just gotta keep it up as you scale. At around 200-300 employees your job in leadership is simply telling the same story over and over again to different constituencies in different ways, for years.
rvnx 2y ago
It's not about how much they get. The reality is that you can give 100k extra to a software engineer, he will still prefer his kids and wife. Money isn't buying love. You can hire a prostitute, she will work for you, but she will still not love you. This is the same with companies.
- alok-g 2y ago
  +1. Someone recently hinted at the opposite angle: Give them a lot of money and their motives would move to safeguarding their jobs, which results in a higher level of corporate politics.
- anal_reactor 2y ago
  I think this is a great analogy.
FL33TW00D 2y ago
This is why most of the actually meaningful companies are "mission driven" (the phrase has been coopted). That's how you obtain incentive alignment, when you genuinely believe that working hard as possible for the company is in pursuit of something greater. This is impossible to do for yet another tax/hr/finance/billing startup, and why companies with big missions like SpaceX et al have no problem hiring.
deleted 2y ago
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mihaic 2y ago
> Why should they ignore their own self-interest in favor of your company's long-term success? I wasn't expecting them to do something bad for themselves, merely to simply do what I was explicitly asking and paying them for (and we paid above-market salaries). Too often communication was conveniently misinterpreted in obvious bad faith to justify them using some expensive AWS feature, or simply ignore the core message in the request. This was hidden for a lot longer than it should have been since Covid forced us to go remote all of a sudden and people would vouch for one another. Honestly, I think now that there simply isn't a way to align most employees with you, and that the secret to successful start-ups is only going for the easy to execute things, that don't rely on the qualities of your employees (or you have 100mil raised and your problem is naturally a good challenge for them).
- evantbyrne 2y ago
  Engineers should always be considering the business impact of their decisions, but it's also the job of management to create and enforce that culture at every single level. On the other hand, it is also suffocating to talented engineers to have to try and predict how their bosses would do something and emulate that instead of just doing the work, and I think this push-pull is where most engineering managers fail their employees. Too little control and the less engaged/talented engineers will make decisions that tank the project, too much micromanagement and velocity tanks. With that said, regardless of where engineering management sits on the continuum of control, outcomes will suffer if managers are just simply bad at engineering and making business decisions, which is also often the case.

neom 2y ago

Long term thinking + high quality story telling. Just gotta keep it up as you scale. At around 200-300 employees your job in leadership is simply telling the same story over and over again to different constituencies in different ways, for years.

rvnx 2y ago

It's not about how much they get. The reality is that you can give 100k extra to a software engineer, he will still prefer his kids and wife. Money isn't buying love. You can hire a prostitute, she will work for you, but she will still not love you. This is the same with companies.

alok-g 2y ago
+1. Someone recently hinted at the opposite angle: Give them a lot of money and their motives would move to safeguarding their jobs, which results in a higher level of corporate politics.
anal_reactor 2y ago
I think this is a great analogy.

FL33TW00D 2y ago

This is why most of the actually meaningful companies are "mission driven" (the phrase has been coopted). That's how you obtain incentive alignment, when you genuinely believe that working hard as possible for the company is in pursuit of something greater. This is impossible to do for yet another tax/hr/finance/billing startup, and why companies with big missions like SpaceX et al have no problem hiring.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mihaic 2y ago

> Why should they ignore their own self-interest in favor of your company's long-term success? I wasn't expecting them to do something bad for themselves, merely to simply do what I was explicitly asking and paying them for (and we paid above-market salaries). Too often communication was conveniently misinterpreted in obvious bad faith to justify them using some expensive AWS feature, or simply ignore the core message in the request. This was hidden for a lot longer than it should have been since Covid forced us to go remote all of a sudden and people would vouch for one another. Honestly, I think now that there simply isn't a way to align most employees with you, and that the secret to successful start-ups is only going for the easy to execute things, that don't rely on the qualities of your employees (or you have 100mil raised and your problem is naturally a good challenge for them).

evantbyrne 2y ago
Engineers should always be considering the business impact of their decisions, but it's also the job of management to create and enforce that culture at every single level. On the other hand, it is also suffocating to talented engineers to have to try and predict how their bosses would do something and emulate that instead of just doing the work, and I think this push-pull is where most engineering managers fail their employees. Too little control and the less engaged/talented engineers will make decisions that tank the project, too much micromanagement and velocity tanks. With that said, regardless of where engineering management sits on the continuum of control, outcomes will suffer if managers are just simply bad at engineering and making business decisions, which is also often the case.