15 ms·

No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

• givemeethekeys 9mo ago
  I'd like to add to this, only because it is an early stage item but maybe a little unrelated: If you are an early stage startup and your founders have a habit of talking about "competitors", run like hell.
  • OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
    +1. and if they say things like "we're going to disrupt the industry," again, run. There were many things I did not like about working for Jeff Bezos, but one I did like is he kept repeating this.
  • OsrsNeedsf2P 9mo ago
    > If you are an early stage startup and your founders have a habit of talking about "competitors", run like hell. Why? Comparing what the competitors are doing can be a great way to come up with new ideas
    • wetpaws 9mo ago
      [dead]
    • OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
      because comparing yourself to your competitors will get you a faster horse buggy, not an automobile. if you're in a startup, you should be risking making automobiles. if you want to make faster horse buggies, go work for AT&T.
      • charcircuit 9mo ago
        Good ideas need the right timing to line up. AT&T can afford to keep a research project around until the timing is right where a startup needs to find market fit immediately.
        • OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
          i'm not sure that is true about AT&T. you may be thinking about Bell Labs, which effectively destroyed it's culture in the 90s or early 2000s. but i take your point to mean there are large companies that have budget to maintain projects that do not have an immediate need to be profitable. and agree that for startups, it's a great idea if you're building things for which a market is emerging. everyone talks about how Steve Jobs is a miracle worker. not to diminish his accomplishments, but he was also very lucky. he wanted to sell apple 2's into a market that was just starting to want to buy apple 2's. i'll give him the iPhone, however. i think he was smart enough to understand the forces were aligning to make a product that your average user would like. but apple didn't spend 30 years making the iPhone. they had to wait 'til the market was there and manufacturing costs were low enough and bandwidth was available. i'm mostly agreeing w/ you, but i think ideas can weave in and out of companies and organizations. CALO jumped from DARPA to SRI to Apple to Quato and motivated several more startups.
          • throwaway2037 9mo ago
            Before the 1990s, Bell Labs was the research arm of the world's largest and richest telecommunications monopoly. That explains the difference between old and new Bell Labs. Wiki says: > With the breakup of the Bell System, Bell Labs became a subsidiary of AT&T Technologies in 1984, which resulted in a drastic decline in its funding.
      • SR2Z 9mo ago
        Ah, the mythical secret weakness of all startups: another startup doing the same thing.
        • OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
          of course. how else would they get funded?
    • deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    • solatic 9mo ago
      Your competitors are not necessarily targeting the same users, and their internal strengths and weaknesses are different from yours. All comparisons to competitors are superficial and distract you from building what your users want and improving upon your internal strengths and weaknesses.
  • zaphirplane 9mo ago
    Why
    • givemeethekeys 9mo ago
      Scarcity mindset.
      • zaphirplane 9mo ago
        Saying competition is integrating with whatever or has a feature for bla seems like a good thing
• OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
  lol. "don't motivate engineers." dude can't motivate engineers with money so he thinks you can't motivate engineers. that's actually funny. and a little depressing.
  • mainecoder 9mo ago
    why don't you criticize the arguments his making instead of the person, he is basically saying hire people with autonomy not people who need motivation.
    • OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
      the idea i am criticizing is, as explained, "motivation" is something which can be managed and throwing more money at engineers is not a universal motivation.
• lifeisstillgood 9mo ago
  Hire good people and trust them, they will build the best they can for the users they can talk to If you don’t know what good people look like you can’t win.
  • Nextgrid 9mo ago
    And pay them well. If you want people to build you a thing that prints money, you better give them a sizeable cut. Otherwise enjoy "market rate" performance.
  • array_key_first 9mo ago
    The biggest thing is trust, in just about any relationship. The truth is, I think, most people are very well meaning and highly ambitious. It's disillusionment and distrust that creates the rift. People want to work hard and they want to do good - but they're scared. They're scared that working hard will only be to their detriment and, well, can you blame them? When managers create an almost adversarial relationship, it can feel like doing your best is setting yourself up for failure.
• systemtest 9mo ago
  When I read about 996-style culture I am happy to be European. That would not work here. 40 hours per week max and most engineers prefer to not work more than 32 hours a week. So you have a good work/life balance. I currently work 4 hours a week.
  • alephnerd 9mo ago
    You don't have to work at an early stage startup - in fact most people don't. But some people do wish to participate in an early stage startup, and plenty do in Europe as well. > So you have a good work/life balance. I currently work 4 hours a week. And this is why when I was a PM, we shut down our Amsterdam office and shifted it to Praha, Bucharest, and Warsaw. You won't find as many people who will complain about a 40 hour workweek while earning €80k TCs
    • thesuavefactor 9mo ago
      Working more hours however =/= getting more done. In fact, some experiments show the opposite (within boundaries of course).
      • alephnerd 9mo ago
        I agree, but the issue is the impetus behind the statement. The tone which that poster took and the default negative assumption is a negative trait to most hiring managers - especially at the early stage. At an early stage organization, you want your employees to be self-motivated but also open to pull crunchtime if needed (eg. customer escalation, rolled up product launch, pivot)
      • throwaway2037 9mo ago
        I disagree. It is more accurate to say that more working hours is a continuum of productivity. Imagine that you have two nearly identical software engineers. One works 40 hours per week and the other 41 hours per week. Which will be more productive? Very likely the 41 hour per week engineer. Now, if you compare 50 vs 51, then 60 vs 61, and so forth, the productivity gap will become much smaller, possibly hard to measure after 60. I have witnessed a few young engineers in my career with simply unbelievable work ethic and talents that could work 80+ hours a week for months on end. It was amazing to see, and their output was unmatched. From personal experience, I worked like a dog in my younger years for two reasons: (1) To become a better engineer, you need to make a lot of mistakes and fix them yourself. (2) Much junior engineering work is just time in front of the screen pounding out simple features for a CRUD app. The more that you complete, the quicker you get promoted.
• chis 9mo ago
  I wonder how universal these stages are. All I can say is when I worked at a 15 person company, it was extremely clear to me that we needed more structure than "everyone reports to the CEO". We struggled to prioritize between different projects, milestones weren't clearly defined or owned, at times there would be long debates on product direction without a clear decisionmaker, etc etc. Not to say the article is so wrong. I think their advice to consider elevating a few engineers into informal tech leads is a great answer. We went with the path of hiring one dedicated "manager" of all engineers and that worked pretty well too.
  • alephnerd 9mo ago
    Depends team to team and founder to founder. I've seen early stage startups where most ICs were able to self manage, but others where some form of structure was needed. At the stage that you mentioned, it's natural for founders to end up hiring an Engineering Lead. > consider elevating a few engineers into informal tech leads It is potentially risky - I've seen plenty of talented engineers flounder because they were thrust into an ill-suited management role too soon, but I think if someone is motivated and eased into the role they tend to be superior to an outside hire.
• jayd16 9mo ago
  I think its clearly false that motivation is an inherent trait. That would imply that demotivation is also inherent, which I think is even more obviously wrong.
  • OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
    it's not hard to de-motivate people. but here's the thing... not everyone is motivated by the same thing. the trick of motivating people as a manager is spending the time to figure out what motivates them. and if you could only de-motivate people, eventually everyone in your team would be de-motivated.
  • tyre 9mo ago
    I think by the time you are hiring people at 27 years old or whatever, there is a noticeable gap in motivation. A quarter century of lived experience (which is "inherent" to the person you're hiring) is a lot, especially at the beginning of one's life. There are all sorts of things like depression, cynicism, past experiences, etc. that can lead to someone have a lower baseline of motivation. It's also highly contextual, which I think is what you're saying and I 100% agree with. Some people thrive in role A and would want to bang their head against a wall for 40 hours in role B. Others vice versa, others would be meh in either, etc.
  • marcus_holmes 9mo ago
    I think demotivating people is incredibly easy, see any Dilbert cartoon featuring the PHB ever. That doesn't mean that motivating people is also easy. They're not equivalent. Motivating people requires understanding their psychology, their values, what they want from their life, etc, and then applying that knowledge to create a workplace culture that feeds all of that. Demotivating them just requires not understanding any of that, or ignoring it in favour of feeding your own ego or psychology. It's a lot easier to demotivate.
    • Culonavirus 9mo ago
      Ah yes the workplace culture, psychology angle. I would expect to read that on Linkedin, not here. No, motivating people simply requires giving them more money (performance bonuses, stock options, thirteenth salary/end-of-year bonus...). DUH. OBVIOUSLY. People in management positions always try to weasel their way out of paying their people more. (Well, not always, not all of them do, but you get my point.) Unless you work on truly cutting edge stuff (by which I mean the likes of SpaceX and its equivalents in different industries), motivation is money. It's as simple as that. No need to twist yourself into all kinds of pretzels. No, it's not the coworkers (which, by the way, are not your friends unless you meet outside of work), it's not the job as such (very few people outside of art actually enjoy doing their job as an activity after say 10 years of doing it), it's money. Money is the primary motivator (by far). You work for money. End of story. Anyone saying otherwise is a bs artist.
• Swizec 9mo ago
  > at 15 engineers, it is very doable for a single person to keep track of everyone's work and ensure alignment. All my past experience disagrees. Sure you have 15 engineers, but you're supporting a business of 150 people. This is a pretty common ratio. The noise gets very loud at that scale and it becomes almost impossible for self-managed engineers to make forward progress. At the very least you need super clearly defined ownership boundaries. That means business process and workstream ownership, not code ownership.
  • OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
    it's worth reading Mythical Man Month WRT team composition. not because Brooks says anything new about the subject, but to get perspective on how long people have been trying to find a good idea for how to structure teams.
  • tyre 9mo ago
    +111111 I don't believe a manager can be effective at 15 direct reports. I think it's possible to keep things afloat, but split that team in half and hire another manager and you'll be in a much better position. What usually happens here is that your most senior members of the team are picking up management responsibilities instead of doing IC ones. By all means they should contribute to mentorship, direction, culture, etc. but there is way too much going on to have a deep understanding of those 15 engineers. The only times I think this work is when the leader sucks, so swamping them with reports means they have a more difficult time micro-managing. But they're probably getting in the way in some other fashion.
  • matusp 9mo ago
    Yup, 15 is just too many. I think that 10 is already pushing it, depending on how many projects are going on at the same time.
  • cdavid 9mo ago
    My rule of thumb is that management complexity is given by #direct reports x #project, where project is defined as a set of stakeholders (be it PM, etc. depending on business). Concretely, managing 12 ICs on a well defined platform team w/ a single PM is much easier than managing 6 people working across 6 businesses, as is more common when managing a team of data scientists.
• burnto 9mo ago
  > Motivation is a hired trait. The only place where managers motivate people is in management books Initial motivation is the hired trait. It’s very easy to demotivate people. The trick is to not do that.
  • cmrdporcupine 9mo ago
    Yep people have all sorts of sources of motivations. One of the key ones is a sense of ownership. Many people join startups instead of BigCorp because they want voice and influence that they don't get in a larger company. I've seen so many founders, managers, leaders, etc kill that by not recognizing this fundamental fact. Of course there's also the problem that you can find and hire people who are motivated people but there's absolutely no guarantee people are going to be motivated for your specific problem.
    • OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
      thank you. can i hire you to run one of my teams? i've been trying to explain this to my managers for half a decade.
  • vjvjvjvjghv 9mo ago
    “ It’s very easy to demotivate people” So true. And really hard to reverse
  • hahahahhaah 9mo ago
    Thw word hired is doing a lot of work. Is motivation intrinsic to a person. Or is it a person plus situation. Ot is it person, situation and reason (reason given in interview) I have been most motivated when there was an aha in the interview process. Or a "cooll!" feeling. For me usually about the end product over the tech stack. I like to work on things I like to use myself.
    • tyre 9mo ago
      I think motivation is contextual. When I love the mission of the project I'm working on, I'll put everything into it. When I hit a prolonged wall of politics or poor leadership, I'm not going to operate at 100%. There's a trifecta that works well: 1. The job is what the employee wants to be doing (IC, manager, FE/BE, end product or mission, whatever). 2. It's what the company needs. (Don't let a high performer do something that's Priority 10 just to keep them.) 3. It's what the employee is good at. (This includes areas of growth that they have aptitude for!) People in those situations, in my experience, tend to thrive. It's great that you've recognized the kinds of products (ones you use) that give you that. Something I don't think hiring managers do enough is convince applicants not to work there. Have a conversation to discover what the person wants. If it's not this role, that's totally fine! It's far better to help someone discover what they love than hire someone into something they won't.
• cmrdporcupine 9mo ago
  This is all a bit messy to read, but seems TFA recommends against 1:1s and any kind of ticket management or any eng. management all when you have 5-6 engineers and this ... insane. People need to get on the same page. You don't need to be (shouldn't be) process insane or go SCRUM or whatever to do that. But having regular organized interactions and task definitions is absolutely imperative even early on when you don't know for sure what you'll be doing.
  • OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
    yeah. i think you can get away with no 1-on-1's for small teams (like 4 people) but by the time you're at 6 or 8, it's probably a good idea. i suspect the OP has reason for believing this, so rather than say "they're wrong," i would say "i'm not sure they explained their environment sufficiently to explain their conclusion." as for ticket management. JIRA is not your friend. i would rather go with a stack of post-its than JIRA. JIRA does not help you understand what you are trying to do (in my experience.) once you've figured out specific tasks, JIRA can track those tasks, but so can BugZilla or (as my teams are using increasingly) text files checked into the repo. people often confuse the tool with the process and confuse following the process with making progress. the first rule of issue tracking systems is they should not get in the way of making tasks you need to do visible. JIRA routinely violates this rule. hmm... maybe i should write my own blog post.
    • cmrdporcupine 9mo ago
      Agree about JIRA. It trends towards TPS Reports and form filling, substituting a workflow in the issue tracker for actual human processes and communication. We just rolled out Linear, and I'm gauging how I feel about it. GitHub / GitLab issues I don't find useful. Linear seems like a middle ground. And it's nice and fast. It also doesn't seem to let PMs go apeshit with custom fields and workflows, so that's good. I always crave for something closer to Buganizer we had internally at Google, which was just nice and minimal and not invasive. At least in its V1 form.
      • OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
• 0-679-72034-0 9mo ago
  [dead]
• yfw 9mo ago
  I used to be very motivated to do the right thing but the culture at my company doesnt reward it and actually actively seems to be promoting bad practices e.g. not documenting. Now I also dgaf. You dont necessarily need managers but you do need someone to set expectations and keep the team accountable. Otherwise its a race to the bottom. There's no way for me as a single engineer to undo slop faster than its generated.
  • OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
    "lift up your hearts. all will come right. out of the depths of sorrow and of sacrifice will be born again the glory of mankind."
• pyrale 9mo ago
  > I know several top 1% engineers in the Valley who disengage from recruiting processes when 996 or something similar is mentioned. A few years back, on this board, 996 was something people made fun of when it was reported that some Chinese companies did it [1]. And now, the strongest claim this blog can make is that some engineers in the US would disengage from recruiting? That the issue with working on saturdays is daily standup? What happened in these years for such a change to happen?! [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19507620 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19507620
  • cmrdporcupine 9mo ago
    What happened? Started with Musk purging half his staff ... I've been around long enough in this industry to see the pendulum swing back and forth a few times. The peak of 2020/2021 was the epitome of "spoiled tech worker" but now we're well on our way the other side, I'd say.
  • Herring 9mo ago
    It’s better to look at what didn’t happen: unionization. Americans often remind me of Steve Jobs trying to cure cancer using diets & acupuncture. You know what the solutions are, you just don’t like them.
    • bob001 9mo ago
      Until recently American engineers made a lot of money at comparatively cushy jobs. A decent engineer in the US could make 5x their equivalent in most European nations. Staff+ engineers at FAANG could make 5x that. People in a good position tend to not like rocking the boat.
      • al_borland 9mo ago
        Not just that, but the union would likely end up capping their salary much lower so the wealth can be spread around. How hard is the 10x engineer on the team going to work when the compensation is the same regardless? This is where people end up working multiple jobs, if they can keep up with their peers only working one day per week.
• crazygringo 9mo ago
  > do not adopt all the "Scrum rituals" like standups, retros, etc. wholesale, and if you do, keep them asynchronous. There is little added value to a voiced update I couldn't disagree more. I know it's an unpopular opinion, but when standups are done synchronously, everyone actually pays attention, notices blocks and helps with them. Things get surfaced and quickly addressed that simply wouldn't otherwise, which is the purpose of standups. When it's async, people just put in what they're working on and mostly ignore everyone else. Standups need to be about 2-way communication, not 1-way. And retrospectives are about improving how the team works. Every team has challenges of every kind. Retrospectives are for surfacing those and addressing them. They take up a couple hours a week, but the idea is that after several months the team is more productive and it pays for itself in time. > Organic 1:1s (as opposed to recurring ones): keep them topic-heavy and ad-hoc, as opposed to relationship maintenance like in the corporate world. Also disagree. 1-1's aren't about "relationship maintenance", again they're about surfacing issues that wouldn't arise organically -- all the little things that aren't worth scheduling a conversation over, but which need to be addressed for smooth functioning. At the end of the day, managing a team is managing a team. In terms of managing people, it's not fundamentally that different if you're a 10-engineer startup or a team of 10 engineers at a megacorp. These things aren't "anti-patterns" or "rituals". When done correctly, they work. (Obviously, if done badly, they don't -- so if you're managing a team, do them correctly.)
  • OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
    yes and no. "agile" has become doctrinaire and "one size fits all." i miss the eXtreme Programming era where standups, pair-programming, test-first, timeboxing, etc. were all "tools in a toolbox" to be applied as needed. i think the OP is experiencing a world where they're told "oh, here's AGILE. you have to do everything in this book," which i think i would push back on as well. but... if you're going to do standups and retrospectives... i agree with you. do them synchronously. the idea is to get everyone to listen to everyone else. the reason they're STAND-ups is 'cause everyone's supposed to be standing so there's motivation to keep them short. this often makes it difficult to do "follow the sun" development. i quit a job a couple years back because my management insisted my engineers on the US west coast be included in standups for teams in Pune (India). and that 1-on-1's are for surfacing issues that haven't come up elsewhere seems like received wisdom among my peer group. it seems to work well for me, so +1 on that too. the phrase "when done correctly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. i bet people who have bad experience with these practices were in situations where they weren't done correctly. one of my problems with environments where management thinks devs are interchangeable bots motivated only by money is that there is zero motivation for management to change their approach when it doesn't work. if they think the only thing that motivates people is money, they think they have to add more money or fire their devs and get devs that are appropriately motivated by cash.
• sailfast 9mo ago
  It seems like a tautology that high performers are turning down positions when 996 is mentioned. Who on EARTH would opt in to a system like that imposed by your management? (Barring the obvious compensation-related encouragement)
• everlier 9mo ago
  This is such a great advice overall. Many people are commenting about flaws in the overall approach, yet everything said is exactly what I saw working/not working in such early companies.
  • OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
    i saw that people who wear black turtlenecks are lauded as visionary geniuses, so don't forget to buy some turtlenecks and yell at people on a daily basis.
• blinkbat 9mo ago
  I find a lot of this to also be true with sole engineers managing agents. I've now seriously approached vibecoding two nontrivial projects, and in each case using "safe tools" was a good way to get to a working stage, faster: - in one I insisted on typescript early and found it to be more of a hurdle than letting the LLM cobble js learning in and address bugs in a way an engineer might find uncivilized (trial and error over bulletproof typing). - in another, I found that using react was not offering much benefit to a given project, and asked the llm to rewrite in vanilla. while this mostly worked, it introduced new bugs that were not present when using react. switching BACK to react eliminated these and enabled the LLM to continue writing features at no (current) technical or performance cost!
• Animats 9mo ago
  If you need motivation, maybe the organization is designed badly. It was once said of the Roman legions "The Legion is not composed of heroes. Heroes are what the Legion kills." Field Marshall the Viscount Slim, who commanded in the China-Burma-India theater in WWII, once wrote "Wars are won by the average performance of the line units." He wrote negatively on various special forces type units, preferring to use regular infantry and training them up to a good, but not superhuman, standard. Arthur Imperatore, who had a unionized trucking company in New Jersey, is profiled in "Perfecting a Piece of the World" (1993) for how he made his trucking company successful despite a very ordinary workforce. There's an argument for winning by steady competently managed plodding. The competently managed part is hard. Steve Bechtel, head of the big construction company that bears his name, once said that the limit on how many projects they could take on was finding bosses able to go out to a job site and make it happen. Failure is a management problem, not a worker problem.
  • ebiester 9mo ago
    This post is talking about very small companies. At that 20+ person department, it's true. Once you have a team where the founder doesn't know everyone, the average matters a lot more. If you have 15 people, you can hire 15 people and they will be able to organically organize if you hire well. If they have a question, they know what everyone is working on. The code base is small enough that everyone can just figure it out even if the documentation is bad. The larger that group is, the more effort it takes to make sure everyone has the context they need to get their job done. That's where management matters. And honestly, when I was the first manager (team of 17) brought in, I was writing code and on my own project in addition to starting to build up the "what do we need to do to scale?" You bring someone like me in at 17 people because you're going to need to scale soon and someone needs to build the first set of processes that solve the problems of the next stage, and figure out the onramp because done wrong, they make everything worse.
    • mattmanser 9mo ago
      Hiring well is extremely hard.
  • 9mo ago
• theturtle 9mo ago
  Yeah. This. In 42 years in IT, i saw way too many situations where the last thing engineers need is a "team" or "management," or even worse, an outside "team leader," which usually resulted in the engineer's work or the team's work turning directly into cowshit. "Managers" want to talk about doing a thing; engineers want to actually do the thing, and both cannot happen simultaneously. When they see results deteriorating, "managers" think the solution is "more management," which is never, ever the solution.
• marcus_holmes 9mo ago
  Love this, and agree with almost all of it. The only quibble I'd have is with "1:1's happen organically and infrequently" - I think this is based on a misunderstanding about what 1:1's are for. Regular, formal, 1:1's are the opportunity to get above the work and talk about meta stuff - career direction, morale, interpersonal issues, etc. It's the founder/manager's chance to check if the employee is happy and thriving, or if there's something that needs to change. These sorts of conversations can happen organically, but often don't, and can be awkward if they do happen organically. Getting the awkward out of the way with a formal agenda can really help to get into the guts of it. Rather than having to manipulate the conversation to get to an emotional item, the manager can just flat-out ask the question because it's on the agenda. Obviously, you can overdo this, and it can turn into a nightmare for folks so I can see why TFA proposes eliminating them. But properly done, formal 1:1's are really valuable even in small teams.
• rballpug 9mo ago
  Series A scripts in Linux, to concurrent 996 work mesh networks. The Catalogue of Network Training Material refers to specifying READ_ONCE(), WRITE_ONCE().
• joshcsimmons 9mo ago
  This reads like someone who has mostly had unskilled managers. The force multiplier difference a great manager can have is immense. I worked so much harder as an IC at small startups when I knew someone had my back and cared about my growth.
• tptacek 9mo ago
  We're apparently back to making psychoanalysts out of interviewers: I'll dedicate a post to specific ways you can identify motivation during hiring, but in short, look for: the obvious one: evidence that they indeed exhibited these external signs of motivation (in an unforced way!) in past jobs; signs of grit in their career and life paths (how did they respond to adversity, how have they put their past successes or reputation on the line for some new challenge); intellectual curiosity in the form of hobbies, nerdy interests that they can talk about with passion I'm pretty confident that this doesn't work, and that searching for "intellectual curiosoty in the form of hobbies and nerdy interests" is actually an own-goal, though it's a great way to keep your Slack channels full of zesty, nerdy, non-remunerative enterprise during the core hours everyone has to actually ship code together.
  • Aurornis 9mo ago
    10 years ago I bought into the idea of hiring for nerdy interests and hobbies as a proxy for motivation. I will say I met some excellent people during this time, but looking back those same people would have been hired anyway due to their accomplishments at companies. > though it's a great way to keep your Slack channels full of zesty, nerdy, non-remunerative enterprise during the core hours everyone has to actually ship code together. Spicy take, but that's 100% consistent with my experience. Hire a lot of people for their nerdy interests and hobbies and your company comms become full of chatter about nerdy interests and hobbies. Meanwhile the "boring" people who ship code and then go home to their families (or pets, or anything) are trying to ship code and get the job done. Nerdy interests and hobbies is not a good proxy for work ability. Hiring someone primarily for nerdy interests and hobbies is probably a red herring. Focus on what matters.
    • KptMarchewa 9mo ago
      >10 years ago I bought into the idea of hiring for nerdy interests and hobbies as a proxy for motivation. I will say I met some excellent people during this time, but looking back those same people would have been hired anyway due to their accomplishments at companies. >Nerdy interests and hobbies is not a good proxy for work ability. Aren't you actually describing a great proxy?
• johnfn 9mo ago
  > Motivation is a hired trait. The only place where managers motivate people is in management books. This seems entirely false to me. To be honest it is so incorrect it significantly puts into question the rest of the article. 1. I have absolutely had managers motivate me to work harder. I have also had managers completely demotivate me and cause me to quit. How on earth can anyone who has worked in the industry for any amount of time say that "The only place where managers motivate people is in management books"? 2. Of course most of the facile strategies mentioned in the article (like 996, micromanaging, etc) won't work. The article then generalizes this to all strategies - but "if terrible methods can't solve it, nothing possibly can" feels like a shaky argument at best. A good manager understands this, and motivates by helping you understand how the things you are doing are actually critical to the success of the team and the company. (If success of the company isn't something you're interested in, then yes, it's going to be hard to motivate you.) A poor manager sabotages motivation in a hundred different ways - he makes you feel like your efforts are totally wasted, or fails to articulate why they are important.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  • tayo42 9mo ago
    So what did those managers do to make you more motivated?
    • idontwantthis 9mo ago
      Treat me like a human being, work with me to set reasonable expectations, share blame and focus praise.
    • dannersy 9mo ago
      Cared about anything other than their own upward movement, actively worked towards my professional development, made sure I had actual, not hand wavey, feedback, and made sure my compensation reflected my growing responsibility. I am aware that all of those things may not be in their power to give, but some combination of that in any org that is somewhat functional would be motivating.
• badc0ffee 9mo ago
  So glad I've never had a "Saturday Standup". Is that really a thing?
• ungreased0675 9mo ago
  The author is ignorant, and I mean that literally, not as an insult. They haven’t thought deeply about why some methods of work produce better outcomes, and are still looking at the surface level artifacts. A management function is important for aligning effort, enabling performance, and clearing obstacles. Even if there isn’t a “manager” those functions are still helpful. Bad managers also exist, and can reduce performance, which can be fatal to a startup. But that’s not a reason to avoid having management functions assigned to employees.
• Glyptodon 9mo ago
  As a former engineer at a YC startup from pre-A to post-B, I generally agree with much of this in a broad way if the startup is a technology first one with organic growth or hasn't really figured out product/market fit. But I think some of the management and team stuff is much more complicated in B2B or B2B2C situations, regulated industries, or cases where there are substantial non-engineering employees, perhaps doing sales, onboarding, or things related to the "offline" world (if there are physical aspects to the business). In particular, I don't think you can have a super flat eng structure run out of a few docs if eng needs to be working with one or more teams larger than the eng team itself unless there's some kind of separate interface to large outside teams. If you end up with a significant sales team, account management team, support team, significant numbers of contractors, or other categories of workers because of the nature of the business, you will have to be more regimented about how things are structured. In companies that face this issue, it's often one of their major challenges and not avoidable compared to other kinds of startups - your sales team may have all kinds of ideas and some of them may even be good, and some may even want to sell them before you've built them. And if your sales team is 2x the size of product and engineering... it's not easy to run out of one document. (Note that I don't love or endorse this, but in certain kind of markets and products it seems like a bit of an unavoidable issue.)
• neilv 9mo ago
  It sounded good, up until the examples for: > I'll dedicate a post to specific ways you can identify motivation during hiring, but in short, look for All will be gamed by interviewees, by the afternoon this hits the HN front page. (And, for example, tech interview prep has already been telling people to fake passion and curiosity, for many years now.) Here's what you do: 1. Consider that the early startup also belongs to the early hires. It's their startup too. You're the last-word decider, but it's not only your startup. You want it to also be theirs. Believe this, and act like it. 2. Reflect that in the equity sharing. "0.5%", to be diluted, as options, with ISO rules that discourage exercising at all... while co-founders divide up 70% of founder real shares between themselves... is nonsense, for that founding engineer, who you should want to be as motivated as you, and contributing as much as you do. 3. With equity like you're serious, make the salaries low-ish. Not so low that it's nonviable for modest family cost of living, but low enough to self-select out the people who aren't committed to the company being successful, or who don't actually believe in the company. 4. Have an actually promising company and founding team, or you won't get many experienced people biting.
  • Buttons840 9mo ago
    I'm quite cynical, but all this sounds fair to me. Modest compensation with good equity sharing is hard for candidates to game too.
  • stuartjohnson12 9mo ago
    I think what people miss about indexing on social signals is that convincing social performance is hard. My suspicion when people say things like "ah but if you index on a social signal then everyone will just perform the social signal" are themselves feeling as though they do not naturally signal that thing, and ironically are frustrated by the effort that it takes to appear as though they do.
    • neilv 9mo ago
      Why is that your suspicion? The context on this one is that we've gone from an environment in which kids were mocked for having curiosity and passion about nerdy things like systems, and it didn't pay that well as an adult, and those people would go home at the end of the day and also write open source code... To one in which it's now a high-paying career, and a bunch of interview prep manuals coach on faking that, doing open source to promote your career, etc. So if OG nerds look around at the environment and see the dynamics, of people who just want well-paying jobs (nothing wrong with that) seeming to do a performative dance with interviewers who also just want well-paying jobs (nothing wrong with that), and everyone is being told to project passion and curiosity (when they really just want well-paying jobs) and to look for it in others... You think the problem is that OG nerds, for example, feel that they do not naturally signal that? They may signal that just fine, but merely be questioning all the performative theater by people who aren't here for that, but some management fashion told them they should pretend to be.
• akst 9mo ago
  > Motivation is a hired trait. The only place where managers motivate people is in management books. Source?
• epolanski 9mo ago
  The whole thing about motivation is non sense. 1. Motivation is a feeling, it's an emotion, it comes and goes, it's a bonus. It's discipline and professionalism that make the huge difference. Many people have the motivation and dream to "create their own programming language", "launch their startup", "make it to the NBA", "lose 40 pounds and get fitter" but this motivation, a feeling, will consistently fight the emotions telling you to have fun, relax, go out with friends, play video games to relieve stress. Motivation is a great boost to discipline and professionalism, but those two survive even when motivation goes off, whereas won't take you anywhere. 2. You cannot hire for motivation and if you're looking for that trait you'll likely projecting your own biases. I suspect that the author of the blog post has nerdy hobbits so he projects himself on candidates. Non sense. Yes, nerdier engineers are likely more interested in the craft and in overall engineering, but that says absolutely nothing about them being motivated in building yet another B2B SaaS. 3. A very good engineer joining a startup, should have the implicit motivation of wanting to get rich in few years, otherwise he/she's be joining a cushier job that pays better.
  • erikerikson 9mo ago
    I disagree. Motivation is not just an emotion but an inherent desire. For a motivated engineer the balance between the work with pleasures and dreams is already won and pre-balanced for sustainable achievement. I find the work itself rewarding and I find world improvement results reinforcing of my enjoyment. I want to code and I'm happy to direct that energy largely according to my employer's needs and our shared benefit. I can be given high level directives and refinement feedback over time. My observed results are faster, more effective progress as reported by internal and external stakeholders. I haven't minded becoming wealthier but it was never my primary motive. As you note, there are other approaches.
    • epolanski 9mo ago
      > Motivation is not just an emotion but an inherent desire Desires change as we grow up and life changes us. The people you hire today, aren't going to be the same 3/6/9/12 months from now when a parent gets sick, a partner leaves, a child is born, when something suddenly changes their priority, etc.
• dogman1050 9mo ago
  As a manager, my job was to make sure they were working on the right thing. If they didn't carry their weight, I either reduced the impact by assigning them necessary-but-boring tasks to offload the high performers, or PIP'd them. I "rehabilitated" several engineers over the years and even gave them references when we parted. Staff that lied to me more than once were terminated.
• karlitooo 9mo ago
  Just let me do what I want to do and if you get the sense the team is not performing please ignore that lmao
• burnt-resistor 9mo ago
  Do not be a sole founder / tech lead / manager who uses obscure tech or add immediate geometrically-increasing tech debt to be paid almost immediately by others.
• TuringNYC 9mo ago
  "I know several top 1% engineers in the Valley who disengage from recruiting processes when 996 or something similar is mentioned." Setting this expectation early seems honest and the best thing to do. The worst is when companies sell people on WLB but then flip it to 996 -- you end up with all the wrong people and no one wins. Best to be transparent from the onset. I always encourage candidates to go visit the company several times if possible, including a visit at 5:30pm or 6:30pm to see the state of the office and attendance. There is no right or wrong answer --
  • setopt 9mo ago
    > including a visit at 5:30pm or 6:30pm to see the state of the office and attendance As an academic, I used to work 11am-8pm many days when I was younger thanks to flexible working hours, and I wasn’t the only one working late but not early. I realize this is probably more rare in corporate settings, but keep in mind if the place has flexible hours you might see more people at 6pm despite people not doing 996.
    • dkarl 9mo ago
      That was true of me as well, and at the same time, I was working alongside parents who worked 7:30-5:30 with a break to pick up the kids from school. Nobody wants a "visit" from the founder, anyway. They want timely two-way flow of information, access and guidance on the occasions when they need it, and maybe (maybe) an occasional chance to hang out socially as a group with no reference to work. Nobody wants the founder randomly dropping by during work hours to assess morale.
    • pessimizer 9mo ago
      This is really my priority to achieve at a job, and one of the reasons I try to be good enough to be indispensable is to be allowed to roll in in the morning whenever I get there. I have a very tough time in the morning convincing myself to go to work, and a very tough time at work tearing myself away from something in an intermediate state. Things at work are always in an intermediate state at 5:00, unless you stopped working well before then (or got very lucky), so I always end up working late whether I come in on time or come in late. So I'm always trying to get to the point where management lets me get there when I get there, and trusts me to be productive. It's a mental thing. I get up early and do a lot in the morning; I'm a morning person. Maybe too much so. The time between getting off work and going to bed is garbage time for me; a long annoying commute and a meal. When I leave at 5:00 I just fall asleep by 9:00.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• tuleiff 9mo ago
  The professional won't avoid doing things because they lack motivation.
• bsoles 9mo ago
  > Intellectual curiosity in the form of hobbies, nerdy interests that they can talk about with passion Although I know that a lot of people would argue for "what's wrong with doing your day job well and going home to your family, friends, etc?", in my experience, it is also true that the best software engineers I've seen during my 25 year career are the ones that made their job also their passion and hobby. I think intellectual curiosity and being a 9-5 person are inversely correlated, again in my experience.
  • nerdponx 9mo ago
    You can make your job in general a passion/hobby/craft but that doesn't mean you have to work more than your fair share for your employer to be a competent craftsperson.
    • bsoles 9mo ago
      > that doesn't mean you have to work more than your fair share for your employer I would never argue for that. My meaning was more about having a passion/hobby in the field that you are working in.
  • the_af 9mo ago
    Your overall opinion might be true, but it's also unfair to competent people who treat it like their day job, and do it competently (but maybe without being amazing). There is a place for this kind of people, among which I count myself nowadays -- I used to be way nerdier, learning new programming languages and embarking on projects just because, until life got in the way, my interests shifted, etc. > I think intellectual curiosity and being a 9-5 person are inversely correlated, again in my experience. I think this is objectively false. I've seen plenty of terrible coworkers -- terrible at their jobs, that is -- who I later found to have hobbies they were passionate about. One was an excellent standup comedian in her spare time. Another did lots of sports and took them seriously. They just weren't very good at software, and they also "phoned it in". One was essentially a "used car salesman" personality, I'm sure he would have excelled at selling used cars! But his code was awful, and he was very combative towards the rest of the team during code reviews, resisted testing his stuff in any way, shape or form, etc. A friend of mine is a middling developer (not bad, but he's the first to admit he's average), but is an awesome guy, funny, and also an outstanding magician.
• _blk 9mo ago
  Did I miss the article mentioning to ask the eng staff how they actually like to work? I get corporate culture and all but engineers like having their subculture and that's fine. As a manager, it's my job to make sure my ppl feel equipped (schedule included) and to keep upper mgmt happy and convinced that it works even if work hours don't match other jobs. So I don't thinly it's ever too soon to hire a manager, as long as he thinks of himself as part of the eng team. Concerning motivation, you can absolutely motivate people by explaining why their work matters and by helping them with the corp paperwork. Example: engineers don't like SAP, I don't like it either, but the project we're working on is so cool that it's worth the 30min hassle per week and I'll sit with them until they get it.
• 28304283409234 9mo ago
  Keep HR and hiring teams to the bare minimum. In the scaleups I've worked for, HR got scaled first. And therefore became more powerful than any other department. HR people get hired by the dozen, get bored, and start creating work like 'self reviews', 'peer reviews', 'yearly goals', etc... on top of scrum. Bonkers.