7 ms·

> I pushed everyone too hard. I didn’t appreciate how maturing companies need more slack, and that running people at startup intensity constantly will wear them

> I pushed everyone too hard. I didn’t appreciate how maturing companies need more slack, and that running people at startup intensity constantly will wear them out. Sounds like wisdom many companies might consider...

bigmattystyles 4mo ago
Of course, some people never learn this but for those that do, I wonder if this sort of wisdom only comes with age and/or wealth. It’s easier to be nice/benevolent/decent when your back is not against the wall. When you’re in it, you might not even have your back against the wall but think you do.
- bluefirebrand 4mo ago
  I'm of the opinion that people will be more successful if you don't act like their back is against the wall even if it is You can only wring so much out of people with stress and panic. Driving people to burn out is not the answer. Probably an unpopular take here though
  - bigmattystyles 4mo ago
    No, I fully agree with you.
  - pdimitar 4mo ago
    Everybody knows this... especially those that gaslight people into working themselves to the bone. They know that people wisen up to this so they hire younger people, before they understood the game. Classic.
  - andrekandre 4mo ago
    > You can only wring so much out of people with stress and panic. just to add, its not only wringing out, it literally leads to worse quality, more incidents and can eventually compounds itself towards a death spiral in many cases
- ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago
  Well, founders run themselves that way, so they often feel as if they are “leading from the front,” with the notable exception, that they reap founder rewards (which often still come, even with failure), and the folks they are driving, will never reap those rewards.
  - steveBK123 4mo ago
    > founders run themselves that way .. reap founder rewards (which often still come, even with failure) It is worth noting that founders have more upside but arguably also have less downside due to this. Founders quietly get liquidity during fundraising rounds that other insiders do not, which makes a huge difference in de-risking.
rectang 4mo ago
More likely it will be taken as a plan for "how to win at any cost and then humanize yourself later".
gtowey 4mo ago
Wisdom is not appreciated in our industry. Everyone in tech with a modicum of status or power thinks they got there because they're smarter than everyone else and there is nothing of value to be learned from others. Thus, our leaders blunder in to the same mistakes everyone else is making over and over again. We never learn.
- analognoise 4mo ago
  This is more an age thing, and it's fixed by experience. Which is why there's such a focus on youth - who else can you get to sacrifice themselves with the whisper promise that it will make them rich, who else is easily goaded with "You're so smart you should work more"? We learn, but that's not what The Machine optimizes for, so when you realize it you leave. Other bodies throw themselves on the gears, the cycle repeats.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago
    > "Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment." - Attributed to Nasrudin
  - kakacik 4mo ago
    > This is more an age thing, and it's fixed by experience. There is a simple trick for that, its called ageism. Good luck finding job in some youngish teams when you are over 50, you need to show extraordinary talent, experience and flexibility to be considered. I agree with others - people often think they are smarter than others, and smart folks tend to fall into that trap easily, triple that with young age. It works sometimes for some folks and thats it.
    - mothballed 4mo ago
      At age 50 you contract to do the thing the young bucks butchered after the investors / executives realize what happened and beg for a "hired gun" to get it done. Then you GTFO.
dilyevsky 4mo ago
Pretty sure Carmack's idea of slack is what many companies would call "working as hard as possible"
steveBK123 4mo ago
Part of it is the upside / skin in the game aspect changing from small startup days to big company with 100s or 1000s of employees. You hire differently as well when you are hiring 100s of people instead of a cracked team of 5. There is a world of difference between "work nights & weekends maybe we become millionaire/billionaires together!" and "work nights & weekends so that you get an exceeds expectations and eligible for a 5% increase on the annual review cycle". As a leader, it is unreasonable to have the same expectations before & after that transition.
AndrewKemendo 4mo ago
In my experience what I see happen is that executives look at comments like this as proof that grinding people into the ground actually work They don’t care about whether or not a company lasts for 30 years or whatever they care that stuff gets shipped and point to this as: “the best programmer in the world was only successful because he pushed his people super hard” So I wouldn’t be hopeful that this is an effective warning
- somecontext 4mo ago
  In the linked thread that John Carmack is responding to, Sandy Petersen agrees: > So if my theorem is correct, and Quake gutted id Software, was it worth it? Well I'd say yes absolutely. https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/2069592330152362034 https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/2069592330152362034
princevegeta89 4mo ago
And yet, that is what they do, meaninglessly and stupidly enough.
stvltvs 4mo ago
Not enough thought goes into safely transitioning from scrappy startup to mature enterprise. Attitudes, culture, and practices have to change. It gets super awkward, and it's a rare CEO that does both well. Practically speaking, I spend a lot of time paying down technical debt incurred during the startup years, and practices are only just maturing to where we're not digging ourselves a deeper hole anymore.
- torben-friis 4mo ago
  It's a fascinating period to learn to navigate. It is very rare for a startup leader (usually very hands-on and practical minded) to be able to delegate and think strategically well enough to survive the transition. Sometimes they even lack breadth in their experience (because, well, their experience was the company's startup phase). What to do, then? replace them with outsiders? That would not be fair, and it destroys company culture. Leave them be, knowing that they're not up to the task? That's even worse, the people under them will suffer. It sucks that the most common answer is that eventually there's a crisis, heads roll, corporate suits take over. Thus starts the period where the graph goes up and the product goes down.
darth_avocado 4mo ago
Tell that to Elon, Zuckerberg and the like
phaser 4mo ago
They could. But they rather get their "wisdom" from Steve Jobs trivia romanticizing the grind and being an asshole. Like Elon Musk, who once wrote in a company-wide email in 2018: "Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value"
- ninkendo 4mo ago
  > Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value I’d be interested to hear more about the context for this, since it sounds perfectly reasonable, enough that it’s triggering some cognitive dissonance with my general hatred for Musk. It’s a truism in most companies that meetings tend to have too many people for no good reason. It’s just too easy to add extra people “just in case”, or adding whole teams when you only really needed one person, etc… and as an IC I’ve been in roles where I was in back to back meetings literally all day, leaving no time to actually get my work done. A policy of “if it’s obvious to you that a meeting doesn’t need you, feel free to walk out” sounds very reasonable to me.
  - mrhottakes 4mo ago
    What if you're needed at the end of the meeting but not the beginning?
    - ninkendo 4mo ago
      Then it would likely not be nearly as “obvious” that I’m not adding value, if all it takes is some time to pass before I’m suddenly needed. If we’re on a topic that will eventually make its way to something I can help with, I should be able to see that coming. But if you say “but what if you don’t know” then it’s the same as if literally anyone else at the company is needed at the second half of a meeting: you say “let’s loop in mrhottakes, this seems like it’s his expertise” and you get looped in. Preemptively adding every single person on the off chance they may be needed can lead to madness: at the limit you may as well add the whole company to the invite. After all, what if they’re needed at some point? It’s extremely wasteful. Multiply the number of people by their hourly salary: that’s how much a hour meeting “costs”. Don’t be wasteful.
malnourish 4mo ago
Supergiant games appears to have taken these lessons to heart given their output cadence and apparent low rate of turnover.
aurareturn 4mo ago
Many founders/bosses often think that their employees are lazy because they don't work as hard as they do. They usually forget that their employees are usually paid a lot less or have magnitudes less equity. Not everyone owns 15% of the company. I will grind too if I'm paid well enough and the potential reward is worth it.
- manphone 4mo ago
  Yeah, this is my favorite one, the number of CEOs I’ve had tell me that they were frustrated how little everyone else was putting in compared to them while they’ve had hundreds of times of the return is hilarious.
  - fatnoah 4mo ago
    I was VP Eng of a 40+ person team at a startup, and my workaholic CEO once asked me if it bothered me that other people on the team didn't work as hard as me. My answer was very tactful, but noted that in any decent exit, I would walk away with multiples of some of those people, so it made perfect sense that I'd work harder.
    - MyHonestOpinon 4mo ago
      But it is not only about the money. People just have their own lives, interests, and passions. For me, the lack of autonomy when doing my job kills a lot of the motivation.
      - gedy 4mo ago
        Yeah all the "10x CEO" types would lose their minds if someone was bossing them around or micromanaging like they tend to.
- zasz 4mo ago
  That and also employees don't have the same power. Employees fundamentally have less autonomy. If you have to work inside someone else's box all the time, you're not going to want to work as hard.
dietr1ch 4mo ago
The MBAs don't care about the long term. Burnt out employees are an externality they can just lay off. Also, since there's a lot of risks in many dimensions, nailing work-life balance, but failing in another aspect will also end your company, so why not make them try their best in the short term while there's some runway left.
sidewndr46 4mo ago
unless I'm mistaken John Carmack is unbelievably wealthy. Like give away a Ferrari and start a rocket company for fun wealthy. There's a number of people who read this and conclude that the message is you can't push someone hard enough, it's impossible to fail if you just push hard enough.
- georgemcbay 4mo ago
  > unless I'm mistaken John Carmack is unbelievably wealthy. Depends upon how you define unbelievably wealthy, which has rapidly expanded in recent years. According to "the internet" (which is, of course, going to be wrong, but probably not by orders of magnitude) he's worth ~$50 million, which is an awful lot of money from my perspective, but still places his net worth a lot closer to us plebs than it is to all of the centibillionaires and the one trillionaire who briefly existed. > There's a number of people who read this and conclude that the message is you can't push someone hard enough, it's impossible to fail if you just push hard enough. It is, of course, possible to fail no matter how hard you push. Working very hard sets you up for the possibility of success, but does not guarantee it.
  - sidewndr46 4mo ago
    Lifetime earnings in the US is less than $2 million for most individuals. John Carmack is all of 55, he potentially has decades of life ahead of him. It's important to realize that Carmack was very wealthy even back in the late 90s. He doesn't have insane multi-billion dollar empires because he seemed to just shift to trying to enjoy life rather than pursuing more wealth. My general analysis here is that while money certainly can help buy some happiness, you can really only use so many yachts.
avaer 4mo ago
Also worth considering if there is survivorship bias in this wisdom. Would Carmack be in a position to give advice on how to make Quake if id slacked itself into shutting down before Quake was finished? Remember that Carmack also started a rocket company. You probably wouldn't take his advice about how to run successful rocket companies. (this isn't shade on Carmack, he's my hero)
Goronmon 4mo ago
Though it is interesting how many old-school game developer stories from the employee side can be summarized as "I worked out of college for low pay, long hours and I basically lived at the office with little/no outside personal life."
- sbarre 4mo ago
  I think you can say that for any nascent / figuring-it-out industry. The early days (late 90s / early 00s) of web development and web agencies was pretty much the same thing. We were all learning as we went, there were very few senior people, and the company owners/leaders certainly didn't know any better than we did. But we felt lucky to be doing this exciting and cutting edge work, so being at the office working was often the thing we _wanted_ to be doing the most. The inmates ran the asylum, as they say..
- InitialLastName 4mo ago
  Young people often have low expenses, few external demands on their time, and poor living conditions. If they are smart, motivated and lucky they can sometimes take advantage of that situation to do extraordinary work. Note that a growing range of professions (law, medicine, finance, journalism,, politics) have developed career paths such that they take advantage of that condition and demand that level of commitment out of their entry-level employees.
stephbook 4mo ago
Ironically you're only listening to his words of wisdom because the team created an incredible game.

bigmattystyles 4mo ago

Of course, some people never learn this but for those that do, I wonder if this sort of wisdom only comes with age and/or wealth. It’s easier to be nice/benevolent/decent when your back is not against the wall. When you’re in it, you might not even have your back against the wall but think you do.

bluefirebrand 4mo ago
I'm of the opinion that people will be more successful if you don't act like their back is against the wall even if it is You can only wring so much out of people with stress and panic. Driving people to burn out is not the answer. Probably an unpopular take here though
- bigmattystyles 4mo ago
  No, I fully agree with you.
- pdimitar 4mo ago
  Everybody knows this... especially those that gaslight people into working themselves to the bone. They know that people wisen up to this so they hire younger people, before they understood the game. Classic.
- andrekandre 4mo ago
  > You can only wring so much out of people with stress and panic. just to add, its not only wringing out, it literally leads to worse quality, more incidents and can eventually compounds itself towards a death spiral in many cases
ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago
Well, founders run themselves that way, so they often feel as if they are “leading from the front,” with the notable exception, that they reap founder rewards (which often still come, even with failure), and the folks they are driving, will never reap those rewards.
- steveBK123 4mo ago
  > founders run themselves that way .. reap founder rewards (which often still come, even with failure) It is worth noting that founders have more upside but arguably also have less downside due to this. Founders quietly get liquidity during fundraising rounds that other insiders do not, which makes a huge difference in de-risking.

rectang 4mo ago

More likely it will be taken as a plan for "how to win at any cost and then humanize yourself later".

gtowey 4mo ago

Wisdom is not appreciated in our industry. Everyone in tech with a modicum of status or power thinks they got there because they're smarter than everyone else and there is nothing of value to be learned from others. Thus, our leaders blunder in to the same mistakes everyone else is making over and over again. We never learn.

analognoise 4mo ago
This is more an age thing, and it's fixed by experience. Which is why there's such a focus on youth - who else can you get to sacrifice themselves with the whisper promise that it will make them rich, who else is easily goaded with "You're so smart you should work more"? We learn, but that's not what The Machine optimizes for, so when you realize it you leave. Other bodies throw themselves on the gears, the cycle repeats.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago
  > "Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment." - Attributed to Nasrudin
- kakacik 4mo ago
  > This is more an age thing, and it's fixed by experience. There is a simple trick for that, its called ageism. Good luck finding job in some youngish teams when you are over 50, you need to show extraordinary talent, experience and flexibility to be considered. I agree with others - people often think they are smarter than others, and smart folks tend to fall into that trap easily, triple that with young age. It works sometimes for some folks and thats it.
  - mothballed 4mo ago
    At age 50 you contract to do the thing the young bucks butchered after the investors / executives realize what happened and beg for a "hired gun" to get it done. Then you GTFO.

dilyevsky 4mo ago

Pretty sure Carmack's idea of slack is what many companies would call "working as hard as possible"

steveBK123 4mo ago

Part of it is the upside / skin in the game aspect changing from small startup days to big company with 100s or 1000s of employees. You hire differently as well when you are hiring 100s of people instead of a cracked team of 5. There is a world of difference between "work nights & weekends maybe we become millionaire/billionaires together!" and "work nights & weekends so that you get an exceeds expectations and eligible for a 5% increase on the annual review cycle". As a leader, it is unreasonable to have the same expectations before & after that transition.

AndrewKemendo 4mo ago

In my experience what I see happen is that executives look at comments like this as proof that grinding people into the ground actually work They don’t care about whether or not a company lasts for 30 years or whatever they care that stuff gets shipped and point to this as: “the best programmer in the world was only successful because he pushed his people super hard” So I wouldn’t be hopeful that this is an effective warning

somecontext 4mo ago
In the linked thread that John Carmack is responding to, Sandy Petersen agrees: > So if my theorem is correct, and Quake gutted id Software, was it worth it? Well I'd say yes absolutely. https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/2069592330152362034 https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/2069592330152362034

princevegeta89 4mo ago

And yet, that is what they do, meaninglessly and stupidly enough.

stvltvs 4mo ago

Not enough thought goes into safely transitioning from scrappy startup to mature enterprise. Attitudes, culture, and practices have to change. It gets super awkward, and it's a rare CEO that does both well. Practically speaking, I spend a lot of time paying down technical debt incurred during the startup years, and practices are only just maturing to where we're not digging ourselves a deeper hole anymore.

torben-friis 4mo ago
It's a fascinating period to learn to navigate. It is very rare for a startup leader (usually very hands-on and practical minded) to be able to delegate and think strategically well enough to survive the transition. Sometimes they even lack breadth in their experience (because, well, their experience was the company's startup phase). What to do, then? replace them with outsiders? That would not be fair, and it destroys company culture. Leave them be, knowing that they're not up to the task? That's even worse, the people under them will suffer. It sucks that the most common answer is that eventually there's a crisis, heads roll, corporate suits take over. Thus starts the period where the graph goes up and the product goes down.

darth_avocado 4mo ago

Tell that to Elon, Zuckerberg and the like

phaser 4mo ago

They could. But they rather get their "wisdom" from Steve Jobs trivia romanticizing the grind and being an asshole. Like Elon Musk, who once wrote in a company-wide email in 2018: "Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value"

ninkendo 4mo ago
> Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value I’d be interested to hear more about the context for this, since it sounds perfectly reasonable, enough that it’s triggering some cognitive dissonance with my general hatred for Musk. It’s a truism in most companies that meetings tend to have too many people for no good reason. It’s just too easy to add extra people “just in case”, or adding whole teams when you only really needed one person, etc… and as an IC I’ve been in roles where I was in back to back meetings literally all day, leaving no time to actually get my work done. A policy of “if it’s obvious to you that a meeting doesn’t need you, feel free to walk out” sounds very reasonable to me.
- mrhottakes 4mo ago
  What if you're needed at the end of the meeting but not the beginning?
  - ninkendo 4mo ago
    Then it would likely not be nearly as “obvious” that I’m not adding value, if all it takes is some time to pass before I’m suddenly needed. If we’re on a topic that will eventually make its way to something I can help with, I should be able to see that coming. But if you say “but what if you don’t know” then it’s the same as if literally anyone else at the company is needed at the second half of a meeting: you say “let’s loop in mrhottakes, this seems like it’s his expertise” and you get looped in. Preemptively adding every single person on the off chance they may be needed can lead to madness: at the limit you may as well add the whole company to the invite. After all, what if they’re needed at some point? It’s extremely wasteful. Multiply the number of people by their hourly salary: that’s how much a hour meeting “costs”. Don’t be wasteful.

malnourish 4mo ago

Supergiant games appears to have taken these lessons to heart given their output cadence and apparent low rate of turnover.

aurareturn 4mo ago

Many founders/bosses often think that their employees are lazy because they don't work as hard as they do. They usually forget that their employees are usually paid a lot less or have magnitudes less equity. Not everyone owns 15% of the company. I will grind too if I'm paid well enough and the potential reward is worth it.

manphone 4mo ago
Yeah, this is my favorite one, the number of CEOs I’ve had tell me that they were frustrated how little everyone else was putting in compared to them while they’ve had hundreds of times of the return is hilarious.
- fatnoah 4mo ago
  I was VP Eng of a 40+ person team at a startup, and my workaholic CEO once asked me if it bothered me that other people on the team didn't work as hard as me. My answer was very tactful, but noted that in any decent exit, I would walk away with multiples of some of those people, so it made perfect sense that I'd work harder.
  - MyHonestOpinon 4mo ago
    But it is not only about the money. People just have their own lives, interests, and passions. For me, the lack of autonomy when doing my job kills a lot of the motivation.
    - gedy 4mo ago
      Yeah all the "10x CEO" types would lose their minds if someone was bossing them around or micromanaging like they tend to.
zasz 4mo ago
That and also employees don't have the same power. Employees fundamentally have less autonomy. If you have to work inside someone else's box all the time, you're not going to want to work as hard.

dietr1ch 4mo ago

The MBAs don't care about the long term. Burnt out employees are an externality they can just lay off. Also, since there's a lot of risks in many dimensions, nailing work-life balance, but failing in another aspect will also end your company, so why not make them try their best in the short term while there's some runway left.

sidewndr46 4mo ago

unless I'm mistaken John Carmack is unbelievably wealthy. Like give away a Ferrari and start a rocket company for fun wealthy. There's a number of people who read this and conclude that the message is you can't push someone hard enough, it's impossible to fail if you just push hard enough.

georgemcbay 4mo ago
> unless I'm mistaken John Carmack is unbelievably wealthy. Depends upon how you define unbelievably wealthy, which has rapidly expanded in recent years. According to "the internet" (which is, of course, going to be wrong, but probably not by orders of magnitude) he's worth ~$50 million, which is an awful lot of money from my perspective, but still places his net worth a lot closer to us plebs than it is to all of the centibillionaires and the one trillionaire who briefly existed. > There's a number of people who read this and conclude that the message is you can't push someone hard enough, it's impossible to fail if you just push hard enough. It is, of course, possible to fail no matter how hard you push. Working very hard sets you up for the possibility of success, but does not guarantee it.
- sidewndr46 4mo ago
  Lifetime earnings in the US is less than $2 million for most individuals. John Carmack is all of 55, he potentially has decades of life ahead of him. It's important to realize that Carmack was very wealthy even back in the late 90s. He doesn't have insane multi-billion dollar empires because he seemed to just shift to trying to enjoy life rather than pursuing more wealth. My general analysis here is that while money certainly can help buy some happiness, you can really only use so many yachts.

avaer 4mo ago

Also worth considering if there is survivorship bias in this wisdom. Would Carmack be in a position to give advice on how to make Quake if id slacked itself into shutting down before Quake was finished? Remember that Carmack also started a rocket company. You probably wouldn't take his advice about how to run successful rocket companies. (this isn't shade on Carmack, he's my hero)

Goronmon 4mo ago

Though it is interesting how many old-school game developer stories from the employee side can be summarized as "I worked out of college for low pay, long hours and I basically lived at the office with little/no outside personal life."

sbarre 4mo ago
I think you can say that for any nascent / figuring-it-out industry. The early days (late 90s / early 00s) of web development and web agencies was pretty much the same thing. We were all learning as we went, there were very few senior people, and the company owners/leaders certainly didn't know any better than we did. But we felt lucky to be doing this exciting and cutting edge work, so being at the office working was often the thing we _wanted_ to be doing the most. The inmates ran the asylum, as they say..
InitialLastName 4mo ago
Young people often have low expenses, few external demands on their time, and poor living conditions. If they are smart, motivated and lucky they can sometimes take advantage of that situation to do extraordinary work. Note that a growing range of professions (law, medicine, finance, journalism,, politics) have developed career paths such that they take advantage of that condition and demand that level of commitment out of their entry-level employees.

stephbook 4mo ago

Ironically you're only listening to his words of wisdom because the team created an incredible game.