7 ms·
Startups Finding the Best Employees Are Actually Employed
- walshemj 11y agoNot to go all Michael Gove here does the NYT not have subs to correct grammar /meaning it should be "Are Actually Employees" Title as written implies something totally different - ie the its hard to recruit
- zem 11y agoi first read it as "hard to recruit" too, but it's grammatically correct, just ambiguous. i wonder if the ambiguity was actually deliberate on the headline writer's part.
- SilasX 11y agoIt's not just ambiguous, but wrong. For all X, the best X is is an X. To convey the meaning they want, the title should be "the best (workers|peformers) have employee status." As it stands, it reads like a statement of the fizzbuzz phenomenon: "the best employees are are already employed somewhere else [and not still looking]".
- a3n 11y agoThat's exactly what I thought it meant before I read the article.
- zem 11y agono, it's just a rhetorical device; read it as "the best employees are actually employed [rather than contracted]"
- SilasX 11y agoWell, the rhetorical device conveys the wrong thing, so it's not very good: - Being contracted is a way to be employed. - The contractor can still be an employee of the contracting agency - It can mean "employee vs out-of-work" [1] just as much as "employee vs contractor" To often, journalists fancy themselves novelists and sacrifice clarity for flourish. In this context, that's the wrong choice. [1] What I and the sibling thought.
- eli 11y agoIt's not a great title but changing it to "the best employees are actually employees" is worse
- netcan 11y agoHaving a good PR company can be a massive advantage. This is a whole NYT article spun out of "company hires employees instead of contractors." A long one, and it sounds like they're doing something revolutionary and trend changing.
- davidgerard 11y agoIf not nickel-and-diming your workers counts as good PR, then good.
- pjc50 11y agoThis is bizarre, especially alongside the "We need to rethink employee compensation" article. On the one hand you have the Uber-style workers who are being treated as much like interchangeable, disposable parts as possible; and on the other you have the development staff who are hard to recruit or replace but are increasingly dissatisfied with being paid partly in lottery tickets. Maybe "move fast and break things" has reached the point where we're regretting what's been broken.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- rrss1122 11y ago"Move fast and break things" worked when valuations were sky-high and stock options could have been worth something. With interest rates going up and valuations coming down as a result, we are definitely going to start regretting what's been broken.
- itgoon 11y agoLess "move fast and break things", and more "maximized maximization" overkill. You see it all through these threads: any turnover costs money, a sub-optimal employee costs too much, everything comes down to cost. Okay, I get it. IT is a cost center. A good company should minimize those costs. There's a point of diminishing returns for everything, and I think we've long since passed it in compensation. I think things would work better if various managers and leaders could accept that they just aren't that smart. Rather than try to squeeze every last bit, accept that they can't, and build it into their businesses. That would mean scheduling time and money to handle turnover. Which would mean running a little "fat" all the time. Since the only metric that matters is "cost", then that doesn't happen. So, an employee leaves, everyone else falls behind trying to not only make up their work, but make time to hire and train someone else. Schedules and budgets are blown. Everyone says "we have to do something", to justify being called "leaders". We've reached a point where everybody is out of ideas. There may some tweak here and there that can be made, but this is it. This is as cheap as things are going to get. The sooner employers figure it out, the sooner things will get better.
- DanielBMarkham 11y agoI thought this was going to be a story about finding new workers, but instead it's a story about the latest media topic: subcontracting versus hiring employees. The author looks to be coming down fairly heavily on the side of hiring people instead of using subcontractors. In the article's defense, it does present some of the other side of the argument -- later on in the piece. I think this is all going to shake out over the next five years or so, with these markets bifurcating into a more expensive model using employees, and a less expensive model using contractors. Each will have benefits and drawbacks. I couldn't help but think of a recent interview with one of the LinkedIn founders I read recently. As you know, LinkedIn facilitates a lot of recruiting -- and poaching -- across many industries. The writer asked the founder how, since he saw the massive churn in IT, did he go about hiring people? His response was golden: as part of their hiring and employee management process, it's made clear that any full-time job is probably temporary. So there are clear goals that both the company and employee have for growth in order to reach their next level. The employee might want to work in several new technologies and gather up some skills they are missing. The company may want to enter a high-risk, high-stress market to see if there's a business model there. Everybody gets something they want and the relationship is understood to both be temporary and mutually-beneficial. I like this. This is the model I use when assembling and managing technology teams, and it's the model I've seen work over and over again. Quite frankly it's the only model I can see working in a rapidly-changing economy. The real question is how you apply this model to more mundane service-oriented industries like Uber.
- toddan 11y agoI dont get it. Why do they not invest in hiring less experienced developers and make them the best employees. It may cost more in the short run, but if you invest early in a developer with little to no experience you get the opportunity to shape that developer into your tech stack and company.
- pjc50 11y agoConventional answers to that question: - hard to select based on "potential", especially in a nondiscriminatory way - devs are hard to teach; risk it may not work out, which is additional risk startups do not want - process is time- and energy-consuming at the best of times; detracts from growing the product and business - if you train people, they will expect to be paid more All three of these are somewhat true. Really it's the giant employers (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, IBM, Oracle) that should be training graduates, rather than startups with tiny funding. But employees don't appear on the balance sheet as an asset, just a liability.
- brlewis 11y agoI don't know which part of the article you're referring to, but in general it's best to have a variety of experience levels together, and that's how you help less experienced developers grow. Hiring only one or the other isn't a good option.
- yummyfajitas 11y agoSome people do that. A friend of mine took such a job - her first developer job ever. I told her to take the job, learn from the training and earn 2x-3x her previous salary as a secretary. Then I told her that a year from now she should start looking for an employer who will pay market rate and won't spy on her reddit account. If you do invest in less experienced devs, make sure you can recognize the ones that are too naive to realize when their value has gone up. Maybe also use psychological tricks to give them impostor syndrome.
- chralieboy 11y agoAnd that's why companies don't provide a lot of training. Turnover is incredibly high in SV. Most people stay at jobs for 2 years, so if it takes a year to get them to the equivalent level you're making a large investment for little return. To answer the question of "why not just pay them more to keep them?", it isn't always that simple. Two years is a long time in startup land, meaning the equity component offered by a much smaller company can be really compelling and unreasonable for the parent company to match. It may make sense for the employee to take that job, but it also therefore makes sense for the employer to not train them if they think they're going to leave.
- unimportant 11y ago>Of course, creating “good jobs” entails costs. Managed by Q’s workers get an “above market” wage, plus full medical benefits. “They are the same benefits that our programmers and engineers get,” Mr. Rahmanian said, because “we didn’t want to create a company that had a divide between people that worked in headquarters and the others.” That's just common sense. If you pay the same salary that some outsourcer pays you're looking at a high turnover that will be more of a headache and cost factor than 3-4k extra a year above the average wage for someone in customer support for example (which is a tiny amount compared to engineer salaries anyway). >Munchery, a dinner delivery service, pays drivers a base wage that exceeds the minimum wage, plus their driving expenses, plus tips. Taken together, it comes out to about $23 an hour in San Francisco, far higher than most other delivery jobs. Those who work more than 30 hours a week also get health and retirement benefits. I don't know about Munchery and will give them the benefit of a doubt, but usually companies that offer full benefits for 30+ hours (don't they legally have to do this anyway in SF?), they just cut anyone off at 29 hours. Also the "taken together" "wage" is highly misleading if it includes costs of gas and all the other expenses that one has to pay for a car, in a city where one doesn't even necessarily have to own one. Basically the whole story is about common sense, as min wage or slightly above contractors obviously don't tend to be very loyal or excited about their work beyond lip service, as pretty much anyone doesn't see this as a long term situation and will just switch to the next best thing whenever possible. Employment contracts on the other hand come with notice periods, non compete etc. that will make switching jobs a lot more of a hassle and make anyone think twice if they really want to do it.
- sveme 11y agoHas anyone ever seen a non-compete clause on service jobs like delivery car driver or cleaners? Just curious, that would take the thing to a whole other level.
- protonfish 11y agoJimmy John's http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/10/jimmy-johns-noncompete-agreement_n_7042112.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/10/jimmy-johns-noncomp...
- bad_user 11y ago> If you’ve ever wondered why there are such vast differences in quality between Uber rides you’ve taken, this is why: Beyond customer ratings and warnings, Uber can’t tell drivers what to do. The author is implying that if Uber drivers were employees, then they'd behave better and the experience would be more consistent. That's just bullshit. There's nothing special about the employee status, the only difference being that the employment law applies. But there's always a contract in place when hiring contractors and if anything Uber can demand much more from contractors than they can from employees. And if you want proof to the contrary, you only need to look at taxi drivers, many of which are employees of bigger taxi companies. Then there's also the issue that the article is comparing cab drivers with highly skilled professionals, the kind that end up working in startups.
- pmorici 11y agoI think you are mistaken. Most taxi drivers are not employees they rent the taxi from the company on a per shift basis.
- bad_user 11y agoIt depends on where you live. In my city many of them are employees, I know because I've got some acquaintances in the business. And we're still having the same poor service just like everywhere else.
- jegutman 11y agoYea, employees provide great customer service. Totally explains Time Warner Cable.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 11y agoHe's not necessarily implying that. He's saying that the "set of employees" would behave better than the "set of contractors" that they'd have as an alternative. It does not mean that these sets would be identical, people-wise. The first set would contain different people, possibly with little overlap. That alone makes it possible to have a vastly different culture. We could argue about why the two sets wouldn't be identical, but some mechanisms seem obvious enough that I don't see the point in that.
- iamthepieman 11y ago"Man surprised when alligator, bought to serve as lap-dog, bites off hand" The real debate is not sharing economy vs entrenched service providers or contractor vs employee it's why companies (and the investors who give them money) think they can have their cake and eat it too with regards to employee loyalty and employee status. You can only buy customer and employee hearts for so long with quirky parties and hip ads. Eventually you have to treat people right.
- glesica 11y agoMy (least) favorite is job ads that list "working for a startup" as a "perk". Part of the problem is that startups have been romanticized so heavily that working for one has become its own reward in the eyes of many. As you pointed out, this kind of delusion only lasts so long.
- noarchy 11y ago>According to the Internal Revenue Service, a business that hires an independent contractor is not entitled to dictate how or when the contractor performs a job. Maybe things work differently in the US vs here in Canada, but here "independent contractors" are often treated like employees, particularly in IT. You'll often see such contractors, who are technically working under their own (solo) company rather than for the client - working alongside salaried employees, doing the same work, under almost identical circumstances.
- bpyne 11y agoWhen I was a contractor I had more control of my hours. Employers preferred 40 hours, but would accept less depending on their situation. Other than that, I worked alongside internal people and did the same work.
- exelius 11y agoThis happens a lot in the US too; it's unfortunately a side effect of the hiring policies at most companies. Many companies would prefer to pay $150,000 per year to a contractor than pay $100,000 per year plus benefits. The contractor route gives you more cost certainty, plus when you lay off a contractor by canceling or refusing to renew the contract, it doesn't count as a layoff. Using contractors this way allows companies to respond more quickly to negative economic conditions, and at a lower cost (you often have to pay severance to employees).
- jofer 11y agoIt's the same here in the US... The company I work for hires countless contractors that are required to work set hours and treated exactly like employees, except they're not given benefits, etc (in principle, they're paid more, though). The biggest oddity is that I know of several "contractors" who have worked full-time for the same company for _multiple decades_ that are now being laid off with no severance and no warning. Obviously, that's the advantage from the company's viewpoint, and you don't go into one of those roles without being aware that it could/will happen, but still... I've never understood how being a "contractor" somehow completely sidesteps employment laws.
- josefresco 11y agoNo offense, but these startups by nature have NO IDEA if their employees-over-subs strategy will work. There's one quote in the article from a VC who says the following: "When you look at the level of churn amongst the employee base and the customers, the high reviews from workers, the high customer-satisfaction rating — they were proving it from hard-core business metrics.”" No mention of revenue of course, just user-survey style measurement. Also, a quote from a VC who invests money into the subject of the article is not exactly unbiased. What about data from long established businesses, who have moved from subs to part-time and full-time employees? "Full stack startup" reads more like a marketing strategy then one created for long term financial success.
- brockers 11y agoI thought this was an Onion headline at first.