1) Carrying an entire 75ft tree in pieces from my backyard to my front yard.
2) 10 hours maybe
3)wood needed to be moved
4) when looking at the pile of wood I have to move
5) the resulting stack of wood in front of my house
6)yup, been stronger ever since those few days a few months ago
I won't say I especially like it up to that point. But that was maybe because I was already doing the passion=hours translation in my head. But at least he's honest about it at that point.
I agree with the gist of hiring people that care about their craft, but asking them to care about the company is harder.
That really requires some sort of reciprocal "company cares about you", and that's hard to guarantee. Especially when you're hiring the generation that saw their parents lose out on the things like pensions vs 401k, layoffs as regular events, etc.
And companies who dare asking your consent to collect, retain, and share (with 3rd parties they like) everything about you from your teams chat to gene data.
> I agree with the gist of hiring people that care about their craft, but asking them to care about the company is harder.
Exactly! Pride in one’s work is what you want. Hiring people who care about your company when, for most people, it’s another notch in their belt, means that your hiring pool is severely constrained and you’ll pass over many people who take pride in their work (and who would therefore benefit your company tremendously).
Stop pretending your company is anything more than a capitalist endeavor that pays people for their time.
Too many times you give your all and when there is a bump you get flushed down the toilet, it’s not trust inspiring. Luckily I did found companies who cared, but it’s a minority. The best advice I can give is : make your company human. Give and take, be there for eachother, care. Sounds simple, but in my experience not many companies tick these boxes.
I wish this passionate-about-the-company, corporate BS that is under the guise of new age feel good advice, fad goes away. The number of founders I have met who show the attitude that they are trying to change the world and I should be grateful to have a chance to work for them is astonishing. There is nothing wrong with having a business that doesn't change people's lives in a fundamental way. But don't sell me BS that your another social media app is going to change the world in a good way, while you, being a founder, take all the winnings and I, being an ordinary employee, have to overwork without proper compensation and feel good about it.
> If someone is applying to Scale and has never been deeply obsessed about something before, then it’s a bad bet to think Scale will be the first.
So you mean that you're looking for unbalanced people? I don't get how being obsessed about a product equates to long term success for an employee in your company. To me it's more like a recipe for burnout.
For those reading this article who might be tempted to a company like this: stay away! You’ll not get any meaningful equity, what you have will be quickly diluted, and as the company either starts its death spiral or “March towards profitability” you’ll be asked to work inappropriate hours and your commitment to the company will be questioned.
Go for an early stage startup with meaningful equity or just go for a more stable, profitable company.
I would strongly recommend the latter. The former is playing the lottery. Even if you win, stock appreciation in big tech over 10 years beats the startup stock. Not to mention, you won't be at a no name startup for years to find out whether you won the lottery.
If one doesn't care about the financial PoV, there are good enough reasons to go to a mid stage startup as well (clearer purpose, structure, product market fit etc.) over an early stage one.
The second half of this should be: "...and help them to keep giving a shit."
I've seen too many times to count management completely squashing out any passion that employees might have for the company or product. The most common ways I think are micromanaging and soliciting feedback / ideas then completely ignoring it. Both will immediately have your employees checking out and saying to themselves "fine, I'll show up, do what I'm told, then clock out at 5."
There you have it. Come on, by now we all know what this “caring” or “giving a shit” stuff is about. Just say you want people to work hard, long hours. Just say that.
Yikes. I would never work for that person after reading that article.
“I started a company and I’m totally wild about it. It is my life. If it is not your life too then you don’t belong here.”
Founders are supposed to be obsessed with their company. (Though I question that too.) But demanding everyone else at the company be just as obsessed is doomed to hire children and sycophants and drive off professionals who have seen this movie before.
I got this vibe too. Now I know to stay away from this Scale guys if I'm looking for work one day. Work/life balance is just as important as taking pride in your work. Any mentally healthy individual knows that.
Also not good for the business. It means you attract people who pretend to care about it. So, people who can tell a good story, not those who will talk honestly to you.
it's not obvious to me that hiring good storytellers is a negative.
I think you can make the case that that's not the sole criteria or highest criteria you should seek, but I've seen remarkable longevity in companies where people are willing to fake it til they make it. (Longevity defined here as keeping people employed and keep raising money when needed. Not changing the world or anything.)
I think it's more likely he cashes out and becomes another "young prodigy angel/VC/investor".
He doesn't have the work experience to understand the problem domain well enough to build a company to solve it and he doesn't have the life experience to apply what work experience he has had. I'd bet the money I'll net after the lockup on an IPO I'm in that close to 100% of the value of "his" company was built on that bed of VC funds and their connections he lucked into.
He's a cute anecdote for the company's marketing--that's the entire sum of his value. He's not likely to build another company or achieve any further success outside the VC bubble.
As a founder, there is nothing I hate more than other founders expecting their employees to work 996 for them. It shows they don’t respect their employees time and abuse it for their will. Unfortunately, this seems common in the startup world. I also think that’s why VCs love young founders as well.
The downside is also much bigger for founders. The board will cut the founder pay when times are tough, long before they touch rank-and-file employees, because they know you value your equity. The other folks can walk.
Nothing stops a founder from walking away. Plenty of founders sell their shares to investors/cofounders in order to cash out.
Boards are typically stacked in the founders favor, so any reduction in pay would be the founders own decision. Which makes sense, because they want to keep the company that they have significant equity in alive.
I think you're talking about a company where things are going well. I'm talking about one where they've gone badly, and the founder has lost most control.
If the founder has lost most control, they also have way less equity. So way less reason to stick around. If things are going that badly, dump the stock, and GTFO, same as the smart employees are likely to do.
That's kind of the point: it's absurd to expect an employee--who doesn't see either the same rewards or the same risks as founders--to be as passionate about the company as the founders are. I'd go further--it's not just absurd, but astoundingly stupid and naive. It demonstrates a profound lack of both reasoning ability and experience.
I worked at a startup and I could tell that the founders viewed the company as if it were their baby. They wondered why their employees, the "babysitters", didn't give the same effort and attention to their baby as we did. That is, no weeks significantly past 40 hours, no responding to email after hours, etc.
If you think of it in terms of babies and babysitters, it's clearly absurd to expect the babysitter to bend over backwards to help your child outside their paid duty. Yet the founders can't see it.
Don’t fall for the trap that says that only the sexiest sounding jobs are OK—for one, what that means varies by the talents and interests and skills of the workforce. For another, it’s going to bias you towards treating, e.g., janitors as subhuman, and that way is the path to a very bad place.
What makes work satisfying is, to a large but not total extent, a function of the mutual respect the employer and employee have for the humanity of the employee. Some jobs are just bullshit. Some aren’t. All jobs have a certain amount of toil.
You’ll get people who give a shit about the work when your work isn’t bullshit, and about the job when the culture at work respects them.
> The inverse would be "hire people who don't give a shit."
That’s the complement. The inverse would be “Fire (or don’t hire) people who give a shit”. Also what you identified as a corollary is more accurately identified as the converse.
One way to have a business worth giving a shit about is to care about what your customers do. To you, the programmers, it's Yet Another Middleware CRUD CRM Layer, but to your users, it's how they make their living or enjoy themselves in their time off. They care about what your software does for them.
We programmers tend to prize the code that we write for other programmers: the compilers, the kernels, the libraries. But most of us will work for customers who do real-world things, whether that's watching a movie or checking in patients at the dentist office or tuning their guitar. So our software is usually incredibly dull to us as programmers, but of crucial interest to our users.
This doesn't have to be management consultant BS. You can't just fake caring about customers. Be sincerely interested in making their lives better, even though what they do isn't what you as a programmer have devoted your life to.
this is a tangent, but every single time i have ever watched an end user use "my" code i have learned an incredible amount. Often, related to how to make a CRUD app that isn't horrible to use!
Decoupling devs from exposure to these sorts of experiences is a huge disservice. Just sitting and watching someone use your product for a few hours is incredibly illuminating.
That's why the number one tip for startups is to talk to users, including demoing your product. Turns out, it's not just a good idea for only startups but also any product at all.
> For another, it’s going to bias you towards treating, e.g., janitors as subhuman, and that way is the path to a very bad place.
Do you have any more thoughts about this point? In my own life I’ve seen some of my friends with hotshot jobs develop this sort of mentality, and I sort of don’t know what to make of it. I want to be like “this is a toxic attitude to have!” but at the same time I can’t make a better argument than it’s immoral and without janitors we’d all be dead.
A person's job is largely dependent on their own value system. The worth of a person does not correspond to how much that person values career prestige. It is easy to believe the opposite when you value career prestige highly.
I only have moral arguments for moral questions. Certainly the idea that humans, because they are human and for that reason alone, have inherent worth is not exactly new. It is seductively easy to start thinking you're above other people because of what you have, or what you know, or what you can do. It's not true, but a relatively dirty part of ourselves certainly wants it to be.
"The basis for determining the value of human work is not primarily the kind of work being done but the fact that the one who is doing it is a person." [0]
“And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.” [1]
“Giving a shit” seems to be entirely focused on whether they are putting in hours. I notice that nowhere in the 6 questions is there anything that would assess what was achieved.
So if I went to Scale, sat around for 12 hours and spent 7 on Hacker News, I would achieve as much as the Google employee but somehow be differentiated according to Scale.
The google engineer could work few hours and make life better (or worse) for a billion people.
The startup engineer has little impact in comparison. For this company specifically it's probably near zero, it's basically outsourcing like mechanical turk.
I personally recall moving from a small startup to a Fortune 50. I could spend half the time in the office and achieve a hundred times the outcome, easily.
Great advice, but I'd add one thing - the company itself, the leadership, etc. also has to give a shit at the same level as its people.
These Googlers that work 11-4 probably either used to give a shit, or still give a shit, but when you care deeply about your work and the company gets in your way or doesn't share your passion, it's an awful and demoralizing place to be.
So quit, you say. But you can't because you give a shit and you really, really want the company to succeed and do great things.
I wouldn't be surprised if some people get away with it, especially if they reach a certain specialization in a core codebase and are okay letting their career coast. It is not "the common paradigm" as stated in the article (at least, it wasn't in the NYC office 2014-2016).
People who coast might. People who are vying for a promotion or good rating absolutely work much harder than that. Google keeps a high bar for talent, and such talent isn't the kind that is satisfied with chilling at work. Google is notorious for making it hard to get a promotion - you wouldn't hear that complaint from coasters :) Painting all Googlers in the same brush is one of the following:
1) Ignorant and immature, if coming from a place of ignorance
2) Malicious if intended to show big companies in a bad light to attract ambitious young people
Google is a giant company, so surely somewhere there are some people who behave this way—-among a hundred thousand employees and hundreds of groups you will find at little bit of everything.
But in the groups I have worked for, solid full days are the norm, and somewhat rarely you have to really dig in and work a bit more, and even more rarely, you have so much slack that you can go hone early. But generally people nearly always put in full days.
I have a genuine question and I'm not trying to be snarky -- do people actually think this way in real life, or is it an elaborate social game of pretending to be more "passionate" than the next guy?
Scale seems like a cool company with an interesting product, but let's be honest, rational people here - they aren't curing cancer, creating art, or landing on Normandy Beach. This seems obvious to any self-aware person. So why all the bravado?
> "I have a genuine question and I'm not trying to be snarky -- do people actually think this way in real life, or is it an elaborate social game of pretending to be more "passionate" than the next guy?"
The instinct for tribalism is strong and that tendency is aided by the cheerleading that's done at all-hands meetings and other motivational internal meetings. I have met more than a few people who were long term employees who were genuinely gung-ho about their employer but they had a rude awakening when the the business needed to do layoffs for the first time.
Having had many interviews and a couple of jobs where my passion for the company seemed to be far more important than the quality of my experience, etc., yes.
> "I have a genuine question and I'm not trying to be snarky -- do people actually think this way in real life, or is it an elaborate social game of pretending to be more "passionate" than the next guy?"
We have a slight issue with 'identity' in the US. I need to read more Tocqueville before I really start espousing any diagnostic on the psyche of the US but...
This type of mindset is what occurs when someone searches for their identity and meaning then places that whole 'life's worth' in the form of businesses or enterprising endeavors.
It can be broadly characterized as externalizing one's identity, which is painfully likely to fail or let you down in some way. In its most extreme forms, it's really a mental disorder (bordering the wildly high-functioning creative schizophrenic) that the Startup Zeitgeist has hailed as 'how to innovate' and find your 'life's work.' The disorders become evident once one sacrifices all of self at the alter of this 'give a shit' goal - burn out is not the goal of human life.
I'll say I'm recovering from this mindset and have a fonder appreciation for what it means to foster a community (be that business, HOA, religious group, friend group, etc) that allows you to have a 'life's work' that gives you resources to flourish in ways you never thought you could.
The real irony is that often the best work is only possible when you balance it with rest, family, and community. Writing for 12 hours a day probably isn't going to produce the next great American novel, so I'm skeptical that it will produce the next "great" startup either.
>have a genuine question and I'm not trying to be snarky -- do people actually think this way in real life, or is it an elaborate social game of pretending to be more "passionate" than the next guy?
IMHO, if someone has not once wanted something in their life and worked really hard to get it then that does raise an eyebrow. It doesn't have to be a job. It could be an instrument, sport, extra ciricular, school project, volunteer work, or really anything. If you haven't, it means you either have never wanted to achieve something or didn't want to put the effort in to try.
Life happens and at some point we all make it to a point we are comfortable. So I think it's unfair to expect that out of a 45 year old with two kids. But if you get to be 45 without having really tried at something... well it's a bit sad.
There are enough people in tech industry evidently passionate about work to work nights and weekends. I've actually seen all combinations on the spectrum of fun work / BS work (e.g. calling your engineers at night because something on a web page mostly used in the same time zone is not pixel perfect and being mad in the morning they were not available); young / old; and doing good work / crappy work while at it.
So there's definitely something genuine to it, but many more have to fake it. I am working at a place where you don't have to fake it nearly at all and very happy about it...
Think about it... it might seem unfair, "unfair" towards e.g. me. I'm usually only passionate if the work happens to be very interesting for me in particular, otherwise I'm going to do good work with passion about quality/etc., but only 9-6, after which I'll go be passionate about other things.
But, I've worked with quite a few engineers similar to me in ability, or better, who would totally work 14 hours a day for no reason, no pressure or crunch. If a business had a choice, why would they hire me over these guys?
I mean, if we're being honest, even I don't "give a shit" about what I'm working on beyond building something fun/cool that enables me to make a living.
I want to hire someone who is good at what they do and brutally honest that they're taking the job because they need to feed themselves and take care of their loved ones and have enough free time left to finish their instrumental guitar record or whatever.
> The uncomfortable truth is that most people don’t give a shit. For example, it’s absolutely shocking that the common paradigm for engineers at Google is to come in at 11am and leave at 4pm. In no world can you be working 5 hours a day and be giving a shit, and so the conclusion is that very little meaningful work gets done at Google. Maybe a bit of a hyperbole, but not far from the truth. That culture is broken.
Never saw anybody do this. There might be some people who can get their part done quickly and are no longer interested in climbing the ladder, but that must be quite rare. People are not evaluated on the amount of time they spend in their chairs.
Google is a giant company, so surely somewhere there are some people who behave this way—-among a hundred thousand employees and hundreds of groups you will find at little bit of everything.
But in the groups I have worked for, solid full days are the norm, and somewhat rarely you have to really dig in and work a bit more, and even more rarely, you have so much slack that you can go hone early. But generally people nearly always put in full days.
Alexandr Wang is 23 years old and he became tech lead at Quora 7 years ago (?!). I assume the guy has been pulling 90 hour workweeks since age of 12 or something.
Just wait for your first RSI my young friend, and then we will talk again ;)
I'm really curious how he feels like about holidays, I assume people in Europe cant't give a shit having 4-6 weeks of holidays yearly, right?
His linkedin says Tech Lead from 2014-2016. But it doesn't mean he was tech lead from the start. He could've become tech lead on his last 3 months at the company.
One useful piece of advice that I have received is that there are tradeoffs in giving shit at work. This article mentions downsides of not giving a shit, but doesn't mention downsides of giving too much shit, that is, getting too emotionally attached to the work you are doing. Especially in big companies projects get cancelled or requirements change or managers assign work that doesn't even make sense, and if you are emotionally attached to your work when this happens it can cause interpersonal issues, low morale or unhappiness in general.
The author is setting up himself for a lot of disappointment. I am not sure why he expects employee number n*100 who gets 0.1% equity (if at all) to give a shit about his company (that he himself most likely has a huge stake in). Also, it's comical he cites one of the most successful companies in the world (Google) and criticizes their work culture. That culture clearly works for Google since they are wildly successful.
I agree with the second criteria but not the first. People with passion about something might bring that passion to work. In my experience, they're more likely to bring something they're already passionate about to work and make the rest of us passionate about it as well.
Trying to find candidates that are passionate about the company before they join doesn't seem right. If we're only aware of how the company appears from the outside (press releases, company website) how are we supposed to have a real attachment to what the company truly is? Best case scenario is them being attached to how the company markets itself, which isn't a great approximation. That said, there might be something here I can latch onto into the form of:
1. Hire people passionate about something.
2. Promote people passionate about the company.
However, I still see some problems with the above. I would need time to chew on it before basing any personnel decisions around it.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 246 ms ] thread1) Carrying an entire 75ft tree in pieces from my backyard to my front yard. 2) 10 hours maybe 3)wood needed to be moved 4) when looking at the pile of wood I have to move 5) the resulting stack of wood in front of my house 6)yup, been stronger ever since those few days a few months ago
Now we equate "giving a shit" to how many hours you put in. Should we just go back to counting lines of code to view effort?
That really requires some sort of reciprocal "company cares about you", and that's hard to guarantee. Especially when you're hiring the generation that saw their parents lose out on the things like pensions vs 401k, layoffs as regular events, etc.
Exactly! Pride in one’s work is what you want. Hiring people who care about your company when, for most people, it’s another notch in their belt, means that your hiring pool is severely constrained and you’ll pass over many people who take pride in their work (and who would therefore benefit your company tremendously).
Stop pretending your company is anything more than a capitalist endeavor that pays people for their time.
2-intellectual work does not translate to how many hours you put in.
Step 1. Create jobs that enable people to have a quality life.
Step 2. Ensure people feel like they're building a career they can take beyond your company.
Step 3. Give them reasons to stay, so they feel like working for you is the best option available to them.
even this however does not guarantee people will give a shit, a sane person however might...
So you mean that you're looking for unbalanced people? I don't get how being obsessed about a product equates to long term success for an employee in your company. To me it's more like a recipe for burnout.
What's the employee turnover at Scale?
Does that work if the candidate is obsessed not by something but by someone?
Go for an early stage startup with meaningful equity or just go for a more stable, profitable company.
I'd state it more like: Go to an early stage startup only if you'll still be happy with the experience if the equity evaporates.
Statistically, that's the smarter way to think about it.
>>> What’s the hardest you’ve ever worked on something?
Lead-up to the holiday season as an employee of an ecommerce startup.
>>> How many hours were you working a week?
Way, way, way too many.
>>> When were you the most unmotivated in your life?
The entire following year!
I've seen too many times to count management completely squashing out any passion that employees might have for the company or product. The most common ways I think are micromanaging and soliciting feedback / ideas then completely ignoring it. Both will immediately have your employees checking out and saying to themselves "fine, I'll show up, do what I'm told, then clock out at 5."
There you have it. Come on, by now we all know what this “caring” or “giving a shit” stuff is about. Just say you want people to work hard, long hours. Just say that.
“I started a company and I’m totally wild about it. It is my life. If it is not your life too then you don’t belong here.”
Founders are supposed to be obsessed with their company. (Though I question that too.) But demanding everyone else at the company be just as obsessed is doomed to hire children and sycophants and drive off professionals who have seen this movie before.
I think you can make the case that that's not the sole criteria or highest criteria you should seek, but I've seen remarkable longevity in companies where people are willing to fake it til they make it. (Longevity defined here as keeping people employed and keep raising money when needed. Not changing the world or anything.)
I question it too. As a cofounder, I strive to destroy this sort of attitude. Doing my part by example to establish that culture.
Eventually he might grow or has to grow out of it.
He doesn't have the work experience to understand the problem domain well enough to build a company to solve it and he doesn't have the life experience to apply what work experience he has had. I'd bet the money I'll net after the lockup on an IPO I'm in that close to 100% of the value of "his" company was built on that bed of VC funds and their connections he lucked into.
He's a cute anecdote for the company's marketing--that's the entire sum of his value. He's not likely to build another company or achieve any further success outside the VC bubble.
Proper incentives entice employee engagement.
Boards are typically stacked in the founders favor, so any reduction in pay would be the founders own decision. Which makes sense, because they want to keep the company that they have significant equity in alive.
If you think of it in terms of babies and babysitters, it's clearly absurd to expect the babysitter to bend over backwards to help your child outside their paid duty. Yet the founders can't see it.
I assume he's diluting his own equity to make sure everyone has as equal of a stake in the company? That's the only way I'll accept this statement.
It’s extremely hard to give a shit about Yet Another Middleware CRUD CRM Layer Corp.
There’s a fine balancing point between working a bullshit job (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs) and recognizing that no, the B-Ark (https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchan_Ark_Fleet_... ) is a bad idea, we really do need telephone handset sanitizers.
Don’t fall for the trap that says that only the sexiest sounding jobs are OK—for one, what that means varies by the talents and interests and skills of the workforce. For another, it’s going to bias you towards treating, e.g., janitors as subhuman, and that way is the path to a very bad place.
What makes work satisfying is, to a large but not total extent, a function of the mutual respect the employer and employee have for the humanity of the employee. Some jobs are just bullshit. Some aren’t. All jobs have a certain amount of toil.
You’ll get people who give a shit about the work when your work isn’t bullshit, and about the job when the culture at work respects them.
This is a corollary. The inverse would be "hire people who don't give a shit."
That’s the complement. The inverse would be “Fire (or don’t hire) people who give a shit”. Also what you identified as a corollary is more accurately identified as the converse.
We programmers tend to prize the code that we write for other programmers: the compilers, the kernels, the libraries. But most of us will work for customers who do real-world things, whether that's watching a movie or checking in patients at the dentist office or tuning their guitar. So our software is usually incredibly dull to us as programmers, but of crucial interest to our users.
This doesn't have to be management consultant BS. You can't just fake caring about customers. Be sincerely interested in making their lives better, even though what they do isn't what you as a programmer have devoted your life to.
Decoupling devs from exposure to these sorts of experiences is a huge disservice. Just sitting and watching someone use your product for a few hours is incredibly illuminating.
Do you have any more thoughts about this point? In my own life I’ve seen some of my friends with hotshot jobs develop this sort of mentality, and I sort of don’t know what to make of it. I want to be like “this is a toxic attitude to have!” but at the same time I can’t make a better argument than it’s immoral and without janitors we’d all be dead.
"The basis for determining the value of human work is not primarily the kind of work being done but the fact that the one who is doing it is a person." [0]
“And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.” [1]
[0] http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/do...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpe_Jugulum
So if I went to Scale, sat around for 12 hours and spent 7 on Hacker News, I would achieve as much as the Google employee but somehow be differentiated according to Scale.
Agree with your point though, giving a shit is not about how many hours your work, it’s about how much you care.
Quite the opposite in fact.
The google engineer could work few hours and make life better (or worse) for a billion people.
The startup engineer has little impact in comparison. For this company specifically it's probably near zero, it's basically outsourcing like mechanical turk.
I personally recall moving from a small startup to a Fortune 50. I could spend half the time in the office and achieve a hundred times the outcome, easily.
These Googlers that work 11-4 probably either used to give a shit, or still give a shit, but when you care deeply about your work and the company gets in your way or doesn't share your passion, it's an awful and demoralizing place to be.
So quit, you say. But you can't because you give a shit and you really, really want the company to succeed and do great things.
Google is a giant company, so surely somewhere there are some people who behave this way—-among a hundred thousand employees and hundreds of groups you will find at little bit of everything. But in the groups I have worked for, solid full days are the norm, and somewhat rarely you have to really dig in and work a bit more, and even more rarely, you have so much slack that you can go hone early. But generally people nearly always put in full days.
Scale seems like a cool company with an interesting product, but let's be honest, rational people here - they aren't curing cancer, creating art, or landing on Normandy Beach. This seems obvious to any self-aware person. So why all the bravado?
The instinct for tribalism is strong and that tendency is aided by the cheerleading that's done at all-hands meetings and other motivational internal meetings. I have met more than a few people who were long term employees who were genuinely gung-ho about their employer but they had a rude awakening when the the business needed to do layoffs for the first time.
Having had many interviews and a couple of jobs where my passion for the company seemed to be far more important than the quality of my experience, etc., yes.
We have a slight issue with 'identity' in the US. I need to read more Tocqueville before I really start espousing any diagnostic on the psyche of the US but...
This type of mindset is what occurs when someone searches for their identity and meaning then places that whole 'life's worth' in the form of businesses or enterprising endeavors.
It can be broadly characterized as externalizing one's identity, which is painfully likely to fail or let you down in some way. In its most extreme forms, it's really a mental disorder (bordering the wildly high-functioning creative schizophrenic) that the Startup Zeitgeist has hailed as 'how to innovate' and find your 'life's work.' The disorders become evident once one sacrifices all of self at the alter of this 'give a shit' goal - burn out is not the goal of human life.
I'll say I'm recovering from this mindset and have a fonder appreciation for what it means to foster a community (be that business, HOA, religious group, friend group, etc) that allows you to have a 'life's work' that gives you resources to flourish in ways you never thought you could.
https://youtu.be/-YG0kMpzL_A
IMHO, if someone has not once wanted something in their life and worked really hard to get it then that does raise an eyebrow. It doesn't have to be a job. It could be an instrument, sport, extra ciricular, school project, volunteer work, or really anything. If you haven't, it means you either have never wanted to achieve something or didn't want to put the effort in to try.
Life happens and at some point we all make it to a point we are comfortable. So I think it's unfair to expect that out of a 45 year old with two kids. But if you get to be 45 without having really tried at something... well it's a bit sad.
So there's definitely something genuine to it, but many more have to fake it. I am working at a place where you don't have to fake it nearly at all and very happy about it...
Think about it... it might seem unfair, "unfair" towards e.g. me. I'm usually only passionate if the work happens to be very interesting for me in particular, otherwise I'm going to do good work with passion about quality/etc., but only 9-6, after which I'll go be passionate about other things.
But, I've worked with quite a few engineers similar to me in ability, or better, who would totally work 14 hours a day for no reason, no pressure or crunch. If a business had a choice, why would they hire me over these guys?
I want to hire someone who is good at what they do and brutally honest that they're taking the job because they need to feed themselves and take care of their loved ones and have enough free time left to finish their instrumental guitar record or whatever.
Maybe some Googler would like to comment on this?
But in the groups I have worked for, solid full days are the norm, and somewhat rarely you have to really dig in and work a bit more, and even more rarely, you have so much slack that you can go hone early. But generally people nearly always put in full days.
Just wait for your first RSI my young friend, and then we will talk again ;)
I'm really curious how he feels like about holidays, I assume people in Europe cant't give a shit having 4-6 weeks of holidays yearly, right?
Even working “only” 5 hours/day, not including weekends, would make work the single most time-consuming item in my life (excluding sleep).
I work hard to be a good engineer, and I work hard to be a good employee in the way I interact with and support my coworkers.
Recognize where you have influence and where the best place to make those investments are. It’s usually NOT for the whole company.
Trying to find candidates that are passionate about the company before they join doesn't seem right. If we're only aware of how the company appears from the outside (press releases, company website) how are we supposed to have a real attachment to what the company truly is? Best case scenario is them being attached to how the company markets itself, which isn't a great approximation. That said, there might be something here I can latch onto into the form of:
1. Hire people passionate about something.
2. Promote people passionate about the company.
However, I still see some problems with the above. I would need time to chew on it before basing any personnel decisions around it.