Ask HN: What do you think when companies ask for gritty people?

208 points by xupybd ↗ HN
When I see this I immediately think the work will be the kind of grind that requires lots of Grit to survive.

226 comments

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Work for 10 people, but they only want to hire 3.

SOURCE: my current company likes me and the other 2 gritty software engineers.

Usually it means they spend too much time on LinkedIn
Best case: they want to hire people who don’t like red tape and just want to get stuff done, people who thrive on little to no oversight

Worst case: they want to hire people that will work endless hours to meet arbitrary deadlines

That's quite a wide range, but sounds about right. OP, we need you to apply and find out, for science!
I assume OP asked because of the Flexport job ad on HN (currently #19) which says "looking for gritty people". Apply and let us know :D
Someone on the marketing team has been watching Hard Knocks
I think the wide range is appropriate given that the thread is trying to extrapolate an entire company's culture from a single word in a job posting title. It's up for interpretation, but I think the message the company is trying to get across is that their culture is not like that portrayed in the recent LinkedIn employee TikTok videos.

https://nypost.com/2022/08/23/linkedin-employee-reignites-wo...

One thing is for sure: they aren’t going to hire someone with potential and invest in developing them up.
Not everyone has the skillset required to do that, and in a small team you may not have anyone with that skillset.
I"m mad at myself for seeing the CEO of one of my former employers pushing the book Grit constantly, seeing the above behavior and not putting two and two together for months...
That's perfectly reasonable, many companies are not in a position where they can afford (or are able) to grow someone up.

I see way more juniors hired than companies can afford, and then people wonder why nothing gets done with "so many developers". Each junior absorb capacity from more senior employees.

It's purely a business choice whether you hire someone to grow up or not.

Precisely the opposite. Usually "grit" means they're willing to hire hustlers who are eager to pick up new skills than established entitled slackers.
Long hours, low pay, and tolerates verbal abuse from a boss with a filthy mouth.
I have experience with jobs that were the opposite of these (except for long hours) and definitely required grit. Which is still to say: not pleasant, but rewarding. It might be reasonable for some jobs to filter out people looking for “pleasant”, without it being a toxic work environment.
I did not realize that a filthy mouth was a thing until my last job. Why is that a thing? It is a very toxic environment.
Some people in this industry think dropping f-bombs constantly makes them edgy.
“Filthy mouth” is something a stuck up cunt would say. Cultures are different. Unless it turns into verbal abuse, get over it.

There is a huge variety of cultures that speak English and only a subset can’t handle hearing certain words. Having a problem with people swearing is effectively classism in the US.

Basically every vancouver startup
I think in most cases it's just "talent" throwing a buzzword out there and is pointless to read into. On the other hand I agree it has the connotation that most people have brought up. If somehow the culture is really "gritty" it sounds like an excuse to coerce people into working without support and convincing them it's a good thing
Underpaid and overworked with bs promises of upside.
Their ads are cringy. They remind me the "How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?" meme
Same as when they ask for rockstars or ninjas or whatever: maybe they can put me in touch with someone who can actually explain the role and context.
Do people still say those terms? I feel like they were cool (well, at least not utter cringe) for like 6 months 10+ years ago and ever since has been a signal of cluelessness. “Grit” at least implies self-awareness / honesty so long as it’s not paired with other indicators that it’s coming from the “hustle culture” idiom
Yes "ninja" is still used.

I'm cringing at this jobs website in my country that lists 47 "ninja" jobs including "Mortgage Broker Ninja" and "Customer service Ninja" among others...

https://www.seek.com.au/ninja-jobs

I assume they want to hire someone who resembles the official mascot of the Philadelphia hockey team. Important skills include threatening physical violence over social media.
Huggable and potentially insurrectionary (in the pre Jan 6 sense)
My company has a lot of people based out of Philadelphia, so this immediately came to mind.
orange, lots of hair, plays hockey.
I came here to say "only Philadelphia hockey fans need apply" ... haha!
Feels like a meme from 2012, implies low pay on the downside but a willingness to work across teams and hustle on the upside
(comment deleted)
I'm less cynical than others here. They probably just wanted a job ad title that a) sticks out b) gets your attention by making you reflect on your own personality and c) entice you to click through to the ad and see what kind of jobs "gritty people" applying for.
Sure, but how are you less cynical than others here?
As I write this comment almost everyone else in the thread is interpreting it to mean some variation of an abusive workplace environment. The guy you responded to is being more charitable and less cynical than that.
I think it's actually more cynical than the other comments, because in the case of abusive workplace environments, asking for "gritty" employees is a fairly honest thing to do, and gives a decent indication of what the company is like. Whereas the commenter here was suggesting that the term "gritty" is a nothing more than a meaningless attention getter, and thus totally insincere.
Hoping we're talking about the right "They" ... Why is "people" capitalized?

Regardless, I feel like that's a little too optimistic.

Wow, i've never seen this but talk about a red flag.

Makes me think of a snyder movie. Would you want to live in a snyder movie?

It could be positive, a signal valuing do'ers over politicians.
This is like emails from Nigerian princes with deliberate grammatical errors. It weeds out candidates who would turn them down after an interview, leaving only those candidates desperate or gullible enough to take the position.
I'm never going to work for a company that encourages "hustle". Uber's "always be hustlin'" was so astonishing I couldn't believe it was real when I first heard it.

To me this directly implies they want to move fast and ignore ethics and morality in order to do so. Like, that's pretty much one of the accepted definitions of that word?

Do you really think the majority of Uber engineers have forsaken all morality? A more plausible explanation is that bad patterns can emerge from systems where most of the players are still behaving [locally] ethically.
It's awfully hard to avoid being aware of all the criminal stuff Uber has engaged in.
They want people that don’t mind staying up all night on a call performing a migration/upgrade or will work long hours to get a project done on time.
Optimistic view: they value people who can get the job done and don't care too much about perfection, specific tools, etc...

Cynical view: they're cheap and want you to do the job of 2 or more people.

I'm glad someone asked the question. I was brushed the wrong way by that ad as well.
Grit can be defined as "Perseverance of Effort and Consistency of Interest" [0] so when I see an ad looking for "gritty people" I assume they're trying to find folks who tend to keep working on a problem consistently and won't want to move on until the work is completed.

Kind of a boring response, but I think you're reading too much into this. It's just a word.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4981570/

Funny to see it rubbed so many people the wrong way. It actually stood out in a positive way to me, I read it as “we want people who bring projects to the finish line, including if they are challenging”. The reason I would see it as a positive is that I would expect the existing culture to reflect that, and it’s a quality I value in colleagues. As a shared culture it also seems like a good trait for a growing company.
Are they're existing employees not doing that, so that's why they need to hire such a person?
It seemed a net positive to me too. Presumably, you would join a fast growing company for a challenge and not just to coast or “quiet quit“. You would want colleagues who feel the same esp. if chunk of your compensation is locked up in equity.
>> “we want people who bring projects to the finish line, including if they are challenging”

I think that statement would attract better candidates than wanting gritty people. One reason for that is that very capable people need less grit to succeed than others that are less capable.

> I read it as “we want people who bring projects to the finish line, including if they are challenging”.

Which makes it content-free, because that's what every company is looking for anyway.