I once worked in a very, very low-on-the-totem-pole position for a company ranked highly on the Fortune "Best Companies to Work For". The reason their employees said such nice things about them is that they went to great lengths to only hire people who would "drink the Kool-Aid", so to speak. If you only hire people who can be convinced that you are wonderful, your employees will surely say that you are wonderful.
That being said, it was not a completely terrible place to work. There are much worse. It would have been hard to convince even "suckers" that it was a good place to work if it had, in fact, been a truly awful place to work. But it definitely wasn't great. The pay was mediocre, and the expectations were through the roof. And if you didn't act sufficiently grateful, if you didn't appear thrilled to be there at all times, then it actually became a pretty hostile place to spend time.
I've worked at one of these places too. Some managers knew the deal, others, for whatever reason, drank and lived the kool-aid. That is to say, they truly believed in it or at least believed believing would get them somewhere and did everything in their power to advance it.
I can be satirical and sarcastic --most managers were okay with it as it helped to relieve pressures and a way to communicate issues --a few saw this as heresy. I really can't stand that kind of manager. One who believes so much in the system they are so personally vested in the company ideology.
This is the real reason behind when companies say things like "We only hire the best." It's not to attract the best, it's for people working there to believe that they are part of the "best" (whatever that means).
The way pretty much every company finds people is that it hires the best, according to subjective and biased criteria, from the people that currently are looking or don't have jobs who tend to live in the area and happened to find out the company had an opening.
This is timely in light of the "Dear Future Homejoy Engineer" job posting[1] that is currently on the front page. It starts off with "so it's xmas eve and i'm in the office with several other folks who didn’t have plans for xmas either. everyone is cranking away. we’ve decided to watch the interview later and then get dinner and drinks together" and gets more depressing from there.
This article speaks about "four core needs" of employees ("physical, emotional, mental and spiritual") but the author doesn't seem willing to consider the possibility that employers aren't capable of meeting these deep personal needs in the first place.
Personally, I think the imbalance, chaos and unsustainable pace you see in even the supposedly "best" workplaces is more often than not just a reflection of the fact that large numbers of individuals don't set boundaries, prioritize or make a dedicated effort to invest in their own health and well-being. These people are not going to go to the Googleplex or a hot startup's swagged-out SOMA digs and suddenly find enlightenment. Unhappy, unbalanced people are going to be unhappy and unbalanced wherever they go and in many cases, they'll seek out environments that are unhappy and unbalanced.
Given that some people are "unbalanced, unhappy" people, isn't it actually a good thing, rather than "depressing" as you say, that they can find companionship in their workplaces.
Is it really better for people with nothing to do at Xmas eve to go home and be alone anyway? Is it the employers responsibility to ensure that the company culture makes zero allowances for these people?
It's not the job of employees to provide companionship for their employers. You're hiring workers, not friends.
If employees want to get together on their own time and spend the holiday together, that's cool. But it gets less cool the more you mix in expecting them to do work for you and/or fill in gaps in your social life.
Dear God, that Homejoy job posting is terrible. Just completely tone deaf.
> right now i’m taking a quick break and after a quick lap around the office, i notice actually many more people here. i wonder — how am i so fortunate to be the ceo of a startup where people are so driven?
I dunno, maybe the people noticed that the CEO is at work on Christmas Eve and fear that if they aren't there too they'll be pigeonholed as slackers?
Leaders lead by example. If you, the CEO, are sitting in the office on Christmas Eve, you won't have to tell people they're expected to come in. They'll observe your behavior and come to that conclusion for themselves.
Not to be a huge ass, but the lack of using capital letters, while proving the shift key does in fact function (@, % both featured in posting) only further solidifies the idea I had in my head that this is a crazy person posting. Not a fun, quirky, startup CEO kind of crazy, but more the delusional, oblivious type of crazy.
I feel exactly the same way. I can't stand it. It's not as if it takes noticeably more effort to press shift.
Furthermore, typing like that will actually take extra effort on mobile devices which automatically capitalize after periods. It's displeasing typography that does not parse well. It is like a constant distraction in every sentence that deflects my attention away from the author's message.
And it's so much worse than that because not only did the CEO work Christmas Eve, not only did they publicly name who was there (and therefore who wasn't), they used it as an advertisement about why you'd want to work there! It's just unspeakably warped; it is like the "Free Stress Test" that the Scientologists offer on the street: it's a way for those who wish to join a cult to self-identify.
In contrast, a quote I ran across today[1] about Fairchild Semiconductor, a startup that actually did the change world:
Most of the founders were married, busy starting their families and raising small children in addition to all the time and effort they were spending building Fairchild ... I am struck by what a remarkable time it was and what innovative opportunities.
Somehow, I don't think the same will ever be written of Homejoy...
I'm glad I wasn't the only person to think this...it was one of the most depressing job ads I've ever read. Even if the truth really was that Homejoy was so great that employees are willing to work on Christmas there...very, very few people on the outside are going to believe you. And the ones who do give you the benefit of the doubt, they may feel more pity than admiration about your work ethic.
Note/edit: it is possible that none of the employees working at Homejoy tonight celebrate Christmas...but then, that wouldn't be much of a sacrifice then, nor something to really remark for this job ad, any more than if it were just a typical Wednesday/Thursday of a work week.
I'm imagining a nifty little startup office at night, open plan, with 15 or so people. It looks like any other late night push to hit a goal except it's Christmas eve and barring any cultural reasons these poor souls have nothing better to do than ... go into the office? I want very much for them to to discover family and love and presence and how much more it matters than "work". No matter how much you love work it can't love you back. The lottery ticket can wait just one night.
What consistently cracks me up about these stupid job postings from these startups is how so full of bullshit the language is. Like they're all on the verge of discovering the Ark of the Covenant.
"We're here to make a difference that will change the way the world looks at...washing your dog. Yes the Dogwashy app will completely reinvent shampooing and grooming as we know it. Don't you want to spend your X-Mas break working here so you can tell your grandchildren that you were part of the revolution?"
What's makes that better is that Homejoy is rated 2.7 on glass door. To be fair though, I don't have an account on there so I couldn't read past the first page of reviews and most of the negatives were contractors.
So, for those of is trying to start companies, how do you create an effective work-place environment?
It's obvious from articles like this that you can't just dump a bunch of cash on slides and ping-pong tables, but it also isn't fesable (for most companies) to have 4-hour workdays. How can you balance the need for breaks with budget concerns?
I'd really appreciate somebody with experience in the area weighing in.
Speaking from experienced (startup that's made 3 hires, going on our 4th), is you have to find "culture fits". People who share your appetite for work, who want to be a part of the vision, and that you can stand spending a lot of time with. We'll never win the perk war, but we are the only company just like us, and look very hard for the people who will get along with us.
I think you'll find that most people will "get along" with you just fine if you're a decent person, pay well and don't ask them to sacrifice a too big portion of their life. If they're competent and willing to work hard, everything else is noise and bullshit.
Yes working hard and competent is the bulk of it. But we've met people like that we simply wouldn't bond with. Culture fit is hugely important, and if you hire a cultural misfit, it's much more difficult to fire them.
Since the concept of "culture" is so vague and no one using it seems to be able to describe what exact set of criteria it represents, it appears to be whatever a hiring manager wants it to be. If you don't like someone's skin color, religion, cultural background, the fact that they don't like drinking or going to team-building trips every weekend, or you just don't like the color of their shirt, it's easy to reject them on the grounds of not being a "culture fit". Who cares about their professional skillset when you're obviously looking for a paid buddy.
Curb your hubris and start treating people like human beings. I've worked for a number of "world changing" startups managed by 20-something year olds like you and the fact that it always devolved into a high school popularity contest made me sick to my stomach.
I hope that their "appetite for work" matches your appetite for giving out equity. If not, you've just hired a bunch of people with bad judgement and no social life.
Nobody works themselves to death, but we all push ourselves to get as much done as possible. If you want to be a founder, or early stage employee, you're going to have to work harder than the average 9-5er.
Totally. Sounds respectable then. I just think that founders need to be very clear that the work vs reward relationship is going to be very different for them vs their employees, unless the employees have very significant equity approaching cofounder levels.
1. Hire qualified people regardless of where they came from and what they look like. In other words, be careful about falling into the "culture fit" trap that is responsible for a lot of the "I can't find candidates" complaints at startups. Diversity is healthy, and when you don't have a homogenous workforce, you're far less likely to end up with a bunch of 20-something "go-getters" who aren't yet wise enough to understand that output (work product) matters way more than input (hours worked).
2. Be careful about perks that have social implications and/or require employees to spend non-work time at work or with co-workers. A lot of the perks startups offer today, such as catered lunches/dinners and frequent group outings, send the message that you're trying to build a family, not a company. Many people have a life outside of work and these "perks" ask/require employees to give up what should be their free time.
3. Don't ignore management. A lot of startups eschew basic management practices, mistaking management for bureaucracy. The reality, however, is that a healthy dose of competent management is one of the best ways to promote productivity and avoid time-wasting dysfunction.
You can't. If you create a dynamic work environment with a constant influx of interesting problems to deal with, you lose the 8-by-5 solid employees with families you make up the framework of lots of successful companies. If you optimize for them, you can't get the spotlight rangers looking for hot problems to work on and recognition to go along with it.
If you cater meals, some employees will want to skip out and take the salary bump instead, others don't mind losing out on pay for free weekly massages.
Free beer? Non-drinkers feel left out. Game room? non-gamers hate it. Ping-pong, foosball, pool tables, free gym? You'll find somebody who it alienates.
You have to pick what you want your company to be and commit to it. Where would you want to work? Build that. You'll find the right people to populate it, but try to keep it open to diversity of styles and ideas.
Your best employee will probably be somebody completely different than you.
"Culture fit" is quite stupid. A fair amount of conflict is key to fiery technical debates and keeping out the complacency. Imagine if the parliament worked like that. Hire people who would own a responsibility and have the ability to execute it too. Everything else needs constant gardening.
Ex-Googler here, now working on my own startup. I had weeks at Google with 14 hour days and time in on the weekends. I also had weeks where I worked 4-6 hours/day and put away the phone & laptop on the weekend, or even ducked out at 2:30 on a Friday afternoon so I could celebrate my anniversary with my girlfriend.
I appreciate the sentiment of the article, but there's a lot of complexity to the issue that it ignores. For one, most of the time that I was working crazy hours was because I a.) wanted and b.) needed to. I believed in the project's mission, the work was fun & challenging, and there was a lot to do that just wouldn't get done if I didn't put in the hours.
Similarly, when I worked very light hours, it was because there wasn't much work that I had to do. I was blocked on other teams, or in-between projects and my manager didn't have a good idea where I'd be productive at the moment, or "held in reserve" so that if we needed to react quickly to market opportunities I'd be well-rested and not occupied by other projects.
Working hard is not always a bad thing, or onerous, or exhausting. Sometimes employees work hard because they believe in what they're doing and want to do a good job; that's part of what makes a company a good place to work, after all. And sometimes it is, and creates a very unhealthy competition where everybody tries to outdo each other. I think that one of the things that Google in general and Larry Page in particular realizes is that people will have different desires for work/life balance at different stages in their life, and that within a large company, there should be places that can accommodate everyone from the achievement-oriented new Ph.D grad to the family with a young kid.
This was my experience at Google as well. I was there a little over five years. There were times when I was completely in love with my team and my project and I was working until 3AM and feeling great about what I was getting done. There were times when I was burnt out or dealing with personal/medical issues and not contributing nearly that much. I can't complain about how I was treated in either circumstance.
Beyond my own experience, I had multiple teammates who had long commutes and family commitments and made a rigid practice of leaving before five every single day. As far as I know, none of them were ever given any trouble about it. Maybe they weren't promoted as fast as if they'd burned the midnight oil, but that seems like a fair trade.
The fact that you mention taking off at 2:30 on a Friday to celebrate your anniversary as an example of your privilege or freedom at work proves the author's point.
That point has more to do with our inherent freedom to live self directing lives than arguing that hard work isn't a good thing. It's more an indictment against the whole employee lifestyle than your admittedly superior company.
To reiterate my point, you feel like it's worth mentioning that you were allowed to stop making BigCorp money for two and a half hours to celebrate one of the more important events in your life.
So another way of putting it, is you were working a "job" that was actually your hobby, and you just happened to be getting paid for it. I have the same problem -- often times, after 5:00 rolls around, I just start getting into a good flow and tend to take advantage of the lack of interruptions between 5 and 7 pm. Only problem is I get home, make some dinner, do a couple chores, got to bed, then wake up and do the same thing. Then I wonder why I can't get any personal projects done.
Hmm, could it be that the freedom that you describe is just difficult to handle for some people (or some personality types)? I've noticed in myself an occasional tendency to assume the worst when things are unclear, and to subject myself to rules that nobody explicitly set for me.
Bill Joy used to say that the number of bright employees in a company was the log of the number of employees. He would then explain that he had not expressed the base, which could be different on a company by company basis.
Though he never expressed the result for the self-employed, log(1) = 0 in any base.
This topic is very valid, but far to complex and nuanced to be addressed in a single article.
Long hours at Google? Please. The long hours argument would certainly hold up at many of the other companies on the list, however. Point being that no generalization can define why these rankings are misleading (though they certainly can be).
Different take on this: being perceived as "the cultural leader" is actually detrimental to a company.
Let's take Google as an example, although any large company with a strong reputation would do. Take technical or cultural or managerial attribute Q (say, which programming language to privilege). Ask "what is the best Q option for Google?" Most people will admit that they don't know. There are lot of variables. Ask "what is the best Q option for the cultural leader? Suddenly you get a bunch of bikeshedding product executives trying to throw their weight around. Now that it's not "Google" being discussed but "the cultural leader" hanging in the balance, peoples' opinions get much more entangled and politicized (if less relevant to the specific needs of the company, Google).
The concept of "the cultural leader" in technology is flawed and dangerous and it attracts people for the wrong reasons. You should hire the people who want to make a cultural leader by doing great work and, um, leading... not people who want to hold high positions at an organization already recognized for leadership.
best places i worked at i'd not call a "Best Place to Work" as it was about successful work and not about being a "Best Place". Currently i work at a typical BigCo, mindless work, mindless management, one of those highest rated "Best Places to Work" for those who care :)
From interviewing at Google, I had a really robotic impression of employees and life there. The entire process was disorganized. I drove four hours across the state to get there, navigating all sorts of construction, and found my own accommodations. When I arrived on site I was repeatedly asked to solve the same Java/C problems on whiteboards for a new person each time.
No one bothered to ask me what made me unique or interesting, even though I have amazing stories to tell from traveling around the world and from projects I've worked on in the past. The free lunch thing is sort of over-blown, when you have to fill out a form and shout over a line of people to get a BLT sandwich made. And then there were a bunch of bicycles strewn out across the campus, mostly toppled over, for no explicable reason.
Honestly, the only reason I would want to work there is for the money, and for that reason employees should not really expect to enjoy their time there.
An interview is a fairly terrible way to get to know a company's culture. Among other things, the interview is a filter, not an employment conversation.
At the end of the interview I was left alone in an office where an employee showed up and thought I was there to interview him. Still, I understand your point.
He asked if he could use the conference room.
I said I was there for the interview.
He asked if he was being interviewed.
I said, no I was.
And then he asked if he could Skype someone.
So I ran through a few buildings looking for my hiring rep.
Because I got stuck with my file that they were supposed to have at the end.
I have seen this from both sides, and it is something you _need_ to know if you are interviewing people. The very best people for the job will have options. The very best hires don't _need_ your job. Not considering that your organization is being evaluated by the same folks you want to hire is not smart.
Why would you expect anything but an interview when showing up for an interview? It's not like they expect an impromptu tap dance to convince them you really want to work there.
I don't think it is reasonable to expect a Google interviewer to ask you about your "stories ... from travelling around the world." Their primary reason for hiring you is for your ability as (I'm assuming) a developer. Although your travel experience may make you a more interesting person, that isn't altogether the point of the interview.
I guess you could say that measuring the "likeableness" and culture-fit of a potential employee is important, but that can definitely be derived from the interview in general rather than from your life stories.
> Although your travel experience may make you a more interesting person, that isn't altogether the point of the interview
Maybe it is a mistake that it's not a point in the interview? In fact, I'd care a lot about the personality of a person I will be working with in the future.
I understand that in the "cattle hiring" model where you hire people and then assign a team, this is irrelevant, but I personally consider this a huge weakness of cattle hiring.
I agree it should be considered in an interview, but I don't think it should be the point or the focus of the interview. The idea is that even though you'd like to work with someone who has a nice personality, I'm sure you'd also like to work with someone who is competent and the company would much rather hire someone who is competent rather than only interesting.
> No one bothered to ask me what made me unique or interesting
To me, it seems like Google's hiring process as a huge company (at least for the vast majority of positions) is explicitly looking for interchangeable people, so regardless of what they advertise, their process is not one that holds "uniqueness" as a plus. This is also evidenced by the "hiring committees" they are proud of and talk about a lot outside the company, which will inevitably reduce the variance of new hires.
P.S. that might not be a bad thing for a big company of that size; I'm not holding this against them, but as a prospective employee, one should definitely consider this.
Something easily in excess of 90% of applicants at Google can't program computers in any reasonably productive way. The interview process is designed to find out whether you've ever seen a computer (the HR phone screen), whether you've ever programmed one (the next phone screen), and whether you'd be able to productively contribute to a huge and complex code base (the on-site).
Asking about all the stamps in your passport would be a waste of everyone's time. If you get hired we can all chat about it at lunch. Otherwise nobody cares. Anyway at a company with tens of thousands of engineers there's already a bunch of people exhibiting every one of your "unique" characteristics.
In this case I am the only American to voluntarily move to a radioactive fallout zone in Japan immediately after the Tohoku earthquake where I studied computer science at Japan's only school dedicated exclusively to the field. So while it is nice to hear how Google does their text-to-speech from a young employee, I do understand Markov models and Mel frequency coefficients well enough and have done my own interesting research working in a CS lab setting. I could care less if they hired me, I thought it was rude that I traveled 10,000 miles around the world and survived to be shoved out the door.
This was also coming after resigning from another company where I was treated terribly after moving from Chicago to southern California.
And that's really beyond the point. Fog Creek Software in New York City does an excellent job of treating their employees well, both interviewing and starting, and maybe that's something only offered by smaller companies, but I think an interviewee for a software job should be treated with a little bit more personal respect.
And there you've experienced the best that Large Enterprise life has to offer for worker bees.
Working for an employer is inherently dehumanizing. You are considered a resource of the company, not a unique individual. The larger the company, the stronger this effect.
>In this case I am the only American to voluntarily move to a radioactive fallout zone in Japan immediately after the Tohoku earthquake
No offense, but that's frankly irrelevant to an interviewer. You can't expect someone to waste a part of their day to stroke your ego when their task is to evaluate you and see if you can make it in the company.
It's just a huge red flag to me that the employees of a massive international company could be so globally unaware looking at the dates and locations of things printed on my resume to not ask a single question about it.
Furthermore, Google might just be looking to hire a massive number of low-level Java developers and have a need to make them write bubblesort and FizzBuzz over and over, but I am someone who is a Java compiler writer, so I thought things might have lined up better.
And at this point, I am not concerned about my ego so much as having a way to support myself. I didn't start programming when I was 10 to make a million dollars, I did it because I wanted to know how things worked. Now I might as well work at the pizza factory down the street so long as I have a place to live.
Not trying to challenge you on your various experiences, but you sound somewhat annoying to work with. Congratulations on being such a smart, accomplished, and worldly human being.
You're right, I was being kind of an asshole. However, I think the OP's frustrations may have more to do with his high opinion of himself than he thinks.
Are you still in the market for a job? Send me an email, it's in my profile. I won't get back to you right away because of the holidays and such, but I'm intrigued none the less.
Have an ounce of empathy and look at things from the other side of the table. Anybody can write "I wrote a java compiler" on their resume. Anybody who is even modestly determined can fake a github repo of such a project.
People have done (much) crazier things to try to get a job at Google.
The only thing for interviewers to do is to try to assess your technical ability in the limited time that they have.
I did a fair number of interviews when I worked at Google. (For strong candidates,) I spent every minute of the 45 or whatever given to me in an interview trying to get more signal to make their interview summary packet stronger. If I stop to ask how you saved a village in Fiji from sharks, that's fewer glowing words I'm going to write about you in my feedback.
To echo what somebody else wrote upthread:
> If you get hired we can all chat about it at lunch.
"It's just a huge red flag to me that the employees of a massive international company could be so globally unaware looking at the dates and locations of things printed on my resume to not ask a single question about it."
For a large company that is more or less irrelevant unless you are interviewing for a position specific to varied international experience.
Making sure you can program is far more important. I work at a really international setting ... good C++ is good C++ regardless of the cultural background of the programmer.
Which in itself is really friggin awesome - in my experience a programmer is a programmer with any cultural background just as long they grok the CS and programming fundamentals. Perhaps Google has observed the same?
For smaller companies where the interviewers will be dealing with you day to day the personal details are more interesting.
I mean, most reasonably well-off people go abroad during or after college studies and this experience doesn't really sound that remarkable other than the fallout zone. Did you develop any interesting biological mutations?
To be fair, filling out a form for a sandwich is about 5% of the food service operation at Google.
Most are just like lunchrooms in school, with much better food. Sorry that someone didn't give you a better experience there, with regards to food and otherwise.
Quote from article: "But these lists don’t really measure something even more important: the quality of their employees’ lives." But the article isn't showing that the quality of life at lower ranked companies is better. In the end you are responsible for your own quality of life. You can achieve amazing things at Google, Facebook, etc, but it comes at a price. Key question is: what do you value most?
Before that I worked at a place I could charitably call a "bottom place to work".
I've worked at a few very mediocre places as well.
So I've been around the block so to speak.
About a decade and a half ago, I worked at a place that doesn't show up on any of these lists. The main day-to-day difference it seems from where I work now and this place I worked at long ago is that I get free candy and juice. The other place had more interesting work. Almost all of my professional acquaintances come from the former place.
We have a badass cafeteria, but I still have to pay for it. So I guess that's better than the Amazon gig and the mediocre to decent food I was offered?
One of the chefs here is a former Google executive chef, his Polenta with mushroom sauce is pretty good, but a bit tart.
I get whatever hardware and resources I've asked for so far. So far I've gotten a large format printer with staff, 3 developers, a new rMBP with top of the line specs, a new monitor, travel expensed and have $100k worth of rack mountable GPUs on order. I'm throwing a lot of people and hardware at a problem that everybody including the client thinks should be solved this way, but for <reasons> probably won't work out in the end...and we all know it.
I've found not-for-profits to be consistently decent places to work, plus I can take pride in working at them for all kinds of principled reasons. Even if the pay sucks, the offices tend to be nice and its nice knowing you're helping the species move forward a little every day. The unofficial motto where I work is "fuck the money, do the right thing by the client". I like that.
But I know from long-timers that work-life balance kind of sucks and there's been some lean times recently that have left some old-timers hungry with a thirst they can't quite get rid of. There's a yoga class I can take, $60/season. We have a Gym, the showers are cleaned twice a day.
I've found that for-profits make me a heck of a lot more money, but range from miserable to mediocre.
I've almost worked at Google, Amazon and a few other bright stars on these kinds of lists, but the problems didn't seem terribly interesting even if the cafeterias were cool. I guess pushing ads, on-line retail or some other kind of kool-aidery is hip. I like my Android phone well enough. Maybe if I could have taken that salary and moved cross country and displaced my life, the free catered meals would have been worth it. The quiz-show interview was lame and completely irrelevant for the job they wanted me to do.
I've interviewed with a few places that think they're best places to work. 3 catered meals a day, game room, casual dress code, whatever. It's fine, but then they're supporting 10 year old application cruft and the hardest problems they have to solve is supporting the new release of Java.
The most I've ever learned, and thus the most rewarding job I ever worked was for a small and scrappy startup that failed. The lessons I learned there have earned me nonstop promotions at better places. I would absolutely do that again if I had a time machine even though it had really sucky aspects to it. It didn't even come close to being a best place to work...though I also got free candy and juice.
The best problems I've ever worked was for a shitty shitty mega-corp. They sent me around the world 4 times in two years, to active war zones, where I got shot at. Coding under fire is amazing. Saving people's lives is amazing. Dealing with corporate bullshit back home where none of that is recognized for any reason sucks. I recently was contacted by an employee to answer questions about code I hacked out 7 years ago while I was taking mortar fire. The stories I'll tell my grandkids come from this job. Also not a best place to work. No free juice or candy, no cafeteria.
It's interesting McKinsey is in the top-10. I'v...
All right I'm intrigued. What kind of coding were you doing under fire? Were the problems interesting in their own right or was the danger factor the biggest part of it? Was the work anywhere near the "principled reasons" category?
The scrappy startup: can you share a couple textbites about the lessons you got there? What kind of crossover did those lessons have in the war zones - or was that afterwards?
Question of whether a place is 'good to work at' is pretty much subjective. Some might argue Google is a great place to work given the perks, benefits and compensation. Others might avoid big companies like Google where working long hours is the norm and is in fact recommended (if you want to get out in front of your peers).
Others might like companies with less perks, but a great work culture, where there's less focus on facilities but more focus on the having great work / life balance and culture.
> "Culture fit" is a nebulous, oft-abused term that is commonly used to justify the short-sighted practice of hiring people who look and think alike. This is detrimental to even small teams, and it doesn't scale as teams grow.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that 'Culture fit' = hiring people who look alike. Having an maintaining a good work culture where individuals on a team gel together, much like an orchestra, is extremely important and not to be cast aside. Sure, a candidate might have a PhD from MIT and is smart, but if that individual is quiet, has difficulty working in a pair (assuming pairing is part of the culture), and is adamant about working in a silo and going hero mode, having that candidate on your team might just be disruptive.
Having said that, I do think culture fit shouldn't be the only or the veto decision when it comes to hiring. It should however be a part of the overall decision. And yes, if you're not hiring someone because they don't like Fight Club but your team does, then calling that a 'culture fit' problem is dumb. It's not about hiring people who only think alike, but hiring people who have the same / similar philosophies when it comes to doing their job.
Straw man. You just described someone with qualitative deficiencies (not being able to pair) as an example of poor culture fit. This is not what most people mean when they say culture fit.
"but if that individual is quiet, has difficulty working in a pair (assuming pairing is part of the culture), and is adamant about working in a silo and going hero mode, having that candidate on your team might just be disruptive."
Re-read the part about being a professional. Then you will see why this is a straw-man construction.
I'll still trade you 3 "free" meals a day for that money into my salary. I can use that money better, and it's a stronger negotiating point for me at my next job (while total compensation package is not).
The point is that it doesn't work like that. You could make the same argument about all of your office supplies, computers, and office space. "I'll take the extra bump of salary rather than you paying for the office space I will occupy." "Fire the administrative assistant, give us the extra salary, and rotate us all through phone/email/mail company correspondence duty."
They are perks designed to make working there more pleasant and efficient (if you eat there your lunch commute is gone and you are likely to converse with coworkers). They have nothing to do with your compensation.
Lots of very solid, very good employees don't want to be rockstar programmers. They want you to define a desired end-state, give them a due date in a few months and leave them to solve it within the bounds of their regular job hours.
If you think of an orchestra, it's like all the nameless people in the violin section vs. soloist. Optimizing for rockstars is like optimizing for soloists and that rarely works well.
They're your steady soldiers, getting the job done at the pace you set. They can be used to set organizational tempo, long-term goals, etc. They're the ones who will work for your company for 10 years and not complain too much.
But they also recognize that they're working to live, not living to work. Lots of startups want their employees to be obsesses with their work, they want all the employees to do things together, live together, marry each other, they want them to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner together.
Lots of employees find that a huge turnoff, because frankly, they have better lives than what any startup can offer.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadThat being said, it was not a completely terrible place to work. There are much worse. It would have been hard to convince even "suckers" that it was a good place to work if it had, in fact, been a truly awful place to work. But it definitely wasn't great. The pay was mediocre, and the expectations were through the roof. And if you didn't act sufficiently grateful, if you didn't appear thrilled to be there at all times, then it actually became a pretty hostile place to spend time.
I can be satirical and sarcastic --most managers were okay with it as it helped to relieve pressures and a way to communicate issues --a few saw this as heresy. I really can't stand that kind of manager. One who believes so much in the system they are so personally vested in the company ideology.
The way pretty much every company finds people is that it hires the best, according to subjective and biased criteria, from the people that currently are looking or don't have jobs who tend to live in the area and happened to find out the company had an opening.
This article speaks about "four core needs" of employees ("physical, emotional, mental and spiritual") but the author doesn't seem willing to consider the possibility that employers aren't capable of meeting these deep personal needs in the first place.
Personally, I think the imbalance, chaos and unsustainable pace you see in even the supposedly "best" workplaces is more often than not just a reflection of the fact that large numbers of individuals don't set boundaries, prioritize or make a dedicated effort to invest in their own health and well-being. These people are not going to go to the Googleplex or a hot startup's swagged-out SOMA digs and suddenly find enlightenment. Unhappy, unbalanced people are going to be unhappy and unbalanced wherever they go and in many cases, they'll seek out environments that are unhappy and unbalanced.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8794956
Is it really better for people with nothing to do at Xmas eve to go home and be alone anyway? Is it the employers responsibility to ensure that the company culture makes zero allowances for these people?
If employees want to get together on their own time and spend the holiday together, that's cool. But it gets less cool the more you mix in expecting them to do work for you and/or fill in gaps in your social life.
> right now i’m taking a quick break and after a quick lap around the office, i notice actually many more people here. i wonder — how am i so fortunate to be the ceo of a startup where people are so driven?
I dunno, maybe the people noticed that the CEO is at work on Christmas Eve and fear that if they aren't there too they'll be pigeonholed as slackers?
Leaders lead by example. If you, the CEO, are sitting in the office on Christmas Eve, you won't have to tell people they're expected to come in. They'll observe your behavior and come to that conclusion for themselves.
Furthermore, typing like that will actually take extra effort on mobile devices which automatically capitalize after periods. It's displeasing typography that does not parse well. It is like a constant distraction in every sentence that deflects my attention away from the author's message.
In contrast, a quote I ran across today[1] about Fairchild Semiconductor, a startup that actually did the change world:
Most of the founders were married, busy starting their families and raising small children in addition to all the time and effort they were spending building Fairchild ... I am struck by what a remarkable time it was and what innovative opportunities.
Somehow, I don't think the same will ever be written of Homejoy...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight
Note/edit: it is possible that none of the employees working at Homejoy tonight celebrate Christmas...but then, that wouldn't be much of a sacrifice then, nor something to really remark for this job ad, any more than if it were just a typical Wednesday/Thursday of a work week.
This reminds me of The Family Man http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218967/
"We're here to make a difference that will change the way the world looks at...washing your dog. Yes the Dogwashy app will completely reinvent shampooing and grooming as we know it. Don't you want to spend your X-Mas break working here so you can tell your grandchildren that you were part of the revolution?"
It's obvious from articles like this that you can't just dump a bunch of cash on slides and ping-pong tables, but it also isn't fesable (for most companies) to have 4-hour workdays. How can you balance the need for breaks with budget concerns?
I'd really appreciate somebody with experience in the area weighing in.
Curb your hubris and start treating people like human beings. I've worked for a number of "world changing" startups managed by 20-something year olds like you and the fact that it always devolved into a high school popularity contest made me sick to my stomach.
Nobody works themselves to death, but we all push ourselves to get as much done as possible. If you want to be a founder, or early stage employee, you're going to have to work harder than the average 9-5er.
2. Be careful about perks that have social implications and/or require employees to spend non-work time at work or with co-workers. A lot of the perks startups offer today, such as catered lunches/dinners and frequent group outings, send the message that you're trying to build a family, not a company. Many people have a life outside of work and these "perks" ask/require employees to give up what should be their free time.
3. Don't ignore management. A lot of startups eschew basic management practices, mistaking management for bureaucracy. The reality, however, is that a healthy dose of competent management is one of the best ways to promote productivity and avoid time-wasting dysfunction.
It usually degenerates into a bunch of hip young guys with lots of hair product and eclectic playlists.
Build for diversity and you'll get surprisingly awesome skillsets on your team.
If you cater meals, some employees will want to skip out and take the salary bump instead, others don't mind losing out on pay for free weekly massages.
Free beer? Non-drinkers feel left out. Game room? non-gamers hate it. Ping-pong, foosball, pool tables, free gym? You'll find somebody who it alienates.
You have to pick what you want your company to be and commit to it. Where would you want to work? Build that. You'll find the right people to populate it, but try to keep it open to diversity of styles and ideas.
Your best employee will probably be somebody completely different than you.
A culture where everyone worked to the maximum of their ability and where the sum was greater than the parts, those places tended to do pretty well.
I appreciate the sentiment of the article, but there's a lot of complexity to the issue that it ignores. For one, most of the time that I was working crazy hours was because I a.) wanted and b.) needed to. I believed in the project's mission, the work was fun & challenging, and there was a lot to do that just wouldn't get done if I didn't put in the hours.
Similarly, when I worked very light hours, it was because there wasn't much work that I had to do. I was blocked on other teams, or in-between projects and my manager didn't have a good idea where I'd be productive at the moment, or "held in reserve" so that if we needed to react quickly to market opportunities I'd be well-rested and not occupied by other projects.
Working hard is not always a bad thing, or onerous, or exhausting. Sometimes employees work hard because they believe in what they're doing and want to do a good job; that's part of what makes a company a good place to work, after all. And sometimes it is, and creates a very unhealthy competition where everybody tries to outdo each other. I think that one of the things that Google in general and Larry Page in particular realizes is that people will have different desires for work/life balance at different stages in their life, and that within a large company, there should be places that can accommodate everyone from the achievement-oriented new Ph.D grad to the family with a young kid.
Beyond my own experience, I had multiple teammates who had long commutes and family commitments and made a rigid practice of leaving before five every single day. As far as I know, none of them were ever given any trouble about it. Maybe they weren't promoted as fast as if they'd burned the midnight oil, but that seems like a fair trade.
That point has more to do with our inherent freedom to live self directing lives than arguing that hard work isn't a good thing. It's more an indictment against the whole employee lifestyle than your admittedly superior company.
To reiterate my point, you feel like it's worth mentioning that you were allowed to stop making BigCorp money for two and a half hours to celebrate one of the more important events in your life.
Though he never expressed the result for the self-employed, log(1) = 0 in any base.
Long hours at Google? Please. The long hours argument would certainly hold up at many of the other companies on the list, however. Point being that no generalization can define why these rankings are misleading (though they certainly can be).
Let's take Google as an example, although any large company with a strong reputation would do. Take technical or cultural or managerial attribute Q (say, which programming language to privilege). Ask "what is the best Q option for Google?" Most people will admit that they don't know. There are lot of variables. Ask "what is the best Q option for the cultural leader? Suddenly you get a bunch of bikeshedding product executives trying to throw their weight around. Now that it's not "Google" being discussed but "the cultural leader" hanging in the balance, peoples' opinions get much more entangled and politicized (if less relevant to the specific needs of the company, Google).
The concept of "the cultural leader" in technology is flawed and dangerous and it attracts people for the wrong reasons. You should hire the people who want to make a cultural leader by doing great work and, um, leading... not people who want to hold high positions at an organization already recognized for leadership.
No one bothered to ask me what made me unique or interesting, even though I have amazing stories to tell from traveling around the world and from projects I've worked on in the past. The free lunch thing is sort of over-blown, when you have to fill out a form and shout over a line of people to get a BLT sandwich made. And then there were a bunch of bicycles strewn out across the campus, mostly toppled over, for no explicable reason.
Honestly, the only reason I would want to work there is for the money, and for that reason employees should not really expect to enjoy their time there.
... I HAVE PEOPLE SKILLS, DAMMIT!!!
(apologies if you've not seen "Office Space")
I have seen this from both sides, and it is something you _need_ to know if you are interviewing people. The very best people for the job will have options. The very best hires don't _need_ your job. Not considering that your organization is being evaluated by the same folks you want to hire is not smart.
I guess you could say that measuring the "likeableness" and culture-fit of a potential employee is important, but that can definitely be derived from the interview in general rather than from your life stories.
Maybe it is a mistake that it's not a point in the interview? In fact, I'd care a lot about the personality of a person I will be working with in the future.
I understand that in the "cattle hiring" model where you hire people and then assign a team, this is irrelevant, but I personally consider this a huge weakness of cattle hiring.
To me, it seems like Google's hiring process as a huge company (at least for the vast majority of positions) is explicitly looking for interchangeable people, so regardless of what they advertise, their process is not one that holds "uniqueness" as a plus. This is also evidenced by the "hiring committees" they are proud of and talk about a lot outside the company, which will inevitably reduce the variance of new hires.
P.S. that might not be a bad thing for a big company of that size; I'm not holding this against them, but as a prospective employee, one should definitely consider this.
Asking about all the stamps in your passport would be a waste of everyone's time. If you get hired we can all chat about it at lunch. Otherwise nobody cares. Anyway at a company with tens of thousands of engineers there's already a bunch of people exhibiting every one of your "unique" characteristics.
This was also coming after resigning from another company where I was treated terribly after moving from Chicago to southern California.
And that's really beyond the point. Fog Creek Software in New York City does an excellent job of treating their employees well, both interviewing and starting, and maybe that's something only offered by smaller companies, but I think an interviewee for a software job should be treated with a little bit more personal respect.
Working for an employer is inherently dehumanizing. You are considered a resource of the company, not a unique individual. The larger the company, the stronger this effect.
No offense, but that's frankly irrelevant to an interviewer. You can't expect someone to waste a part of their day to stroke your ego when their task is to evaluate you and see if you can make it in the company.
Furthermore, Google might just be looking to hire a massive number of low-level Java developers and have a need to make them write bubblesort and FizzBuzz over and over, but I am someone who is a Java compiler writer, so I thought things might have lined up better.
And at this point, I am not concerned about my ego so much as having a way to support myself. I didn't start programming when I was 10 to make a million dollars, I did it because I wanted to know how things worked. Now I might as well work at the pizza factory down the street so long as I have a place to live.
Have an ounce of empathy and look at things from the other side of the table. Anybody can write "I wrote a java compiler" on their resume. Anybody who is even modestly determined can fake a github repo of such a project.
People have done (much) crazier things to try to get a job at Google.
The only thing for interviewers to do is to try to assess your technical ability in the limited time that they have.
I did a fair number of interviews when I worked at Google. (For strong candidates,) I spent every minute of the 45 or whatever given to me in an interview trying to get more signal to make their interview summary packet stronger. If I stop to ask how you saved a village in Fiji from sharks, that's fewer glowing words I'm going to write about you in my feedback.
To echo what somebody else wrote upthread:
> If you get hired we can all chat about it at lunch.
The Unforeseen Costs of Extraordinary Experience
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/10/01/095679761455...
FWIW if you are successful in other endeavors in life, down the road, you'll potentially deal with these situations time and time again.
Good luck.
For a large company that is more or less irrelevant unless you are interviewing for a position specific to varied international experience.
Making sure you can program is far more important. I work at a really international setting ... good C++ is good C++ regardless of the cultural background of the programmer.
Which in itself is really friggin awesome - in my experience a programmer is a programmer with any cultural background just as long they grok the CS and programming fundamentals. Perhaps Google has observed the same?
For smaller companies where the interviewers will be dealing with you day to day the personal details are more interesting.
* at a large company.
I would be fascinated by that story if I were interviewing GP for a position at our (small) company.
I studied phonetics in a language lab and volunteered with other international students at a local elementary school, among other things.
Most are just like lunchrooms in school, with much better food. Sorry that someone didn't give you a better experience there, with regards to food and otherwise.
Before that I worked at a place I could charitably call a "bottom place to work".
I've worked at a few very mediocre places as well.
So I've been around the block so to speak.
About a decade and a half ago, I worked at a place that doesn't show up on any of these lists. The main day-to-day difference it seems from where I work now and this place I worked at long ago is that I get free candy and juice. The other place had more interesting work. Almost all of my professional acquaintances come from the former place.
We have a badass cafeteria, but I still have to pay for it. So I guess that's better than the Amazon gig and the mediocre to decent food I was offered?
One of the chefs here is a former Google executive chef, his Polenta with mushroom sauce is pretty good, but a bit tart.
I get whatever hardware and resources I've asked for so far. So far I've gotten a large format printer with staff, 3 developers, a new rMBP with top of the line specs, a new monitor, travel expensed and have $100k worth of rack mountable GPUs on order. I'm throwing a lot of people and hardware at a problem that everybody including the client thinks should be solved this way, but for <reasons> probably won't work out in the end...and we all know it.
I've found not-for-profits to be consistently decent places to work, plus I can take pride in working at them for all kinds of principled reasons. Even if the pay sucks, the offices tend to be nice and its nice knowing you're helping the species move forward a little every day. The unofficial motto where I work is "fuck the money, do the right thing by the client". I like that.
But I know from long-timers that work-life balance kind of sucks and there's been some lean times recently that have left some old-timers hungry with a thirst they can't quite get rid of. There's a yoga class I can take, $60/season. We have a Gym, the showers are cleaned twice a day.
I've found that for-profits make me a heck of a lot more money, but range from miserable to mediocre.
I've almost worked at Google, Amazon and a few other bright stars on these kinds of lists, but the problems didn't seem terribly interesting even if the cafeterias were cool. I guess pushing ads, on-line retail or some other kind of kool-aidery is hip. I like my Android phone well enough. Maybe if I could have taken that salary and moved cross country and displaced my life, the free catered meals would have been worth it. The quiz-show interview was lame and completely irrelevant for the job they wanted me to do.
I've interviewed with a few places that think they're best places to work. 3 catered meals a day, game room, casual dress code, whatever. It's fine, but then they're supporting 10 year old application cruft and the hardest problems they have to solve is supporting the new release of Java.
The most I've ever learned, and thus the most rewarding job I ever worked was for a small and scrappy startup that failed. The lessons I learned there have earned me nonstop promotions at better places. I would absolutely do that again if I had a time machine even though it had really sucky aspects to it. It didn't even come close to being a best place to work...though I also got free candy and juice.
The best problems I've ever worked was for a shitty shitty mega-corp. They sent me around the world 4 times in two years, to active war zones, where I got shot at. Coding under fire is amazing. Saving people's lives is amazing. Dealing with corporate bullshit back home where none of that is recognized for any reason sucks. I recently was contacted by an employee to answer questions about code I hacked out 7 years ago while I was taking mortar fire. The stories I'll tell my grandkids come from this job. Also not a best place to work. No free juice or candy, no cafeteria.
It's interesting McKinsey is in the top-10. I'v...
The scrappy startup: can you share a couple textbites about the lessons you got there? What kind of crossover did those lessons have in the war zones - or was that afterwards?
Others might like companies with less perks, but a great work culture, where there's less focus on facilities but more focus on the having great work / life balance and culture.
It's tough to find a company that has both =\",
I'm not sure where you got the idea that 'Culture fit' = hiring people who look alike. Having an maintaining a good work culture where individuals on a team gel together, much like an orchestra, is extremely important and not to be cast aside. Sure, a candidate might have a PhD from MIT and is smart, but if that individual is quiet, has difficulty working in a pair (assuming pairing is part of the culture), and is adamant about working in a silo and going hero mode, having that candidate on your team might just be disruptive.
Having said that, I do think culture fit shouldn't be the only or the veto decision when it comes to hiring. It should however be a part of the overall decision. And yes, if you're not hiring someone because they don't like Fight Club but your team does, then calling that a 'culture fit' problem is dumb. It's not about hiring people who only think alike, but hiring people who have the same / similar philosophies when it comes to doing their job.
Re-read the part about being a professional. Then you will see why this is a straw-man construction.
-- This is an excellent comment
They are perks designed to make working there more pleasant and efficient (if you eat there your lunch commute is gone and you are likely to converse with coworkers). They have nothing to do with your compensation.
No you can't. You can't make the argument because one set of things is strictly needed for you to do your job, the other is not.
If you think of an orchestra, it's like all the nameless people in the violin section vs. soloist. Optimizing for rockstars is like optimizing for soloists and that rarely works well.
They're your steady soldiers, getting the job done at the pace you set. They can be used to set organizational tempo, long-term goals, etc. They're the ones who will work for your company for 10 years and not complain too much.
But they also recognize that they're working to live, not living to work. Lots of startups want their employees to be obsesses with their work, they want all the employees to do things together, live together, marry each other, they want them to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner together.
Lots of employees find that a huge turnoff, because frankly, they have better lives than what any startup can offer.