My Competitive Advantage: I Hire Artists

It is a shame that so many employers have it in their heads that they need 100% of their employees lives. Why can't people work less hours for less money? Why must they give all of their will-power? Why can't people have a job with medical benefits, paid vacation but only work 3 days a week, with a salary that takes in to account the trade-off?<p>I'm sure I could come up with some reasonable answers to those questions, but I want to hear what you guys have to say.

I met a restaurant owner recently and he says the best people he can hire to be waitresses are mothers with kids in school. They are generally articulate, intelligent, friendly. And they love being able to go home to pick up their kids at 3pm after the lunch rush.

I really would like to know what kind of 'financial software' it was that Lucky Dave excelled in. It could be MS Excel.<p>Sorry for not adding anything meaningful to the discussion.<p>PS: This guy hired a user of his product. Nevertheless, this user was already giving superb support to other users, without any external motivation. So he hired a passionate customer, who already did some parts of the job. So if you want to hire somebody, you should look at your customers and community first. I think that is the lesson.

Great article. But I wouldn't come to the conclusion that you should hire artists. I would say that the lesson is that you should hire someone:<p>(1) smart<p>(2) motivated<p>(3) conscientious<p>and<p>(4) take very good care of them

This applies to <i>anyone</i> who is really passionate. I've pretty much always had the best luck with hiring people who do things for love, and just happened to also want to make a living, so over time it's evolved to the point where I don't even care about hiring full-time people, if I can get part-time from someone who is amazing.

I Hire Artists? More like, I Hired A Champion. IMO it was pre-mature generalizing.

while this is a great article, and it is probably 99% correct, isn't there something wrong with generalizing from "I hired one artist with flexible time, it was good" to "all hail artists flexiworking as the revolution to come" ? (Or Did I miss the listing of other artists he hired in the article?)<p>With envy, a fairly flexible (sadly-)non-artsy worker

I really enjoyed the thinking in this article and I think there's a tremendous amount of truth to it. It's surprising how often simple potential changes with disproportionately large positive effects (e.g. loosening structure so that creative people can, ya know, <i>work</i>) get dismissed because of dogma.

+1. But surely one sample point doesn't generalize to all artists? Surely there's a distribution of artist quality like there is for engineer quality?

An interesting piece, to be sure. Some of the best programmer I know really refuse to be tied down into doing anything they're not totally passionate about. The article was a bit hyperbole-heavy for my tastes, though.

I wonder what is unique to his product that prevents from solving the 6000 support emails a year problem with product / information improvements.

As an artist myself, I fully understand this.

Hire your champions, your early supporters? This worked out great for Delicious too.