Hire people who give a shit

This article is megalomaniacal. Insisting that your company with 200+ employees will only hire people who will work themselves to the bone without any mention of how those people will be properly compensated is wild corporate propaganda.<p>I honestly don’t know why the tech industry continues to capitulate to leaders like this who obviously, and loudly, mistreat and dehumanize their employees by insisting that if you are not obsessed and willing to put in incredible energy into someone else’s project that you are bad. It does not follow that people should be obsessed with someone else’s business that they won’t be properly compensated for. No matter how many times someone rich says it, it will never be true.<p>I will say, however, that this is an extremely popular position with the rich and powerful. From startups to big consulting firms, there was not a single company in SF that I worked for that did not echo this. From PC saying how proud he was that we did not hire more engineers at Stripe while people were pulling 60+ hour weeks for months at a time, to engineering managers explaining how they slept under their desk while they were working at Facebook, to Big 3 consulting firm partners exhorting 22 year olds to work 80 hour weeks being screamed at by misogynistic clients in cities across the globe, the song remained the same.

And the inverse: have a business which is worthy of shit-giving.<p>It’s extremely hard to give a shit about Yet Another Middleware CRUD CRM Layer Corp.<p>There’s a fine balancing point between working a bullshit job (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bullshit_Jobs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bullshit_Jobs</a>) and recognizing that no, the B-Ark (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hitchhikers.fandom.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Golgafrinchan_Ark_Fleet_Ship_B" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hitchhikers.fandom.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Golgafrinchan_Ark_Fleet_...</a> ) is a bad idea, we really do need telephone handset sanitizers.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

Yikes. I would never work for that person after reading that article.<p>“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.”<p>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.

Lol. You can’t work only five hours a day _and_ still “give a shit”, according to the article.<p>Sounds like someone full of himself. I’m never going to work more than 8 hours a day for a company, preferably less even. I still get more stuff done in those hours that I do work.<p>I care a lot about what I do, but I’m not going to destroy myself or my life for someone else’s company. Already did that for the military, never again.

Oh my, what drivel. Another startup CEO who thinks late-stage employees with essentially zero upside in the company need to put in founder hours.

I have a genuine question and I&#x27;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 &quot;passionate&quot; than the next guy?<p>Scale seems like a cool company with an interesting product, but let&#x27;s be honest, rational people here - they aren&#x27;t curing cancer, creating art, or landing on Normandy Beach. This seems obvious to any self-aware person. So why all the bravado?

I strongly disagree with this post for my company. But that is great, it means there is a company for everyone.<p>At my company one of our most important values is &quot;live the life you love&quot;. For each person we try to understand how the company can help them achieve their personal goals.<p>If someone wants to work a ton of hours to get promoted as fast as possible, we support that. But if they want a balanced life we support that too. We have people that are close to retirement that want to work half time. We support that. If people want to work remotely, we support that. Some people really want to work in an office. We support that. One person wanted to buy a ranch, another wanted to write a book, many people want to start their own companies.<p>We are running a marathon, not a sprint. We monitor people&#x27;s hours and have a discussion if their hours are regularly at too high a rate (some people like it). We know that they will eventually burn out, will start to make bad decisions etc.<p>I don&#x27;t want to be party to a cult where people&#x27;s every waking moment revolves around the company. I dont want people to be obsessed with what we do, though I do want people to have fun. I dont need to wring every ounce of profitability out of the company at the expense of the people.<p>I mountain bike before work, sometimes leave work to kitesurf if the wind is up, work on another startup on the side, go to most of my kids&#x27; presentations, take them to afterschool activities where I stay and watch etc. I want all of my employees to be able to do those things too if they want.

Is this that dude who made a company that rehires cheap labor in the third world for $5&#x2F;day to help with classification while his team sits back and gets all the benefits?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;alexandr_wang&#x2F;status&#x2F;1332059634606112768" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;alexandr_wang&#x2F;status&#x2F;1332059634606112768</a><p>The guy wants his company to be more of a cult than a value producing service. Makes sense.<p>People who care do put in more of their effort and get better results, but you have to give them an incentive for them to care. If your company fails, they get fired. But if your company grows and becomes 10x more profitable, their wages don&#x27;t move. That&#x27;s a great recipe for people doing the absolute minimum to not get fired.<p>This guy wants people who care more about him and his company than for themselves. &quot;Ask not what your company can do for you – ask what you can do for your company&quot;

&quot;Time spent working&quot; is a terrible metric for &quot;gives a shit&quot; and shows me that I wouldn&#x27;t want to work at this place, but I agree with the general idea that people who give a shit are worth a lot of money.<p>Even more important than hiring people who give a shit is not breaking them. Throw enough bullshit hurdles in their way, treat them unfairly, or show that you don&#x27;t care for long enough, and they will stop giving a shit, and you just reduced the value of that worker at least by a factor of 2, if not more. Even if they still put in the same number of hours.<p>It&#x27;s the difference between doing what&#x27;s right vs. doing what&#x27;s rewarded. If you have people who just do what&#x27;s right, you don&#x27;t need a strict reward system. Once you push them towards only going after your rewards, your reward system better be 100% aligned with what&#x27;s good for the company (spoiler: it isn&#x27;t anywhere near that), or you&#x27;re screwed.

&gt; 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.<p>When I was a poker player, I learned that playing less meant earning more (per hour). Focus can only be sustained on the top-level for so long. When I played poker, I cared a lot.<p>When I started working later, I noticed the same thing. The quality of focus is simply less. It&#x27;s still valuable enough to produce something, but not to produce something top of line. Simply test yourself on the first hour with a difficult problem and on the eighth hour. Your first hour self will run circles around you.<p>So I can imagine that there are very attuned HR professionals that know this and see this and want to take advantage of this. Rare they may be, I&#x27;d be one of them if I&#x27;d work in the field.

I think the general idea of finding people who take pride in a job well done is a sound one and does often mean the difference between success and failure of a project&#x2F;business.<p>Where the article completely falls down in is how to measure “giving a shit”. There’s plenty of people that work long hours, get rewarded well but ultimately just create mess after mess that someone who cares about clean, simple code then cleans up after them.<p>A culture that just values attendance is most likely going to have a negative impact on the motivation. I remember a situation where a delivery lead shouting “nobody leaves the office before this bug is fixed” leading me to question the values of a client.<p>Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that gimmicks like pool tables in the office and slides make an iota of difference to someone that gives a shit about software.<p>What does make a difference is a culture that encourages initiative, values transparency and pragmatism. These are the kinds of things you want hear when being interviewed. How many hours did you work will&#x2F;should turn the real talent away...

This article is utter bollocks. I tried hard to read to the end without laughing out loud, in particular this about candidates:<p>&gt; 1. they give a shit about Scale<p>Most companies I interview for, I, shall we say, don&#x27;t give a shit about at application and interview stage. Sure, they may seem like a good fit (tech and remuneration), and I try to fit if it kinda feels good after a couple of interviews. Yes I try and understand their business, methodologies, treatment of staff (am I on call?, what&#x27;s that worth?) etc<p>But to expect me to arrive at a series of interviews with total commitment and &quot;giving a shit&quot; (which I read as hand-my-life-and-all-my-free-time-to-you). Nah, fuck off.<p>You&#x27;re just another company, it&#x27;s up to you to <i>make me</i> give a shit wanting to work for you.<p>Annecdote: Been employed at what I thought would be a nice company to work for ~five months, it&#x27;s turned out well, <i>now I give a shit</i>. It doesn&#x27;t work the other way around, otherwise you seem like a cult.<p>And whilst at this new company I really do &quot;give a shit&quot;, I don&#x27;t allow it to trap me and will happily tell them at which point I don&#x27;t &quot;give a shit&quot; any more and the reasons why.

I agree with the gist of hiring people that care about their craft, but asking them to care about the company is harder.<p>That really requires some sort of reciprocal <i>&quot;company cares about you&quot;</i>, and that&#x27;s hard to guarantee. Especially when you&#x27;re hiring the generation that saw their parents lose out on the things like pensions vs 401k, layoffs as regular events, etc.

He&#x27;s full of <i></i>it. I work for the paycheck and nothing more. My free time is mine and not for your company which I won&#x27;t ever see a dime on. Founders are the only people who make money at startups if even that. I can get more RSUs at an established company that actually vest than a fancy notion that they might if I work like crazy.<p>There are some studies that say working 5 hours a day is more productive than working 8 or 10 or 16 like this idiot is suggesting.<p>As you get older you realize a mission statement is a means to cajole the more inexperienced to buy into your widget or service. Those who have seen it all before know it&#x27;s bogus BS to try to burn people out. I come in, do my job, then clock out. It&#x27;s not about &#x27;giving a <i></i>it&#x27;, it&#x27;s about living life and work isn&#x27;t life.

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&#x27;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&#x27;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.

I give a shit and it&#x27;s my weakness. I usually don&#x27;t take days off until I really need them (and even then it usually takes others to actually force me to take them). I try to only work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, having a healthy balance of work and non-work etc., but I often fail and it then more often than not devolves into periods of ultra-focus and periods where it&#x27;s hard for me to even do the simplest tasks - even though I really want to. I give a shit, so I need to take care of myself because when I&#x27;m unable to work, I feel really bad about it. Because I give a shit, you know - I currently work on stuff that I used to do in my spare time for years out of passion.<p>I went through way too many voluntary crunches (both for work and personal stuff, like game jams) to not see how they deteriorate my health. And occasionally I&#x27;m still putting myself into more, it&#x27;s somewhat addicting. I need to finally get myself tested for ADHD.<p>In this light, I&#x27;m not sure if my answers to the posed questions would satisfy the recruiter looking for someone who &quot;gives a shit&quot;. I used to think it was worth it, I&#x27;m not so sure anymore.<p>I completely understand the need for people who &quot;give a shit&quot;. I don&#x27;t really understand people who are able to work without &quot;giving a shit&quot;. I can&#x27;t. But remember that if you&#x27;re looking for people who &quot;give a shit&quot;, it&#x27;s now your responsibility to not abuse them for it. They will often put their work over their health. You shouldn&#x27;t let them, otherwise your company is not worth giving a shit for.

Imagine a 20-something thinking he&#x27;s seen or experienced enough of the world--any of it--to go on like this.<p>He essentially lucked into VC funding by exploiting sweatshop labor while riding a hyped ML&#x2F;AI market. It&#x27;s a testament to how messed up this industry is.

&gt; 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.<p>So you mean that you&#x27;re looking for unbalanced people? I don&#x27;t get how being obsessed about a product equates to long term success for an employee in your company. To me it&#x27;s more like a recipe for burnout.<p>What&#x27;s the employee turnover at Scale?

I think a lot of employees end up not giving a shit because their employer don&#x27;t give a shit in the first place. The culture is rotting up on both sides of the fence. Companies can&#x27;t force people to give a shit because they surely know how to fake it if required to and companies can&#x27;t change their principles because the sole principle, profit making cannot be changed. What sort of works is propaganda. There are always young people who are gullible to give their heart and souls for companies who don&#x27;t really give a shit. Some companies give a shit at the beginning but after becoming profitable they end up not giving a shit

1-why would anyone (other than you) give a shit about your company?<p>2-intellectual work does not translate to how many hours you put in.

&quot;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.&quot;<p>This is just silly. 5 hours of intensely focused, silent, eyes-glued-to-monitor-and-keyboard work beats the conventional 8 hours of work involving socializing&#x2F;chatting with coworkers over the cubicle, making phone calls, checking in on people, walking around an office, taking breaks, etc., which itself seems to lead to approximately the same 5 hours of actual work... just with much less intense focus (intense focus which is mentally draining).<p>To quantify work output merely by time fails to appreciate the much more important factor involved in work: efficiency.<p>Working 5 hours, intensely, is draining. This author is silly for failing to realize that there&#x27;s a reason Google engineers are allowed to work 11am-4pm: because they&#x27;re competent, efficient, responsible, and probably don&#x27;t waste much time (otherwise I don&#x27;t see how they&#x27;d be employed there-- one of the most sought after &amp; selective employers in the world)

Maybe my opinion is atypical compared to a lot of the comments here, but I&#x27;m of the belief that if you treat your team members not just fairly but well, invest in them, genuinely care about them, and trust&#x2F;empower them, then the overall sentiment of the article makes a lot of sense.<p>I&#x27;m not a big fan of the current state of the world where people hop careers every couple years and are always looking for new opportunities continuously. It&#x27;s driven by extreme corporate greed which is way too skewed in the wrong direction. I always thought there was something nice about lifetime or career companies. Again, if both employer, management, employees and community can create a culture and company that is in balance in all aspects, the author&#x27;s position is justified in my opinion.<p>However, it&#x27;s it&#x27;s just empty words that maintains the status quo of Silicon Valley, then I don&#x27;t agree with the author. We need less selfish egotistical thought leader CEOs following the trends and more down to earth and humble leaders who want to do meaningful work.

Was pretty decent till I got to &quot;I have a particular line of questioning around this&quot;<p>Now we equate &quot;giving a shit&quot; to how many hours you put in. Should we just go back to counting lines of code to view effort?

Scale&#x27;s GlassDoor Reviews from ex-employees are fairly telling<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.glassdoor.com&#x2F;Reviews&#x2F;Scale-Reviews-E1656849.htm?sort.sortType=RD&amp;sort.ascending=false&amp;filter.iso3Language=eng" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.glassdoor.com&#x2F;Reviews&#x2F;Scale-Reviews-E1656849.htm...</a>

&gt; One very scary thing to me is Scale becoming a credential rather than a cult.<p>I honestly can’t tell if this is satire or not.

I was sympathetic to the idea when I read the title. It is definitely better to work with people that both care about the future of the company and the quality of their work.<p>But then I read the title and learned that the author equals those qualities to <i>”being part of a cult”</i> and <i>”being obsessed about work”</i>. Pretty much the stereotypical startup founder that consciously scam young people out of their waking hours in exchange for an illusion.

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&#x27;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.

The second half of this should be: &quot;...and help them to keep giving a shit.&quot;<p>I&#x27;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 &#x2F; ideas then completely ignoring it. Both will immediately have your employees checking out and saying to themselves &quot;fine, I&#x27;ll show up, do what I&#x27;m told, then clock out at 5.&quot;

“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.<p>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.

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.<p>Just wait for your first RSI my young friend, and then we will talk again ;)<p>I&#x27;m really curious how he feels like about holidays, I assume people in Europe cant&#x27;t give a shit having 4-6 weeks of holidays yearly, right?

Great advice, but I&#x27;d add one thing - the company itself, the leadership, etc. also has to give a shit at the same level as its people.<p>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&#x27;t share your passion, it&#x27;s an awful and demoralizing place to be.<p>So quit, you say. But you can&#x27;t because you give a shit and you really, really want the company to succeed and do great things.

The article starts off well, but then goes wildly wrong in the end.<p>&quot;Giving a shit&quot; is orthogonal to working long hours. As a part of my job, I hire people and one thing I tell all candidates is: &quot;I expect you to care about your work. This does not mean that you have to work evenings or weekends. But while you are working, you should care about doing a good job.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s certainly partially about believing that you are working on the right thing, but mainly about believing the craft matters.

The attitude of startup CEOs in my area is that you should be crazy about their company, and work for 45+ hours a week for a salary that&#x27;s marginally higher than what you would make on a 9-5 retail job. Sorry, I don&#x27;t give a shit about your SaaS.

He actually thinks and says that Google engineers only work 5 hours a day and says &quot;so the conclusion is that very little meaningful work gets done at Google...Google is broken.&quot; This article reflects terribly on Scale and he should delete it.

&gt; 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.<p>This statement shows how anti-worker this guy is. Good on such a Googler.<p>If you encounter a leader (like this guy) that thinks working hard for 8 hours a day is bare minimum (like this guy), do _not_ give them your labor if you can avoid it. You only have one life, so don&#x27;t waste it making guys like this far richer than they would ever make you.<p>I hope plenty of BigCo and startup (especially Scale) employees are shaving hours with no repercussions thanks to Covid remote work. Such a huge effective hourly wage bump, and the only things harmed are corporations and their leaders (abstractly and relatively.)

Not a native speaker, but for me &quot;giving a shit&quot; doesn&#x27;t sound like you <i>really</i> care for something. Ok, it&#x27;s (maybe) better than &quot;not giving a shit&quot;, which is nothing at all, but it&#x27;s not much more than the bare minimum...

&gt; <i>Do you think it was worth it? For an obsessed person, it’s always worth it.</i><p>No, just no. It&#x27;s not absolutely always worth it. Especially when you &quot;give a shit about it&quot; and then find it really wasn&#x27;t worth it. That&#x27;s really bad.<p>Also, giving a shit is not a dichotomy. I don&#x27;t just give a shit about either everything or nothing at all.<p>Give me a reason to give a shit about what you do in particular. Unless you are measuring one&#x27;s capability to give a shit in absolute terms, which is very hard to assess in terms of productivity gains.

People have all kinds of motivations:<p>- change the way something works<p>- make money to achieve a goal now or in the future (pay rent vs. fund kid&#x27;s education)<p>- support a friend<p>- make a change in the workplace or the industry<p>- develop experience and a career, further a craft<p>But it&#x27;s almost never &quot;make your business succeed at the expense of other parts of their life.&quot;<p>---<p>&gt; 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.<p>This guy is basically giving a performance review on people he doesn&#x27;t know doing work he&#x27;s unaware of based on a single metric. The ego involved here is indescribable. I would never, ever work at Scale.

The post just deleted all of its legitimate criticisms from other users...now comments aren&#x27;t allowed. What a joke.<p>The funniest one I managed to see was:<p>&quot;Jeff Bezos probably says the same stuff here: `Why don&#x27;t my warehouse workers just give a shit? I even gave them free pee bottles!` Is Scale the next Amazon?&quot;

Just to provide a bit of the opposite perspective from what I’m seeing in most of the comments here, I appreciated the post. I know what it’s like to work with people who _care_ about what they’re doing, and what it’s like to work with people who don’t, and I (personally) would pick the former over the latter even if it meant more hours, less money, whatever.<p>At the end of the day, what makes me feel good is leaving the workday feeling like I got good work done with a good team, and we all tried our best because we care about what we’re doing, instead of just punching the clock. I’m not crazy or indoctrinated, that’s just what makes me feel satisfied by my work. But people are different and value very different things, so I’m glad there are companies that work well for each type of person.

An alternative of &quot;I work hard enough so my boss can buy another Ferrari&quot;.<p>Sad to see this kind of shit from a YC funded CEO.

The thing you&#x27;re expected to &quot;give a shit&quot; about is whatever it takes to make Alexandr rich. Unless someone finds particular life meaning in building a specialized mechanical turk? Of course there&#x27;s grifting from the military-industrial complex involved too: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.govconwire.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;09&#x2F;scale-ai-gets-potential-91m-army-contract-to-support-annotated-dataset-devt-effort&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.govconwire.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;09&#x2F;scale-ai-gets-potential-9...</a>

Alexandr blocked all comments on the post. The tea leaves on working at Scale don&#x27;t read too kindly.

The reception here is pretty bad and perhaps justifiably. There are some pretty scathing Glassdoor reviews that mirror the problems a lot of commenters are pointing out with this attitude. A lot of ex-employees &quot;gave a shit&quot; and they got severely burnt-out from it.<p>I care greatly about the quality and effect of my work (I hope most people do and have the privilege to) but definitely it&#x27;s more important to me that my employer also &quot;gives a shit&quot; about me.

&gt; it is guaranteed that they will not do good work if they do not give a shit.<p>While I do see amazing merit in that statement, from an experiential and rational standpoint I disagree with it. Though, believing this won&#x27;t harm the company too much as it is a very action-oriented statement and leads to a bias of action. That doesn&#x27;t make it true though.<p>I&#x27;ve seen plenty of people doing good work when they don&#x27;t give a shit. It&#x27;s more rare than doing bad work, which is more common.<p>Really, the <i>only</i> thing I haven&#x27;t seen is that people become so desperate or passionate (or both) that they become very lateral&#x2F;creative in their solutions. That&#x27;s the only thing I haven&#x27;t seen &quot;not giving a shit&quot; people do. I&#x27;ve seen this time and time again. And it&#x27;s quite simple why: people that don&#x27;t give a shit don&#x27;t become desperate or passionate about the things they don&#x27;t give a shit about. So they never go into that lateral&#x2F;creative mode. Perhaps the only exception is highly lateral&#x2F;creative people that do it by default.<p>The thing is, creative&#x2F;lateral problem-solving is not always needed and sometimes even counter productive. At my current job, I&#x27;ve noticed that me giving a shit is actually putting me into harms way, because I become creative and want to meddle with too many things. Whereas, when I shut up and not give a shit, do what I told and think a bit with them for the future, that seems to work a lot better for them.<p>Obviously, that&#x27;s just anecdata and companies are diverse. But the author mentions this like it is a rule and as a rule (heh!) the majority of things are most likely never to exist as a rule! You make a general sweeping statement, it takes one counter example to shaken it.

This sounds like a child wrote it. You should hire smart people who get shit done. Hire craftsmen. The whole thing about caring about the company is a joke without real equity. If you care about your work and do a good job then that is your contribution to the company. Engineers usually have 0 input into the direction a company takes so it&#x27;s hard to care that much.

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&#x27;re more likely to bring something they&#x27;re already passionate about to work and make the rest of us passionate about it as well.<p>Trying to find candidates that are passionate about the company before they join doesn&#x27;t seem right. If we&#x27;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&#x27;t a great approximation. That said, there might be something here I can latch onto into the form of:<p>1. Hire people passionate about something.<p>2. Promote people passionate about the company.<p>However, I still see some problems with the above. I would need time to chew on it before basing any personnel decisions around it.

I don’t want to be too harsh but no where in the article does it mention why anyone should give a “shit” about his company.

I don&#x27;t give a shit about your company, because it&#x27;s <i>your</i> company. I don&#x27;t actually have a say in what&#x27;s going on. I can&#x27;t refuse to do what I&#x27;m told because I disagree with the direction of the company&#x27;s mission. I&#x27;d get fired.<p>I <i>might</i> give a shit about the mission, in as much as you can give a shit about the trite verbiage assigned to, in essense, the general thing that&#x27;s supposed to increase shareholder dividends. But the mission is very frequently lost in the minutia of doing one&#x27;s job. Does the mission relate to how I&#x27;m going to fill out this change management form? No; the change management process isn&#x27;t based on the mission, it&#x27;s based on its own thing. I give a shit about the change management process. If I only gave a shit about the mission, I might say, &quot;screw change management!&quot; And then I wouldn&#x27;t be very good at my job.<p>And &quot;giving a shit&quot; based on who&#x27;s interpretation? I can tell you that I give far too much of a shit about how my company works, and if I voiced this frequently, people would be absolutely sick of me. My manager sometimes reminds me - in the nicest terms - to calm the fuck down about the work. You don&#x27;t want the whole company filled with people like me, because they&#x27;d drive each other bonkers. A few of us are nice for variety, and to pop up occasionally and say, &quot;Hey, do we have a central place we can put all this documentation rather than a lot of independent places?&quot; And then calm the fuck down and focus on just <i>writing the damn docs.</i><p>You should want people to care, in a healthy way, both about the thing they&#x27;re working on and the way in which they work on it. But you should never want them to be obsessed.<p>Obsession, n: <i>Compulsive preoccupation with a fixed idea or an unwanted feeling or emotion, often accompanied by symptoms of anxiety.</i><p>If you want this for your employees, you need to get a grip and re-evaluate life.

I am sure the author will - impressively - read these comments and be further emboldened he was right all along. He appears to have limited capacity for self-awareness or self-doubt, which is to say, he exudes an impenetrable armor of self-righteousness. With that mentality, maybe he&#x27;ll become President too.

Seems no one <i>gave a shit</i> about this 20 hours ago when it was last posted <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;from?site=alexw.substack.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;from?site=alexw.substack.com</a>

Yikes.<p>So many things wrong with this.<p>Firstly, hours in != output. At my last job, we had several guys working 60+ hours &#x2F; week whose output was miserable. I put in 5-6 hrs &#x2F; day and was easily 2-10x as productive as them.<p>Secondly, work&#x2F;life balance is real. As a lead, I tell my team they should absolutely not be working over 40 hours, and I won&#x27;t do so myself unless I&#x27;ve fucked something up that&#x27;s mission-critical. I&#x27;d advocate for a shorter workweek but my boss is very old school.<p>Thirdly, I don&#x27;t think you can put in long workweeks and be productive long term. Most people just waste time when they work longer, and their productivity goes down, not up, and their mistakes go up. In dev, especially at startups, a single mistake can cost you your business. Do you really want exhausted workers in your codebase?<p>The truth it you should work however much you feel comfortable for the money you&#x27;re getting. That&#x27;s different for everyone. But if I can provide several million in revenue growth with a few hours of effort per day, then I figure I&#x27;m more than paying for myself. If you&#x27;re willing to work 80 hours while getting paid the same as if you work 40 and being as productive as working 20, that makes you stupid and servile imo, not dedicated.

&gt; 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.<p>Maybe some Googler would like to comment on this?

I&#x27;ve tried giving a shit as an IC, and have basically learned and been told repeatedly that it&#x27;s just a waste of time, and there&#x27;s no point in caring about a company beyond what it takes to fullfill your responsibility as someone being paid or about your duties beyond how much the people in charge care about them. Startups in particular don&#x27;t reward giving a shit about anything much at all, most of the time, but enterprises are no different. They reward getting tasks done quickly and measurably, in a way that poses little risk to the company, and that&#x27;s exactly what this asshole is saying. There is almost no market for giving shit, and it&#x27;s not worth your mental health to try.<p>&quot;But we serve millions of people, and among those are people who might need us to take a different approach to this webapp for accessibility reasons. Sorry guy, Brad who&#x27;s on vacation and decided on this pointless project to help him get promoted needs this done by X date and your opinion isn&#x27;t in line with his&quot;

It appears to be difficult to isolate the people who give a shit from the people who are good at pretending to give a shit these days.

The way I prefer to look at this is: hire people who you are comfortable giving a sizable stake of your company to. If properly motivated an employee can then decide what is &quot;enough&quot; and &quot;too much&quot; work.<p>Good decision making, forethought, and acceptable risk taking are much more valued by me than &quot;ok with working 80hr weeks&quot;.

Hire people who give a shit about what they like to do, and hire them to actually do that. If you find people who actually care about the company beyond the extent the company cares about them, they&#x27;re either mental or very naive.<p>&quot;Why do you want this Job&quot;<p><i>I grew up dreaming about studying for half a decade to write JavaScript, why else!</i>

I find it funny that the author is concerned about Scale being the kind of company people join for brand rather than &quot;substance&quot;. He never mentions the biggest reason people join companies (esp. in SV): to get rich. It is true that undergrads will intern for company&#x27;s brand and that makes sense b&#x2F;c just having FAANG on your resume completely changes your job search experience. But most fulltime employees are looking primarily to maximize their pay + RSUs.<p>Also, as others have mentioned, companies&#x2F;leaders need to give people something to &quot;give a shit about&quot;. For some people that may just be working on &quot;High quality training and validation data for AI applications&quot;, but I imagine for most people that&#x27;s probably not quite enough to make them excited about work. But, who knows? :shrug:

&quot;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&quot;<p>Hmmm.. hard to imagine a nearly trillion dollar company chugging along nicely without a majority of people &quot;giving a shit&quot;. The author seems to conflate working long hours with productivity and caring about a company. Don&#x27;t you hate it when CXOs don&#x27;t realise that they are in the <i>knowledge economy</i> where people have different styles of working and different schedules &#x2F;shrug

I&#x27;ll give you some answers:<p>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&#x27;m surprised how much negativity is in these comments and threads.<p>Is it really just the one question &quot;how many hours did you work?&quot; that has everyone up in arms? Ok, let&#x27;s find another way of saying that? BTW, it probably isn&#x27;t an important question, and it&#x27;s up to the company to set the culture around work hours.<p>However, I will say that for many companies, hiring people who give a shit, doesn&#x27;t have to mean hiring for people who give a shit about your grand vision. A QA engineer doesn&#x27;t need to be passionate about what the product does for a customer (though it&#x27;s nice), but you want them to be passionate about QA.<p>We should all be passionate about the craft&#x2F;task we do. The nice thing is, even if you find something you would absolutely hate doing, there are people out there who would love that very thing.<p>I learned this when I was younger, working in the event space, and a guy who was working for me was a housekeeper at a hotel as his main job. He loved it. I couldn&#x27;t understand how, and he explained that he went into the room knowing the task, he had 10 things he needed to check off the list, if each of those 10 things was done perfectly, he was confident the guests would be happy with the cleanliness of the room. It&#x27;s as if the thought of what he was cleaning or the things he was going to run into never crossed his mind. This is the task, focus on the task, love the process.<p>I actually was the same when I was a busser (clearing plates at a restaurant). I guess I was somewhat passionate about the mission of the joint, which was that we wanted patrons to have a good time. Part of that means clearing up the dishes promptly, with a smile, and have fund with the guests. I don&#x27;t ever remember thinking about that constant mess I was cleaning up, wiping left over food into the bin, etc etc. I gave a shit because...well, it was easy to give a shit.<p>Maybe there&#x27;s something to that, make it easy for people to give a shit. If they&#x27;re not into YOUR mission, help them find or work on THEIR mission.

The comments here at HN are quite harsh imho and I feel bad for possibly ruining someone&#x27;s day. Is there a way for me to delete the submission?<p>I posted it on HN as I liked the points in the article. The points in the post are reasonable provided there&#x27;s fair equity for the employees (which I believe is disclosed prior to joining - I have no knowledge about dilution, preference etc). I also agree with the commenters on HN that it doesn&#x27;t make much sense when there&#x27;s no equity.<p>But there are too many comments making the same&#x2F;similar point.<p>I personally find what Alex is doing is inspiring, running a 200 person company (ref: article) at 23 is remarkable. I also applaud his courage to publicly share what he thought was best advice.<p>I might get downvoted for this but I couldn&#x27;t not say this.

&gt; 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<p>Even working “only” 5 hours&#x2F;day, not including weekends, would make work the single most time-consuming item in my life (excluding sleep).

He seems to be confusing working long hours with working hard. Those aren&#x27;t the same thing. I would even argue they&#x27;re in conflict with each other. Nobody does good work when they&#x27;re &quot;obsessed&quot; with something. Obsession is a sickness. Everyone eventually learns that you need moderation (in all things) if you&#x27;re going to be around for the long haul.<p>Most software in the world is utter trash and I at least partially blame maniacs like this guy who keep people up hacking on it until they fall asleep. I wish more people would do what most people think of as &quot;work&quot; from 11-4 and spend their mornings and evenings thinking about how to do that work _well_ instead of just faster.

a YC company (S16)<p>Given the founders naivety and pig-headedness, i could have guessed.

&gt; The uncomfortable truth is that most people don’t give a shit.<p>People generally give a shit about themselves, and often their families and friends. Less about their work.<p>Here are some questions the author asks in interviews to get at the quality of shit-givingness:<p>- What’s the hardest you’ve ever worked on something?<p>- How many hours were you working a week?<p>- Why did you work so hard? Why did you care?<p>- When were you the most unmotivated in your life?<p>- What’s the thing you’re the most proud of?<p>- Do you think it was worth it?<p>These are pretty good questions to ask in general, except the one about hours working. Not only will the answer be easy to misinterpret, but asking the question gives the impression that you might care more about hours worked than results. As someone who gives a shit, that would turn me off.

Being a person who does give a shit, having such people could be advantageous to the overall and long-term quality of the product.<p>However, hiring such people has the problem of identifying them. I don&#x27;t fare particularly well in interviews; most of the opportunities I have excelled in happened via internal movements.<p>I have difficulty when coupled with bosses that have the attitude but don&#x27;t have the necessary chops because accepting shitty decisions by the way of &quot;I&#x27;m-getting-paid-why-do-I-care&quot; is quite difficult (though this becomes easier with age&#x2F;perspective). Giving shit also has impact on stress level of the employee in situations when wrong choices are made.

&gt; 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.<p>Heh, you think I’ll give a shit working over 8? Odds are you’re company is uninteresting the product or efforts you’re working on are uninteresting and time isn’t going to make give more or less of a shit about it. I’m not meaning this to target OP specifically, this is how I feel about majority of jobs I see and work.

People who &#x27;give a shit&#x27; want to do it long term. They want to work on something that will stand the test of time, that they can make meaningful contributions to.<p>They want to be resourced enough with other workmates that they can be effective at their job without sacrificing their personal life.<p>The first half of the article is right - but it takes a complete nose dive when the true intent comes out. It&#x27;s not people who &#x27;give a shit&#x27; the writer want. It&#x27;s people who will chase money as points, and do anything to increase their points. That&#x27;s who the writer truly wants.

Startups are companies with a scalable business model. Unlike regular small businesses which do not necessarily meet this definition.<p>Pursuing scale does not mean starting immediately with scalability in mind. It means creating a scalable business model, that is able to scale in subsequent stages.<p>That means that in the beginning you will have to iterate quickly to find that formula, aggresively discarding ideas (and therefore code) and moving fast.<p>But that&#x27;s not sustainable. Once you&#x27;ve found that formula, then you have to rebuild it solidly so that it&#x27;s secure, performant, scalable and reliable.

&gt; <i>How many hours were you working a week? Why did you work so hard? Why did you care?</i><p>Oh weird. I work exactly what I’m paid to work. I thought that made me an adult but I guess it means “I don’t care”

I generally like this advice but also worry that unsaid number 3 is “only hire people without boundaries who will fully devote themselves to your company until they burn out.”<p>I’d love to see more companies that give you a reasonable work life balance so that they can continue to benefit from you giving a shit long term. Let me be clear I know nothing about Scale in particular but I have seen other places where the insidious version of the advice here becomes a hiring funnel that churns through passionate workers burning them out.

<i>it is guaranteed that they will not do good work if they do not give a shit.</i><p>Just plain not true. Provable so, over and over and over again. Not other way to say it; this guy is talking utter shit.

&gt;&gt; How many hours were you working a week?<p>This question immediately tells me the recruitment process is done on my side. The answer is <i>hire more people</i>.<p>As a developed society we need to make it illegal &#x2F; strongly penalized to work more than 40h&#x2F;week on average. Calculated monthly, no carry-over.<p>Children need our time, other activities beside work are needed in order to stay healthy.<p>Companies like to pick the most talented people with lowest selfesteam who will allow themselves being manipulated into working 60h weeks.

You absolutely can give a shit and work all kinds of hours. The only important thing about working hard is logically analyzing a problem, implementing a solution, and presenting your work appropriately. Sometimes that takes two hours, sometimes it takes thirteen.<p>If you say, hey why aren&#x27;t you solving more problems then on lighter days, then that sounds like some jerk taskmaster dictating a rate rather than someone concerned with solving problems.

I mean, if we&#x27;re being honest, even I don&#x27;t &quot;give a shit&quot; about what I&#x27;m working on beyond building something fun&#x2F;cool that enables me to make a living.<p>I want to hire someone who is good at what they do and brutally honest that they&#x27;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.

Having mentored interns in the past the idea that certain academic institutions signal intelligence over others is flawed at best. This is anecdotal but one summer we got two - one from Harvard and the other from a US college I&#x27;d never heard of. One we went on to offer a job, the other struggled with basic coding and had to be taught multiple times how to open a PR.

I think of the devs I&#x27;ve worked with that can&#x27;t seem to manage a kanban board themselves or speak up and ask cross-cutting big picture questions.<p>If I know my senior dev doesn&#x27;t give a shit, then I need to establish a manager&#x2F;lead who does give a shit. If I have someone who does give a shit, then I have to spend less managing their 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.“<p>Ahaha, sounds like the writer is young. What we are actually doing is playing the long game. We do care, but we are optimizing for not burning out, so we can have a larger ‘area under the curve’ of giving a shit.

how do these children like idiots get funded and be in charge of 200 ppl? this mindset is criminally short sighted..

Here&#x27;s a CRAZIER!!! plan. Pay people enough to give a $hit.<p>Real life has taught me one thing about losers that talk like this. 99% of the time it means they expect more work than they are willing to pay for. Bonus points if they can have some sort of legal (read slavery) leverage over you.

A few years ago Riot Games turned me down for a position I was overqualified for because I’m not a hardcore gamer. I laughed it off because I knew that people who “give a shit” about the gaming industry expect to work 12 hours per day 300 days per year for a below market salary.

From personal experience this guys sales pitch is used to defend and glorify the worst work cultures. Having worked at a place for 12 years believing that my contribution was vital and necessary and then seeing that conception unwind in two months was the best education _ever_.

This was stolen from Atomic Object, then contorted. AO had this as one of its original five workplace tenets. But it was more like &quot;help each other out&quot;. Last I looked, they changed it to &quot;care deeply&quot;, which I guess is more PC.

&gt; In no world can you be working 5 hours a day and be giving a shit<p>In what world is this necessarily true?

This article has an exploitative undertone in the hiring process.<p>The “what will you do to work here vibe” might work for inexperienced fresh grads but is something others will avoid like the plague. It seems like there no employee leverage at scale.

This is exactly the kind of company I wouldn&#x27;t want to work for unless they highly, highly reward me for &quot;giving a shit&quot; (aka working like a dog for the exec team to have a better exit when they sell the company).

What do you do when the founder doesn&#x27;t give a shit? I&#x27;m talking about leaving early every other day, ignoring his employees, lying to customers, forgetting about &quot;decisions&quot; that were made only days ago...

&gt;&quot;o What’s the hardest you’ve ever worked on something?<p>o How many hours were you working a week?<p>o Why did you work so hard? Why did you care?<p>o When were you the most unmotivated in your life?<p>o What’s the thing you’re the most proud of?<p>o Do you think it was worth it?&quot;<p>PDS: These are some <i>great</i> interview questions!<p>I would also add:<p>o Tell me what your future goals are?<p>o How do you think your future goals would&#x2F;could relate to this company?&quot;<p>o What do you think this company can do for you to help you achieve those goals?<p>o What do you think you can do for this company, to help us achieve our corporate goals?<p>Etc., etc. -- but the interviewer must first establish at least a little bit of trust, rapport, safety, etc., if they are to have any hope of an answer that contains a high percentage of candor, because after all, <i>there is a potential job and there is a potential income at stake</i>...<p>But, all in all, some great interview questions!

Do people at google actually work 11-4 like it says in the article?

I think most people do give a shit at the beginning of their career. Unfortunately, many companies do everything they can to make their employees stop giving a shit.

This is how employers see the world:<p>- giving a shit doesn&#x27;t matter<p>- creativity doesn&#x27;t matter<p>- how hard you work doesn&#x27;t matter<p>- self educating doesn&#x27;t matter<p>- energy and enthusiasm don&#x27;t matter<p>- having built stuff on your own doesn&#x27;t matter<p>What matters:<p>- can you implement bubble sort?<p>- can you implement a red&#x2F;black tree?<p>- can you do this coding test?<p>Look, employees don&#x27;t need to be obsessed workaholics, but being really interested in your job and motivated and willing to do great work matters, and employers, for the most part, ignore these factors and focus on technical skills. And worse, in many cases their technical assessments are misguided anyway and don&#x27;t really give insight into how good someone is as a software developer.

&quot;if things go right, there will be many long nights&quot;<p>Ya, that isn&#x27;t things going &quot;right&quot;. That&#x27;s things going wrong. Or a failure of planning.

One of the fears of a technical downturn I have is that I might be forced to look for work with a CEO like this. They care nothing about you but ask that you care immensely about them. It’s like an abusive relationship where one person takes constantly and gaslights you into believing actually it’s good.<p>They’ll outsource your job if they can, claiming a foreign worker will work harder and care more, when in reality they’re able to act like tollbooths on bridges to America extracting what they can from people who want to escape their country.

Lol! How many hours did you work a week? I would be pretty scared if someone asked this. To me, scale seems like a sweatshop.

While I agree with hiring people that give a shit about their work, that’s probably the only thing I agree with.

This article is a great way to weed out people with families. Or hobbies. Or any sort of life outside of work.

I sure hope he&#x27;s trolling. This would be epic trolling, because many startups actually think like this.

This guy clearly isn&#x27;t mature enough to understand why a job is called a job rather than a hobby.

No. Work for an organization who gives a shit about work&#x2F;life balance and personal development.

Short Scale.

&gt; it will be more common for people to interview for the brand rather than the substance<p>lol!

this guy is so funny. what skin do i have in your game?

sure, but why wouldn’t you ask them WHY they gave a shit?

this is spot on

&gt;Ultimately, you’re searching for people you’d be willing to spend every waking moment with, since if things go right, there will be many long nights.<p>Lots of hours at this place eh?<p>&gt;What’s the hardest you’ve ever worked on something?<p>What happened to work smart not hard? Also what exactly does it mean to work hard as a developer?<p>&gt;How many hours were you working a week?<p>Hours again eh? Sounds like this place has absolutely no work-life balance and just burns everyone out. To whose benefit? Oh right only the benefit of the CEO.<p>&gt;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.<p>This has to be the dumbest thing I have read in ages.<p>Google has a market capitalization of 1.2 trillion. They have extensive research into how to treat employees to maximize their productivity. If you think google is doing it wrong, you are indeed the one doing it wrong.<p>&gt; lack of office attires<p>You can tell this guy has a dress code. Even General Motors the place of 10 layers of bureaucracy discovered they dont need a dress code.<p>Working for this guy sounds like a nightmare.

&gt; How many hours were you working a week?<p>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.

Perhaps you should perform a self-reflection first?<p>Maybe you can stop forcing engineers to jump through hoops to pass your stupid l33t testing questions? You might think you’re hiring the smartest guy, for the cheapest price, but instead of getting a good engineer that can write solid code, you get a code monkey that throws shit into your engineering process. Think about that for a moment.<p>Maybe you can set realistic deadlines? And readjust them as the requirements change in midstream.<p>Maybe you can hire managers that understands the complexities of software development? So they can actually manage effectively for a change.<p>Maybe you can avoid putting your employees through death marches to solve some arbitrary business problem?<p>Maybe you can get rid of your stupid open office seating arrangement, thereby forcing your most valuable employees to sit in such close proximity to one another? Thank god for Covid-19! That finally put a check on this stupid business practice.<p>Maybe you can stop viewing your employees as a cost center, and start to view them as an asset? Since the job of the engineer, is to help automate some process, he is actually reducing labor needed elsewhere, which costs you actual money if you had to pay an analyst to do it. The engineer automates this part of the job. And once you have a system in place, the initial investment pays for itself.<p>Maybe you can stop doing stupid employee ranking scenarios, like your stupid Stack-Ranking game, where your goal is to kill the bottom 10% regardless. This pits your best employees, your assets, against one another, in a Lord-of-the-Flies fight to the death challenge. This is not a very good scenario to engender loyalty from your best employees, again, your best assets.<p>Anything else?

Pay people enough so they give a shit

&quot;The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the #unreasonable man&quot; --George Bernard Shaw (b. 1856)

This perspective can shove it. If you want to me work all the time I need a piece of the company or substantial pay. Stop normalizing slave labor.

Why don&#x27;t we talk more about how this company employs third world country workers in a &quot;gig economy&quot; model to even further compress wages and squeeze margins? How can one be proud and give a shit about a product like this?

The amount of founder&#x2F;CEO backlash on this thread is eye opening. The OP said many things, among which he talked about the effort required to put in to be a master in your craft.<p>No one is forced to work for such a company. There are many low&#x2F;mid paying comfortable jobs you can do that suit your personality.<p>The reality is that drive and effort. How you redistribute rewards is another thing.

The comments here are really interesting. What is the equity level where one goes from thinking like an owner to being an employee? At what equity level does one feel the things in this blogpost maybe apply? 5%? 1%? 0.5%? If startup are power-law gambles, then 0.025% can still be a great outcome.<p>Should a founder mentality be expected amongst early employees at a certain equity level? Why wouldn&#x27;t someone want to hire someone who had that mindset, and then appropriately compensate someone for that?

After reading the comments: I wouldn&#x27;t grill the author too much about his idealistic views on things. He&#x27;s 23 and got some media attention for exactly that attribute.<p>From crunchbase: &quot;Scale, which accelerates its customers&#x27; AI development by democratizing access to intelligent data [...] After dropping out of M.I.T. to become a teenage tech lead at Quora, Alexandr founded Scale in 2016 and became the youngest entrepreneur ever... [etc.]&quot;<p>So nothing that is revolutionary, new or (IMHO) interesting so I imagine this post was written after having maybe hundreds of interviews with senior engineers, really not being too psyched about the companies offering.<p>Funny enough, when I apply for contracts instead of employment I never got asked the question what makes me passionate about the business. In many ways, recruiters seem to be more professional with freelancers than when interviewing potential employees, even though the cost of a freelancer is usually higher.<p>My advice when you want generally interested people is: hire juniors and hire for seniors as shepherds, figuratively speaking. Unless you have something that people care about (which is usually outside the B2B market) that&#x27;s a better bet than to assume that anyone senior really would give a shit about your business model.