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Comment by rectang | Hacker News Reader

Here's what she's rebelling against: http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/download/Recruiting%20Giants.pd...

    RULE 1:  You don’t recruit and retain male engineers
    you recruit and retain Wives and Girlfriends

    *   If the wife or GF is unhappy the engineer is gone
    *   If the relationship breaks down the engineer is gone
    *   The paycheck goes to HER
    *   Why does SHE want her husband or BF to work for you?

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So this is somewhat OT, but in reading the slides, I noticed this gem:

> Potential money is worth more than actual money.

In very, very rare circumstances, that is true. In the vast majority of cases, it's total B$. It's what company founders tell employees to exploit them, to get them to work overtime as a norm for crap normal-time pay. It's what the founders genuinely hope is true because they own so much of the company, but it rarely turns out that your shares are worth as much as the net-present-value of the delta to an average salary. At least in my experience.

>It's what company founders tell employees to exploit them, to get them to work overtime as a norm for crap normal-time pay.

Um, that's precisely his point since he's writing it from the POV of a employer.

Which is exactly why Alex St. John can go fornicate himself with a pointy stick.

There's lots of great compensation negotiation guides for engineers. This one just happens to be for employers.

In so many ways, Alex St. John is just like Silicon Valley's Russ Hanneman [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo

Pretty ugly.. As this article [1] put it, that slide deck is a how-to guide on picking the best potential employees purely for exploitation potential. Real engineers should not demand money, instead work 80 hours a week because passion. Otherwise you have the dreaded "wage slave mentality". Jeez..

1: http://www.geek.com/news/developer-bro-alex-st-john-want-a-g...

I work 80 hour weeks about 50 - 55 for my employer and the rest on my side projects. It's all about passion (I have to keep my job to be able to work on side projects that I'm passionate about), but I don't think I'd be a good candidate to work for this guy.

Is this one of those true things we all agree not to talk about? Because I sure don't see anything wrong with it: if a guy's wife is unhappy with his job, then he'll get a new one.

It's one of those things that has a kernel of truth surrounded by an offensive and exaggerated wrapper, and which people love to use as a bludgeon to say that you're denying reality if you try to argue against it.

Yes, you recruit and retain the significant other... too. The engineer (who may have a husband or a boyfriend!) actually does have a significant say as well. They both count.

Stuff like "The paycheck goes to HER" is bullshit and demeans both the engineer and the significant other.

If you ignore all the crazy shit, then yes, what's left is true.

The problem here is not that an unhappy spouse will cause the employee to leave, but rather that the author makes the assumption that the employee will be male, and that the male will have a female SO.

EXACTLY. So many people on this thread have not even noticed that women are not considered as candidates!

I think for that the rule 1 would have to state: "You don't hire female engineers. End of rule 1."

There are some rules about male engineers but that doesn't preclude hiring women engineers. It just might have been that it's harder to form rules for them because of historically smaller sample to learn from.

Because it says explicitly:

> RULE 1: You don’t recruit and retain male engineers you recruit and retain Wives and Girlfriends"

Reading is fundamental

The implication being that you don't recruit or retain female engineers at all.

No the implication is that that's not how you manage female engineers, it's just how you manage male engineers.

He says later that female engineers will go get promoted into non-engineering roles soon enough anyway. The implication there is you don't need to worry about retaining them as engineers as they won't stay that way.

BTW this isn't an endorsement of either his views or his approach. I mean the general thrust of the presentation could be renamed "ways to stiff your staff".

There are bits of it that ring true e.g. the different motivations between newbies, lifers and the rest. The majority though is clearly intended to be provocative.

One could imply that if one were searching out reasons to get offended over a tongue-in-cheek powerpoint, which in fact features another slide specifically about female engineers.

You mean a new job, or a new wife?

Yup. Other bosses just call this "work life balance" and are praised that they pay attention to it.

I'm sure the guy wrote a lot of worse things but this one is not particularly deranged.

This is also the guy who sent out the email saying that if you're going to the hospital, make sure to take your laptop with you so you can keep working. I'm guessing employee work-life balance is not very high on his list of concerns.

Yes. I've read other stuff he wrote. Pretty crazy. I just hope all the people that come in contact with this guy or others like him, are in position to show them a finger.

Wife, or job?

Difficult to say, I've seen it go both ways. Depends on how much he likes the wife.

Well in Alex St. John's case, his messy divorce led to him getting fired from Microsoft by performing a George Costanza [1]:

>But perhaps the most telling element of all of this is St. John’s own experience. In an interview by Christopher Redner [2], St. John himself suffered burn out at Microsoft to the point where he “got himself fired”. “He would pass out at his keyboard and straggle into morning meetings with key marks on his face. Worked sucked everything out of him; his marriage disintegrated.”

>According to a Shacknews interview from 2007 [3], St. John was going through a “messy divorce” at the time. He wanted to get fired rather than quit, because that ensured he’d retain his stock options for Microsoft.

[1] http://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/04/alex-st-johns-ideas-about-g...

[2] http://www.informationtechnologyleaders.com/stvid.html

[3] http://www.shacknews.com/article/46338/alex-st-john-intervie...

That's painfully not exactly wrong by itself. Its been good advice to make sure the significant other is very happy with the company, and it is often missed. If children are involved, making "family" life easier will make things better.

// I have no real idea of the history here, I'm just commenting on one rule that can be personally costly not to heed

Obviously the gender assumption is pretty cringeworthy in and of itself, but what I find particularly strange is how he advocates this but then turns around and complains that developers don't want to do 80-hour weeks as a regular requirement of employment. These are not mutually-reconcilable recommendations.

Maybe the reasoning is : "get his partner to agree to the idea of him doing 80 hour weeks"...

And it just gets better and better from there in later slides .. so much information about the character of one person so readily available. Or would that be an ad hominem? Decisions ..

I've seen someone put this into action, and open communications with his subordinates' wives. Instead of getting mad at her husband for being paged in the middle of the night, or having to work weird hours, she can angrily text the boss directly.

That's interesting. But how does it help the wife to directly interact with her husband's boss?

Wouldn't the benefit be for the employee whose spouse can direct anger not at the employee but their manager? The benefit would thus be employees being less likely to have to choose between their relation or their job.

If I was the husband, I'd rather prioritize being able to swiftly handle my wife's aggressions over brushing off such an intimate challenge for the sake of an employer (who instead gets to do the said challenge).

Anyhow - the purported direct benefit, according to Alex St. John, is for "the wife or GF" as the whole point is to make her happy (from the linked presentation: "If the wife or GF is unhappy the engineer is gone").

Hence, my question: how does it help the wife to directly interact with her husband's boss? Put differently, what is it about directly interacting with her husband's boss that makes her happier than directly interacting with her husband?

Only if the boss getting a bunch of angry texts has any impact. If things continue on the same way, then it's only postponing that choice.

It's bizarre to even write this slide. Everything in it (the slide, not the presentation) becomes fairly much a reasonable insight if you just say family instead of wife or girlfriend. Hell, even partner would do.

Well, to be fair, it's true (except for the part about the paycheck) but it's also equally with gender role reversed, so with a female employee and an husband.

If the partner of the employee is unhappy with the job, it will make the employee much more likely to find another job and so as a manager, it's smart to take into account the girlfriends, wives, husbands and boyfriends of your employees.

Yeah, I don't know. The whole thing is a cringe-fest but a good part of that was recognizing myself, wife, parents, and co-workers in there.

His VentureBeat article was pretty horrific but that pdf seems to reflect a certain ground truth. Not saying it reflects a reality anyone should be happy with, but if I was paying him to consult on recruiting and sat through that presentation I wouldn't be asking for my money back..

I'd at least want a discount for the ugly slide template and terrible use of apostrophes

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