Calling out Jason Fried for bad business advice
blog.scottolsen.net
blog.scottolsen.net
This article is unnecessary.
And it reads like it was written by an MBA-type who is upset that successful people are ignoring the gospel truth he was presented in college. There are very few hard-and-fast rules in any profession.
Cover letters are an excellent way to judge the intent and character of an applicant. Sounds like Scott is the one with a chip on his shoulder there...
Not sure why I'm meant to be influenced by how an MBA stumbles through hiring tech people, though.
"Not sure why I'm meant to be influenced by how an MBA stumbles through hiring tech people, though."
What if this MBA has 20 years of experience hiring tech people, both for small and large companies, and who is also an active programmer in their spare time. Don't you think their hiring advice might be important to consider? And yet your statement jumbles him in with all those other pointy-haired 'MBA types'. That is the same problem with only looking at an applicants alma mater is it not?
Edit: And grellas' comments are awesome not just because he is a lawyer, but because of his rich experience working with startups and tech companies.
http://blog.scottolsen.net/?page_id=2
Do you think he's had 20 years experience hiring tech people? It's possible he has. And you're right. I know lots of smart MBA's --- though most of them also have engineering degrees, unlike Olsen.
Google has always made it clear that they intend to hire the best and brightest. Facebook has always said the same. When Zuck arrived in Palo Alto, he prowled Stanford for top engineering talent because, like Google, he knew that that was the key to the company's long-term success. He found the guys who made Photos, their first real killer app. They weren't even programmers. They were just clearly brilliant people.
37 Signals is a company full of hypocrisies. They have clearly won the lottery with the popularity of Ruby on Rails but insist on deriding others who have won similar lotteries and actually managed to turn their luck into something huge. They rail against taking investments but make an exception for taking money from Bezos because that particular money isn't used for operational purposes (cuz they marked the Bezos money with special ink and keep it in a separate safe from their other, properly bootstrapped money, which is ok to use for operations). The only advice they're qualified to give is: "how to successfully bootstrap if you create a piece of open source software that spreads like wildfire and lets you make money selling books and software to legions of fanboys".
Did we read the same article? That's not what he was saying at all.
Jason and company are big fish in a little (technology) pond, full of people who are run-of-the-mill IT types in non-tech towns. It's given Jason a big head. That's his point, and he's dead-on. Where you read "MBA" into that is beyond me.
I'm a huge fan of the business 37Signals has built however Scott Olsen hit it on the head with his critique of their advice.
37Signals do indeed suffer from a "Pernicious Lack of Perspective" and from "Strident Insistence". If you read Rework (which frankly will only take you an hour), it is a series of chapters that could each be retitled "And another thing I really like about what we do at 37Signals".
Their advice doesn't work in all cases and they seldom if ever draw examples of other companies where it does. This doesn't take from what they have achieved but it does mean they're often far too far out of their boat when shouting advice at others.
Kudos to Scott for not only making this point but also being a very good writer.
They publish this stuff primarily just for the sake of writing it. It's an outlet for a company that purposefully avoids adding features to their products if at all possible. It's a deliberate practice to keep themselves creative — the megalomaniacal marketing is just added ego-gravy.
But if you have a very small amount of information and time to make a decision, where would you place a bet? It's certainly very unfair for the many talented graduates from lesser known universities. However, I find the idea of recruiting based partially on these bullet points valid from a expected proficiency optimizing perspective.
The talented guy doing IT at a law firm has some options to signal his talent. For example, he can create or become a top contributor in an open source project. I am sure many talented people who feel unfulfilled in their jobs do this.
Try to avoid getting in this jam; make that an explicit goal of your recruiting (and, more importantly, business planning) process. You may find that Fried's "chuck the resumes" advice starts making a whole hell of a lot more sense.
I've helped my friend do recruiting at his startup (albeit, not in the US). There are hundreds and hundreds of applications, and the constraint I pointed out becomes evident. Is it really cost-effective to personally interview and understand the context of every single resume-submitter, including those with absolutely no experience? How about someone without even a compsci degree and no experience to make up for it?
To be in a position to blow off resumes, you need to run a company like 37signals does. You need to chill out, do excellent work, collect fans, and be open to interesting people who go out of their way to bug you for jobs.
The very best people in the industry don't give a shit about your job reqs. The minute they actually get on the market, they're snatched up, because their friends track their every motion and are alert to the slightest sign of unhappiness in their current job. You think Mark Dowd, Zed Shaw, or Tom Preston-Werner are going to fill out job reqs and send out resumes? That's naive.
By running extremely lean, rocking out the business, and building stuff people like in an environment that builders like, 37signals can drag in A+ players when they become available, because they aren't clogging up the decks with people they fished out of a pile of resumes. Your friend, maybe not so much?
That’s where the cover letter comes in, right? If B’s cover letter says “I see from your Web site that your business is involved with X, Y, and Z; here are some examples of projects that I recently worked on that are directly relevant to those needs”, and A’s cover letter is all buzzword buzzword buzzword, I would take B a lot more seriously as a candidate.
I think his approach makes more sense if he has to weed through 1000 resumes submitted by total strangers, and since he doesn't have the time to zoom in too much on all 1000 of them, he would like some heuristic for narrowing them down to say only 100 or so. Applying a stereotype or thinking in general terms can be a useful filter to achieve that result.
But yes, it's going to also filter out some people who would have been a great fit. This is another argument in favor of the 37Signals approach, because the Big Dumb Companies can disproportionately suck up the Good School types whereas the Small Smart Startups can disproportionately suck up the "Gets Things Done But Went To Bad Schools Or None At All" types. And they complement each other in the hiring ecosystem. It all works out in the end! :)
And yes, I am speaking in broad brush stokes here, and there are exceptions for every rule.
Yes, really. That's the point. Merely being incredulous doesn't form a coherent argument against it. My angle on this is a little personal, which would probably automatically strip my it of any validity, but let me explain why. Perhaps it would make a compelling case to someone.
I'm originally from Bulgaria and graduated high school there. For obvious political reasons I hadn't traveled at all and I wanted to study in the US. I got into private and public schools, but the difference in the standard of living at the time was such that even with substantial financial aid I could only afford to go to a state school. Still, I'd get to see the US (New York in particular) and the draw of the adventure was enough to get me to go.
After school, like most international students, I took advantage of a program that is essentially an extended internship (OPT). There were hard time constraints, so I needed to find a job quickly. I ended up working at a consulting firm you never would have heard of doing mostly Java with a bit of Rails. It was a great place to work and I learned a lot. If the respect and trust of the people you work with counts for something, I'm fairly confident I got good.
None of this is something I could convey in a resume. Worse, Mr. Olsen would dismiss me outright because I have gone to a state school (because I was poor) and done Java (because I couldn't afford to sift through the market). Feel free to attribute this to cognitive dissonance, but I find his views arrogant, ineffective, and lacking a human approach. His argument is a pernicious over-simplification of a complex, human problem.
Mr Olsen makes no judgement in his post as to which of the two candidates is 'better'. He just asks the question "You’d ignore this information, and go straight to the cover letter?"
The way I interpreted it was "No one could rationally ignore this information. Clearly one should factor it when making a decision about which cover letter to read first, which candidate to interview first, etc." I don't think that's an unfair way to read this, and it clearly implies something about the qualities of former candidate with respect to the latter.
He talked to a CEO last week who fell ass-backwards into a huge deal that he can't win without recruiting 2-3 "enterprise SAS sales persons" "ASAP". Why, if he followed Fried's advice, he'd never close those deals!
You want to take the advice of people like Scott Olson if this is the situation you'd like to find yourself in: bouncing from make-or-break high-6-figures enterprise deals dogfighting with 3 other companies doing exactly the same thing you do. There is indeed a playbook that most direct sales enterprise software companies run from, and if you don't mind quietly crying into your hands for 5 minutes every day when you start your day sitting in the lobby of a telecom company you're pitching in Jackson Mississippi, you are well served by its plays[1].
I can't read Fried's mind, but here is the sense I get from how he writes --- and this may be my own bias here --- he would rather gnaw off and consume raw his own big toes than run this kind of company. He's writing his own playbook for his company. And in that playbook, he doesn't "staff up". He's unlikely to wind up in a situation where he has to delude himself that he can ramp up 2 sales reps so that they can close a single deal whose window is days to close.
Instead, the point of Fried's model appears to be: grow headcount as slowly as possible, and instead of posting job reqs, leave yourself maximally exposed to motivated talent. Exposed: running a company that people love, and that people are inclined to ping for openings. Motivated: people who are seeking out the opportunity to work with you. Talent: people who can prove themselves with something other than a sheet of paper that looks identical to everyone else's paper.
Scott Olson's friend can't do that. He runs an enterprise software company that needs "Enterprise SAS Salespersons". Guessing, regardless of the "deep technical rocket science" involved, that top talent isn't beating down the doors to get an interview at that company --- unless it's attached to a monstrous 1099 consulting rate.
But, I mean, what do I know? All I can say for reasonably sure is that Fried is crying his way to the bank because of this mean post.
By the way: I've lived in Chicago all my life, started 2 companies here, one of which I'm at now, and I don't know anyone who (a) works for the park district or (b) is hiring people with UofC MBA's. Scott might just have needed a better social circle here, and some different career choices. As someone who has spent a couple years in the valley, I will attest to the fact that it is easier to find people talking about the "rocket ride days at Netscape" there. That wasn't enough of a win for me to stay, but hey, if "heady stuff" like that does it for you, mazel tov! You be a mensch in the valley, I'll keep growing a business in Chicago.
[1] This playbook is also the reason every VC-funded enterprise software company with less than 10MM revs has products with pilot pricing at $70,000, and why they all have the exact same 3-person VP/Marketing, Dir/Marketing, and Marketing Communications Manager marketing team, solely responsible for giving the CEO a "marketing plan" that in no way influences the sole product the whole company develops. It is also the playbook that recruits 3 "sales engineers" so that there are enough people staffing the pointless industry conferences the playbook dictates they must spend $200,000 on every year. And it's the reason you're getting fucking obnoxious phone calls from "inside sales" people every other day.
And since nobody who actually knew what they were doing would ever go out of their way to subject themselves to this kabuki startup built out of PowerPoint "lego" slides and strip club visits, you do indeed need resumes to execute this plan.
But hey. Little stress balls with your company's name on it. Don't forget the perks.
It's amazing to me how thoroughly old guard biz types (especially the kind you find haunting the halls of print media conglomerates, not that that's relevant here) cling to outdated traditions like resumes. At this point I generally don't even bother sending a resume when applying for work unless it's explicitly demanded and can't remember the last time I updated mine. The last two jobs I took where picked up on the strength of my open source contributions (look Ma, real code!) and a small developer blog that I maintain. Resumes? For developers? Seriously?
Jason is a romantic when it comes to what worked for him and he is preaching it to the world. Scott just can't handle the fact that preaching still works.
It's probably really frustrating that all you have control over is the flavor of that powder. Maybe that's why Olson is so angry. Or maybe something bad happened to him in the Chicago parks. Some of them do get pretty iffy at night.
1. they have to cover a much higher staff cost for the "non-productive" types (compared to the 37Signals model, eg.)
2. they have to, as you say, go to the conferences, strip clubs, steak dinners with clients, going really big with paid advertising early, etc.
3. pay for all the costly-but-failed sales attempts
If instead you forego all those extra costs, and try to keep it cheap and grow organically, you can sell at lower price points, and keep revenue ahead of costs, instead of the other way around. With no big upfront cash burn needed, then no big outside upfront investment needed, and therefore the founders can continue to maximize control, freedom and retained equity.
And this may be a bit OT, but... how about an Amazon link to that playbook? ;)
http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/09...
and do the opposite.
By the way: I've lived in Chicago all my life
Enough said.
I can only add one tidbit:
Whenever someone uses "deep" as a description of tech/knowledge/experience, that is a sign that they are full of it. E.g. "deep technical rocket science."
Enterprise SAS indeed, we know little about Olson, but he wants us to know he's climbed up the corporate latter the right way, and he's probably a devout resume reader, and as such Fried is destroying his carefully cultivated world reality. He likes to drop titles like "CEO", and yearns for the corner office, fat pension and gold watch perhaps.
I admire Jason in that he retweets these critiques, whereas the criticizer (Olson) does not allow comments - that's what I expected. Dish it out, but can't take it back?
I wonder what they would think of Mark Zuckerman's hiring practices? According to Ben Mezrich, Mark would have the applicants drink shots as they completed each section of a coding contest. Resumes would be pretty meaningless.
When Fried warns against growing your business too fast based on pipe dreams rather than actual, quantifiable needs, this guy says, "Oh, come on, who does that? He's arguing against cartoon characters!" But a lot of people really do get caught up in the ideas of what they should be doing to grow their business according to some blueprint and don't stop to consider whether it's best for the business at this stage. I think Paul Graham has written about this too, where too much venture capital will put pressure on startups to become big business-y in a hurry, to their detriment.
I sure as hell don't think just because Person 1 went to Stanford and Person 2 went to State School that one is better than another.
Maybe part of it is that I'm from Pennsylvania and we happen to have some fairly good state schools like Penn State.
Or the fact that when it comes down to writing code, where you went to school means absolutely DICK. Hooray, you spent 4 years learning Java at exorbinate cost. So what?
What does matter to me - and shows in the resume, incidentally - is what you did after school ( or instead of it, in my case ).
So when I read REWORK, I see it as "Here's how I built my business. You could do the same." When I read Crush It, I hear "This is how I, @garyvee, built my business. You could do the same." I don't hear, "This is always the way that it works in every business ever." Maybe that's just me.
If someone says "this is the way it works in every business ever" you can immediately know they are full of it.
I found Rework mostly unremarkable, but I do appreciate the way they are saying "you don't have to do things the same way everyone always has" so loudly.
In some cases (like mine above) it is unnecessary to specify that it's your opinion, because it's truly and obviously an opinion. But not every statement made is someone's opinion [1]. For example:
"In my opinion, the earth revolves around the Sun."
"In my opinion, Barack Obama is the 44th President of the United States."
etc.
However, in many cases (including some by 37signals), writers intentionally leave out the "weasel words" not because their statements are obviously opinion, but because they know it will get people riled up and serve as good linkbait. Ironically, they often fall back to this whole idea of "of course it's only my opinion, weasel words are bad writing, etc", which strikes me as kind of a reverse-weasel. Write as if you're stating absolute truth (in order to get links), even when you aren't, and then hide behind "good writing" when people complain.
[1] I'm really not interested in the greater philosophical questions of whether it's opinion that the earth revolves around the sun. If you are, be my guest, but I'm fully prepared to just accept some things as fact. The earth revolving around the sun is one of them :)
EDIT: I might have been using "heliocentricism" wrong, so I removed it to prevent ambiguity.
I haven't read Rework, but in "Getting Real," they had two paragraphs on one page explaining all of the above: "Yes, this is purely based on our experience. Some people do it differently and it works. We're just telling you about our way of doing things." And then the rest of the book was written simply, without cushioning. I think that's a fine compromise.
Wait, did I need the 'in my opinion' or not? I am confused now.
If they were, your point would be awesome. But they are clearly opinion.
"Resumes are dumb" != "The earth revolves around the sun"
If your reader will see it as an arguable point (instead of an uncontroversial fact), then you should make (or at least sketch) the argument, because you're not a sect leader or anyone else who can spoon-feed "truth" to his minion. You should make the argument because you want the reader to be able to disagree with you and see where he/she still follows you. And if it's not worth making an argument, there's an opportunity to make the text shorter and more concise by exactly that sentence.
The problem is that it's a lot harder to build a following while permitting doubt or ambiguity. So what you have is a number of extremely popular figures who each present what has worked for them without even entertaining the idea that that doesn't necessarily imply that it is the best way to do things, always and in all places. And the gurus often don't agree, but nobody seems to mind too much until the gurus' own projects finally triumph or fail, after which point the correct point of view immediately takes on the property of always having been obvious.
It's not necessarily JF's fault. The rewards for stridency are great, because there is always an audience for it.
This is such a great explanation for what's going on here. I've often wondered if people who have been really successful at one thing and preach that method only (read: almost all gurus) are perhaps less informed about success and what will get you there than people who read a number of the gurus. Maybe they just got lucky :|
If you state "this is my opinion, what's yours? I'm open to changing it if I hear a good argument or am exposed to new evidence" that sets the tone for a much different conversation than "these are the facts in my universe, for all you know they may be beliefs for which I would rather die than acknowledge they are even the slightest bit imperfect". When you say "I think ..." or "in my opinion ..." you are signaling something closer to the first message, when you don't you may be signaling something closer to the 2nd message.
No-name Blowhard Slams Accomplished Internet Entrepreneur in Half-Assed Effort to Validate Gigantic Ego
I've known Jason Fried since 1998 or so and he's a stand-up guy. Over the years he has built his own successful empire by carefully hiring the right people and nurturing them in the proper ways. While his advice is unconventional, it is by no means bad advice. What works for him and 37 Signals will likely work for others.
There was an interview with Marissa Meyer on The Charlie Rose show where they talked about recruiting talent for Google and Marissa was asked what her experience was. Since it's Google they had obviously tried to do all sorts of predictions on how well a new employee would turn out based on cover letters, interviews, resumes, etc. What she said was interesting. The only predictor of how well a new employee would do his job was his resume. Nothing else gave a statistically significant prediction.
So Marissa and I think the poster is right and Fried is wrong :-)
"We basically found that their background and references are the best predictor. You can't use them exclusively, but it's true: The best predictor of future performance is past performance. And that's what we really found out through the regression models. We also found that there were a few interviewers in the company who were very, very good. They were several standard deviations off, meaning that they could tell in an interview where or not someone was going to be good or not. In some cases, they would be aberrant and reach a different conclusion from the other interviewers, but they would be correct."
There is an entire group of people that the likes of Google simply will not look at and so it makes their results a little less substantive. Here are folks that would never get hired at Google in their 24 year old form:
-John Carmack
-Bill Gates
-Steve Jobs
-Larry Ellison
-Paul Allen
-Michael Dell
If Marissa Meyer truly believes she's found a statistically significant predictor, then I urge her to hire people without doing any interviews. She won't, because she knows it's more pseudo-science from Google. I wish more people would call them out on this kind of logic. They have a particular knack for marketing local maxima as the global kind.
You're probably objecting to the all encompassing way it was said, which I could understand. I think Jason would agree that resumes aren't 100% useless in every case.
But writing from a "lets tell both sides of the story" perspective is boring and accomplishes nothing (everyone knows there are two sides to every story). If you think the pendulum has swung too far in one direction, then writing to push it the other direction is all you can do.
Except, that's not a great point-- it's a pretty trivial point, and one that was hammered to death by Spolsky, t al., a decade ago.
And, it's not a matter "let's tell both sides of the story", as much as "pay attention to the context."
Fried has found something that works for 37signals. That's good, as far as it goes. To try to generalize from that into "This is the way everybody should do things" is not only arrogant, it's crazy.
If Fried were really interested in doing his readers a service, he'd examine why his system works at 37signals, and outline the context which makes it appropriate-- so that if the reader's context is similar, he can adjust the advice accordingly.
Isn't that what he's doing? Both "Getting Real" and "REWORK" both present an entire philosophy, with many facets that work together to create the effect that they have.
Help me out.
Oxytocine is the love/hate hormone; it binds a cohort together and simultaneously creates aggression towards outsiders. Oxytocine is responsible for the condition known as The Fanboy Syndrome. Whether by design, or by instinct, each utterance from the lips of Jason Fried and Davie Heinemeier Hansson carries a payload of powerful semiotic messages that alter the target's brain chemistry. Sometimes the target will become a Fanboy, and sometimes the target will feel a threat to a pre-existing Fanboy alliance---then comes the rage.
As members of the tech community, we endure constant oxytocine bombardment by masters of manipulation. With each new version of Android, with every semi-annual dose Steve Jobs charisma, with every shift in the Facebook security policy, in the Ruby vs Python vs Java flame wars, we are exposed to massive, and sometimes fatal, doses of harmful hormones. It's important to remember that we are not animals; we can take defensive measures. When next you feel your Fanboy or your Hateboy urge rising from the depths, do not resist it. Resistance is futile. The path to freedom from oxytocine slavery is to acknowledge it, to embrace, and then, to let it go.
I Googled around a little bit for an example here, here goes.
Nobody is gathered around arguing the soundness of the approach or the appropriateness of the attitude of Ben Angel, founder of Nationwide Networking, what seems at a glance to be a somewhat successful business consulting and entrepreneur coaching business.
Why?
Presumably because Ben's advice is conventional, safe and mostly like everyone else's. It may be more likely to be suited to your business, but it's not new and it's not interesting, is it?
37Signals built a very different, opinionated business. It worked because either they got all their opinions exactly right (not likely...), or because building a business that way makes people like you - and makes you successful.
While "Stanford vs. State School" might not be the best argument, the point still holds. It is useful information, and all else being equal the Stanford kid probably has a track record of a harder work ethic. Make a decision solely based upon it? Absolutely not. But it would be poor business sense not to take it into account.
on right because...
its the first sign of arrogance and disregard to throw away the intellectual capital of time honored industry practice
cover letter is industry standard too, yo, but you disregarded it
As far as I perceive Jason Fried he's extremely self confident and may come across as arrogant to some. But personally I'm fine with that. I like people who know they're good and are not ashamed to feel good about it. And I like when they talk about it. I also like how this particular kind of people know better than talk about stuff they know nothing of.
Obviously Jason Fried doesn't want to write "Resume's work sometimes, other times pay attention to the cover letter," That's just boring.
For all I saw, the OP missed the point.
Hiring is process and much like any engineering adventure you are attempting to find tools and sub-processes that control this human adventure for a desired outcome.
There is no one magical one right way to combine those subprocesses and tools into one magical hiring process.
Its like any engineering process, you measure, verify and measure again and than make changes on those inputs.
As long as you've built up a massive blog readership and are selling them koolaid about how totally awesome you are. Oh and if you create rails.
It is so weird to me, this "critique" of 37signals that says "but, they did all these awesome things, of course they're successful". This isn't a get-rich-quick scheme.
The issue isn't that I disbelieve they did awesome things so they're successful. Sure - they did good stuff, and got some luck. The question is, can it be replicated by others, and is their advice useful to people looking to build companies.
Their advice is SO narrow. It's basically "how to build 37signals". So for me, it's not really very useful unless I invent a time machine, and decide I want to build 37signals before they do.
All I'm saying is, if you think that having a popular blog is the key to 37signals success, then go start a popular blog. Nobody is stopping you. God did not reach out from the heavens and give SvN to 37signals.
Meanwhile, how many people work for Github? 4? What parts of 37signals' advice clearly don't apply to them? Are there no other examples of small companies with strong revenue that we can come up with?
Rinse. Repeat. Grow, incrementally.
* Advertising can never work - sell direct is only option, charge from day one etc
* Fire workaholics etc
* Never take funding
If you want to create a company like 37Signals, which sells premium slimmed down feature set webapps to businesses, then their advice probably makes a fair bit of sense. But that's a pretty narrow segment of startups.
Also much of their business seems to be about giving advice, writing books, talks, etc lifecoaching. So their advice is really about creating a company to do that.
I'm pretty sure you're wrong about your (implied) revenue breakdown there, but I don't have any better information than you do.
Personally, I've found a lot of wisdom in what JF/DHH have said. Does everything they say apply, literally, in 100% of situations? Of course not. But there is/was a whole lot of traditional/oldskool advice out there that is too extreme in the other direction, and what they advocate is a refreshing alternative that DOES work for them, and DOES work for other folks.
As always, YMMV and caveat emptor.