Comment by zappo2938 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zappo2938 | Hacker News Reader

One CEO says when hiring he asks if the applicant thinks she is smart or hard working. The only correct answer is hard working. Later in the article another CEO at a college job fair looks at a plain resume and asks what the kid has been doing with his time. The kid says he drives home and works Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at his family's diner all weekend returning to school on Monday morning.

I used to work on a massive private yacht. I'm cleaning and polishing the outside making it look pretty for all the passerby's to admire after we arrived at the marina at Atlantis in the Bahamas. A tourist perhaps in his early 40s with a family stops me to ask "How do I achieve getting my own yacht?" I said what everyone says, hard work. He scoffed at me and replied that he works very hard in technology in Vegas. He works 50+ hours a week and that he will never realize a yacht like this.

It's not hard work. That's not the answer. It's something else. After working 6 years on private yachts my best guess is that the people who own the yachts hire people who know what they are doing, they provide those people with the resources they need, and they stay out of their way. They do not micromanage.

The writer mentions Ray Dalio and his hundreds of principles for working at his firm, Bridgewater Associates. Maybe, but the big thing to take away from Dalio's principles is not to micromanage. He has built an algorithm to make decisions based on merit of each employee's history of making the correct decision. [0] "In order to be an effective investor, one has to bet against the consensus and be right." He has established a way to quantify merit, which I think is similar the democratization of the stock market itself.

[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/ray_dalio_how_to_build_a_company_w...

At Bridgewater, its not exactly just not micromanaging, that is one of the parts. Its more along the lines of knowing when to manage, specifically where the fine line is between micromanaging and "true managing", removing people who aren't performing (firing or getting them into the correct role), getting people leverage that they need (that is supporting them in the way they need) and escalating to other management "correctly". Management is finding the right balance of all of that to allow a subordinate to achieve their potential.

Source: I worked there once upon a time.

>>Management is finding the right balance of all of that to allow a subordinate to achieve their potential.

Do you mean giving guidance instead of micromanaging which means "to control every part, however small."

The problem with micromanagement comes from one person making all the decisions for her subordinates. Whereas, it makes more sense for productivity to spread the decision making across many people. Another problem that micromanagement causes is subordinates not having confidence in the decisions they do make. So people who are otherwise smart and hard working find their time wasted in second guessing themselves not able to make a decision.

Micromanage is very different than guidance which means "advice or information aimed at resolving a problem or difficulty." Perhaps, a better way to describe what Ray Dalio is offering is guidance and based on listening to that video his principles are more suggestions than demands. More importantly, with a grain of humility, Ray encourages guidance coming from below encouraging his subordinates to offer guidance to him. This is very different from micromanagement which is unidirectional.

The CEO should be making the most major business decisions for the company. However, it is the responsibility of the the employees to realize that vision. The person welding shouldn't have to know about markets. However, the very wealthy people I have interacted with would never go into the galley and tell me how to bake a cake. They would say they have guests flying in and would I make something a little more special to impress them.

To expand on what you are saying. Perhaps, one of the ways to support a subordinate is to offer guidance. The keyword I make here is offer or perhaps a better word, proffer, to offer for acceptance meaning it is ok for the subordinate to reject the guidance.

My experience is that these CEOs hire people who know what they are doing, provide them with the resources they need, and stay out of their way. However, if the subordinate does not produce the CEOs do not micromanage. They simply let them go or move them into a more appropriate position.

Being a CEO is more than not micromanaging but my experience observing several CEOs including a few billionaires closely is that they strikingly don't waste their time micromanaging. If someone needs to be micromanaged, they are let go.

Sometimes you need to micromanage, but if you find yourself doing that you better figure out what is wrong with that machine or person and replace it or them after the engagement/meeting/whatever is completed.

We're conflating micromanagement as the style of management and an instance of micromanagement, which is mostly what I'"m talking about. Quality management should be flexible and a manager should be able to navigate between different levels of involvement. On the CEO side of what you're saying, depending on what it is, micromanagement might be the way to go. That can't be a long term solution but for specific things it might be the most effective.

I think we're saying very similar things, I was just giving you a more accurate BW style management viewpoint. Anyways, Ray's points a guidelines anyways, sometimes rules need to be broken to move quickly, but you can always come back and discuss whether that decision to break them was valid.

Some people micromanage incessantly. Are you saying that micromanagement is just one of many tools a CEO can use to achieve a result, that sometimes it is the quick and easy solution to, perhaps, a roadblock launching a product? I can agree with that.

I’d add “take risks, then do everything you can to reduce the risks.”

Other than possibly in finance, working 100 hours a week _for someone else_ is not going to lead to owning a mega yacht. One needs to actually take the risk and accept the consequences. “Risk” usually is working for no compensation for a while, sometimes years.

(Tech is unique for not absolutely requiring this, in that a VC may be willing to absorb most of the founding risk. The founders receive salaries long before cashflow would support them. In almost any other industry, “owning the means of production” actually means taking that risk yourself.)

Pretty much. You can't produce labor for someone and some day financially responsibly own a huge yacht. There's no path that makes sense unless you hit outsized luck in the form of an IPO gone right or something similar.

Assuming you weren't born into wealth, you have to take on outsized risk to get outsized results. You can be smart about the risk you take, do a lot of research into the correct risks, and limit the downside as best you can, but you can't beat math.

Venture capital exists in every industry.

Of course, but it’s almost always after a company at least has a product and usually after revenue is funding salaries. Using PG’s phrase, it’s after the company is “default alive.” By that point, the founding risk is pretty low.

A first-time entrepreneur raising capital without a product or revenue is, for all intents and purposes, unique to tech and biotech. The very few exceptions aren’t common enough that an entrepreneur could plan around them.

For anyone considering a non-tech business, the podcast “How I Built This” covers it well: http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this

The advice of the CEOs was about applicants, not about their own success. In other words, the people who own the yachts hire people who work hard.

"Hard work" was presented as the correct answer for getting hired, not for getting a yacht. Methinks the yachts go to those who hire hard workers.

Well, hard working is the answer.

The fundamental problem is that hard working for the right thing. Modern capitalism has perfected the art and tech to force people to work on inconsequential work (thinking Google hired so many to lure people clicking ads).

If people were freed and have the resource to work on things they care, the people who want yacht, probably had good chance to get it; and the people who want to go to Mars, should also have the change not entirely in the hands of a billionaire business man disguised as a genius technologist.

> work on inconsequential work (thinking Google hired so many to lure people clicking ads).

I'm not sure if it's what you meant but working to make people click ad is probably the most consequential work that has been done in SV in the past 40 years... It's the thing that enabled everything else.

I thought it was the PC itself.

Then closely followed by the spreadsheet.

I don't know that there's any formula really. There are rich people that micromanage, and rich people that don't.

It's some combination of starting position, aptitude, hard work, and luck.

To own a big boat without financially stressing yourself would require you to be a billionaire. That level of wealth involves a huge amount of luck.

Steve Jobs was a notorious micromanager and he owned a massive, custom-built yacht.

Too bad he micromanaged his doctors and died a year before it was launched. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_(yacht)

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