Ask HN: What do you think when companies ask for gritty people?
When I see this I immediately think the work will be the kind of grind that requires lots of Grit to survive.
Honestly, I can think of two things.
1) They're bad, looking for smart people to grind them down with 70-80 hour workweeks, with no end in sight, with the illusion of small stock grants that will be diluted a few more times before IPO.
2) They just needed a short title for the job posting (HN limits titles to 80 characters), and they tried to summarize the fact that they look for people who are motivated, willing to work hard. But it doesn't say much about their attitude, their desire to exploit workers, vs simply trying to find good hires to add value to the company.
I don't know if it's #1 or #2, or a #3 that I can't think of right now.
A wise prospect employee will do the homework to understand what's the company culture, what's the cap table situation, etc. There are plenty of resources to get a better sense of whether it's a good idea to work for a company or not.
https://news.ycombinator.com/jobguide.html
I don't think anyone is flouting these rules deliberately. It's just hard to get people to behave differently than they're used to. Founders gonna found.
And the response, even on HN was was "whoa, these guys are so cool" and "more companies need CEOs like this who are innovative and hustlers like this guy". It was their entire schtick.
This isn't to say they didn't have interesting things to share, but the PR/Code-bro-speak was turned up to 11 and it was a huge turn off.
So maybe not that surprised they use words like "grit" in their job postings. I personally would reserve such a word for things like fighting in a war or doing a solo trek to the South Pole, but hey, apparently Flexport thinks their job is at the same level?
I mean, yes, grit, determination and tenacity are all great things to teach a child who doesn't know what they are (or at least what they're called).
But an adult? Looking for a job?
Asking for "gritty people", sorry, I'm not sandpaper
If their first task was to create a new conferencing platform, this would explain a lot of things.
https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/why-googles-high-turnover-rat...
Whether we IPO’d and got 7-fig TC was more due to market forces, our exec team, and some other noise. Whether the engineers got something delivered in 3 months instead of 4 didn’t really have a sizable impact. Besides - I found most companies that burned their engineers down to the wick were just spinning wheels more often than anything. Using up all their engineers when they hadn’t thought their product or market strategy through almost at all.
I’m not convinced 70+ hr work weeks are justified at almost any stage of company except pre-seed/seed.
You should consider changing your about text, it seems outdated :)
Edit: OK I know that sounded cynical. In all seriousness if you are not a coaster and are professional about putting in your fair amount of effort and having a delineation between work and life, what "more" is gritty supposed to signal and what is the price one is paying for it?
But everything you said about cults etc holds true. Just that I'd expand that beyond something what just managers want.
There's a clear difference between someone with grit and someone without.
A person without grit will message me on slack with a half baked question that is practically, "I tried almost nothing and I'm stuck, can you solve this for me?"
The question is how many times these hours are spent.
If the project is due tomorrow, it's worth asking ten people for a few hours of their time. If it's not urgent, blocking those ten people for a few hours might lead to more work time being spent on the problem than you figuring it out.
I think there's a sweet spot in between asking too little and too much, and it's contextual.
That's why bigger orgs are inefficient and need to acquire smaller companies to get stuff done.
Middle managers give the impression of doing something useful without actually being able to do much.
It's up to senior engineers/tech lead/manager to detect that and then give feedback, helping that engineer grow.
It's also an important quality for an engineer to be able to take feedback and correct. Grit isn't the only important quality.
It also happens with more intermediate or senior engineers who have been able to get away without rigorous methods to solve problems. Maybe they are used to an overly helpful tech lead, or they have changed domains to something more challenging/where stack overflow doesn't have the answer.
Many a time I've been faced with obscure build/environment issues that no one on my team has seen, and googling doesn't provide any easy out. At that point, I feel the necessity for grit. It's a good word too, as it can feel like sandpaper on my soul to start cracking open codebases I wished just worked to get past a complete impasse that my deadline didn't account for me to face.
Worst case: they want to hire people that will work endless hours to meet arbitrary deadlines
I see way more juniors hired than companies can afford, and then people wonder why nothing gets done with "so many developers". Each junior absorb capacity from more senior employees.
It's purely a business choice whether you hire someone to grow up or not.
https://nypost.com/2022/08/23/linkedin-employee-reignites-wo...
That, or crawl into 30 tonne/hr gold ore processing circuits, into crushers | screens, to install robust camera systems to count rocks ...
High altitude exposure climbing radio masts, ..
All the usual stuff.
Enjoy the outdoors? A career in exploration geophysics could be waiting for you!!
His life out in the world in some exotic places doing science was part Indiana Jones. Because of his class I now respect nature and want to be a good steward, but also know deep down that if the Yellowstone volcano pops off in my lifetime, well, hello handful of fentanyl!
Also the most fascinating part is when I did my report on Mt St Helen’s I found out how many animals had like a few minute head start and knew something was coming and ran for it.
Like they had a tip from the earths magnetic energy or something made them react. I recently wrote here about trusting my gut, and that was one of the examples that made me stand back and appreciate what I don’t know about energy and the universe.
Lastly, my Dad flew a C-47 in Alaska and hauled smoke jumpers on the regular. He still has utmost respect for them. I’m trying to get him to write out a day in the life from that time before he kicks the bucket. All those guys are probably dead by now.
Events described are, as indicated, just the usual stuff ... somewhat more extreme days at work have been known to involve surprise!! nuclear testing followed by detention in situ, and extended debriefing by multiple TLA's from several countries. Good times.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pokhran-II
Other 'interesting' days at work have involved being adrift in a burning boat in disputed waters with overpaid useless O&G observers whinging about pirates "rescuing" us and stealing his watch, etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spratly_Islands_dispute
These are the things your math & physics teachers neglect to mention when they suggest field work :-)
There is a huge variety of cultures that speak English and only a subset can’t handle hearing certain words. Having a problem with people swearing is effectively classism in the US.
-hard worker (Which employer is not looking for that?)
-be able to work under pressure (yea.....no)
-talented (there are companies that want untalented ppl ? Can I give this title/attribute to myself)
-"Too much happy vibes"
Example:
an AMAZING Company XYZ is looking for an AWESOME talented ROCK STAR developer to fill this FANTASTIC OPPORTUNITY ! (am I joining a cult ?)
What I DO look for are JD's that have at least a 'smell' that a tech-savvy person had a word in writing it.
-Come solve interesting problems (rare, but usually gold level indicator of cool job)
-No mention of design-patterns (no thank you Mr-Fortune-500-Banking-Company). I do have nothing against them in practise where they fit, but not on JD.
-More focus on meta-skill or interests (problem solving, thinking, math, physics, science, DrWho)
Less mentions and focus on tech-stack (not NO mention of tech stack, just don't make it a laundry-list of buzz-words/frameworks etc)
-Some mention of philosophy (douch-filter)
Example:
-You are not your code
-No one knows everything
-a Hint of a joke/humor :)
Last 2cents:
If you are looking for "web devs", a rule of thumb I found useful is to look for "programmers that can do webdev" in contrast to web-dev that can do programming...
a small but subtle difference at least in my country and experience
Almost forgot to most important thing. NO SCRUM !! If I wanted to be a cole-miner-of-code-on-an-assembly-line, I would have become a cole miner
https://www.forensicfocus.com/forums/employment-and-career-i...
>This is how most job ads sound nowadays
>We’re looking for a person with more than 100 years of experience in software development, coding everything from BIOSes to cloud applications, knowledge of all past, present and future operating systems and setting up secure networks. The applicant must also be able to juggle up to twenty balls and read hieroglyphs, be fluent in Swahili and dance like Michael Jackson (especially moonwalking – nice to have at corporate Christmas parties).
I think that statement would attract better candidates than wanting gritty people. One reason for that is that very capable people need less grit to succeed than others that are less capable.
Which makes it content-free, because that's what every company is looking for anyway.
I can't figure out how they're keeping all the parts up to date - like, what's their approach to keeping all the libraries and language releases up to date, when the platform starts getting picked to pieces. Stuff like that's tricky and (I think) you really gotta think it through before you have that 1 stray unowned service that hasn't been updated in 2 years.
It's weird. I'm a bit more cowboy than I'd like to admit, I'll throw code into prod that I'm not 100% sure of, but I can lay out why I'm not sure, these are the logs and metrics to watch, and this is the rollback plan. quantify the risks, show they payoff, roll the dice (or, not if it's too scary). I'm not super pro in their preferred language. I can mostly read it, I've done a little debugging in it. Open classes are scary, but I know how to grep a monorepo.
Maybe I should try to interview there. I dunno, every time there's something that spooks me in the descriptions. I guess they ramp up random impostor syndrome feelings. Maybe I'm not as cowboy as I think I am.
Source [0].
I've recently been reading the book that the author of this article wrote, called The Quick Fix, which looks to debunk popular psychology concepts such as grit. Companies may want gritty people but if the underlying concept is false, they're not going to get the kinds of people they want. But perhaps they use "gritty" as simply a marketing term for "persevering."
Aside, I see you also saw the Flexport ad asking for "gritty" people to apply. I was a bit turned off the company as well once I started reading the book above.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-false-promise-of-quick-fix-...
Sure, some companies may try to take advantage of those qualities by pushing workers too far, but I would say that's more determined by a given company's corporate culture, and not just because they're using specific buzzwords like "gritty".
rockstar
ninja
10x
I don't have anything to question the result, but the phrasing makes me wonder if "job-market success" means being good at getting things done, or being good at advancing into positions that pay more for less work.
I'm cringing at this jobs website in my country that lists 47 "ninja" jobs including "Mortgage Broker Ninja" and "Customer service Ninja" among others...
However most of the "gritty" people i've interviewed would probably not consider themselves gritty... so putting that in a job description is pretty silly.
SOURCE: my current company likes me and the other 2 gritty software engineers.
Longer. Unpaid work, Passive aggressive abuse, no work life balance, bosses like in office space, an owner/CEO that will randomly storm in demanding drop everything and handle his problem of the week, no holidays, sneaky changes in your job contract, diluted options/stock, ignore your health, secretive sus behavior, psychological abuse, workday never ends... and more.
Grit is for primary stakeholders. ANYONE that EVER says you need grit is looking to abuse you. Grit is the ability to withstand unreasonable torment and keep working.
Regardless, I feel like that's a little too optimistic.
I understand where it is coming from – but I can't help but wonder what the job post is trying to achieve with this statement. Maybe they want to attract people who would like to work with other “gritty” folks.
The problem is that it can mean a lot of bad or good things on a wide scale. Be more specific, please.
The other thing that pops into my head is a hiring manager that is really into buzzwords. Either way, it’s a signal not to take the company seriously.
In the more conventional sense, it's a bit of a red flag. Grit as a character trait implies extreme self-sufficiency and tenacity.This can sound very appealing to managers when they want to despatch someone to do a job, but may prove awkward when that someone returns with unwanted insight into the origin of the problem.
In it, the author argues that success has more to do with the amount of energy and time you invest in improving, rather than any natural gift you may have for a specific job or sport. Or at least, that talent is not sufficient for success.
I see a lot of truth to this; e.g. there are plenty of people who are super intelligent, but have lackluster skill portfolios, or are way to quick to switch jobs or environments when it's anything but ideal. In a controversial way, this may even be somewhat correlated with being very talented, since there's a history of having things go easy for you and not needing to learn healthy coping mechanisms for adversity. Before we get too far along that wagon though, there's probably also the flip side, where people are _too_ gritty, and don't solve problems that should be solved, because they can endure through it. It's something of a balance. But the core message is good; people who are passionate and enduring about their profession tend to be good at it.
Using other words like passion and perseverence is no better. The problem isn't being dedicated, the problem is using those virtues as a good sounding way to say "We want people we can abuse and work like dogs for no real reward,"
I exhibit all those qualities of liking what I do and doing it almost 24/7 by choice, and overcoming all the hard problems that come along that others give up on etc, and I see ads like that as toxic AF.
No way am I working for anyone that thinks it's cool to demand that sort of work-worship. I give it voluntarily to people who treat me like a human, and such people by definition don't ask for slavish devotion. And if they had to ask for above & beyond for some outstanding reason, they for damned sure don't try to couch it such language, and it's the exception not the rule.
I don't disagree with your points, I just have a different set of connotations attached to 'grit', I guess. For me, it's not necessarily an indicator that a place will work you harder, or expect overtime heroics, etc, it could just mean they have a preference for a certain personality type, which I have no issue with. But you could be right, if it's used as a pre-filter for people who put up with a toxic workplace.
Any employment contract you can ever sign is with company that needs gritty people. You are not a partner, you hold no capital, you are not a unique snowflake the company values, you are just a cog in a money making machine that needs to work reliably - by easily replacing damaged and worn out cogs.
The whole obsession with startups and stock options in them on HN is nothing but the aspiration to reverse this power asymmetry. So that you too can get the power to set the rules of the game, and that others, that you employ, follow your decisions. Money is just another name for power, and the rules of power are the same since the days we started walking on two legs, and probably before that too.
Then I remembered that "grit" was a trendy pop-psychology concept a few years ago. I recalled it being used as a way to explain why some students do better in school than other students without resorting to ideas like "innate intelligence". The core of the idea was that you do better in school by working hard and not giving up.
That kind of grit doesn't really work as the adjective "gritty", though. So my impression of the company is that they were looking for trendy way to say "we want to hire developers who are good at their jobs", stumbled over a dead trend, and didn't run it past a copy-editor. A poor first impression, but an understandable one.
I personally don't think it's an important concept; I don't think measuring "grit" tells you anything deep or important about a person. For example, someone might exhibit "grit" in one job but not another, just because one was a good fit and one wasn't.
But neither do I think it tells you anything deep or important when a company mentions it in a job description. I think it's a trendy fad in pop-sci, akin to Myers-Briggs or DiSC. Someone there probably read an article about it recently.
Dev manager: Bill Waters is the best scalability engineer. The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. A pitiless man, double tough; fear don't enter into his thinking. I'd have to say L.T. Quinn is the most thorough, he's never introduced a regression.
VP: Where would I find this Rooster?
I think they just want people who will show up and work diligently in the working hours.
People who don't need too much supervision. People who have common sense. People who have street smarts. People who can figure out things.
Is there something wrong with that?
But to use the term "grit" or "gritty" is far too ambiguous. It means very different things to different people. My assumption would not be that they mean what you say, because that's the default expectations for any job. My assumption would be that they're trying to say something fairly unique and special, but the vagueness of the term means that it's up to me to try to read the tea leaves to figure out what they're actually looking for.
My experience in the industry tells me that what they're probably looking for is someone willing to put up with a terrible working environment.
When posting inclusive job roles, you limit language that is unnecessary to the role that one group may describe themself as but not another. “Coding ninja”, “gritty developer”, “rockstar”, etc. HR tells me that studies have shown that this kind of language biases applicants to men, which isn’t a huge surprise. I now make an effort to be truly honest in job postings about what is required and leave it at that.
Flexport wants young men to commit their lives to their product so they can burn them up and spit them out in a year or two.
Perhaps gritty people tend to work more hours, but this has very little to do with having grit itself.
Cynical view: they're cheap and want you to do the job of 2 or more people.
Grit is not synonymous with overwork. Grit is more about, when something is hard, not just looking for an easier task, but continuing to focus on the problem at hand. It doesn’t mean being a hero and figuring things out on nights and weekends. It might mean patiently reaching out to the people who can help you, following up when others drop the communication, taking responsibility for chasing requirements, etc.
Grit can also meaning sticking to your guns when it comes to boundaries and thus preventing burnout.
I guess I just would caution folks to not read too much into this word. It’s not a strong signal of anything, put it together with everything else that you see from the company. Some people just read the book Grit and want to use the term
But I appreciate your healthy understanding of the word. When I was younger, that was how I understood grit, and it is still how I see it when I am working alone on the things that I am most passionate about. I guess the solution here is for the person hiring to be aware of how their own usage of words might be interpreted. If you already know that “grit” can be taken negatively but at the same time you want to attract people who are passionate about your craft, then you really need to pay attention to people’s reactions and rethink your comms strategy.
>I guess I just would caution folks to not read too much into this word. It’s not a strong signal of anything, put it together with everything else that you see from the company. Some people just read the book Grit and want to use the term
However when a company or individual within a company uses this word in conjunction with recruitment I believe they are asking for: Long hours, loyalty, the ability to overwork.
There is huge corporate incentive to find people like this and people within the company are more likely to be looking for this, when they use that word "grit."
A manager who does not use that word tends to have much more empathy for his employees.
I have never seen this, it seems like something someone not a native English speaker would write, when I see "gritty people", I think "dirty" or "unrefined", that's what the word "gritty" means to me, I don't know why a company would ask for that.
> Flexport is hiring smart, gritty People who get stuff done
I'm more concerned about the capitalization of "People".
* Prioritizes ownership, working hard (not just smart), and solving the problem, even if it requires manual effort (not beneath you, grinding, ..), skills you don't have, emotional rollercoaster scenarios of startup life, etc. Amazing when the team is like this, and while common to senior startup teams, rare for teams in companies with large/reliable revenue.
* Can signal needing to make up for an unhealthy lack of resources, a bigger rollercoaster than you may have thought, and more work than you want
* Startups that don't look for it risk a culture of overspending and dangerous levels of complacency wrt needs for product/market fit and revenue generation. Startups that do may burn their team out, including critical staff.
We look for it, but in the marathon sense wrt effort+emotion, and creativity+ownership for getting your area done. Important to know where key lines in the sand are here, such as avoiding burnout.
- a substitute for lack of process
- a sign that the company doesn't have their shit together
- because the company can't afford hiring enough people to do the work
.. trying to hire people who work an honest day's work and give a damn is ok, but often I'd say "grit" is a lazy word and/or a mask for something being wrong.
I see two reasons for hiring:
1. To join a broken team and getting stuff done by constant grit. In which case I don't want to work there.
2. Company actually wants to fix the team and hire gritty people to phase out the defunct team. I also wouldn't want to do that.
At the same time it tells me that your company is precisely that: badly managed.
If your company needs "gritty" employees once every couple of years when some catastrophic unforeseeable event happens, good. When you need gritty employees on a daily basis that smells like someone is unable to organize their core business.
The exception would maybe be if your company is in the business of incident response or similar, where employees must expect a certain type of "bursty" workload given the nature of the business. But then you will probably pay them like lords.
1. You get your typical 996. Everyone works long hours. They are visibly suffering. They are well compensated for their suffering. Often there's a third party - stockholders, clients that are witness to this and believe that they're doing their best work.
2. As they say, eliminate distractions. That's often things like games, travel, and other personal ambitions. Some choose to keep the personal ambitions and pleasures and eliminate family, friends, and health. Burnout is common and as such, working more than 40 hours/week is discouraged, but you end up too exhausted to be dealing with all but a few things.
Either way, work life balance is expected to be quite low.
Grit is Stamina. Grit is not about being the smartest person in the room – it’s about having more passion and perseverance to stay the course. When the going gets tough, the gritty keep going. Grit is the #1 factor in success. “Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare,” according to Angela Duckworth’s best-selling book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. We agree. Watch her Ted Talk here.
Hello, and welcome to DevOps.
Here you will trade your time for money, building a set of self-perpetuating skills largely superfluous outside of the needs created by software complexity having gone awry.
Extreme perseverance in the face of unending frustration and monotony is ideal for this role. You will be well-compensated so as to discourage premature, permanent departure from the specialty—and life.
Good luck.
However, most ads read like the employer has too many unqualified applicants and would like unqualified applicants to weed themselves out. But that doesn't work because there is no way to know what phrases make people feel like the job isn't for them. In my opinion such ads should contain as few "filter" clauses as possible.
No tech employer could exploit me after the first two years of my career so I don't fear the downside outcome where the cynics are right. If I will be poorly compensated for my work, I can figure that out when I interview the company.
https://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_grit_the_powe...
If you describe a dive bar as “gritty,” you don’t mean it has perseverance and will push through difficult tasks.
I’ve worked on teams that look for “grit,” and at the time it meant someone would persevere in the face of adversity. Now I perceive it as a dog whistle for “willing to tolerate thankless and difficult work without adequate support or compensation.”
To me this directly implies they want to move fast and ignore ethics and morality in order to do so. Like, that's pretty much one of the accepted definitions of that word?
I imagine there are businesses out there with the gross revenue to support hoards of median engineers doing clearly defined jobs with unsurprising workloads. I used to do that at a well funded public org. It was easy and required little effort. It required the opposite of grit.
People with grit find their own problems, solve them, and you don’t even hear about half of what they did unless you ask. Initiative, drive, and the ability to actually execute to completion autonomously, or even better to autonomously organise a group of ICs to make impactful change — those are the people with grit I want to work with, and how I see myself.
If you are deliberately adversarial about the amount of effort you are putting in — a common canard is bringing up work/life balance, as if it’s something unique only they care about — then you’d probably be much happier working for HP or Cisco!
https://www.amazon.com/Grit-Passion-Perseverance-Angela-Duck...
But seriously, pay me market rate and respect that a "996" working schedule produces garbage output. If you want me to sacrifice my well-being for your company, I deserve to have the title of "Founder" and a percentage of the company to match that.
In all honesty, it's more of an indicator of the kind of management culture. The same goes for the word "resilience". To me, as a software developer, it's a red flag.
I don't think it reveals anything really about the company. Just expect that the first round of interviews will be pretty generic I guess.
Your response to it says way more about you than it.
A job title should communicate role and impact. If “grit” is the role, that isn’t very compelling to me personally.
* Why another hiring ad again on HN for this company! I'm tired of seeing them here
* Looked at the job openings anyway; see openings for Sales and Interns. Why in the fi** is it on HN?
They're on my shit list of employers to ignore.
I see dozens of SWE roles on their careers site at all levels.
When I read the Flexport post title, I interpreted gritty to mean "our goal is to build, our goal is not providing the cushiest engineering job".
Presumably this works well as a filter and gets them people of a certain type.
What type it is - hard to say, you will need to ask self-described gritty people that :)
Makes me think of a snyder movie. Would you want to live in a snyder movie?
There are possibly hundreds of reasons a company might ask for gritty people
Investigate, then deliberate
Been there. Done that. Never again.
"A fighting contract in Ukraine: A job for a real man!"
...which is apparently an actual slogan used by Putin's military recruiters (in Russian of course).
Not coincidentally, that's another shit job.
Kind of a boring response, but I think you're reading too much into this. It's just a word.