Giving a Shit as a Service (2022)
allenpike.com
allenpike.com
As a blue-collar electrician (although retired), I want to hire anybody that seems to give even the tiniest shit. While working, it took me a decade to realize that "if you're the only person that 'gives a shit,' YOU'RE GONNA HAVE A BAD TIME."
Not only that (which is 100% true) but also you're raising the bar in required work quality for everyone else to get on par with you, therefore expect to make a few friends and many enemies, especially among colleagues.
The older I get, the less I'm willing to help disaster scenarios.
"A lack of planning on your behalf, does not constitute an emergency upon mine."
Agreed. Imo, having "on call" rotations is a clear red flag and bad software practice that has somehow made it in the mainstream.
I understand the idea of "mission critical" when you're running software on the Moon or something, but if your Earthbound software has so many potential bugs that you need to have dedicated people being on call every weekend to fix bugs or restart servers, you just built it poorly.
With that said, there are some types of software that exist to deal with complexity external to itself. External systems (integrations, screen scraping systems, etc.) can break without fault internally, but need to be fixed ASAP.
One might say, "You built it poorly by deciding to build this at all." And sometimes that's true. But I've been in plenty of situations where the options were 1) don't solve the customer problem, don't pass go, don't collect $200. Or, 2) build finicky software that works but needs to be babied... and hire engineers that don't mind doing this type of work.
That last bit is critical. Some engineers like the heroics and drama of it. Some people can't help but run headfirst into the fire... and there's jobs for them there :-)
So lending a hand with emergencies that even could have been avoided is ok to help someone new to it.
Caring via software or infrastructure for users is often about effort as you have described.
I thought so too until I gigged for a SaaS company that absolutely needed it. No, it was not moon-shot rocket control software, but it was a money printer with literally thousands of clients around the globe paying six figures for the service. The on-call SWE duty was not onerous: about 2 hour shifts every 2 months, and your job was to attempt to handle it and then escalate it to staff if you couldn't. There were so many CI tests on the way to production that nothing ever happened, until it did, and then you needed to make sure that money printer go brrr.
Most software engineers just happen to be bad engineers. On-call rotations are a band-aid for poor planning and development (to be fair, often imposed by tech-delinquent middle managers or executives).
I have worked at firms of various sizes and there is always a point where things usually become complex at some point. Software is as much or more so about managing the humans than it is the software. This becomes especially true as the firm grows in size. Like all fields there are certainly some individuals that perform better/worse than others but even for the best engineers out there, mistakes happen, edge cases pop up especially as the potential complexity grows. Of course these mistakes can pop up more frequently depending on the imposed deadlines. Deadlines to me are a healthy balancing act between the different parts of the business. Sometimes they are arbitrary but I think in a healthy relationship it helps to have that pushback/friction to figure out how much effort is required.
That was a long way of saying I think its a pretty naive and dismissive view to just hand wave and say this is both due to bad engineers and tech-delinquent middle managers. You are not asking for it either but I think this also comes down to social ability/skills. If your worldview is that most software engineers I can only imagine this shows up in the workplace.
Nobody engineers software like spacecraft companies- that doesn’t mean that no one else gives a shit, it just means that cost constraints are real things.
Also, the demands on spacecraft software are trivial (“move the camera once a month”, “do a correction burn after a planetary encounter”, “watch this sensor and do this if it changes”) compared to a modern web application at a Fortune 500 company.
Oncall rotations are part of defense-in-depth against bugs and unforeseen circumstances: Most of the companies that survive without a formal one only do so by outsourcing this for the most common cases; to Cloudflare, to Amazon, etc. -- if there's an opportunity cost to being down someone needs to be able to pick up the phone when there's an outage or critical issue.
Let’s all plan our emergencies to 8am to 5pm, Monday to Friday. And don’t forget the scheduled lunch break at 1pm!
In the old days operations tended to be very isolated in much the way you are proposing. The problem with this is that stability depends very much on the software, so over time operations folks would be extremely defensive and impose all kinds of constraints on what software could do, and the software engineers would be frustrated that they couldn't do things efficiently. Imagine how firefighters would feel if construction workers had a tendency to randomly leave explosives and gas cans hidden throughout new construction and then waltzed off to the next job while the firefighters had to deal with the consequences.
At the end of the day, devs need to have some skin in the game or it's a recipe for disaster.
But, as we know, useful software interfaces are difficult to define well and, once they exist, they tend to be the most inflexible part of a fast-changing system. It is always better (though of course more expensive) to control both sides of an interface for this reason.
The "skin in the game" argument elides this fundamental reason and substitutes one that implies all of this is the fault of lazy devs, which isn't (generally) true IME.
Edit: I missed the part where you say the Heroku customer has their own on-call team. IME this is not true. The whole reason to use a PaaS like this is to avoid having an Ops team. Sometimes orgs outgrow their PaaS and keep using it anyway, but this isn't necessary, only a historical artifact. These orgs would likely save more money and get a better result by going with normal IaaS or racking their own servers and, in fact, are probably actively switching to that model.
In mature industries, there absolutely are plenty of regulations in place to make sure that builders don't make responders' life harder. That doesn't mean that the responders aren't needed, but the fact that the software industry as a whole decided to go all "response is the only thing we need for most things" is evidence that it is not mature.
The nature of software and physical construction is different.
It just requires spending more money hiring more people.
When you're in the middle of harvesting and your tractor breaks down, you want it fixed now, not at somebody else's convenience.
Mechanics and tow trucks also form an oncall for broken down cars.
There's oncalls all over the place for tech of all kinds. I think the biggest difference with software is intellectual property - we've made it so nobody else is allowed to fix whatever's broken, so of course, we need oncalls to fix the problems instead of letting customers go to their preferred mechanic
If you have different constraints, you get a different result.
Shipping things has the highest risk of breaking something. I worked with an SRE team responsible for managing incidents for a few months, they told me that ~80% of incidents are caused by bad code being shipped, and I saw that happen as well.
Modern software applications are complex and interconnected. It's pretty easy to unintentionally break something in a different part of the application, or ship subtly bad code because you aren't intimately familiar with that part of the codebase.
Mechanical watches have been around for roughly 500 years (about 4x-5x tbe time since the first program, depending on how you count), which is a substantial amount of time to iterate on core functionality. Even then, watches until the 1970s (when quartz was introduced) were often imprecise enough to lose 15 minutes/day.
The Voyager probes have both lost several instruments, were built with substantial amounts of redundancy, all to the adjusted for inflation cost of about $3.94B US dollars. Maintenance per year is estimated to be about $5M, including the occasional software update.
Do you think this company had good CI/CD and automated tests? They did not. There was fortunately a lot of monitoring so at least you knew when the service was in a bad state, but absolutely nothing else other than a ticket and an angry customer.
I would much rather have extensive test coverage, very good CI/CD, make sure not to do releases on weekends and holidays, and have a few people whose job is to do the monitoring and escalate to the right people rather than just putting a target on a random engineer's back and hope they can fix things quickly.
Everyone being motivated to develop in a way that isn’t resulting in brittle software and breaking and maybe even use boring tech for stability so even if an on call is a real thing, it’s relatively benign. It’s not a bad thing to rely on the genius of smart people who have been at it for decades and are decades ahead in some realizations.
Having software that self reports and logs multiple occurrences of the same errors and escalating errors that start in the app are one great way to stay ahead of issues.
By the time someone reaches out it’s easy to find the error, session, user, and say ok we see it and are on it. Acknowledgement at this depth upfront quite often let’s the customers to say it’s ok take a look on Monday. It’s reassuring. Also easy to forward such an issue to a distributed team.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/27/22696097/hospital-ransomw...
By far, the most likely thing to kill you in a hospital is not the IT system but errors by the doctors and nurses. Or that you're too sick to save no matter what they do.
My experience is that a dedicated team running a follow-the-sun rotation (so the team doesn't need much if any "out of hours" because it's always in hours for at least one of them) actually leads to flakier services and more alerts. Without the visibility of the impact of the flaky services, fixes are lower priority and also more difficult to validate.
In this manner, on-call is not a lack of planning, nor an emergency, but deliberately ensuring we have a plan in place to triage out-of-hours incidents, mitigate those that need mitigating, and leaving anything else to be fixed in-hours.
On the other hand, unpaid on-call is unacceptable.
The best on-call rotations are the ones where you’re rarely paged, but when those pages happen they’re for important urgent work where your involvement is vital (even if your role only needs to be channeling the work to the right person). Ideally you’re also compensated for being available, even when nothing happens (my current team gets a day off [in addition to normal PTO] for every week of on-call time).
"Just throw more humans at it!"
Depends on your relationship with the person who planned poorly: if you truly don't care, then you run the risk of becoming known as the jerk engineer who isn't a team player. The reality is that employees are generally expected to cover for each other to provide the (paying) customer with consistent support.
If the party who planned poorly was the customer, you have to decide whether they're paying you enough to scramble for them, and whether you want their accolades or their ire. My M.O. is to support my customers through thick and thin (within reason, of course), which tends to get me repeat business and referrals.
Yes, going out of your way for your customers is good for business. Give a shit.
It can be made more or less direct to great resonance.
“If you want my help, plan for it and understand I’m not able to help last minute when there’s no planning”
People who don’t like anyone working more than them or enjoying life more than them are usually haters who are busy not doing much themselves.
Raising the bar doesn’t mean having to make it more work for everyone.
Those doubt worshipping and self-sabotaging enemies aren’t worth having in your life but it is nice to give a bit of shit about them too.
Move at your pace to wearers what you want and you will find like minded people.
In general, people largely filter out the "caring" of what won't directly affect them personally or their tribe in the short term, blind to the longer term repercussions until they are pointed out with concrete details AND actionable options. Someone doing the "right things" for the current situation, either has foresight or prior knowledge. Those that aren't, either have neither, can't learn, or the options' positive net ffects do not outweigh the momentum of "doing nothing."
Some sort of "change management consulting" or something?
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I'm looking for some sort of intellectual career which will allow me to capitalize on my inherent "glass half empty" perspectives. I used to do residential home inspections [as primary income, post IBEW], but during recent no-inspections home-buying... my services were required less-and-less.
I have enough runway to last about a decade unemcumbered... but got tired of feeling like the only guy on jobsites that cared about not delivering _turds_ to well-paying customers.
Glad I'm not the only one who thinks this. When I was a teenager trying to decide what to do with my life, I dropped professional programming because every developer I knew at the time just didn't give a shit. Sometimes I wonder if I made the right decision. Recently someone posted an article here about disenchantment in the software industry, after reading it and the comments the feelings of doubt quickly went away.
A sample of my "Giving a shit" checklist includes: Do they not utilize metrics or care when they tank? Do the rank and file engineers have a general malase and use terms like "not my problem" with impunity? Does management continually deprioritize critical "keep the lights on" work eg security patches WHEN they are fully aware of the repercussions (this knowing is key.) List of red flags goes on.
No org is perfect, but why endure the pain when it can be avoided. Especially so when it can easily be recognized early enough in many cases.
Recently the private data center was sold to some international holding company, and it brought a smile to my face recollecting a conversation I had once with [now-former] CEO:
"The data center is just a trick pony show we use to sell our real product."
Glad they did well on the sale to new foreign owners. Definitional evil.
One variant is when Management punishes you for bringing something up by making it your task to then fix it. I think they don't do this on purpose, they often just don't think about it. And it leads to a culture of "don't tell the boss". I've seen some really dire problems swept under the carpet because of this.
Head of agency only gives a shit about billable hours, not sustainable revenue.
CTO gives a shit about shiny new tech objects, not how appropriate they are for the news of the client.
Manager gives a shit about over-committing and shipping gawd-awful soltions, and not the integrity and esteem of the team.
Team members give a shit about not making waves, and bad processes and lack of growth (i.e., learning new things) persist.
Designer gives a shit about the aesthetics of the design, not about how it's going to compromise the UX.
And so on.
I've left more than one job because I'm not wired to be complicit (in someone else self-destructive shit giving), and because I give a shit about clients and users, as well as being able to look at myself in the mirror.
This is so tantamount to "living a good life."
I have two attorney brothers, and the things they fight for... jfc.
Hired bullies. Hound dogs. At the mercy of [well-]funding.
A $5 would be 2x better
You're right that at this point you'd need to be giving out a lot of them each time for it to count for much. Dollars are worth so little that we're beyond "let's get rid of pennies" and approaching "WTF is the point of coins smaller than the quarter?"
[EDIT] That first bit comes off as harsher than I meant. I just mean that this was a more common thing years back, lots of folks of a certain generation (or couple of generations) did it, and at this point I can definitely see how giving out $2 bills, which was once novel (though when the eighth older person did it in a year, not so novel...) and also a decent amount of money, is getting into "yeah, thanks for the two whole quarters, grandpa, I'll be sure to buy a candy bar with them when I get several more" territory, thanks to inflation.
[EDIT EDIT] I'm struggling with internalizing new prices, too, incidentally. I've finally learned that when my kids get $10 it is not worth getting them excited about going to get a toy with it. They'll need, bare minimum, double that amount, and even then there won't be a lot of options after tax. There's almost nothing they can get with $10 but candy or shitty collectible (ahem, kiddy gambling) card crap.
So ~15 years ago our son had been invited to his best friend's birthday party. Unsurprisingly, the birthday boy had a list of electronic toys on his gift list, as had become tradition.
While my wife and I were out shopping for said gift, she located one of the electronic items. Probably a game cart for whatever was popular at the time.
Meanwhile, I had come across something that had stirred up fond memories of my own: a sleeping bag + flashlight (+ some other related item) combo. Woo :)
We decided to get both the game and the sleeping bag combo, just in case the latter wasn't well-received.
At the birthday party, I think literally every other gift was for his gaming system. Once he opened the sleeping bag gift, he, his mom, and at least a few of the other kids had a "wait - okay that's different and kinda cool" reaction.
Even if he never went camping with them, I hope he got many hours of use out of that sleeping bag and flashlight. I know I did with mine.
Does that distinction matters to the person who the $2.00 and $0.50 is handed to? That’s an exercise left up to the reader to try.
Addendum: I interpreted the OPs comment to be regarding appreciation of people who work in roles not typically tipped in the course of their service.
"I gave a shit enough to go out of my way to get these, and carry them. Now I am giving one to you because you gave a shit enough to go out of YOUR way. Thank you."
May a real $2.50 some-time-soon cross your path.
(As well, I'm a Canadian but I believe those are unusual currency denominations so another little plus).
I think for a lot of people, even some on the ever bubbly hacker news, amounts less than $10 are still not considered insulting (context depending).
Also, I hope most people don’t believe a gift of less than $10 usd is an insult. It’s not nothing.
I figure that's enough of a lost art that someone might actually think "oh cool" and either pin it to the cork board or add to a shoebox of keepsakes.
Looks like you can get $100 worth of half dollar coins for $147 from the US Mint https://catalog.usmint.gov/kennedy-2023-half-dollar-200-coin...
Pro-er tip: You can also do this with two dollar bills.
Yes, I'm the "full-sized candy guy" because I don't want the neighborhood kids vandalizing / stealing from my vehicles. Yes, I'm that old. Yes, my neighborhood is that sketchy.
A price I'm willing to offer. So far, no burglaries (and I leave the doors unlocked).
You should try and look past the literal aspects of things.
I did the same with silver dollars for a long time,. Gave them as tips eating out but it sucks if your not autistic because everyone is confused/overly excited.
It's worth about $15 but people would think they won the lottery when I gave them a coin. That's why I stopped.
This makes leaving a Franklin half dollar all-the-more rewarding [to an observant recipient]. For reference, a Franklin half dollar is 90% silver. It is also, IMHO, the most-beautifully-surfaced US coin ever produced. It "tings."
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It is in my fantasies that I had reason to celebrate a grand-enough "night on the town" as to leave just a single golden buffalo coin as payment [about $2000USD].
Oh my goodness. That perfectly describes my last 5 years in academia. The last person on the deck of a sinking ship, directing panicking souls, after everyone smart and agile already jumped in the lifeboats.
But I don't regret it. I helped a lot of kids into lifeboats, and even found a nice lump of driftwood for myself as the university system gave one final creaking groan then plunged into the darkness.
"Nobody wants to be the last one left at the party. You have to help clean up, then..."
We ended our professional relationship over petty words when I felt like the only person giving a shit about maintaining her assets [as her maintenance guy]. Our personal relationship has outlasted any pettiness; but it still hurts seeing her squander her massive inheritance without maintenance.
"Last one out please turn off the lights..." seems a motif not just of the post-war generation, but the whole post-war culture and institutions.
20% of men in this cohort lost their virginity via SWer, typically abroad during/before wartime.
Just out there leaving messes everywhere, like they're paid to do it (or something).
Maybe this is reductive of me, and certainly any $ amount is better than zero $, but I sort of feel like by putting a financial value on your compliment you are devaluing it.
A super heartfelt "Thank you for giving a shit. You truly made my day and inspired me to have faith in humanity. I know your job is hard and noone expects you to go the extra mile, and I genuinely appreciate that you did" in your own words would be meaningful.
A financial tip of significance (e.g. 20$ - several HOURS of worth) would also be meaningful.
That 2-dollar bills and fifty-cent pieces are rare is going to interesting to some, but I think to most the only thing they'll perceive is that you valued their extra mile at $2.50. I don't think that's what you're intending, so I thought I'd offer that alternative perspective.
And then you get to walk out [usually a few days later] with five straps of Jeffersons, feeling like a baller...
This lasts me about one year of "appreciation" for others' "giving a shit"s.
Yes. This is why people stop giving a shit.
I think new people, fresh out of school, mostly give a shit, but slowly figure out that their lives are a lot easier if they don't.
So, in essence, "giving a shit" in this context means being highly dedicated, passionate, and attentive to the details, which often leads to a better outcome and a more satisfying experience for the customer
Thanks for posting this. I'd seen it before and was looking for it recently, so it's now safely bookmarked.
English is such a weird language...
Reminds me of Rob Schneider's "Dude" bit (He's not usually my fave, but this was fairly good): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfI4cjGiJGE
I can also highly recommend the one about eating and children in Africa - my favorite :)
That and "literally" being so frequently abused it now has a dictionary entry to explain that it can also be used to emphatically refer to non literal stuff.
If you think showing enthusiasm for stuff by handing over a turd is weird, you'd also love the (nineties) British habit of complimenting something by saying it's "the dogs bollocks", as if canine testes were renowned for their desirability...
Describing a very low lower-bound doesn’t technically say anything negative, but it sure implies it.
E.g. your example "how was your food" ... "it was edible".
If you've just been to a fairly average restaurant, that would be understood to mean it wasn't terrible but you didn't really enjoy it.
If you're at a close friend's house for dinner and they served something amazing, and you replied "it was edible", it would be understood to mean that it was really good and far better than anything you could have made yourself. If you said the same thing to a mutual friend who didn't know about their cooking skills, it would be interpreted negatively.
Another example would be replying to "How are you?" with "I'm not dead yet!" could mean anything without context, but most likely would be said to someone who knew your situation and that there'd been bad stuff going on, and would probably mean you were actually doing better than might be expected.
As for "I could care less", I think it was probably just misheard as the negative is very weak "I could'(n) care less". Coupled with the end of "could" and start of "care" being the about the same position in the mouth, and the (n) requires the tongue to quickly block and release the air in the mouth whilst also nasalising the sound that lasts a fraction of a second, it would be easy for a lazy speaker to not make it clear and/or omit it, and then if the listener never bothered to think about the meaning, they could repeat it wrongly. The deliberately inverted meaning only really makes sense if it was followed by "but" that later got omitted. To me "I could care less, but ..." (and then just stopping) would have about the same effect as "I couldn't care less".
But, I prefer to be wrong in a way that makes me believe people are being clever.
(I believe this is the origin of the saying)
https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/2rgl7i/how_did_i...
Further down is the suggestion that "give" in the phrase, means "care". Which it does, in part, but as the way language goes, so many words and phrases have double meanings that merge to make one subtle meaning.
"I couldn't give a toss," is a common variant. As is, "I couldn't give a flying fuck." But neither has the positive version in the same way — you don't normally give a toss about something specific, and a flying fuck is never positive. But, interestingly, you can give a toss in general.
English, as you have realised, has layers of weirdness and subtle traps.
Not in the US - this is very British.
I responded with one of my favorite [passive aggressive] formal responses: "From now on I won't 'give a shit,' anymore. Instead, I'll start 'giving a hoot'."
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English is weird. The language of exceptions [similar to chemistry].
I hate it when the best version of a phrase has a swear word; I don't blame you for using it.
"Thank you for at least SEEMING to give a shit about your job."
or,
"Thank you for giving the impression that you might actually give a shit about this place."
Hoot hoot.
Unfortunately, I'm one of few people nowadays that just don't swear at all.
Yes, I'm peculiar. Oh well.
However, I'm also trying to remove the use of non-vulgar words where others would use swear words, such as just saying, "I hate that thing," instead of "I hate that bloomin' thing."
Benefits? Having a cleaner mouth gives me a perception advantage. Also, it forces me to be more creative with how I express myself, which increases my communication skills and wordsmithing in writing.
Not really helpful as a rubric honestly. If you can decide one day a word isn't a swear word but the next maybe you feel like it, seems like you're more interested in crafting and following arbitrary rules than any benefit gained from such rules.
> However, I'm also trying to remove the use of non-vulgar words where others would use swear words, such as just saying, "I hate that thing," instead of "I hate that bloomin' thing."
Is the constant self policing not a mental burden?
> Benefits? Having a cleaner mouth gives me a perception advantage. Also, it forces me to be more creative with how I express myself, which increases my communication skills and wordsmithing in writing.
You can still be expressive and have a deep appreciation and use of diction, with out arbitrary limits to your vocabulary.
If your saying you are attempting to alter your own perspective by adjusting your language to better match your perspective, I agree with the practice, just unclear how a loosely and arbitrary group of words are harming you in material way.
Reduce, Re-use, Recycle [from same era marketing].
I did stop reading there. I was 100% convinced that this meant that they couldn't care less about what they were doing, yet their homepage seemed to indicate that they'd give a lot of dedication to detail.
In German "drauf scheißen" (to shit on something) means to not care at all about a given thing.
If they didn't give a shit that would mean they didn't care and this is the opposite.
I think "shit" in English is one of the most linguistically flexible words, used in various ways, from very positive ("It's the shit!") to negative ("It's shit") meanings.
As another commenter said, the positive meaning of "shit" often seems to be the result of reversing a common phrase. "I don't give a shit" means I don't care at all, not even a shit; and later the opposite phrase started to be used, "I give a shit" to mean I do care about it.
It's one of many confusing and illogical things about English.
I feel the Brits had it the right way and the Americans oddly reversed it.
But honestly shit and fuck can fill any English sentence.
Most business interactions are with people who literally do not care at all. Will not consider alternatives, will not give advice, will not tell you you are being silly.
In that context, anything better than that is a big deal. You sometimes encounter people who care a lot, but you don’t usually get to compare them with someone who cares only a little. You still get to compare them with the rest who “give zero shits”.
But the much more common interpretation "you ain't shit" = "you are less than shit" = "you are worthless/nothing". See also "it don't mean shit".
If you hear “You ain’t shit“, the speaker does not hold you in high regard.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2003/07/02/garbage-is-too...
And for the other one, I've heard "It's the shit" for good (although to me, that's definitely an Americanism that became popular in the UK in the 90s), but never "You're the shit" on its own. But just to show how random this is, "You're the shit who did this!" definitely isn't positive!
Cool, here's a good example: https://youtu.be/HCm_jfLmBEE
> But just to show how random this is, "You're the shit who did this!" definitely isn't positive!
For sure. In my experience, in the U.S. that use is almost always preceded by "little": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx_giDzTkeg
Another variant you may not have heard is "shitass", used a lot in Reservation Dogs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYMG0Guy5WI
> For sure. In my experience, in the U.S. that use is almost always preceded by "little":
Yeah, we often say "little shit" in the UK if we want to emphasis how unimportant we thing they are.
That said, I've since thought of some almost counter examples to my original comment. I know "shizzle" derives from "shit", and I have heard "It's the shizzle" before (but again originally from US sources, it became a popular phrase in the UK around the late 90s, but largely disappeared now). Thinking back, I've also heard "It's the m**f**g shit man!" but it was always done in an over-the-top way, also rarely, and usually as a parody.
Maybe it's just the intensifier in that. I think "It's good shit" and "It's bad shit" mean the same as without "shit". And I still don't think I've ever just heard "It's the shit" on its own, other than that source you cited and that's from the US not the UK.
Even "That's the shit" to me would just mean "this is the stuff" with an implication that there's something wrong with it, maybe illegal, maybe broken, whatever.
In the UK, "the shits" also refers to diarrhea, so maybe that's why we don't use "the shit" in a positive sense here. Of course, maybe the younger generation do, and I've just never noticed it.
Because I give a shit.
Amazon until 2022 really genuinely exemplified this. I saw it for more than a decade leading up to this. Just an unbelievable collection of people that truly Gave A Shit. Publicly we called it "Customer Obsession" and through that lens you could move mountains around here in the pursuit of Doing The Right Thing.
The first sign of trouble was 2021. Salaries skyrocketed in the industry. Amazon didn't keep up. A lot of great people left because they got obscene offers, and you know, who could blame them? Our core of "intermediate" engineers (L5 here) got decimated - why bust your ass for a promotion when you can just get a Senior offer from one of 100 over-funded Unicorns for more money than you would've made here. Sensible.
Then in 2022 the stock price dropped in half and a bunch of folks who seems like were only putting up with the bullshit as long as the stock grew indefinitely left too.
Then 2023 brought layoffs.
There's still a lot of us around that Give A Shit, but I feel like we are outnumbered more and more by those that just want to punch in and out and no longer Make History. I get it. I can't blame anyone individually. But I miss it.
Everything that gets released today seems cobbled together and half baked. The "this is something we bought and slapped an API and product umbrella on top of" is glaringly obvious.
Back in 2018 we used to get strong "give a shit" vibes from all the product teams we talked to. Now it's more "this is what we're going to build, isn't it going to be great?".
I skip all the product meetings we get invited to now.
I remember Amazon from 2002 — that felt like they really gave a shit. There are occasionally times where it feels that way now, as a customer. But most of the time the customer service experience is slow, impersonal, and painful.
I understand they're a big company, and I don't expect it to be as good as when they started out. But I wouldn't say that Amazon "genuinely exemplified" giving a shit up until last year. Apple might fit that bill, but even they have fallen off recently (apparently you now have to make appointments to buy products in-store?!).
I usually end up responding like that, having started to think about the problem and approach. But I just know what the takehome message will be for some.
Now it'll be someone's CRM startup feature: responds to RFQs with an LLM prompted to give the appearance of thoughtful consideration of the problem. Because, one time, a blogger said you should ask questions like that, to make a better impression, was the takehome message they got.
Or it'll become a mnemonic for remembering the mix of kinds of questions on an RFQ you should ask, for the sake of appearances, and you'll fail an interview for not hitting each letter of the mnemonic exactly once, and in order. ("Sorry, bro, I was really hoping you'd pass, but you forgot the R in SCROT. You're not Amazoogle caliber yet, but take some more interview prep classes, and you can try again in a year.")
I'm starting a business, and this is my real product.
Most everybody will see my FOSS code as my product, but that's my loss leader.
My real product, the stuff people will actually pay for, is doing stuff such as responding to bug reports like [1].
In other words, my product is caring about your needs and meeting them.
On the flip side, I want customers who care too. I think one reason those furniture people did so well is because they had a customer who cared, and it was refreshing.
When you do something day in and day out, you either become careless, or obsessed.
As a customer, you want to seek out the latter, but as a vendor, when you are the latter, getting a customer who cares is not just refreshing, it's enormously fun!
But that's not something anyone has paid you for, so it's actually a counterexample.
Boasting about your clever business strategy when you have no paying customers is like boasting about your excellent fishing technique when you've never visited a body of water.
And you're kinda wrong; I've been paid for bc, kind of.
I've been paid by people adopting it, an obscure alternative to an obscure command-line tool that nobody uses.
And yet, my bc is in FreeBSD and Mac OSX.
Perhaps the reason I'm confident is because this little thing of mine managed to replace entrenched competitors in a few places. Why can't I do it again?
It's much harder to get people to pay you for a product than it is to convince them to use your product for free.
As a fellow founder, I wish you success, but I think you're assuming success based on things that don't really correlate with success from my experience running indie businesses for the last five years.
I've fallen into the exact same trap myself, so maybe I can save you some time.[0, 1] Before you have money safely in your bank account from real, paying customers, all the indicators you see are highly noisy.
Non-paying users can be a good sign, but they can also lead you astray. You could have 1,000 non-paying open-source users actively engaged with your product, and that does nothing for your business if none of them are willing to pay. You're better off finding 10 users willing to pay $40/month and letting their feedback guide your work.
I recommend testing customer's willingness to pay ASAP. If nobody's willing to pay for what you're offering, it's a sign that your product hypothesis was wrong and you need to gather more feedback about what customers want and pivot.
For most companies most of the time, this is true.
bc is my gift to the world. It will remain that way.
I'm writing other software, upon which my business will be based.
You could say bc is how I advertise my services. :)
This seems bizarre. I work in sales, and I avoid making things too challenging for potential clients. Pushing back on the scope is one thing, but I think the way to show that you care about a potential client is to listen, identify their issue, and provide them with a solution that meets their budget. So many sales people try to push the envelope, to maximize the sale, for better or for worse, but I've never done that.
How does a client tell the difference between what you do and a salesman overpromises both of these salesmen listened and said that they could do it. Many people have experience of the bad salesperson and so will assume that they are all like that.
What are you selling? I imagine that would make a difference
As companies grow, they might choose to hire employees and managers who are paid flat wages regardless of whether the company does a lot of business or a little. If the employees work hard and the business flourishes, but they see no reward of any kind, this fosters resentment and they stop caring about quality of service.
Intelligent business owners recognize this reality and offer incentives that reward employees if business is good - e.g. commissions on sales in the retail world, stock options in the startup world, wage increases in the manufacturing sector, etc. Greedy shortsighted owners ignore this dynamic, so their employees are incentivized to do the least amount of work possible, just enough to avoid being fired.
Where things get really bad is when monopolization grows and markets end up controlled by very few players, so customers have nowhere else to turn to (Comcast etc.).
People with that mindset tend to want it in others, and will believe it to be the cause of successful relationships. I say this as someone with precisely the same belief. I’ve no idea if it’s causal, correlated, or simply a coincidence that my brain sees as a pattern, but for the moment I’m convinced it’s at the very least correlated.
Totally agree, but folks like that will run into the "it won't scale" types and get frustrated with their corner cutting ways for the sake of future scaling opportunities.
Then all three sides fight and nothing gets done.
Though, to start with, it was bit unclear if Clojure still doesn't run on ART/Dalvik/whateveritscallednow
On the Flutter side, it's just another cross platform toolkit like React Native, but a la Google, and won't/can't replace the years and years of Java development.
But the current and foreseeable future Kotlin will be the Java successor because of its JVM/Java compatibility, ecosystem and ease of use. For a while some of the new committed code in Android has been Kotlin.
Well except Google's Java is like version 1.5 or 8 - while Oracle Java has kept moving forward and has many more features at this point as far as I understand. I think this was the crux of the issue for running Clojure. I don't know the Java lib compatibility story tbh. I imagine many libraries won't run on Android
Kotlin especially with Jetpack Compose for UI.
The furniture makers that inspired this article can afford to give a shit because 1) they're expert at what they do and 2) they charge a lot of money.
These are constraints on both ends: on the supply of labour and on the demand for it. This is also why most people can't afford to give a shit -- they're not good enough to charge enough for that rare commodity.
At scale you can afford to not give a shit. I don’t think you get to scale by not giving a shit, do you?
But once you’re there? Well the money is just rolling in and well you can’t care about everything, can you? So you let some stuff slip and before you realize it you’re halfway down a slippery slope, claiming giving a shit doesn’t scale and forgetting in your panicked slide that it was your choice to stop giving a shit in the first place.
Sure it may be “easier” to give a shit when you’re an artisan charging a premium for your craft.
However you can still give a shit if you’re a designer for IKEA. You can take joy knowing the more you minimize price while maximizing durability you not only bring joy to the majority of people who can’t afford hand crafted tables, but your efficiency can have major waste and ecological ramifications that an artisan shop can’t hope to copy.
What you give a shit might change, but giving a shit absolutely scales.
Also maybe add 2022 to the title.
Giving a shit as a service - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32071349 - July 2022 (152 comments)
When I was being courted by a startup for an IC position, the best question I asked was "What does your churn look like?". It was really low, and despite some other reservations I ended up taking the job, and we had an awesome exit. Because our customers really loved us, and we worked hard to make them successful.
It seems like at some point in growth all companies attract a critical number who don't really care. Maybe it's just hard for people to care when the numbers are big. Maybe that caring is hard to maintain as things get more institutionalized
There’s honestly probably a lengthy blog post in this.
Especially in the sector of managed/professional services or SaaS - companies try to scale up fast to have more customer acquisition (focus on net new), and tend to sacrifice the level of bespoke service that retains customers, leading to increased churn over time.
This approach usually means that ARR will increase over the short term (3-5y), which is totally fine, but unless your service is really sticky or you gain market dominance, the growth curve will eventually plateau and enter a decline.
You also see this outside of tech - in the service industry in general. Company expands rapidly, service deteriorates over time, eventually enters a decline phase.
Maintaining quality of service is hard over the long term to balance with growth, you really gotta put the work in.
So this is the exact reason that my software business will only grow to the point that it provides enough for my wife and me.
Why are people so obsessed with growth? They're like the businessman/tourist in [1], and I just want to be the fisherman.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekdote_zur_Senkung_der_Arb...
Examples:
- Microsoft commitment for Windows to be backward compatible or their care about Excel (including using their own compiler, 1-2-3 compatibility in early years etc). Doesn’t means that there aren’t also examples of the clearly not-GAS.
- Hospitality industry which trains their staff and makes extensive use of checklists and SOPs. Disney comes to mind or high-end hotels.
- Most services in Japan, where it scales culturally
I think most people have the capacity in them to care. Working at a place you don't care about is utterly miserable and draining in the long run, its not something someone does by choice. People usually end up doing it when they are isolated from the effect of their work. Either not hearing at all whether anyone used or cared about your work, or worse hearing that work was arbritrary/pointless.
For example manager stressing about deadlines, you all work hard to meet them, then all of a sudden it turns out your work isnt being used and is just sitting around. What was the deadline for? why did this happen? does anyone apologise, or even feel the need to explain?
In general being isolated from the effect of your work also had a strong negative correlation with happiness in my experience. Hard to be happy when you feel like a cog in a machine that wouldn't care if you dissapeared.
I guess this sort of situation is inherently more likely as team sizes grow and the number of steps in communication channels rises.
Many times i've observed a team full of people who give a shit breed people that don't, as the company grew and many of them ended up as managers who failed to delegate effectively, and by overworking themselves on the important and meaningful tasks (because they gave a shit) they neglected their reports with menial and meaningless/arbritrary tasks and no feedback (who became morose and could not give a shit if they tried)
Yes. Once a company is a clear contender in a space the ghouls start to show up. They’re there for the easy win. With growth comes the need for more hands and the People who Give a Shit always end up covering for those that don’t.
I enjoy it, but am keenly aware that "giving a shit" often gets severely punished, these days.
https://youtu.be/ZIaLTuaK1-k?si=rkic-7X67KrZvwmf
Saw it some years ago. IIRC, somewhere in the video, he yells, almost groans, "give a fuck" (about things you do), meaning the same as "giving a shit", the title of this HN thread. The overall talk is a bit funny to watch, including him strutting around the stage.
I'm sure that plays into it, yes.
In most cases, the more money you give the more they will "give a shit."
Unfortunately for this to work, ALL parties need to “give a shit”. Sure this might work for a small “boutique” firm working with another small “boutique”. But at the end of the day, big firms are probably farming the work down to a low level employee or contractor (think VP -> Executive VP of Acquisitions -> Managing Director -> Director -> Manager -> Lead Project Manager -> Project Manager -> some person working with project manager) with a set of requirements.
Initially it was to be completed in 4 weeks. But in order to impress their boss, one or more of these people kept reducing the deadline and suddenly it’s a project that’s wanted to be completed over the weekend.
Low level person doesn’t give a shit. As long as it meets min spec, it’s Gucci. The further questions asked by the 5th vendor will probably get ignored.
Upon completion, everyone is “happy” it’s delivered before their anticipated deadline.
Except upon delivery the product is “half assed”. Nobody is really happy but they keep their mouth shut and accept it anyways so they can pump their numbers.
They’re great catalysts for change, they’re fantastic scapegoats, etc.
-Dennis DeYoung, Styx, "Fallen Angel" (Anecdotally, may have been referring to a quote by comedian George Burns)
Filter at the door, look for people who give a shit, have a passion for the work, etc. Hire them, look to avoid people who got into it simply because it’s a fat paycheck. I wouldn’t confuse this with “I spend all day everyday in my off time coding,” but seek out people who have a reasonable articulable love for a tool, a language, or something and or can articulate why they don’t like a thing. I have opinions on, say, Java over NodeJS and can speak at length with passion about why I feel the way I do.
Understand and manage them as human beings. I’ve been hired on to companies that experienced radical change within the first days, weeks, and months of accepting the job. I’ve walked into jobs such that what I interviewed for literally did not exist when I started on Day 1. I’ve worked at companies that have had serious pivots around product-market-fit such that the job I accepted radically changed, i.e. from Full-Stack SE to AWS DevOps. Those companies just offered no honest conversation or explanation around circumstances, just managers magically started assigning random tickets one day. Coincidentally, I hated those jobs and couldn’t have given less of a shit if they succeeded or failed. I’m not a cog, a fungible unit, or a human-resource. I’m a human, full-stop. The firms I’ve worked with that suffered turmoil but offered me the basic human decency of a conversation, however, earned loyalty out of me and enabled me to continue giving a shit.
People involved in meetings tend to care more. Not "involved" as in invited to, involved as in people want to hear their opinion and care what they think. The trope of people hating/not listening in meetings comes from it literally not mattering whether they are in the room or not. I get that you might not initially care what <newhire> has to say, they're hardly bringing insights, but the best onboardings ive seen are those where seniors want to hear their experience, what they struggled with, and work with them to make it easier for them and future newhires. It's noticable how much harder people work shortly after seeing their feedback/work being put to use.
Another thing ive observed a lot is its common for people who give a shit to get promoted to lead others, but by taking on a lot of the meaningful work themselves, overworking, and failing to delegate, they breed people under them that dont give a shit, due to leaving only meaningless tasks and having no time for feedback or informing their reports what is even going on.
Finally, once someone has fallen into the habit of not giving a shit at a specific company, unfortunately it requires a mighty effort to bring them back again. It's usually possible with time, but much harder than just keeping them happy in the first place.
I guess give a shit about people and you may well find they give a shit themselves
This goes for people in a consulting capacity in internal roles, too. There are way too many “SMEs” who will show up to your meetings, tell you it’s “complicated”, and then leave, thinking they’ve made a contribution. If you raise issues but don’t help your customer navigate this complexity, you are adding negative value.
Weren't they?
Weird line.
Giving a shit makes for a more happy customer, but cutting a board oval shaped is what they do in a workshop for breakfast.
Just look at the top comment, works in construction, electricity is over 100 years old, still had trouble finding people who care.
Part of the challenge is that practicing construction is expensive so not everyone gets a chance to do so. Practicing code is easy and inexpensive. There's an accessibility to it that isn't there for building. I code stuff that doesn't work all the time and I don't care, I just start over because I didn't lose much. It's very different when dealing with expensive construction materials.
Maybe. It could also be that the majority of their customers only want boring non-oval shit most of the time. So the chance to flex a bit on a "non-standard" order and getting to actually demonstrate those skills leads to a much better outcome for everyone including the craftspeople.
“Fucking shit” Sex with poop.
Bukowski and the Cohen brothers made those words art
When I was a teenager I actually quit professional programming as a career because I felt that I would be miserable in this field. I felt that way because every single developer I met at the time simply did not give a shit about stuff, they just wanted their paycheck at the end of the month. Well I wanted to give a shit and so I turned it into my hobby.
It's not without its problems, of course. Giving too much of a shit turns you into an obsessive perfectionist which can be paralyzing. Can spend days thinking about the best way to do something instead of just doing it. Thankfully I have no deadlines.