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Comment by dominicq | Hacker News Reader

An idea I had (not sure if correct) is that many people have a similar amount of "work ethic", but distribute it differently. So, for example, person A can invest nearly 100% into their job and will be perceived to be "extremely hardcore", while person B might have the exact same absolute amount, but only allocate a fraction to their job, distributing the rest to other activities. This person will be "normal". Most people should limit the allocation to their job because they have very limited upside. Most entrepreneurs should allocate much more than employees because of less limited upside.

I feel like many bosses want people to allocate more to a job, but don't offer the corresponding upside.

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I had a boss like that.

One time he told me "In a bacon and eggs dish, the hen contributes but the pig really gets involved. I want all my team to be pigs".

I internally thought "yeah, but you are neither the hen or the pig, you are the guy eating the dish". I left as soon as I could.

He used a metaphor in which he slaughters his entire team? Sheesh, talk about making the subtext text.

The metaphor also breaks down because if you're trying to make a bacon and eggs dish without any hens then you end up eating bacon with bacon instead.

I dont think the metaphor breaks down at all I just think it is saying things that while very true are not meant to be communicated to the pigs and hens.

A bacon and eggs dish without eggs isn't a bacon and eggs dish, so in the metaphor the business fails to achieve its stated aim.

Cannibalistic metaphors were not on my red flag list but they are now.

In reality, that boss probably was just repeating something that he heard - hoping that his boss would like how it sounds. I recall similar parables in early 00's agile. It is a lot easier to say things like this than come up with an actual strategy.

Folksy management sayings inevitably compel me to innocently ask inconvenient questions.

Because either (a) the person using them really knows their shit and will have a response or (b) they're just full of shit.

Usually the response is either to just double down "this is the most important thing that we do" (with no further explanation), or anger: "Idiot! How can you not possibly know what I mean to be committed like the pig in my story".

The context I have heard the ham and eggs analogy was for certain scrum rituals that were supposed to be for ham people only (ie, excluding people without a stake in the outcome). Someone probably told this boss to butt out of a meeting.

It is all dumb stuff, imo. 00's agile got away with a lot of stupid things - usually with the implicit aim of increasing the number of billable devs (or to sell conference tickets or books. It was almost like, the more absurd, the better. There are still remnants of that but, thankfully, it has mostly disappeared.

I had a [founder] boss who would say to his team "I want everyone on the team to act as though they owned the business!" He and his family owned 100% of the equity.

"We're like a family here!"

So we can look forward to being asked for many unpaid favors, and a spate of domestic violence around the holidays.

> "I want everyone on the team to act as though they owned the business!"

"Ok, then I'll make a decision about..." "NOT LIKE THAT"

Weird metaphor. Your boss wanted to make bacon and eggs without any eggs.

>I feel like many bosses want people to allocate more to a job, but don't offer the corresponding upside.

I agree, and I think that if you look back at the early dot com startups that did things like food, recreation, laundry and even housing right on-campus you'll see a culture that tried to actually meet that need in a way that doesn't seem unfair. The idea was "you give us everything you've got at work and everything else will just take care of itself". Then, as inevitable as death, came the investor class demanding more for less and eliminating the benefits with the hope that the sigma grindset would just perpetuate itself anyway.

But nobody can give you more time.

Thread makes a good point that everyone should be evaluating their time investment in work vs. their potential upside, especially if they're sacrificing time to other aspects of life. (Relationships, family, travel, etc)

Giving everything you've got with a potential huge reward = risky but possibly worth it

Doing the same without a huge reward = you're a sucker, because your company is getting more from you than they're giving

>But nobody can give you more time.

Yeah they can. That's exactly what someone who does your laundry for you does. They give you that time back, and in exchange for some of your time (in the form of money, which for working people is never anything but time spent doing things other than what you want). If I make $70/hr and can buy an hour of doing laundry back for $20 I can work that hour instead of spending it on laundry, have the same amount of time and $50. Or I can work that hour and buy laundry three times, netting me $10 and 2 hours.

Same with the food and housing examples. Save meal prep time given back, commuting time given back (I am assuming corporate housing is relatively close to the office compared to usual, self selected housing).

once I realized money is just time but we don't all get to trade between the two at the same rate a lot of things started to make sense.

Extending your point -- why should a company even pay employees, if they provide everything needed for a happy life + a retirement plan?

What could possibly go wrong if an employer provided everything for their employees?

I see what you're trying to do here but....yes, actually? Or to be more accurate to what I'm thinking is that not also the job of money? To provide what's needed for a happy life and a retirement plan? And for those of us who are not in the rent-seeking class, money is acquired by working for pay. The only actual issue is exclusivity - when you can only live in company housing and can only buy at the company store they're free to take advantage of you. When the company housing has to compete with other housing and the company store has to match or beat prices at other stores they become just one more potential source and you as the wage-earner get to decide between them and everyone else.

Yes, they want you to give all you've got and neglect all other aspects of your life. Young people are very good candidates to fall into this trap. Once they burn through those precious years working for somebody else and get none of the upsides they get it too. But there are always new young people ready to "change" the world.

Imho, this is the original staffing sin of the video game industry. An endless supply of naive labor is never a good thing to trust manangement with.

Has that changed at all in the video game industry? I assume it's just as prevalent a problem as ever since games are just as popular as ever.

They unionized in recent news.

This is what unions are all about - most people should limit the allocation to their job, but a lot of employers (not just Musk) want employees to work "like owners" without providing real ownership of the equity upside of the company they work for. Even most equity packages do not provide upside on a remotely similar scale (you might make 500k extra) compared to what the founders, execs, and VCs will make on your labor. I'm not sure that HN is going to be very Marx-friendly but Capital Vol 1 gets into this if you can hang through all the blathering about coats and fabric.

This is true in the sense that everyone has the same number of hours in the day, and someone who is 25 and single and lives in a studio apartment 3 blocks from the office will by definition be able to spend more time working than someone who lives 90 minutes from the office in the suburbs and has 4 school-aged kids.

But there are absolutely different levels of work ethic and stamina between people. And I'm not even talking about willingness which obviously varies, but some people can work for 12 hours straight and some people are just physically incapable of doing it.

I think there are some companies / missions / bosses, who can clearly identify goals and a concrete strategy to achieve them. This, plus some equity, can really help set people's incentives in the right direction such that people want to put in more time and effort.

On the other hand, a lot of companies don't offer either and seem to believe that simply rallying the masses to put in 20% more time (on average) will somehow lead to outsized gains.

Agree. He isn't very hardcore as he isn't working 16 hours a day at my company for $10 per hour.

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