How to become passionate about delivering shareholder value | Hacker News Reader

How to become passionate about delivering shareholder value

seangoedecke.com

3 pointsrtukpe6 comments

Make great products, tell people about them, and the stock price will take care of itself.

Always thinking about maximizing profit leads a lot of companies to make moves that don’t align with my values, like loading a product full of ads, spamming users to generate sales, or selling user data. One could argue that these are addressed by the article in the “and stay up” directive, but looking around at the industry, it seems clear that people don’t care and many customers simply accept that this is the way of the world. It’s not the world I want, nor are they the companies I’d want to give my business to, or work for.

If what I think would delivery stockholder value is in opposition to the direction the leadership of the company is going to attempt to drive up shareholder value, that can be a major source of burnout and lack of purpose.

If you want to climb the career ladder this is a good mindset to have. As someone who got into engineering cause I like to build neat products for people, it's a hard mindset to adopt. It switches your goals from what is the best for the people using it to what's going to make the most $

Somehow reading this failed to make me passionate about shareholder value. However, I'm still passionate about end-user value.

I don't care directly about shareholder value, and I never will. Doing so would make my job pointless. I care about product quality and providing good value to our customers. It's the board's job to worry about shareholder value, not mine.

Many employees who own stock in their employer do care directly about shareholder value without finding that it makes their job pointless. Why would it be otherwise for you?

Because caring directly about shareholder value is a distraction from what I'm actually there to do. If I focus on shareholders, that leaves less time and energy doing my actual job and would make it more likely that I make decisions that make our products worse. If I'm doing that, then what's the point? I may as well be an MBA or something.

There is division of responsibilities for a reason. I also don't care directly about the bookkeeping, HR, etc., for the same reason. That's not to say I don't care in the absolute. I just don't (and can't) care about those things directly. I contribute by doing good work.

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