Hire People Who Care (2020)
alexw.substack.com
alexw.substack.com
I guess I just don't care.
Scale recently laid off 200 full-time employees and terminated 500 contractor positions. The CEO, author of the post, went to work for Meta.
https://scale.com/blog/scale-ai-announces-next-phase-of-comp...
On the other hand, I can easily imagine why nobody mentioned this fact befor you did: only few people read startup gossip.
Numbers disagree: 485 comments, 470 points.
Funnily enough, hearing this question is a huge red flag for me. It signals they value work hours more than quality delivery.
We're in a weird place where we can actually read what these people think publicly.
Wanting to work hard is positively correlated with perseverance and work which inspires.
Hard working is good when it's good.
The truth is that the level of your craft has probably the biggest impact. A beginner can tear themselves apart with stressfull allnighters while doing a job and deliver the result a seasoned pro would have delivered in an afternoon.
And if all your employees are doing is stressfull allnighters and damage control they have no time to learn how to do properly and fast. But I get it, the goal is to extract money from their labour, not be their friends or produce quality products.
I am deeply saddened when I see people making the same mistakes over and over again.
This attitude negatively impacted my career on more than one occasion.
I am now doing a relatively low-pay work for the public services. My job is cleaning the Augean stables of decades-old Java code, but I feel better than shitting crappy code for the unicorn that none needs in the industry that should not exist.
"Four hours of creative work a day is about the limit for a mathematician." ~~ Henri Poincaré.
Human body has its real limits. Respecting your body is essential for living a healthy life.
Jokes on you, I care a lot about my work and can still get it done in 5 hours a day.
I'm finding the cognitive dissonance of both trying to do away with workers and having opinions on what makes a good one to be headache-inducing.
Thus, hiring people who do care requires very particular kinds of bosses who can accept/handle people who care. Companies who do not have those are in my opinion often better served with people who don't give a fuck, but hardly ever (because they don't really consider it to be worth their time) actively disagree with orders from above. If the description of such people sounds passive-aggressive to you, I don't disagree: such people sometimes are this way. So, it might actually (surprisingly) make sense for companies to scout for passive-aggressive people. :-)
My impression is that cult leaders often do care about their followers. The problems rather start when the cult member becomes disobedient - this is when matters become very dirty.
Cult leaders care about their followers insofar as they stay submissive ass-kissing sycophants. It's not like they care about the follower's actual well-being.
But when the employee is in need the employer discards them like an expendable resource, instead of making good on the "we are family"-tagline.
Work world is full of these one-sided "deals".
For smaller companies, bad equity splits, or a lack of transparency around equity or company performance is probably most common. It's pretty common for startups to avoid telling the whole story to the rank and file to keep them unaware of the actual risk/reward they are taking, which then allows founders/leadership to pad the risk/reward they themselves get.
Which is just a roundabout way then of saying that they want to appear like they care, but they don't actually. You will become math to them at the point where they get rewarded and find out your reward is more work.
"Preferred stock" is not really "preferred", it has a lot of limitations that common stock doesn't have. But it does have preference during liquidation and/or secondary market tender offers.
There are ways that founders or major stockholders can use to screw the minor stockholders, but preferred stock does not protect against them at all.
> Which is just a roundabout way then of saying that they want to appear like they care, but they don't actually.
If people are giving non-trivial amounts of stock in a company where they work is "just math", then I don't know what else you want.
Why? Because common shares have their price set by a 409A valuation, which through the first few rounds of funding especially will be a small fraction of the preferred share price, set by agreement between the company and its investors. Cheap common shares make early exercise practical, so you can file an 83(b), not worry about AMT, and benefit from the QSBS tax exclusion after five years. Cheap common shares also mean you capture most of the value of preferred shares as gains, rather than having it as basis, out of the gate, since in a successful exit preferred shares are simply converted to common.
What companies that care actually do is offer early exercise, so employees who want to can take advantage of the QSBS tax exclusion, and give 10-year exercise windows with ISO->NSO conversion, so employees who decide to leave aren't forced to exercise or forfeit their options within 30-90 days. There's a lot of uninformed talk about preferred shares on HN, and you really ought to ignore it.
I’ve known one person screwed by AMT, he worked for PayPal. I’ve known a few people who got rich off of early FAANG, Microsoft. I’ve made enough off company stocks to buy a car after 30 years at this, I’ve made probably five times that much just being long on AAPL since Steve returned, and some of that was also from company 401k match, which is likely second for income from employer benefits, or maybe behind health insurance.
I’ve know hundreds of people fucked over by the empty promise of common stock options. Who got less than nothing because they got nothing and lied to about it by bosses who they would now never trust again. At least a dozen of those were early employees, and a few of them looked to make money on paper but got diluted to hell and back during a funding round, because you can do that to non preferred stock.
I would also invite you to follow up with the person who responded to me in the affirmative. This is by and large an opinion I’ve adopted from advice from other people, that fits my own experiences, not something I’ve researched as much as they. The other person may give you better counter examples.
Under standard deal terms (1x liquidation preference), preferred stock simply means you're first in line to get your money back if the company is liquidated for less than the price you paid. But if you haven't paid anything, if you're just sitting on options, then the preference does nothing. And those shares will cost 5x+ more than common shares, so now you probably can't afford to exercise them. That means you've limited your upside to protect yourself from a downside you can't afford to expose yourself to in the first place. It makes no sense.
Like, to boil this down: What you're asking for is the right to invest in the company at the same price and on the same terms as other investors. And if you ask for that, some companies would say yes! A gung-ho employee with that level of buy-in? Hell yes! But you probably can't afford it. Luckily common shares are a much, much better deal.
Dilution also isn't in itself a bad thing. It just means new shares are being issued. Generally your shares are going up in value at the same time, but if they aren't, if they're being devalued, it's not because of the dilution. It's because the company is failing. And in this scenario the capital raised from the dilution is actually maintaining a higher value for your shares than they'd otherwise have, because again, the company is failing. At least now it's failing with some cash in the bank.
> I’ve know hundreds of people fucked over by the empty promise of common stock options.
To be clear, I'm not saying you and your friends haven't been shafted. I'm saying the underlying mechanism of the shafting isn't what you think, and wouldn't have been fixed by having preferred stock. If the company(ies) were successful and the outcome wasn't great for the team, then the grants were too small. The fix for that is to give people more ownership. If the company(ies) failed, then believe it or not all the preferred shares did for investors was best-case get them their money back. Either way, preferred stock is a red herring.
> I would also invite you to follow up with the person who responded to me in the affirmative.
rjbwork? They're just regurgitating the common talking points. Anytime someone brings up cap tables you can safely ignore them. The cap table has sensitive information; even most investors don't get to see it.
Happy to explain any of this in more depth. I had extremely good outcomes as an employee with common stock at companies that actually cared, and now with my own company have spent tens of thousands of dollars on lawyers optimizing our stock plan to be as employee-friendly as possible.
Then there are the employers at the other end of the scale, those who couldn't care less about their staff, they think that they pay the staff and that's all that's required of them, and everything that goes wrong is the staff's fault.
So, in practice, the employers that see their staff as human beings rather than "resources" to be exploited is a bloody good start.
But you're asking the wrong question. The real question is why, despite decades of evidence showing these practices improve retention and performance, they remain exceptional rather than standard. The system isn't broken; it's working exactly as designed. It is optimized for wealth extraction, not value creation.
Public companies are legally obligated to maximize shareholder value. Every dollar spent on employee wellbeing that doesn't directly boost quarterly metrics is arguably a breach of fiduciary duty. Middle managers who genuinely care get promoted out or pushed out. The few companies that do care either have unusual ownership structures (co-ops, private ownership with values-driven founders) or are temporarily buying talent in hot markets. Once conditions change, watch how quickly that 'caring' evaporates.
So yes, we all know what caring looks like. The question is why we keep pretending the current system has any mechanism to deliver it at scale.
I don't follow this bit. It's worse for employees, it's worse for employers, and it's exactly as designed?
We have actual studies showing that remote workers are more productive, have higher morale, and save themselves and their company money (no commute, no office rent)
And yet employers are still doggedly determined that employees sit in their toxic offices being miserable.
Employers are worse off (lower productivity), employees are worse off (lower morale).
I work in a tech field, but not quite the "pamper you with massages and ice cream sundaes" part of it. I am profoundly uncomfortable with the cultural deception at those types of places.
Cash compensation isn't very reliable.
Now you only need to make sure the basics (food, shelter, etc) is alright and that everybody gets what they came for each day.
So to answer your question: What it looks like for an employer to care depends on the specifc employee. Some may just look for financial benefits, others (like me) may just want to be given the time and means to do their job well, yet others value free rime more than money, or a better office, more autonomy within their domain or whatnot. The wishes are many.
But you need to first get the basics right, and many fail at that.
In my country it's like "Well, the company broke all records of profit, we earned 500 million dollars more than last years. Here, have this box of chocolate as a gift. Keep the good work guys"
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Your work creates the profit that your salary comes from, the employer takes a cut of that and gives you what they deem they can get away with.
checks notes
Literally my entire career.
And humans that replace caring with money are assholes.
As a former freelancer the standards I hold myself to are exceptionally high. Then I got employed and carried that standard with me (still do). The problem is that this means work will be pushed my way, because I am sometimes literally the only person who can do it within a day instead making it a month long project.
This led then to such an amount of work that I could mo longer hold that quality level, which made me unhappy. Of course I complained all the way, with no real change.
The only thing that worked was a strategic leaking of the fact that I was looking for positions elsewhere, suddenly a whole lot of concessions were made, and since then it has gotten better and I got much better at rejecting work.
Care too much and you burn out and get replaced.
... or you become a menace to your boss. :-)
It's not the same caring that is reserved for family and friends, though.
Point being, it should be reciprocal. Most (at least many) technical people will always want to do good work and care about the problem they're solving, it's easy to destroy that by expecting them to care only about story points or whatever instead of something meaningful.
Some people are motivated by what they produce at work, not their compensation
The benefit of this being from 2020 is we can see he was right, he built a colossal company at breakneck speed
It's completely possible to want fair hours while also caring. And, like many commenters, I'm frustrated with employers that want more than a third of my waking existence.
As to the substance of the article, I agree with the title, but the line of interview questions used is trying to answer “how many hours can we squeeze out of you?”. Being concerned your company will become a credential rather than a cult? I’m not here to drink the Kool-Aid, I’m here to do the work and then do the other things I care about outside of work.
Frankly, during my time at Amazon I was never really that worried about a service going down. Wasn't paid enough to lose sleep over someone else's problem.
Founders care because they have the most skin in the game - unless it's for a family or a huge ego I don't find it surprising when employees don't care outside of 40hrs a week. I even support that line of thinking.
- We are a cult: Check
- Align with the mission: Check
- Be obsessed: Check
- Abandon everything for the obsession: Check
- Overwork and get underpaid: Check
This mentality of the author is deeply flawed. Yes, success requires hard work, but doesn't necessitate a burnout.
I'll pass, thanks.
It absolutely matters to care about the problem you're solving. A team of people with a skill level of X that cares about a problem will be better in both performance and in general culture and being around than a team with a skill level of 2X that consists of mercenaries.
I learned it the hard way. When I was asked to set up a team of 14-16 engineers, I first went the latter way. The interviewing was difficult and the bar was higher, but the people who were there were focused on what they could get out of the role. Circumstances led to a reset, and the second time around, I built a team that optimized for caring about the problem. I started with the two people I liked working with in the initial group because they liked the problem statement. I had to lower the computer science performance bar to build the team to size. I also had a budget left over for other purposes, as we didn't need to pay for 2X performance, and the team was heavier with younger folks.
We delivered the goals in three months. More importantly, working with people who have a shared purpose, rather than "getting mine," is just a better place to be. I had to spend time skilling up some people, but they did it in a month!
Since then, I've always optimized for being around "mission-driven" people, rather than "mercenaries." Sometimes you need that 5X skill set, in which case a limited-time contractual helper is probably better, but the team has a soul.
Giving a shit about your work is the second point. Without any other comments suggesting the alternative, I assume this is second in order of importance. And as there are only two points I would take that to mean the second point is the least important.
His first point is to give a shit about the company. This being the most important point probably explains the accusations of late payments and wage theft from former employees and contractors against the company. They just weren't putting the company first!
As an aside, I have been thinking of this in relation to the 3 laws, as in a sense, executives see workers as robots, and I think the 3 laws mesh quite nicely with corporate directives.
1) A robot (employee) may not injure the company or allow the company to come to harm;
2) A robot must obey their manager unless it conflicts with the First Law;
3) A robot must protect its own existence (in the company) as long as it does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
The work doesn't really come into to it, unless it is a subset of the 3rd law.