Anthropic CEO reportedly worried new hires only care about money | Hacker News Reader

Anthropic CEO reportedly worried new hires only care about money

finance.yahoo.com

65 pointsfrays83 comments

I know a lot of good people that got thrown away by mission focussed companies. They were loyal and put with all kinds of BS for those companies. I was laid off from jobs I went way above and beyond for. They didn't hesitate. They are the ones that turned us all into disposable mercenaries. Why wouldn't we go for the money? What else are they offering, thumbs up emojis?

If only I could pay my bills with thumbs up emojis. I can even double my offering from one to two!

The concept of job security and stability has been broken, so everyone is too busy securing their future by collecting as much money before there is another record profit layoff!

This. Let me know when I can pay for a Chipotle meal or rent in mission statements. Until then saving up money is important.

Yep we are all bogleheads now

Wait until the Hiob question hits that believe system. In the end its just a matter of if we put the bank inside or outside of the temple. Anyway, it never worked in an agnostic way.

I, as an engineer, shall work for a mission and not (so much) for money. But as soon as the mission can possibly be completed without me using the latest shiny AI tool, it is okay for the company to get rid of me.

wow, what a beautiful and brave statement. thank you for your service

Here's an idea: instead of paying your employees $800k, how about you cut their pay to $80k. See how many of them are truly in it for the mission.

Anyone who thinks people work for anything other than money is delusional. Anyone who works for "the mission" is an idiot - no company or billionaire running a company cares about you. They will let you go in a heart beat.

He is right, when a startup becomes successful the hiring pool becomes different. For example, you won't see people who came for politics-sake before real money is on the table.

This can kill the culture and make the actual people that were shipping unhappy

I’m aware of this (consciously) but I would really do my job if it was unpaid, in fact: many do (and did) in the form of side projects and volunteering and FOSS.

I was always weirded out by the “only in IT for the money” crowd, which is a lot more than the people in it for passion these days it seems, and I might be an extreme case, but consider that while I run an IRC community- I do not write open source software.

I do a ton of side projects that personally interest me. I’m mainlining hard technical problems with zero need for permissions or waiting on bureaucracy or jira tickets. If a decision needs to be made, I don’t have to wait until next week when all of the “stakeholders” are available to talk about it. I figure it out myself.

If my day job was a side project I wouldn’t work on it at all.

to be fair with you, I have a huge intolerance to that bureaucracy, likely in part due to my passion.

I think it would genuinely be the same for me.

I disagree, while money is a really important factor, that's not the final. Personally, I've changed to lower paid job to work on something i am more interested in.

I agree. We all make these kinds of trade-offs sometimes. We trade some amount of money for peace of mind, more interesting work, better colleagues, a healthier environment, and so on.

But I never buy the "mission" story, or the "we’re a family" line. We’re not a family, and I’m not on a mission.

I’m fine with the word "vision." I’ll be part of your vision if I find it interesting or if I believe in it too. But I’m not on a mission to achieve it.

To me, "mission" implies sacrifice and renunciation - whether that means sacrificing your lifestyle, your time, or your family. I’m not doing that.

I'm fine if leaders talk about mission and vision as long as it's to inspire and not in lieu of money. The right amount of money is table stakes. The problems start when leaders begin replacing money with mission, and people buy it.

I know a lot of people didn't like the harshness of the scene in Mad Men where Don tells Peggy, that's what the money is for, but people would be good to remember it. I tell people who work for me if someone offers you a lot more money than I can, take it!

I agree with you, but I don't think the parent post was arguing for money being the only factor, just a big one.

Would I work 9-5 for no money: No! Would I move from a shitty 9-5 to a less shitty one while taking an affordable pay cut: Yes.

> Anyone who thinks people work for anything other than money is delusional.

I work so that I am given food, shelter, entertainment, etc. at some point in the future in exchange for what I have given. Money is just the IOU that records the promise that I will receive those things later. I'm sure there is someone out there who is driven by the desire to collect IOUs and nothing more, but everyone (else but me)?

I agree with you mostly, and it’s important for everyone to understand. With that said, not everyone maximizes for only money.

Yup, I agree. I’m just clarifying what I meant by my original comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49206654

I turned down a better paid, lower stress role recently where I would have been working with good people I liked and had worked with before.

Main reason was a sense of mission. If I screwed up in that role, a billionaire would have been a tiny bit poorer but literally nobody else would care. My current role involves critical global infrastructure, everyone would notice if we screwed up.

Having said that, money is still very important. I am pretty well remunerated - more would be nice but I'm not hurting.

People can work for passion, some times even contrary to their own self interests, especially when you're starting your career. You hopefully grow out of it when you become established because companies don't pay large salaries for passion.

I've not seen smart professionals put passion before money unless it's their own company, and that's becaue they expect to earn quite a lot in the future, so it's usually money first, and that's OK because you need it to live comfortably.

Let's start with the CEO's pay.

Nah just go a step further and offer dorm accomodation and some slop for food, and then let people volonteer.

"Ask not what your Company can do for you —ask what you can do for your Company". - Anthropic CEO.

Maybe more like "Ask not what AGI can do for you -- ask what you can do for AGI." ;-)

The good ones go work for OpenAI. And they lose any chance in the race.

Guess they should stop whining then. I can't see why is that a problem, maybe they'd like to pay less so they can pay more themselves?

There will be be plenty of people, they just wouldn't be in Silicon Valley. Or possibly anywhere in the USA.

$800k/year in the UK is "Buy nice house in commuter belt in one year without bothering with a mortgage, three years if you want somewhere or something fancy but still not aristocratic, ten years if you do want aristocratic".

Be careful what you wish for. Ideological employees exist, and they might even work for less. But that doesn’t mean they will always agree with Dario’s ideology. This is something Google has found out.

And when those ideological people start making noises about the ways they disagree with the company, he might miss the more mercenary employees.

It's an industry where companies with "open" right in the name lobby against open models and training on stolen data is viewed as more ethical than training on existing models. It takes some time to catch up with reality there.

So Anthropic studied humanity, and their big discovery was: new hires care about money. Peak anthropology.

I'm sorry. Companies are not charities or families but like sports teams. We come together for a limited objective, where the company meets its objectives and I get paid for my time.

I was laid off last year along with many of my colleagues, some time before the layoff the group director had an impromptu meeting and declared we are working for the good of the world and that we should all feel aligned with this message to serve humanity - "Our mission is to empower every person and every individual organisation on the planet to achieve more".

No your mission is to pump the stock and return value to shareholder. My mission is to help you do it and get paid for my time.

And it turns out more often that not, that to serve humanity is a cookbook.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zon...

Dario Amodei is the Woody Allen of the AI world always worried and neurotic about something.

Aren't they (where they = tech CEOs, at least) all?

I can somewhat understand their mindset.

Once you reach a certain level of wealth, you don't really need money just to survive—you already have enough.

After that point, money becomes more like a high score you're trying to beat.

Hitting certain revenue targets, reaching specific asset milestones—that kind of thing.

And because of that, they start to believe they're working for some other value, not for money.

But if you talk to them long enough, you always end up at the same conclusion: 'It's still about money, isn't it?'

They'd never admit it, though.

'Because I'm not earning money just to survive—I'm different from you guys.'

They genuinely believe that.

Meanwhile, I'm here thinking that if I don't do work I hate, I'll literally go hungry tomorrow.

It's funny when these executives, on one side, will happily lay people off, implement attrition policies, or engage in morally-questionable behaviors, all with the purpose of maximize profits, while on the other hand blame the employees that they don't care about the company, and are only in it for the money. It's a thinly veiled way of saying "only I am allowed to play the game as the ruthless capitalist".

Yes, that's the exact greedy classism that the century-ago Gilded Age made well-known to dedicated students of U.S. history today. I'd be shocked if 1% of students who passed an handwritten-essay history exam in the past fifty years remember it at all. On the plus side, at least we don't have to reinvent terminology for this: it's all already written down and studied in depth and condensed into a two hours PBS documentary so that anyone in the cog class today can learn about it — even if they've been largely been denied literacy by the leadership class starving out public education:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjpYzFtxfjU via https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/gilded-age...

I once worked as a contractor at a startup whose CEO had little trophies on display in a wall case showing off funding rounds for previous startups. There were like 3 employees and 15 contractors, and he had one of the contractors give a speech about believing in the mission or whatever. It was laughable. I was only there a couple months and found out later they got bought out by the largest company in the space. He probably bought a few more tacky red Ferraris after that.

Funny, new hires are similarly worried the Anthropic CEO only cares about money, so they have something in common!

If he were not such openly against open models and China, his potential hiring pool would include more idealistic people.

So surely they will fix by lowering wages and other compensation of all their executives and other high level people to minimum wage. Thus getting only those people who care about mission and not money.

Or does it only apply to workers and not people in the lead?

It’s really easy to get out of touch

Like, really easy

Even amongst the middle class, the people that act like they’re really on a job out of passion have assurances that their downpayment on a house will be covered, or are subsidized by prior military service, or some kind of financial support system they don’t notice is not available to others

The people that are passionate that really only have salary is effectively zero

Founders aren’t educated on this power dynamic and need to be coached

I once saw a job candidate take a competing offer from Facebook because they had better snacks.

They believed in the company’s Mission™ (brand tortillas).

Back in the day, it wasn't just better snacks - Facebook served three meals a day, they had free drop-off laundry on campus, all the snacks in the world, and that barbecue shack on campus was legitimately decent.

Of course, you had to sell your soul in the process, but particularly for young, single folks just out of university, it was like moving to another better college campus, and if you took full advantage of the perks you could bank another 30-40k of your comp, easy

Sometimes the reasons people give are not the real reasons.

Turns out people have to pay their bills in dollars, not company mission statements.

I completely agree, but aligning with the company's mission might reduce the pain of work.

I accept different people have different incentive and the direction of the company is what attracting them. If a company could not show long term reliability, it would attract only short-term minded people.

It's incredible how modern news is straight propaganda these days.

The article is criticizing Amodei but I take issue with the fact that they printed the story at all. Whether they say something that seems smart or stupid, newspapers keep publishing only what the rich and powerful say.

And I think the rich and powerful know this. They know that to keep journalists busy they just need to continue making waves. Doesn't matter if they are strategic or not, just overwhelm the news with garbage and prevent much more worthier stories from surfacing.

I think this may be a sign of the 'AI guilt' that even the strongest LLM supporters must feel, if they know how it all works and the environmental impact it has. I feel it just as a user of the US-based models, so I guess it must be stronger though possibly subconscious feeling for folks who work on making it happen. It would therefore be hard to be motivated by much other than the giant pile of money they give you each month/year.

You're supposed to build the machine that's designed to replace you and all labor and make me a neofeudal lord for the love of the game, you greedy pigs!

When “Anthropic CEO” makes sure more diverse talents can successfully get through their hiring process, then I’ll listen to this argument. Until then, you get what you test for (or what you deserve if your hiring process is so complex).

People give him a lot of shit for these antics. The "regulate us!" cries, disaster-marketing of escaped models, now this. I am slightly annoyed to be paying for a product (Claude Max) with such eyeroll worthy marketing.

But it works. Fable is truly amazing, maybe not head and shoulders above the rest but at least a head. Apparently, this neurosis-driven development does attract AI talent.

It suprises me. It shouldn't because the same target demo has been following Eliezer Yudkowsky for decades now but it still does. I just don't have a theory of mind where this is an attractor.

There are a lot of bad midwit arguments for why you shouldn't worry about machine superintelligence. The bad midwit arguments mean that midwits filter themselves out.

Almost every founder cares about this but he’s in a business where he genuinely thinks he’s walking the Secher Nbiw to paradise with extinction on either side. I can see how someone in that position would be concerned about this.

There’s an ego element though. Being mission driven and choosing to work for Anthropic is implicitly validating of the “peril” and of the leadership team as the ones to steer through it, so they are indirectly asking for this validation.

I think the comments here are taking this comment as being about how salaries are too high, or how it's daft to suggest people shouldn't chase the best paying role available to them. I suspect that isn't really what Dario means though.

Perhaps I'm being too generous but I think his comments are about two problems that all rich companies face:

1. How do you maintain momentum in an industry where other companies with deep pockets can tempt your staff away quite easily just by offering more money? If everyone is willing to hop from company to company then it drives wages up (not a bad thing) but also slows progress as a whole industry (a bad thing).

2. How do you keep people when they can just retire and live a life of leisure at any point? It's not about the high wages; it's about employing people who want to see the challenge through to the end.

Ultimately Anthropic has a vast pile of money and can pay people loads to work there. That isn't enough to keep them there though. Paying a lot doesn't get the company to the next milestone if people are happy to just drop it for a better offer or walk away entirely when they feel they have enough.

It's the most first world problem imaginable, but I can see that it would be something that keeps a billionaire CEO up at night.

Who has recruited them?

It's always possible that the capitalists involved care so much more about money than anything else, especially people, that the acorn can not fall far from the tree.

They would know better than us.

Aren't new hires actually expected to need the money more than people who are already rich?

It's like these guys are out of touch with the rest of the human race and too dumb to realize it.

If you pay your employees enough to sing all day about how much they love you they will sing.

I doubt this is true.

New hires earn a small fraction of what existing employees make.

It's hard to think notions like company loyalty have ever meant something in Silicon Valley. Amodei himself would have never subscribed to a "mission" in the entirety of his career, having jumped from Baidu to Google to OpenAI and finally backstabbing them to form their own company. It's all just a performance; inevitably the same thing is going to happen to Anthropic too.

He left OpenAI because he didn't think sama was being faithful to the mission.

https://www.openaifiles.org/

Like I said, all a performance. Just needed a "positive" reason for drama.

There were exceptions, and I use “were” and not “are” because I don’t know any modern Silicon Valley companies that value loyalty, though I know some people at Apple and Google with long tenures.

Hewlett-Packard under its founders believed in loyalty, and even had a philosophy dubbed The HP Way (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_HP_Way) that seem like an interesting cross between some of the positive aspects of working for a Japanese company (loyalty, sense of care by the company) and the positives of working in Silicon Valley (flexible work hours, profit sharing), plus some other ideas (Friday afternoons devoted to personal projects).

This philosophy was not commonplace even in Silicon Valley at the time; the founders lamented “hire and fire” companies in Silicon Valley. Eventually HP abandoned the HP Way once HP started hiring outsiders as CEOs instead of hiring from within, beginning with Carly Fiorina.

Employees reportedly worried CEOs only care about money

Supply and demand eh, Mr. Amodei. Just like your extraordinary gobbling up of all memory, storage and gpu causes extraordinary prices for consumers. I bet you don't care about that, so ask me again why i should care about your supply and demand issues at your company.

Literally cannot take this guy seriously, this guy, Sam Altman.. these dudes are memes

Lol. Is this The Onion?

These frontier AI companies are labor market nuclear weapons. What kind of fucking mission statement is going to inspire people when they're responsible for 50% unemployment?

The head money printer of a company whose sole purpose is to print money is worried his employees share his attitude? That gives him a good shot at winning the Olympics of double standards.

Dario, you could ask Claude about 'Entfremdung' and what a guy called Marx said about it nearly 200 years ago. :)

LOL.

Would "Anthropic new hires worried CEO only cares about money" be considered newsworthy?

Hell yeah. They pay well! Shit is costing more and more so more money is good.

Since when do people in Silicon Valley work for a mission?

Right? People typically do work for money. That's capitalism.

If I could pay bills with happyness and contributions to society through working for a cause, I would, but that's not reality.

Also businesses seem to think we should be Undyingly Loyal to them without any reciprocity. It's wild.

They work for the love of diarupting anf breaking things.

Maybe I’m looking through rose-colored glasses, but while people need money, there was a time where there was more idealism from the founders and the employees. Steve Jobs could’ve quit business in 1985 after his failed coup; he was rich enough to never have to work again. Yet he started NeXT, and he was able to get people to join his company.

I feel we’re in a timeline in Silicon Valley where there’s little idealism. Employees seek money, and who can blame them when a two-bedroom apartment can easily rent for $4000/mo or more, and when a house is easily $2 million? Leaders seek not only money, but power, and their desires for power have been more blatant in the past year.

Where are the Steve Wozniak and Gary Kildall figures of Silicon Valley these days?

Capitalism is a rat race

Lol welcome to capitalism bro.

You dont get to kill off coding skills and expertise then expect people to give a f*** about some vision. The vision is that the people you’re hiring now wont have a job in the future. Wtf do you think people are going to do while the clock is ticking?

The paycheck is the thank you for working for your vision. That’s the end of the agreement for any good worker who understands capitalism.

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