Searching For Beasts In Silicon Valley’s ‘War For Talent’
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As someone who has always built and shipped, I've been troubled by a subtle shift in thinking in our industry the last few years. Why so much hostility and failure to learn from others? Why so much attitude?
This brilliant post finally explains it: because so many of us who at one time would have been building products, services, and value are now building anything but: resumes, reputations, portfolios, and (Heaven forbid) "personal brands".
Thank you, Glenn Kelman, for one of the best arguments I've seen in a long time for builders to just shut up, find a customer, and satisfy them.
Just a few gems that really resonated with me:
But one crucial difference between this boom and the last is that the folks in the last boom had to ship or starve.
Amazing what you can do when you have to.
But how many engineers hired from Stanford or Berkeley in the past year will ever feel the savage need to make something happen, to bust out of the matrix, to push the limits of their abilities?
Is "bust out of the matrix" the new "think outside the box"?
The problem is that the young engineers earning that much become well-fed farm animals at the very moment in their lives when they should be running like wild horses.
What a great metaphor!
The result for many engineers and product managers is often a case of arrested development, as they drift from one startup to the next, dabbling in several side-projects, without the ballast of having solved some really hard problems or contributed to a lasting business.
Sometimes, not having an alternative is the best motivator to finish something.
After all, the only way to get much better at your craft is to be challenged in ways that make you uncomfortable. Yet not many people in high technology are uncomfortable these days.
I had no idea.
Startups, like professional football, are best done by the most desperate people on the planet.
Great observation!
It's a great metaphor, and I've heard it before - Dave Thomas gave a presentation on Herding Racehorses, Racing Sheep: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Developing-Expertise-Dave...
>Amazing what you can do when you have to.
It's not any different this time around. We just haven't reached the starvation period.
But it's very, very close.
Why do you think this? What are the signals you're seeing?
EDIT: On the other hand, it's questionable the degree to which the market valuations of regular investments are being pumped up by our capitalism-and-bailouts-induced capital glut.
Facebook's IPO is either symptom of or driving this whole mess.
The social craze was clear with Groupon's blunders and Facebook's IPO. That there is a crash coming should have been--and was--clear then.
Ever since then it's only gotten clearer that there's a crash coming, even if those that say "It's soon" were repeatedly proven wrong.
In other words, it is asymptotically becoming "sooner" the more and more it's being proven that "soon" isn't actually that "soon."
(This is, of course, the nature of predicting events that throw up so many signals.)
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What I mean to say, actually, is that you're asking a pointless question. The signals that indicate "Crash imminent!" have long been fired.
When I say it's "very, very close," did you think I mean it's within a year, or within days?
From a certain way of looking at it, it's at the moment of _least_ certainty how 'soon' an event will occur that the event becomes very, very likely to occur. Because that's when we're the _most_ certain that it's inevitable, but the least certain how it will happen!
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The answer you probably wanted: Google Reader's collapse makes it devastatingly clear to the tech world that there's a giant gaping opportunity to displace social media. All of it. App.net thinks too small, and the start-up world's programmers--all of them--are sharpening knives.
So... will Wednesday work for you?
Understand that I primarily stare at a shell most of the day, so I'm not completely savvy on newer startups. Google Reader shutting down just made me check out newsbeuter sooner rather than later :). App.net just seems like a Twitter competitor with longer strings; what do you see?
Google Reader's demise is really strong proof that Larry Page is obsessed with Google Plus to the point of depravity. There are alternatives, but that doesn't distract from the point: _Google_, one of the bright centers of the Internet, is behaving with abject incompetence.
Google just made a huge mistake. It made that mistake because of a huger mistake in trying to compete with Facebook.
People don't like Facebook. The technically illiterate might allow it into their lives, but they have no loyalty to it.
However, Facebook is the center of mass for people's online selves. App.net _is_ just a Twitter competitor with longer strings.
And in a certain sense it only makes sense that the center of this social media nonsense gets shut down.
There'll be a new Facebook soon. Hopefully a better one.
Although I use Facebook extensively, I do see where someone could come in and make a better one. The only thing is we have never seen something with the tentacles that Facebook & twitter have. Go to almost any page on the Internet and I can guarantee you'll see a "share" button. Did MySpace have that? I mean 1 out of every 12 people on the planet uses Facebook.
I am not tying to pessimistic, and I hope someone will take them off their high horse, but how will a service displace something that has over 1 billion active users? Maybe that just adds to the point that it is past their prime. Humans like the latest, greatest, shiniest this and that...so maybe everyone is ready to move on.
This is an astute observation—that is what we're all doing. But we've become so comfortable creating and sharpening knives that no one has dared make the cut. We're sharpening knives, sure, but that's all we're doing.
There are big things out there waiting to be built. An integrated social system that actually works, and fits within people's lives in a natural way that Facebook and twitter simply don't. There's room to bring in all of our connected experiences in the same way a great chef creates a seven course meal. Artfully. Human. I don't personally believe software has seen the magnum opus of which it is capable, yet.
I loved this article because it's so right. We're all so spoiled that we haven't been able to build the Great Wonder of the Internet. We're just making stones in a disorganized fashion. I have this feeling of desperation that I can barely explain, but I think that like most people who can just see a glimmer of the wonders we could be building, I am too comfortable where I am to act on it and create something truly grand.
Sharpening knives, creating better knives, sorting our knives, admiring our collection of knives. Someday they'll be used for the great art that is bound to come, because it's possible, and like countless cultures before us, we feel compelled to complete what we know is possible.
Early on in the internet era, much less the social network era. Everything we've done so far has been just mapping out the territory. The actual building on it is yet to come.
And it's ok if you're too comfortable where you are to build it. Others aren't. They'll get it done.
When you say for builders to shut up, find a customer, and build--isn't that what was being done before? If so, how could this incentive setup of serial failure being rewarded be avoided?
Heck, if I could have gotten a couple million dollar head start in life by working on my hobby once a week, I'd take that even if I had to delay a regular career by a few years.
"According to Sports Illustrated, 78% of NFL players are divorced, unemployed, or bankrupt two years after leaving the game, and MSNBC reports that one in four NFL players live paycheck to paycheck" [1].
Most athletes do not invest wisely, and often lack the experience to handle large sums of money [2]. Are you so sure that you'd be the exception?
[1] Slideshow warning: http://www.complex.com/sports/2012/04/six-reasons-why-pro-at...
[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/don-mcnay/like-lottery-winners...
In the UK the bottom 3 teams are relegated down to the lower division now if the NFC and AFL did that you'd seem some pressure.
There are many ways to live your life. That's maybe the most important thing to realize in your life, that every aspect of your life is a choice. There are default choices. You can choose to sleepwalk through your life, and accept the path that is laid out for you. You can choose to accept the world as it is. But you don't have to. If there's something in the world that you feel is a wrong, and you have a vision for what a better world could be, you can find your guiding principle, and you can fight for a cause. So after this talk, I'd like you to take a little time, and think about what matters to you, what you believe in, and what you might fight for.
The Passionate Programmer[3] had a similar point throughout the book. Pg said similar thing years ago on his You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss[4].
[2] http://gumption.typepad.com/blog/2012/03/principle-centered-...
[3] http://pragprog.com/book/cfcar2/the-passionate-programmer
So you think that just paying a young grad $100k a year (which is a shitload of money by most European standards, but adjusting to your SV environment not that much) will just turn him into a well-fed far animal? will just put off their need to "break outside the matrix"? If you want most of your engineers to be mostly motivated by "hunger", you're doing something very wrong at one level or another!
Which he's arguing, not entirely unreasonably, reduces the chances they'll swing for the fences. They can take less risk and still get a fairly guaranteed reward of a good level of comfort.
The types of people willing to destroy their health and have no family, no significant others, no interests outside of work should be thrown in jail because all they do is drive down the quality of life of everyone else.
The more that these kinds of myths spread, the worse our lives will be. As software people, it's essential that we counteract this romanticization of economic exploitation, or we will be dragged down with all the clueless fools who buy it into.
Your kind of gutlessness is pretty much exactly why the world has been gifted to neoliberal extremists. Normal liberals lack the courage of their convictions. They're afraid to do anything beyond sending a stern letter.
Your pathetic sternly worded letters go straight to the paper shredder. The corporate state doesn't care. Capitalism doesn't care.
The only truth that capitalism recognizes is power. The only way to stop neofeudalism is through strength and power.
Putting people in jail as I said is really not an effective policy. There are far better policies. But I'm not actually making a specific policy recommendation, I'm arguing that normal modes of individual behavior that are condoned by American capitalist democracy are not effective at solving these issues. To solve these issues the only choice is to do things that your neoliberal masters would consider immoral. The point is that what they call a sin is actually virtue, and vice versa.
Using your muscles/strength/laws/guns/brains to ensure economic safety for everyone is a virtue
Still, bravo!
Let's put aside the fact that it'd be hard to establish a set of behaviors of similar severity on which to jail people (and build consensus on, because it's not right to jail people on one person's opinion); if society put up such a low bar for jailing people we'd have more jailed than free people. There are behaviors that society has deemed destructive and you can be jailed for; taking a low salary does not appear in this list.
With these areas you are frankly not going to get traction talking the way you do. There's lots of injustice out there, there has been with every political and economic system created to date or what's likely to come in the future. When you are outnumbered like this the best approach I can think of is to live well, be an example to others, and be frank about your opinions to those who will listen. (It's an overused example but as I write this I'm starting to think of the example of Gandhi here.) Talk of guns, beating people up, jailing them for what is in many cases just innocent/naive people doing what society expects of them, does not strike me as constructive.
Edit: To be clear I'm not saying that drastic political change (i.e. through legislation) doesn't sometimes have to happen. I'm saying you need pick your battles wisely. Jailing people for accepting a sub-$100k offer does not make sense.
These perks reflect the fact that employee #5s are beginning to understand their real worth, just as players have in professional sports world. I guess even employee #1s are wanting perks as well, feeling the gap between themselves and their wise and well-moneyed investors.
We can decry the loss of innocence -- or the loss of some kind of better work ethic from yesteryear -- all we want, but it won't bring the good times back. Let's just move the industry forward and make the best of our latest batch of talented brats.
I'm pretty much spewing morsels at my screen now, screaming for the sheer irony of this statement.
MARXIST FANTASY!? Bull ever-loving mother-fucking shit! Yes, this is capitalism, but not "how capitalism works best", this is Capitalism, Red in Tooth and Claw, solely because the author values the bloodshed and tears more than the actual creation of wealth in today's startups.
I could take a criticism of the frivolity of some of today's businesses, or some other attempt to persuade that the boom cycle is reaching its end and the "fake" businesses that don't really produce enough value to justify their own existence will have to die.
But this is just blood-fetish! He says in his own words: engineers' salaries are worth every penny in value created!
Startups, like professional football, are best done by the most desperate people on the planet.
Then get out of Silicon Valley and take this Fight Club crap to Gaza Strip, one of the most desperate regions on the planet.
Or just shove your head in this instead: http://www.culturecongress.eu/english/theme/theme_cyberiad/b...
This guy has Protestant work ethic brain damage. He enjoys the aesthetic of self-flagellation, the pain and suffering.
He's sado-masochistic and loves pain, both his own pain and the pain of others.
People who talk like this are the worst people in the world because they always end up taking out their bloodlust on others. They advocate for low wages, for harsher punishments, for more terror at every opportunity. It is the most blatant expression of thanatos and the fact that people like this hold significant positions of power pretty much sums up why the majority of the world's population has their head held underwater by a tiny, brutal elite.
The elites are sadists. They morally justify their sadism with their own masochism--"I love to suffer, so you should too!"
Horrific.
Ok, apparently I really do need to shut up.
This guy has Protestant work ethic brain damage.
The thing being that the Protestant work-ethic comes off as completely ridiculous to anyone who's not a Calvinist or a secular raised on Calvinist values.
I mean, I pulled some truly long working hours just last week-and-a-half. Project had to get done, and I had realized I needed to rebuild it shortly before it was due in. So it got done, and more than just that got done too.
Doesn't mean I liked it, for Heaven's sake, nor that I would recommend continual 12-hour workdays and all-nighters as the Right Way. It's entirely unsustainable over the long term, and, as I deserved, I crashed hard on the weekend.
http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-name-to-se...
jwz made out all right, he got the startup lotto. But most people won't. And I'm not keen on seeing underpay and overwork glorified in some song and dance by a CEO/VC/$etc. Cui bono.
Of course, if someone wants to pour blood, sweat, tears, health, and their life into a company, that is of course their choice. But I think they should own both that risk and that reward for that risk. I think that if an employee is asked to go without, then the employee should also own the reward as well. It is a basic principle of investing: higher risk carries higher rewards (otherwise you don't invest).
If the employee with a family who works 80 hours a week and sleeps under his desk wants to write a paen of glory to their lifestyle, that I will respect. They will know of what they write.
I think I would rather be underpaid in graduate school, personally.
Just because someone is smart and has raw talent does not mean they are wise. In order to build that technical wisdom you need to be a part of an engineering organization that has it already. Some startups do, but universally characterizing all startups as being the best learning environment is incomplete advice at best and dangerous, self-serving advice at worst.
When new grads approach me about wanting to do a startup I tell them to work at a Facebook or google for a year to learn the ropes, then make the jump.
If you want to develop technical skills, the way to do it is by reading and then trying to solve the challenging perennial problems. This generally is not profitable activity which is why it is funded by research grants.
This guy is confusing technical skills with something else, something that sounds like a hypermasculine myth about the value of self-flagellation. It is Protestant work ethic bullshit, the kind of bullshit that, when it permeates a society, makes that society utterly anti-pleasure and impossible for any sane person to enjoy.
You can also look at it from the other direction: if only a small proportion of people are great at founding startups, then doesn't it make more sense for them to leave early to found other startups? As long as the people left at the first one have the ability to continue the trajectory, I don't see the problem -- and presumably, the people allowing them to cash out don't see the problem either. It's just a more efficient allocation of scarce resources.
> The broader trend of generally increasing pay, ... Before most computer science graduates ever walk across a stage to get their diplomas, they’re set for life.
Why shouldn't they be? If doctors and lawyers are set for life (depending on how you look at it), why shouldn't highly capable engineers be too?
> The result for many engineers and product managers is often a case of arrested development, as they drift from one startup to the next, dabbling in several side-projects, without the ballast of having solved some really hard problems or contributed to a lasting business.
I don't get what's so bad about this. A lot of businesses don't last, period. Side projects are great.
This whole article comes across almost as a lament for where the Real Men Engineers all went -- the ones who would slave away for little money, solving the hardest problems, out of some kind of macho competition, romantically proving their mettle.
But that's ridiculous. As long as engineers play a valuable role in the economy, they should be compensated in accordance.
This whole article seems to be rooted in some kind of anti-change nostalgia. It almost all boils down to the author being annoyed that 24-year-olds are "collecting expensive scotch". If that's what really bothers you, then the problem is with you judging other people's tastes, not with them.
Maybe there's a valuable point somewhere in the article, but it's hard for me to see it with the author's terribly patronizing, the-trouble-with-kids-these-days attitude.
Be careful, the market can and will sort this out. Blacksmiths used to be set for life; so did lawyers more recently, now they struggle to find jobs. Smart people are what will always be in demand, not a specific skill.
Good article. My expectations are low with TechCrunch nowadays.
Thats probably the most rational thing to do since the chances of making it big with a startup are minimal while the chance to ruin your health/life are huge.
Someone shove these people into a Davos Parallax VR already....
You should work for us because, it's, like, really great! You should want to work 55 hours a week because you really want to! The fact that you're creating stockholder wealth is merely incidental.
Every company in the valley seems to pay "market wages" and then complain that there's simply not enough talent out there. It shouldn't be about the money for them. They should want to work here, because it's so great!
People should be paid what's "fair" and should want to work as much as is practical. Some kid out of college should be paid what's fair for them as a person - it's like a moral issue - not according to the value they create for the company, which can be enormous even if it's just a kid of school. And we need rock stars, not warm bodies, even if the gain to the company from hiring each non-rock star is still enormous.
I am familiar with several SV firms that would make like $400,000 per year per new hire, but insist on paying "market wages" based on experience, and then complain it's impossible to find enough people to hire. You think if we were on wall street a firm would hesitate to double someone's salary if the firm thought they could make double that by hiring them? No one in SV wants to compete on pay. Everyone wants to convince themselves that they've created the greatest place on earth to work, and that everyone should work there because it's so great. The fact that they create wealth for the stockholders is a benign coincidence.
If SV ran the retail industry, everyone with the same job titles would make pretty much the same amount of money working at either Saks Fifth Avenue or Old Navy. What if Saks wanted to hire someone away from Old Navy? They would try to convince them that Saks is really great!! Not because Saks could see that it could gain more from the person working for them than at Old Navy than Old Navy would and can therefore pay them more. That's economic efficiency. But it seems kind of crass, doesn't it? You should want to work for us! Because it's so great, and we'll give you a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of the equity.
What if I went around telling employers I wanted a strict 40 hour work week? How suddenly would they forget about that hiring shortage? Wanting to work less shows you don't care. You should want to work here. Not because by you working here it creates more wealth for us than we're going to pay you. You think that multiple still doesn't apply if someone is working 13% less hours!? But someone who wants to work less doesn't care, and you should want to work and want to work here as much as possible.
I get six dozen recruiter emails a week. All of them sound exactly the same - you should work here because it's so great! None of them want to compete on fundamentals - pay me more and give me more vacation time. How distasteful! As a result I am completely indifferent between all of them. Everyone likes to pretend it's not about money and there is no price curve for labor. It's weird.
What's amusing is that SV is also a place bankrolled by VC, and the VC firms don't buy into that stuff at all. They have no problem paying huge bonuses to lure people away Morgan Stanley, Goldman, etc. But you'll rarely hear them espouse for engineers the mantras they believe for financial professionals: you gotta pay those big bonuses if you want to get the "top talent."
Of course they want engineers to be desperate, it's a lot cheaper that way. This idea that the best ideas come from desperation isn't necessarily accurate anyway, builders want to build, its in their blood. It's why I hack on the weekends and played with breadboards and legos as a kid.
Having enough money allows me to focus on doing what I love best: building stuff. I want to be a part of building the Holodeck, paying me less won't make me want it more.
At that level of revenue, yes, there are taxes and capital costs to pay, but you can also afford damn fine salaries, too.
Marry me?
But you see I've been reading HN since the beginning and the endless neoliberal bullshit has made me despair for hacker culture--to the point where I'm now embarrassed to tell educated people that I work in the software startup scene. I'm ashamed to call myself a hacker because of the people the word is associated with.
The smartest people I know see only bad things coming from Silicon Valley. I try to convince them that there are a few good hackers out there who can make positive contributions to civilization...
But even the hero Aaron Swartz has a blighted track record because he created reddit--a shitheap that is destroying culture and causing a resurgence in "White Nationalism" aka Nazism.
If you recognize that memes don't matter, reddit's most notable cultural achievement is that it has become the biggest white pride recruiting site on the planet. And this is the legacy of our BEST hacker activist... this is pg's big hack of society.
So your existence on HN has been meaningful. There are other hackers with similar thoughts, but they rarely speak up publicly. The ones that I know have learned to keep quiet or use pseudonyms so they can get by without conflict.
Anyway don't take my fanboyism too seriously.
If supply is short and prices don't rise, something in the market is broken.
The market has always been broken. The "free market" is pretty much the biggest myth since Jesus.
When I saw that rise was when I started believing there really is high demand versus the supply. It does happen sometimes.
Losers (bottom/workers): trade away expectancy and long-term growth for stability and risk reduction. Rationally checked-out. Strategically minimize discomfort.
Clueless (middle/managers): non-strategic, eager people who clean up the mess made by Losers below and Sociopaths above them. Give a lot to the company, get mediocre returns. Losers are actually less "losing", because they know the trade they are making. Clueless expect to be rich, respected, or secure one day but hit a glass ceiling (Effort Thermocline, the highest one can go by working hard rather than smart) and never get it.
Sociopaths (top/executives): strategic and hard-working, but insubordinate and risk seeking. Take the other side of Loser risk-selling and turn it into personal gain. Good at engineering situations so that upside risk goes to them and downside goes to others (often Clueless).
MacLeod Losers are most of the workforce, and it's relatively easy to turn a reliable profit on one. You pay him a pittance X, and he gives you labor worth 1.25X, and at scale you can make a lot of money this way. However, if you're trying to build a brand or reputation quickly and impress people (press/investors) your average* productivity per person matters, not your sum profit. MacLeod Losers, who reliably return a small-but-positive profit for the company, bring that economically unimportant but socially relevant average down.
VC-istan is a world without MacLeod Losers. MacLeod Sociopaths are the investors and tech press and executives who are brought in by VCs after the company's de-risked. But VC-istan startups (founders and employees) are all-Clueless. That's why "you should want to work 55 hours a week because you really want to" in VC-istan. That's why being a "true believer" in the company matters more than being able to do the job. That's why there's such an age discrimination problem. They're looking for Clueless.
What keeps a company or system stable is the Effort Thermocline. It's the interface between Clueless and Sociopaths and it's the point where jobs become easier with increasing rank instead of harder. (Clueless are often oblivious to its existence.) It's the glass ceiling that you can't cross unless you work smart and "get it". The unconditional work ethic of, e.g., the macho brogrammer only gets you to upper-tier Clueless. VC-istan's Effort Thermocline is especially stable because it exists between companies.
Having nice work conditions works for the boss too. Who wants to own a crappy business? I want to go work somewhere nice, and if I am in charge of the place, I think it is then up to me to make it happen.
No. The sociopaths are the ones who control the economic system and the bulk of the capital, who, if your company becomes worth anything, will make you an offer you can't refuse and you will no longer be an owner.
If you refuse to be bought out due to some kind of lifestyle ideology, then you're clueless and suffering from Protestant Work Ethic brain damage.
You're describing an instability. You are an instability. The laws of capitalism dictate that your situation as business owner should either set you up as a sociopath maximizing your outcome, or sell the company to a sociopath who can make more money using your company than you're able to make.
If you then could retire but choose not to, you're clueless, because you're enthusiastic about being a cog in a dehumanizing capitalist machine. Only clueless people and sociopaths feel good about that. Clueless people like it because they have no clue, and sociopaths like it because power and destruction is what turns them on.
Personally I just find that most people who willingly engage in commerce without a financial need to do so lack imagination. I do make exceptions for hacker types like pg who seem to believe they are subverting the system with their economic activity, but the line between being a subversive capitalist and being the most deluded sort of clueless person is very fuzzy.
Perhaps there are s subset of people that you have not met, or do not understand. I would identify with those people who enjoy work (I must suffer from Protestant Work Ethic brain damage, despite being an atheist), because when I do work I accomplish things, and this accomplishment makes me happy. Why this makes me a clueless sociopath I am not sure, but the several companies I have started in the last 23 years have at least let me live in modest comfort. I could have retired around 30 and lived of passive income but that is really quite boring.
Maybe you should try starting a company since you know so much about it.
The linked articles are quite interesting in their entirety: looking at binary values of being strategic, dedicated and subordinate has some interesting implications and avoids the suggestion of amorality and mental disfunction carried by the sociopath tag.
One other claim of the articles is that for certain companies the investors are the (sociopathic) executives and the CxOs are middle-managers under a delusion. Not universal but again food for thought.
Rank culture (valuing subordinacy above all) is the one with the most pronounced and rigid MacLeod structure. Tough culture (valuing dedication, often to extremes) tends to exist when the company gets a hard-on about culling low performers and Loser/Clueless stability breaks down... but a new proto-Sociopath set uses the enhanced performance standards to take and give bribes and run extortions and they become the new holders of rank.
There are two good cultures-- guild and self-executive-- that don't have MacLeod tiers.
I like the D&D concept of alignment. There's a moral spectrum (good, neutral, evil) and a civil one (lawful, neutral, evil). So there are 9 possible alignments. Most people and especially most organizations are true neutral (meaning neutral in both) in ideology, even if they tend toward the rank culture's lawful evil over time.
The ideal "Organization Man" is morally neutral, and civilly neutral with regard to the greater society's laws, but lawful with respect to the organization's laws. Most organizations can find something to do with lawful and civilly neutral people, but have no idea how to handle the chaotic.
MacLeod Losers tend toward civil neutrality. They're not chaotic enough to feel a need to break rules, but not lawful enough to care about rising in the company, unless they can get the hard currencies (compensation, more freedom, career progress) that actually matter. Lawful people, however, see important positions as a validation in themselves and seek them.
MacLeod Clueless tend to be lawful. Some are lawful good, some are lawful evil; most are lawful neutral.
MacLeod Sociopaths are the people who don't fit: they find the comfort of the Loser world to be false, and the delusions of the Clueless to be laughable. They tend to be chaotic, which creates an up-or-out time pressure on their organizational trajectories.
This doesn't mean they're bad people. Chaotic good are the white-hat "good Sociopaths", and chaotic neutral tend to be gray-hatted but will usually try to be decent.
Chaotic people rise in organizations because they have no other choice. They either need to get into an executive sinecure, or into a special, high-creativity role where their outsized talents (see: convexity) are an asset that overcomes their social deficits.
However, evil people also rise. Neutral evil are the most capable, because they're fluent in law and chaos and have no strong pro- or anti-organizational bias. They can be chaotic when out of power and lawful when in it. However, lawful evil is perhaps the most virulent, because while neutral and chaotic evil can indulge in non-ambitious sadism, lawful evil are driven.
So, organizations end up being run by a chaotic-or-evil set that needs to make itself look like something else, and society doesn't much like or understand them and calls them "sociopaths", but the most interesting subset (chaotic good, chaotic neutral) are not bad people.
In many business models it's pretty easy to see the value added by a new, average developer at this firm may be way more than it is at other firms in the hiring market, and are irrationally failing to make gains from trade and inefficiently allocating the labor market by refusing to capture the quantity of labor supplied at a higher price point, before of (I think) cultural reasons.
Whoa! So, let me get this straight, if you get funded in the valley (let's say even if you go through YC) then as a CEO you decide to pay yourself $100k+?
If you're smart, you keep the money to grow the company and don't pay yourself $250k/year. Under $150k is safe. You don't want to be worrying about your own expenses while running a company, but you shouldn't be out buying new Audis or Teslas as a baby founder CEO.
If you're 35 or 45, $100K or even $200K is not going to pay the mortgage and support a family.
We clearly have seen some egregious examples of CEOs cashing out before their company succeeded. But the suggestion that paying yourself $150K is out of line - displays a lack of familiarity with the cost of living in the Bay Area today.
This story is getting ridiculous.
I know people in SV who are supporting entire families on incomes less than $100k. It's not uncommon.
It's simply exaggeration, bordering on lying, to say otherwise.
The tech innovator has been replaced at the head of the table by the hustler. Someone who can network, cut deals, bring in the $ is more valuable to a startup this cycle. It's no longer value being traded, it's expected value.
This is what the 07-13 spin of the wheel is all about.
Hustle or die.
It could be something you put yourself through for fun like running a marathon or far more serious like fighting in a war. It could be the grinding repetition of preparing for a piano recital or the grit required to dig ditches or paint houses for a living. It could be raising a child all by yourself."
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I completely agree with this part. I have hired a 100+ people and the most impressive ones in the long run are usually people who have achieved something notable - published in a poetry book, achieved something in a competitive sport, etc. - it doesn't seem to matter what it is, as long as they have done something hard, and that they know they achieved something. It seems to give them the confidence to get through more challenging problems in the workplace. Even a person who has run a small 2 person business has achieved something that most of the population never will, and they tend to have more 'grit' or whatever you wish to call it.
1) A lot of it is about efficient use of engineering (or sales, or product) time. Yes, one can skip catered/cooked meals, gyms, and onsite dentists, but what's the tradeoff? The team will go out for lunch, which, depending on location, might waste up to two hours of employees' time. In a busy location like SoMa or FiDi it's just deciding on the place and then waiting to be seated, in a remote location, like Google's or Facebook's campuses, it would be the time it takes everybody to get in the car and drive.
2) Tax savings also come into play if the company is profitable or on the verge of achieving profitability. Catered lunch to every employee of the company is a business expense, transferring the same amount of money to an employee in the form of higher salary or bonus is taxed at both company and employee levels.
3) Some of the perks cost very little to establish. Car washes, onsite dentists, haircuts are something that employees usually have to pay for, and it's just the matter of providing some space to the vendor who's willing to provide this service to the employees.
Passion, people! I know the term gets thrown around a lot and it often doesn't mean as much as people make it, but I'd say a minimum of passionate involvement with your problem domain would be nice to find in SV more often. I know I can never rest on my laurels until I've brought down at least one big corporation by doing what they do in an open source, anarchic, power to the people way. Hell, I want to bring down the www, have it lose mindshare to a fully peer-to-peer network, but bluetooth doesn't cut it. I hate these walled gardens, I fear for our future which they can undermine, and I wouldn't want to contribute to more of these gardens, pretty on the inside with unicorns and flowers, until you reach a wall and see surveillance equipment and people shot down trying to escape.
But what do VCs know? They're in for a buck, and so are most companies who get big enough to lose it's founder's initial vision. Some companies are founded on a great vision, to solve a passion imbued problem, to give true value to society. O'Reilly has been discussed here recently and it rekindled a lot of my beliefs. I don't want to be at the helm of some billion-dollar ex-startup if I'm just gonna be a puppet to a board of investors. I'd rather stay lean, hungry and foolish, make a true crowd business out of my problem domain, where my software is open source and lots of third-parties have a go at profit. I'm just one of them, thriving on an open ecosystem. That sounds better. I like what App.net is doing. More people should follow the lead.
It absolutely is happening, however. So if some tiny fraction of this current era's chosen realize their good fortune and power, they could truly change the world.
The nature of that motivation can vary from person to person.
What causes wealth to ruin many people isn't comfort, but the social pressures that are often required if one wants to stay wealthy and in access to high-status people, most of whom turn out to be a defective or, at best, a mediocre crowd. Giving people enough money that they have the autonomy to run their lives and some comfort isn't going to have that effect.
-To improve rapidly at a skill, you have to practice at the edge of your abilities. If you're a decent writer you're not going to improve by mindlessly writing what you already know for hours on end. Only the time you spend challenging yourself really counts.
-There's a decent amount of evidence that being surrounded by wealth triggers laziness. That is, if your office has opulent wooden desks, high-end art, etc., that sends signals along the lines of "conserve the resources we already have." While if your surroundings are a little messy it triggers an instinct to work hard and gain more resources. The Talent Code goes into detail on this. Note that all that matters here is appearance-this doesn't mean that you'll get more performance by giving your employees crappy computers, it means you'll be better off if your office looks spartan.
As long as a company only promotes "discomfort" in these two elements, that can actually be a good thing. But when you get to the point of physical discomfort, that's almost certainly a negative.