Why the ‘Best Places to Work’ Often Aren’t
dealbook.nytimes.com
dealbook.nytimes.com
This article speaks about "four core needs" of employees ("physical, emotional, mental and spiritual") but the author doesn't seem willing to consider the possibility that employers aren't capable of meeting these deep personal needs in the first place.
Personally, I think the imbalance, chaos and unsustainable pace you see in even the supposedly "best" workplaces is more often than not just a reflection of the fact that large numbers of individuals don't set boundaries, prioritize or make a dedicated effort to invest in their own health and well-being. These people are not going to go to the Googleplex or a hot startup's swagged-out SOMA digs and suddenly find enlightenment. Unhappy, unbalanced people are going to be unhappy and unbalanced wherever they go and in many cases, they'll seek out environments that are unhappy and unbalanced.
Is it really better for people with nothing to do at Xmas eve to go home and be alone anyway? Is it the employers responsibility to ensure that the company culture makes zero allowances for these people?
If employees want to get together on their own time and spend the holiday together, that's cool. But it gets less cool the more you mix in expecting them to do work for you and/or fill in gaps in your social life.
> right now i’m taking a quick break and after a quick lap around the office, i notice actually many more people here. i wonder — how am i so fortunate to be the ceo of a startup where people are so driven?
I dunno, maybe the people noticed that the CEO is at work on Christmas Eve and fear that if they aren't there too they'll be pigeonholed as slackers?
Leaders lead by example. If you, the CEO, are sitting in the office on Christmas Eve, you won't have to tell people they're expected to come in. They'll observe your behavior and come to that conclusion for themselves.
Furthermore, typing like that will actually take extra effort on mobile devices which automatically capitalize after periods. It's displeasing typography that does not parse well. It is like a constant distraction in every sentence that deflects my attention away from the author's message.
In contrast, a quote I ran across today[1] about Fairchild Semiconductor, a startup that actually did the change world:
Most of the founders were married, busy starting their families and raising small children in addition to all the time and effort they were spending building Fairchild ... I am struck by what a remarkable time it was and what innovative opportunities.
Somehow, I don't think the same will ever be written of Homejoy...
Note/edit: it is possible that none of the employees working at Homejoy tonight celebrate Christmas...but then, that wouldn't be much of a sacrifice then, nor something to really remark for this job ad, any more than if it were just a typical Wednesday/Thursday of a work week.
This reminds me of The Family Man http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218967/
"We're here to make a difference that will change the way the world looks at...washing your dog. Yes the Dogwashy app will completely reinvent shampooing and grooming as we know it. Don't you want to spend your X-Mas break working here so you can tell your grandchildren that you were part of the revolution?"
I appreciate the sentiment of the article, but there's a lot of complexity to the issue that it ignores. For one, most of the time that I was working crazy hours was because I a.) wanted and b.) needed to. I believed in the project's mission, the work was fun & challenging, and there was a lot to do that just wouldn't get done if I didn't put in the hours.
Similarly, when I worked very light hours, it was because there wasn't much work that I had to do. I was blocked on other teams, or in-between projects and my manager didn't have a good idea where I'd be productive at the moment, or "held in reserve" so that if we needed to react quickly to market opportunities I'd be well-rested and not occupied by other projects.
Working hard is not always a bad thing, or onerous, or exhausting. Sometimes employees work hard because they believe in what they're doing and want to do a good job; that's part of what makes a company a good place to work, after all. And sometimes it is, and creates a very unhealthy competition where everybody tries to outdo each other. I think that one of the things that Google in general and Larry Page in particular realizes is that people will have different desires for work/life balance at different stages in their life, and that within a large company, there should be places that can accommodate everyone from the achievement-oriented new Ph.D grad to the family with a young kid.
Beyond my own experience, I had multiple teammates who had long commutes and family commitments and made a rigid practice of leaving before five every single day. As far as I know, none of them were ever given any trouble about it. Maybe they weren't promoted as fast as if they'd burned the midnight oil, but that seems like a fair trade.
That point has more to do with our inherent freedom to live self directing lives than arguing that hard work isn't a good thing. It's more an indictment against the whole employee lifestyle than your admittedly superior company.
To reiterate my point, you feel like it's worth mentioning that you were allowed to stop making BigCorp money for two and a half hours to celebrate one of the more important events in your life.
That being said, it was not a completely terrible place to work. There are much worse. It would have been hard to convince even "suckers" that it was a good place to work if it had, in fact, been a truly awful place to work. But it definitely wasn't great. The pay was mediocre, and the expectations were through the roof. And if you didn't act sufficiently grateful, if you didn't appear thrilled to be there at all times, then it actually became a pretty hostile place to spend time.
I can be satirical and sarcastic --most managers were okay with it as it helped to relieve pressures and a way to communicate issues --a few saw this as heresy. I really can't stand that kind of manager. One who believes so much in the system they are so personally vested in the company ideology.
The way pretty much every company finds people is that it hires the best, according to subjective and biased criteria, from the people that currently are looking or don't have jobs who tend to live in the area and happened to find out the company had an opening.
Though he never expressed the result for the self-employed, log(1) = 0 in any base.
It's obvious from articles like this that you can't just dump a bunch of cash on slides and ping-pong tables, but it also isn't fesable (for most companies) to have 4-hour workdays. How can you balance the need for breaks with budget concerns?
I'd really appreciate somebody with experience in the area weighing in.
Curb your hubris and start treating people like human beings. I've worked for a number of "world changing" startups managed by 20-something year olds like you and the fact that it always devolved into a high school popularity contest made me sick to my stomach.
Nobody works themselves to death, but we all push ourselves to get as much done as possible. If you want to be a founder, or early stage employee, you're going to have to work harder than the average 9-5er.
2. Be careful about perks that have social implications and/or require employees to spend non-work time at work or with co-workers. A lot of the perks startups offer today, such as catered lunches/dinners and frequent group outings, send the message that you're trying to build a family, not a company. Many people have a life outside of work and these "perks" ask/require employees to give up what should be their free time.
3. Don't ignore management. A lot of startups eschew basic management practices, mistaking management for bureaucracy. The reality, however, is that a healthy dose of competent management is one of the best ways to promote productivity and avoid time-wasting dysfunction.
It usually degenerates into a bunch of hip young guys with lots of hair product and eclectic playlists.
Build for diversity and you'll get surprisingly awesome skillsets on your team.
Smart companies look for professionalism, not "culture fit." True professionals can work very effectively with different kinds of people, including people who they're not likely to become friends with. Professionalism works in small teams, and it scales.
If you're finding that more than a few well-qualified candidates "can't work with your current team" it's worth considering that the problem is with your existing team, not the people you're adding to it.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that 'Culture fit' = hiring people who look alike. Having an maintaining a good work culture where individuals on a team gel together, much like an orchestra, is extremely important and not to be cast aside. Sure, a candidate might have a PhD from MIT and is smart, but if that individual is quiet, has difficulty working in a pair (assuming pairing is part of the culture), and is adamant about working in a silo and going hero mode, having that candidate on your team might just be disruptive.
Having said that, I do think culture fit shouldn't be the only or the veto decision when it comes to hiring. It should however be a part of the overall decision. And yes, if you're not hiring someone because they don't like Fight Club but your team does, then calling that a 'culture fit' problem is dumb. It's not about hiring people who only think alike, but hiring people who have the same / similar philosophies when it comes to doing their job.
Re-read the part about being a professional. Then you will see why this is a straw-man construction.
-- This is an excellent comment
If you cater meals, some employees will want to skip out and take the salary bump instead, others don't mind losing out on pay for free weekly massages.
Free beer? Non-drinkers feel left out. Game room? non-gamers hate it. Ping-pong, foosball, pool tables, free gym? You'll find somebody who it alienates.
You have to pick what you want your company to be and commit to it. Where would you want to work? Build that. You'll find the right people to populate it, but try to keep it open to diversity of styles and ideas.
Your best employee will probably be somebody completely different than you.
I have no experience with these things. Why would this be the case? Is it because "a dynamic work environment with a constant influx of interesting problems to deal with" implies longer work hours?
If you think of an orchestra, it's like all the nameless people in the violin section vs. soloist. Optimizing for rockstars is like optimizing for soloists and that rarely works well.
They're your steady soldiers, getting the job done at the pace you set. They can be used to set organizational tempo, long-term goals, etc. They're the ones who will work for your company for 10 years and not complain too much.
But they also recognize that they're working to live, not living to work. Lots of startups want their employees to be obsesses with their work, they want all the employees to do things together, live together, marry each other, they want them to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner together.
Lots of employees find that a huge turnoff, because frankly, they have better lives than what any startup can offer.
This is a false dichotomy. If a company is so broke that offering a few free meals will impact their salary pool, they aren't going to offer the free meals at all. Anecdotally, every company I've worked at that offered free lunch paid more than any of the companies that didn't offer free meals.
They are perks designed to make working there more pleasant and efficient (if you eat there your lunch commute is gone and you are likely to converse with coworkers). They have nothing to do with your compensation.
No you can't. You can't make the argument because one set of things is strictly needed for you to do your job, the other is not.
A culture where everyone worked to the maximum of their ability and where the sum was greater than the parts, those places tended to do pretty well.
Others might like companies with less perks, but a great work culture, where there's less focus on facilities but more focus on the having great work / life balance and culture.
It's tough to find a company that has both =\
Long hours at Google? Please. The long hours argument would certainly hold up at many of the other companies on the list, however. Point being that no generalization can define why these rankings are misleading (though they certainly can be).
Before that I worked at a place I could charitably call a "bottom place to work".
I've worked at a few very mediocre places as well.
So I've been around the block so to speak.
About a decade and a half ago, I worked at a place that doesn't show up on any of these lists. The main day-to-day difference it seems from where I work now and this place I worked at long ago is that I get free candy and juice. The other place had more interesting work. Almost all of my professional acquaintances come from the former place.
We have a badass cafeteria, but I still have to pay for it. So I guess that's better than the Amazon gig and the mediocre to decent food I was offered?
One of the chefs here is a former Google executive chef, his Polenta with mushroom sauce is pretty good, but a bit tart.
I get whatever hardware and resources I've asked for so far. So far I've gotten a large format printer with staff, 3 developers, a new rMBP with top of the line specs, a new monitor, travel expensed and have $100k worth of rack mountable GPUs on order. I'm throwing a lot of people and hardware at a problem that everybody including the client thinks should be solved this way, but for <reasons> probably won't work out in the end...and we all know it.
I've found not-for-profits to be consistently decent places to work, plus I can take pride in working at them for all kinds of principled reasons. Even if the pay sucks, the offices tend to be nice and its nice knowing you're helping the species move forward a little every day. The unofficial motto where I work is "fuck the money, do the right thing by the client". I like that.
But I know from long-timers that work-life balance kind of sucks and there's been some lean times recently that have left some old-timers hungry with a thirst they can't quite get rid of. There's a yoga class I can take, $60/season. We have a Gym, the showers are cleaned twice a day.
I've found that for-profits make me a heck of a lot more money, but range from miserable to mediocre.
I've almost worked at Google, Amazon and a few other bright stars on these kinds of lists, but the problems didn't seem terribly interesting even if the cafeterias were cool. I guess pushing ads, on-line retail or some other kind of kool-aidery is hip. I like my Android phone well enough. Maybe if I could have taken that salary and moved cross country and displaced my life, the free catered meals would have been worth it. The quiz-show interview was lame and completely irrelevant for the job they wanted me to do.
I've interviewed with a few places that think they're best places to work. 3 catered meals a day, game room, casual dress code, whatever. It's fine, but then they're supporting 10 year old application cruft and the hardest problems they have to solve is supporting the new release of Java.
The most I've ever learned, and thus the most rewarding job I ever worked was for a small and scrappy startup that failed. The lessons I learned there have earned me nonstop promotions at better places. I would absolutely do that again if I had a time machine even though it had really sucky aspects to it. It didn't even come close to being a best place to work...though I also got free candy and juice.
The best problems I've ever worked was for a shitty shitty mega-corp. They sent me around the world 4 times in two years, to active war zones, where I got shot at. Coding under fire is amazing. Saving people's lives is amazing. Dealing with corporate bullshit back home where none of that is recognized for any reason sucks. I recently was contacted by an employee to answer questions about code I hacked out 7 years ago while I was taking mortar fire. The stories I'll tell my grandkids come from this job. Also not a best place to work. No free juice or candy, no cafeteria.
It's interesting McKinsey is in the top-10. I've only ever heard terrible things about working there. The average rate of burn-out is under 2 years for new hires, so the suck factor must be incredibly high. But then again, a McKinsey bullet on your resume opens lots of doors.
In-N-Out and Costco are probably great to work if you don't have options. But I definitely need more than $12/hr for the lifestyle I've become accustomed to.
I know of Googlers who take month-long spur of the moment vacations 3 times a year and keep advancing. I know others who are on-call and put in hard 14-16 hour days constantly and fight with their managers for their pay increases.
It really is relative. If the work doesn't interest you, or the politics suck, or you like getting paid on time, and that matters to you more than anything else, then you might have a terrible time. You want dry-cleaning, catered lunches and work-life balance? Then maybe this list is a good one for you.
Google does have interesting problems, but it's likely that you won't be working on them.
The scrappy startup: can you share a couple textbites about the lessons you got there? What kind of crossover did those lessons have in the war zones - or was that afterwards?
No one bothered to ask me what made me unique or interesting, even though I have amazing stories to tell from traveling around the world and from projects I've worked on in the past. The free lunch thing is sort of over-blown, when you have to fill out a form and shout over a line of people to get a BLT sandwich made. And then there were a bunch of bicycles strewn out across the campus, mostly toppled over, for no explicable reason.
Honestly, the only reason I would want to work there is for the money, and for that reason employees should not really expect to enjoy their time there.
... I HAVE PEOPLE SKILLS, DAMMIT!!!
(apologies if you've not seen "Office Space")
I have seen this from both sides, and it is something you _need_ to know if you are interviewing people. The very best people for the job will have options. The very best hires don't _need_ your job. Not considering that your organization is being evaluated by the same folks you want to hire is not smart.
I guess you could say that measuring the "likeableness" and culture-fit of a potential employee is important, but that can definitely be derived from the interview in general rather than from your life stories.
Maybe it is a mistake that it's not a point in the interview? In fact, I'd care a lot about the personality of a person I will be working with in the future.
I understand that in the "cattle hiring" model where you hire people and then assign a team, this is irrelevant, but I personally consider this a huge weakness of cattle hiring.
To me, it seems like Google's hiring process as a huge company (at least for the vast majority of positions) is explicitly looking for interchangeable people, so regardless of what they advertise, their process is not one that holds "uniqueness" as a plus. This is also evidenced by the "hiring committees" they are proud of and talk about a lot outside the company, which will inevitably reduce the variance of new hires.
P.S. that might not be a bad thing for a big company of that size; I'm not holding this against them, but as a prospective employee, one should definitely consider this.
Asking about all the stamps in your passport would be a waste of everyone's time. If you get hired we can all chat about it at lunch. Otherwise nobody cares. Anyway at a company with tens of thousands of engineers there's already a bunch of people exhibiting every one of your "unique" characteristics.
This was also coming after resigning from another company where I was treated terribly after moving from Chicago to southern California.
And that's really beyond the point. Fog Creek Software in New York City does an excellent job of treating their employees well, both interviewing and starting, and maybe that's something only offered by smaller companies, but I think an interviewee for a software job should be treated with a little bit more personal respect.
Working for an employer is inherently dehumanizing. You are considered a resource of the company, not a unique individual. The larger the company, the stronger this effect.
No offense, but that's frankly irrelevant to an interviewer. You can't expect someone to waste a part of their day to stroke your ego when their task is to evaluate you and see if you can make it in the company.
Furthermore, Google might just be looking to hire a massive number of low-level Java developers and have a need to make them write bubblesort and FizzBuzz over and over, but I am someone who is a Java compiler writer, so I thought things might have lined up better.
And at this point, I am not concerned about my ego so much as having a way to support myself. I didn't start programming when I was 10 to make a million dollars, I did it because I wanted to know how things worked. Now I might as well work at the pizza factory down the street so long as I have a place to live.
Have an ounce of empathy and look at things from the other side of the table. Anybody can write "I wrote a java compiler" on their resume. Anybody who is even modestly determined can fake a github repo of such a project.
People have done (much) crazier things to try to get a job at Google.
The only thing for interviewers to do is to try to assess your technical ability in the limited time that they have.
I did a fair number of interviews when I worked at Google. (For strong candidates,) I spent every minute of the 45 or whatever given to me in an interview trying to get more signal to make their interview summary packet stronger. If I stop to ask how you saved a village in Fiji from sharks, that's fewer glowing words I'm going to write about you in my feedback.
To echo what somebody else wrote upthread:
> If you get hired we can all chat about it at lunch.
The Unforeseen Costs of Extraordinary Experience
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/10/01/095679761455...
FWIW if you are successful in other endeavors in life, down the road, you'll potentially deal with these situations time and time again.
Good luck.
For a large company that is more or less irrelevant unless you are interviewing for a position specific to varied international experience.
Making sure you can program is far more important. I work at a really international setting ... good C++ is good C++ regardless of the cultural background of the programmer.
Which in itself is really friggin awesome - in my experience a programmer is a programmer with any cultural background just as long they grok the CS and programming fundamentals. Perhaps Google has observed the same?
For smaller companies where the interviewers will be dealing with you day to day the personal details are more interesting.
* at a large company.
I would be fascinated by that story if I were interviewing GP for a position at our (small) company.
I studied phonetics in a language lab and volunteered with other international students at a local elementary school, among other things.
Most are just like lunchrooms in school, with much better food. Sorry that someone didn't give you a better experience there, with regards to food and otherwise.
Let's take Google as an example, although any large company with a strong reputation would do. Take technical or cultural or managerial attribute Q (say, which programming language to privilege). Ask "what is the best Q option for Google?" Most people will admit that they don't know. There are lot of variables. Ask "what is the best Q option for the cultural leader? Suddenly you get a bunch of bikeshedding product executives trying to throw their weight around. Now that it's not "Google" being discussed but "the cultural leader" hanging in the balance, peoples' opinions get much more entangled and politicized (if less relevant to the specific needs of the company, Google).
The concept of "the cultural leader" in technology is flawed and dangerous and it attracts people for the wrong reasons. You should hire the people who want to make a cultural leader by doing great work and, um, leading... not people who want to hold high positions at an organization already recognized for leadership.