Hiring Against Humanity, or How to Wreck a Startup Community

This is so very important. As hackers, we have a strong cultural legacy of disrupting the traditional structures of power. Anyone can patch some code. Anyone can publish online. Anyone can share information.

Now that hackerdom has, by all counts, won, should we turn around and build our own little world where we are empowered to give power to CEOs and their CEO friends, and not to the common man, so that the common man claws his way to the top so he can in turn exert power over his former mates?

Hackers, we should not be the pigs in Animal Farm, bringing with our revolution the exact social structures we set out to destroy.

This is a fair criticism of CEOs playing against employees. It's very true. That said, it's also disingenuous to thnk that CEOs are playing the same game as employees. That's why the two are at odds. If we're going to get anywhere on the problem, it's just going to have to face the realities and get outrospective on all sides.

At the end of the day, the solution to this drama, as these things usually are, is to address things head on and directly within the bounds of law. Realize that you are trying to recruit talent or be recruited as talent. Realize that this relationship is both business and social, and that you are selling your services as an employee or an employer. This is the whole package, and you should be selling it as such, not just salary or stocks.

This also requires us to face some ugly facts. If you can't afford to pay talent, you better have some other facets to offer. If you aren't very talented, you better have some other aspects as an employee to bring to the table.

To use the dating analogy of the author, this is very much analogous. If you're not attractive, work on that where you can and focus more on the other things you bring to the relationship table. Just as importantly, realize if someone isn't looking for what you're offering, that's just a bad relationship to get into, not really a reflection on either side being worthless or ruthless. They might be those things, but it's not a given.

Relationships are hard. We should approach them in an effort to achieve a win-win for both sides, even in employment or dating, and we should be more loyal about them in those respects or face the consequences of those actions. If all you want is to get paid a good salary, that's totally fine, but everyone should know that up front and going forward. Then no CEO can really complain when they hired you for X with that understanding, but someone else offers you X+Y not far down the road. If you want exclusivity, offer something that gives you that. Same thing as an employee, though job security is a different negotiation, obviously.

This post was rising up the front page when I refreshed and it was dumped to the middle of the second page - would I be crazy for guessing that some of these CEOs have more karma/power on HN (TBH I don't really know/care how it works on here) and have buried it intentionally?

Wow; I hadn't seen this Horowitz post til now. His attitude has no respect for his employee's personal agency at all. Thanks for writing this Bryan. Hopefully this will make a difference.

Didn't Steve Jobs and Google pay $324'000,000 because of this?