Hire People Who Care (2020)
alexw.substack.comI didn't realize "caring" meant "being exploitable" as in "working extra hard for no extra pay."
I guess I just don't care.
Unless it's my own company I'd have to be making at least $500k to really "care".
I read through all the comments and it is amazing that nobody is mentioning the fact that the reason why this 2020 post is coming up now is because of this:
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...
I agree that this information is highly interesting and relevant considering the content of the article.
On the other hand, I can easily imagine why nobody mentioned this fact befor you did: only few people read startup gossip.
> only few people read startup gossip
Numbers disagree: 485 comments, 470 points.
"How many hours were you working a week?"
Funnily enough, hearing this question is a huge red flag for me. It signals they value work hours more than quality delivery.
I thought the same thing. The moment the article equated 5h work day to not giving a shit, they lost me.
"It isn't enough for your work to make me rich. You also have to care."
We're in a weird place where we can actually read what these people think publicly.
Odd that the article doesn't address the most obvious criticism: is the CEO just matching the cliche of trying to select for people that overwork for underpay?
Wanting to work hard is positively correlated with perseverance and work which inspires.
Hard working is good when it's good.
A absolute rookie mistake is thinking your exhaustion-level has a linear correlation with the quality of the results. I know people who get suspicious if they haven't exhausted themselves, how can they have done a good job if they are not drained?
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 actually do care. I am also emotionally involved. Bad code makes me feel bad, I am ecstatic about good code.
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.
> In no world can you be working 5 hours a day and be giving a shit.
"Four hours of creative work a day is about the limit for a mathematician." ~~ Henri Poincaré.
During my Ph.D., I worked very intensely with the help of a Pomodoro timer. After 4 to 5 hours of productive work (8-10 pomodoros), my brain just shut down, but I did a ton of work during that time.
Human body has its real limits. Respecting your body is essential for living a healthy life.
This is me too. But if I add a 20-30 min powernap and some coffee, I can get another 4 pomodoros in.
Then maybe build a cooperative, where all employees are effectively co-owning the company? Then you can expect everyone to care as much as you do. Otherwise it doesn't seem to be a fair thing to expect.
Hire people who only do it for the money you'll have to pay them properly. Hire people who care instead.
I’ve never agreed with a title and then disagreed with the content more than this article.
Jokes on you, I care a lot about my work and can still get it done in 5 hours a day.
This is a very round-about way of saying that trait conscientiousness predicts employee performance (which it does). Good to see a random guy's Substack coheres with the psychometric literature.
Random guy is CEO of an AI company.
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.
What a word. I understand consciousness but conscientiousness is going too far.
Random guy :)
I rather have the impression that many bosses/companies actively avoid people who do care: this kind of people is often rather inconvenient to manage, since because of the fact that they do care, they are very willing to fight (also or even particular to superiors) for their vision.
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. :-)
It would be nice if the employer also cared in return, however in my experience, this is exceptionally rare. I think more than a fair share of us here learned our lessons in investing ourselves rather sharply. It rarely, if ever, pays off for the worker.
This is my experience as well.
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.
> Care too much and you burn out and get replaced
... or you become a menace to your boss. :-)
In practice what would an employer caring look like to you?
You know what caring looks like. You experience it in your personal relationships every day. The disconnect isn't knowledge, it's incentives. The practical answer is straightforward: predictable schedules that people can plan around, living wages that are indexed to the COL, transparent paths for advancement, respect for work-life boundaries, investment in employee development beyond immediate productivity needs (i.e. good healthcare for the worker and their dependents), genuine sick leave without retaliation, respect for physical and cognitive limitations, and protection from arbitrary termination.
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.
> The system isn't broken; it's working exactly as designed.
I don't follow this bit. It's worse for employees, it's worse for employers, and it's exactly as designed?
One of the weirdest things I am seeing is the pushback from employers on "Remote"
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'd bet that when employers that want to bring employees back to the office commission studies of the pros and cons of remote work, those studies unsurprisingly determine that remote work is worse in most ways. Things like productivity and morale are hard to measure accurately anyway, so it would be easy to slant them to fit what people want to hear.
There's that piece of news that comes up semi regularly that claims that some unnamed individual in some in unnamed country is holding three remote jobs down simultaneously.
I have expanded on this above.
> Once conditions change, watch how quickly that 'caring' evaporates.
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.
When I was producing no-budget movies (people work for you without pay!) the secret trick was to keep a mental list of why people were here. Diana the camera assistant was here because she liked to learn, John the actor was here because he liked to try some things out, Linda was here to meet people, Joe was here because he is your friend.
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.
There are employers that care - they genuinely try to keep their staff engaged, and happy. They also, when times are hard, are the ones least likely to make people redundant, they hold on as long as humanly 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.
What risk/return are they expecting employees to accept? What risk/return are they willing to accept? Any advantage they give themselves over the employee, to me, means they don't care.
I don’t understand what you’re talking about; could you please give some sort of example, or perhaps further elaborate?
For larger companies, "You have to move to X place and work 1 day a week in-office, but also we just laid some people off and will give you no guarantee that you won't be laid off after moving" is a good example that's common right now. You know none of the leadership is getting that kind of deal, but they expect a % of their employees to deal with it.
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.
Well a classic would be to insist the employee treats the company like "family" and comes in when someone misses their shift on their free day.
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".
Employer who pays themselves less than they pay their employees.
That's a foolish metric - the employer is usually making money through asset accumulation (the business that they own is worth more)
Cash compensation isn't very reliable.
Stock options.
Unless they're preferred stock options, that's not caring. It's misdirection.
Yup. If they won't show you a cap table or if you have different shares from the founders, you value it at zero until proven otherwise (liquidity event).
Uhm... No? Founders typically also have common stock. Preferred stock is for investors.
I'm pretty sure that's not the case, but I've never heard of a early or even founding engineers getting preferred stock.
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.
It's the case. And the kicker is that if you understood the tax games we play with startup stock, you wouldn't want preferred shares.
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.
Only if you don’t get diluted to shit.
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.
Preferred stock isn't protected against dilution. That's why the big investors also negotiate pro rata rights, which allow them to buy proportionally more shares in future rounds to maintain their target ownership percentage (the key word here being "buy"; they still have to pay up for the new shares at the going rate).
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.
Sorry, but you're wrong.
"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.
To be fair, he says in TFA he wants to recruit like a cult. I don’t know many cult leaders who care about their followers, so at least he’s honest if not psychopathic in the way he says he’s going to abuse you before he does so.
> I don’t know many cult leaders who care about their followers
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.
>My impression is that cult leaders often do care about their followers.
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.
Yeah they're literally paying you money so they don't have to.
It oftentimes feels like you are paid way less than you actually gave to the company – assuming you actually worked hard and cared.
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"
This is why workers are "losers" according to the Gervais Principle.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Maybe this opinion would have more weight if you respected that humans are not perfectly spherical massless money sinks.
No. They are profiting from your labour, and returning a smaller portion of that profit to you.
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.
Not to invoke a true scotsman fallacy, but most knowledge/white-collar workers I know aspire to be more than just being a cog on a payroll.
No, they are giving you a tiny fraction of the cake you earn them. The fact is that you are there to make them money.
I guarantee you, if you were running the company you work at, there might be a few here and there that you truly care about, but the vast majority of your workers are workers.
Maybe this opinion would have more weight if you didn't use a throwaway account to post it.
That, at best, is dehumanizing the employer. There is no corporate structure that exists without humans making the decisions at some point in the chain. The decisions might be abstracted or broken into small chunks, but it's still humans at the bottom.
And humans that replace caring with money are assholes.
I missed this clause in
checks notes
Literally my entire career.
Hire professionals. My care is reserved to me, my family and my friends.
Professionals care about the quality of their work. They care about what they're mastering and making. Life's too short to not care.
It's not the same caring that is reserved for family and friends, though.
Professionalism is a form of caring, though.
I agree w post, and relevancy from its original date in 2020, but curious on what original intention was to repost from such a long time ago, see link belwo
(2020) - I agree, personally I think two issues are 1. taking advantage of people caring to give them below market comp for the work expected of them, and (more subjectively) 2. having some lame and disconnected mission or stated culture. It's easier to care about building something cool than about displaying grit and authenticity or whatever BS some cost center has come up with.
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.
A lot of the criticism in this thread sounds like it’s coming from people who don’t give a shit and just want a paycheck
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
Are you looking for a job by any chance? I promise you'll have the opportunity to produce great things for extremely mediocre compensation. That's what you want, right?
Are you hiring? I can work for minimum wage.
I give a shit, want a paycheck, _and_ want a life outside of work.
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.
It’s hard to find people with talent period let alone people willing to take ownership without reciprocal financial incentives. In my 20s, I was this guy. I worked hard and just assumed it will work out in the end. Boy oh boy was I wrong.
Comments disabled. 2.7 rating on Glassdoor for work/life balance at Scale. I’m sure it’s nothing.
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.
The first step to hiring people who care is paying them enough that they have a reason to care.
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.
That's a bingo card of a blog post:
- 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.
I'll take the opposite side of the comments and the body of cynical people here.
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.
In a somewhat misguided defence of the OP, he actually makes two points.
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.
Is it common that folks are going into work at 11am and leaving at 4pm? I thought America had a crazy work hour culture
It's very uncommon to go in that late. What's much more common is people taking morning meetings from home and then going into the office to complete their day. If you're a 996 grindset blogger, I suspect you're fairly likely to mistake one for the other.
They work a lot of days (they have very few paid leaves compared to EU in general) but not a lot of hours per day (from what I could see working at French/American companies)