My Competitive Advantage: I Hire Artists

http://chrisashworth.org/blog/2010/06/24/my-competitive-advantage-i-hire-artists/

by kes • 16 years ago

132 37 16 years ago

_pius• 16 years ago

I really enjoyed the thinking in this article and I think there's a tremendous amount of truth to it. It's surprising how often simple potential changes with disproportionately large positive effects (e.g. loosening structure so that creative people can, ya know, work) get dismissed because of dogma.

nerme• 16 years ago

It is a shame that so many employers have it in their heads that they need 100% of their employees lives. Why can't people work less hours for less money? Why must they give all of their will-power? Why can't people have a job with medical benefits, paid vacation but only work 3 days a week, with a salary that takes in to account the trade-off?

I'm sure I could come up with some reasonable answers to those questions, but I want to hear what you guys have to say.

pxlpshr• 16 years ago

that's great when you're a lone wolf, but it generally fails when team work is involved; and therein lies the divide between lifestyle vs. startup.

zasz• 16 years ago

Luckydave is doing what the parent commenter said, essentially--working somewhat part-time, and making enough money to do what he really cares about. And he's an excellent team member.

stcredzero• 16 years ago

I had a 3 day a week job with full benefits and paid vacation. My salary was cut by 40% from my 5-days a week compensation, as you suggest in your comment, but I still had enough to live on. I gave it up because I was bored. Can't have everything, I guess.

natrius2• 16 years ago

An employee that works three days a week isn't worth 60% of the value of a full time employee. More people will be required to do the same amount of work, which means more communication overhead. If you still want full benefits as well, you'd be lucky to get 40% of your full-time cash compensation.

ZeroGravitas• 16 years ago

I'd imagine you get more redundancy (in the good sense) by having more part-time people, lower your truck-number, and have people less likely to be distracted by personal stuff in work hours since they can visit the bank (etc.) on their free days. Recent posts about productivity have claimed white-collar/creative workers are most productive at lower than 35 hours a week. I wonder if anyone has actually studied the cost/benefits from both the employer and employee side.

lsc• 16 years ago

I strongly disagree. If you hire someone part time who is only doing that type of work for you, I believe you get /more/ than the value you pay for.

E.g. if you hire a programmer for three days a week and they go rock climbing the rest of the time, You probably get about the same productivity as hiring a programmer full time, and you don't need to pay them for the rest of their time.

The thing is, so many problems are solved 'in the background' - When I hire a knowledge worker, really, I'm paying for the background processes when they are in the shower as much as anything else.

Now, things are different if you are splitting someone with another job of a similar type, I think. In that case, if you are providing more interesting work and/or better motivation, you can 'steal' some of the background processing from the other job, but the other way around is also possible. (a win win is also possible here; your guy can learn something one place and use it at the other, etc... but it's less of a sure win, I think, as, say, hiring an artist to work on your customer support when they are not doing art.)

Of course, if you are hiring someone for a rote job where performance doesn't vary or matter, or where burn-out doesn't happen, none of this applies.

zupatol• 16 years ago

I have a programming job somewhat like that, except that I work full-time for (approximately) 9 months followed by 6 months unpaid leave during which I make comics. The people I tell about this arrangement usually say they would love to the free time but could not afford to earn less. Some would not mind reducing their expenses but are afraid to ask their boss because it could hurt their career prospects. In most jobs the idea of working part-time is unusual, does not bring direct benefits to the employer, and requires some coordination effort, so why would they do it? The one big upside for the company is the employee's higher motivation, but unfortunately this is not easily quantifiable. I was lucky to be hired by a director who was also an artist wishing he had more time to paint.

During the dotcom boom I had an interview with a software company founded by students where many programmers worked 60%. They had some coordination problems. The company went down in the dotcom bust. My previous job was with a company where everybody worked 4 days a week. They wouldn't let me work 3 days after they had tried it with one employee and were not satisfied with the results. Before I worked 3 days a week as an economist and it went pretty well.

There are other jobs where part-time is more usual or even the norm. Many artists become part-time teachers.

pbhjpbhj• 16 years ago

>I work full-time for (approximately) 9 months followed by 6 months unpaid leave during which I make comics. The people I tell about this arrangement usually say they would love to the free time but could not afford to earn less.

My wife and I started a business together and took (and 5 years in still have) about 40% of our previous joint earnings collectively (and she was working part-time). We did this 1) to work together, 2) to bring up our children ourselves, 3) to bring art to the masses, 4) because we're crazy.

It's amazing but this month I managed to eke another £12 per mo off our (domestic) outgoings. We could definitely use more money but I've been surprised by how much we managed to cut our costs. It seems that if we went back to our previous pay levels we almost wouldn't know what to do with the money (except we would, pay off the mortgage for one).

tl;dr I think you'd surprise yourself by how frugal you can be.

Tamerlin2• 16 years ago

If you want to be totally, brutally, honest about it, companies should pay me a full salary for a half work week.

Why?

Well, take John Harrington's example (photographer).

You book a one-hour shoot, for say $200, to make it an easy number to play with.

Your job is to show up, set up the lights and backdrops, do the necessary makeup, get the executive portrait for the financial report (or whatever), and get out of his way.

Now, the exec suddenly says, "I only have 30 minutes, so you have to get it done in that amount of time."

Do you take a pay cut? No. You charge double, because to do the same work in half the time, you have to be better.

If I can get my work done in 20 hours/week, and another engineer takes 40 hours/week to accomplish the same task, I should be getting the higher hourly rate, not the same hourly rate.

akkartik• 16 years ago

+1. But surely one sample point doesn't generalize to all artists? Surely there's a distribution of artist quality like there is for engineer quality?

prawn2• 16 years ago

Of course. And like I said in another reply, the key to LuckyDave isn't so much that he's an artist, but that he's a brand champion - he has irregular work and he's a major advocate.

techiferous2• 16 years ago

Great article. But I wouldn't come to the conclusion that you should hire artists. I would say that the lesson is that you should hire someone:

(1) smart

(2) motivated

(3) conscientious

and

(4) take very good care of them

ssp• 16 years ago

No, that's watered down to the point that you are almost not saying anything.

The takeaway from the article, stated more bluntly, is that if you can be flexible on the hours, then you can have (1)-(3) for cheap by hiring artists or other people who need or want flexible hours.

masterj• 16 years ago

Indeed, the company offering 80k per year likely thought it was hitting all of the above points.

techiferous2• 16 years ago

Thanks. I like your summary better. :)

prawn2• 16 years ago

I agree - the guy isn't valuable just because he's an artist, it's because he's a brand champion first and foremost. If you got a lazy artist, they'd love the idea at first and then they'd prioritise their art stuff even without realising and without giving notice ahead of time. Brand champions won't lose interest like that.

Pick people who have irregular work (part-timers, social workers, freelancers) but who are also brand champions.

kees• 16 years ago

I really would like to know what kind of 'financial software' it was that Lucky Dave excelled in. It could be MS Excel.

Sorry for not adding anything meaningful to the discussion.

PS: This guy hired a user of his product. Nevertheless, this user was already giving superb support to other users, without any external motivation. So he hired a passionate customer, who already did some parts of the job. So if you want to hire somebody, you should look at your customers and community first. I think that is the lesson.

pradocchia• 16 years ago

The productivity gap in Excel between casual users and power users is such that it could be. 80K in NYC in the financial industry does not suggest a high-end tool to me.

nandemo• 16 years ago

Many tools used in the financial industry aren't really very high-end, but people who are good at it get paid well because they're relatively scarce.

Still, 80k in NYC sounds like an entry-level position.

AndyKelley• 16 years ago

I Hire Artists? More like, I Hired A Champion. IMO it was pre-mature generalizing.

SwellJoe• 16 years ago

This applies to anyone who is really passionate. I've pretty much always had the best luck with hiring people who do things for love, and just happened to also want to make a living, so over time it's evolved to the point where I don't even care about hiring full-time people, if I can get part-time from someone who is amazing.

wazoox• 16 years ago

As an artist myself, I fully understand this.

joshu• 16 years ago

Hire your champions, your early supporters? This worked out great for Delicious too.

wallflower• 16 years ago

I met a restaurant owner recently and he says the best people he can hire to be waitresses are mothers with kids in school. They are generally articulate, intelligent, friendly. And they love being able to go home to pick up their kids at 3pm after the lunch rush.

ciupicri• 16 years ago

That's a good reason, but another reason might be the fact that they can't afford losing their job because they have to raise their kids.

riffraff• 16 years ago

while this is a great article, and it is probably 99% correct, isn't there something wrong with generalizing from "I hired one artist with flexible time, it was good" to "all hail artists flexiworking as the revolution to come" ? (Or Did I miss the listing of other artists he hired in the article?)

With envy, a fairly flexible (sadly-)non-artsy worker

dunk010• 16 years ago

An interesting piece, to be sure. Some of the best programmer I know really refuse to be tied down into doing anything they're not totally passionate about. The article was a bit hyperbole-heavy for my tastes, though.

richcollins• 16 years ago

I wonder what is unique to his product that prevents from solving the 6000 support emails a year problem with product / information improvements.

My Competitive Advantage: I Hire Artists

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