Hire Family People

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/996-hire-family-people

by breily • 18 years ago

95 152 18 years ago

veritas• 18 years ago

I'm not complaining but is it 37signals week?

sanj3• 18 years ago

I believe that David came away from Startup School with a heap of new ideas that he's been talking about back in Chicago.

falsestprophet• 18 years ago

I think a lot of people came away form Startup School with the idea they want to hear more from dhh.

jimbokun• 18 years ago

I believe he has decided to take the opposite position to pg on every point about how to start a business and see how well he can argue it.

Which is a healthy thing for Hacker News, I think, getting other perspectives.

dhh8• 18 years ago

You're exactly right. Startup School was a great way to collect some thoughts that had been scattered for a while. A real energy boost.

vlad• 18 years ago

My notes of DHH's speech were on the front page for a couple of days so maybe users were inspired as well as inspired to post more themselves. ;)

slapshot• 18 years ago

I'm just going to point out that this sets a troubling precedent. If one firm thinks it's legitimate to discriminate in favor of mothers with children, that suggests that being a parent is an acceptable basis on which to discriminate. It opens the door to people thinking about whether somebody is a mother in making hiring decisions. That's troubling on a lot of levels, and in some states illegal.

EDIT: apparently the source has been revised to make it clear that the point is just to look evenly at parents and non-parents; that's OK, but I'll leave the comment above in reference to the earlier version.

breily• 18 years ago

He did post a revised version shortly after I submitted it - http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/996-why-i-love-working-wi... - Deals more with 'why working with family people is awesome' instead of just 'you should hire family people.'

"Update: Removed potential confusion around labor discrimination."

comatose_kid• 18 years ago

He's not advocating that you should only hire people with families. He's just saying that people with families shouldn't be discriminated against in a startup world that seems to value youth, because they can be as productive.

DaniFong2• 18 years ago

Laws or not, in the startup world there's a lot of discrimination when it comes to hiring decisions.

jrockway• 18 years ago

And the laws are kind of weird. If you say you discriminate, but don't, you've committed a crime. If you say you don't discriminate, but do, it's not a crime. (I think the reality is that everyone discriminates in favor of "people they like" anyway. It is somewhat scary that we have so many thought crimes now.)

aston• 18 years ago

I assumed based on the title he meant "hire people from your family." Was totally expecting an essay about the McAskill's at SmugMug.

pg12• 18 years ago

Even if people with kids were more productive per hour, that's not enough in a real startup. The empirical evidence is pretty clear on that. I can't think of a successful startup whose founders didn't, in addition to being smart and determined etc, also work long hours.

dhh8• 18 years ago

I think the reason for that is more one of risk. Starting a new company is a lot more risky than being an employee of one. And if you have a family to support, you're less likely to be willing to take on big risk.

So I absolutely agree that it's easier to start a company when you're single and have no obligations because you can tolerate much more risk.

Update: Seems that the original argument changed from "if kids are so great, why aren't more founders parents when they start their business" to "kids might make you more productive during regular working hours, but you need more than just regular working hours to start a business".

I'm happy to offer my thoughts on the second argument as well. I think people working on startups generally work way too much and the ones that succeed don't do so because they put in 14-hour days.

At 37signals, our "startup" (Basecamp) got off the ground on a 10 hour/week programming budget and designers who were busy doing client projects. For the first year, it wasn't the sole focus for the company.

We believe those constraints were instrumental in their way they shaped Basecamp and thus part of the success of the company.

Doesn't mean that there might not be other businesses out there where working lots and lots of hours can be beneficial somehow, but I think that it's a fallacy that you need to work crazy hours to succeed. I do believe that others believe this, though, I just don't think it's healthy or beneficial.

All of this is somewhat tangential to the original argument, though, which is that you shouldn't be afraid of hiring family people. Who should start a company is a great debate as well, though.

pg12• 18 years ago

(If this exchange is confusing to anyone, it's because dhh was replying to my comment while I was still editing it.)

But in reply to the second half: while 37Signals may be a counterexample to the rule that startup founders need to work long hours to succeed, there seem to be a lot more startups that did than didn't.

Different people presumably have different points at which spending more time on something makes the result come out worse. Probably this also varies with the type of work. So it could be that when person = dhh and work = product design, 10 hours per week is a reasonable limit, and when it's someone else and the work = writing database software, the limit might be 70 hours per week.

In the absence of any other evidence, you have to assume that successful startup founders knew what they were doing, and that if they worked long hours it was because it paid off for them.

menloparkbum9• 18 years ago

It is actually less risky to start a "startup" than it is to bootstrap your own business. If you are a parent, you're better off trying to grow your business with someone else's money than you are with your kids' college fund.

nostrademons• 18 years ago

But it does apply to founders. Nearly everyone interviewed in Founders at Work remarked that constraints breed creativity. That focus is one reason startups can kick the ass of big corporations.

It's just that it's possible to overconstrain the solution as much as underconstrain it. In the early stages, there's so much work to do that if you try to add kids to the mix, you don't even attempt it. As the startup gets more developed (or if you start with a simple enough problem), the amount of work needed becomes manageable enough to juggle with family life.

Same goes for having a day job. It worked for Joshua Schacter, Pierre Omidyar, and Steve Wozniak, because the focus of having only so many hours available disciplined them to work on products they could do in those hours. And the economy was such that not many other people were working on those products, so they ended up dominating their niches. But it fails for many, many other entrepreneurs, because the problems they could solve within those constraints had already been solved by hundreds of other people.

pg12• 18 years ago

Nearly everyone interviewed in Founders at Work remarked that constraints breed creativity.

That doesn't mean that they make you net better, though. If they did, you could prove by induction that the ideal strategy in a startup would be to work an arbitrarily small amount of time per day.

wensing3• 18 years ago

In the early stages, there's so much work to do that if you try to add kids to the mix, you don't even attempt it.

This sentence resonated with me as a father of two. But on second thought, I realize, the root reason I do not attempt it (again, for now) is a lack of finances and stability, not a lack of time. I lack time because I have a day job, and I have a day job because I don't have the money to pursue my own business without incurring lots of debt.

The optimal solution, for me, would be to have 12 months salary saved up, and burn through that while starting my own business. And it wouldn't be a 'startup' by PG's definition--I've learned that control is more important to me than growing fast.

raghus• 18 years ago

I am curious: do any of the founders of YC companies have kids?

pg12• 18 years ago

Three have that I know of.

andreyf• 18 years ago

that's not enough in a real startup

What else is there to being successful other than productivity?

I'd suggest this: DHH mentions "an amazing ability to get stuff done when the objectives are reasonably clear", but in a startup, often there is no "objective" - reasonably clear or not. Instead, there is something more like a search heuristic based on "the view form here". With time, the heuristic changes, and the objective changes, and the strategy changes, and the product changes. If I remember correctly, Flickr started as a Flash-based chat website. To get from there to what Flickr was acquired as required the notorious "startup hours". Basecamp went through no such life-changing make-overs, and so didn't require those kinds of hours.

zealog• 18 years ago

I think this is an excellent point and really gets into what David was talking about in his (absolutely inspiring) Startup School presentation and how it relates to this post.

To many people, being in a startup is about selling the same thing to the same people - eyeballs to VCs or Google. That's it. There frequently isn't a lot of concern over what exactly it is that draws them there. In these situations, long hours are required (or at least mandated) because the target moves so frequently because someone has a "better idea" or needs to implement "just this one thing" to appease some VC who ends up not funding you anyway. This lack of focus and constraints leads to middle of the road products that can only be worked on by people working 14 hour days to adapt to the ongoing changes.

It's sort of like when Hollywood is out to make a "blockbuster." They buy a popular comic book character, get a dozen hack writers to work on it - even while the scenes are being shot - and they put in a bunch of crap special effects. Sure, sometimes it works, but most of the time it's a bunch of dreck that will never make back its $200 million budget. Contrast that to the lifestyle business - er, independent film - being written and directed by the guy who LOVES what he's doing and making it for himself and you get Pulp Fiction.

Me, I'd much rather make "Pulp Fiction" than "Daredevil."

paul• 18 years ago

Perhaps the long hours are a consequence of the determination rather than a cause of the success.

I actually thought that people at Google were pretty reasonable. They weren't exactly 9-5, but most people weren't working 80 hours/week either (I certainly didn't).

alex_c• 18 years ago

After a contractor decided on a radical life change and moved to a different country, leaving us without anyone with his skill set, my old manager used to joke that he should only hire people who have a mortgage, because they'll never leave on their own.

Funny as a joke, but a bit chilling when it's given as real advice.

marvin2• 18 years ago

I'm pretty sure that a lot of managers actually follow this advice consciously.

mosburger2• 18 years ago

Thank you so much, 37signals guys.

I've always found pg's essays to be motivational and inspring, but there are two things that always turn me off; 1.) I don't live in San Fransisco, and probably never will, and 2.) I have a family. I often feel dismissed by PG and his disciples. DHH's stuff gives me hope that there's still a chance for "fogeys" (cripes, I'm only 33!) like me.

I have a feeling that, if I ever applied to YCombinator, my application would end up in the wastebasket the moment they caught a whiff of the fact that I have a wife and kids. Is that fair?

I stay up late into the night hacking after the kids go to bed, and I'm in the office hours before other people are there so I can do some extra hacking. Am I not motivated enough? Can I not be passionate? Perhaps DHH is onto something. Perhaps balancing the challenges of work and family five you a healthy dosage of time management and prioritization skills.

There are some interesting comments on DHH's site - several presumably young, single kids are crabby and crying "discrimination!" (e.g., "Wow, that’s actually offensive. And illegal in BC, Canada and I hope other enlightened jurisdictions.", or the more eloquent "I’m single and you can kiss my ..."). I wonder if these people have ever noticed that the discrimination often goes the other way, against the thirty-something parent crowd, too.

attack5• 18 years ago

I bet that I'll be in that exact same position in 10 years. All of us will.

tptacek19• 18 years ago

Yes. That position is known in the social sciences as your prime earning years.

wanorris2• 18 years ago

> Perhaps balancing the challenges of work and family five you a healthy dosage of time management and prioritization skills.

Plus, I don't know about you, but I have real world experience about a boatload of pitfalls that I know to avoid that I wasn't aware of 10 years ago. That is a potential source of significant efficiency.

pg12• 18 years ago

I have a feeling that, if I ever applied to YCombinator, my application would end up in the wastebasket the moment they caught a whiff of the fact that I have a wife and kids.

We don't ask on the application form if people have kids, nor as far as I can recall have we asked anyone in an interview. The reason most of the people we fund don't have kids is simply that most of the people who apply don't have kids.

jsrn• 18 years ago

> [...] most of the people who apply don't have kids.

how do you know if you don't ask?

joshwa• 18 years ago

It's also a selection bias-- $5000+5000n effectively rules out most people who are farther along in life.

SwellJoe3• 18 years ago

My co-founder has kids and is older than the OP, and we never felt like that had any impact on our acceptance to YC.

brlewis3• 18 years ago

I have a feeling that, if I ever applied to YCombinator, my application would end up in the wastebasket the moment they caught a whiff of the fact that I have a wife and kids. Is that fair?

No, it is not fair for you to air that feeling here. The YC partners get enough discouragement from having to reject a lot of smart people, so why add discouragement about someone speculating they would be rejected if they actually applied?

News.yc is a handout. Take it and be grateful. The information I've gotten here has been invaluable for my own work, and it's actually possible to keep up with it. (I try to follow TechCrunch for photo-specific news that doesn't rise up here, but there's too much noise. I have a day job and 3 kids, so I have to budget my time.)

If you don't want to be dismissed, implement something great. Nobody will ask about your family status.

skmurphy• 18 years ago

News.yc is a community site. YC partners may be the stone in the stone soup but the soup comes from the community.

michaelneale2• 18 years ago

YCombinator startups are startups - it seems that most of them are built to be sold - with a quick (ish) payoff for the founders and investors who sacrificed a lot.

37s viewpoint is more about a sustainable "small" business. Both are valid.

PS I am 33 w. kids as well, and know what it is like. In some ways, you can have a lot more time to think/hack, as you tend to spend more time at home (and quiet time is spent at home, not out at the pub).

axod2• 18 years ago

"37s viewpoint is more about a sustainable "small" business. Both are valid."

But IMHO 37s viewpoint has little to do with startups. Sure, we could all go and build a modest business that can grow to a small/medium size, and sustain us. But I'm guessing that would count as a failure for a lot of us.

sabat8• 18 years ago

I don't mind the message -- no, you don't have to live in SF (your loss! :-) and no, you don't have to be single.

It's the delivery I have a problem with. More and more, it seems like DHH and his sidekick are deliberately looking for fights. Like they have something they need to prove.

Therapy?

axod2• 18 years ago

Don't forget "No, you don't have to sell to google for millions"

pkrumins• 18 years ago

Those 37signals people are very, very arrogant. I don't like it. I disagree on every post they have just by reading the title.

dhh8• 18 years ago

So someone is arrogant when you don't agree with them? And you don't even have to know what they're saying to make that call, you just have to read a three-word summary? What a unique path to expanding your horizon.

aditya• 18 years ago

heh -- you did leave an open invitation for the trolls :)

sabat8• 18 years ago

No, man. Someone is arrogant because his attitude seems to say "I know better than you, pretty much all of the time."

cellis2• 18 years ago

I'll admit, DHH coming into Hacker News is a breath of fresh air, even if a few of the 20-somethings here (including myself) can sniff out the psuedo-defeatist , "statistically its not possible" scent it is tinged with. I think, on the whole of things, pg isn't out to attract the type of people that want to start the types of business DHH is talking about.

I think pg is set out to do the same thing VC's do (invest in outlandish, maybe crazy ideas), albeit with a focus on extremely good hackers and with a fraction of the budget.

What DHH seems to be implying is that you should focus on building something that you can get paid for, right away, and throw away the big dreams. Which is pretty much the opposite of pg.

kirubakaran• 18 years ago

> throw away the big dreams

AFAIK all he meant was: don't throw away your easily achievable dreams.

That is not the opposite of pg's thoughts.

tptacek19• 18 years ago

DHH is saying that your dreams should have to do with the merits of your offering, not the strength of your cap table. You're caricaturing him.

sabat8• 18 years ago

Maybe I'm in the minority. I think DHH's arrival here is a big gust of foul air.

Suddenly the arguments are getting out of control, and pg's participating. Nitpicky, negative, petty debates.

I've read every DHH post that's appeared here in the past days, and every one of them comes off like the work of a sophomoric contrarian who believes that the minor success he's had entitles him to tell the world how to think.

I like this place better when positive, hopeful people are having conversations.

This air just stinks.

davidw2• 18 years ago

pg and dhh have been very civil in their exchanges, even though perhaps they're not exactly arguing over profound ideas. It appears that you are the one who has introduced personal attacks on dhh. Would you say those things to him in person?

asmosoinio2• 18 years ago

I have enjoyed the comments in this post, even if sometimes negative.

For example the PG's and DHH's discussion about definition of a "startup" might seem like nitpicking when taken out of context, but I found it extremely valuable.

neilk• 18 years ago

We all argue from our narrow perspective. Certainly pg did, at least at first, when he offered his own startup experiences as a model for others. Perhaps since then his vision has been more empirically verified. But DHH's advice is basically conservative -- he's just arguing that web businesss can grow like other conventional small businesses -- so it has a fair amount of weight behind it too.

menloparkbum9• 18 years ago

In the startups I've worked for, the best systems administrators were guys with 5-10 year old kids.

Experience actually counts for more in systems administration, so being older isn't a disadvantage. Surviving the infant-toddler years hones one's skills at managing interrupt-driven tasks and strange working hours.

torpor• 18 years ago

I've been a programmer since I was 12 years old, and have over 30 years experience with technology companies - and yes, startups too .. I helped get a few major 90's-era dotcoms up and running and many of them are still at it today.

My experience is this: either you waste a lot of time futzing around with computers, or you make them do the work they need to do and get on with your life. It has nothing to do with how old or young you are, or how many kids you have. I am a very happy Father now - in fact, this is the greatest startup, with the most rewards, I've ever been involved in - and I'm still applying the same fundamental policy to myself as a programmer: get things done, don't futz around with computers, make them actually do the work they're supposed to do.

It doesn't matter what "kind" of person you are, it matters only what kind of things you make. I know 50-year old grandfathers who can kick royal Assembler ass and still leave early at the end of the day, and I know 18 year old kids who put the keyboard down after 8 hours and go do something else instead, as well.

IMHO, this over-generalization about 'types of people' is a real curse. I would say, don't do it. There are no 'types' of people in the computer world, no matter how the ycombinator cultists want to pitch it to the world: there are people who get things done, and people who don't.

Get things done. Get your code written, working, tested, and in the hands of people who will actually use it. If you can't do this, then you will fail. If you can, then rock on .. may your kids, now and in the future, always appreciate this aspect of you as a person.

thomasfl• 18 years ago

This is music to my ear as a father of three, 40 yo hacker.

wensing3• 18 years ago

Not to dredge up the past, but this refreshingly contrasts with Zuckerberg's encouragement at Startup School 2007: 'If you want to found a successful company, you should only hire young people with technical expertise'. http://www.texasstartupblog.com/2007/03/27/facebook-class-ac...

sanj3• 18 years ago

I wonder if this would have been better accepted if the title was:

"Why it doesn't make sense to discriminate against family people"

Hire Family People

Related Stories