Searching For Beasts In Silicon Valley’s ‘War For Talent’

http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/16/bring-out-the-beast/

by ssclafani • 13 years ago

151 115 13 years ago

edw519• 13 years ago

Every once in a while you read something and shake your head thinking, "I always felt this but was never able to verbalize it like this." This is one such post: one of the best things I've discovered in 6 years of Hacker News.

As someone who has always built and shipped, I've been troubled by a subtle shift in thinking in our industry the last few years. Why so much hostility and failure to learn from others? Why so much attitude?

This brilliant post finally explains it: because so many of us who at one time would have been building products, services, and value are now building anything but: resumes, reputations, portfolios, and (Heaven forbid) "personal brands".

Thank you, Glenn Kelman, for one of the best arguments I've seen in a long time for builders to just shut up, find a customer, and satisfy them.

Just a few gems that really resonated with me:

But one crucial difference between this boom and the last is that the folks in the last boom had to ship or starve.

Amazing what you can do when you have to.

But how many engineers hired from Stanford or Berkeley in the past year will ever feel the savage need to make something happen, to bust out of the matrix, to push the limits of their abilities?

Is "bust out of the matrix" the new "think outside the box"?

The problem is that the young engineers earning that much become well-fed farm animals at the very moment in their lives when they should be running like wild horses.

What a great metaphor!

The result for many engineers and product managers is often a case of arrested development, as they drift from one startup to the next, dabbling in several side-projects, without the ballast of having solved some really hard problems or contributed to a lasting business.

Sometimes, not having an alternative is the best motivator to finish something.

After all, the only way to get much better at your craft is to be challenged in ways that make you uncomfortable. Yet not many people in high technology are uncomfortable these days.

I had no idea.

Startups, like professional football, are best done by the most desperate people on the planet.

Great observation!

dmiladinov• 13 years ago

The problem is that the young engineers earning that much become well-fed farm animals at the very moment in their lives when they should be running like wild horses.

It's a great metaphor, and I've heard it before - Dave Thomas gave a presentation on Herding Racehorses, Racing Sheep: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Developing-Expertise-Dave...

Helianthus6• 13 years ago

>>But one crucial difference between this boom and the last is that the folks in the last boom had to ship or starve.

>Amazing what you can do when you have to.

It's not any different this time around. We just haven't reached the starvation period.

But it's very, very close.

tomrod6• 13 years ago

> very, very close

Why do you think this? What are the signals you're seeing?

strandev• 13 years ago

So what are you doing about it?

tomrod6• 13 years ago

As someone outside the valley (but a fellow traveler on HN), this attitude of "personal brand" has always confused me. Are the problems being worked on so hard that genius defeats competition? In essence, are the incentives for people in Silicon Valley so misaligned that a person can open numerous unsuccessful companies and still have a positive brand?

When you say for builders to shut up, find a customer, and build--isn't that what was being done before? If so, how could this incentive setup of serial failure being rewarded be avoided?

svachalek2• 13 years ago

I just noticed the football comment and now I'm wondering how bad I just got trolled. (Surely a $2M salary makes you desperate indeed.)

kybernetyk• 13 years ago

Pro football players have to earn a life's salary in a few years before they get worn out. $2 million over 50+ years isn't really that much.

brianpan• 13 years ago

You make a good point, but football players also have the desperation maker of competition and winning. There are surely players that make it to the NFL and coast, but 1) they have competed to get to the NFL, 2) there are plenty of people willing to take their current jobs, and 3) a Super Bowl win is a big prize that they probably haven't gotten yet and requires some amount of "desperation" to achieve.

snowwrestler• 13 years ago

Most of the young men who play in the NFL do not come from money. In fact for a lot of them, being the best football player in their high school was their only hope to go to college at all, let alone earn millions of dollars.

DanielRibeiro• 13 years ago

These are very good points. I believe this also echoes Bret Victor's comment at the end of his famous Inventing on Principle[1, 2]

There are many ways to live your life. That's maybe the most important thing to realize in your life, that every aspect of your life is a choice. There are default choices. You can choose to sleepwalk through your life, and accept the path that is laid out for you. You can choose to accept the world as it is. But you don't have to. If there's something in the world that you feel is a wrong, and you have a vision for what a better world could be, you can find your guiding principle, and you can fight for a cause. So after this talk, I'd like you to take a little time, and think about what matters to you, what you believe in, and what you might fight for.

The Passionate Programmer[3] had a similar point throughout the book. Pg said similar thing years ago on his You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss[4].

[1] http://vimeo.com/36579366

[2] http://gumption.typepad.com/blog/2012/03/principle-centered-...

[3] http://pragprog.com/book/cfcar2/the-passionate-programmer

[4] http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html

nnq• 13 years ago

> well-fed farm animals

So you think that just paying a young grad $100k a year (which is a shitload of money by most European standards, but adjusting to your SV environment not that much) will just turn him into a well-fed far animal? will just put off their need to "break outside the matrix"? If you want most of your engineers to be mostly motivated by "hunger", you're doing something very wrong at one level or another!

jessedhillon• 13 years ago

$100k is beyond comfortable for everywhere in the Bay Area except SF. You can still spend ~$2700/mo on rent, and have money leftover for fun and savings. Hell, even in SF that will get you a pretty nice life.

pnathan2• 13 years ago

I immediately was reminded of jwz's response to Michael Arrington about two years ago:

http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-name-to-se...

svachalek2• 13 years ago

Yes, it's funny to read the "set for life" comment in reference to a wage that's just about good enough to pay for an apartment around here. Not to mention considerably less than what most of the non-"talent" in the so-called "war for talent" expects in a year.

redschell• 13 years ago

Same here. That jwz piece really left an impression on me, so whenever I run into an article, like the TC one here, with some founder/VC/"serial entrepreneur" talking about culture or work ethic or some crap like that, I really have no choice but to assume that this guy is just some scrub trying to lure me under a desk.

pnathan2• 13 years ago

The old adage "follow the money", or the even older, "cui bono"[1] really should be brought into play here.

jwz made out all right, he got the startup lotto. But most people won't. And I'm not keen on seeing underpay and overwork glorified in some song and dance by a CEO/VC/$etc. Cui bono.

Of course, if someone wants to pour blood, sweat, tears, health, and their life into a company, that is of course their choice. But I think they should own both that risk and that reward for that risk. I think that if an employee is asked to go without, then the employee should also own the reward as well. It is a basic principle of investing: higher risk carries higher rewards (otherwise you don't invest).

If the employee with a family who works 80 hours a week and sleeps under his desk wants to write a paen of glory to their lifestyle, that I will respect. They will know of what they write.

I think I would rather be underpaid in graduate school, personally.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cui_bono

dictum• 13 years ago

Pardon me if I'm being too cynical or if I'm missing the point, but all I see is a CEO saying that young employees should work more for lower wages, with some naturalistic, late XIX century imagery of bravery — fighting in a war, the most desperate people, bringing out the beast, horses running wild.

waterlesscloud4• 13 years ago

He's also saying startup CEOs have it too cushy. He's saying they can just cruise from startup to startup, and while they may not get OMG rich, they can live a pretty well-off lifestyle.

Which he's arguing, not entirely unreasonably, reduces the chances they'll swing for the fences. They can take less risk and still get a fairly guaranteed reward of a good level of comfort.

asveikau3• 13 years ago

Think about who benefits from the CEO living an ascetic lifestyle and that then being a "cap" on everyone below them. I read this whole thing as an appeal to young founders to screw themselves over.

runarb• 13 years ago

Agree! The "back in my days" speech is getting a bit old.

nonamegiven• 13 years ago

The "back in my days" speech has been old since recorded history. But I think you'll find as you get older that your "my days" occurred in particularly brilliant times. At least, that's what history would suggest.

jamespitts• 13 years ago

One one hand, I totally agree with what Kelman has to say. Perks are poisonous and can seriously undermine our culture. On the other hand, what about the power-law-driven disparity between what the CEO stands to gain if the company becomes successful vs. employee #5? Or #100?

These perks reflect the fact that employee #5s are beginning to understand their real worth, just as players have in professional sports world. I guess even employee #1s are wanting perks as well, feeling the gap between themselves and their wise and well-moneyed investors.

We can decry the loss of innocence -- or the loss of some kind of better work ethic from yesteryear -- all we want, but it won't bring the good times back. Let's just move the industry forward and make the best of our latest batch of talented brats.

tatsuke95• 13 years ago

>"Before most computer science graduates ever walk across a stage to get their diplomas, they’re set for life."

Be careful, the market can and will sort this out. Blacksmiths used to be set for life; so did lawyers more recently, now they struggle to find jobs. Smart people are what will always be in demand, not a specific skill.

Good article. My expectations are low with TechCrunch nowadays.

tomrod6• 13 years ago

My experience in third world countries are that blacksmiths and, more commonly, ferriers are set for life (though not set greatly); this is because of the ability to customize things to specific needs. I guess in the US this would be the equivalent of a machining shop?

khuey• 13 years ago

Skilled trades are doing pretty well these days even in the US. Much better than a lot of college graduates. The going rate for a decent plumber/electrician/welder isn't cheap.

crazygringo• 13 years ago

> Now, of course, you can cash out as soon as the startup has made any significant progress. ... How many startups would be doing better now if all their early people still had to work there for a big payday?

You can also look at it from the other direction: if only a small proportion of people are great at founding startups, then doesn't it make more sense for them to leave early to found other startups? As long as the people left at the first one have the ability to continue the trajectory, I don't see the problem -- and presumably, the people allowing them to cash out don't see the problem either. It's just a more efficient allocation of scarce resources.

> The broader trend of generally increasing pay, ... Before most computer science graduates ever walk across a stage to get their diplomas, they’re set for life.

Why shouldn't they be? If doctors and lawyers are set for life (depending on how you look at it), why shouldn't highly capable engineers be too?

> The result for many engineers and product managers is often a case of arrested development, as they drift from one startup to the next, dabbling in several side-projects, without the ballast of having solved some really hard problems or contributed to a lasting business.

I don't get what's so bad about this. A lot of businesses don't last, period. Side projects are great.

This whole article comes across almost as a lament for where the Real Men Engineers all went -- the ones who would slave away for little money, solving the hardest problems, out of some kind of macho competition, romantically proving their mettle.

But that's ridiculous. As long as engineers play a valuable role in the economy, they should be compensated in accordance.

This whole article seems to be rooted in some kind of anti-change nostalgia. It almost all boils down to the author being annoyed that 24-year-olds are "collecting expensive scotch". If that's what really bothers you, then the problem is with you judging other people's tastes, not with them.

Maybe there's a valuable point somewhere in the article, but it's hard for me to see it with the author's terribly patronizing, the-trouble-with-kids-these-days attitude.

mbesto• 13 years ago

the typical founder of a company that hasn’t yet released its first product earns, according to private salary surveys, nearly $200,000 per year.

Whoa! So, let me get this straight, if you get funded in the valley (let's say even if you go through YC) then as a CEO you decide to pay yourself $100k+?

seiji• 13 years ago

Assuming your funding round is high enough (a few million dollars), then yes. You raise money then pay yourself.

If you're smart, you keep the money to grow the company and don't pay yourself $250k/year. Under $150k is safe. You don't want to be worrying about your own expenses while running a company, but you shouldn't be out buying new Audis or Teslas as a baby founder CEO.

rayiner3• 13 years ago

What a bunch of crap. It's great that young engineers are making so much money right now, because that's just money that the VCs would otherwise be making. And what can I say, I'm a partisan--I think that's a perfectly fine thing. Indeed, it's worthwhile to take a page out the the VC playbook here. Clearly, the VCs have figured out that you don't need to keep young, ambitious people "hungry" for them to work their asses off. Look at who the VCs hire--people exiting from bulge bracket NYC banks. Look at what they pay these people. Every time I hear complaints about skyrocketing SV engineer salaries, I go over to WSO and remind myself: nope, still not ridiculous yet: http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/salary/venture-capital-compen... (note that VP is not a particularly senior person in most financial firms--usually 6-8 years out of college assuming the person didn't go back for an MBA).

rohern• 13 years ago

Amen.

calinet64• 13 years ago

That's a relative viewpoint, which still doesn't explain away the effect of money on the individual developers, who essentially no longer have to strive to create something of value in order to maintain their lifestyle. I think the article's right: that's a problem, and it's very difficult to pin down, much less solve.

rayiner3• 13 years ago

Sure it's a comparison between two industries, but I don't see why the observations don't translate. The young associates working for VCs don't rest on their laurels just because they have fat paychecks coming in. Indeed, they work incredibly hard to keep the gravy train from stopping. Why should it be different in engineering? Just because an engineer makes a lot doesn't mean he doesn't have tremendous incentive to create something of value, because ultimately if he doesn't those paychecks stop coming. Indeed, big paychecks and golden handcuffs are actually an incredibly effective way to get smart people to put in tremendous effort. It's a model that the Valley fully believes in and buys into, because that's the model VC firms use.

gdubs• 13 years ago

I feel like this article is one big false equivalence. I'm not really sure what the takeaway point is either. Is this representing the P.O.V of the employers, or is this someone who wishes the best talent would break-out and build spectacular products on their own? Because, I suspect it's the former. There's a big draw for young talented engineers to start their own thing, be their own boss -- that's why there are perks for settling at a bigger corporation. For a young, brilliant, mathematician who in school dreamt of winning awards for solving the unsolvable... well, they're probably not gonna be too excited about selling coupons, ads, or whatever else it is your company does. That's why there are perks. /rant.

kayoone• 13 years ago

"The problem is that the young engineers earning that much become well-fed farm animals at the very moment in their lives when they should be running like wild horses."

Thats probably the most rational thing to do since the chances of making it big with a startup are minimal while the chance to ruin your health/life are huge.

eli_gottlieb10• 13 years ago

Well yeah, but don't you see, workers and founders behaving rationally ruins the romantic hero-story investors tell themselves to justify their place in the world!

Someone shove these people into a Davos Parallax VR already....

dyno123453• 13 years ago

Silicon Valley has a weird relationship to capitalism. They sometimes like to pretend to themselves that work isn't about money, and the laws of supply and demand shouldn't apply to labor.

You should work for us because, it's, like, really great! You should want to work 55 hours a week because you really want to! The fact that you're creating stockholder wealth is merely incidental.

Every company in the valley seems to pay "market wages" and then complain that there's simply not enough talent out there. It shouldn't be about the money for them. They should want to work here, because it's so great!

People should be paid what's "fair" and should want to work as much as is practical. Some kid out of college should be paid what's fair for them as a person - it's like a moral issue - not according to the value they create for the company, which can be enormous even if it's just a kid of school. And we need rock stars, not warm bodies, even if the gain to the company from hiring each non-rock star is still enormous.

I am familiar with several SV firms that would make like $400,000 per year per new hire, but insist on paying "market wages" based on experience, and then complain it's impossible to find enough people to hire. You think if we were on wall street a firm would hesitate to double someone's salary if the firm thought they could make double that by hiring them? No one in SV wants to compete on pay. Everyone wants to convince themselves that they've created the greatest place on earth to work, and that everyone should work there because it's so great. The fact that they create wealth for the stockholders is a benign coincidence.

If SV ran the retail industry, everyone with the same job titles would make pretty much the same amount of money working at either Saks Fifth Avenue or Old Navy. What if Saks wanted to hire someone away from Old Navy? They would try to convince them that Saks is really great!! Not because Saks could see that it could gain more from the person working for them than at Old Navy than Old Navy would and can therefore pay them more. That's economic efficiency. But it seems kind of crass, doesn't it? You should want to work for us! Because it's so great, and we'll give you a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of the equity.

What if I went around telling employers I wanted a strict 40 hour work week? How suddenly would they forget about that hiring shortage? Wanting to work less shows you don't care. You should want to work here. Not because by you working here it creates more wealth for us than we're going to pay you. You think that multiple still doesn't apply if someone is working 13% less hours!? But someone who wants to work less doesn't care, and you should want to work and want to work here as much as possible.

I get six dozen recruiter emails a week. All of them sound exactly the same - you should work here because it's so great! None of them want to compete on fundamentals - pay me more and give me more vacation time. How distasteful! As a result I am completely indifferent between all of them. Everyone likes to pretend it's not about money and there is no price curve for labor. It's weird.

rayiner3• 13 years ago

> Silicon Valley has a weird relationship to capitalism. They sometimes like to pretend to themselves that work isn't about money, and the laws of supply and demand shouldn't apply to labor.

What's amusing is that SV is also a place bankrolled by VC, and the VC firms don't buy into that stuff at all. They have no problem paying huge bonuses to lure people away Morgan Stanley, Goldman, etc. But you'll rarely hear them espouse for engineers the mantras they believe for financial professionals: you gotta pay those big bonuses if you want to get the "top talent."

zenbowman2• 13 years ago

Exactly, lol.

Of course they want engineers to be desperate, it's a lot cheaper that way. This idea that the best ideas come from desperation isn't necessarily accurate anyway, builders want to build, its in their blood. It's why I hack on the weekends and played with breadboards and legos as a kid.

Having enough money allows me to focus on doing what I love best: building stuff. I want to be a part of building the Holodeck, paying me less won't make me want it more.

eli_gottlieb10• 13 years ago

It's perhaps difficult to quantify the marginal contribution of your latest hire. However, almost all companies are keeping track of their revenue-per-employee, and it's fairly common around here to remark that your company is not yet doing well until that number hits about $200,000/man-year. Apple and Google and the like have about double that.

At that level of revenue, yes, there are taxes and capital costs to pay, but you can also afford damn fine salaries, too.

eli_gottlieb10• 13 years ago

From God's mouth to yours, brother. If there is a shortage on the labor market, let prices rise and quantities-sold drop, same as anything else!

dyno123453• 13 years ago

I keep hearing about the extreme shortage of software engineers. But why haven't I heard about software engineer salaries skyrocketing?

If supply is short and prices don't rise, something in the market is broken.

michaelochurch4• 13 years ago

It comes down to the MacLeod hierarchy. For a lot more on this, go here: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/02/26/gervais-macle...

Losers (bottom/workers): trade away expectancy and long-term growth for stability and risk reduction. Rationally checked-out. Strategically minimize discomfort.

Clueless (middle/managers): non-strategic, eager people who clean up the mess made by Losers below and Sociopaths above them. Give a lot to the company, get mediocre returns. Losers are actually less "losing", because they know the trade they are making. Clueless expect to be rich, respected, or secure one day but hit a glass ceiling (Effort Thermocline, the highest one can go by working hard rather than smart) and never get it.

Sociopaths (top/executives): strategic and hard-working, but insubordinate and risk seeking. Take the other side of Loser risk-selling and turn it into personal gain. Good at engineering situations so that upside risk goes to them and downside goes to others (often Clueless).

MacLeod Losers are most of the workforce, and it's relatively easy to turn a reliable profit on one. You pay him a pittance X, and he gives you labor worth 1.25X, and at scale you can make a lot of money this way. However, if you're trying to build a brand or reputation quickly and impress people (press/investors) your average* productivity per person matters, not your sum profit. MacLeod Losers, who reliably return a small-but-positive profit for the company, bring that economically unimportant but socially relevant average down.

VC-istan is a world without MacLeod Losers. MacLeod Sociopaths are the investors and tech press and executives who are brought in by VCs after the company's de-risked. But VC-istan startups (founders and employees) are all-Clueless. That's why "you should want to work 55 hours a week because you really want to" in VC-istan. That's why being a "true believer" in the company matters more than being able to do the job. That's why there's such an age discrimination problem. They're looking for Clueless.

What keeps a company or system stable is the Effort Thermocline. It's the interface between Clueless and Sociopaths and it's the point where jobs become easier with increasing rank instead of harder. (Clueless are often oblivious to its existence.) It's the glass ceiling that you can't cross unless you work smart and "get it". The unconditional work ethic of, e.g., the macho brogrammer only gets you to upper-tier Clueless. VC-istan's Effort Thermocline is especially stable because it exists between companies.

gregpilling3• 13 years ago

From your list of positions one might occupy, I find none appealing to me. Since I own the business I work at, does that automatically qualify me to be a sociopath?

Having nice work conditions works for the boss too. Who wants to own a crappy business? I want to go work somewhere nice, and if I am in charge of the place, I think it is then up to me to make it happen.

jkonowitch• 13 years ago

All of us have different equations with which we evaluate opportunities. An exciting work environment and a chance to build something you believe in may be a perfectly rational reason to work for below-market rates, especially if you take equity, in essence making an investment in the company.

epicureanideal• 13 years ago

I have a similar perspective on this issue. I would like to discuss this further. If you are interested please email me. My contact is in my profile. Same invitation is open to anyone else who has the same perspective.

nradov• 13 years ago

The main reason that top software developers aren't paid more than market rate is that their true value is almost impossible to accurately quantify. This is less of a problem in the financial services industry where it's relatively easy to measure the profit contribution of an individual investment banker or stockbroker.

waterlesscloud4• 13 years ago

It's hard to quantify precisely, but it's not that hard to quantify in general terms. In general terms, it's a lot more than 0.2%.

dyno123453• 13 years ago

In companies that are generating significant revenue it's pretty easy to tell if a change is profitable or not, and that you could make X more changes worth Y with Z more developers - not even trying to put a price on individual developers, just a typical developer whom may not even need to be a diamond-in-the-rough, rock star, ninja, volcano-surfing lion tamer.

In many business models it's pretty easy to see the value added by a new, average developer at this firm may be way more than it is at other firms in the hiring market, and are irrationally failing to make gains from trade and inefficiently allocating the labor market by refusing to capture the quantity of labor supplied at a higher price point, before of (I think) cultural reasons.

brador• 13 years ago

Build something good is no longer an acceptable USP for a startup. Any tech of value can be copied fast.

The tech innovator has been replaced at the head of the table by the hustler. Someone who can network, cut deals, bring in the $ is more valuable to a startup this cycle. It's no longer value being traded, it's expected value.

This is what the 07-13 spin of the wheel is all about.

Hustle or die.

freework• 13 years ago

This has been my experience. "Hustle" and "Hack" make up the ying-yang of tech startups. Hustle skills are more valued nowadays in SV than hacking skills. Silicon Valley these days is full of hustle and hype, but with no hack to back it up.

prostoalex• 13 years ago

Few points in defense of perks:

1) A lot of it is about efficient use of engineering (or sales, or product) time. Yes, one can skip catered/cooked meals, gyms, and onsite dentists, but what's the tradeoff? The team will go out for lunch, which, depending on location, might waste up to two hours of employees' time. In a busy location like SoMa or FiDi it's just deciding on the place and then waiting to be seated, in a remote location, like Google's or Facebook's campuses, it would be the time it takes everybody to get in the car and drive.

2) Tax savings also come into play if the company is profitable or on the verge of achieving profitability. Catered lunch to every employee of the company is a business expense, transferring the same amount of money to an employee in the form of higher salary or bonus is taxed at both company and employee levels.

3) Some of the perks cost very little to establish. Car washes, onsite dentists, haircuts are something that employees usually have to pay for, and it's just the matter of providing some space to the vendor who's willing to provide this service to the employees.

eli_gottlieb10• 13 years ago

Maybe some of these examples sound preposterous to you, but they’re what the rest of America does every day. Looking for candidates who have visited that hard place in themselves at one point in their life isn’t some Marxist fantasy of mine. It’s how capitalism works best.

I'm pretty much spewing morsels at my screen now, screaming for the sheer irony of this statement.

MARXIST FANTASY!? Bull ever-loving mother-fucking shit! Yes, this is capitalism, but not "how capitalism works best", this is Capitalism, Red in Tooth and Claw, solely because the author values the bloodshed and tears more than the actual creation of wealth in today's startups.

I could take a criticism of the frivolity of some of today's businesses, or some other attempt to persuade that the boom cycle is reaching its end and the "fake" businesses that don't really produce enough value to justify their own existence will have to die.

But this is just blood-fetish! He says in his own words: engineers' salaries are worth every penny in value created!

Startups, like professional football, are best done by the most desperate people on the planet.

Then get out of Silicon Valley and take this Fight Club crap to Gaza Strip, one of the most desperate regions on the planet.

Or just shove your head in this instead: http://www.culturecongress.eu/english/theme/theme_cyberiad/b...

zenbowman2• 13 years ago

lol, nice.

bravohippo9• 13 years ago

Oh, eli, you never disappoint.

This guy has Protestant work ethic brain damage. He enjoys the aesthetic of self-flagellation, the pain and suffering.

He's sado-masochistic and loves pain, both his own pain and the pain of others.

People who talk like this are the worst people in the world because they always end up taking out their bloodlust on others. They advocate for low wages, for harsher punishments, for more terror at every opportunity. It is the most blatant expression of thanatos and the fact that people like this hold significant positions of power pretty much sums up why the majority of the world's population has their head held underwater by a tiny, brutal elite.

The elites are sadists. They morally justify their sadism with their own masochism--"I love to suffer, so you should too!"

Horrific.

eli_gottlieb10• 13 years ago

Oh, eli, you never disappoint.

Ok, apparently I really do need to shut up.

This guy has Protestant work ethic brain damage.

The thing being that the Protestant work-ethic comes off as completely ridiculous to anyone who's not a Calvinist or a secular raised on Calvinist values.

I mean, I pulled some truly long working hours just last week-and-a-half. Project had to get done, and I had realized I needed to rebuild it shortly before it was due in. So it got done, and more than just that got done too.

Doesn't mean I liked it, for Heaven's sake, nor that I would recommend continual 12-hour workdays and all-nighters as the Right Way. It's entirely unsustainable over the long term, and, as I deserved, I crashed hard on the weekend.

peterhunt• 13 years ago

I challenge the idea that a startup is the best place for an aspiring new engineer to learn. If you don't have an adequate number of high caliber technical folks on your team it's simply impossible to effectively absorb and train new engineers.

Just because someone is smart and has raw talent does not mean they are wise. In order to build that technical wisdom you need to be a part of an engineering organization that has it already. Some startups do, but universally characterizing all startups as being the best learning environment is incomplete advice at best and dangerous, self-serving advice at worst.

When new grads approach me about wanting to do a startup I tell them to work at a Facebook or google for a year to learn the ropes, then make the jump.

bravohippo9• 13 years ago

Like you said, it's just complete bullshit. Rapidly assembling CRUD apps to discover a market is somehow gaining technical skills?

If you want to develop technical skills, the way to do it is by reading and then trying to solve the challenging perennial problems. This generally is not profitable activity which is why it is funded by research grants.

This guy is confusing technical skills with something else, something that sounds like a hypermasculine myth about the value of self-flagellation. It is Protestant work ethic bullshit, the kind of bullshit that, when it permeates a society, makes that society utterly anti-pleasure and impossible for any sane person to enjoy.

qwerta• 13 years ago

Perks such as massage, car wash, or yoga classes are peanuts. How much it costs to wash a car? 10 dollars a month? It is like saying company provides chair and free toilet paper in a bathroom.

softbuilder• 13 years ago

Great. Here comes the next interview question. "Tell me about a time when you did something hard?"

bennyg• 13 years ago

I agree with what he says, but his bio at the bottom feels a little at odds with it. Sequoia backed... Sequoia backed...

majormajor• 13 years ago

Is there any other industry where people in high demand like to talk and read so much about how they're actually overpaid?

eksith• 13 years ago

Good article, but I wish one of these days I can visit a tech site without having to disable JavaScript.

Myrmornis• 13 years ago

However much sense it contains, it really is best to avoid writing an article along the lines of "Arrh, now, back when I were a lad..."

michaelochurch4• 13 years ago

I don't buy in to this "excellence requires discomfort" mythology, at least as used to justify bad work conditions and low compensation in startups. Truly excellent people have intrinsic ambition that wouldn't go away just because they had stable, high salaries. In fact, they're going to have more freedom and do better stuff.

What causes wealth to ruin many people isn't comfort, but the social pressures that are often required if one wants to stay wealthy and in access to high-status people, most of whom turn out to be a defective or, at best, a mediocre crowd. Giving people enough money that they have the autonomy to run their lives and some comfort isn't going to have that effect.

SatvikBeri• 13 years ago

There are real ways in which certain types of discomfort are useful, but many organizations have completely perverted this into "all discomfort builds character."

-To improve rapidly at a skill, you have to practice at the edge of your abilities. If you're a decent writer you're not going to improve by mindlessly writing what you already know for hours on end. Only the time you spend challenging yourself really counts.

-There's a decent amount of evidence that being surrounded by wealth triggers laziness. That is, if your office has opulent wooden desks, high-end art, etc., that sends signals along the lines of "conserve the resources we already have." While if your surroundings are a little messy it triggers an instinct to work hard and gain more resources. The Talent Code goes into detail on this. Note that all that matters here is appearance-this doesn't mean that you'll get more performance by giving your employees crappy computers, it means you'll be better off if your office looks spartan.

As long as a company only promotes "discomfort" in these two elements, that can actually be a good thing. But when you get to the point of physical discomfort, that's almost certainly a negative.

michaelochurch4• 13 years ago

That's really interesting. You're absolutely right on the first point. The issue is more of one where a corporate environment with prevailing discomfort discourages the high-end deliberate practice, because people don't want any more risk or pain. As for the second, this is the first time I've heard about it, but it makes a lot of sense.

goldfeld• 13 years ago

I see this as part of a bigger problem, which is a lack of gusto in Sillicon Valley. People aren't striving to solve problems deeply meaningful to themselves, they are looking for the next big buck in social/local/corny. Others are just as much going after whatever seems to have money in it rather than some problem domain they could be passionate about. Then, of course, if you haven't some problem that truly bugs your existence, you're gonna cash out and live like a fat cow as soon as you can. I could never understand people aiming for exits. Exit? I want to change the world! Or a tiny bit of it. But MY tiny bit.

Passion, people! I know the term gets thrown around a lot and it often doesn't mean as much as people make it, but I'd say a minimum of passionate involvement with your problem domain would be nice to find in SV more often. I know I can never rest on my laurels until I've brought down at least one big corporation by doing what they do in an open source, anarchic, power to the people way. Hell, I want to bring down the www, have it lose mindshare to a fully peer-to-peer network, but bluetooth doesn't cut it. I hate these walled gardens, I fear for our future which they can undermine, and I wouldn't want to contribute to more of these gardens, pretty on the inside with unicorns and flowers, until you reach a wall and see surveillance equipment and people shot down trying to escape.

But what do VCs know? They're in for a buck, and so are most companies who get big enough to lose it's founder's initial vision. Some companies are founded on a great vision, to solve a passion imbued problem, to give true value to society. O'Reilly has been discussed here recently and it rekindled a lot of my beliefs. I don't want to be at the helm of some billion-dollar ex-startup if I'm just gonna be a puppet to a board of investors. I'd rather stay lean, hungry and foolish, make a true crowd business out of my problem domain, where my software is open source and lots of third-parties have a go at profit. I'm just one of them, thriving on an open ecosystem. That sounds better. I like what App.net is doing. More people should follow the lead.

DaniFong• 13 years ago

Every era has its pyramids; this is far from the first or worst severe misallocation of human effort and resources.

It absolutely is happening, however. So if some tiny fraction of this current era's chosen realize their good fortune and power, they could truly change the world.

auctiontheory• 13 years ago

If you're 25 years old and have no college debt and no responsibilities of any kind, $50K may be enough to live on in SF or in the Valley. (Although probably not without parental assistance, or some sweet group housing deal.)

If you're 35 or 45, $100K or even $200K is not going to pay the mortgage and support a family.

We clearly have seen some egregious examples of CEOs cashing out before their company succeeded. But the suggestion that paying yourself $150K is out of line - displays a lack of familiarity with the cost of living in the Bay Area today.

waterlesscloud4• 13 years ago

Now $200k isn't enough to pay a mortgage and support a family?

This story is getting ridiculous.

I know people in SV who are supporting entire families on incomes less than $100k. It's not uncommon.

It's simply exaggeration, bordering on lying, to say otherwise.

gregpilling3• 13 years ago

From the article: "After all, when evaluating a Redfin job applicant one of the big questions I’m trying to answer is “when did she do something hard?”

It could be something you put yourself through for fun like running a marathon or far more serious like fighting in a war. It could be the grinding repetition of preparing for a piano recital or the grit required to dig ditches or paint houses for a living. It could be raising a child all by yourself."

---------

I completely agree with this part. I have hired a 100+ people and the most impressive ones in the long run are usually people who have achieved something notable - published in a poetry book, achieved something in a competitive sport, etc. - it doesn't seem to matter what it is, as long as they have done something hard, and that they know they achieved something. It seems to give them the confidence to get through more challenging problems in the workplace. Even a person who has run a small 2 person business has achieved something that most of the population never will, and they tend to have more 'grit' or whatever you wish to call it.

CurtMonash• 13 years ago

Entrepreneurship is a game for the highly motivated.

The nature of that motivation can vary from person to person.

Searching For Beasts In Silicon Valley’s ‘War For Talent’

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