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Reddit’s CEO said that when he returned in 2015, he had to remind employees to work hard.
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There’s a tendency in the US tech industry to place idealism above hard work, he said.
Idealistic people work harder than anyone—for idealistic causes.
They don’t work so hard for companies that betray their idealism.
It’s so absurd for them to think they are going to get people to work harder without idealism.
Working harder isn’t very scalable. Working more productively can be, but almost always requires investment.
A lot of people don’t understand what productivity means and often use it interchangeably with working harder. However from the owner’s perspective, getting salaried workers to work more hours, assuming the extra hours produce marginally more output is net new profit. As they’re seeking ever increasing profit, that’s one lever they have to push to get some growth. The next one on the labour side is decreasing salaries.
I was idealistic at my current place. Then my manager and another key person left, and it all went out the window. Even when they were here, I was still more idealistic than was realistic. But my manager helped channel that.
Now I feel betrayed and sidelined and stifled. Disillusioned. Totally unnecessary too.
I joined a company a decade ago thinking “meh” but discovered a fantastic work env. The mandate changed: make XYZ suck less. That’s it. It was kinda a startup within a stuffy 100-year-old setup. And yeah, we worked like freed slaves. But then, same, the stuffy people wanted to helm the awesome, committed a coup, and installed feckless morons on place of our command team.
Soooo I left, along with about half the staff. It wasnt idealism so much as an environment of respect and support, but it fell apart fast when the good people were tossed.
