-
Reddit’s CEO said that when he returned in 2015, he had to remind employees to work hard.
-
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.
Yeah that dude is on the short list too.
Which communities delete comments for mentioning the gentleman in green overalls?
Former mod of /r/jailbait says what?
It’s always funny seeing these silicon valley startups have essentially zero retained employees and engineers except the CEO.
All money machines built on the backs of long gone engineers that only exist because they’ve cornered their share of the oligopoly market.
“In the Bay Area, broadly, is this — it’s almost an entitlement of, ‘I work at these companies, but I don’t have to work very hard and I’m here for myself,’” he said.
I always found it amusing how the term “entitlement” has been butchered by Americans. It’s the only language they know and they keep butchering it with low level polemical theatrics.
How is “I’m here for myself” an entitlement? This is not your family. The goal in any job is to maximize returns, i.e. least amount of work for high financial return (like … wait for it … running a business). Sure there are other factors at play too (career growth, not wanting others to have to work more because of you, being genuinely interested in what you are doing and not seeing it as work, not wanting to treat customers like shit), but that’s an individual thing. A business isn’t automatically entitled to any of that.
The entitlement of the business owners and CEO are the real fucking entitlement here. These pricks aren’t entitled to my motivation. If they want me to be motivated to work hard, they have to provide that motivation. If the pay is shit, the work is shit, the colleagues are shit, and the boss is an entitled prick, there’s no fucking way I’m motivated, and no fucking way am I gonna work hard.
While we’re on the topic. If a business owner wants his workers to care about the profits of the company. Maybe they should be guarenteed a part of the profits, possibly even make their share of the profits be determined by how much value they add to the company. Though I see why the business owner doesn’t want socialist stuff like that, since they’d end up owing the company money.
Agreed. Although I am not even going this far.
I don’t understand Huffman’s use of the English language (I learned it when I was 4 and I use it for work and media consumption).
Idealism? What idealism? I’ve worked in several American startups and corps, I have friends who’ve work in multiple US tech corps and smaller startups. I have no clue how he brought idealism into the picture. And how is idealism related to working hard or not working hard? It’s an unrelated concept. If anything, idealism implies you work too hard, instead of going with the flow and putting in effort only when it benefits you. And what’s entitlement got to do with any of this?
It honestly sounds like Huffman bringing up random keywords in a borderline word salad “Entitlement! Entitlement is bad, right (it’s neither good or bad)? Idealism is impractical! We must work hard!”
What idealism?
Probably things like “but the mods do that work for free, we should make things better for them” and “but we have no original content, it’s the users who provide value, we should make things better for them.” You know, stuff like that.
If the pay is shit, the work is shit, the colleagues are shit, and the boss is an entitled prick, there’s no fucking way I’m motivated, and no fucking way am I gonna work hard.
Giving me flashbacks to one of the worst jobs I ever had years and years ago. Within five years of leaving, all but two members of the most toxic team I’d ever worked with had quit, and the CEO had twice relocated the main office to cheaper and smaller buildings (I presume because of a drop in revenue). He treated them like shit, and they all passed it on down to new hires, effectively destroying employee morale from the top down. What a miserable crab bucket of a job.
I always found it amusing how the term “entitlement” has been butchered by Americans.
In this case it’s a deliberate misuse by the GOP to conflate the word with welfare programs that the voters see as free handouts to the lazy. So then they can tout polling data that shows voters against entitlement programs as fodder to gut/end social security and Medicare. I’m constantly having to have this discussion with conservatives when they use the word incorrectly.
