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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.
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.
I got fired for working “hard”. Excuse me karen it’s nature body function.
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.
Working harder (if overtime is uncompensated) does increase productivity. But it’s an abusive and ineffective or even counterproductive practice. I used to lead a service line within a medium-sized consulting firm, and I made it clear to managers reporting to me that forcing their staff into extended overtime in order to meet milestones would get those managers sacked for bad planning. It only took a couple firings before the other managers started taking it seriously. The biggest problem was managers bidding jobs with the clients that assumed the whole squad would be working 60-70 hours weekly. That’s burning out our people to take on work which, if correctly estimated, wouldn’t be profitable for the firm. And that leaves zero contingency for when something goes wrong, which it often does.
But the moronic frat boys who run many IT firms and consultancies still try that One Simple Trick, on the assumption that if they burn out their staff, there are always more suckers who can be found to replace them.
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.
If I have a job, I’m not going to jump through my asshole just to enrich some Sand Hill Road greedhead unless there’s something substantial in it for me.