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Comment by yupper32 | Hacker News Reader

> Have 1-2 interviews with a take home.

> fire those that don't perform up to expectations quickly.

This attitude is why I haven't been recruited. I have 10 years at big tech and companies expect me to jump ship with the threat of getting fired if I don't immediately live up to expectations (even if I'm confident that I will, but I'll never know how high your expectations are until it's too late). Add on wild take home assignments on top of my full time job and (typically) less pay than big tech.

It's simply not worth the trouble.

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I've never poached someone without giving them a significant raise for one thing. I'm always clear about my expectations which are pretty simple - your time belongs to you. We pay you a high salary and expect you to get your assigned work done. As long as you get it done on time, you can fuck off and enjoy all of the excess time you have. If you do all of your two week sprint work in 20 minutes, you can enjoy the next two weeks off.

Most companies pile work upon their best performers. I'm the opposite. I reward our best performers by giving them back their time. Expectations differ some depending upon compensation, but really as long as you get your reasonable expectations done, I'm happy, you're happy, management is happy. It's never been an issue.

> If you do all of your two week sprint work in 20 minutes, you can enjoy the next two weeks off.

Citation/sources wanted. That was my expectation with a 'salary' job; being paid to get the work done. Work is done under 40hr, congrats go home! Work takes longer than 40hr, oh well. In my experience though, in _every single_ company punishes efficiency and hard work, with more work. You're done in 20h? CONGRATS, you get Bob's work now too! Make sure to get his and your work done! Leaving early is absolutely not heard of.

Yes, I/we do things significantly different than any other company I've worked for. Working fully remote makes it easier since you don't see people getting up from their desks or not coming into work. Our developers have no set hours, can work any hours they want, and are only expected to get the work assigned to them during a sprint done, no more, no less. I brought this style of work to our workplace and it's been a massive success. Everyone is extremely happy and productivity is through the roof. Makes for very loyal and hard working employees.

If you read Drive by Daniel Pink, you'll learn that the things that unlock higher performance are Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose. That's what we strive to give to our employees, including autonomy over their own time and how they get their work done.

Great to hear, glad that's working for you and the employees. Sounds great. Thanks for the book Req; I'm not in a position at a company to implement such teachings, I'm just an IC. Autonomy is certainly a big driver of job happiness for me though, I get it.

Thanks! We're constantly refining it. Employee satisfaction is a huge priority for me as we only hire top talent. Happy employees are productive employees. And productive employees make my bosses happy which makes our sales go up which makes the value of my equity go up. Everything is just better this way.

If I ever feel like writing a book (fat chance), I'll try to spread the gospel.

I’m curious how you handle overly optimistic estimates with this approach?

Quality expectations make a lot of sense, but “on time” is famously hard in software. How do you decide whether the developer was slow or the deadline was unrealistic? And similarly, how do you protect developers from feeling that they have to throw out work-life balance to hit deadlines/sprints that turn out to be unrealistic?

Good question. We generally overestimate to make sure people are given lots of time to complete a task. We also are not strict on deadlines. Didn’t make it this sprint but put forth your best effort in 40 hours a week? No worries at all. Good job. We’ll finish it in the next sprint. We never expect anyone to sacrifice work/life balance to further the company, a luxury of hiring only the best developers who keep my managers happy working reasonable hours. A lot of it is my managing their expectations as well. So far it’s working well.

> threat of getting fired if I don't immediately live up to expectations

I also try to fire fast and every single time the issue is that they do not actually have the skills they listed on their resume.

That's why the coding test and that's why you need to fire fast.

I have all kinds of patience for good people that need ramp up time.

You need to have a very very clear idea of what the new hire will be doing when they start.

Plenty of companies assign people badly and then act all surprised that they don't have a Plug Compatible Interchangeable Engineer. https://kidneybone.com/c2/wiki/PlugCompatibleInterchangeable...

> You need to have a very very clear idea of what the new hire will be doing when they start.

Yep. My latest hire started a few weeks ago and I had a back log of pretty simple tasks that were well within their wheelhouse and a dedicated mentor to help bring them up to speed.

I've been on the receiving end of gruelling "sink or swim" initiations that were called "onboarding"

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