Hi -
I helped write the article...would love to hear the nuance, either as a comment here or you can DM me on Twitter @evanish to speak more on it.
Thanks Jason
1,583 karma · joined May 7, 2012
Blog: http://jasonevanish.com Twitter: @Evanish
Contact: evanish dot j at gmail
Previously, I ran Product at KISSmetrics and co-founded Greenhorn Connect, a site for Boston entrepreneurs sold to The Capital Network in August 2014.
I helped write the article...would love to hear the nuance, either as a comment here or you can DM me on Twitter @evanish to speak more on it.
Thanks Jason
Employees quit managers, not companies. If you've ever worked at a dysfunctional, hyper-growth startup, or a big company wrecked by politics, you've experienced how bad management can make work miserable. It’s crazy managers aren’t given more help. We're changing that by helping with the fundamentals of good management through software.
We have hundreds of paying customers, and want to bring great design and experience to our validated and growing product. You will help in designing & building Lighthouse to be a world-class product.
### You:
You’ll have the chance to bring all your skills together as part of a team that’s customer driven and excited to make more people love their jobs and the managers they work for. It's a mission you can feel great about working on every day.
You’re an awesome fit for this role if you...
-> Take great pride in your work and obsess over getting the details right.
-> Always look for places to simplify, whether that’s removing a button, or making 30 lines of code work with 5.
-> You love using funnels & analytics, as well as talking to customers, to ensure what you design & build is best for customers.
### Tech stack currently includes (open to changes you advocate for): Rails, Capistrano, haml/scss, bootstrap, jQuery, Postgres, Stripe, GCal API
* Interested in the role? Email Jason at GetLighthouse dot com mentioning Hacker News in the subject line. Please, no recent code school grads.
Employees quit managers, not companies. If you've ever worked at a dysfunctional, hyper-growth startup, or a big company wrecked by politics, you've experienced how bad management can make work miserable. It’s crazy managers aren’t given more help. We're changing that by helping with the fundamentals of good management through software.
We're a 500 Startups alum, with a growing product with hundreds of paying customers, and want to bring more great design and experience to our product.
### You:
If you're excited to build an amazing product leading the process from design through implementation, this is the perfect role for you (with the big equity to match). You’ll have the chance to bring all your skills together as part of a team that’s customer driven and excited to make more people love their jobs. It's a mission you can feel great about working on every day.
You’re an awesome fit for this role if you...
-> Take great pride in your work and obsess over getting the details right.
-> Always look for places to simplify, whether that’s removing a button, or making 30 lines of code work with 5.
-> You love using funnels & analytics, as well as talking to customers, to ensure what you design & build is best for customers.
### Tech stack currently includes (open to changes you advocate for): Rails, Capistrano, haml/scss, bootstrap, jQuery, Postgres, Stripe, GCal API
* Interested in the role? Email Jobs at GetLighthouse dot com mentioning Hacker News in the subject line. Please, no recent code school grads.
Are 33 year olds "younger people"? Because being born in 1983 is the generally agreed millennial dividing line and starting point of Gen X.
The larger point is to encourage the step back and a broader discussion, and to share some of the data showing that people actually don't want piles of feedback on every little thing every day.
It's also the point to emphasize that waiting to have a real conversation about it is best no matter how polished you are. You can be a perfect communicator, and taking the time to hear their side, go over examples, and talk about next steps ensures the feedback is actually meaningful (i.e.- leads to positive change). Firing that off a note in a "Real Time Feedback" system does none of that.
I'll bet on the leader that picks their moments for feedback and is deliberate and detailed, over someone reliant on their exact eloquence in the moment every time.
Leadership by example, training, adhering to values all matter. It just so happens that use a tried and true system of actual structure gives you a wealth of knowledge and experience to pull from.
Could a flat org work? Maybe? So far, it seems like every company that tries and gets to scale has serious problems. Maybe it makes sense stick to innovating on your core business, and sticking to business best practices in your processes. (A recent post by the former Cofounder/CEO of Brightroll digs into this: https://medium.com/@todsacerdoti/0-to-640m-non-obvious-lesso...)
"We began to realize that by building a company with a flat org structure, we had done the exact opposite of what we had intended. We had centralized all the decision-making, and we were relying on a secret implicit structure to make progress.
Every company has a structure. If you don't explicitly define your structure, then you are left with an implicit one, and that can stifle productivity. We had hoped that being flat would let us move faster and be more creative, but as we grew, we ended up with an unspoken hierarchy that actually slowed down our ability to execute."
Employees quit managers, not companies. If you've ever worked at a dysfunctional, hyper-growth startup, or a big company wrecked by politics, you've experienced how bad management can make work miserable. It’s crazy managers aren’t given more help. We're changing that by helping with the fundamentals of good management through software.
We're in 500 Startups right now, have a functioning product with hundreds of paying customers, and want to bring great design and experience to our validated and growing MVP. We’re looking for you to take the lead on designing Lighthouse to be a world-class product, while we focus on sales, marketing, and the back end.
### You:
If you're excited and ready to take the drivers seat on the direction of a product from design through implementation, this is the perfect role for you (with the big equity to match). You’ll have the chance to bring all your skills together as part of a team that’s customer driven and excited to make more people love their jobs. It's a mission you can feel great about working on every day.
You’re an awesome fit for this role if you...
-> Take great pride in your work and obsess over getting the details right.
-> Always look for places to simplify, whether that’s removing a button, or making 30 lines of code work with 5.
-> You love using funnels & analytics, as well as talking to customers, to ensure what you design & build is best for customers.
### Tech stack currently includes (open to changes you advocate for): Rails, Capistrano, haml/scss, bootstrap, jQuery, Postgres, Stripe, GCal API
* Interested in the role? Email Jason at GetLighthouse dot com mentioning Hacker News in the subject line. Please, no recent code school grads.
Employees quit managers, not companies. If you've ever worked at a dysfunctional, hyper-growth startup, or a big company wrecked by politics, you've experienced how bad management can make work miserable. It’s crazy managers aren’t given more help. We're changing that by helping with the fundamentals of good management through software.
We have a functioning product with hundreds of paying customers, and want to bring great design and experience to our validated and growing MVP. We’re looking for someone to take the lead on making Lighthouse a world-class product.
### You:
If you’ve been building your skills for years on product teams and are looking for the chance to take the drivers seat on the direction of a product from design through implementation, this is the perfect role for you (with the big equity to match). You’ll have the chance to bring all your skills together as part of a team that’s customer driven and excited to make more people love their jobs.
You’re a fit for this role if you...
-> Take great pride in your work and obsess over getting the details right
-> Always look for places to simplify, whether that’s removing a button, or making 30 lines of code work with 5.
-> You love using funnels & analytics, as well as talking to customers, to ensure what you design & build is right.
### Tech stack currently includes: Rails, Capistrano, html/scss, bootstrap, jQuery, Postgres, Stripe, GCal API
* Interested in the role? Email Jason at GetLighthouse dot com mentioning Hacker News in the subject line. Please, no recent code school grads.
## Looking for: Founding Product Engineer
Employees quit managers, not companies. If you've ever worked at a dysfunctional, hyper-growth startup, or a big company wrecked by politics, you've experienced how bad management can make work miserable.
It’s crazy managers aren’t given more help. We're changing that by helping managers with the fundamentals of good management with software.
## You:
You're a talented engineer who wants to own full-stack development and product architecture, and is excited by the opportunity to build and lead a team as the company grows. You’ll be taking over for (or managing, your choice) an offshore team that has helped build out the product to profitability and hundreds of paying customers.
If you want to build an awesome product and team that helps more people love coming to work, with the processes and systems you feel are best, this is a big opportunity, with the equity/upside to match.
## Tech stack: Rails, Capistrano, html/scss, bootstrap, jQuery, Postgres, Stripe, GCal API
* Interested in the role? Email Jason at GetLighthouse dot com mentioning Hacker News in the subject line.
Sorry, please no recent code school grads (We need you to already have startup experience).
Coincidentally, this is why I started a company, GetLighthouse.com to tackle this and the general problem of bad people management practices. It's amazing what a little structure, best practices, and automating can do to improve things for a manager and their team.
- Only 30% of employees are engaged
- 50% of employees have left a job to get away from a manager
- 25% of Millennials plan to quit their job in the next year.
Unfortunately, HR is who watches over these issues and are totally disconnected from the root problem (bad management issues). They focus on compliance, lawsuits, and stability. Usually their org is small too, so they have no idea what it's like to have 10 direct reports and constant pressure to ship.
https://getlighthouse.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Ga...
(Source: Gallup State of the American summary: https://getlighthouse.com/blog/gallup-employee-engagement-su...)
If you do one on ones well, the trust and rapport you build in the good times will help you get through the bad because you're more comfortable having much needed conversations.
Coincidentally, this problem generally contributes to turnover issues, which tend to happen in waves as groups leave. It's a pretty logical process on why it happens and while it's easy to fix, most don't: https://getlighthouse.com/blog/employee-turnover-why-employe...
#### Looking for: Product Engineer
We're a bootstrapped, profitable, and growing B2B SaaS product. Looking to transition from offshore development to someone I can work with locally to move fast and build a product customers love.
#### Tech stack includes:
If you're looking for the chance to build an awesome product and grow a team with the processes and systems you feel are best, this is a big opportunity, with the salary + equity/upside to match.
#### Full Description at:
* Apply there or email Jason at GetLighthouse dot com mentioning Hacker News in the subject line.
Go take the absolute highest paying offer the next time you interview for jobs, and if you do that a series of times, I think you'll find you won't be as happy as taking the best overall offer that takes into account things like:
- Role/responsibility
- How interesting the work is
- Whether you're excited to work with your future peers
There's a reason people leave finance despite the high pay. There's more to life than money.
Toyota actually even brought this to their blue collar workers with their "Total Product System" which allowed anyone to stop the assembly line if they caught a problem and engaged them in feedback to find solutions. (More here: http://hbr.org/2004/05/learning-to-lead-at-toyota/ar/1)
Issues tied to financial stability certainly will drive you to want to get a higher salary, especially with how impossible home ownership is in places like Silicon Valley.
With that being said, if you aren't having to stare at your bank balance every morning and sweat your salary, then what makes you happiest at work is those other factors of things like Pink's framework of Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. It's also the lack of those 3 areas that will make a job that pays sufficiently pretty damn miserable leading you to seek a more fulfilling job if you can find one that meets your salary needs. I bet there's a limit to what you'd put up with at work even if they paid you $1 million per year.
Having worked in a number of early stage startups I have talked to a number of older members of teams I've been on who have forgone as much as $50-60k in salary to move from a giant company to a mid-size startup. That definitely affected their quality of life to do it, but it was worth it to wake up happy, despite perhaps making some sacrifices. As they told me, they had to make some adjustments in their lifestyle but then got used to it and it was okay.
The other important factor that I would encourage you to look at Pink's research for is that it turns out if you use financial incentives to tie to creative tasks (like an engineer shipping features) it actually has been found in psychology studies to lower the quality of the work and the motivation of the person. This means bonuses are often a really bad idea. The good thing about a salary is that it is disconnected from a specific creative task.
A few examples:
1) Mary Meeker's Internet Trends 2015 -> http://www.slideshare.net/kleinerperkins/internet-trends-v1
2) Gallup, here and in some of their research -> http://www.gallup.com/services/182138/state-american-manager...
3) Deloitte's latest study on Millennials -> https://getlighthouse.com/blog/deloitte-survey-millennials-2...
4) Reid Hoffman's book, The Alliance -> http://www.slideshare.net/reidhoffman/the-alliance-a-visual-...
Companies don't reward managers for caring about people's development, so it won't change until companies start to.
Turns out some things you need to be ok, but they don't make you happy. If you don't have them, they make you unhappy. They're called "Hygiene Factors".
Then there's a whole set of things that if you have them, they make you happy, but the absence doesn't make you unhappy. These are called "Motivators".
Mbrock is essentially asking for a one on one that isn't filled with Status Updates and platitudes. One that fosters genuine conversation and values their input.
You're talking about real growth and whether it's a specific title or new skills, that's also a huge motivator.
Unfortunately, in most companies, managers are not rewarded for doing either of those things, nor punished for failing to do them.
The only company I know that even measures it is Google, who uses something called the "Upward Feedback Survey" to gauge it and found correlation between scores on the survey and quality of managers (team output, turnover, etc). More on the survey and some of the research behind it here: https://getlighthouse.com/blog/google-management/
See Dan Pink's Drive for a good summary of many of this research, which has led to his Autonomy - Mastery - Purpose framework that is part of his more well-known TED Talk on the subject: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation
Coincidentally, those 3 pieces of his framework hit on many of the aspects of this thread and especially the Gallup research on the desire for goals and growth.
In the "Great Recession" a similar effect happened when many who lost their jobs took new jobs that they were overqualified for. This blocked out entry level workers and recent graduates, especially when other companies also adopted hiring freezes.
A related situation can also be if a company stops growing. If you're not growing then the company doesn't have new opportunities for people to take on. There's few promotions then and work can be "maintenance mode" (as an early thread above talks about with engineers) for everyone, thus creating boredom and career stagnation.