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I didn't realize "caring" meant "being exploitable" as in "working extra hard for no extra pay."
I guess I just don't care.
Unless it's my own company I'd have to be making at least $500k to really "care".
I read through all the comments and it is amazing that nobody is mentioning the fact that the reason why this 2020 post is coming up now is because of this:
Scale recently laid off 200 full-time employees and terminated 500 contractor positions. The CEO, author of the post, went to work for Meta.
https://scale.com/blog/scale-ai-announces-next-phase-of-comp...
I agree that this information is highly interesting and relevant considering the content of the article.
On the other hand, I can easily imagine why nobody mentioned this fact befor you did: only few people read startup gossip.
> only few people read startup gossip
Numbers disagree: 485 comments, 470 points.
"How many hours were you working a week?"
Funnily enough, hearing this question is a huge red flag for me. It signals they value work hours more than quality delivery.
I thought the same thing. The moment the article equated 5h work day to not giving a shit, they lost me.
"It isn't enough for your work to make me rich. You also have to care."
We're in a weird place where we can actually read what these people think publicly.
Odd that the article doesn't address the most obvious criticism: is the CEO just matching the cliche of trying to select for people that overwork for underpay?
Wanting to work hard is positively correlated with perseverance and work which inspires.
Hard working is good when it's good.
A absolute rookie mistake is thinking your exhaustion-level has a linear correlation with the quality of the results. I know people who get suspicious if they haven't exhausted themselves, how can they have done a good job if they are not drained?
The truth is that the level of your craft has probably the biggest impact. A beginner can tear themselves apart with stressfull allnighters while doing a job and deliver the result a seasoned pro would have delivered in an afternoon.
And if all your employees are doing is stressfull allnighters and damage control they have no time to learn how to do properly and fast. But I get it, the goal is to extract money from their labour, not be their friends or produce quality products.
I actually do care. I am also emotionally involved. Bad code makes me feel bad, I am ecstatic about good code.
I am deeply saddened when I see people making the same mistakes over and over again.
This attitude negatively impacted my career on more than one occasion.
I am now doing a relatively low-pay work for the public services. My job is cleaning the Augean stables of decades-old Java code, but I feel better than shitting crappy code for the unicorn that none needs in the industry that should not exist.
> In no world can you be working 5 hours a day and be giving a shit.
"Four hours of creative work a day is about the limit for a mathematician." ~~ Henri Poincaré.
During my Ph.D., I worked very intensely with the help of a Pomodoro timer. After 4 to 5 hours of productive work (8-10 pomodoros), my brain just shut down, but I did a ton of work during that time.
Human body has its real limits. Respecting your body is essential for living a healthy life.
This is me too. But if I add a 20-30 min powernap and some coffee, I can get another 4 pomodoros in.
Then maybe build a cooperative, where all employees are effectively co-owning the company? Then you can expect everyone to care as much as you do. Otherwise it doesn't seem to be a fair thing to expect.
Hire people who only do it for the money you'll have to pay them properly. Hire people who care instead.
I’ve never agreed with a title and then disagreed with the content more than this article.
Jokes on you, I care a lot about my work and can still get it done in 5 hours a day.
This is a very round-about way of saying that trait conscientiousness predicts employee performance (which it does). Good to see a random guy's Substack coheres with the psychometric literature.
Random guy is CEO of an AI company.
I'm finding the cognitive dissonance of both trying to do away with workers and having opinions on what makes a good one to be headache-inducing.
What a word. I understand consciousness but conscientiousness is going too far.
Random guy :)
I rather have the impression that many bosses/companies actively avoid people who do care: this kind of people is often rather inconvenient to manage, since because of the fact that they do care, they are very willing to fight (also or even particular to superiors) for their vision.
Thus, hiring people who do care requires very particular kinds of bosses who can accept/handle people who care. Companies who do not have those are in my opinion often better served with people who don't give a fuck, but hardly ever (because they don't really consider it to be worth their time) actively disagree with orders from above. If the description of such people sounds passive-aggressive to you, I don't disagree: such people sometimes are this way. So, it might actually (surprisingly) make sense for companies to scout for passive-aggressive people. :-)
It would be nice if the employer also cared in return, however in my experience, this is exceptionally rare. I think more than a fair share of us here learned our lessons in investing ourselves rather sharply. It rarely, if ever, pays off for the worker.
This is my experience as well.
As a former freelancer the standards I hold myself to are exceptionally high. Then I got employed and carried that standard with me (still do). The problem is that this means work will be pushed my way, because I am sometimes literally the only person who can do it within a day instead making it a month long project.
This led then to such an amount of work that I could mo longer hold that quality level, which made me unhappy. Of course I complained all the way, with no real change.
The only thing that worked was a strategic leaking of the fact that I was looking for positions elsewhere, suddenly a whole lot of concessions were made, and since then it has gotten better and I got much better at rejecting work.
Care too much and you burn out and get replaced.
> Care too much and you burn out and get replaced
... or you become a menace to your boss. :-)
In practice what would an employer caring look like to you?
You know what caring looks like. You experience it in your personal relationships every day. The disconnect isn't knowledge, it's incentives. The practical answer is straightforward: predictable schedules that people can plan around, living wages that are indexed to the COL, transparent paths for advancement, respect for work-life boundaries, investment in employee development beyond immediate productivity needs (i.e. good healthcare for the worker and their dependents), genuine sick leave without retaliation, respect for physical and cognitive limitations, and protection from arbitrary termination.
But you're asking the wrong question. The real question is why, despite decades of evidence showing these practices improve retention and performance, they remain exceptional rather than standard. The system isn't broken; it's working exactly as designed. It is optimized for wealth extraction, not value creation.
Public companies are legally obligated to maximize shareholder value. Every dollar spent on employee wellbeing that doesn't directly boost quarterly metrics is arguably a breach of fiduciary duty. Middle managers who genuinely care get promoted out or pushed out. The few companies that do care either have unusual ownership structures (co-ops, private ownership with values-driven founders) or are temporarily buying talent in hot markets. Once conditions change, watch how quickly that 'caring' evaporates.
So yes, we all know what caring looks like. The question is why we keep pretending the current system has any mechanism to deliver it at scale.
To be fair, he says in TFA he wants to recruit like a cult. I don’t know many cult leaders who care about their followers, so at least he’s honest if not psychopathic in the way he says he’s going to abuse you before he does so.
Yeah they're literally paying you money so they don't have to.
Hire professionals. My care is reserved to me, my family and my friends.
Professionals care about the quality of their work. They care about what they're mastering and making. Life's too short to not care.
It's not the same caring that is reserved for family and friends, though.
Professionalism is a form of caring, though.
I agree w post, and relevancy from its original date in 2020, but curious on what original intention was to repost from such a long time ago, see link belwo
(2020) - I agree, personally I think two issues are 1. taking advantage of people caring to give them below market comp for the work expected of them, and (more subjectively) 2. having some lame and disconnected mission or stated culture. It's easier to care about building something cool than about displaying grit and authenticity or whatever BS some cost center has come up with.
Point being, it should be reciprocal. Most (at least many) technical people will always want to do good work and care about the problem they're solving, it's easy to destroy that by expecting them to care only about story points or whatever instead of something meaningful.
A lot of the criticism in this thread sounds like it’s coming from people who don’t give a shit and just want a paycheck
Some people are motivated by what they produce at work, not their compensation
The benefit of this being from 2020 is we can see he was right, he built a colossal company at breakneck speed
Are you looking for a job by any chance? I promise you'll have the opportunity to produce great things for extremely mediocre compensation. That's what you want, right?
I give a shit, want a paycheck, _and_ want a life outside of work.
It's completely possible to want fair hours while also caring. And, like many commenters, I'm frustrated with employers that want more than a third of my waking existence.
It’s hard to find people with talent period let alone people willing to take ownership without reciprocal financial incentives. In my 20s, I was this guy. I worked hard and just assumed it will work out in the end. Boy oh boy was I wrong.
Comments disabled. 2.7 rating on Glassdoor for work/life balance at Scale. I’m sure it’s nothing.
As to the substance of the article, I agree with the title, but the line of interview questions used is trying to answer “how many hours can we squeeze out of you?”. Being concerned your company will become a credential rather than a cult? I’m not here to drink the Kool-Aid, I’m here to do the work and then do the other things I care about outside of work.
The first step to hiring people who care is paying them enough that they have a reason to care.
Frankly, during my time at Amazon I was never really that worried about a service going down. Wasn't paid enough to lose sleep over someone else's problem.
Founders care because they have the most skin in the game - unless it's for a family or a huge ego I don't find it surprising when employees don't care outside of 40hrs a week. I even support that line of thinking.
That's a bingo card of a blog post:
- We are a cult: Check
- Align with the mission: Check
- Be obsessed: Check
- Abandon everything for the obsession: Check
- Overwork and get underpaid: Check
This mentality of the author is deeply flawed. Yes, success requires hard work, but doesn't necessitate a burnout.
I'll pass, thanks.
I'll take the opposite side of the comments and the body of cynical people here.
It absolutely matters to care about the problem you're solving. A team of people with a skill level of X that cares about a problem will be better in both performance and in general culture and being around than a team with a skill level of 2X that consists of mercenaries.
I learned it the hard way. When I was asked to set up a team of 14-16 engineers, I first went the latter way. The interviewing was difficult and the bar was higher, but the people who were there were focused on what they could get out of the role. Circumstances led to a reset, and the second time around, I built a team that optimized for caring about the problem. I started with the two people I liked working with in the initial group because they liked the problem statement. I had to lower the computer science performance bar to build the team to size. I also had a budget left over for other purposes, as we didn't need to pay for 2X performance, and the team was heavier with younger folks.
We delivered the goals in three months. More importantly, working with people who have a shared purpose, rather than "getting mine," is just a better place to be. I had to spend time skilling up some people, but they did it in a month!
Since then, I've always optimized for being around "mission-driven" people, rather than "mercenaries." Sometimes you need that 5X skill set, in which case a limited-time contractual helper is probably better, but the team has a soul.
In a somewhat misguided defence of the OP, he actually makes two points.
Giving a shit about your work is the second point. Without any other comments suggesting the alternative, I assume this is second in order of importance. And as there are only two points I would take that to mean the second point is the least important.
His first point is to give a shit about the company. This being the most important point probably explains the accusations of late payments and wage theft from former employees and contractors against the company. They just weren't putting the company first!
As an aside, I have been thinking of this in relation to the 3 laws, as in a sense, executives see workers as robots, and I think the 3 laws mesh quite nicely with corporate directives.
1) A robot (employee) may not injure the company or allow the company to come to harm;
2) A robot must obey their manager unless it conflicts with the First Law;
3) A robot must protect its own existence (in the company) as long as it does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
The work doesn't really come into to it, unless it is a subset of the 3rd law.
Is it common that folks are going into work at 11am and leaving at 4pm? I thought America had a crazy work hour culture
It's very uncommon to go in that late. What's much more common is people taking morning meetings from home and then going into the office to complete their day. If you're a 996 grindset blogger, I suspect you're fairly likely to mistake one for the other.
They work a lot of days (they have very few paid leaves compared to EU in general) but not a lot of hours per day (from what I could see working at French/American companies)