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.
My impression is that cult leaders often do care about their followers. The problems rather start when the cult member becomes disobedient - this is when matters become very dirty.
Cult leaders care about their followers insofar as they stay submissive ass-kissing sycophants. It's not like they care about the follower's actual well-being.
But when the employee is in need the employer discards them like an expendable resource, instead of making good on the "we are family"-tagline.
Work world is full of these one-sided "deals".
For smaller companies, bad equity splits, or a lack of transparency around equity or company performance is probably most common. It's pretty common for startups to avoid telling the whole story to the rank and file to keep them unaware of the actual risk/reward they are taking, which then allows founders/leadership to pad the risk/reward they themselves get.
Then there are the employers at the other end of the scale, those who couldn't care less about their staff, they think that they pay the staff and that's all that's required of them, and everything that goes wrong is the staff's fault.
So, in practice, the employers that see their staff as human beings rather than "resources" to be exploited is a bloody good start.
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.
I don't follow this bit. It's worse for employees, it's worse for employers, and it's exactly as designed?
Now you only need to make sure the basics (food, shelter, etc) is alright and that everybody gets what they came for each day.
So to answer your question: What it looks like for an employer to care depends on the specifc employee. Some may just look for financial benefits, others (like me) may just want to be given the time and means to do their job well, yet others value free rime more than money, or a better office, more autonomy within their domain or whatnot. The wishes are many.
But you need to first get the basics right, and many fail at that.
In my country it's like "Well, the company broke all records of profit, we earned 500 million dollars more than last years. Here, have this box of chocolate as a gift. Keep the good work guys"
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Your work creates the profit that your salary comes from, the employer takes a cut of that and gives you what they deem they can get away with.
checks notes
Literally my entire career.
And humans that replace caring with money are assholes.
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.
... or you become a menace to your boss. :-)
Wanting to work hard is positively correlated with perseverance and work which inspires.
Hard working is good when it's good.
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.
Funnily enough, hearing this question is a huge red flag for me. It signals they value work hours more than quality delivery.
I guess I just don't care.
It's not the same caring that is reserved for family and friends, though.
We're in a weird place where we can actually read what these people think publicly.
- 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.
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
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.
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. :-)
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.
Jokes on you, I care a lot about my work and can still get it done in 5 hours a day.
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...
On the other hand, I can easily imagine why nobody mentioned this fact befor you did: only few people read startup gossip.
Numbers disagree: 485 comments, 470 points.
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.
andy99•1h ago
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.