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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.
I bet his yearly salary he can’t name a single facet of what he is referring to as ‘work’ and has no earthly idea how the tech behind Reddit works or is maintained.
I bet his yearly salary he can’t name a single facet of what he iS referring to as ‘work’ and has no earthly idea how the tech behind Reddit works or is maintained.
You’d lose that bet. He was around when Reddit was pretty small, and I’m pretty sure wrote some of the original (Common Lisp, IIRC) codebase at least, if not the later Python rewrite.
kagis
Yeah, sounds like he was working on the Python codebase too.
I’m Steve Huffman, aka u/Spez. I founded both Reddit and Hipmunk (where I was CTO). Until about a year and a half ago, I was a full time engineer. I started programming as a kid, and worked as a developer through high school and college at Virginia (CS major).
That was from 2017.
I’d also add – I think that a better criticism is not his lack of technical familiarity, but rather that he also worked at at Reddit when it was a startup, co-founded it, and despite having sold off his stock and left once before returning, I’m sure has some form of company-performance-linked compensation today. Basically, when he’s starting out, if Reddit goes under, he loses pretty big. If Reddit becomes big, he makes a ton of money. Today, if the company does well, so does he. The result is that he has a tremendous incentive to do everything he can to make Reddit successful.
In addition, his personal actions will have always been a substantial portion of determining what makes Reddit do well. If you’re one of a very small technical team making early technical decisions, those calls can determine whether the company sinks or swims. Later, he’s holding a high-level position where there’s a lot of impact.
So he gets compensation tightly tied to company performance, and his actions have a large impact on company performance. His interests are tightly-aligned with the company. And in that environment, yeah, you’re gonna care more about company performance and the impact of your actions on that performance.
That gets harder to do as companies grow. Sure, you can give employees stock options or have an employee stock purchase plan. I think every tech company I’ve been at has done that. And to some degree, yeah, that’s gonna align your interests with that of the company. Problem is that any one engineer, if you’re at a company with thousands of engineers, just doesn’t have as large an impact on the stock price. And usually, the proportion to which your compensation is stock or something tied to stock falls off as the company grows.
Stock in the company is a pretty good incentive when you’re a ten-person company. It doesn’t work as well as an incentive in a large company, not outside of the people near the top.
You can have companies set up bonus programs with milestones or something to try to replicate that alignment, but I don’t think that any bonus program works as well as stock. Lot of issues.
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Say someone doesn’t meet a milestone. Then maybe it’s the fault of the person who planned and structured the milestone: maybe it wasn’t realistic.
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There’s information disparity between the people setting the milestone and the people accepting it as compensation, and how much compensation someone gets is always going to have some level of a zero-sum aspect, outside of wanting to have happy employees that are retained. With stock prices, the only people on the “other side of the fence” are the competition.
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Might be ways to game the system, or to influence the people who set those bonus milestones (“Kathy down in accounting is sleeping with Bob who is running the bonus program”). Even if that doesn’t happen, if someone feels that there is — and I’m pretty sure that missing a bonus is disappointing — I bet that there’s potential for ill will.
I’ve thought about ideas before to try to figure out how to replicate some of that “startup” alignment of company and employee incentives for larger companies. But they usually smack into one of a number of problems; it’s really easy to create misincentives. I wasn’t able to come up with something that’ll align company and employee incentives as well as a startup. And this is not a new problem, so a lot of people have thought about it; if there were an easy solution, I’m pretty sure that companies would have done it by now.
But point is, I suspect that he’s comparing how much time and effort he’s willing to put in to what a random engineer is when Reddit is a larger company. And I’m pretty sure that at least some of the difference is that their personal incentives are different; he’s gotta take that into account. Maybe Reddit did have people not putting in the effort in 2015 relative to similar companies — I don’t know. But I still really suspect that at least some of the factor is going to be the personal incentives issue.
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“In the Bay Area, broadly, is this — it’s almost an entitlement of, ‘I work at these companies, but I don’t have to work very hard and I’m here for myself,’” he said.
I always found it amusing how the term “entitlement” has been butchered by Americans. It’s the only language they know and they keep butchering it with low level polemical theatrics.
How is “I’m here for myself” an entitlement? This is not your family. The goal in any job is to maximize returns, i.e. least amount of work for high financial return (like … wait for it … running a business). Sure there are other factors at play too (career growth, not wanting others to have to work more because of you, being genuinely interested in what you are doing and not seeing it as work, not wanting to treat customers like shit), but that’s an individual thing. A business isn’t automatically entitled to any of that.
Yay Capitalist propaganda!
The harder I work the bigger my CEOs paycheck. Why the fuck should we “work harder”?
I always found it amusing how the term “entitlement” has been butchered by Americans.
In this case it’s a deliberate misuse by the GOP to conflate the word with welfare programs that the voters see as free handouts to the lazy. So then they can tout polling data that shows voters against entitlement programs as fodder to gut/end social security and Medicare. I’m constantly having to have this discussion with conservatives when they use the word incorrectly.
The entitlement of the business owners and CEO are the real fucking entitlement here. These pricks aren’t entitled to my motivation. If they want me to be motivated to work hard, they have to provide that motivation. If the pay is shit, the work is shit, the colleagues are shit, and the boss is an entitled prick, there’s no fucking way I’m motivated, and no fucking way am I gonna work hard.
While we’re on the topic. If a business owner wants his workers to care about the profits of the company. Maybe they should be guarenteed a part of the profits, possibly even make their share of the profits be determined by how much value they add to the company. Though I see why the business owner doesn’t want socialist stuff like that, since they’d end up owing the company money.
If the pay is shit, the work is shit, the colleagues are shit, and the boss is an entitled prick, there’s no fucking way I’m motivated, and no fucking way am I gonna work hard.
Giving me flashbacks to one of the worst jobs I ever had years and years ago. Within five years of leaving, all but two members of the most toxic team I’d ever worked with had quit, and the CEO had twice relocated the main office to cheaper and smaller buildings (I presume because of a drop in revenue). He treated them like shit, and they all passed it on down to new hires, effectively destroying employee morale from the top down. What a miserable crab bucket of a job.
Agreed. Although I am not even going this far.
I don’t understand Huffman’s use of the English language (I learned it when I was 4 and I use it for work and media consumption).
Idealism? What idealism? I’ve worked in several American startups and corps, I have friends who’ve work in multiple US tech corps and smaller startups. I have no clue how he brought idealism into the picture. And how is idealism related to working hard or not working hard? It’s an unrelated concept. If anything, idealism implies you work too hard, instead of going with the flow and putting in effort only when it benefits you. And what’s entitlement got to do with any of this?
It honestly sounds like Huffman bringing up random keywords in a borderline word salad “Entitlement! Entitlement is bad, right (it’s neither good or bad)? Idealism is impractical! We must work hard!”
What idealism?
Probably things like “but the mods do that work for free, we should make things better for them” and “but we have no original content, it’s the users who provide value, we should make things better for them.” You know, stuff like that.
People have been saying this about the U.S. tech industry for years and the reason is that the rich were mad working in tech here in the U.S. used to be a decent career and so this became the bullshit line given to corporate media by CEOs.
There is literally nothing to it beyond this.
Work hard?
Work at all?
Employees?!
Is this what he calls the mods?
I have a gut feeling that if looked for, a downward trend in the in the quality of reddit starts when he came back.
Yeah that dude is on the short list too.
Which communities delete comments for mentioning the gentleman in green overalls?
Nearly all?
Here? LOL no.
At some point one of these dudes is just gonna hire the wrong security goons.
Twat says what?
Like why would you want to work for these companies???
All my homies hate spez
Why you need so many homies though
A good homie support structure is important to most people’s mental health. I, for example, have no homies and at best meh mental health.
I’ll be your homie, bro.
All good points can I join
Alright who knows how to set up a lemmy group chat? Is that a thing? Can’t have homies without a group chat.
He got how much for ruining the site and profiting off years of its users’ work?
I assume the rest of his sentiment goes something like: ‘not working very hard…to increase shareholder value’
amen
Spez maybe should have worked harder at not destroying both shareholder value and the trust of the people that actually made the site what it was.
Like who is he working for here, because it doesn’t seem like anyone’s pleased about him
Feature-wise I feel Lemmy is nearly identical to Reddit. The biggest advantage Reddit has is the communities and they’ve been basically hacking away at them for over a year.
Hey that’s not fair. Reddit has been working hard at making itself more closed and on giving it a far shittier UI
Former mod of /r/jailbait says what?
Well I guess he’s effected some change there in that he’s got me working hard to avoid reddit.
Fuck spez
