Ask HN: Is passion a fair thing to ask for from an employee? I mean when you are a startup and can't make decent payments as salaries, can one really expect the developer to be passionate? Or maybe it's because I am based out of a third world country where salary trumps everything. Or am I dealing with the wrong set of people. |
Most of the good programmers do it, right? Work on 4 products a year in multiple industries.
Should you hire someone who is passionate about the cause or one who is passionate about code(read growth/career)
1. Access to CS literature (any lit. not just titles specific to the field we're in). 2. Encouragement for improving skills. 3. A culture that promotes interaction between people. 4. Machines that are fast, build quickly. 5. Willing to pay for a personal license to dev-tools. 6. Provide a very small percentage of company time to drop the main task at hand and pick up something completely unrelated to hack on.
This should be sufficient to ensure that your employees value their jobs and would rather continue than leave.
* If you want high performance, give me high money.
* If you want loyalty/passion, give me equity/profit sharing.
You can buy my performance i.e. time with money. You can buy my passion i.e. commitment with reciprocation. If you give me typical market wages without profit sharing, don't expect anything beyond typical performance without commitment.
One source[1] showed that:
- For highly creative jobs, respect and autonomy to function and just enough $ to cover comfortable living expenses produced the best results.
- As you add more money, the performance for these jobs decreased.
AND
- For highly repetitive jobs, performance increased with pay almost linearly.
- Offering more autonomy for lower pay in these types of jobs lowered performance.
Programming is a highly creative job. While you are making very logical assumptions (more $ == more work) I would argue that after the first month or so, that would no longer be the case.
You would then just be equating (more $ == more HOURS working) but not necessarily producing.
The findings of the study did hinge on the person seeking autonomy to make enough to cover their living expenses such that the concern for money was off the table.
Really interesting stuff.
I think from my own experience, after the honeymoon period of the giant paycheck wears off, this tends to be absolutely true.
As for passion, it has to come from the top down.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Surprising-Truth-About-Motivates...
Thanks to yengz for the reminder where this study came from!
Here is the flaw. If you are properly compensated and don't have any other options, giving you a big fat raise doesn't improve your productivity, that's true and that's what the studies measure. Hey are you a developer? Here's an extra ten bucks, will you now come up with a better algorithm? No, of course not, because money doesn't make you a better developer, just as paying existing public school teachers more doesn't make them any less severely incompetent.
However, if you want to attract more productive people in the first place, you have to pay them more money because there is a competitive environment. The "excellent studies" try to prevent readers from noticing that that's not what they looked into, and it's clear they do this intentionally.
Do you think that Google would attract the same caliber of developers by paying what McDonalds pays its line workers? You must believe that if you really believe that these studies are correct in their claims that there is no advantage to paying more than survival wages.
The simple fact is that sustenance wages are not in fact ideal for attracting the best developers, designers, writers, actors and inventors.
If you don't recognize that, but continue to insist that the opposite is true, then you are intentionally seeking to deceive people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
He mentions a couple of studies.
There are some excellent studies out there that suggest this to be false.
Money is not a motivator. But lack of money is a demotivator.
(Unfortunately, I don't remember who said this. Anyone?)
This tactic works only until the employee knows a sufficient number of people that have been screwed out of their equity. Usually, that takes some time and experience.
In a related note, ever notice that most passionate employees are younger?
Edit: I Don't know why I can't reply to the replies of this post.
What I meant to infer is that the parent to my post may have seen 'professionals' perform better than he would have expected them given their pay.
What I tried to reply is that this level of performance may still be the professional working at only 50% of capacity.
I was assuming that the amount the professional was being paid was relative to what that company would be paying everyone else. Which would lead me to conclude everyone was probably working at 50%.
Maybe that was a bit of a stretch on my behalf though :)
1. Someone who will respond to your above-and-beyond commitment to them (in compensation, tools, respect, etc.) with above-and-beyond results?
2. Someone who will give above-and-beyond results even when given lousy tools, a poor work environment, unrealistic expectations, and mediocre compensation?
#1 is fair to ask. #2 is not.
In my experience at a previous company, they upgraded every developer and QA engineer's workspace to have high-end hardware and dual 24" monitors (1920x1200, not the 1080p BS). Previously barely-missed deadlines were practically eliminated, better employee morale appeared, more innovative ideas started appearing, and various other things showed up.
All in all, this convinced me and I'm a firm believer in giving employees great tools and freedom to approach things in their own way. It shows that the company cares about you, and that goes a long way with employees and their performance backs that up.
Even making shitty wages, I can't hide my passion for my work. When I was 15, bagging groceries and helping people load up their cars, I couldn't restrain my passion for doing things well, and that was $6 an hour. If I'm getting paid something approaching a reasonable wage while working on my true creative passions of UI/UX? Forget about it — I'm on fire.
So I think it's worthwhile to look for people who have that energy. With the caveat that such energy has value and if you can't provide full-market cash compensation you need to make up for it with a cocktail of other benefits like flexibility, autonomy, work environment, equity, great employee-selected tools and indulgence/encouragement for people's specific ambitions.
I don't mind being paid below market but I definitely need something to make up for this. You could this (following in no particular order): (1) profit sharing (2) equity (3) a higher-than-market level of responsibility for a given experience level and (4) interesting work.
The other thing is that every time I start a new position I'm full of excitement and passion but this excitement drains out of me pretty quickly thanks to terrible decision making by the management, my discovery that I got lowballed on my offer or by others in the team being hired at levels disproportionate to their ability, or by my being forced to work on something completely different from what I promised when I was made the offer, or my discovery that the management are bunch of penny-wise pound-foolish cheapskates.
The TLDR here is that you need to be honest and extremely fair in your dealings. Always ask yourself whether you'd want to continue if you were in the employees position.
Don't ever fall into the trap of thinking that you are doing the employee a favor by giving them a job. Anybody worth hiring can pretty much get an offer with a phone call or two in the current hiring market.
The other issues you mentioned could be true in our case. We did give more responsibility to an inexperienced developer who has shown great initiative.
A good developer with commitment or a better developer who is all over the place?
Honestly development as a career is very hard, I have seen a lot of developers who cannot switch off, or focus on solving a specific problem. I think passion to solve a problem sometimes makes it easy for a developer to work on something for a decent amount of time and not try hacking the nxt shiny thing around.
Here's an awesome TED talk that you can watch which is a good introduction in the field - http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html - it shows that performance in creative fields can decrease when the payout is greater.
Salary is just one factor in job satisfaction, there are lots of other ways, most of them cheaper from a costs perspective, which can improve the "mood". Here's a list:
- equity
- 20% time (autonomy to work on self-driven projects)
- a perceived notion of fairness (i.e. no bozos as managers,
promotions done right on merit and payout/hierarchy that
correlates with the actual job performance, not politics)
- free drinks/food/catering (or at least joint cafeteria area
for lunch bonding/discussions)
- awesome hardware
- high employee/manager ratio to avoid micro-management
- a tech ladder allowing growth without becoming a managerI'm an employer (and a programmer) and I view passion as a byproduct of developers being properly incentivized to do something they find fascinating.
That incentive varies from programmer to programmer. Incentives can be cash, equity, profit sharing, flexible hours, encouragement and recognition, kick-ass equipment, a steady supply of new tech toys to play with, paid time and travel to conferences, etc.
The second aspect, of course, the truly hard one, is keeping people fascinated. Everything gets boring as hell eventually. As an employer I actually find this harder than determining what incentives people respond to because I'm personally aware of how quickly programmers get bored.
Autonomy, autonomy autonomy...
The job I had before I started this business I always told my superiors that after three years a dev was going to start getting "the itch." I was only at that job for 4.5 years so I don't have the experience to know what really happens, but I did see guys start getting wanderlust at about three year, plus or minus. But I always felt that had more to do with unclear opportunities for growth, "just ok" equipment, and an uninspiring salary increase schedule.
So...I don't know. My gut says most will move on.
Does this happen a lot in the industry. If it does happen frequently then it makes more sense for a honest founder to always recruit/ collaborate with younger programmers.
In my experience, most employees feel that pushing themselves won't actually accrete any value to themselves, and that really kills any sort of passion.
If they're not passionate to begin with maybe they need to be motivated. Money does it for some people but it's not everything. Interest is very important too.
Then pay me enough to make it worth my while. I have my own projects that I'm passionate about and there's so many hours in the day; every minute I'm spending working on your idea is a minute I'm deferring my own visions. You want me to pour my time into your idea? I'd better get more than just enough money to live on - I want to be able to not worry about looking for work for a while after I'm done with your project, so I can spend my time working on my own stuff that matters intensely to me and me alone. If you can't give me tons of money then I'd better have a serious stake in the eventual profits, and you'd better not want me to work on it for very long.
funny many organizations extort that level of commitment from its workers. for a short time "obey me or get fired" may work, but in long term it'll kill the workspace morale, motivation and innovation.
It is the job of the company to impart passion, set an example and hold on to the people that get behind the company vision.
Without that vision or passion from the founders, none of the employees will have it and you are left with salary trumping everything (because there is nothing else, except maybe a small group of people you like hanging out with).
If you are passionate and convey that clearly, passion will trump salary for the right people, and those are the ones you want on your team.
Yeah, that's a dealbreaker. I need to pay my bills. If you can't do that, sorry, but I have to keep my housing.
Give someone interesting an interesting problem. Don't hire assholes (in fact, fire assholes). Create a community where genuine mistakes aren't a big deal to their employment (and avoid cover your ass) and the passion will come. Support creativity, support big ideas, support some of the random, one off ideas that come out of creative people (easter eggs, hack weeks) and it'll pay for itself.
Conversation doesn't really need to go beyond this point. It's like asking "Should my woman cook and clean for me even though I beat her each day?" Really, the cooking and cleaning is not the issue in that conversation.
There's passion about what you do (passionate about their field, tools), and passion about what you are doing (healthcare, education, making money). These are high energy, all-in types who live their jobs. They are also few in numbers.
You can hire and fire based on displayed passion, but I'm not sure it can be taught. They either have it or they don't.
Also, don't confuse passion with work ethic, which is (probably) equally valuable, but more of a character trait that can be applied to many different things.
So my thinking is maybe if the guys are passionate about the problem/ industry and not just interested in learning to do a lot of stuff, we would have a better shot at succeeding.
Correct me if there is a flaw in my understanding.
so yeah, in 3rd world country, to be passionate and motivated, money mostly talks. Sad but true
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
Passion can be driven by incentives outside of salary.
This is completely a different topic from the discussion though so I'd prefer not to continue with it, if you would like to, it would be best to start a new thread.
Developers in many other parts of the country can live comfortably with an average wage. But watch out if you get sick. Sickness is for the rich. As we found out last month, if you are a long term employee at Microsoft and you get brain cancer, they give you a bad review and then declare you ineligible for disability benefits. Shouldn't have gotten cancer!
My idea of comfortable living is you can afford a house, to marry, and to afford health care. Others may disagree, but I don't consider that to be even worth debating.
Perhaps you're suggesting that there are no cases where this is true? (i.e., one will always be happier with the extra $$$).