Dropcam CEO's Beef With Brogramming and Free Dinners

waderoush writes "Plenty of technology companies serve free breakfast, lunch, and dinner to their employees, but Dropcam CEO Greg Duffy says that's a form of mind control designed to get people to to work late. To keep employees happy, Duffy says, it's better to make them go home to their families for dinner. Some other suggestions from the San Francisco video monitoring startup: don't fill your engineering department with young, single, childless males (aka brogrammers). Keep your business model simple by making actual stuff that you can sell for a profit. And don't hire assholes. Why pay attention to Duffy's advice? Because Dropcam has a 100 percent employee retention rate — no one who has joined the 4-year-old company has ever left."

Comments

Re:They're overanalyzing.

[dgatwood]

Productivity in areas that require actual thought and concentration falls off after about 20 hours. Even 40 hours is a joke for anything but menial physical labor.

What this means is that the best ways to increase worker productivity are:

• Ban meetings. Most days should have exactly zero meetings; if you have three meetings per day, you can't get work done because of all the interruptions.
• Most meetings should be either at the end of the day, the beginning of the day, or at lunch (with food). This minimizes the disruption that they cause.
• Require all emails to contain a bullet-point executive summary. One person concentrates when writing it so everyone else doesn't have to concentrate while skimming it.
• Standardize on a 30-hour workweek.
• Standardize on an office environment so that workers can easily shut their doors and concentrate for periods of time.
• Suggest specific break times that workers can choose so that they maximize their interaction with other people while minimizing how much they interrupt other workers in between.
• Encourage workers to take non-work classes, form activity groups, etc. so that they don't burn out.
• Encourage workers to work on things that they enjoy working on. Hire contractors to deal with the painful crap.

If you do these things, your productivity will soar.