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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."
"no one who has joined the 4-year-old company has ever left"
So what do they have like two employees?
Young, single, childless males are the ones who will dedicate their evenings to making sure not only that things run properly, but that you are in the front of your field. Filling your department with family oriented people is just going to give you a whole bunch of people who will do what they must and anything they need to not to lose their job. If you follow this advice, DO NOT EXPECT TO INNOVATE!
I start a company with 8 of my FRIENDS and stay profitable... there's the 100% retention rate. If it was a big company with a 100% retention rate, I'd be impressed. Also, they make a camera... a cheap one, while I can't say either way on the value, I can't imagine they're doing anything cutting edge here. Coincidentally, he's keeping costs down by not offering any perks to his employees in turn supposedly keeping the cost of the camera down, that's too much trust there imho. I do agree with the capping of worker hours, but here's the flip side, why should a w-2 worker who gets paid a salary for 40 hours no more work even the extra 15 minutes in 40.15 hours for free? Nobody should be feel obligated to do that (I know I'm being idealistic, but numbers are numbers). Another asshole CEO trying to fluff up his image by talking about how great he is while lining his pockets imho.