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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."
I'd agree with dinner, and maybe breakfast to an extent.
But lunch? It's just a time saver to have it at work.
If I eat while working and don't take the time off for lunch, I can leave sooner.
To keep employees happy, Duffy says, it's better to make them go home to their families for dinner.
That's fine for regular employees, but assuming sys admins want to go home to their families is just silly.
http://xkcd.com/705/
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
You end up with unmaintainable code, late deadlines and an environment where numerous employees want to kill each other. Profit? Good luck.
It doesn't matter how talented the asshole is if he\she costs more than they're worth. I'd rather have a few mediocre developers who are nice to each other, write to spec, comment appropriately, and write code that anyone can understand and maintain.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Some programmers like free dinners, and enjoy sleeping til noon and working til midnight, and don't mind the 12 hours because their best friends are at work.
Other programmers want to work 9-5 to drop kids off in the morning and get home to them at dinner.
Many programmers go through each of those stages in their carreers.
It's not an either/or question. Just make a workplace that accomodates both groups and keeps both happy.
"...that we shouldn't want things like identities, families, and lives. It is a joy for us to be interchangeable work-bots. Dissention must be expunged so that we can be assimilated. Obedience is happiness!"
"Agile" does nothing of the sort. If that's how you're doing Agile, you're doing it wrong.
...for having a CEO that actually cares about them.
Isn't it a crucial part of Agile to tell others they are doing Agile wrong? :)
how many employees are there? just him?
FTA:
Rather, it's that people just like to stay: Dropcam has hired 30 workers to date, and it's never had to give a single going-away party.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
That’s why there are no free dinners at Dropcam—around 6:00 pm the company
I am sorry, at WHAT time? Ever heard the song 9 to 5? 9 to 5! Dinner is at 6 o'clock. Having to stay at work till six and then the commute means you won't be home close to 8. Kids will be in bed by that time. Dinner will be waiting in the oven.
A GOOD going home hour is 5... oh wait. that is rush hour, means you leave "early" and arrive home just as late. Do you know what would be even BETTER? A company with FLEXIBLE hours and a max 8 hours on the workfloor. Now THAT would be a social company. Even better if you can take a half day off to deal with plumbers and other stuff.
Nobody left in the last 4 years. Geez, I wonder why. An economy down the drain may have something to do with it.
Don't get me wrong, a company that doesn't expect unpaid overtime in exchange for a greasy cold pizza (especially if there is no pizza) everyday gets pretty old pretty fast. But closing the doors at 6 doesn't show much of an improvement. You are still putting in a long day, except now you don't get free dinner at the end of the day. What about those without a family for who a company dinner saves time not having to cook for themselves?
It is telling that the article calls him a wunderkind idealist and then fails to list any idealistic thing in the next few paragraphs.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Obviously not hiring the right people then!
All the biggest innovators I have worked with in my current gig are married with kids. One has teenage kids.
Hiring kids and brogrammers, you end up with a shitload of very clever people (or 'clever', since many have intelligence, but lack knowledge and wisdom). And a mountain of garbage. What you're looking for is people who _aren't_ wet behind the ears, but who actually give a shit about what they do. If they hack Lisp in their spare time, but have a family, they stand a decent chance of being a good hire.
Please do and leave it that way, because no one with a productive/meaningful life cares anything about your trivial host file ramblings.
The one consistent thing about Agile: "you're doing it wrong". I have never seen a different answer to any complaint about Agile.
Apple would never exist
Table-ized A.I.
Google uses dinner as a form of manipulation. It's considered bad form to eat dinner at Google and then go home. It's like training animals with food rewards.
30.
So in other words statistically insignificant. That's in line with all the startups I've worked for- we didn't lose people unless we fired them with very few exceptions.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I think he's qualified.
For conventional small businesses, about half fail in their first year. The fact that he's managed to achieve so much at his age makes him an EXCELLENT person from whom to seek out advice.
No, those are things that agile *claims* to do. Whether it does that, what else it does, and how well it actually does those things varies greatly. "Agile" in my experience is usually just a buzzword meaning iterative development of any sort.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
The proverbial "brogrammer" is the only type of programmer your average valley C-level Dunning-Kruger sufferer can relate to.
ralphbarbagallo.com
Slashdot is a .org.
once you take away the "works in silicon valley" and "startup." he says dont hire assholes but then goes on to tout "ethical fiber" as a hiring qualification. what even is that? You dont want a bunch of "single childless males" but what about childless women? as a gay male, is a heteronormative marriage a job requirement for me to work here? sure, people can be hit-or-miss socially but thats why you have harassment and discrimination courses, and adhere to them.
he says he wants a family friendly company that supports paternity and maternity leave but in california those arent things you decide to "do" for employees, theyre state law. saying you're "really diverse" just because you have married couples working for you fails on so many levels to understand what diversity in the workplace means. yes ive worked for startups that buy out bars and clubs for the night, but they also give out baseball and movie tickets too. my last startup work traded in the nightclub perk for a bowling alley because they listened to their employees instead of making vague generalizations about how family friendly or unfriendly the workplace perks needed to be.
he doesnt buy dinner for the company, which is fine. working weird hours in IT means you've alienated my entire shift by robbing me of a breakfast that for you is a dinner. not buying dinner doesnt inherently prevent people from working late. Making intelligent business decisions like purchasing new hardware based on my MTBF and MTTF calculations instead the cost avoidance of making me work 90 hour weeks failing over infrastructure will keep me from working late.
Good people go to bed earlier.
No, those are things that agile *claims* to do. Whether it does that, what else it does, and how well it actually does those things varies greatly. "Agile" in my experience is usually just a buzzword meaning iterative development of any sort.
This is a pretty good little tangential comment thread. IANAPC (professional coder), but I'm quite familiar with professional methods with capitalized names that use the no true Scotsman fallacy to claim that every unsuccessful project was simply one that didn't correctly follow the method's instructions. On the other hand, any successful project was necessarily successful because of the Capitalized Method and the only way to quantify the value added by this method is to claim that the profit generated by the entire project is 100% due to the method's efficacy, of course.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Whats his position on Foosball ? No Foosball, no work, seriously.
1999 called, they want their overused dotcom-era fads back. (*) Seriously, at this point, a foosball table is probably a negative sign, the cliched, almost obligatory easy-choice symbol a company would choose if they wanted to make themselves appear a (superficially) fun and exciting place to gullible young programmers.
:-P
(*) Then again, the 1990s probably want their "[year] called, they want their [subject] back" cliche back, but they're not getting it
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
"Agile" in my experience is usually just a buzzword meaning iterative development of any sort.
But that's what agile really is. If you're really doing iterative development (getting to shippable every so often, not merely calling N weeks of coding "an iteration") then you're doing Agile.
Don't confuse "Agile" with products cooked up by Agile consulting companies in order to have something to sell, like scrum and eXtremeProgramming.
Agile is 4 ideas:
* Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
* Working software over comprehensive documentation
* Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
* Responding to change over following a plan
There's a bunch of buzzwordism and scams and generally bad news sold as Agile, and all the BS has (perhaps rightfully) given Agile a bad name, but those 4 ideas are good ones.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
An honest to god company that
a) doesn't trying to abuse it's workers,
b) hires normal people who are decent workers but also have lives outside the office
I don't need a camera. I just want to send them money.
A VC once told me that before he invests in a start-up, he drives by their offices at 9pm on Friday night. If the parking lot is empty, that company is going to fail.
Isn't that a self-fulfilling prophecy? I mean, if every VC demands this, then of course every company not meeting these standards will fail--because they won't be able to get any venture capital funding.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
There are plenty of place that don't suck. I hope you work in one. There are plenty of places where no one needs to work more than 40 hours to meet commitments, and only the overachievers do.
There are plenty of places where the norm is for a coder to have his or her daily schedule dominated by whether he or she "picks up" or "drops off" the kids, not by meetings. There are plenty of places where keeping your skills current isn't some after-hours effort. Strangely enough, programming doesn't require heroic effort to ship on time if your basic engineering processes are smart to begin with - something that requires experience with many ways of doing things to get right.
A mature workforce is part of all of that. Look at any other engineering discipline, and you'll see careers from the early 20s to the early 60s, and a real career path for the second twenty years of engineering work. Software engineering is still maturing as a field, but we'll get there.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
As a veteran of TQM, ISO9000, XP, and fuck-knows-what in between, allow me to translate: All agile does is to make us jump more frantically whenever the client farts, get bitched out at for not having it fixed yesterday (as in fuck quality, just slap something together so you don't get reamed at the standup tomorrow morning), and the team members turn into their own slave drivers so that management doesn't have to take the heat for a Bataan Death March.
(You're right in that Agile has nothing to do with workplace problems. It's just another way of not fixing them while looking good on a resume.)
I'm not sure how you managed to read all that from that one sentence.
I read it as, "We don't want a bunch of inexperienced kids who don't necessarily know how to code, and don't understand anything about what real life is like."
I think this is a great sentiment, especially considering that in silicon valley is undergoing an epidemic of age-ism.
He didn't say anything about discriminating against anyone who doesn't fit some hetero-normative world view. He wants people who actually have a life outside work hours. You know, the kind of people whose lives revolve around more than just pizza, cola, and Call of Duty.
No mention if his company is making profits either. Easy to keep employees with high payroll based on venture capital debt.
Depending on the quantity of VC available, it could be profitable to rent ~20 cars and park them in your lot overnight.
I've worked at 2 startups that were sold for 125M and 225M, each making more than 5x the invested capital. At neither of them would seeing anyone there at 9 be more than an extreme rarity. 8-9 hour workdays were the norm.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
A VC once told me that before he invests in a start-up, he drives by their offices at 9pm on Friday night. If the parking lot is empty, that company is going to fail.
Isn't that a self-fulfilling prophecy? I mean, if every VC demands this, then of course every company not meeting these standards will fail--because they won't be able to get any venture capital funding.
Indeed, it does seem a bit radical. I've worked in start-ups, incidentally ones that survived the dot-com crash and are doing well nowadays. One had a solid business model and the other one was malleable enough to change gears and explore new business venues.
We certainly did work our asses off, but ours were cycles of 50-hour weeks followed by a week or two of 60-hours weeks prior to delivering milestones, followed by a couple of weeks of 9-5's with a couple of days off. Rinse and repeat. It worked, and I know from 2nd and 3rd hand accounts that similar cycles work in other productive environments.
Sometimes people really have to work crazy hours, but then again, who the hell in this time and age works crazy hours on-site????? That is pretty much what this VC is expecting to see, and to me that's a big fuck-up in terms of technology-oriented work environments?
Fine we work long hours, a good portion of it from home. If I see a tech company parking lot full on Friday 9pm, either that company is a government contractor working with classified shit that needs to be done on premises, or they are a bunch of apes who have yet to discover the blessing of telecommuting.
The VC is full of shit, or maybe his business wisdom is sooooo out of our pedestrian ability to grasp that it looks like magic shit conjured by Harry Potter or something.
-Male: Sadly, sexism in the industry is pretty well established. No good reason for it. There ARE reasons, but none of them good.
Sexism is common in workplaces stuffed with mostly young male workers (or mostly young female workers). Hiring a more representative crowd tends to put a damper on "bro culture".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Agile is 4 ideas ...
Congratulations, you've passed the Rorschach test! For bonus points, tell us what the "cloud" really is.
BTW, I not only like your ideas, I've followed them as much as possible since long before "Agile" was a buzzword. But while decrying buzzwordism, you've overlooked that "Agile" (capitalized? seriously?) is itself just a buzzword.
None of which have anything to do with a majority of agile I've seen
*Individuals.. blah blah blah
Yeah, I can't even tell you what this means. I doubt anyone else can either. Its marketing drivel that sounds moderately impressive, but has no real effect on how any company does anything.
*working software over documentation
Even when doing agile the absolute most effective companies I've seen have lots of documentation. Those that didn't either had 1 or 2 amazing developers who were the documentation (have a problem? Ask Gabe), or they failed miserably.
*Customer collaboration blah blah blah
Yeah- I've worked at multiple companies doing agile. Never talked to a customer. Wouldn't want to- we hire technical PMs for a reason. My company wouldn't want me to either- I'm too blunt and too honest.
*Responding to change
Everyone responds to change. And the general response by most agile places is the same as in non-agile- try to save room later in the schedule to meet the final release date you want for feature X. Because regardless of all the hand waving, there's still always a roadmap where you have features planned out for the next X quarters.
Here's what agile actually means in industry- that there's going to be some attempt at organizing work into X week batches. That's it. Do that, and they consider it agile.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
. If that's how you're doing Agile, you're doing it wrong.
At this point Agile has assume mythical qualities. Any time anything fails to work as promised by Agile, the implementation gets the blame, not Agile. They keep parroting the same thing. "if it does not work, you are doing agile wrong". You could postulate an imaginary waterfall organization, staffed with mythical programmers who do waterfall right. Then I could also say, "if it does not work, you are not doing waterfall right".
We have agile. We have agile tools. We have vendors selling agile management tools to our company making oodles of money. And you ask the agile tool vendor to implement something, suddenly it is going to take 18 months and two release cycles. They are agile, they sell agile tools, they should know how to do agile, and I ask for something simple like, "I want to be able to add/delete people to the notification list of user stories. There is no need to assume, there is going to be only one customer proxy or just one person monitoring progress. So when will I be able to add a notification field and add email ids to it?" 18 months and two releases.
The defect reports come from the field via Siebel database, and some script converts it to rally. In the process it fumbles the name of the submitter and the stupid script becomes the submitter. There is no lookup table to go from Siebel ticket number of Rally defect number or vice versa. Hey, vaunted rally tool vendor, when can you fix it? 18 months and two releases. This is already 18 months and two releases gone, and there is no solution in sight.
Rally is snake oil. It promises to deliver skycastles to addled top management which thinks building software is like toasting bread in Quiznos or building a car in the assembly line.
There are problems with waterfall. There is an entirely different set of problems with agile and rally. Agile is not going to make your process more efficient, or your software higher quality.
Now is your time to come in and say, "Rally is not agile" "You are doing agile wrong" completely ignoring the point there is no documented case of agile working better than waterfall given the same resources and goals.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If only I had mod points... Agile is another buzzword for management to hide behind and another way for them to pin their personal failures on the people who work for them. Hooray.
Corporate America sucks.
Agile has been around for quite some time now - certainly before the inanity of extreme programming and long before scrum. But giving something a buzzwordy name helps sell it to management. It doesn't matter how good your ideas are without management buy-In.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
My understanding of federal anti-discrimination laws, is that this is illegal.
Brogrammers are quick to cite federal anti-discrimination laws. Thank heavens no company in SV would engage in say age discrimination.
I have to agree. The one thing I unconditionally disagree with Agile on is their attitude towards documentation. I agree that this may speed the process of coding... maybe... but it makes long term support a disaster. Code is not documentation, even well formatted and commented (which is infrequent to begin with). Some coders may be able to translate on the fly, but even then, it doesn't explain very well the requirements behind the code or the model being used.
In short, it is coders and architects surrendering to product owners who want their stuff "fast". And as such, I understand that they want features out the door fast to capitalize on trends or whatever, but if the code attains any sort of age, it becomes a nightmare.
If anything, documentation proves that the developer actually understands what they wrote, as opposed to merely looking for validation by it compiling and then seeing it do (mostly) was it is expected to do on the surface. It's great for new features quickly, but I've seen there is a tendency for much Agile-generated code to limp along until it is completely re-written later. Or as I'd call it, TP code, although ultimately I might hesitate to even wipe my ass with it.
That's one possibility. Another is that whatever is supposed to be The One True Agile (tm) requires certain pre-conditions that aren't always met.
I could say "don't blame the single-pass waterfall process - if it failed for you, then you're doing it wrong". In some (rare) cases, single-pass waterfall is exactly right - a single programmer implementing a rigid specification (for example writing an H.264 decoder). But that's a pre-condition. It won't always fail and it won't always work, just like "Agile" or any other "methodology".
The truth is that there's no silver bullet. Every set of guidelines also includes a set of conditions (implicit or explicit). For example, most software development processes assume that the programmers involved are not all back-stabbing psychos. But even that's not always the case. Blaming reality for the failure of a process is the wrong way around.
Care to make an argument based on its merits rather than attack a strawman "brogrammer", brah?
*Software is written by people...
Umm, no duh? Once again, is there anything that means anything in that sentence? At absolute best it says "too much process is bad", which is a tautology- if it wasn't bad it wouldn't be too much.
*If you spend 6 months...
And in reality nobody ever spent 6 months just writing docs before writing code. On the other hand most agile projects fall way to hard on the other side- absolutely no documentation. Architecture doesn't appear- at least not good, clean, usable architecture. You have to think that stuff out beforehand. Its good to have the freedom to change it where it isn't meeting your needs, but spending large amounts of time constantly refactoring things because you didn't think things through up front is also wasteful. Part of the art of software engineering is figuring out where that line is.
*PMs are your customers.
No, not really. Not even close. My PMs represent a subset of my customers. Who aren't the same as my users. Listening to them is a good idea. Giving them what they want unfiltered is a bad one. And neither of them are necessarily the user, who also needs a seat at the table. But guess what- I don't interact with the PMs anymore at an agile company than at a non-agile one. The amount is relatively unchanged.
*Early delivery- has as many minuses as pluses. Ever work on software that had a meaningless deadline 3 months in and need to scramble to meet it? Iterative development gives you that fun ever couple of weeks. Plus you get to show the customer half finished software and get yelled at for it not working when you know you won't have it working for months. There's situations where this is actually worth the costs- heavily GUI software where the user really deeply cares about the look and feel of the UI, is paying by the hour so you have infinite time to tweak it, and doesn't have a lot of dependencies that take a long time. There's also situations where its a miserable failure- backend software where you need to do heavy calculations and heuristics for your result where the results will need to be massaged for weeks. Or anything where you're doing actual research, and not just development. A real project needs to weigh these factors and decide which set of problems is a better one to have.
Here's the problem- you, and a lot of other agilers, seem to think you've found something new and creative and preach it as a programming religion, and the solution to all problems. It isn't any of those things. The ideas have been around for decades. They're mostly being applied in the same way they always have. And some of the common practices are good for some types of situations. Some aren't. And those can switch up depending on the personalities of the team, the customer, the company, and the type of problem you're solving.
You throw out the baby with the bathwater with a lot of practices recommended by Scrum, XP, etc. Particularly the utter lack of documentation, design, and forward planning. And rather than listen when people try to give you feedback all you say is "you're not doing it right".
You want a real development methodology, I'll give you one. Think about what you're trying to do. Think about what the customer and user wants. Think about your team, their skills, and how they interact. Think about common practices and whether they fit those other things. Then choose the ones you think will work. Implement them. When something starts causing you problems, change something to fix it. In a reasonable timeframe, evaluate if that fixed it. Keep it or alter it based on that. Repeat.
The problem is that this doesn't follow a preset plan or a nice 4 bullet points manifesto. It requires people actually work at it. Its much easier to say "we're going to be Agile" then adopt a bunch of processes (and yes, daily scrums, automated unit tests, tdd, etc are all processes and may or may not be a good fit for you) and treat that as holy writ. Then when things change and
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
My understanding is that familial status is only a protected class for housing discrimination. At least federally.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Did you warn them? You didn't?!
http://xkcd.com/875/
he was probably just ego-wanking all over you to make you realise what an important big man he was.
only big, already successful companies can afford to own or rent their own parking lots. startups rent office space and most of their employees rely on street parking or nearby commercial parking (or public transport, bicycles, or living withing walking distance of work etc).
The startup might rent a few parking spots for the founders or maybe top employees...but they certainly won't be in an easily identifiable Startup Inc Parking Lot that you can do a drive-by eyeball at 9pm, they'll be a few reserved spots in a nearby car park.
now go wash that VC spoof off your face. and stop lapping it up.
How is at-work entertainment a fad? At Netscape, we had foosball, ping-pong, pool, and arcade machines. It builds camaraderie and is a great way to blow off some stress when you need to clear your mind for ten minutes.
Seriously, I just don't get what's with the Slashdot crowd, half the time. It's like they just want to hate what they do for a living so much and hate their work environment so much that when the opportunity to enjoy both comes along, they have to attack it with one ridiculous mentality or another.
The next best thing to loving what you do for a living is at least loving the environment you do it in. By some of the comments, here, you'd think everyone wanted to work in a coal mine and have people whipping them.
no one who has joined the 4-year-old company has ever left...
... alive.
I once worked on a place with such "mind control" (I would have put it as "emotional blackmail"). Oooh, free food! Oooh, videogames to play after lunch -there is a one hour mandated break, although most people will be done by 15-30 minutes-! Ooooh, free pizza&beer every Friday! Oooh, lots of parties on weekends! Yeah, well, I got fired because of the mortal sin of going home at about 7-7:30pm despite having been told that I had very good technical capabilities, so I wouldn't say it was a good job.
I'll take owning my time over such "perks" any day, and I wish there were more CEOs like this guy.
I work, I go home when I've done my 8 hours, I get paid. Simple. Why is this so difficult to grasp?