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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.
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.
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)
"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.
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.
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.
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.