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

Pfft

[Dancindan84]

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/

Hiring assholes is never worth it.

[gestalt_n_pepper]

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.

Re:Hiring assholes is never worth it.

[TXG1112]

developers who are nice to each other, write to spec, comment appropriately, and write code that anyone can understand and maintain.

This is pretty much the textbook definition of a good programmer, not a mediocre one.

Re:Hiring assholes is never worth it.

[Spy Handler]

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.

If they could do that (esp. the bold part), they wouldn't be mediocre developers.

Re:Hiring assholes is never worth it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Have people been calling you an asshole for so long that you feel the need to redefine the word asshole into something good? "Asshole" most certainly does not imply or even in the slightest connote competence.

Re:Hiring assholes is never worth it.

[lgw]

To me, the bold part is the bar for being an average developer. Not to be harsh, but if you can't right good code to spec then you suck, and should do something else for a living.

A good developer finds the simplicity hidden in each complex problem. He creates the design that makes people say "wow, it really is that simple" not "hmmm, how does that actually solve the problem here".

They're overanalyzing.

[ron_ivi]

Just keep employees happy.

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.

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.

Re:But...Agile teaches us...

[Jane Q. Public]

"...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.

His Employees Already Win...

[MatthiasF]

...for having a CEO that actually cares about them.

Re:Hm.

[Penguinisto]

Yes and no.

Sometimes you need to get off your ass and walk around once in awhile. Focus your eyes on something that doesn't involve pixels or a desk. Lunchtime is perfect for that. Gives you a chance to get out, walk around, notice things, talk to folks in a groups, and in a setting where you're not all eyeballing a PowerPoint presentation.

I get the leave-earlier paradigm, but honestly? 8-10 straight hours in front a screen makes Johnny a very unhappy soul. Break that shit up.

Re: But...Agile teaches us...

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't it a crucial part of Agile to tell others they are doing Agile wrong? :)

Re:Hm.

[egcagrac0]

Normal people do, yes.

A lot of tech workers don't act like normal people, however.

Re:Slashdot = intellectual vomit

[chargersfan420]

Slashdot is a .org.

Re:And here is where I stopped reading

[AdamHaun]

Having to stay at work till six and then the commute means you won't be home close to 8.

A two hour commute one way? If you're spending four hours a day commuting you're living in the wrong place.

Re:100 percent of 1 is 1

[tool462]

Depending on the quantity of VC available, it could be profitable to rent ~20 cars and park them in your lot overnight.

It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[luis_a_espinal]

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.