One of the interesting aspects of giving a shit is that it will lead sometimes to you doing things which are not in your short-term selfish narrowly-defined "best interest" but because you give a shit you'll do it anyway. Some of these lead to long-term value that is very significant but you can't know at the time.
I was once asked by a client (bank) to take a call with one of _their_ clients (a pretty important hedge fund). I did this as a courtesy even though I thought our product wasn't appropriate for the hedge fund. Anyhow I get on the call and it's the COO, the Chief Investment Officer, the CTO and a couple of other _very_ important people at this big fund. (ie a much more senior call than I really expected). Anyway, because I give a shit, I told them our product wouldn't really be right for them and explained why. They thanked me and I heard nothing more of it.
Until a couple of years later where I offered a job out of the blue because one of the people on the call had been impressed by how I had dealt with it, and by pure coincidence his partner was a recruiter who was tasked with headhunting for a CTO role and he said "hey you should check this guy out".
> One of the interesting aspects of giving a shit is that it will lead sometimes to you doing things which are not in your short-term selfish narrowly-defined "best interest" but because you give a shit you'll do it anyway. Some of these lead to long-term value that is very significant but you can't know at the time.
The feedback loop on these actions is so long that it's hard to understand the value of a positive reputation. It can take years of consistent positive actions before the long-term, indirect benefits of building a good reputation become apparent.
This is a constant sticking point when I mentor young people: It's easy to enter the business world and assume every interaction with other people is purely transactional. What's in it for me right now? Why should I help you?
It's also easy for junior people to think that changing jobs is a perfect reset button for their reputation or that the consequences of their actions will be neatly contained to the people around them. It can be a shock to discover just how much backchannel reference checking happens when evaluating candidates as well as how often they'll end up working with former coworkers again at other companies down the road.
Reputations are very asymmetric: They take a long time to build, but they can be destroyed very quickly. It can take years to see the benefits of having built a positive reputation, but it's an incredibly powerful asset once you've built it.
> They take a long time to build, but they can be destroyed very quickly.
I agree with the vast majority of what you've shared, but this one is a bit trickier.
Reputations can be destroyed quickly, but it isn't normal or easy for them to be destroyed quickly. Someone can end up in the press for something flagrant, sure, but usually what happens is that the people that have seen your work first hand may hear of a lapse of judgement or a flub with technology, raise their eyebrows a bit, and think to themselves "that's not the person I know, but I'll keep an eye out for next time."
A certain degree of humble appreciation for our shared fallibility is a marker of maturity. I've had the opportunity to be both gracious and the receiver of grace in situations like this, and I don't think the message we should be sharing with younger software developers is one that would inspire paranoia. Treat others as you would want to be treated, even when it hurts, and the rest will work itself out even if you mess up here or there is a better orientation to adopt in my opinion.
I had a brain tumor that made me make seriously poor decisions over a period of 4 years. I destroyed my reputation of 20 years that got me requested by a fortune 10 to the USA and green card sorted.
I am one of the few actually good recruiters that exist and am now capable of doing the good work that got me where I was but absolutely no one wants to hear it or give me a chance.
One of the main issues is I was very senior (but still actively worked on search assignments for niche technical and or c suite) and there are few senior roles and most junior people don’t want to manage me at 45 or even consider me for less senior positions.
45 is oooooooold in recruitment where you are up or out in a sink or swim environment and 90% are just glorified telemarketers.
None of this is anyones fault but man I got emotional writing this.
I hear so much about how terrible the recruitment ‘industry’ is, much of it true, I’m desperate to work and to help but how the hell do I break this loop?
How do I get past the ‘he took his pants off in the office once’ reputation? put CAT scans on my CV?
Have you tried posting an explanation / apology on linked in ?
It's actually one of the very rare case where sending a public message to your whole professional circle makes perfect sense.
Sorry to hear that. I read a story in the papers recently where one chap had a brain tumour that he wasn't aware of, and it was making him act in a way that had him lash out at his family always and divorce his wife. Once they discovered it, he managed to get it removed, survive, and actually start to patch things up with his family.
I guess there isn't really a point to this comment other than to say you definitely have my sympathies, that stuff can be brutal. I hope you can get past this professionally.
The competent recruiters that I've met in my field have all been running their own small shops or regularly attaching to companies for specific goals. I keep in touch with them and pass their info on to friends.
I don't know nearly enough about your industry to know where reputation fits into the system but it's certainly not a concern from my point of view.
Yes this is true, and you are correct that is my best option.
It is word of mouth and the actual contract/consulting work I have had has come from friends in the industry who know me and pass the lead on.
Having said that some of this is just me being negative and beat down - I've had two positions to fill on a freelance basis and that lead to the CFO recommending me for a third role which was enough to launch a llc!
Then the pandemic happened.
So I'm starting again.
Except now it's five years instead of three since I've been in the game, and really now eight years since my troubles started so contacts start to wane and move on and forget you.
I'm not the guy who can play golf and entertain anymore.
I've been in a similar situation but can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Giving yourself time to feel shitty about a shitty situation is pretty normal, but if you like doing good work then your interest in the work will be motivating when you dig back into it.
Lots of new areas and ideas floating around right now, and it'd be worth looking around before setting your sights on an old career trajectory.
How common is it for recruiters to work with commercial real estate agents? It's weird how little I know about your industry.
If you present yourself as well in person as you do in your writing it seems like you could tell the story well and people would be endeared to you. What is keeping you from these roles?
Honestly, it's because I struggle to get to the stage where I can tell the story because people see my name and back channel it.
Within my chosen specialty I was pretty well known and my issues were very public.
It's getting a bit better as the counter story gets out but its exhausting sometimes and hard to talk about in a 30 minute phone screen, the entire conversation becomes about that.
I'm not an insider in recruiting, but just to share thoughts in case they stick (including quotes from other replies you've made in this thread):
>"Honestly, it's because I struggle to get to the stage where I can tell the story because people see my name and back channel it."
Assuming you can afford it, have you considered a reputation firm to bury negative search results for your name? The ability to find well-paying work can outsize the cost. Good research is needed here, as some firms are likely ineffective, while others do work.
Have you also considered going by an alternative version of your name? If you have a spouse, could you adopt their last name? If the problem is really that serious, even a name change may be warranted. At the least, a "doing business as (DBA)" name change could work, similar to what gopher_space wrote about operating as a small shop.
>"Within my chosen specialty I was pretty well known and my issues were very public."
Would your skills and experience in recruitment be relevant to another specialty? A real option is to lower your expectations of seniority, and start at a more junior level in a different field/specialty that uses the same skills, and build up new experience and have new connections. With your background, you should progress much faster than a genuine junior recruiter.
>"Except now it's five years instead of three since I've been in the game, and really now eight years since my troubles started so contacts start to wane and move on and forget you."
How have you created those contacts in the first place? There must have been a time when you succeeded without relying on established contacts, and you created them as you were getting your foot in the door. Age and reputation may work against you, but reputational obstacles can be mitigated from the suggestions above.
>"45 is oooooooold in recruitment where you are up or out in a sink or swim environment and 90% are just glorified telemarketers."
Are there ways to obscure your age? If you have a degree, can you remove the year? Can you remove earlier experiences from your C.V.? Would there be anything you can do to physically look younger, or at least make your age ambiguous for in-person interviews?
>"I'm not the guy who can play golf and entertain anymore."
There is a sales book (less relevant for recruiting) called "The Challenger Sale," which asserts that likability, while important, is far less useful and valued by others than helping people identify problems they may not have considered, and offering solutions. Instead of focusing on golfing and entertainment (likability), would it be possible to focus more on outcomes you had at previous work positions?
In a completely different tack, would you be willing to switch to an adjacent field outside of recruiting? For a moment, assume that recruiting is completely non-viable (this isn't true, but consider this for a moment). What do you like about recruiting? What specific skills do you excel at, within recruiting? Are there any other career directions you would really enjoy, where these skills will give you a strong advantage, even if you had to learn additional skills?
Overall, you really can get back on your feet. There are a lot of stories on HN where people are worse off (felony criminal record or homeless), yet who have still created enjoyable and sustainable careers. It's completely valid to feel emotional about your circumstances, but there is a clear pathway to find work you enjoy (address the obstacle of reputation; consider a different style of pitching your skillset that is challenge-focussed while leveraging your past experience; changing fields outside of your specialty, while accepting a junior position and working up; and changing your career path while leveraging your existing skills).
There's also a compounding factor. There's some relatively low-risk, high-reward career progression to be had by staying in something niche. I don't mean a JS packaging system, something more like A/B testing. People who stick it out advance, and niches are (by definition) small. So you're either bouncing around fields all the time (which can work) or the people you've worked with over the last 10 years are going to make up a surprising portion of the most influential people in your field.
I recently finished Warren Buffett's biography Snowball, and this is a recurring theme in his life. His integrity is one of the most important factors in his success; he got a great deal or gotten out of a sticky situation with regulators simply because people trusted him to do the right thing.
This took decades though, he'd been operating in this manner since he was a child, but it wasn't until he was in his 50s that all that goodwill began to work for him on an unimaginable scale.
It means that Taleb got stupidly, ridiculously lucky with an option trade one time (in a way that he didn't expect or intend) and, as a result, he is rich and therefore people now pay attention to him on all kinds of subjects outside of his expertise.
I read his Black swan and Skin in the game and he had some good ideas there, that stuck with me, so definitely recommend these books. But your summary is very accurate, so his books should be taken with a huge grain of salt.
It's inspirational self-help rhetoric, it may not actually MEAN anything.
But you could parse it as: "reputation" is your standing in the eyes of others, and if you define success as a good reputation then you cede control of your success to others. "Honour", "courage", and "integrity" are self-assessed, so if you define success as "acting with honour" then it's your definition of honour that matters.
It's framed as an either-or, but you have a reputation whether you want one or not. It's what other people say about you when you're not in the room. If you want others to choose to work with/buy from/hang out with you, then you care about your reputation for that is what will determine whether they engage with you.
Reputation doesn't automatically follow from the values you live (consistently good people can have weak reputations, consistently awful people can duplicitously craft good reputations). Two people can act with honour, courage, and integrity, yet have different reputations. I think Taleb's rhetoric clouds the point.
From what I know, executives appreciate people being honest with them and not constantly trying to sell them on something. OP was honest and didn't try to sell them something they didn't need - something people in executives positions really appreciate and remember.
Case in point:
I remember working on a project that was taking a long time to get stuff done. One day, I took lunch in our project room and was there with another junior dev as we were both trying to finish a few things up and working and eating lunch.
Suddenly in walks three older gentlemen in suits. They start looking at all the stuff (charts, metrics, designs, etc) we have posted up around the room and start talking and pointing to some charts. I kindly ask them if there's something I can help them with.
They walk over and introduce themselves. Two are executive VP's of the department we're building the app for. The other is a senior VP who is showing them what we do. I start explaining how the progress is going, "Well, Bob, its really all rainbows and unicorns right now. If we can get server A talking to server B, it will be even better."
Exec A puts his hand and I stop talking. Looks at me and says, "Atfateshands, tell me honestly how the project is going. I didn't come down here for a sales presentation, tell me honestly what your thoughts are."
That evolved into a 30 min talk about what I thought was holding the project back and possibly transitioning out of some the tech that was kind of forced on the project to a better framework that would speed up building this app. I stood at a whiteboard and quickly ran the numbers for them showed them it wasn't too late to pivot.
They thanked me for my time and left. I figured nothing would come of it. Then a few days later, the project manager comes to me and says, "You know how you wanted to pivot to that new JS Framework? You got the green light. Let's get started ASAP, ok?"
The same three guys showed up about a month later, and pulled me outside the room to thank me for my honesty and not just telling them what they wanted to hear and believed that pivoting to the tech I recommended essentially saved the entire project from getting scrapped. Because of all the delays we were having, they were discussing the possibilities of just shutting the project down in the next few weeks when they visited our room that day. The most senior VP also told me in the future not to wait around before speaking up.
It was a pretty eye opening experience, but gave me a really valuable lesson.
> "You know how you wanted to pivot to that new JS Framework? You got the green light. Let's get started ASAP, ok?"
It sounds like the PM also wanted to pivot.
But someone between you and the VP on the org chart didn't.
Were they bitter about the situation where it seemed like you went over their head? Were there repercussions from that?
I'm not saying you did anything wrong, but you make it sound like the decision was unambiguous - you are being forced to use some tech that's slowing you down, and you know of a way to speed things up. Why did that need a VP to be approved?
I'm not bringing this up to blame you - but I also want to make sure anyone reading this doesn't feel like their only action in a situation like this is to wait for a VP to come in, hear all their complaints, and magically solve their problems. In another situation, your exact actions would have led to no change, and a ruined relationship with a manager who would have vindictively punished you by going outside the reporting chain.
"In the Abilene paradox, a group of people collectively decide on a course of action that is counter to the preferences of many or all of the individuals in the group. It involves a common breakdown of group communication in which each member mistakenly believes that their own preferences are counter to the group's and, therefore, does not raise objections, or even states support for an outcome they do not want. A common phrase relating to the Abilene paradox is a desire to not "rock the boat". "
I ran a meeting once where a significant consensus decision was made after lengthy discussion of several alternatives.
The result surprised and disappointed me, so I checked with everyone individually later, away from the meeting, to find nobody in the group wanted the option they voted for, they just voted for what they thought everyone else wanted. Which turned out to be wrong. It wasn't even a compromise, it was just incorrect belief from misinterpreting everyone else's sentiment.
The least popular option prevailed, with unanimous consensus, and nobody knew it was unpopular until I checked after.
>> It sounds like the PM also wanted to pivot. But someone between you and the VP on the org chart didn't.
Most of the department was still on Waterfall, we were doing Agile. They mandated we use their old tech stack since we opted for Agile instead of their standard Waterfall project management. This was communicated as a compromise, not knowing how old the tech stack was.
There was a lot of back and forth and the PM showed incredibly courage to stand up to the department heads. Using the old tech stack was a compromise, but in the end, started slowing the project down. Once I was able to explain in more layman terms how it was affecting the project, the people with more say allowed us to pivot.
There was minimal backlash, once we pivoted. I made sure we started hitting goals and gaining traction quickly to offset any arguments they were going to make. I knew we'd be under a microscope, so I put in the extra work to make sure we were covered.
The thing is, you take that lesson, try to speak up another time, and the executive flies off the handle at your boss about some perceived sidestepping of the hierarchy.
I have caught the good and the bad from speaking up but the universal message is to always keep your mouth shut...and that's why we can't have nice things.
I power through and speak up usually, but most people are deathly afraid to because of the spoken/unspoken "keep your mouth shut" cultural message born of hierarchies. Toxic, and probably the reason people flee corporate life ASAP.
Keeping your mouth shut maintains your own status quo. People advance in their careers by being good at knowing when to keep their mouths shut, and when to speak up.
I've been in the same position a few times after this and it really is all about reading the room and the people you're talking to.
It was clear the execs I was talking to wanted to get a more "feet on the street" perspective on the project and find out what was really making the project lag behind. I felt like I had nothing to lose and could explain things in a simple manner so they could understand what the issue was and give them a viable alternative that could save the project.
In other situations, I've had the CTO sit in front of a room and berate a dev team I was on for not testing an external app and having it crash a bevy of servers for almost two days while asking if anybody had any answers as to why we didn't test enough. The other situation was getting pulled into a VP's office and ask me why a project wasn't hitting our goals. It felt like more of a "Tell me who I should be firing for this." meeting and I wasn't about to throw anybody under the bus and felt like being honest and speaking up wasn't in my best interest.
Biiiig part of the equation people don’t consider when they ask us to “go the extra mile” repeatedly. It’s ok for us to ask, “well…what have you done for me lately or can commit to now?” once in a while.
> but is optimising for this lottery the best use of time and effort?
The difference is that you're not optimizing for a single lottery. If you build a habit of caring about things and doing a good job, people will notice. You'll meet thousands or tens of thousands of people across your career. The more of those people who walk away with a positive idea of your reputation, the more "lotteries" you've entered. The more positive your reputation, the more entries you get.
This really shows up in the second decade of a career, when many of the people you've worked with in the past have moved up into management positions and are looking for good candidates to recruit. Having established a reputation as a person who cares and who does the right thing will fast-track you through interview processes and move you to the top of recruiting lists (and rightly so, because you've already proven yourself).
He didn't invest much time, just the time on the call and the time to determine it wasn't a fit. So I wouldn't call it optimizing for lottery. Instead, I'd call it optimizing for reputation. And you can't know what doors your reputation will open for you. You just can't.
What's the alternative? If he'd fibbed and tried to make it work, and then wasted everyone's time during the sales process. Or worse had an unhappy team at the end of the POC or a contract that the company wouldn't renew?
I guess he could have not taken the call, but I think if a client asks you to do that and it isn't invasive in terms of effort, most consulting folks would do it.
There's other low-but-non-zero probability outcomes with a high payoff out of such a call, too. For instance, it may turn out that you are a good fit, because the requirements got mangled during the inevitable game of telephone. There's enough such possibilities that it's worth taking the call, but also not wasting anyone's time once the situation has become clear.
Another one I encounter frequently ... it isn't a good fit for this team, but seems like it might be for $PeerDepartment. And now you have a warm introduction from someone they trust.
Also some high-probability relatively low payoff events. The OP could probably expect the hedge fund that took the meeting would feed back to the bank that referred them that they appreciated the introduction and thought the team had integrity and good sector-specific knowledge. That might help cement relations with the existing client and win more referrals for the company.
And hedge fund employees impressed by a presentation are likely to talk to and occasionally move to work at banks. The headhunting relative with the ideal job vacancy certainly wasn't the most likely of the many potential positive outcomes!
People who don't "optimize for this lottery" are the ones who luck always seems to pass them by. They just don't know why, and they guess they're just unlucky. It's just not fair!
What they don't see is how the "lucky" people put extra effort in over an extended period of time, without immediate personal gain. It's not worth it... Until it is.
Calling these lotteries is actually a big misrepresentation. Lotteries are for astronomical odds. Plus you can do things to change your odds.
Instead of waiting to be picked, you could have been proactive and reached out to them for a job. The odds massively improve in your favor compared to a lottery in terms of winning (winning = getting a job in this case). And to belabor the obvious, no matter how cool I am with the gas station clerk, it's not going to improve my odds of winning the lottery.
That leads us to part 2, which is "why do anything at all for your career when you already have skills" and it's because doing things like signalling that you give a shit alerts other folks with decision-making powers that can benefit you.
If this was the only time in their life they'd be implicitly taking this gamble, sure, that's a reasonable question. But if you behave "impressively" in a consistent fashion, things like this are more likely to happen.
Is an optimizing your life around best use of time and effort the meta-optimal path for a satisfying life?
One argument is that the parts of our life that make it our particular life are the things that are, by design not optimal. Any optimal choice we make is an optimal choice any rational actor in our shoes would make, so says nothing about us or our particular place in the universe.
You are what you're willing to squandor time and attention on.
I wouldn't call it winning the lottery; it's just that people remember people they admire for whatever reason. I am early in my career, but I definitely have a short list of people I've worked with that I admire for a number of reasons (integrity, empathy, getting shit done, etc). I have pushed to work with them for those reasons, and I feel like I've gotten work people admiring me for whatever reason.
I find a lot of people conflate building and maintaining relationships with people with going to "networking" events and other artificial faux network building.
I've also never thought of myself as deliberately building a network but the (few) jobs I've landed over the past 25 years have been directly through people I knew.
It's honestly up there. Success is a combination of luck and effort; where opportunity meets preparation. You can control preparation. You can't control opportunity, you can only put yourself in places where opportunity hangs out.
It’s refreshing to see these stories. As someone from the commercial film world, these stories often end in “long term relationships that are incredibly mutually beneficial and profitable for all” or “someone got something for free off me knowing full well they had no intention of ever talking to me again.”
It’s tough knowing the difference. A lot of people baulk when I say I won’t “go the extra mile” sometimes, but frankly I just have to make my own calculations and sometimes you (royal you) are just being greedy. If I “go the extra” mile as a video producer for every person who asks me, not only am I potentially setting steeper expectations for next time (because it is NEVER just once with most people and they may tell others), but I am also taking on more work for less pay. That’s other work I could be doing, that’s being with my kids, that’s all sorts of valuable time for potentially nothing.
I don’t know. I hope this little rant has something useful in it haha
It definitely does. Going the extra mile in a 5 minute way is not the hardest thing to do most of the time because of the minor consequence. The bigger the sacrifice gets, the harder it is to go the extra mile. It’s still best to do it as much as possible, but within calculated reason.
Everyone saying it doesn't scale is missing the point.
Scaling is a winner-take-all, venture capital mindset. The article is about service businesses, which do not need to hit web scale! We are talking about services here not your web startup.
Even beyond services, giving a shit and building saas is not impossible. In fact, I wish more tech companies started small and stayed small. I absolutely want to run a digital small business and I want to give a shit, it makes the building feel purposeful instead of this product-led growth at all costs bullshit.
I hope we see a software middle class grow in the next decade. Middle class tech companies are going to be coming from the bootstrapper + founder focused funds (TinySeed / Calm) and they are going to have a distinct advantage if they understand their strategy/context in their chosen verticals.
> The article is about service businesses, which do not need to hit web scale!
There are many small consultancies that are humming along, making high six figures to low seven figures a year in income, with good paying jobs and work/life balance. It can be a bit of a grind for the owners (who assume a lot of risk and have to land clients) and there are some ups and downs due to the realities of consulting (okay, just lost a big client, time to tighten the belt), but I've seen this work a number of times. Having a recurring source of income (productized service, hosting) can really help.
The main thing these companies do is "be excellent", aka give a shit.
I'm curious about how to get involved in these types of companies. They don't seem lie the easiest thing to search for, but that might just be that I don't have the exposure to know where to look.
There are a lot of people who already do this. Take a look at the MicroConf community started by Rob Walling. The middle class is growing in software, you just won't read about it (usually) on most of the social media platforms or news outlets because it's usually not a flashy story.
not giving a shit doesn't scale well either. see: our currently corporatist hellscape of a country which allows companies to defraud customers en masse and only receive a slap on a wrist fine in the unlikely case they are punished at all.
Giving a shit has many personal benefits that go beyond the question of financial sustainability.
Career-wise, if you give a shit about your work and your colleagues this does add up to a reputation. When you do things "right", don't gossip or backstab, act with integrity and honesty, people notice. You'll be seen as trustworthy, a pillar to fall back on.
The thing is though, the person screwing everybody over and job hopping before the damage becomes visible may actually get more out of their career, financially. It's a rather philosophical question as to which character type you want to be.
Another reward of giving a shit is the gratitude people show, because it has become a rare behavior it seems.
For example, I'm running a web community (photography), non-profit, as a hobby. One particular user, an old Australian guy, is very much not tech savvy and recently I spent two nights in a row to get him onboarded again. He struggles with the simplest things but it's all good now.
To a calculating mind, this is a ridiculous investment of scarce free time with virtually no gain. The last part is where that mind couldn't be more wrong.
The man was almost in tears from gratitude. He's alone, struggles and nobody bothers to explain him anything, not even his family, most of which live far away. He got helped, by somebody he never met, for no particular reason but giving a shit.
I will remember that gratitude a decade from now. By comparison, a stranger could now send me 10K and it would mean absolutely nothing to me. I don't need it, I have my stuff. You can't buy deep and memorable human connections and moments, they are by definition a result of giving a shit.
Look at how little it takes and how giant the impact is. A company put genuine effort into a customer's table needs, and here we are.
Are you saying I can outsource my shit-giving activities?
Sign me up. I've been unable to give a shit for quite some time. I wish I could give a shit, but the world has become a pretty ugly place, in large part because of deliberate attempts to demoralize those who give a shit.
You see it all over the place on social media. People do a weak-ass form of shit-giving in the form of "raising awareness", the least conceivable level of effort for something you wish you could give a shit about, but don't actually give a shit.
Of course even if somebody tried to GaSaaS, the space would promptly fill with people giving as few shits as possible for as much money as possible. Too many major charities do that: they'll take your money and spend it mostly on advertising for other people to give their money, too, and very little on the things you'd expect if they actually gave a shit.
I know TFA is more about the business sense of giving a shit, but I'd love to see somebody able to give a shit in a larger sense. Unfortunately, I can't give a shit because it seems nobody gives a shit any more -- except the people who are passionately devoted to making sure other people feel miserable instead.
IMNTBHO, it started with Google. They pioneered the idea of embedding themselves DEEPLY into our lives (email!), while absolutely not giving any shits about it at all. There NEVER was a number to call if something went wrong. Can't get your POP or IMAP settings right? Fuck you! You lost your password? Fuck you! Someone stole your account? Fuck you! There's no recourse for any problem unless you're important enough to raise a stink about it on a social media platform. Then EVERYONE saw that their businesses were no longer constrained by having to give a shit any more, and it's just been all downhill ever since.
Our culture is in love with bullshitting. If you can bullshit to get what you want (ostensibly), then you're the man. Notice how getting away with things is glorified. It's like you managed to hack the Matrix or steal the cookie from the cookie jar your mommy didn't want you to touch. It's the childish satisfaction that you're hot shit because you got past the grown ups.
Of course, you can get away with a lot of bad things. The question is: should you do such things? The answer is: no. No one of any sense of dignity will lie, cheat, steal, or bullshit. No one who know how harmful it is to themselves to do such things will do them. It is beneath them and their love themselves too much to want to harm themselves. It's degrading. Wine won through illicit means tastes like urine anyway, if it tastes like anything at all. It's like the devil has offered you a glass of Chateau Lafite under the condition that you hand him your taste buds, or that you let him take a dump in it first.
Give a shit about things worth giving a shit to the degree that they are worthy of being given a shit about. Don't worry about approval from others. Virtue is its own reward. Don't whine. Don't be envious.
When selling my last house, I invited 3-4 local realtors for appointments. 3 showed up with some printed comps and gave me a general idea of list price right then. The last showed up, walked through the house, asked about upgrades I had made etc etc then said "Let's meet again in a few days when I've had a chance to accurately price your place." He got the sale.
And now I see several "app" companies are trying to push realtors out of their business entirely by using "algorithms" for private equity to buy up any and all housing. And I guaran-damn-tee they don't give a shit.
Those companies have already failed though (Zillow is practically about to go out of business because they failed so hard), probably can never succeed because of the adverse selection effect, and "investors are buying all the housing" is a myth propagated by NIMBYs.
Zillow is totally fine financially. Yeah they lost $10b which is bad news but they didn't bet the farm, and as they continue to invest r&d in renter/landlord oriented services they should be fine. It's the Expedia of houses, and people have to live somewhere. Can you put forward any proof at all that they are even struggling, let alone "about to go out of business"?
They can’t buy “all” the housing and make money off that. You can simply defeat them by building more housing.
Same reason car companies sell you cars instead of keeping them for themselves. They naturally depreciate, except we intervene in the market to help boomers’ retirements.
Yeah, because it's good-to-essential for boomers' retirements and they're the median voter. Young people are pretty bad at voting in general (they take any excuse to stop doing it) but unfortunately even besides that, wouldn't be the median voter because of population demographics.
But if you're a young person who doesn't own a home, X corporation owning the homes isn't worse for you than random boomer landlords owning them. Corporate landlords at least don't take things personally when you ask them to do maintenance, and theoretically you can be part owners of them since they're publicly traded.
And corporate landlords didn't defeat the social housing legislation in California just now, boomers did.
I remember my first "real" job was at a company in a niche market who had a couple competitors.
We were told often by sales and the executives that they were often told that despite our product being more expensive they bought our equipment because:
"When we call your tech support guys you answer, and your support team seems to actually care about fixing the problem in a way that it doesn't happen again."
That tech support team would stay together as a team through a couple acquisitions (and being acquired) for nearly 20 years (of my time at least) supporting new products and so on, until finally as always happens with tech support they were eventually devalued by the company enough that one final sale of the company happened and everyone was laid off.
Years later I met up with some of the product engineers (who survived the last acquisition) told me "We still talk about how that team did it the right way. The team we have now is three times as big and handles fewer tickets and is horrible at their job."
I always thought that team should have been sold as a group to someone who cared but really nobody values good tech support teams ... not for long.
Now I work at a small software shop where we just keep picking up customers based on word of mouth ... because someone told them "these guys can deliver and care".
This is great, I look for companies like these locally. When covid started, a lot of people in my community were out of work, or experiencing a drop in customer patronage. I decided to help these businesses best, I should make a contract with myself to always look for someone in my friend group who produces or services something first, then the wider local community, then the state, and so on. Much to my surprise I've only had to go to Amazon once, for an obscure component that isn't known to be produced in my locality.
Through this, I've ended up with a lot of ancillary benefits and connections. The interaction is so much more pleasant this way, I don't think I'll go back. They're delivering a consisting product or service, and I'm predictable as a customer as a result. Here's an example: when I walk into the meat shop, they know I'm going to be there, so when something unique or special comes in, they have something set aside that they knew I'd want. They always have a recipe too or something they made to share. To me, that's service.
You don't have to be my best man or fishing buddy, you just have to acknowledge the reciprocal relationship we have.
So far the consensus seems to be that GaSaaS doesn't scale.
I would like to protest this sentiment.
With technology, you can empower non-wizards to give substantially more of a shit than they otherwise would be able to.
The danger lies in the specific nature of those technological implementations and the engagement models applied to their usage. Today, our models look something like "fuck your dopamine loop as hard and fast as possible without any subsequent regard for anything at all"
This is my biggest issue with working at FAANG (been at 2). Lots of people just don't give a shit. To paraphrase the Silicon Valley show: "you got your RSUs now fuck off for 4 years". I can't fault people for making the best financial decision for them, but for crying out loud, give a shit about the code. Write the unit test. Write the docs to explain the architecture. Refactor the code while you're editing that file. Think about class and method names. Give a shit.
I've been working with startups for awhile and I never got the chance to give a shit. Not even when I was CTO. So many external pressures, deadlines, hacky releases to demo to whatever investors. Responding to A | B testing. Firefighting. And the list can go on.
The only time in my life I had the possibility to give a shit was when I was working for shit money contracting for the government. I've never been in that situation again where I could spend as much time as I needed until I delivered to the quality I desired. Architecture diagrams, properly planned executions, testing etc etc. Much slower moving than startups but I trust the systems I wrote to continue saving lifes as they have done until now. Most of the code I delivered for startups, I don't even trust at release, what can I say about decades down the line...
For what it's worth, working at Amazon for a bunch of years now, this is the highest percentage of people that truly Give A Shit, I've ever encountered.
I know it's not universal but in the parts I've worked in, it's intoxicating.
You pay premium to get the GaS package. Most people think that’s because you’re paying them to care, but that’s not it at all. You cannot pay someone to care.
You’re paying for the rare access to people who get genuine satisfaction of doing something well. The fact that it is a precious commodity saddens me. I think a lack of decent financial security keeps people from G’ing an S.
I run a mobile app agency like you and we do pretty well selling GaSaaS.
I'm a developer but have studied sales quite a lot over the last 10 years. The most important thing I learned is to find clients that fit you really well when it comes to skills, culture and budget.
To do this you have to give a shit and not be afraid to ask potentially off-putting questions. Stuff like:
"Are you sure you want to build this app, your business case doesn't add up so why bother?"
"Can you demonstrate you're in this for the long haul? There's no joy in building an app that fails, which is what happens if you don't budget to iterate your app."
"How come you don't hire freelancers or contractors, it will cost you less?"
Obviously I ask nicer questions too, but these are good "give a shit enough to risk losing the sale" kind of questions.
We once landed a $mm deal because I told a CTO to his face that most of his teams were probably incapable of accurately describing the technologies they use and how/why. 90% of the time it works every time ;-)
Why I work with museums. I'll never be rich but they're full of amazing people who truly give a shit about what they do. The WankerCoefficient is very low - 12 years in and the number of tosser clients I've had to deal with can be counted on one hand.
As a consequence of this, we deliver good work - highly focused on client needs, bespoke, and at high quality. We've got a name for it and have never done anything apart from rely on word of mouth for new work.
I did a brief stint fixing some DB issues in the Museum of London (pdp11 v7) and I completely agree. To work in the minutia of the minute books of the guild of glovers in London, over a 400 year period and simultaneously be able to handle asinine requests from the public knowing that ONE in a thousand may serve a purpose, even if only to keep somebody's child alive to history in 20 years time... on a pittance.
Same with staff at the V&A. The new management destroyed all the goodwill behind the scenes.
Reminds me of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work - where the author repairs broken motorcycles, and sometimes ends up spending more time than expected (without charging extra to the client) because he cared. A lovely book that is worth a read.
Some fancy words, for where "shitgiving" doesn't quite fit:
Meta-cognition. Mentalisation. Intersubjectivity.
When a sentient being picks up the (apparent) communications of
another being, instead of taking these 'noises' on face value as
signals requiring action/process, they perceive another. Another
being, like them, with thoughts and feelings, that they "hold in
mind". These are first steps towards empathy/sympathy.
The distancing function of technology is very efficient at suppressing
this. What we do in a purely protocol/process based world made only of
responses, targets, KPIs is forget meta-cognition. It's not that
people are being "evil" [1] but that quality frameworks based only on
measuring things don't accommodate it.
[1] Cold Evil: Technology and Modern Ethics - Andrew Kimbrell
Sometimes "giving a shit" can talk you right out of a job.
You: I'd love to work with you but I need to know X,Y,Z and we need a couple more meetings. I want to fully understand your project and your goals before committing to price.
Someone else: I can do it for $
Some people pick (thoughtful & detailed) you, and some will pick (easy and vague) someone else - it really depends on their personality.
Some business owners simply want to write a check. Others want to be intimately involved - the skill is determining which is sitting in front of you.
It's a real great message, yes, they gave a shit. They gave a shit because the author likely paid >10,000 CAD. Yes, ten thousand Canadian dollars. Or $7692 USD. This is significant to me because I feel like for a table (conference room or not!) anyone asking for that type of price point _should_ give a shit. I'm all for nice furniture (in fact, I've built some) – but I'd say some of the cape-wearing folks who really care are often doing so behind the scenes, or, if you're lucky: in a position at a company (or their own company) who really has pride in what they're doing.
I think the author found a company who gives a shit, but I'd also like to point to other makers who give a shit without the five-figure price point.
The difference in quality and customer service of a small local/regional ISP that truly does give a shit vs a giant nationwide-scale ISP can be amazing.
If the small ISP has a sufficient amount of network engineering knowledge and acumen to build small-scale things at very high quality.
More along the lines of the custom wood business referenced in the original post, I am familiar with a few small welding/steel fabrication and custom carbon fiber CNC cutting shops in the metro Vancouver area that also give a shit.
They aren't trying to scale up to some huge size or go for economies of scale, they are perfectly content to serve a mid sized local market with not cheap, high quality products.
This is precisely why Amazon emphasizes Customer Obsession (giving a shit about customers) and Ownership (giving shit about your problems other people in the org have). I don't love everything about Amazon, I sure do like these two.
We don't put our values on our web site but we do talk about them internally a lot and I have them listed on a small piece of paper glued to my laptop next to the trackpad. #1 is "Integrity". You cannot convince anyone you have integrity by telling them anything, they can only come to believe it by seeing how you act over time.
And if we don't have integrity what does it matter what the other values are?
This - the people involved actually giving a shit - is exactly why FOSS projects' volunteer support (on IRC, for example) regularly trumps the crud experience you get from huge, established, and deep-pocketed vendors of alternative products that are astonishingly expensive. Ironically, often the most extreme in the "support" contract department.
This concept is also relevant when applying for a job. At one of my previous jobs, I asked my boss what about the interview convinced him to give me an offer. He said it was because I asked so many questions, and he hardly had a chance to ask any that he'd prepared.
It makes me think about the research[1] that suggests people pick their doctors based on empathy over competence, but it's really hard to evaluate competence if you don't think the person is listening to you. Maybe you can see by some objective measure if they rate highly, but if the communication is bad, how can you be sure if what you are buying is what they are selling, even if what they're selling is the best ev4r.
While it's important to give a shit when dealing with customers, I wonder how useful "giving a shit" is when it comes to things like picking a conference table.
Was that really the best use of this CEOs time? Is the company that much better off because of their fancy table?
This adventure seems incredibly decadent and pointless to me. It's just a fucking table, focus on what matters.
I'm trying to understand your post. It seems like you're suggesting that picking out a table isn't that important, but my understanding of the post was that the person selling the table should give a shit, not the person buying the table. In which case I think it depends on if you're selling a commodity or a luxury. If you're selling a commodity focusing on one individual sale may not matter that much, you need to scale. If you're selling a luxury, it may very well be in the CEO's best interest to help sell an $8000 table to a company that is in the habit of buying $8000 tables.
That was the whole point of the article - the process of <dealing with thing> was delightful because <thing needer> dealt with a <thing provider> that gave a shit.
Yeah I know but in this case whether or not <dealing with thing> is delightful is undermined by the consideration that giving a shit about <thing> in the first place seems counterproductive for <thing needer>.
Clearly there needs to be shit giving limits for both counterparties regardless of <thing>.
Tangential, but IMO the super-power rich people have at achieving personal goals (this principle also applies to business goals, but let's set that aside) is largely due to being able to pay (to them) pocket change to make others do their giving-a-shit for them.
How many shits do you have to give to stay fit as a poor person? Lots. Many shits must be given. You must be a shit-giving machine. 100% of shits given toward your goal must come from you.
How many shits do you have to give to stay fit as a rich person? Let's see... you're paying an amount of money that's meaningless to you to have someone else give a shit about your meals, both making sure that your diet is healthy and balanced and that it's tasty and appealing to minimize the shit-giving you need to stick with it... and someone else give a shit about your work-outs... and someone else to give a shit about your schedule to make sure that stuff fits in... gee, look at that, you hardly have to give any shits at all, personally!
I feel you. There's so much shit-giving when you're poor. You can't afford to outsource maintenance. You must figure it all out yourself: car maintenance, appliance repair, taxes etc. There's always something you've gotta figure out. With a bit of money, you make a phone call and someone else is liable for any trouble that might arise.
That's part of why I think the benefits of the US moving to some kind of single-payer or similar healthcare system would be much larger than they look based on a naïve cost calculation—our healthcare system consumes a ton of largely uncompensated giving-a-shit from a very large proportion of our society (basically everyone who's not very rich). I have to think that's harming other activities (including health itself, since, as covered, eating well and exercising requires a pretty large amount of giving-a-shit) some of which might provide direct benefits to measures like GDP, if some of that time and giving-a-shit were recovered for other purposes.
> So, I suppose the moral of the story is: find yourself work you can give a shit about. And work with people who give a shit. It’ll make shit a lot more pleasant – I guarantee it.
I'm doing this now. No one believes that it's worth paying for, which is a bit sad, but I'm OK with that.
Great post. It could be 'care', I call that 'Berufsstolz' in German. Like professional pride. Not everyone has it, but those that do, they sure are more successful inside and outside the company and are (in general) a pleasure to work with.
The phrase "giving a shit doesn't scale" makes as much sense to me as "honesty doesn't scale." It's not a question of scaling it out, its just a question of how you operate. Do you care? Are you honest? Do you have integrity? You should be able to do these things at any scale.
That's not necessarily true - you can be honest and not give a shit.
Take OP's example of buying a table - the company they worked with really spent a lot of time understanding their needs and making something custom for them. An alternative would be to go to IKEA and buy a table. IKEA does not give a shit in the same way and will not spend a great deal of time learning about you and what you're going to use your table for to ensure you get something perfect.
There's absolutely nothing dishonest about that. It's not even to say that they don't care about the quality of their products. It just means they're not going to go the extra mile. Of course, it also means you're going to get a table for probably an order of magnitude less money. That's a perfectly reasonable tradeoff, and it's a good thing both types of businesses exist.
I've often thought one of the reasons I'm drawn to software is it feels like there is, at the same time:
* great pay (relative to other jobs)
* good working conditions (sitting at a desk)
* low barrier to entry (no credentialing)
* the ability to be a craftsman (or craftsperson, I suppose)
I'm trying to think of other jobs that allow you to hone your craft in modern industrial society while fulfilling the other criteria and can't think of any.
But as far as comfort, I've done manual labor (farm work, trail work) in the past.
I would choose sitting at a desk in AC with bodily autonomy (to go to the restroom or take a walk when I want) over such manual labor. All. Day. Long. :)
> Giving a shit doesn't scale. In a society obsessed with growth, it's not a sustainable thing.
GaS comes in many forms, and can scale without issue for forms that fall within (for example) product design and development processes. I think we can agree that some companies do this better than others. Improved shit-giving at this stage actually gets cheaper per customer with scale.
Per-unit/per-customer forms of GAS can scale as well, but not for free. For example, Google and YouTube could vastly improve customer/creator support, but explicitly chooses not to because they believe there's no GaS ROI there.
A company you might have heard of literally survived and scaled thank to the process of giving a shit impulsed by a CEO they re-hired while the company was on the brink of bankruptcy.
It was Apple.
Giving a shit does scale and it's precisely when apple stop giving shit (keyboard, pro) that they enter the danger zone for theirs reputation.
It's not the top % of the wealthy. They're fine and structurally fine, unless they screw it up.
It's both 1) a fraction of some of those a few order of magnitude lower who WANT to get to the top, and 2) those who believe only growth can sustain the "world" system (and they are not necessarily wrong, only it's become critical to redefine growth in a radical different way, or we'll all burn).
Interestingly enough, psychotherapy can be looked at as a 'giving a s** as a service', where no one else gives a s**. Which is somehow sad state of affairs.
People are arguing that GaS doesn't scale, but for larger companies, you have to GaS. Take Amazon's easy and quick return policy. They GaS for this interaction, making it a huge reason why you'd want to buy from Amazon. On the other hand, take Google's different services. Because they didn't GaS about the longevity of their services, they now have a graveyard of different services they killed and a lot of people who won't invest in the Google ecosystem because of it.
Other examples of not GaS: Shopify support, Google support, Amazon and warehouse workers.
TLDR: You have to GaS as you scale because otherwise people will start discounting you or your product as not trustworthy or worth the frustration.
Just wondering - I guess "giving shit" should be sufficiently well defined that we could create a training set for a GPT-3-like pre-trained language model.
I think I agree, you are saying that the people who devise the hazing leetcode interview process don't care about the actual day to day work at the company?
I was once asked by a client (bank) to take a call with one of _their_ clients (a pretty important hedge fund). I did this as a courtesy even though I thought our product wasn't appropriate for the hedge fund. Anyhow I get on the call and it's the COO, the Chief Investment Officer, the CTO and a couple of other _very_ important people at this big fund. (ie a much more senior call than I really expected). Anyway, because I give a shit, I told them our product wouldn't really be right for them and explained why. They thanked me and I heard nothing more of it.
Until a couple of years later where I offered a job out of the blue because one of the people on the call had been impressed by how I had dealt with it, and by pure coincidence his partner was a recruiter who was tasked with headhunting for a CTO role and he said "hey you should check this guy out".