[rgifford]

You're missing what the previous commenter said.

There are a lot of ways in which companies can succeed simply by their timing, or a couple incredibly lucky early hires, or first mover advantage in a growing space, or the right VCs -- not because of good leadership but in spite of it. Leaders take credit regardless.

Often this is why technical folks deride soft skills. Folks that tout them sound like my friend who's "figured out slot machines." My response: "Dude, that's awesome!" I'm not about to burst his bubble on the random, ambivalent jitter of the universe. We all need our delusions, who am I to take his?

[borski]

There are also a lot of ways a company could fail due to randomness. In fact, many more failure modes than success modes. Startup success definitely includes some luck, but luck alone does not define success. Clubhouse is a great example of that. Lucky, but never found a retention strategy and wasn’t managed well enough to adapt. Startup success requires skill and countless hours of hard work, period, and the leaders who are successful rarely look the same. It also requires some luck, but you need both.

I also used to deride soft skills. I learned, over time, that they’re extremely valuable, and deriding them doesn’t take away their power.

I think nearly every engineer would be well served by attending a good conflict resolution and “how to influence people” course. My 21-year-old self would smack me for saying that, but I’ve learned things since then.

[rgifford]

I agree: Conflict resolution, public speaking, salesmanship -- they're all valuable. They make for better people in this world.

When it comes to how these traits translate to the success of leaders or companies? I have no idea. I'd guess causation there is noisy. I bet leaders get a lot of mileage out of bullshit like playing surreptitious games for social capital, managing risk in decision making by offloading it and/or shifting blame, carefully crafting turn-of-phrase to manipulate people against their own self-interest -- especially in favor of a compensation structure that has senior leadership making 300:1 versus their lowest paid workers.

In a modern secularized world corporate leaders of large companies seem to take on the role of psuedo-religious figureheads that grant absolution and purpose in the face of the unknown and rob workers blind in return. Like, why in the hell do we need company values? Never understood why workers collectively put up with that patronizing, condescending nonsense. But I guess they're there for some poor shmuck that doesn't know himself otherwise and will warp his identity to them and put in 15 extra hours per week for the privilege. You gotta feel for his wife and kids though, don't you?

It's all just soft skills though -- that's the differentiator, the secret sauce, what makes great leaders. So soft. So skilled. /s

[geodel]

> Never understood why workers collectively put up with that patronizing, condescending nonsense.

Its simple because only few people find it condescending or nonsense. Most people I know either ignore it without judgement or find it valuable at work.

Ignoring soft skills or social graces work fine in some privileged roles where hard skills have some great premium. As one can see in case of top chefs, doctors, movie stars, sports people, high skill engineers etc.

For others listening to corporate leaders sermons is just way of life not some unbearable atrocity.

[dennis_jeeves1]

>For others listening to corporate leaders sermons is just way of life not some unbearable atrocity.

Pretty sorry state of affairs, correct? Implicate in all this talk of soft skills is the fact that it can also a force for manipulation of the holocaust league.

[borski]

What? Please clarify, because at first glance it sounds like you’re making an extremely racially charged analogy?

And no, it isn’t necessarily a sorry state of affairs; having to sit through a talk you’re uninterested in is hardly a terrible price to pay as compared to most other labor.

[dennis_jeeves1]

>What? Please clarify, because at first glance it sounds like you’re making an extremely racially charged analogy?

in a manner speaking, yes it's a radically charged analogy, I'm making.

>And no, it isn’t necessarily a sorry state of affairs; having to sit through a talk you’re uninterested in is hardly a terrible price to pay as compared to most other labor.

There's a collective price that we all pay when we regard all those sermons to be just a simple nuisance. A familiar quote will put it in a better perspective than I can: "All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." Of course I agree that if you're the only one who opposes the sermon, you risk your livelihood.

[borski]

> I bet leaders get a lot of mileage out of bullshit like playing surreptitious games for social capital, managing risk in decision making by offloading it and/or shifting blame, carefully crafting turn-of-phrase to manipulate people against their own self-interest -- especially in favor of a compensation structure that has senior leadership making 300:1 versus their lowest paid workers.

That would be a bad bet. There are a few leaders that are like this and build short-term successful companies, and there are fewer yet that are like this and are able to build long-term successful ones. There will always be sociopaths who are master manipulators, but it isn’t limited to leadership. I know plenty of engineers who get hired at multiple roles illegally and outsource their jobs to fiverr, and if they get caught they simply quit before or after a PIP and get a new gig.

The vast majority of leaders really do care, and these stories and assumptions do those leaders a disservice, because good leadership/management takes real effort, time, and hard work. Manipulation quickly loses you the trust of your team and causes them to leave, hurting your cause.

> Like, why in the hell do we need company values? Never understood why workers collectively put up with that patronizing, condescending nonsense.

Retention. If you can find a set of people who share a common set of values, they are easier to retain because everyone is aligned on where we need to get and how we want to get there.

Alignment is extremely important for success. A founder can force alignment for a while, but the whole company is far better off if alignment occurs due to intrinsic belief systems.

> But I guess they're there for some poor shmuck that doesn't know himself otherwise and will warp his identity to them and put in 15 extra hours per week for the privilege. You gotta feel for his wife and kids though, don't you?

That’s not the point of having values. When we came up with them for Tinfoil, they came from the team and we debated and reviewed them annually, and changed them as needed.

The point was to make sure we are on the same page when it comes to hiring, and it also helped in two other ways:

1) Making hiring more objective. No more “I didn’t think she fit our culture” nonsense. Now you had to point to specific examples which were antithetical to our values. If we didn’t get to see a certain one, it told us what to ask next.

2) Making it easier for peers to managers to call out problems. If someone was out of line, or suggesting something that flew in the face of a value we’d agreed upon, anyone was enabled to politely point out that was against our values. The rule in how to respond to that was a polite thank you for pointing it out, and we never really ran into issues with it.

What I found fascinating was that by having this set of values, engineers and others were actually more likely to point out a manager’s or exec’s issue, and did so. When they did, they were almost always right, and things got adjusted.

But what I found exceptionally surprising was how much it helped engineers talk to each other in the office. When you have a common set of beliefs and things you want to do to embody, it’s much easier to maintain alignment.

Also, we were upfront about these before the offer; nobody had to join, and all of our values were argumentative. That is, they were active opinions that could trivially be disagreed with and cogent arguments could be made against them. That was ok! This was what we wanted to do.

An example of a bad value: innovation. Literally nobody wants to not be innovative. Terrible value, gets nothing across.

An example of a good value: use the right tool for the job. We strongly believed in being polyglots and using the right tool for the job, rather than building with what we already knew (unless that was the right tool). Plenty of companies make the argument that we are all Python because then we all speak the same language and things are faster to build. That’s a legitimate argument, neither is right or wrong; but we picked the former. If you preferred the latter, there are plenty of places to work that fit better!

[rgifford]

> That would be a bad bet.

It's a terrible bet. But it's the direction American corporate leadership has overwhelmingly been heading for the past couple decades [1] [2].

I get the sense you've had the good fortune to run and work in smaller startups in The Bay Area that have been unprecedentedly democratic in the scheme of human enterprise. I'm guessing you've also had the good fortune to do that during a 3 decade span of falling interest rates that drove money into VC and startups in a similarly unprecedented fashion. Everyone plays nice when they're eating good.

I studied social sciences / economics and it gave me a lot of perspective when I went to SF for tech work. The history of American labor is one of asymmetrical power and blood. This isn't a notion we've disabused ourselves of and grown beyond. Between the early 1800s and early 1900s the US saw decades of terrorism against workers by corporate leaders. Look into Labor Wars [3], The Pullman Strike [4], The Battle of Blair Mountain [5], The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire [6]. After labor laws cemented and wars settled, corporate leaders moved towards globalization to start the process all over again in other countries and hollowed out middle America to do so.

Historically, the defining traits of American corporate leadership are amorality and self-pursuit. Startups have this silly habit of sitting around to LARP as altruists that might, maybe stumble into billions of dollars. Like if they talk about company values, truisms, and team building enough it changes gravity. Who is getting paid what? That's all that matters. If you're making a half a percent over four years as the 5th hire at a startup, you're getting screwed unless your founder is the second coming of Jesus Christ himself. I think workers and the general public are waking up to this and getting tired of lip service and signaling from leaders that play altruist or cut throat as they see fit.

I'm using the pronoun 'you' in that last paragraph generally, more as in the pronoun 'one.' I'm not specifically berating you. I'm glad you exist and I appreciate you sharing your experience and talking with me! It was a rewarding discussion. All the best.

1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/261463/ceo-to-worker-com...

2. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/14zgfv3/oc...

3. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/themine...

4. https://jacobin.com/2022/07/great-upheaval-railroad-strike-1...

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...

[borski]

> If you're an altruist, prove it. Make less than 200k a year, including stock grants (with appreciation factored in).

I did, with the exception of when the sale happened. For the first three years, I paid myself $30k. For the next two, $50k. For the next one, $70k. For the next one, $90k. Only in the last two years did I pay myself $160k.

When we sold, I gave up over half my RSUs and distributed them across the engineering team. I tried to give them all up (because I was well covered by the cash portion of the sale) but the acquirer wouldn't let me, since they wanted me to be incentivized to stay.

My cofounder gave up none of hers, despite being equal partners with me.

I suspect most of my team would work for me again, whereas the same is definitely not true of my cofounder.

Being cutthroat works short-term, and you may win big. But you get one shot at that, usually, with only a few "star-studded" exceptions (Adam Neumann, for example).

Being "altruistic" (which is not the word I'd use; I'd use "a decent human being who understands how negotiation works and what a BATNA is") works long-term.

[felipemnoa]

>>We all need our delusions

Not to be an a-hole but says who and why? I think I prefer utter honesty, but ironically I may just be deluding myself.

[dennis_jeeves1]

>>We all need our delusions

>Not to be an a-hole but says who and why? I think I prefer utter honesty, but ironically I may just be deluding myself.

Well, ahem, yes, most people will call you deluded :)