> Potential money is worth more than actual money.
In very, very rare circumstances, that is true. In the vast majority of cases, it's total B$. It's what company founders tell employees to exploit them, to get them to work overtime as a norm for crap normal-time pay. It's what the founders genuinely hope is true because they own so much of the company, but it rarely turns out that your shares are worth as much as the net-present-value of the delta to an average salary. At least in my experience.
Um, that's precisely his point since he's writing it from the POV of a employer.
1: http://www.geek.com/news/developer-bro-alex-st-john-want-a-g...
Yes, you recruit and retain the significant other... too. The engineer (who may have a husband or a boyfriend!) actually does have a significant say as well. They both count.
Stuff like "The paycheck goes to HER" is bullshit and demeans both the engineer and the significant other.
If you ignore all the crazy shit, then yes, what's left is true.
There are some rules about male engineers but that doesn't preclude hiring women engineers. It just might have been that it's harder to form rules for them because of historically smaller sample to learn from.
> RULE 1: You don’t recruit and retain male engineers you recruit and retain Wives and Girlfriends"
Reading is fundamental
He says later that female engineers will go get promoted into non-engineering roles soon enough anyway. The implication there is you don't need to worry about retaining them as engineers as they won't stay that way.
BTW this isn't an endorsement of either his views or his approach. I mean the general thrust of the presentation could be renamed "ways to stiff your staff".
There are bits of it that ring true e.g. the different motivations between newbies, lifers and the rest. The majority though is clearly intended to be provocative.
I'm sure the guy wrote a lot of worse things but this one is not particularly deranged.
>But perhaps the most telling element of all of this is St. John’s own experience. In an interview by Christopher Redner [2], St. John himself suffered burn out at Microsoft to the point where he “got himself fired”. “He would pass out at his keyboard and straggle into morning meetings with key marks on his face. Worked sucked everything out of him; his marriage disintegrated.”
>According to a Shacknews interview from 2007 [3], St. John was going through a “messy divorce” at the time. He wanted to get fired rather than quit, because that ensured he’d retain his stock options for Microsoft.
[1] http://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/04/alex-st-johns-ideas-about-g...
[2] http://www.informationtechnologyleaders.com/stvid.html
[3] http://www.shacknews.com/article/46338/alex-st-john-intervie...
// I have no real idea of the history here, I'm just commenting on one rule that can be personally costly not to heed
Anyhow - the purported direct benefit, according to Alex St. John, is for "the wife or GF" as the whole point is to make her happy (from the linked presentation: "If the wife or GF is unhappy the engineer is gone").
Hence, my question: how does it help the wife to directly interact with her husband's boss? Put differently, what is it about directly interacting with her husband's boss that makes her happier than directly interacting with her husband?
If the partner of the employee is unhappy with the job, it will make the employee much more likely to find another job and so as a manager, it's smart to take into account the girlfriends, wives, husbands and boyfriends of your employees.
His VentureBeat article was pretty horrific but that pdf seems to reflect a certain ground truth. Not saying it reflects a reality anyone should be happy with, but if I was paying him to consult on recruiting and sat through that presentation I wouldn't be asking for my money back..