Not being able to fire people is indeed a big disadvantage. Bad employees are much worse than just not contributing. They make the people around them worse and have a negative impact on the morale. As a manager you want to be able to get rid of such people as quickly as possible. I'm not saying firing on the spot is a good thing. But it should be reasonable to fire someone within 6 months and it shouldn't come as a surprise to the employee. Good managers communicate to their employees when they are not performing.

That's not invalid by itself as long as everyone knows that the game is purely transactional. But it isn't fair to expect employee "passion" when their own continued employment is contingent on whether management thinks they're still necessary.

The easiest example to grok would be if you had hired a VP of sales who is an expert in B2C selling, then you pivot your product to a B2B offering. Or say you pivot into being a data-heavy product and your CTO has no idea how to build a data pipeline.

In these cases you could say “they will figure it out”, and sometimes that works. But sometimes you need to recognize that through no fault of their own, your employee now does not have the skill set they need to do their job, and find someone that does have those skills.

This is most pronounced in hyper-growth startups because bigger companies seldom pivot dramatically or change their scale rapidly enough that a motivated and smart employee can’t grow with the role.

So the claim is that employees should be so passionate that they are willing to make personal sacrifices for the benefit of the company.

But if things aren't working out the company is in its rights to immediately cut them lose. Shouldn't the company be willing to make some sacrifices for the employee?

This still seems to hold no?

Talk about entitlement. You think that when a company hires you, that should be a commitment to employ you forever regardless of need?

Passion can come from your own investment in the success of the business, through equity and through the opportunities that come to productive employees at growing companies, both before and after they leave. Or it can come from a belief in the mission, distinct from faith in the company. You can pursue the same mission at a different company. But I guarantee you one thing: passion does not come from a guarantee of continued employment.

Hardly. I can't speak for the original comment I quoted, but I personally view employment as pretty transactional. You pay me this, I give you this. I may or may not have passion, but that should be immaterial to the job at hand.

The employer sets a bar. The employee clears it or does not. That bar may change over time. If the employee does not clear the bar the employer fires the employee. If the employee clears the bar the employer continues paying the employee.

To the extent that passion comes into the conversation, it's an internal issue for the employee to sort out by themselves and not really the business of the employer.

Are you saying something different? Because I don't think we're actually in disagreement, but maybe we are?

Perhaps this is our disagreement. Employees with passion often perform better and there is nothing "unfair" about employers desiring passionate employees for that reason.

I agree that passion shouldn't be a requirement per se (whatever that means) if job performance is otherwise good, but passion is very highly correlated with job performance.

That sounds really weird to me to bring up, regardless of whether it's true or not. As in this makes sense when you're thinking of trying to hire folks trying to gauge passion as a proxy for their performance when you can't directly observe it, but when they're working for you, you don't need proxies! You can directly observe performance!

So passion seems pretty irrelevant as soon as someone is hired, unless you're afraid of them jumping ship. But that's the nature of the beast. Employers can fire employees and employees can jump ship. Such is life.

> there is nothing "unfair" about employers desiring passionate employees

I'm a bit confused; I mean there's nothing unfair about desires in general? Someone could want a billion dollars to fall from the sky into their lap and I might say "good luck," but there's nothing unfair about it. Employers might desire their employees to want literally zero pay and employees might desire their employers to give literally zero work. Good luck to the both of them.

The question then is not so much desires as it is the actual dynamics of the job itself and to what extent those desires are actually manifested in observable behavior.

I think the overarching theme that the_local_host was bringing up has to do with the language of morality in general.

You can talk about the employee-employer relationship in a very dispassionate sense as one of mutual transactional need with one discarding the other when one is no longer needed, which is fine. You can also talk about the relationship in the language of fairness and passion, which is also fine.

But there's something pretty unsettling about crossing the two together, especially when the perceived dynamic is that when it's convenient for the employer they slip into one or the other rather than when it's convenient for the employee.

EDIT: In response to your additional new line: "I agree that passion shouldn't be a requirement per se (whatever that means) if job performance is otherwise good, but passion is very highly correlated with job performance."

I think the original point of the_local_host's comment is that it's just kind of weird to talk about passion at all or whether an employee "should" do something or not or even the notion of employer/employee entitlement.

Just make the job expectations explicit. If an employer wants employees to work weekends make that explicit in the job description. If the employer wants a work product that a typical employee can only produce after 100 hours of work in a week then fine, ask for it, just make it clear upfront. If the employer wants employees to work extra hours for deadlines, fine just make it explicit.

The employee then takes it or leaves it. And from the employer side either the employee fulfills those expectations or doesn't.

But don't leave it implicit and then complain about the lack of passion, which is what I think the_local_host was pointing out.

(There's wider policy questions of whether you want to incentivize or disincentivize that behavior on a societal level, but that's an altogether different scope/level of conversation.)

From my experience this can be extremely hard - to be able to know how much one employee is contributing compared to another one.

I'm personally saying it isn't really the business of the employer to talk about employee passion to begin with. In the same way that the employer may desire an employee to keep a clean home and healthy living habits, because of the various signaling benefits it has for their job duties, but it isn't really the employer's business to care.

While I agree that there should not be a specific job requirement to keep a clean home and healthy living habits independent of job performance, I absolutely disagree that employers shouldn't "talk" about it in general terms. It's perfectly appropriate for companies to encourage and help their employees to lead healthy lives (e.g. providing healthy food, gym access, encouraging taking vacation time, promoting appropriate work-life balance, etc), just as it is appropriate for companies to encourage having passion for the mission even if it isn't strictly a job requirement.

I don't think so. I mean I guess you'd have to ask the_local_host whether I'm accurately representing the thrust of the quote, but the operative word here is indeed "expect" as opposed to desire or encourage.

Rephrasing the original quote in my own language I'd say something like:

Employers and employees can use purely transactional language to talk about employment and it's fine. Employers and employees can use emotional and moral language such as "passion" to talk about employment and that's fine too. But which language to use should depend on what forms the bedrock of the relationship. If the transactional needs form the ultimate bedrock of the relationship, an expectation of "passion" is no bueno.

There is a difference between encouragement and expectation. And I think employees would chafe under the expectation of e.g. eating healthy food or using the gym (probably not vacation time though, although a select few might, in the same way that I don't think, absent flight concerns, employers would be terribly offput by employees refusing raises).

In the same way that team activities, team meals, happy hour, providing materials about the mission etc. can all be viewed as perfectly fine encouragement for passion for both the mission and the company, that is not the same as expecting passion.

Expectations are two way streets. You get things if you meet them. You don't get things or have things taken away if you don't meet them.

Desires and encouragement are not.

> I absolutely disagree that employers shouldn't "talk" about it in general terms.

Talk is indeed too strong of a word on my part in the sense you're using it, but the point I was trying to get across is that if transactional needs ultimately dominate the relationship then those are the ones that should be emphasized.

I would prefer employers tell employees upfront that they're expected to work long hours and nights for deadlines or similar things in that vein, rather than leave it implicit and then tut-tut them for a lack of passion.

And because of that that's why I emphasize the word "expect" rather than "desire."

Then why do founders work harder than hired managers?

As long as that holds, I think a lot of people, especially founder types, are happy. The moment that's wrested away, whether by excessive board oversight, or by perceived meddling from investors, or by perceived interference by a manager, passion drops.

That's why autonomy was so important for the article writer.

I suspect employers would like both, but would prefer to subordinate the former to the latter, because otherwise that employee is easily going to jump ship to a competitor or potentially not be an effective employee at all and get lost in the weeds of their craft rather than the mission. This sort of passion for the mission/company itself is also the impression I get from the article.

And that's a pretty big ask if as an employer you also want the ability to discard people who are no longer good skill fits for the company.

I mean you can ask it and you may well succeed, but I would expect quite a few burned bridges along the way.

Absolutely.

> I suspect employers would like both, but would prefer to subordinate the former to the latter

I think this depends on the company - size in particular seems very relevant. A lot of startups want their hires to be "mission driven", i.e. passionate about the company's objectives. This is more important if (like most startups) you're hoping for your hires to be generalists, and figure things out as they go along. In this scenario you can have meta-level "passionate about what you do" regardless of what the object-level task is (or more realistically, within a broad range of tasks that fall within your area of competence-but-not-expertise). But that's not as important as passion for the mission, and I do wonder if "passionate for whatever thing you're working on" is an oxymoron. In this situation I think your point is correct, the small companies want passion about the mission.

One of the complaints in the OP was that Google employees are _not_ (as) mission-driven. My model here would be that at a big company, you're looking for a bunch of highly-specialized individuals that are effectively PhD-level experts in their field (not saying you completely discard/devalue generalists, but the trend is towards more specialists as you get bigger since you have more tasks that can actually keep a specialist busy full-time). For hiring/motivating specialists, you need to select for people that are passionate about the craft, not necessarily the mission. Not to mention if I understand correctly at the lower levels at least you tend to apply to a broad "Software engineer" role and get slotted in to a team, rather than applying specifically for a role in a specific subject area. I'm guessing the median Googler is substantially less mission-oriented than the median 10-person-startup engineer. Indeed to the extent that your mission is "boring" (I don't know many people that are excited by selling ads, for example) I suspect you want to actively select for people that are passionate about the craft, not the mission; these people will be happy with any mission, as long as they get to craft well. So for large companies I think I disagree with your theory about preferences between the two passions.

Note with all of this -- you can still be a primarily mission-based small/growth startup, and have a situation where a skill mismatch emerges, and you need to replace someone. I don't think it's hypocritical to want your employees to be passionate about the mission, while also having the skills required to do the job, and recognize that sometimes your passionate and mission-driven employee is just not the right person for the role they are currently in.

> And that's a pretty big ask if as an employer you also want the ability to discard people who are no longer good skill fits for the company.

Perhaps there is some hypocrisy if you are really encouraging passion about _the company_, and selling the "we are a family" story, and then turn around and terminate someone because you pivoted and no longer need them. I know some startups do this and it's a bit awkward. Your company may be close, but you're not a family. But I don't think "hires mission driven people" and "fires fast if there's a lack of fit" are mutually incompatible asks/expectations in general.

I don't think the point is that you shouldn't get rid of a role that isn't needed anymore, that absolutely should be done. If you are expecting a level of commitment from an employee far beyond what you are willing to commit to them, something is broken.

That VP of sales and CTO will almost certainly do fine. The jobs need to be radically different for it to be worth the morale hit of firing people, and the cost of hiring and onboarding new staff.

Don't expect passion and dedication if the company doesn't offer the same guarantee back when the going gets tough or they change direction. You treat your staff like mercenaries, that's what you'll get.

It’s literally his job, as a CEO, to make sure promos and career progression align with increased product quality.

Sure, it’s harder as a part big company, where there’s more bureaucracy to deal with (both for good reasons of consistency and equality, and bad reasons of just because) but no one said growing is easy. As an engineer I’d be fired if I wouldn’t solve technical challenges of scaling.

No you can't fire a person on the spot, but the assumption is that if they got into Google in the first place there's something of value there, so the company has a commitment to fix the problem before jettisoning the person.

What this guy seems to be complaining about is his inability to make personal arbitrary choices from his own authority and only his.

Yeah, you for sure can't do that at Google. Thank god. It's not a feudal kingdom.

Unless they are so toxic that everyone hates them, they’ll be able to swing performance to an even average.

Or at least squeak along until they leave of their own volition.

I can kind of see why that would be annoying to someone that used to be able to make personal arbitrary choices from his own authority.

Ok, but then they're just average, not bad. Hence, no need to fire them.

Somehow the person two comments above me twisted his message into the author being the entitled one. I think this is what the author is referring to by PC and putting on a corporate face.

If you want them to optimize for building a better product, give them more equity. Most people don't want to work during the best 40 years of their lives. Give them a way out or they will try to find one themselves.

I didn't get any indications that he expected 80 hour work weeks 52 weeks a year from everyone. To paraphrase, I think he was frustrated with his employees going to the townhall or yoga class in the quad instead of working on the customer outage.

It seems like he tries to care about his users a lot, and wants his team to as well.

Also, the "offensive things" in his talks were only offensive to a small vocal minority by his own account.

Is that really something we should take at face value? There are plenty of instances of people getting unreasonably offended but it's also extremely common for people to be shitty to their colleagues and use this as an excuse. He provides no actual examples.

Personally I've met and worked with lots of people that were in many ways friendly and genuine but had some weakness or quirk that induced them to mistreat their coworkers.

The second kind of people you mention are, well, human. Such small transgressions exist in family and among friends as well.

I really don't see how this is an excuse. it's like saying "black people are a minority in the US so who cares if they say they are oppressed"

If there's a specific demographic that is consistently affected by what you're saying, there might be an issue though.

Sure but it's really not that hard to keep things under control in the work place. I have my own opinions, sometimes I share them at work, sometimes people may disagree, however, I don't "rack up multiple HR complaints" like this guy did.

Firstly, these came from events he was _invited_ to speak at. If you invite someone to speak and then don't let them speak their mind what was the point in inviting them?

Secondly, as a non-american none of the things he mentions are egregious. A bit unprofessional? Yeah, probably. But not worthy of being reported to HR.

How do you know whether or not the things he said were worthy of reporting to HR? He didn't say what they were for a reason

To me, it sounds like people wanted to "hold him accountable" for upsetting them. You clearly think otherwise.

And I don't know, but the article makes me believe he is not out to attack people. Some people have also pointed out cultural differences that are likely at play here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26168899.

Again, you clearly think differently given one of your other comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26170030.

No this is exactly what I think. I think it is valid for people to air the grievances. I think the difference here is that you are skeptical of the validity if their complaints. If I am right, this is a pretty fundamental difference in world view that I doubt can be reconciled on a HN thread at this point unless you disagree

You can't just throw BLM around, or we'll end up with stuff like: "So yeah, this code is bad and I'm the only one who thinks so, but not caring about my opinion is like not caring about oppression of black people!".

I disagree. The OP was essentially arguing that being offensive to a group of people is okay if that group is a minority. I was simply demonstrating how absurd that argument is when directly applied to a specific group of people.

I honestly don't even understand your analogy, it isn't similar to what I was saying at all. It is pretty safe to assume the author of the article was saying offensive things to a group of people, not having an unpopular opinion about something in general. These are two very different things that any sensible person with empathy would be able to differentiate. So, because of these inherent differences, your slippery slope argument makes no sense and is not be reflected in actual social interactions