The Rolling Stones were wrong

The people that I work with must sometimes see me as selfish. And who can blame them? If an idea doesn’t excite me, I’m not on board with it. Don’t get me wrong. I understand that sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do. And when one of those moments hits you, you just have to roll up your sleeves and do what needs to be done.

…but it’s surprising how rare those moments really are. I mean really, which do you find yourself saying more:

  1. “Man. I really want X, but I just can’t do that. There simply isn’t any way to avoid doing Y instead.”
  2. “I really need to get X done, but I keep procrastinating. I need to get my act together.”

Judging by my highly scientific approach of recalling blog postings I’ve seen in the recent past and comments I’ve seen on Hacker News, I’d say that problem #2 is the far more prevalent problem. Now sometimes you do run into a situation where you have to deal with something bad to get something that overrides that badness. But at the end of the day, I don’t run into many moments where I just have to do something I don’t want to do. It just doesn’t happen that often.

Some of you probably still see this attitude as selfish, but I don’t think it is. You do need to focus on others in addition to yourself. But happiness isn’t a zero-sum game. Happiness is more like an infectious disease. A person who is excited will also make others excited. They’ll be giving their team their all. Likewise, a person who just isn’t happy can drag others down.

But in either situation, how often do you run into a person who is successful at something they’re not happy doing?

Get results

In Joel’s now famous (some might say infamous) blog post about hiring, he asserts that you should look for an employee who is smart and gets things done. Let’s stop and think about a variation of that question now. What should a person, as an employee of a company, do to succeed?

I left a comment on Hacker News that basically boiled down to two things:

  1. Get results.
  2. Make sure people know you’re getting results.

…and that’s it. We can sit and philosphize about the ideal startup employee all day (and I’d probably join in!), but at the end of the day, results are all that matter. Let me expand a bit on these points.

I’m sure the vast majority of programmers winced a bit when I said that “results are all that matter”, while the vast majority of evil bosses patted themselves on the back. Let’s face it, everyone has had that boss who told us to “Just forget all that documentation, testing, version control, and process nonsense and just get things done for Christ’s sake. Results matter, not that bullshit!” Let me be clear: I’m not that guy. I’m pro-documentation, pro-testing, pro-version control, pro-process, and pro-other things I’m not thinking about. I support those things because I want to get results. Not that I necessarily do those things as often as I probably should, mind you.

After all, none of those things are an end in themselves. How often does anyone say “The best part of this commit is the documentation!”? But you should still write documentation because it will help you and your coworkers get results later on.

The second point is something I wouldn’t have included at one point in time. After all, results should speak for themselves, shouldn’t they? Sadly, reality doesn’t work that way, and point 2 oftentimes trumps point 1. Perception is reality. You might have built the feature or service that will make it big for your company. But that doesn’t matter if nobody realizes what you built and how great it is.

One issue that has been brought up is that I should add a third point: don’t be an asshole. I must admit that I’m a bit ambivalent on this subject. It’s not that I’m pro-assholes. I’ve dealt with assholes before, and I don’t want to create that kind of work environment. That said, I think that a person is allowed to be an asshole X% more if they’re getting results. We can debate the value of X, but I say that at a minimum it’s non-zero. Especially if it’s in the name of getting more results.

Thus, I don’t think a third point is necessary. You should be kind to your coworkers as long as you can do so while getting results.

So, to wrap this up, I think this makes a pretty good set of criteria to evaluate your actions as an employee of a startup (or any company!). Are you getting results? And do people know about those results?