Photo by Felix Mittermeier.
Last week we were out in California for a few days. Johnathan had some meetings and we hadn’t been out to the Bay Area together in a few years. It was well past time.
Before we left, we wondered what we might find. While we still have friends out there, it wasn’t clear how many would have time to meet up. And many of our friends are now tech millionaires, which is a really weird sentence to write. We weren’t even staying in the city. We were staying just up the street from Stanford. Right off of Sand Hill Road.
Talk about the belly of the beast. The entire stretch is lined with aging VC firms. Many of whom made their billions while sexually harassing female founders and failing to fund people of colour. Swell bunch, all in all.
We weren’t sure what it would feel like to be back. In part because in 2019, it’s not possible to pretend you’re just visiting a warm part of the peninsula with a bunch of familiar logos. You’re at the epicenter of tech wealth. And the epicenter of tech power.
And what we found were a whole lot of deeply unhappy people there. Unhappy people at the grocery store. Unhappy people driving too fast down 280. Unhappy people in very spendy bike pelotons. Unhappy hippies under redwoods in Marin.
You can find unhappy people anywhere in the world. But it’s a hell of a thing to be surrounded by the people who are selling us the future. And find out that they’re miserable. If this is where we’re headed, we need to stop the ride and get off.
— Melissa & Johnathan
What Melissa’s reading
It is an utter delight to read Amanda Mull’s take on the modern job description. She’s got a string of zingers that are one part snicker, one part cringe for anyone who has spent time writing job descriptions in a startup.
There’s a bunch in here we already know. Obfuscated language in job specs makes it harder to attract the right candidates. Makes it more likely you’ll narrow your candidate pipeline. To the exclusion of older candidates, female candidates, job-seekers who are parents, non-native English speakers, and non-white candidates.
The people who find these exercises in corporate creative writing appealing? Well, they’re the same people whose interests are already well served by the status quo.
We train up bosses and we talk to them about terms like ninjas and rockstars. We talk about crushing it. And lists of bulleted requirements a mile long that no candidate will ever read. We talk about how all of this gets in the way of finding talented folks and building a strong team. In tech, the default is that we shove a bunch of garbage into our descriptions and then shrug about pipeline problems.
Hiring managers have so much power. There’s no reason to be cute. There’s no reason to play games. If you’re worried that no one would get excited about the role based on the actual responsibilities or company, START THERE. Think about what it would take to be a job where someone could thrive. One that someone could do well and then feel good when they logged off at the end of the day. And then write that job description.
Your future employee will thank you.
What Johnathan’s reading
25-50% of US office workers are burnt out
There’s value in skepticism, but I try to avoid outright cynicism. And so when I see a headline like this, even though I have this knee-jerk desire to say, “no kidding,” or “that low?” I try to temper it. Because this is a catastrophe. Ironic detachment doesn’t work for house fires and it shouldn’t be what we reach for here, either.
25-50%. You can quibble with their methodology (if you can find it – Robert Half seems to be more interested in shooting the PR angles than publishing the data?) but it’s hardly unique. Here’s one from a week earlier, “Poor workplace communication leading to higher stress.” And if you feel like the NY Post is alsonot your most-trusted source for psychological data, the American Psychological Association’s Stress in America reports reports have been running for more than a decade. It’s a real thing.
When I worked at Mozilla, we used the term “crispy” to refer to the state right before burnout. People who are crispy aren’t fun to be around. They are curt. They are itching for a fight they can win. They cry without much warning. It is a beautiful thing about Mozilla’s culture that we would recognize crispiness in our colleagues and take care of each other. It is an ugly thing that we saw it so much that we had a whole cultural process around it.
And these days it seems more and more people are crispy. If not completely burnt.
We see more of this in our own work, too. Sometimes they come in wanting to talk about their team members. Or with a head full of questions about Millennials and How To Manage Them. But often they’re coming with their own anxiety. Their own burnout. Sometimes they cry without much warning.
And I’ll tell you, friends. We’re not mental health practitioners, and we don’t claim to have everyone’s answers. But there’s a thing that cuts to the heart of it for a lot of them pretty quickly.
Clarity.
Understanding how the pieces go together. Understanding what’s expected of them. How should they know if they’re succeeding and what happens if they fail? How’s it supposed to work? When you start to talk about this stuff you can see people’s shoulders loosen. You can feel it.
Anxiety disorders are a real thing and can happen completely independent of work. Even so, I think an appropriate attitude for a boss to take is that you’re either creating anxiety and burnout or you’re reducing those things. And if you want to be reducing them, a thing you can do right-now-today is to look for places to clarify.
Where are you assuming something is obvious that isn’t? Where do you need clarity from your own boss so you can stop stalling and deflecting when your team asks for clarity from you? Go get it. Treat clarity like a thing you are owed, because it really is. And then turn around and treat it like a thing you owe your team, because you really do.
