Can’t Breathe with No Air: Identifying What Really Matters
I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.
— Margaret Atwood, Canadian poet
Recent news about the Amazon fire in Brazil reminded me of the 2017 Northern California wildfire. I was visiting the Bay Area for a college reunion, and vividly remember the sky being dark grey on my ride from the airport at 3PM. Right after I got off my ride, reality sunk in: I could barely breathe and facemasks were sold out everywhere.
The average human breathes more than 20,000 times a day. It is so ingrained in our daily lives to breathe, that we never give it a second thought and take this act for granted. While the air quality in the Bay Area during the California wildfire was alarming, this was simply an average day for residents of Beijing.
Similarly, it is easy for those of us lucky enough to have joined great companies to take for granted the very elements that make these companies so great. After a few years, we get used to the status quo and start complaining about other things — just like a Bay Area yuppie complaining about his avocado toast not being fully locally sourced — while forgetting what a privilege it is to work for those very same companies.
“Take care of the people, the products, and the profits — in that order”
A few years ago, as I was contemplating switching jobs, I focused on looking for a place that was smaller. I explained to an executive before I left, “the company was growing so big that I felt that my impact was miniscule. My group brought in tens of millions of dollars in revenue, but represented just a handful of percentage points of the entire company. I wanted to look for a place where I could own a larger slice of the pie, with the understanding that the overall pie might be smaller.” What I didn’t realize then was that I was leaving behind many things. Things core to me enjoying my job. Things I took for granted. Just like fresh air.
It took visiting a place 80 miles from a wildfire to recognize how much I valued fresh air. Similarly, it took a trip to the other side (of the corporate world) for me to realize that what I valued the most wasn’t company size, industry, or even mission. What I cared about was how the company treated its employees and the cultural values it fostered. Ben Horowitz summarized it better than I ever could have in The Hard Things about Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, “Take care of the people, the products, and the profits — in that order.”
Upon further reflection, here is a partial list of company attributes I took for granted a few years back:
Do right by employees
Earlier in my career, we once had to let someone go for performance reasons. However, because he was on an H1B working visa, he would only have had 30 days¹ to find a new job, including transferring his visa. The company worked out a legal deal with him that kept him employed by the company while searching for a job, allowing him to focus on recruiting without worrying about getting deported.
On multiple other occasions, that company also allowed employees being let go to keep their prorated portion of the equity grant, despite not hitting their one-year cliffs. Although this was not standard practice — most companies would just cancel these employees’ stock grants — this company appreciated the contributions from the employees and wanted to treat everyone fairly.
I did not truly appreciate the lengths the company went to to do right by its employees. It took a departure to other places to realize that these efforts are rarely made elsewhere. These are attributes that I value and should not be taken for granted.
Integrity over competence
For the first few years of my career, this was a no-brainer. While I may not have agreed with all of leadership’s decisions at past employers, I truly believed they tried to do the right thing. For instance, a former employer famously turned down business opportunities from the tobacco industry. Another constantly weighed the investment trade-offs between publishing critical cancer research findings and building new revenue-generating products sooner.
It wasn’t until later that I discovered integrity can’t be presumed. I once noticed during an onsite interview that an executive candidate lied on his resume. He changed certain dates in his employment to hide gaps on his resume, which I discovered and verified during the interview. After the interview, I slacked the hiring committee channel with my discovery, but the CTO immediately responded, “is that really a deal-breaker?” I proceeded to explain that gaps in employment weren’t a deal-breaker, but lying should be. Unfortunately, I was the only one that cared.
On another occasion, we interviewed an executive candidate that the founders really liked because they shared similar backgrounds. We were specifically instructed to “go easy on him on the technical portions of the interview because he probably wouldn’t do well in them.”
These experiences taught me that different companies may have wildly different values. One should always go back to first principles and not assume anything.
Servant leadership
One of the running jokes at another former employer is that there are only 3 people (out of 500+ when I was there) who do not have monitors on their desks: the CEO, COO, and CTO. Legend has it that in the early days, the company was onboarding employees so quickly that the shipments for monitors couldn’t arrive on time. One by one, the CEO, COO, and CTO all gave up their monitors, and for some, eventually desks (none of them had offices). They recognized that as leaders, their job was to enable others to do their best work. Since they were in meetings all day, it made sense for individual contributors to take the monitors.
On the other hand, I have also visited startups where executives would take up the largest rooms as their offices — despite there not being enough conference rooms for meetings — while stacking up 3 to 4 monitors each. One of them reserved one of his screens solely for tracking bitcoin prices!
A few months ago at Airbnb, our group was growing so quickly that we didn’t have enough desks in our area for the new hires and interns. Immediately, all the group leads and managers (including myself) voluntarily gave up our desks to ensure that all the new hires and interns got desks. This time around, I made sure to specifically acknowledge the group leads’ contributions to my team instead of taking it as given.
Outcome over facetime
It is commonly accepted in the Silicon Valley tech scene that outcomes matter more than facetime. However, just like breathable air, I’ve learned that this can also be taken for granted, and is not always the case. When evaluating a new opportunity, this is a principle I learned not to ignore.
In the early days of my career, my employer had a reputation of being a sweatshop where many people worked long hours and on weekends. Except David. David would work 25–30 hours a week and leave the office. Furthermore, he worked on his desktop and had a non-smart phone so it wasn’t even possible to reach him after hours. However, he always committed more code, fewer bugs, and was the most thorough when reviewing other engineers’ code. No one ever batted an eye when he would waltz into the office at 11AM and leave at 6 for dinner because he was contributing more than anyone else on the team.
On the flip side, I’ve also seen companies run by people from very traditional backgrounds. I once worked with a project manager, Chad², who had spent his entire career as a back office project manager at large banks. Chad would constantly complain to executives that the engineers on my team were “not working hard enough because they’re on Facebook or Youtube on company dime.” On each occasion, I would refer to the status document and explain that we were the only team in the company that had met or exceeded every single deadline. Unfortunately, that didn’t matter — the complaints from Chad kept coming in.
Eventually, I scheduled a meeting with him to explain the cultural differences between project management in finance and software engineering in tech. I gave the example of the aforementioned former colleague, David, who consistently worked 25–30 hours a week yet had nearly twice the output of everyone else.
Me: “In David’s case, he was already contributing twice as much as everyone else. Do you still think it is necessary to make him stay at the office for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week?”
Chad: “Of course. Even if he can contribute more than anyone else in 25 hours, he should still be in the office for 40 hours a week because that is what he is being paid to do.”
It was at that point when I realized how wildly different people’s world views are, despite all working for “tech companies.” Just because many companies value outcome, doesn’t mean that they care about it more than facetime. I learned that when evaluating companies and cultures, it is always good practice to check your assumptions, as others may not share the same values as you presume.
Next time you feel disgruntled at work, look a bit deeper. What truly makes you happy? What might you take for granted? If you are like me, you may have gotten so used to breathing fresh air that you complain about a grey day, and start getting frustrated by minor issues. It is only when you relocate next to a wild fire where you choke on each breath, do you remember what truly counts. Make sure to really understand what you value. If you still decide to leave, ensure that the next place has all the minimum attributes that you require to be effective, and could be overlooking.
[1] The grace period has since been extended to 60 days.
[2] Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals.
For more musings on tech culture, organization building, and management, follow me on Twitter @kenk616.
