Once every year we review market rates and issue raises automatically. Our target is to pay everyone at the company at the top 10 percent of the market regardless of their role. So whether you work in customer support or ops or programming or design, you’ll be paid in the top 10 percent for that position.
The best designers and the best programmers aren’t the ones with the best skills, or the nimblest fingers, or the ones who can rock and roll with Photoshop or their environment of choice, they are the ones that can determine what just doesn’t matter. That’s where the real gains are made.
Management scholar Peter Drucker nailed it decades ago when he said “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
It’s OK if it’s not perfect. You might not seem as professional, but you will seem a lot more genuine.
If you want to know the truth about what you’ve built, you have to ship it. You can test, you can brainstorm, you can argue, you can survey, but only shipping will tell you whether you’re going to sink or swim.
Check the cover letter. In a cover letter, you get actual communication instead of a list of skills, verbs, and years of irrelevance.
Don’t throw good time after bad work.
What do you call a generic pitch sent out to hundreds of strangers hgoping that one will bite? Spam.
You don’t create a culture. It happens. This is why new companies don’t have a culture. Culture is the by-product of consistent behavior.
It’s time for companies to stop asking their employees to breathlessly chase ever-higher, ever-more-artificial targets set by ego.
Whenever executives talk about how their company is really like a big ol’ family, beware. They’re usually not referring to how the company is going to protect you no matter what or love you unconditionally. You know, like healthy families would. Their motive is rather more likely to be a unidirectional form of sacrifice: yours.
If you can’t fit everything in within the time and budget allotted then don’t expand the time and budget. Instead, pull back the scope. There’s always time to add stuff later – later is eternal, now is fleeting.
Starting a business on the side while keeping your day job can provide all the cash flow you need.
The idea that you’ll instantly move needles because you’ve never tried to move them until now is, well, delusional. Sometimes you get lucky and things are as easy as you had imagined, but that’s rarely the case. Most conversion work, most business-development work, most sales work is a grind – a lot of effort for a little movement. You pile those little movements into a big one eventually, but that fruit is way up at the top of the tree.
Ever try to cancel an account with your cell phone company? It’s not an inherently complicated act. But many phone companies make it so difficult to do because they have retention goals to hit. They want to make it hard for you to cancel so it’s easier for them to hit their numbers.
Everyone should be encouraged to start his own business, not just some rare breed that self-identifies as entrepreneurs.
The most important thing is to begin.
It won’t be as easy, but lots of things that are worth doing aren’t easy. It just takes commitment, discipline, and, most important, faith that it’s all going to work out.
Everyone wants to be heard and respected. It usually doesn’t cost much to do, either. And it doesn’t really matter all that much whether you ultimately think you’re right and they’re wrong. Arguing with heated feelings will just increase the burn.
Meaningful work, creative work, thoughtful work, important work – this type of effort takes stretches of uninterrupted time to get into the zone. But in the modern office such long stretches just can’t be found. Instead, it’s just one interruption after another.