I’ve been hiring and managing people for a year or so now, and it’s been pretty interesting to see what things turn out to be important in employees.
(obviously this is only from my experience; I wouldn’t be sharing it if I didn’t think it had some broader applicability but also my job is pretty weird)
Working more hours is really valuable. I think a reasonable prior is that a person’s output is linear in their number of hours worked. (This sounds like sort of an obvious point, but I think people can miss it because of the strong expectation of a job being something you do 9-5 or whatever; I definitely missed it for a while.) There’s a point at which it gets sublinear, but that’s often pretty far out. (I feel like there can be regions where it’s superlinear as well; if I’m working few enough hours I can get to a point where I have to spend all my time catching up on what happened when I wasn’t working.)
You can pay people more for working more, but the costs of hiring and training are really high, and scale with the number of people. It’s also just sort of better to have one person doing a job rather than two; it allows knowledge to be more concentrated and cuts down on communication and coordination costs.
Another thing that’s valuable: just being in the office. I used to think of “just showing up” as a bad thing and that companies should just care about how much work you get done, not how many hours you’re in the office. But actually, it’s really nice to have people in the office even if they’re not being productive; they can deal with things that come up, answer questions whenever you have them, join in conversations, etc. Being available 24/7 by phone/online is also great.
Willingness to just do whatever needs to be done is another good one. It turns out that a lot of things are annoying, and boring, and someone still has to do them. The difference between “ugh do I have to” and eagerly volunteering for the shittiest jobs is really big.
Being proactive is huge. I think this is the biggest thing I fucked up when I first started working. I was operating under some assumptions like:
- my manager’s time and the time of the more senior people around me are really valuable
- I should try not to waste it
- therefore I:
- shouldn’t talk unless I have something really worthwhile to say
- shouldn’t ask questions unless I’ve exhausted all possibilities for answering them on my own
- shouldn’t ask for more things to do unless I’ve done everything I’ve been given so far
- etc.
Now I realize that this is the exact opposite of helpful, and actually makes management way more work. A lot of management comes down to stuff like having accurate models of what people do and don’t know, and what they’re good and bad at, and what they spend their time on. The less active effort I have to expend to build these models, the better. I love it when people:
- ask lots of questions and talk a lot, especially when they’re saying something dumb. if they say lots of wrong things, it lets me know what they don’t understand, so I can help fill in the gaps.
- give lots of updates on what they’re doing without being asked
- ask for more stuff to work on
- like my ideal interaction is something like “hey, here are the top 3 things on my stack. here are the stages they’re all at. if there’s something else you think I should do let me know, otherwise I’ll default to working on these”
- suggest things and take initiative. I used to think stuff like “well, no one’s asked me to help with this project, even though it seems like a good fit for me, so they probably think I would be bad at it.” actually, it’s way more likely that it just didn’t occur to them, because constantly assessing and reassessing every combination of (person, project) is really hard, and they’ll be happy at you pointing things out and making their job easier.