joeemison

Why is it that there seems to be the assumption that all "A" players are those who live to work, work 60+ hour weeks, and generally immerse themselves with their work?

I employ "A" players who want to work 40 hours a week and spend the rest of the time with their families. They are excellent at what they do; they just want to do it as a job, not as a lifestyle, and they want to compartmentalize it into 9-5, M-F.

Why is that so hard to believe?

Why is that we know the exact price of a gallon of gas more than the exact amount that's withheld from our paycheck due to taxes? We have occasion to interact with both amounts on about the same schedule, and the amount that's withheld from our paychecks is significantly more. But we spend much more time looking at the price of gas, as we stand next to our cars, waiting for it to be pumped in.

When you publish salaries to show your culture of trust and transparency, you are also showing your culture of caring what salaries are. And your culture that it's important to know what other people are making. All of this serves to elevate the importance of salary across your organization (and potentially also trust and transparency).

If your goal for your organization is to have a culture that is that is not focused on salary, it's hard to defend the decision to publish everyone's salaries and make a big splash out in the world in your blog and in interviews about how your culture includes publishing salaries. Salaries, salaries, salaries. You'd be much better off segmenting salary conversations to a particular time (or times) of year, having those as individual conversations, and framing those conversations to your organizational culture--"we want to make sure you're being properly compensated... now let's get back to being great!"

There is a concept in social psychology called the "ironic effect"--essentially, if I tell you to stop thinking about pink elephants, you're going to think about pink elephants. The same problem applies here--if I publish everyone's salary to show how transparent the organization is, I'm also going to bring salary front and center to my organization and its culture.

I have been struck recently over many conversations with different VC-funded startup CEOs (series A or B money, all at least $5M) at how strong the CTO/tech team rockstar/ninja kool-aid seems to be. "Our tech guys are smarter than everyone else in the world" seems to be a pervasive sentiment. Generally speaking, the CTO/tech team also seems to believe that about themselves, and usually the CEO is personally self-effacing and does not have that kind of personal arrogance.

I know that there are dark days and uncertainty within a startup, and that you do have to "fake it until you make it", but there's a real danger in drinking that kool-aid and missing out on the fact that everything reverts to the mean, and not everyone can even be "above average", let alone the smartest people in the world. The reality is that your startup that's survived to series A likely has pretty decent tech talent, but it's unlikely that they're significantly better than the tech talent at other startups that have survived similarly.

In particular, it is a big mistake to assume that your tech team is going to be able to solve problems that were really hard for other tech teams, unless you're willing to make solving those problems one of your core competencies (and the other tech teams were not willing to do so).

As a tech co-founder, I am extremely appreciative of the support that I get from my CEO, but I would never want her to (nor does she) assume that I will be able to solve problems that other talented teams have failed to solve for way less money and/or in way less time and/or with way less organizational focus than they have.

So if you're a tech CEO who believes that your CTO and tech teams are far superior to everyone else out there, I would say: the confidence is good, and probably necessary, but you have to make sure that you spend some of your time sober enough to acknowledge reality.