Unlearn Your MBA DHH in Stanford 2010
About the video
It’s the video about a speech DHH presented 2010 at Stanford. It’s very inspring, good to know about the insight of these things, I just randomly listed:
- why VC is a time bomb
- why it’s good to spend your own money for your own business
- how to work as a startup
- how to manage your time
- stories about Rails and Basecamp then 37signals company
- what kind of company is a smart company
- etc…
I wish I could have watched this when I was still in school. But maybe then I wound’t understand the essence of many things. Anyway highly recommend. The video is about 1 hour long but the speech itself is maybe less than 20 or 25 minutes I think. After that was Q&A session and it’s still quite good.
About Japanese Way of (Time) Management
This is my thought, as well as my complains about the topic, you can ignore this if you’re not interested in.
I’m not sure if it’s the majority or just among old guys who happen to be the managers or board members or whatever high postion, higher than you, the people I’ve met tend to think that working hard, say 50 or 60 hours a week is just normal. And not do themselves stick to this principle, they also ask you to do the same thing. It doesn’t mean they’re terrible human beings, actually usually there’s nothing wrong with their personalities or characters, it’s just the way they’ve been educated, been expeirenced by their managers when they were young.
But my argument is, our industry is different, different from old days, it calls for creative, we need passions, need to be motivated. Not even mention how many flaws or damages or consequences it will cause if you force your employees to just work more. Here I quote DHH’s speech:
I think there’s just a lot of misconception out there about how hard you must work. I’m sure this was true in the industrial age when you were hammering on stuff. If you hammered for another five hours, you would produce another 10 widgets and you can sell those widgets. If you’re working in stuff like software or anything else that doesn’t require your personal labor in manufacturing widgets which is basically none. None of this stuff matters.
Wow it ended up longer artcies than I expected, maybe I should refactor this to another post =_=;
Excellent post. Long hours are just not sustainable nor are they productive long term (burnout happens to the best of us)