Why do folks feel unhappy about their careers?
If you think deeply, most of the unhappiness stems from dissonance.
Dissonance between what we are doing and what we think we should be doing.
The goal, then is to keep that gap as small as possible.
How does one do that? Through a lot of things.
But it starts with surrounding yourself with people and an org culture that is aligned to your personal values.
A personal value that is a deal-breaker for me is Fairness.
Here is a lovely story Ben Horowitz narrates around retaining core values.
Interviewer : “How do you make trade offs when you can’t optimize for everything? …..we had a star engineer who was critical and was quitting because he’d gotten a higher offer somewhere else. I came to you, and I said, “we need to retain this person.”
It wasn’t that big of a deal to match the offer. We could afford it. You said, “no, we’re not doing that.”
Because if we do that with this guy, then we’ve got to do that with everybody else. But how do people know when to match offers? Sometimes, there is a short-term emergency where, if you don’t do it, you’re dead.
How do you decide whether to optimize for the long term or the near term? How do you think about that?
Ben: I think that one thing that people care about a lot in a company and in life is fairness. Is there some set of rules at work that if I do my job, if I make my contribution and so forth, I’m going to be treated fairly? That’s a big thing.
My management philosophy at that time and the way we were doing things is: we evaluate everybody on a frequent basis together, and then whoever is performing the best gets the raise.
Not the person who quits and gets another job offer, not the person who asks for it, and so forth.
That was the principle.
Because the whole thing that we had agreed upon was that we had this process, so anybody who followed the process got screwed”
What are your core values?
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