105 ms·
Anthropic CEO reportedly worried new hires only care about money
- adg001 1mo agoWho has recruited them?
- xtiansimon 1mo agoWhen “Anthropic CEO” makes sure more diverse talents can successfully get through their hiring process, then I’ll listen to this argument. Until then, you get what you test for (or what you deserve if your hiring process is so complex).
- mertbio 1mo agoSince when do people in Silicon Valley work for a mission?
- Krutonium 1mo agoRight? People typically do work for money. That's capitalism. If I could pay bills with happyness and contributions to society through working for a cause, I would, but that's not reality. Also businesses seem to think we should be Undyingly Loyal to them without any reciprocity. It's wild.
- watwut 1mo agoThey work for the love of diarupting anf breaking things.
- linguae 1mo agoMaybe I’m looking through rose-colored glasses, but while people need money, there was a time where there was more idealism from the founders and the employees. Steve Jobs could’ve quit business in 1985 after his failed coup; he was rich enough to never have to work again. Yet he started NeXT, and he was able to get people to join his company. I feel we’re in a timeline in Silicon Valley where there’s little idealism. Employees seek money, and who can blame them when a two-bedroom apartment can easily rent for $4000/mo or more, and when a house is easily $2 million? Leaders seek not only money, but power, and their desires for power have been more blatant in the past year. Where are the Steve Wozniak and Gary Kildall figures of Silicon Valley these days?
- wewewedxfgdf 1mo agoDario Amodei is the Woody Allen of the AI world always worried and neurotic about something.
- hansmayer 1mo ago[dead]
- pixelatedindex 1mo agoAren't they (where they = tech CEOs, at least) all?
- imjonse 1mo agoIf he were not such openly against open models and China, his potential hiring pool would include more idealistic people.
- az226 1mo agoI doubt this is true. New hires earn a small fraction of what existing employees make.
- briga 1mo agoHere's an idea: instead of paying your employees $800k, how about you cut their pay to $80k. See how many of them are truly in it for the mission.
- mirzap 1mo agoAnyone who thinks people work for anything other than money is delusional. Anyone who works for "the mission" is an idiot - no company or billionaire running a company cares about you. They will let you go in a heart beat.
- breppp 1mo agoHe is right, when a startup becomes successful the hiring pool becomes different. For example, you won't see people who came for politics-sake before real money is on the table. This can kill the culture and make the actual people that were shipping unhappy
- dijit 1mo agoI’m aware of this (consciously) but I would really do my job if it was unpaid, in fact: many do (and did) in the form of side projects and volunteering and FOSS. I was always weirded out by the “only in IT for the money” crowd, which is a lot more than the people in it for passion these days it seems, and I might be an extreme case, but consider that while I run an IRC community- I do not write open source software.
- janalsncm 1mo agoI do a ton of side projects that personally interest me. I’m mainlining hard technical problems with zero need for permissions or waiting on bureaucracy or jira tickets. If a decision needs to be made, I don’t have to wait until next week when all of the “stakeholders” are available to talk about it. I figure it out myself. If my day job was a side project I wouldn’t work on it at all.
- dijit 1mo ago
- righthand 1mo agoLol welcome to capitalism bro. You dont get to kill off coding skills and expertise then expect people to give a f*** about some vision. The vision is that the people you’re hiring now wont have a job in the future. Wtf do you think people are going to do while the clock is ticking? The paycheck is the thank you for working for your vision. That’s the end of the agreement for any good worker who understands capitalism.
- fuzzfactor 1mo agoIt's always possible that the capitalists involved care so much more about money than anything else, especially people, that the acorn can not fall far from the tree. They would know better than us. Aren't new hires actually expected to need the money more than people who are already rich?
- chris_wot 1mo agoFunny, new hires are similarly worried the Anthropic CEO only cares about money, so they have something in common!
- hasley 1mo agoI, as an engineer, shall work for a mission and not (so much) for money. But as soon as the mission can possibly be completed without me using the latest shiny AI tool, it is okay for the company to get rid of me.
- r_lee 1mo agowow, what a beautiful and brave statement. thank you for your service
- mawadev 1mo agoThe concept of job security and stability has been broken, so everyone is too busy securing their future by collecting as much money before there is another record profit layoff!
- qurren 1mo agoThis. Let me know when I can pay for a Chipotle meal or rent in mission statements. Until then saving up money is important.
- hahahaa 1mo agoYep we are all bogleheads now
- BikDk 1mo agoWait until the Hiob question hits that believe system. In the end its just a matter of if we put the bank inside or outside of the temple. Anyway, it never worked in an agnostic way.
- ingonealan3 1mo agoIt's funny when these executives, on one side, will happily lay people off, implement attrition policies, or engage in morally-questionable behaviors, all with the purpose of maximize profits, while on the other hand blame the employees that they don't care about the company, and are only in it for the money. It's a thinly veiled way of saying "only I am allowed to play the game as the ruthless capitalist".
- altairprime 1mo agoYes, that's the exact greedy classism that the century-ago Gilded Age made well-known to dedicated students of U.S. history today. I'd be shocked if 1% of students who passed an handwritten-essay history exam in the past fifty years remember it at all. On the plus side, at least we don't have to reinvent terminology for this: it's all already written down and studied in depth and condensed into a two hours PBS documentary so that anyone in the cog class today can learn about it — even if they've been largely been denied literacy by the leadership class starving out public education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjpYzFtxfjU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjpYzFtxfjU via https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/gilded-age/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/gilded-age...
- mypalmike 1mo agoI once worked as a contractor at a startup whose CEO had little trophies on display in a wall case showing off funding rounds for previous startups. There were like 3 employees and 15 contractors, and he had one of the contractors give a speech about believing in the mission or whatever. It was laughable. I was only there a couple months and found out later they got bought out by the largest company in the space. He probably bought a few more tacky red Ferraris after that.
- blfr 1mo agoPeople give him a lot of shit for these antics. The "regulate us!" cries, disaster-marketing of escaped models, now this. I am slightly annoyed to be paying for a product (Claude Max) with such eyeroll worthy marketing. But it works. Fable is truly amazing, maybe not head and shoulders above the rest but at least a head. Apparently, this neurosis-driven development does attract AI talent. It suprises me. It shouldn't because the same target demo has been following Eliezer Yudkowsky for decades now but it still does. I just don't have a theory of mind where this is an attractor.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1mo agoThere are a lot of bad midwit arguments for why you shouldn't worry about machine superintelligence. The bad midwit arguments mean that midwits filter themselves out.
- yieldcrv 1mo agoIt’s really easy to get out of touch Like, really easy Even amongst the middle class, the people that act like they’re really on a job out of passion have assurances that their downpayment on a house will be covered, or are subsidized by prior military service, or some kind of financial support system they don’t notice is not available to others The people that are passionate that really only have salary is effectively zero Founders aren’t educated on this power dynamic and need to be coached
- vrganj 1mo agoYou're supposed to build the machine that's designed to replace you and all labor and make me a neofeudal lord for the love of the game, you greedy pigs!
- dartharva 1mo agoIt's hard to think notions like company loyalty have ever meant something in Silicon Valley. Amodei himself would have never subscribed to a "mission" in the entirety of his career, having jumped from Baidu to Google to OpenAI and finally backstabbing them to form their own company. It's all just a performance; inevitably the same thing is going to happen to Anthropic too.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1mo agoHe left OpenAI because he didn't think sama was being faithful to the mission. https://www.openaifiles.org/ https://www.openaifiles.org/
- dartharva 1mo agoLike I said, all a performance. Just needed a "positive" reason for drama.
- linguae 1mo agoThere were exceptions, and I use “were” and not “are” because I don’t know any modern Silicon Valley companies that value loyalty, though I know some people at Apple and Google with long tenures. Hewlett-Packard under its founders believed in loyalty, and even had a philosophy dubbed The HP Way (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_HP_Way https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_HP_Way) that seem like an interesting cross between some of the positive aspects of working for a Japanese company (loyalty, sense of care by the company) and the positives of working in Silicon Valley (flexible work hours, profit sharing), plus some other ideas (Friday afternoons devoted to personal projects). This philosophy was not commonplace even in Silicon Valley at the time; the founders lamented “hire and fire” companies in Silicon Valley. Eventually HP abandoned the HP Way once HP started hiring outsiders as CEOs instead of hiring from within, beginning with Carly Fiorina.
- m132 1mo agoIt's an industry where companies with "open" right in the name lobby against open models and training on stolen data is viewed as more ethical than training on existing models. It takes some time to catch up with reality there.
- jdw64 1mo agoSo Anthropic studied humanity, and their big discovery was: new hires care about money. Peak anthropology.
- trueno 1mo agoLiterally cannot take this guy seriously, this guy, Sam Altman.. these dudes are memes
- itsyonas 1mo agoDario, you could ask Claude about 'Entfremdung' and what a guy called Marx said about it nearly 200 years ago. :)
- arjie 1mo agoAlmost every founder cares about this but he’s in a business where he genuinely thinks he’s walking the Secher Nbiw to paradise with extinction on either side. I can see how someone in that position would be concerned about this.
- ip26 1mo agoThere’s an ego element though. Being mission driven and choosing to work for Anthropic is implicitly validating of the “peril” and of the leadership team as the ones to steer through it, so they are indirectly asking for this validation.
- cavoirom 1mo agoI accept different people have different incentive and the direction of the company is what attracting them. If a company could not show long term reliability, it would attract only short-term minded people.
- synack 1mo agoI once saw a job candidate take a competing offer from Facebook because they had better snacks.
- mypalmike 1mo agoThey believed in the company’s Mission™ (brand tortillas).
- swiftcoder 1mo agoBack in the day, it wasn't just better snacks - Facebook served three meals a day, they had free drop-off laundry on campus, all the snacks in the world, and that barbecue shack on campus was legitimately decent. Of course, you had to sell your soul in the process, but particularly for young, single folks just out of university, it was like moving to another better college campus, and if you took full advantage of the perks you could bank another 30-40k of your comp, easy
- maxk42 1mo agoSometimes the reasons people give are not the real reasons.
- jdw64 1mo agoI can somewhat understand their mindset. Once you reach a certain level of wealth, you don't really need money just to survive—you already have enough. After that point, money becomes more like a high score you're trying to beat. Hitting certain revenue targets, reaching specific asset milestones—that kind of thing. And because of that, they start to believe they're working for some other value, not for money. But if you talk to them long enough, you always end up at the same conclusion: 'It's still about money, isn't it?' They'd never admit it, though. 'Because I'm not earning money just to survive—I'm different from you guys.' They genuinely believe that. Meanwhile, I'm here thinking that if I don't do work I hate, I'll literally go hungry tomorrow.
- ogou 1mo agoI know a lot of good people that got thrown away by mission focussed companies. They were loyal and put with all kinds of BS for those companies. I was laid off from jobs I went way above and beyond for. They didn't hesitate. They are the ones that turned us all into disposable mercenaries. Why wouldn't we go for the money? What else are they offering, thumbs up emojis?
- pixelatedindex 1mo agoIf only I could pay my bills with thumbs up emojis. I can even double my offering from one to two!
- b3lvedere 1mo agoSupply and demand eh, Mr. Amodei. Just like your extraordinary gobbling up of all memory, storage and gpu causes extraordinary prices for consumers. I bet you don't care about that, so ask me again why i should care about your supply and demand issues at your company.
- onion2k 1mo agoI think the comments here are taking this comment as being about how salaries are too high, or how it's daft to suggest people shouldn't chase the best paying role available to them. I suspect that isn't really what Dario means though. Perhaps I'm being too generous but I think his comments are about two problems that all rich companies face: 1. How do you maintain momentum in an industry where other companies with deep pockets can tempt your staff away quite easily just by offering more money? If everyone is willing to hop from company to company then it drives wages up (not a bad thing) but also slows progress as a whole industry (a bad thing). 2. How do you keep people when they can just retire and live a life of leisure at any point? It's not about the high wages; it's about employing people who want to see the challenge through to the end. Ultimately Anthropic has a vast pile of money and can pay people loads to work there. That isn't enough to keep them there though. Paying a lot doesn't get the company to the next milestone if people are happy to just drop it for a better offer or walk away entirely when they feel they have enough. It's the most first world problem imaginable, but I can see that it would be something that keeps a billionaire CEO up at night.
- threatripper 1mo agoIf you pay your employees enough to sing all day about how much they love you they will sing.
- janalsncm 1mo agoBe careful what you wish for. Ideological employees exist, and they might even work for less. But that doesn’t mean they will always agree with Dario’s ideology. This is something Google has found out. And when those ideological people start making noises about the ways they disagree with the company, he might miss the more mercenary employees.
- lain98 1mo agoI'm sorry. Companies are not charities or families but like sports teams. We come together for a limited objective, where the company meets its objectives and I get paid for my time. I was laid off last year along with many of my colleagues, some time before the layoff the group director had an impromptu meeting and declared we are working for the good of the world and that we should all feel aligned with this message to serve humanity - "Our mission is to empower every person and every individual organisation on the planet to achieve more". No your mission is to pump the stock and return value to shareholder. My mission is to help you do it and get paid for my time. And it turns out more often that not, that to serve humanity is a cookbook. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zone) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zon...
- hahahaa 1mo agoHell yeah. They pay well! Shit is costing more and more so more money is good.
- Ekaros 1mo agoSo surely they will fix by lowering wages and other compensation of all their executives and other high level people to minimum wage. Thus getting only those people who care about mission and not money. Or does it only apply to workers and not people in the lead?
- zombot 1mo agoThe head money printer of a company whose sole purpose is to print money is worried his employees share his attitude? That gives him a good shot at winning the Olympics of double standards.
- peter-m80 1mo agoCapitalism is a rat race
- recursivedoubts 1mo agoEmployees reportedly worried CEOs only care about money
- ruperthair 1mo agoI think this may be a sign of the 'AI guilt' that even the strongest LLM supporters must feel, if they know how it all works and the environmental impact it has. I feel it just as a user of the US-based models, so I guess it must be stronger though possibly subconscious feeling for folks who work on making it happen. It would therefore be hard to be motivated by much other than the giant pile of money they give you each month/year.
- 0xbadc0de5 1mo agoTurns out people have to pay their bills in dollars, not company mission statements.
- Arya_xiaofan 1mo agoI completely agree, but aligning with the company's mission might reduce the pain of work.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- glimshe 1mo agoLOL. Would "Anthropic new hires worried CEO only cares about money" be considered newsworthy?
- ryandvm 1mo agoLol. Is this The Onion? These frontier AI companies are labor market nuclear weapons. What kind of fucking mission statement is going to inspire people when they're responsible for 50% unemployment?
- upboundspiral 1mo agoIt's incredible how modern news is straight propaganda these days. The article is criticizing Amodei but I take issue with the fact that they printed the story at all. Whether they say something that seems smart or stupid, newspapers keep publishing only what the rich and powerful say. And I think the rich and powerful know this. They know that to keep journalists busy they just need to continue making waves. Doesn't matter if they are strategic or not, just overwhelm the news with garbage and prevent much more worthier stories from surfacing.
- albatross79 1mo agoIt's like these guys are out of touch with the rest of the human race and too dumb to realize it.