5mo ago

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says the company used to be so idealistic that people were 'not working very hard'

www.businessinsider.com

Reddit's CEO said that when he returned in 2015, he had to remind employees to work hard.
There's a tendency in the US tech industry to place idealism above hard work, he said.

Reddit @lemmy.world

Abaixo de Cão @lemm.ee

5mo ago

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says the company used to be so idealistic that people were 'not working very hard'

www.businessinsider.com /reddit-employees-werent-working-hard-ceo-steve-huffman-said-2025-5

86 comments

Idealistic people work harder than anyone—for idealistic causes.
They don’t work so hard for companies that betray their idealism.
- It's so absurd for them to think they are going to get people to work harder without idealism.
- I was idealistic at my current place. Then my manager and another key person left, and it all went out the window. Even when they were here, I was still more idealistic than was realistic. But my manager helped channel that.
  Now I feel betrayed and sidelined and stifled. Disillusioned. Totally unnecessary too.
Yeah that dude is on the short list too.
- Which communities delete comments for mentioning the gentleman in green overalls?
  
  At some point one of these dudes is just gonna hire the wrong security goons.
  
  Nearly all?
Former mod of /r/jailbait says what?
- Comment of the day
It's always funny seeing these silicon valley startups have essentially zero retained employees and engineers except the CEO.
All money machines built on the backs of long gone engineers that only exist because they've cornered their share of the oligopoly market.
- THEY FINally decided to get rid of most tech employees in 2023
"Employees tend to forget that the entire purpose of life is to run yourself ragged for some dipshit who has obtained entirely way too much wealth and will never stop demanding more. It's like they just don't get it. WORK HARDER! I DEMAND TRIBUTE!"
- Classic hypocritical neoliberal mindset: You don't owe anyone anything, except your company, who owes nothing to you.
- https://youtu.be/r8miwsWtzRw
If there was any justice, Aaron Swartz’ ghost wouldn’t let him have a moment’s rest.
- I can only imagine the world where we got to keep Aaron instead. 😭
- The article failed to even mention our boy.
Guy who never worked hard in his life tries to tell other people to work hard.
Yes sometimes these guys (CEOs) do longer hours, but it consits of eating dinner with other Cs, looking at presentations (which they cant judge because they generally have no idea how the actual business runs), sitting in meeting, flying to other meetings and pretending to look at some company numbers and of course having the very very high responsibility that they keep talking about that they actually never ever have.
Does this mean they should make x50 or more than the average worker ? You judge that.
- I can't remember who it was, but sometime in the last few years a VC or CEO wrote an article documenting their day and how they "worked 12 hours a day" or something like that. What I remember most is that their accounting of their work included their time at the gym, at least one meal, and something else that few if any employers would consider "working time".
  I agree that sometimes C-suite execs do work long hours sometimes, and I'll differ from you in that sometimes those long hours are legitimate and valuable for a company. IMO, it's not the norm nor is it generally worth the premium that most companies pay for those hours.
- Does this mean they should make x50 or more than the average worker ?
  x50?
  Pigboy gave himself a $193 million bonus. Do you think the average reddit worker made $3.86 million?
I bet his yearly salary he can't name a single facet of what he is referring to as 'work' and has no earthly idea how the tech behind Reddit works or is maintained.
- I bet his yearly salary he can’t name a single facet of what he iS referring to as ‘work’ and has no earthly idea how the tech behind Reddit works or is maintained.
  You'd lose that bet. He was around when Reddit was pretty small, and I'm pretty sure wrote some of the original (Common Lisp, IIRC) codebase at least, if not the later Python rewrite.
  kagis
  Yeah, sounds like he was working on the Python codebase too.
  https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/67bjm8/im_steve_huffman_programmer_and_reddit_ceo_ama/
  I’m Steve Huffman, aka u/Spez. I founded both Reddit and Hipmunk (where I was CTO). Until about a year and a half ago, I was a full time engineer. I started programming as a kid, and worked as a developer through high school and college at Virginia (CS major).
  That was from 2017.
  
  I'd also add -- I think that a better criticism is not his lack of technical familiarity, but rather that he also worked at at Reddit when it was a startup, co-founded it, and despite having sold off his stock and left once before returning, I'm sure has some form of company-performance-linked compensation today. Basically, when he's starting out, if Reddit goes under, he loses pretty big. If Reddit becomes big, he makes a ton of money. Today, if the company does well, so does he. The result is that he has a tremendous incentive to do everything he can to make Reddit successful.
  In addition, his personal actions will have always been a substantial portion of determining what makes Reddit do well. If you're one of a very small technical team making early technical decisions, those calls can determine whether the company sinks or swims. Later, he's holding a high-level position where there's a lot of impact.
  So he gets compensation tightly tied to company performance, and his actions have a large impact on company performance. His interests are tightly-aligned with the company. And in that environment, yeah, you're gonna care more about company performance and the impact of your actions on that performance.
  That gets harder to do as companies grow. Sure, you can give employees stock options or have an employee stock purchase plan. I think every tech company I've been at has done that. And to some degree, yeah, that's gonna align your interests with that of the company. Problem is that any one engineer, if you're at a company with thousands of engineers, just doesn't have as large an impact on the stock price. And usually, the proportion to which your compensation is stock or something tied to stock falls off as the company grows.
  Stock in the company is a pretty good incentive when you're a ten-person company. It doesn't work as well as an incentive in a large company, not outside of the people near the top.
  You can have companies set up bonus programs with milestones or something to try to replicate that alignment, but I don't think that any bonus program works as well as stock. Lot of issues.
  Say someone doesn't meet a milestone. Then maybe it's the fault of the person who planned and structured the milestone: maybe it wasn't realistic.
  There's information disparity between the people setting the milestone and the people accepting it as compensation, and how much compensation someone gets is always going to have some level of a zero-sum aspect, outside of wanting to have happy employees that are retained. With stock prices, the only people on the "other side of the fence" are the competition.
  Might be ways to game the system, or to influence the people who set those bonus milestones ("Kathy down in accounting is sleeping with Bob who is running the bonus program"). Even if that doesn't happen, if someone feels that there is --- and I'm pretty sure that missing a bonus is disappointing --- I bet that there's potential for ill will.
  I've thought about ideas before to try to figure out how to replicate some of that "startup" alignment of company and employee incentives for larger companies. But they usually smack into one of a number of problems; it's really easy to create misincentives. I wasn't able to come up with something that'll align company and employee incentives as well as a startup. And this is not a new problem, so a lot of people have thought about it; if there were an easy solution, I'm pretty sure that companies would have done it by now.
  But point is, I suspect that he's comparing how much time and effort he's willing to put in to what a random engineer is when Reddit is a larger company. And I'm pretty sure that at least some of the difference is that their personal incentives are different; he's gotta take that into account. Maybe Reddit did have people not putting in the effort in 2015 relative to similar companies --- I don't know. But I still really suspect that at least some of the factor is going to be the personal incentives issue.
Fuck spez
ahh, the ole, "blame everyone except myself" tactic, very classy 🧐
- Hey you have to understand that these CEOs work 2000 hours weeks, doing work like golfing, riding yachts, and having extravagant dinners, while you lazy peasants are doing things like raising your kids, buying groceries, and sleeping.
I shadow banned everyone except bots and now my company sucks but NobOdY WaNts To WOrK ANYmOre
- They just outright ban people now. Been a Reddit user with zero problems for well over a decade, like 13 years, I’m now banned completely for upvoting Luigi content and saying I was surprised Kanye hadn’t murder/suicided Kim or Taylor yet which is apparently promoting violence. They’re really going out of their way to purge users.
  
  Funny. I said I didn't understand why CIA hadn't killed Trump yet. That is also promoting violence, I guess... If you completely ignore all the people they've killed in the past with a worse reason than what Trump has done specifically to the CIA.
  The least they could've done was banning me for when I said Trump deserves to hang upside down for an extended amount of time in piñata hanging height.
  
  I went to see if this made it to reddit.
  0 points for guessing the result.
This is your brain on capitalism
I assume the rest of his sentiment goes something like: 'not working very hard.....to increase shareholder value'
- amen
Twat says what?
Has this guy got his Texas harem started yet? Seems like he’s speed running the Musk Meltdown playbook.
- Was going to say that. Reddit has become a Nazi heaven and center of Zionism. Never thought I had to put these two word together. Now here we are.
  
  Turns out there were never all that different
Spez needs to go down in his nuclear fallout bunker and stay there.
- he can live with musk, but musk only wants a harem of concubine females.
He got how much for ruining the site and profiting off years of its users' work?
- 140mil-240ish million from dumping his shares.
Fuck spez
- Indeed. Came here just for that.
People have been saying this about the U.S. tech industry for years and the reason is that the rich were mad working in tech here in the U.S. used to be a decent career and so this became the bullshit line given to corporate media by CEOs.
There is literally nothing to it beyond this.
- Yep. Exactly. Before Elon went full Nazi and during the API riots, he said that he wants reddit to be like X and run like how musk operates it
Was that the same idealism that led to the jailbait and creepshot subreddits being allowed to flourish? Or Covid misinfo? Deepfakes? The chimpire? Qanon? All that stuff definitely wasn't operating clandestinely.
- I've heard from writeups from former employees that the internal culture is a perfect reflection of Reddit as a whole. Which says a lot.
Spez maybe should have worked harder at not destroying both shareholder value and the trust of the people that actually made the site what it was.
Like who is he working for here, because it doesn't seem like anyone's pleased about him
- Feature-wise I feel Lemmy is nearly identical to Reddit. The biggest advantage Reddit has is the communities and they've been basically hacking away at them for over a year.
  
  Hey that's not fair. Reddit has been working hard at making itself more closed and on giving it a far shittier UI
  
  except it has pretty repressive policies around moderation, more than any other social media, like they have a whole apparatus built around bans, and ban evasion. trying to use a different account with different ip and proxies, is very difficult.
Reddit CEO says Internal Server Error.
Fuck off bunker boy.
Translation - the employees weren't getting abused until I came back and reminded them why I'm back
Fuck Spez
Whats weird is how bad reddit works in a basic web browser, which is where the app started.
It's frustrating that rich scumbags just get to live a rich life. Where's the justice in that? Saint Luigi deliver us from assholes like Huffman.
Glad I deleted my account. Fuck reddit.
- I think I'd prefer a Glasgow kiss over a Chelsea smile.
Ah yes, Steve showing his true colors.
"Forget moral convictions or a greater purpose than self enrichment. Reddit is public now baby, this thing makes money, not societal progress!"
And in the vacuum, Lemmy rises up.
Maybe people should go back to "not working very hard" because Reddit has spiraled into a shit hole ever since it's users became ad revenue generators.
Fuck Steve Huffman, fuck Reddit, Nazi sympathizing shithole website.
He's basically admitting that now that he's wholly a sellout, he's making more money. La-de-la, tell me more.
reddit is mostly managed by AI filters.
This guy has a face in need of a fist, as the German saying is translated.
Work hard?
Work at all?
Employees?!
Is this what he calls the mods?
Can capitalism just die now please?
Well I guess he's effected some change there in that he's got me working hard to avoid reddit.
place idealism above hard work
To translate from rich asshole, this means act ethically instead of do what I say.
WOW A BOSS WANTS PEOPLE TPO WORK HARDER?????
I have a gut feeling that if looked for, a downward trend in the in the quality of reddit starts when he came back.
What’s “reddit”?
- A conservative pond full of liberal fish
  
  So that explains the gay frogs.
- tosses wine glass A miserable pile of secrets!
Like the CEO? I'm sure he barely pretends to work.
Self destructive policies inside and out.
Like why would you want to work for these companies???
- Résumé.
I might buy ONE(1) share of reddit and ask for it to be directly registered to a stock certificate so I can someday point to it and say "I personally ate a piece of its corpse" out of
pure
s p i t e .

86 comments

pure

s p i t e .