What I find interesting in reading this is that it's not particularly surprising in content. And I don't mean that I expected some hugely toxic culture from a youtube company and found it. I mean that the whole document is largely pretty standard "how to make it in a competitive industry" advice. The tone might be a little unprofessional for folks who are used to big corporate talk, but if you'd leaked internal Microsoft or Google documents to a bunch of long time IBM folks they would have thought the same things I'm sure. The tone might be different, but most of the points seem identical to stuff anyone should be familiar with. "Follow up when you ask someone for something", "Don't commit to giving X if you can't actually get X", "Have a backup plan", "Try to turn a failure into something useful", "Own your mistakes", "Make sure you've exhausted all the avenues for something before you decide it's impossible", "Do the hard work early so you're not cramming it all in at the end", "You are the subject matter expert on your specific project, assume everyone else doesn't know anything". Even the "A,B,C" employee thing is pretty standard stuff folks know intuitively. Fast food is garbage no matter where you go, yet somehow Chick Fil A has lines around the block at lunch time and if there's 3 cars in a Wendy's drive through, you'll go somewhere else. Why? Because Chick Fil A really tries to not have "C" employees (relative to fast food employees in general), and it shows in the customer experience. Two fast food places can have the same quality of food, and the one with the drive through attendant that acknowledges people and responds to phatic phrases, and marks the diet soda cup is going to have more traffic and customer satisfaction than the one where the attendant barely acknowledges you've arrived at the window and leaves you to figure out which was the diet coke when you get home.
That's the same impression I got. It's odd seeing the discussion veer off into morality, because most of it seems to be standard and non-problematic advice (IE, understanding what your product is and don't get distracted by focusing on what it's not).
And though the advice isn't particularly novel, it was worth reading since a surprisingly large amount of people don't do these simple things.
I read the entire PDF and I felt he was pretty spot on about works and what doesn't in running a business.
This is Hacker News, ostensibly created as a website for hackers and founders.
If you are a hacker and a founder then a ton of this advice is spot on.
For example it's a simple concept but he absolutely nails a key factor by distinguishing between A, B and C employees. A high performing team really can't have more than one or two C's. It moves them out even if they're nice, cool, good people. If the team is run by good humans it does what Mr. Beast does and gives them severance.
I can smell a couple C employees fuming on here and in the Twitter thread. I've had C employees work for me and they were always the ones who lobbied me hardest for being more tolerant of mediocrity. Sorry but you just have to hold the line against the average if you want to succeed, this is dictionary definition level of obvious. To be above average, you have to be above freaking average. Half the world is C's and to win your team needs to not be in that half.
While I understand the concept of A, B and C employees to the employer from the PoV of the employee there is also management attrition and lack of incentives.
This concept of A, B and C employees is just ordinary dose of propaganda. A is a salaried employee who is expected to put in extra time and effort as if their livelihood depends on the success of the company, whereas type C employees poison the mindset by doing what they were hired to do. Bs are Cs with inherent sense of pride in delivering excellence who can be coached to become A.
I totally agree. This "excellence" ideology preaches unvirtuous self-sacrifice. Putting extra time and effort means that the employee is sacrificing himself to improve a result which will not benefit him but only a select few.
I argue that in many cases owners and managers, those who are posed to benefit from this ideology, are the ones which poison the mindset by punishing proactivity and being arrogant. There's also D employees, those that are unable to create value by the conditions set forth, they recognize the pointleness of their job and actively do the minimum and create excuses just to not get fired.
Is this really standard management advice? Half-way through the PDF I already felt like I'm reading some insane drivel of a sweatshop boss / wannabe cult leader. Whatever illusion I had that Mr Beast videos are worth watching, I lost it entirely, having learned that they're just a factory product with Mr Beast brand on it, a corporation pretending to be a person, optimized to waste people time[0], and made by people bullied into extremely unhealthy and antisocial behaviors.
Like, the part about making your co-workers feel like they're bottlenecking you; can't imagine working in an environment where everyone tries that number on everyone else. It's extremely adversarial. Is that really standard management advice? Maybe on Wall Street?
This source is pure gold: techniques to manipulate people into consuming your product - which they otherwise wouldn't be. All so you can make money on poisoning their minds (advertising, which is how you convert views to money). You can easily imagine this came out from a drug cartel boss, I'd expect the best and most ruthless one to operate just like that, with same level of cultishness.
And if that's who Mr Beast is, and that's how he thinks of other people - because believe it or not, viewers are other people too, not some cattle to be milked and slaughtered - then I'm glad I don't watch his videos. Not going to, and I'm happy to pass this document around to dissuade others from viewing his channel.
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[0] - I mean, that's kind of obvious in anything social media, but rarely do you get it spelled out without any qualms.
> Like, the part about making your co-workers feel like they're bottlenecking you; can't imagine working in an environment where everyone tries that number on everyone else. It's extremely adversarial.
See I didn’t read it that way at all. I read that as a statement of a concept I’ve always heard about when coordinating between groups. Effectively “pick a person in the other group to be your liaison and your counterpart and coordinate directly, don’t just throw stuff over the wall and hope someone picks it up”. It’s the same basic psychological concept as “in an emergency situation pick one person in the crowd, point them out and tell them personally to go call 911”. Diffusion of responsibility means people will delay or stuff will get dropped. To make things happen you have to make sure things are assigned. Surely this isn’t particularly surprising or controversial right? It’s why large teams often appoint “interrupt” workers who are appointed to specifically answer out of band requests coming in. It’s why you have an on call rotation instead of just paging the entire company if something goes down. It’s why agile appoints a “scrum master” whose singular mission is to clear up blocking issues for the team. It’s why if you don’t assign people to work on maintenance, maintenance won’t get done.
I read that part of the document as saying “if you’re in charge of producing a video due in 45 days, don’t just send a general request for someone to make a script to the writing department, pick a person and get on the same page about what needs to be done and when”
Your example about 911 highlights how mismanaged this whole operation is and how bad any advice there is.
In an emergency situation you single out random person precisely because there are no set processes who should be doing that, so you create responsibility impromptu.
In any half-functional organization work item with a deadline accepted by someone means THEY take responsibility to deliver in time and communicate any blockers. Having to constantly prod counterparty in another team signals totally broken and/or inexistent project management. It fits a lean startup where everyone is responsible for everything and everything is a fire you distinguish right there and move on. It does not fit organization where exponential growth of communication channels means communication becomes the bottleneck.
> In any half-functional organization work item with a deadline accepted by someone means THEY take responsibility to deliver in time and communicate any blockers.
That's what the document was about though. The audience of the document is quite clearly people who will be given the responsibility to deliver a video or product. It's quite literally communicating to them the exact concept you're pointing out here, that you need to establish clear roles and responsibilities. And what's being conveyed is that there isn't a single "one size fits all" responsibility chain. You can't just throw a request over the wall and assume and hope someone on the other side of that wall will come through for you. Most of this document is quite clearly "project management 101". If you're hiring people for a business that is largely centered around having multiple one shot projects in flight at any given time, "project management 101" is exactly the sort of document you want to be handing to new hires. It might be obvious to you, but spend time in any large organization and you quickly come across people for whom taking ownership and responsibility for something and what that entails isn't obvious. Heck I see this on software development teams all the time, where PR requests get thrown "over the wall" at the whole team and the turn around time is delayed as people assume someone else will get to it before they will and forget about it. Most teams I've worked on eventually land on some sort of interrupt or direct assignment system for PRs for exactly this reason, because you need to assign clear responsibility in order to get results turned around faster.
> Like, the part about making your co-workers feel like they're bottlenecking you; can't imagine working in an environment where everyone tries that number on everyone else. It's extremely adversarial. Is that really standard management advice? Maybe on Wall Street?
I think you're misunderstanding that part. The goal isn't to accuse the coworker. The goal is to explain to the coworker that what they need to do for the project is important to the point where any delays is going to cause a delay for the entire project. This isn't intended to be a negative statement; many projects do rely heavily on certain members getting things in by a particular timeline, and if that isn't communicated and followed up on, projects will fail. The dudebro speech in the document lacks tact, but the underlying principal is sound. The excerpt:
> DO NOT just go to them and say “I need creative, let me know when it’s done” and “I need a thumbnail, let me know when it’s done”. This is what most people do and it’s one of the reasons why we fail so much. I want you to look them in the eyes and tell them they are the bottleneck and take it a step further and explain why they are the bottleneck so you both are on the same page. “Tyler, you are my bottleneck. I have 45 days to make this video happen and I can not begin to work on it until I know what the contents of the video is. I need you to confirm you understand this is important and we need to set a date on when the creative will be done.” Now this person who also has tons of shit going on is aware of how important this discussion is and you guys can prio it accordingly. Now let’s say Tyler and you agree it will be done in 5 days. YOU DON’T GET TO SET A REMINDER FOR 5 DAYS AND NOT TALK TO HIM FOR 5 DAYS! Every single day you must check in on Tyler and make sure he is still on track to hit the target date. I want less excuses in this company. Take ownership and don’t give your project a chance to fail. Dumping your bottleneck on someone and then just walking away until it’s done is lazy and it gives room for error and I want you to have a mindset that God himself couldn’t stop you from making this video on time. Check. In. Daily. Leave. No. Room. For. Error.
My uncharitable guess is that a lot of people here talking about the morality of his videos (not the company culture) are mostly parents bitter about their child watching Mr Beast and wanting Feastables.
The company culture is extreme almost culty. I do think that probably what you need to succeed in the creative world because the competition is so insane
Is it? I know one former employee who is currently in open conflict appears to think so, but they're also a single potentially biased source. Beyond that, has there been any specific information about the culture inside? This document hardly reads as "extreme almost culty" to me.
To be honest I think there's just a bit of a bifurcation between people who do business, like really do business as a competition like an Olympic sport, and people who just sort of like turn up and do their thing for a bit and then go home.
To the former camp all of this is intuitively obvious and doesn't need spelling out although the insights are generally useful.
Reading this post at the same time as a blind post where someone is asking what people do for the resto of the week once they finish their 2 hours of sprint work.
