Lighthouse is a management software company whose blog covers one-on-ones, hiring, org structure, and why employees leave managers.
HN commenters mostly link it in hiring posts and for its one-on-one and flat-organization articles, with one praising its one-on-one tooling.
### http://GetLighthouse.com | Front End Engineer | San Francisco, CA | Full Time | ONSITE
Employees quit managers, not companies. If you've ever worked at a dysfunctional, hyper-growth startup, or a big company wrecked by politics, you've experienced how bad management can make work miserable. It’s crazy managers aren’t given more help. We're changing that by helping with the fundamentals of good management through software.
We have hundreds of paying customers, and want to bring great design and experience to our validated and growing product. You will help in designing & building Lighthouse to be a world-class product.
### You:
You’ll have the chance to bring all your skills together as part of a team that’s customer driven and excited to make more people love their jobs and the managers they work for. It's a mission you can feel great about working on every day.
You’re an awesome fit for this role if you...
-> Take great pride in your work and obsess over getting the details right.
-> Always look for places to simplify, whether that’s removing a button, or making 30 lines of code work with 5.
-> You love using funnels & analytics, as well as talking to customers, to ensure what you design & build is best for customers.
### Tech stack currently includes (open to changes you advocate for): Rails, Capistrano, haml/scss, bootstrap, jQuery, Postgres, Stripe, GCal API
* Interested in the role? Email Jason at GetLighthouse dot com mentioning Hacker News in the subject…
I briefly had a (failed) startup in this area, and I did a lot of research. There are certainly a ton of clubs that do this, and there's an obvious reason why: in nightclubs, your product is your customers. They don't show up for your mediocre DJ or overpriced drinks from a bartender that takes an hour to get to you, they show up because there are people there...and a line communicates that there are people there.
So yes, the reasoning behind this is solid, but the problem is that the results aren't. What happens when the person who has waited an hour in line finally gets in and the club only has 20 people in it? They see right through your sham, and they never wait in your line ever again.
I've interviewed quite a few managers of successful clubs and tons of managers of unsuccessful clubs. The unsuccessful clubs are the ones trying to create the illusion of a packed house by creating lines outside, or other illusory shams like guerilla marketing. The successful ones definitely do most things better (food, drinks, ambiance, music, etc.) but they also rely extremely heavily on a similar illusion: they don't pay people to wait in line, they pay people to drink and dance inside the club. They literally have a Rolodex of professional partiers...typically young and attractive, mostly female but not exclusively so. They are people that don't mind dancing and having a good time when nobody is around. Successful clubs pay them to get there early and create the illusion of a party…
### Lighthouse | https://getlighthouse.com | Designer / Front End Engineer | San Francisco, CA | Full Time | ONSITE
Employees quit managers, not companies. If you've ever worked at a dysfunctional, hyper-growth startup, or a big company wrecked by politics, you've experienced how bad management can make work miserable. It’s crazy managers aren’t given more help. We're changing that by helping with the fundamentals of good management through software.
We're a 500 Startups alum, with a growing product with hundreds of paying customers, and want to bring more great design and experience to our product.
### You:
If you're excited to build an amazing product leading the process from design through implementation, this is the perfect role for you (with the big equity to match). You’ll have the chance to bring all your skills together as part of a team that’s customer driven and excited to make more people love their jobs. It's a mission you can feel great about working on every day.
You’re an awesome fit for this role if you...
-> Take great pride in your work and obsess over getting the details right.
-> Always look for places to simplify, whether that’s removing a button, or making 30 lines of code work with 5.
-> You love using funnels & analytics, as well as talking to customers, to ensure what you design & build is best for customers.
### Stack currently includes: Rails, Capistrano, haml/scss, bootstrap, jQuery, Postgres, Stripe, Google APIs
* Interested in the role?…
Speaking as another engineering manager, the advice in that link is pretty shallow. I think it encourages a rapport that feels efficient for the manager but is plain insubstantial for the report.
> I have found 30 minutes is the ideal length of time. Longer meetings tend to lead to us talking about normal day-to-day work, or going off topic altogether.
Compare this bit of advice to Andy Groves's, the former CEO of Intel and big evangelist of 1:1's:
> "I feel that a one-on-one should last an hour at minimum. Anything less, in my experience, tends to make the subordinate confine himself to simple things that can be handled quickly.” [1]
People need time to express themselves; to air their resentments, frustrations, disappointments, disillusionments. Cutting a report off before they can tell you what's really on their minds or in their hearts, does not seem like "quality 1:1 time" to me. Or at least not in the context of managing high performing knowledge workers.
[1] https://getlighthouse.com/blog/high-output-management/
> These are all written by people whose minds have been thoroughly corporatized, true believers in the hierarchy with an inner need to justify it.
This seems to miss the fact that what’s needed in a startup tends to be very different than what’s needed in a larger, more mature organization.
Hierarchies in larger organizations exist to organize things, and I’ve never encountered an organization other than an early stage startup that has somehow managed to avoid this.
Even in flat organizations (which are invariably fairly small), there are plenty of articles out there about how these tend to involve hidden hierarchies and agendas. A few example links:
https://www.getflow.com/blog/flat-will-kill-you
https://getlighthouse.com/blog/flat-organizational-structure-fails/
https://workforce.com/news/hidden-hierarchies
1. Yes we have.
2. YES! Very much so!
3. A 1 hour meeting every other week! If you want to have weekly 1-on-1s, you can have a 30-45 minute meeting.
A few tips:
- Focus of 1-on-1s should be on supporting your direct reports. How they feel at work, how they can achieve more, what should they do for their career developments, etc.
- Active listening is very important! It's a meeting about our direct reports goals, so most of the time we should listen to what they have to say.
- I found this guide by Lighthouse helpful, but there are lots of other good guides:
https://getlighthouse.com/blog/one-on-one-meetings-template-great-leaders/