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.