Hot take / rant:

I hate when employers talk about or solicit "ownership" from their employees.

I see it often in job descriptions, and throughout my career it's been impressed upon me in reviews, one-on-ones, etc.

It's basically a lie. Here's why:

When you're a biz owner, starting a startup, or something similar, you take massive risk.

In exchange, you have the opportunity to make all the decisions and you're exposed to all the upside.

Unfortunately, it's a lot of work, so you delegate a lot of those tasks/decisions.

When you delegate stuff, you have to pay the people that do it ("employees").

They're not your partners. They're not taking any risk: you're paying them directly.

Hence, if the business does really well, the profits should go to you.

Those are the roles of employee and owner.

Employee: little risk, small exposure to downside and upside, consistent paycheck

Owner: Lots of risk, huge exposure to downside and upside, chance of no paycheck

You get upside and downside in proportion to how much risk you take.

In general, I'm all for a free market. If two people want to make a certain agreement, go for it.

What I don't like is being lied to. Misrepresentation.

Which is exactly what's going on when employers say they want you to "own" a feature, a product, a roadmap, a ticket, etc.

The definition of ownership is exposure to upside and downside.

There's a symmetry there that shouldn't be broken.

Great power = great responsibility.

You make the decisions --> you get the reward, but you're on the hook for the consequences.

Which is *not* what employers are talking about when they want you to "own" something.

What they want is for you to go above and beyond, to be entrepreneurial, to TREAT it like it's your own...

...but they don't want to give you the equity. The -real- ownership. The upside.

To be clear, my gripe is not with the employers' demands.

If you want someone who goes and beyond (who doesn't?!) and you want to pay someone a flat salary for it, go for it. That's totally reasonable. Offer that.

My problem is with the mentality.

Before I go into why I don't like the mentality, let me explain the entire point of maintaining the upside/downside symmetry.

Measuring, delegating, managing projects - all of this is HARD.

More importantly, there are diminishing returns.

There is an incredibly large long tail of decisions to be made and tasks to do.

The space of possibilities is HUGE. And also not well defined.

In scenarios like this, the "best" strategy shifts more towards being an art than a science.

If you're a company owner and you have 100 employees, it's going to be impossible to draw out an entire roadmap, a massive set of contingency plans, a "decision tree" for each of your employees, everyday.

You don't have the time.

They *have* to be autonomous at some level.

But the problem is that they can't just do whatever they want.

They have to add value to the business. They have to do what you hired them for.

So there's going to be a middle ground where you set boundaries and give some direction, but they'll fill in the blanks.

In some businesses - especially the more creative and/or high leverages businesses (e.g. tech), it'll be more "blanks" than direction.

You *want* them to fill in the RIGHT blanks, on their own.

These are the areas where it's especially important to uphold the symmetry.

The symmetry is the solution to the Principle-Agent problem.

The symmetry is incentive alignment.

As a business owner, you can either spend your time making progress legible (e.g. micro-managing, enduring all the never-ending "trail of tears" long-tail decisions)...

...or you can just give them exposure to downside/upside proportional to their effort/responsibility.

Like... sales! You close more, you make more.

When people have an incentive to do better, they frequently do.

Especially when they're also exposed to the downside risk.

Which brings me to the employer mentality that I don't like.

From personal observation, it amounts to something like this:

"We are paying you a lot of money to do your best as defined by you when convenient for us, but as defined by us when inconvenient."

Let me break that down.

I'll define two types of transactions: well-defined transactions and ill-defined transactions.

Well-defined transactions are those where the expectations are perfectly clear on both sides. No covert contracts.

For example, buying groceries.

What we're more interested in is the ill-defined transactions.

These transactions have unknowns, which incurs risk, which means upside and downside.

It's not fully understood what each side will get as a result of the transaction.

Which is fine, as long as both sides are aware

The problem with the employer mentality I mentioned,

(e.g. "we want ownership from you but we don't want to give you sufficient equity")

is that it's ill-defined when convenient, well-defined when inconvenient.

They don't want to sufficiently define a roadmap/expectations/etc for 2 reasons.

1) it's hard, if not impossible
2) they want the better of your "best effort" and their expectations of your "best effort".

You're on salary. So if they define expectations and you meet them, then they left money on the table, like a negotiation.

If you do your best, like true ownership, then they win and you don't get proportional upside.

If you're not meeting their expectations, then they can come out of the woodwork and reveal, "oh, hey, you're not up to par with our expectations."

That's what bugs me about it.