"I know one well-known startup who has been trying to fill a role for over four months, and has gone through two dozen candidates, simply because the founder mandates 80-hour workweeks.”
I'm rather surprised that this wasn't a heading topic on its own: Don't Expect People To Work 80-Hour Workweeks. Bleary, burned-out, sleep-deprived, stimulant-addled engineers do not produce decent code no matter how many hours you make them stay at their desks. Obviously. You bloody idiot.
(...The startup founder, I mean, not the article writer.)
Although really this folds into "You’ve Got To Pay If You Want To Play" to make a larger point: If You Want Good Employees, Don't Treat Them Like Shit. Another of those blindingly obvious things that employers all over the world just can't seem to wrap their little heads around.
Now that's a position I would envy: busting your ass working 80 hours a week developing world-changing products ("WordPress plugins and iPhone apps like Santa Strike") so that somebody else, who doesn't respect you as an employee, can get rich off your effort (while they spend their time browsing HN).
> "I want people that think about the product even when they aren't in the office."
God forbid your employees have a social life, hobbies, or side-projects. Enriching some sociopath by building "santa strike" apps is a cause worth sacrificing everything for, right?
Here's the funny thing, which makes employment a lot like romance- I DO think about my product even when I'm not in my office, but I do this because my employer and colleagues are awesome, and I want to make all of us successful, and we have a common purpose and goal.
People won't love you because you insist it. They can't. You'll have to be lovable to begin with, and you do that by being goddamn awesome.
Possessiveness is for the unenlightened, needy, insecure.
It takes a certain amount of life experience to arrive at the conclusion that many challenging work problems are solved by an insight that hits you in the shower, or while jogging, or during other seemingly idle moments that an 80 hour work week robs you of.
There's something heinous about demanding that a group of people think about "the product" in every waking hour.
I think I'm mostly objecting to the wording -- "product" is such a lifeless, anodyne word. If I want people who are passionate about what we're building, we have to build something that inspires passion, and I can't imagine ever calling that "the product".
The main issue with these douchebags is they want to pay for 20 hours and have the employee work 80 hours. I would be a lot more enraged if I got the impression that anyone worth his salt would actually consider working for him. 80 hours building wordpress plugin while being paid for 20 or lesser for a startup headed by an idea guy who declares who won't hire anybody who tracks his hours and is unwilling to work overtime? That will happen the day a monkey comes out of your ass you piece of shit. I am still concerned that it's employers' market and some poor soul will end up getting exploited. Man, sometimes assholes make me hate free markets and I wish for regulations.
And then the guy talks about "premium" salaries. Yeah. Right. Even assuming 50 USD/hour(which is pretty reasonable), 50 * 80 per week comes up to 16000/month comes up to about 192000/year. Unless you have that kind of cash, don't go on shitting garbage about 80 hours/week.
What you find is that the interview process is hunky dory and everybody's all "yeah, cool!", then when you sign on for a salary they try to squeeze all the time out of that fixed rate that they can. It's like feature creep when quoting a project rate in freelancing.
Yeah. Hourly rates helps keep things in perspective. But hourly rates also worsens the douchiness where people start feeling that the number of hours it takes is disproportionate to the amount of work being done.
But in that case, I try to first politely explain them that estimates do go wrong, especially in the cases where I am doing things I haven't done before. I recently setup a xmpp based web chat for the first time. I communicated beforehand that I am not familiar with xmpp web clients and whether I would be able to just use a xmpp web client or I will have to code something from scratch using strophe.js or convere.js, or if it can be done at all. The task is basically "it will be done when it will be done" but I will be able to at least tell you if it can be done at all in a week.
Reasonable explanations mostly work with people who start getting restless when things take longer than expected, mainly because I too vet my clients. But the thing with hourly billing is, if the stakeholders are being unreasonable, I ask them to go eat shit and cut my losses(if any) and I don't have to deal with unreasonable expectations that comes with a fixed price bucket.
Sure, "Engineer's Savings Time" is a common imaginary time scale, which has led to a rule of thumb for engineers to triple their instinctive time estimates for tasks by default.
I actually interviewed for a contractor position at a place last year which was on HN who's hiring. It's a big place and had a good team but they offered well below market rates. I pushed on this an they came up a little (nowhere near enough to entertain). Instead I was greated with an offer to make it up via overtime. I believe the phase was something along the lines of "there's no shortage of work and we don't cap the number of hours you can work per day". I really liked the guys but I thought that was totally disrespectful of my time.
I would be actually ok with that provided that they offered to pay for the overtime. I think they told you the rates they are willing to pay, and left the number of hours up to you. This kind of arrangement works for me. There isn't anything shady going in the background(paying for 20 hours, expecting 60 hours). I have an option to take it or leave it, but they aren't trying to offer a "t&c applied" deal.
I get what you're saying, they're not hiding anything - but you're still losing out. Instead I took another contract for 2.5 times as much - and I was working a lot of overtime on that contract.
You have a finite number of hours in the day, and your life. Don't give them to someone else to profit off. That's crazy.
I am not advocating letting someone use(exploit?) you for his own profit. But I like free markets and I am saying if the employers aren't doing anything shady and just offering low salary, someone who finds the salary good enough can take it.
Recontextualize this for a minute and let me see if it still makes sense.
The company offers a salary of $50/hour when he thinks his market rate is $100/hour. He refuses, countering by asking for $100. The company comes up to $60. He refuses. The company makes the following final offer: "OK, you win. We'll pay you $100 per 1 hour 40 minutes and you can work as much as you want." How have they bettered their offer? Especially when there are (presumably) other market rate jobs out there.
If I had a dollar for every "idea guy" who's pitched me on writing his great iPhone app for free (excuse me, for "equity"), I'd have...well, probably about $10.
A friend of mine wanted to sell me an idea. I laughed in his face and said "I have a list of at least 50 of my own ideas I can work on right now. There's no shortage of ideas. No one pays for ideas, they pay for work".
Your comments aren't doing you any favors. If what they're saying is bullshit, then shut up and don't give 'em the satisfaction (what do you have to prove?). If they're right, then consider what they have to say and act on it appropriately.
If he was in the states and not anonymous, this guy could be sued for "requiring" people to work more than 40 hours a week, which is illegal by federal law even for exempt positions. In an exempt position, the worker can decide to work more than or even less than 40, depending on need, but its their decision to make (hence exempt...), and if a manager/owner were to make that a requirement, they would find themselves in court very quickly, even if they made a statement to that effect. Hope parent is not in the states, has a good lawyer, or is anonymous.
For what it's worth, your comments lead me to think you might benefit from some introspection. Burn the thesaurus and whatever business books you're reading, too. I intend only exactly as much disrespect as the preceding sentences would indicate and admire your entrepreneurship despite it.
True, but only to a degree. Are you the "idea guy" (in addition to coding) or is everyone expected to produce good ideas and those are vetted by a group of smart people? Too many founders think they have some exclusive intelligence that is apart from everyone else which is a conceit that usually leads to unfortunate results.
I suspect I have more time in startups both successful and failures than you, and while no one knows every way to succeed they certainly can detect the patterns of failure. The hardest thing for any founder is to recognize the wisdom of their own employees.
I wrote that part of my profile as a way to say that I love coming up with ideas and putting a small team together in order to build them so we can test their merits. At the time, we had a lot of products and I couldn't lead them all (from a development standpoint).
That's changed as we have shifted focus to fewer ideas and better execution. We maintain a list of things we want to build, and vet every idea that comes our way, be it from a founder, an employee, or a customer.
That said, someone has to be the guy to draw the line in the sand.
Also, FWIW, I spend the majority of my working day writing code.
I love coming up with ideas and executing on them as well, but that's not what provides value in the particular role I'm in at present. It is a good sign that you are worrying less about ideas and more about execution, especially since most businesses revolve around one good idea that needs focused execution at the expense of "things that would be a good idea 6-12 months from now", because a business is what it is at a particular point in time regardless of the end-goal vision.
And yes, at times lines need to be drawn in the sand but those are pretty rare times when you have a good group of smart people and usually involve breaking impasses when there is no clear consensus. There's also the whole "I have a responsibility to shareholders at the end of the day" duty that many employees do not feel, but too often founders use both of these as excuses for "I think X, so it must be so" rather than questioning themselves in the face of disagreement with a group of people you brought on board because of their skills and intellects.
Frankly, I imbue no magical powers to writing code when it comes to founders of tech companies because often the tech is the least difficult problem to address. I know, I know, I speak heresy given the venue but I can code a great product far easier than what is required to build a good marketing campaign and sales strategy, and I at least can depend on my bash/vi session to be predictable unlike those that have to venture out into the customer acquisition arena with all its unpredictability.
Do you have a team of coding mercenaries? I am now quite curious about your company. Did you assemble a team to execute ideas for other founders? That seems like a pretty solid industry, if that's the case.
Edit: just saw some of you other posts, thanks for the info.
I find that post you linked disgusting. Now I see why we need laws for things I feel are obvious. I feel like that person should be reported to the authorities or something. Not hiring people because they refuse to regularly work over 40hrs/week should be illegal. I mean, sure I understand crunch time as release-to-production draws near. I have slept in my cubicle overnight before to make sure a critical production-change went smoothly, but that's my choice when I deem it necessary or a manager I respect is in a tough-spot and would really like me to help him/her out. In what world does any manager think they can demand >40hrs/week from me on regular basis? Unless I own a significant part of the company, I'm just an employee and as such >40hrs/week for a regular employee is an indication of a problem.
"I feel like that person should be reported to the authorities or something. Not hiring people because they refuse to regularly work over 40hrs/week should be illegal."
My husband is a low-grade chef. The vast majority of places where he worked/interviewed expected him to work 12 hour days, 6 days a week (sometimes 6.5 days - those employers thought someone only working 6 hours on the 7th day was being treated well).
And bear in mind people like him are working these very long hours under time-pressure, with people barking orders at them; they are using sharp knives, boiling water, boiling fat.
Quite often, the employers kept all tips/service charges. If the staff did get tips/service charges, they went to waiting staff/bar staff.
Only about 5% of the places where he was interviewed did he get offered a 40 hour week, with some of the tips/service charges going to him.
Oh yeah. And all this on minimum wage. Hours worked beyond 40 were never paid as overtime in these places.
He was working in the kinds of restaurants were programmers and other professionals would go for dinner.
He spent the last 3 months living off his savings until he could get a job at one of the 5% of places that operated the kind of working hours that everyone else takes for granted.
>>where he worked/interviewed expected him to work 12 hour days, 6 days a week (sometimes 6.5 days - those employers thought someone only working 6 hours on the 7th day was being treated well).
And bear in mind people like him are working these very long hours under time-pressure, with people barking orders at them; they are using sharp knives, boiling water, boiling fat.
Okay, good for him. But I stand firmly by what I said, that should be illegal.
>>the kind of working hours that everyone else takes for granted.
I assume you mean 40hrs/week. When I hear someone say "take for granted" to describe something, I believe they consider that something a luxury. If 40hrs/week is a luxury, then what do we consider normal? I'm not accepting some 3rd-world sweatshop, or even 1st-world Amazon shipping facilities as normal... or even what your husband went through as normal. Nobody should have to live like that.
If your making minimum wage in the US they are required by law to pay you 1.5x overtime after 40 hours. Which is why many low wage jobs push people out the door at 40 hours. Granted, recovering that money can be a pain but it's vary doable.
Unless specifically exempted, employees covered by the Act must receive overtime pay for hours worked in excess of 40 in a workweek at a rate not less than time and one-half their regular rates of pay.
That's a pretty huge loophole. For example, certain kinds of kitchen staff in hotels and resorts are not required to be paid anything after the first 40 hours of regular pay.
The list of exemptions is ludicrously long and specific. There are exemptions for employees like movie theaters ushers and news announcers, for example.
"Chef - may be responsible for all food service operations and also may supervise the many kitchens of a hotel, restaurant group or corporate dining operation. A chef de cuisine reports to an executive chef and is responsible for the daily operations of a single kitchen. A sous chef, or sub chef, is the second-in-command and runs the kitchen in the absence of the chef. For assistance in determining whether an employee who performs managerial duties or functions in addition to his or her chef work meets the duties tests for exemption from the FLSA's minimum wage and overtime pay requirements, begin with the Executive Employee section. For assistance in determining whether an employee who has attained a four-year specialized academic degree in a culinary arts program and who performs these or similar duties is entitled to overtime pay, begin with the Professional Employee section, and select the learned category. The professional exemption is not available, however, to cooks who perform predominantly routine mental, manual, mechanical or physical work."
You also can't dock pay by the minute or hour, only by the day.
In general, workers have achieved 5-day work week for almost a century and the conditions you describe fit a third-world sweatshop. Maybe it's time for USA to stop being a third-world sweatshop for so many its citizens - take a look at the Fair Labor Standards Act you had in 1938, maybe you can try to achieve at least that standard if you pressure your congressmen enough.
So basically, you're saying that your husband was abused to hell and back, and implying that the authorities should indeed be cracking down, starting with the more severe abuses in lower-paid, lower-demand professions?
What's really appalling about that post is that the expectation was that people don't complain about working excessive hours. The implication is not only that workers need to work more than the internationally-accepted precedent, but need to do so with total enthusiasm.
I can see people begrudgingly working extra time if the circumstances demanded it, but the idea that complaining about working those extra hours should be a capital offense is horrifying.
Nah it's cool, it's not so hard to just not work for people who don't grok work-life balance. I mean, yeah, sure, labor laws are a great thing, but in this case and in the current market for tech hiring, it's pretty easy to fix by asking "hey what's your work-life balance like?" in the interview, making decisions based on the answer, and leaving if the answer turns out to have been a lie.
Not hiring people because they refuse to regularly work over 40hrs/week should be illegal.
Actually overemploying people should be illegal (at least, it should be illegal without a regulated rate of overtime pay that lets employers and employees rationally negotiate the ethical-lifestyle trade-off involved).
Refusing to hire someone because they won't let themselves be abused is doing them a favor.
> I find that post you linked disgusting. Now I see why we need laws for things I feel are obvious. I feel like that person should be reported to the authorities or something. Not hiring people because they refuse to regularly work over 40hrs/week should be illegal.
It's interesting that you're so adamant about having the ability to make your personal choices here when you're advocating to take choice away from others.
The article states that the employer demanding 80 hour work weeks cannot find anybody to fill that role for 4 months and counting. Employers have to compete for labor just as employees have to compete for jobs. If somebody offers an 80 hour per week job without offering adequate compensation (multiple times the market rate, a large percentage of ownership, etc), then they'll fail to fill that role.
Your personal feelings are no justification for trying to create laws and interfering with other peoples' voluntary transactions in the marketplace.
I probably shouldn't respond, considering the (very stoner) name of "throwaway420", but the employer is in a position of power, so it is not unreasonable to want laws that draw bounderies around your commitment, especially with salary workers.
Fortunately, we work in an employee driven industry, so employers who demand extraordinary commitment can't find employees.
while this is true (mostly), the assumption is that there is competition, which isn't always the case. Civilized society should set some decent standards to which employers must adhere to, because the invisible hand of the free-market doesn't take into consideration human conditions when it optimizes for profit.
> Your personal feelings are no justification for trying to create laws and interfering with other peoples' voluntary transactions in the marketplace.
Actually, doing precisely that is at the core of living in a civilized, democratic nation. If you think full-on free market is better, there is a (not-so-well) working exemplar over in Somalia.
Because Somalia was such a paradise back when it had a government...
'Free market' does not necessarily imply no government. Most libertarians wholeheartedly agree that bringing harm to another, either directly by initiating violence or indirectly by fraud, is wrong and should be legally punished. That is the core of living in a civilized, democratic nation.
The idea that some people should be able to make laws to tell other people what they can or cannot do in completely voluntary arrangements is in fact a return to tyranny, however well-meaning it may be.
> 'Free market' does _not_ necessarily imply no government.
'Free market' doesn't really have any consistent, coherent meaning in terms of actual objective features.
> Most libertarians wholeheartedly agree that bringing harm to another, either directly by initiating violence or indirectly by fraud, is wrong and should be legally punished.
The juxtaposition of this sentence with the last suggest that "Free Market" is a label for whatever a majority of current libertarians prefer; I think this is almost accurate (in use, it seems to mean more whatever any particular self-described libertarian prefers at the moment), and illustrates my previous point.
> The idea that some people should be able to make laws to tell other people what they can or cannot do in completely voluntary arrangements is in fact a return to tyranny
No, that's not true "in fact", its an equivalence based on a subjective value proposition.
Most libertarians wholeheartedly agree that bringing harm to another, either directly by initiating violence or indirectly by fraud, is wrong and should be legally punished.
You don't think that requiring people to work 80 hours/week for months or years on end does them harm? Really?
You think that all of OSHA is tyranny? You think that weekends are tyranny? Vacation is tyranny? Laws against sexual harassment at work are tyranny?
Out of curiosity(and I am being amused and enraged at the same time at the world changing "idea" guy and 80 hours/week) what did the comment you replied to said?
I would never hire someone that complained that more than 40 hours/week was too much
^ If you actually meant that and structure your hiring-process to match, I'd say it's illegal - at least in USA.
EDIT: I was about to post your HN-account details in this comment, but I see you just now removed your name & company-name from your profile info.
EDIT#2: And now you deleted the comment I was replying to!!!
EDIT#3: Ah! But another user was smarter & faster than me and got the info already! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6454675 ...and you can't alter anything in that day-old thread.
Yeah I did delete them after I realized people like you weren't interested in having a discussion, but instead were looking to start a flame war.
Why would you expect to read an article about this? If your comments are any indication, I am not in the minority on this subject.
Edit: This is exactly why I deleted the comments. I can't even explain myself without getting downvoted. If anyone wants to have a debate about it, I'm happy to do that, but I'm not going to engage in a poo flinging contest.
I don't have a horse in this race; I don't care if your point is right or wrong.
But as an outside observer, I have to tell you: the way you've carried yourself in this thread should be embarrassing to you. It's not that people weren't interested in having a discussion with you here--it's that you seem to be incapable of taking criticism (regardless of how accurate or inaccurate it is) and your immediate reaction was defensive and over-the-top smugness rather than trying to understanding their point and addressing it on it's merits.
I would never work for you just from this thread alone. Deleting out of embarrassment was probably you're best option, but this should make you really consider what another commenter said: "you might benefit from some introspection."
I could care less about points. The value to me is in the discussion, but with those particular comments, the discussion wasn't happening, so I put them out of their mercy.
I'm with you. It shouldn't be illegal to ask someone to work 60hrs/week. Provided you inform them that this is desired of them UP FRONT during the hiring process. People should be free to work and hire based on their own situations.
I would also recommend paying about 1.75X "market rate" (which assumes the 40 hour week) to attract candidates worth hiring. Overtime is as overtime does.
not founders in particular, but just some people in general.
unfortunately, in a society where relationship debt is replaced with financial debt, this is inevitable - i.e., tribal societies sees less sociopaths because you cannot be "anonymous" and suffer no punishment for sociopathic behaviour, while in modern society, the externalization of costs and harm means there isn't anyone to "blame" when shit hits the fan, so sociopaths can take advantage of this and insert themselves into a position to take advantage of others without repercussion.
And the sad part is, a sociopathic strategy is successful (where success == money earned), because we don't measure things like ethics ("everything is ethical as long as it is legal").
Leading to people like me writing books explaining these painfully obvious things that nobody seems to know. (https://leanpub.com/nightowls)
Most of my readers who write in say something to the effect of "Oh mai god, my <superior>[1] needs to read this!" I'm not sure if they ever do pass it on, but that's the feedback I get :)
[1] <superior> is usually a mother, a wife/girlfriend, or boss.
My brain seems to prefer the afternoon, and as I've gotten older I can't work much at night anymore. After my brain has been fully engaged in a problem for hours at night it can be really difficult to shut it off and go to sleep, even if I'm exhausted.
Give meditation a try for falling asleep. But if you decide to look into it, try guided meditation first (i.e. a recording). Otherwise, you'll just sit there, with your eyes closed, thinking about work.
80hr weeks also mean it takes 120 hours to do something that should take 30.
But hey, on the other hand, a lot of my work is "Hey, so err, we have this mess on our hands and we need somebody to come fix it because we can no longer implement new features because we keep breakign everything"
I'm sure those engineers are totally fine guys, but man the code I've seen ... wow.
80 hr weeks == all the people at your company who have substantial talent and experience go elsewhere because they can make the same money by working fewer hours. Basic economics.
80 hr weeks == vastly diminished possibility of hiring people who have families, other interests, or "lives" outside of work, so your hiring pool is diminished.
80 hr weeks == everyone is overworked and tired, there's no slack in the system to allow for doing things the right way, effective productivity is actually much decreased because the quality of work is low and the opportunity to pay down technical debt is absent. Any amount of extra productivity that could be had by working more hours is eaten up by people needing to "live" at work (pay bills, communicate with friends and relatives, eat, etc.) and by constantly having to pay the interest on technical debt that can't be paid down.
80 hr weeks == no ability to innovate, no agility, so you get stuck plugging away on N-1 ideas while your competitors who have slack have spent their free time spinning up an N+1 prototype that is going to disrupt your entire business.
Problem is that the formula you really want is usually productivity per dollar and long-term productivity over time.
You can try to optimize both, but the problem with labor is that productivity per hour is not a constant. Even manual labor may see diminishing returns when working lots of overtime. In fact with manual labor the diminishing returns are often fairly easy to measure. With programming, it's much harder to predict.
The conundrum is that unlike manual labor, under some circumstances programming can actually see increase in productivity per hour the more time per day you spend at it. (Less mental context switching? I don't know why it is)
But that's usually only if you don't factor in resulting burnout. Experienced developers recognize this and is why they're more reluctant to work for hour-demanders.
There is such a thing as programming trance, with working 16hrs a day and very high productivity. But then, you need an environment fully devoid of distractions (like working from home if you are single or a locked personal office otherwise), no interactions with your boss or co-workers etc. Unlikely to happen in a company where long working hours are a norm.
Also, programming trance can last at most a week and you can't do it more often than once or twice a year. There are physical limits to what your brain can sustain.
I worked with a guy who would go on a big coke binge and was really quite productive for about 72 hours. He would then do almost nothing for the next three weeks but complain about how hard he'd worked.
If you really manage to achieve Flow State and have a really good view of the problem clear in your mind, then pulling long hours can be very helpful. I think most really good programmers know just how this feels, and when to do it.
Problem is, it's not a "superpower" that can be switched on at-will; it's a state of concentration that requires not only work ethic but a real, intense interest in the subject and a lack of competing thoughts and obligations.
A manager who is demanding high hours is not going to be refraining from piling on the distractions and obligations, because pushing out those competing demands are exactly why they demand the hours.
When I pull an all-nighter, I build momentum like a freight train. In one 16- to 20-hour session, I can get a solid week's worth of work done.
...And then I'm so exhausted that I'm useless for a week afterward. So it's not really all that useful unless I'm up against an absolutely immobile deadline.
is it really though if you're creating so many issues with bad code that after fixing it, support issues, et all that you only end up with equivalent 30hr/week?
when you fuck with the formula, 'basic economics' goes out the window.
Except it doesn't, because the manager will shift to a different aspect of Basic Economics and fire the overworked developer for nonperformance and churn through to the next monkey to leap into the meat grinder. Just add H1-B to your recipe for success.
It's not just startups who take this stand. Sadly. And it's not just in the tech sector either.
Companies expect you to work longer and they pay less. it's the norm now. And you know, I doubt they even care about quality. Most managers I know just want to make their margins.
Investment banks are the worst. But at least you are killing yourself for a percentage. And the smart traders get out after five or ten years.
I worked at a company where I learned after joining that we were mandated to stay until 6 PM. Yet with my particular job, I was on-call at night (and sometimes was called and would work through the night), had to do weekend work etc. Everyone else worked 9AM-6PM, I had to work the extra 5 hours a week, for complete bullshit corporate purposes, plus all the other hours that were specific to my job. Complete bullshit. At previous jobs I was always there at 6PM anyway, but being forced to drove me crazy. I eventually left.
Developers—the good ones—don't want to work for you. They want to work for a cause. They want believe that their work will have real meaning; real impact. This is not instead of a good salary, this is in addition to.
But it's an important addition and often overlooked. It's why among all of the food delivery service startups recently, I have my eye on SpoonRocket. They are on a passionate mission to provide healthy meals at the same price and speed of fast food. That is something to get fired up about. That could have a huge impact. That could change the diet of millions of people.
Please, don't settle for a mission statement. Please don't stop at the point of a good idea and early revenue. Have a mission—a real one. It's not just to romance investors or customers. The biggest impact you'll see is in your people.
On the one hand, Working for a Cause is probably the most fundamental motivating factor behind work-ethic and one of the most powerful motivating factors for people in general.
On the other hand, you often need to take a step back and ask if your project really is a capital-C Cause. The vast majority of economically necessary work, after all, simply is not. Even double-digit percentage improvements in the reliability of cloud computing nodes, for instance, are not a Cause. They are a very economically significant piece of technological development that can make anyone who develops them a bunch of revenue. They are advantageous work that makes the world run a little bit better.
But they're not actually Saving the World or Bringing X to the Masses or anything emotional and epic like that. Worse, attempting to invoke big, epic emotional motivations when your work doesn't really have a Cause to justify those feelings just cheapens the entire trope of Causes, makes it come off as a nasty fiction told to unwitting dupes to make them allow further exploitation than ever before.
Fly your flag if you've got one, but don't feel ashamed to admit you might not have one.
Developers—the good ones—don't want to work for you. They want to work for a cause.
Agree strongly. I – like most of us – am approached by recruiters every single day who throw around buzz words like "disrupt" and "hacker" and (worst off all) "rockstar." None of that matters to me, though. The two most important things to me are 1) that I'm going to be happy at the end of the day, and 2) that my company is doing good. And I don't mean doing well, I mean doing good" – contributing in a positive way. I'm older, though (30).
Of course I want to improve my skill set and work with new/cool/innovative technologies, but I'm not going to do it for a company that I don't care about, or at the cost of my personal wellbeing.
I thought it was some kind of sarcasm. Confused, I went and googled SpoonRocket. It exists. This comment was not sarcasm.
You start your comment with "wanting to work for a cause" and end it with a sentence about a fucking food delivery startup being "something to get fired up about". It just blew my mind.
The cause is not delivery. The cause is healthy food that people can realistically purchase daily.Customers were the ones who (perhaps foolishly? Who knows?) traded away health for convenience by buying cheap fast food. SR attempts to eliminate the necessity of the tradeoff.
Mind, there are the occasional actual Causes we techies can work on, but those are almost uniformly so utterly underfunded that they can barely afford to hire paid engineers at all.
The Safety layer of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is more important to me (age 37 and married with kids). As much as I would love to use my skills to contribute to humanity as a whole, the basic needs of someone in a similar phase of life must take care of the Safety layer first. However, I have found other ways to contribute to a cause (e.g., active in the community, charities, etc.)
I want to work on something I care about. It doesn't have to make the world a better place in general, it can be "I want to make this system faster at processing 'X'" or "I want to make things easier for the customer". Just something I can believe in or strive towards. In the grand scheme of things it can be really insignificant.
However if at least twice a month I'm asked to change the way the calendar on a page looks, I'm going to get tired of it real fast. It becomes clear that it's just wasted effort and a lack of planning. When it seems like all your effort is being ignored, unnecessary, or thrown away it just kills motivation.
The system I spend most of my time on right now is mostly, if you boil it down, some simple record keeping for insurance customers. It's usually not very sexy. But while working on it there have been scaling challenges, using external services like S3 or Zencoder to give users new functionality, and other complexities. There is usually something I want to sink my teeth into, and that's something that keeps me working on it. If it was an ultra-simple CRUD app that never had any additional features, I don't know how long I would want to work on it.
Maybe it's part of living in DC, but I've seen first hand a lot of organizations that do fantastic work and are a clearly a force for good in the world... but are terrible to their employees.
Believing in what you do is important (more important than money, IMHO) but you have to consider your specific role and responsibilities and the co-workers and office culture...
Sorry, not picking on you specifically, but the HN meme of 'what we do is so important' is pretty tiring. My very first job, supporting cancer research, was actually probably pretty important in the scheme of things, and the owners were relentless about busting our chops if we started to take ourselves seriously. I liked that, and found it healthy.
So, a less flippant 'my cause' statement. I'm an engineer. I like solving hard problems. I work hard regardless of whether your business is "important" or not. Now maybe I'm falling into the 'hire somebody just like you' trap, but I'd far rather hire somebody motivated by solving problems, not somebody motivated by the extrinsics.
I am not saying you are wrong, but I am offering a counterpoint. Personally, I scoff at most of the job listings on here. 'Change the world with our personalized back scratching service' or whatever (only a tiny change from a lot of the actual job postings, I made it silly to avoid ticking off legitimate businesses). Tell me you want me to scale your back room, or your analytics are really hard and no one really knows how to extract meaningful data, or you are trying to get your latency down, or you are moving to GPU and CUDA to solve some computational problem. I'm there, I don't care too much if it is Santa Strike or cancer research (I care some, I am overstating things a bit to make a point).
I'm expecting some push back on this, and that's reasonable. I'll just point out that while I am not a pure blood capitalist, I do think the markets will tell you if what you do is 'important' in the form of success. Which is not to say really important things might fail in the market, they do. But if you are making money you are providing value to somebody, and that is, to my mind, enough reason to live and contribute. The world would be bleak indeed if we focused on very. serious. and. important. problems.
To me it's about the craft, creating great software that really helps the user. That is the only challenge I really care about. The software I create is a byproduct of the process I use. I "carve wood" to make the furniture. Sometimes it's beautiful, sometimes it's new and innovative, sometimes not. But it's always enjoyable to me. I don't get attached to changing the world. I'm closing on 20 years doing this and I'll see another 20 more if I'm lucky. I may change the world, I may not. But I will create good software if I have anything to say about it. I think that should be the only real cause, to create great software and if anything, impact the craft in a positive way.
Developers—the good ones—don't want to work for you. They want to work for a cause.
Disagree strongly. Solving interesting problems, improving my skill set and my career, and doing good work for the people immediately around me is enough for me. Negative cause (e.g. working for an unethical company, or in the war industry) would be a problem; but the difference between neutral and positive means little to me. I'm older, though (30).
When I get to ownership level, perhaps starting my own thing, I'll care a lot about macroscopics. However, most of us start out as employees and there's more than enough rewarding in mastering the micro-scale stuff. As long as I'm not being asked to do anything wrong, I'm not going to get emotionally involved in how a company affects the world until I'm an owner; until that point, it's just a distraction.
Macroscopics, in my observation, just mean more Kool-aid; and there are just as many good people at companies doing less sexy (macroscopically speaking) but still important things. In fact, I worked (briefly) for one of those "change the world" startups-- a New York ed-tech that's devolved into being a sidekick to mainstream publishers-- and it was all marketing bullshit; the rank-and-file believed in it, but the executives were the most unethical people I've ever met (and that includes drug dealers).
Here's the way I see it: solving interesting problems is what motivates you to wake up and drive into the office every day. Being a part of a cause is what keeps you driving into that same office every day for five years.
Solving interesting problems will only get you so far. In fact, it will get you as far as the next company that comes along and dangles a nice raise in your LinkedIn inbox with the promise of solving interesting problems.
The cause is what creates long-term loyalty. For employers, maintaining this cause is the challenge. Causes are expensive. All too often, causes are set aside in the interest of profitability. To use Todd's example, this is when the food company realizes that people freaking love mac n' cheese and that they'll sell a lot more food if they stray from the cause and start serving the garbage that so many people love. Remember the early days of Google and "do no evil"? Yeah.
The point is - good developers want to care. They can get a good salary anywhere, but can you also make them care.
Some will want to work for a cause, some get fired up over cool algorithms, some care because they're best mates with the rest of the team and can grab a beer together.
But they want to care passionately about their work. That's the bottom line.
I'm sure plenty of people feel passionately about something, but I don't see how that makes them "good" in any technical sense.
The Spocks will always be a better developer than McCoys.
The best developers I've ever known move around a lot, or work at places like Goldman Sachs. They have a clique, and it's well above any loyalty to some hip corporate mission statement.
The best developers I've ever known move around a lot, or work at places like Goldman Sachs. They have a clique, and it's well above any loyalty to some hip corporate mission statement.
Exactly. They care more about keeping their skills sharp than "change the world" mission statements, so they'd rather do machine learning at a hedge fund than grunt work for some 23-year-old kid whose family connections bought funding.
They start thinking about the big-picture passion stuff when they're owners. Before that point, it's not relevant. You care more about growing your skill set and doing good work for (and mentoring) the people around you.
Well, if it's not a real mission—if it's marketing bullshit—you'll never fool your own people. They'll see through that in a second.
Graham Weston has a worhwhile TEDx presentation[1] that presents a more complete thesis on this subject. He raises three criteria: employees want to be a significant part of a winning team on an inspiring mission.
Nobody feels good changing the world if their own contribution isn't significant. Nobody want's to work for a change-the-world startup that can't execute or stay solvent.
But mission matters, even to employees. It's why (as he mentions) the #1 employer of ivy league graduates has horrible pay and really tough working conditions: Teach For America.
I'll add a reason: you're looking for someone you don't need.
Not every startup is Google. A lot of companies have CRUD applications of minimal to modest complexity which, even if actively used, are nowhere close to facing performance and scalability barriers that would require deep technical expertise.
These startups don't necessarily need "engineers" with computer science backgrounds, but that's what many of them are searching for.
Well, most young founders would NEVER admit the startup they are building may not require top of the line computer science talent since that's admitting the technical aspect of their startup isn't as cutting edge as the most demanding projects of everywhere else.
Sometimes I wonder if it's a case where ego > pragmatism, founders who graduated from top schools, got accepted into top programs (i,e YC), who raised money from top investors, would naturally want "top talent". And it's easy for an inexperienced founder to pursue cargo cult like "google style interviews" when it comes to that.
The technical interviews & hiring criteria are often not aligned with what the company fundamentally needs in order to accomplish its goals. The founders/CTO are often rockstars, and they refuse to acknowledge that what their company needs is productive employees, not clones of themselves.
This leads to an enormous amount of time spent interviewing people in search for these rare "unicorns".
Their background was impressive enough that they where able to raise venture funding for their start-up.
Many times they have built or worked on something technically impressive, that became big & well known (Google Maps, Facebook timeline, Founding engineer at start-up with Billion dollar+ valuation).
Quite true. A lot of companies get it in their heads that they need "ninjas" or "gurus" or "rock stars", in other words world class talent. But why would a top 1%, or even 10%, developer work for a company that is using boring technologies in a boring business that pays only the industry average? Actual top developers are going to find truly exciting places to work and they're going to be paid well above market rates.
If you need to hire somebody you need to be realistic. A while ago it used to be possible to find well above average developers for almost any role, but today the industry is too mature for that sort of thing to happen.
Exactly... There's very few people left who are getting paid under market.
Google alone has 900 recruiters who scour the entire world with an open checkbook for the best talent, while offering some of the highest comp packages in the industry.
This is true even for many software development roles at places like Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. Equally true is the corollary that the interview process for these positions is laughably out of sync with the duties for the positions to be filled.
Very few software engineering roles actually require "deep" technical expertise. What you describe is pointing out yet another way in which the corporate cliche of "we only hire the best" is so pervasive.
Someone said something to this effect in one of those "Why I left Google" blog posts, and other Googlers were calling him/her out because they believe that even a CRUD app at Google is exceptional because it is a Google CRUD app (meaning they solve problems with CRUD apps that other companies don't have, I think).
So, so, so true. I've been looking for jobs in a city outside of the typical developer hotspots (Dallas) and it is absolutely insane for me to see every ad seeking something like a "programming virtuoso" (an actual quote) for fairly basic web dev. I got an email from a recruiter looking for a "top-level web developer" and then saying they would be recruiting at a nearby college job fair. (A tiny, rural college.)
Why does every business need to pretend that they are getting the best of the best? Obviously, I want to get there someday, but I'm still early in my career. I know I'm not top-level anything. It would be disingenuous and frankly delusional for me to claim such!
Absolutely. Another thing is the "rock stars" these companies are looking for would never work at a Fortune 1000 company doing CRUD applications on an old, poorly-written code base in class B office space. They're not finding the candidates they're looking for because those candidates would never apply there.
The author raised the point that very often young founders only want to hire someone in their own image. I believe it's more of a problem of those young founders have never worked with anyone who are NOT of similar backgrounds than they are. In some cases just spending a couple years at a bigger company with a more diverse workforce would completely shatter the "most productive engineers are 20 something CS grads who can code 80 hours a week on Red Bull" stereotype. Sure those people may be motivated by different things in life at that point, but one quality of being a good leader is the ability to gather different people with different backgrounds and motivations and still utilize them to the max and achieve the common goal. A company that's run purely on Kool-aid may have the short-term "enthusiasm" but is not going to survive the ups and downs of a long journey.
Efficiency is not lines of code produced, it's the experience to choose the right technologies and approach the first time: when to choose a stable, behind-the-curve technology and when to take a calculated risk; when to do something that's good enough and when to do spend more time to make it robust.
"New graduates can command $100,000 a year in Silicon Valley. Hired has found that bumping the offer up to $120,000 gives you access to 30% more candidates."
This is something many people on HN have been saying for a long time in response to the question of whether the US needs to create more H-1B visas: companies have a hard time finding qualified employees because they don't want to pay enough. It's nice to see the numbers quantified in this way (even though this is only anecdotal evidence from a single recruiting firm).
Playing devil's advocate: those people are taking some job. If a Startup A hires an engineer for more money preventing Startup B from hiring them they needs to fill their position and may not be able to find a person.
Of course, one of the signs of a real domestic skills shortage is rapidly increasing salaries as companies fight for too few people, so the fact that that isn't happening means there probably isn't a shortage.
Maybe the execs are having trouble raising the money required to hire these people. Another thought is that the VCs are putting arbitrary limits on $/head.
If they're setting arbitrary caps on salary, then they're not playing by the rules of the free market, and they shouldn't be whining about a "shortage". (I can't find someone who is willing to sell me a new luxury car for $10,000. Is that a problem? Is there a shortage of BMWs?)
You can't find developers because everyone in the Greater SF Bay Area is looking for the perfectly seasoned developer that has deep experience in their given stack.
It reminds me of a grownup having Play-Doh time with toddlers. The grownup takes the time to make some recognizable object (a dog, a human figure, an ice cream cone) and then the toddler starts grabbing for it. This is how many young companies act with talent. They don't want to invest in people, they don't want to bring on interns or junior folks. They want high-output plug-and-play rockstar senior devs. And they want them on their terms.
Some of you might see things differently, but that's the impression I'm getting from all of the listings I'm seeing in my job search (for a junior dev role.) There are some companies that are making the long-term investment in finding the less refined talent and developing it, but they are hard to find.
I hope other people see this trend and that I'm not just entirely saturated in the pungent juice of sour grapes.
If properly picked and hired, junior-level inexperienced engineers can be a gold mine. Employers need to retune their hiring process to value intellect and potential over straight-up experience and know-it-all-ness. This is a tricky proposition, since many hiring managers are terribly inexperienced with hiring and don't know how to do much more than coding challenges, "explain to me how DNS works" questions, etc. These hiring managers are trying to compare their own skills against this new hires and they will reject the hire if it doesn't match up. Huge fail. The gold miner hiring manager, however, asks more open-ended questions to probe the intellect of the hire. The gold miner doesn't expect a "full-stack hacker" and is tolerant of "I don't know" responses. The more important question: what problems has this person solved and how did they solve them?
If you want to see how to hire and structure your team, a good example to follow is the military. Consider the typical platoon of Infantry soldiers: you have one senior leader/manager, one senior subject matter expert and all-round ass-kicker, four SME-and-ass-kickers-in-training, and about 36 junior guys who are there to learn. The junior guys make a fraction of what the senior SME makes and their skill level is also fractional. No worries. They are there to learn, develop, and do their best. Treat them well, not like slaves, , respect them, and develop them. Most of them will leave after a few years for a new job elsewhere. That's okay. You got something from them (work) and they got something from you (experience). You, the leader, will identify a few promising individuals amongst them and groom them to be SMEs in training, giving them the added responsibility and pay increases that they deserve. Like an Infantry platoon, your team will eventually hire experienced SMEs from outside the company to bring in fresh skills and ideas. If this team building is done right, you can build a loyal, organic organization that grows and trains it's own and you can do it for about the same cost as going out and hiring three or four absolute badasses that will probably leave as soon as the next shiny, well-paying thing comes along.
> perfectly seasoned developer that has deep experience in their given stack.
This one really pisses me off. "Oh, you've been using JavaScript for 7 years? Sorry, we need someone who is an expert at jQuery."
A decent developer can get up to speed on your stack, provided they've used something similar, in a few days, or a week if you can't spare any of your current team to guide them through the process. And if you can't spare anyone on your current team to mentor the new guy for a few days, you have already lost to the Mythical Man Month.
This is part of the "unicorn hunting" that we see at Hired.com. We've even seen hiring managers rejecting candidates because they didn't use a particular JavaScript framework, or they haven't shipped code relating to a particular industry/vertical.
> On the other hand startup CEOs tends to be prejudiced against developers who work for less cutting-edge large companies like Dell, Accenture, or Salesforce. Mickiewicz points out that Uber’s CTO was hired from VMware.
In what world is VMWare not cutting edge? Sure, they're a big successful company, but that's because they solve a complex problem.
Also, hiring a CTO from a large tech company is nothing like hiring an ground-level engineer - there's no way VMware's CTO spent his days coding before he went to Uber.
I'm not really sure what the point the author was trying to make. vCenter is not a cutting edge piece of software when you compare it to modern cloud offerings like AWS or even OpenStack. vCenter is, however, very good at what it does, and in many ways does a lot of things that new cloudy offerings will probably never do.
One thing I can say about Thuan, having worked for him at VMware for a long time, he always tried pushing things. My guess is Uber saw that and figured he'd make a good fit.
Having actually worked on vCenter, I can tell you that it is at best adequate for what it does, but the code is amongst the shittiest I have ever worked on.
"Too many twentysomething founders look for employees just like themselves. “So you discriminate against anyone who is in their 30s or 40s or has a family,” says Mickiewicz. “But the most talented and experienced people will be in their 30s and 40s."
It's always a relief to see an article like this not just calling out age bias, but putting it at the top. There are other good points in the article too, but it's important to note that Bay Area tech culture skews heavily towards white dudes in their 20s. There are plenty of people pushing back against the "white dudes" part, but we could use a little more pushing back against the "in their 20s." Especially since someone who's 35 today was born in 1978 and was turning 12 in 1990, right around the elbow of the explosive growth curve of home-available computing. You could have maybe made an argument that someone who was 35 in 1995, born in 1960, was a bit late to the game to profoundly grok the web then (I think that argument's wrong, but you could make it without being laughed out of the room). But in 2013, a 35-year-old engineer is someone you want to look for because that's probably going to be someone with perspective and a mature skill set. There are plenty of smart 20-year-olds out there, yet there is no substitute good for experience.
Hiring people that come from a similar background as founders is the biggest problem on that list. It's part of the reason there's a serious lack of diversity in tech and startups today. Truly recognizing that people unsimilar to you are capable, smart, and successful is a learned view. One that founders may not have had time to develop because they have to be so focused on themselves to start a company.
Once you develop bad hiring habits they become part of a start-up's culture, making a lot of people very resistant to doing something differently. For instance, if all you're doing is interviewing and not looking at the bigger picture, you may not even realize you're doing something wrong.
I've had interviews where I basically get asked "Are you fun to drink beer with?", but with more words.
And all I can think is "What a fucking waste of time this is."
Hire the people that you need to get the job done, not because they have the latest in hipster underwear.
My Requirements for hiring;
1. They can do the job well.
2. I can understand what they are saying.
3. They have a bath/shower at least once a week whether they need it or not.
The amount of people who fit into categories two and three is surprising high. These are the people I desperately want to hire but I can't.
> “Hiring Google engineers is generally a really bad idea. If you work at Google you have access to an entire set of tools and technologies that you won't have in a smaller startup environment.”
This seems like a sensible and underrated assertion. I have no idea if it's more true for Google than other large startups...but yeah, great companies have great toolsets...that's in part why they're great. But that infrastructure isn't available elsewhere and an engineer's reliance on that isn't easily tested. It seems akin to my experience in journalism, that some very accomplished reporters have had very accomplished support staff (researchers, fact-checkers, handlers), but may flounder when forced to do that work themselves.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that large companies have great toolsets, but they're definitely pretty different from what's on the outside. I've spent a ton of time learning internal tools and that knowledge won't transfer when I leave my company. Frameworks are different, infrastructure is different, and the process and scope of responsibilities is different. Building something inside a large company is a pretty different skill from making it from scratch. That's my experience anyway.
I verbally accepted a job at a UK based start-up once, it was 3 days per week as that was all they could afford at the time.
It was not until i got the contract that it stated a minimum of 40 hours in the 3 Days, so they wanted me to work full time hours in the 3 days for 3 days pay.
I turned it down. I still see the founder around and he is still looking for dev's.
I played D&D with a guy who did forty hours in two, twenty-hour days. He'd arrive at midnight, work until eight PM, then sleep (on site) until 4 AM, then work again until midnight. From what I heard, the sleep was more of a legal fiction to get around OSHA regulations than actual sleep.
I guess it paid decently enough, since he never complained about, but he pretty much slept for the entire following day. He never knew until Sunday which two days he would be in, so scheduling gaming time was a pain.
Recruiters are notorious for buzzword searching and resume stacking. And Googler's probably don't respond to interview requests because they don't trust or respect recruiters (just a hunch).
Find other ways to advertise your jobs, like old fashoined networking, message boards, social media, etc.
I'll second that one. I'm actively searching to get me and my family out of TX back to the SF Bay area. I'm a .NET guy, so I know the deck's a little stacked against me, but dealing with recruiters is rapidly becoming mind numbing.
"Must have 2 years of T-SQL." Ok, I've written my share of SQL for ASP.NET and desktop apps on MSSQL Server. Add it up and it's about 4 years, plus the last year or so with EF. Here's my resume.
"We can't send this to our client, you don't have T-SQL." Umm... SQL on MSSQL Server _is_ T-SQL. "Now you're lying to me." Ok, this is where our professional relationship ends. Thanks for your time.
Then there's that job where I pitched in on some Java stuff that needed doing. Similar to C#, I can grok. We got that code out the door, and it's still working. Yay. "Hello! I want to tell you about an opportunity requiring 10 years of J2EE and [insert other Java tech buzzwords]." <sigh> I'm not a Java guru anywhere near that level. Let me rewrite that project so Java isn't on there anymore. Doesn't matter. My resume is now in some resume bank that farms it out to non-perceiving headhunting companies.
What is the point of me speaking to an "account manager" (usually a lady) to ask me the same questions the recruiter just did? Is the "recruiter" just there to push buttons on some CRM system or something to make sure I wasn't a false lead? That's not really recruiting.
I just tell "recruiters" that yeah "I know Java and .NET - expert in everything. Let's talk compensation..." and just wait till I talk to the actual tech lead to explain my skills and experience in detail. From what I noticed, if you have worked in one stack or the other you are experienced in my book, you can catch up on the details (WebAPI? Scala?) during your first week.
Have you talked to the bigger companies? Microsoft is here, for one, and are unlikely to turn up their noses to a .NET developer. Plenty of places have dozens of recs open. Don't talk to the stupid recruiters, talk to the companies themselves.
I'm not dismissing your larger point that a good engineer can quickly take on a specific stack - engineering is what is important in a good employee, not knowledge of a specific API.
Phase 2, which I'm implementing tomorrow, consists of basically that. I'm figuring at least Microsoft, Amazon and Google. We'll see what else I can find. Any recommendations?
Very true... Out of the 560+ companies on Hired.com, only 4 or 5 are actively looking for C# talent.
It might be worthwhile investing in a 9 or 12 week course to pick-up rails at Hackbright Academy, or one of the other programming intensives. Given your years and years of experience, I'm sure you'd have no trouble picking it up quickly.
Well, Hackbright's out. Women only, but you bring up a good idea. I may just go and do what I did when I first started C#. Pick up 4 or 5 good books from Amazon and step through them and code up something.
I feel your pain. Startups aren't friendly to the cushy .NET environment. I've seen plenty of other middlewares such as Java, Scala, Python, Ruby, and Node, but no .NET.
If Windows Server/SQL Server was free or astronomically cheaper, that would change I think.
I wouldn't have any trouble spinning up a product on that stack if I knew I could deploy it without spending a lot on just the software stack (especially if I was bootstrapped)
I will admit Microsoft could do better with their pricing. Sql Server Express and Visual Studio Express are free, but I have licenses to all of my development tools ($50 Sql Server developer edition + $500 Visual Studio + $150 Resharper).
Their partner program action packs are relatively cheaper than buying the individual products ($429 Design and Dev action pack includes pretty much everything) or an MSDN subscription.
Their BizSpark program is aimed at keeping costs low during development and Azure has simplified deployment (1 shared instance + Sql Database + 50GB bandwidth for $25/mo).
I've found Node to be a good supplement for some middleware (but it still has bland RDBMS support especially with SQL Server).
I've found that start up founders try to rely on themselves too much for recruiting (really sourcing) and marketing. Just hire someone and take it off your plate - you are more useful raising money, building product and getting users. Recruiting is important but can by very time intensive.
Define clear goals, values and process and then Hire someone to do it. Let them fill the funnel through boards, social media, recruiters or other marketplaces (cough Hired.com cough). You and your team can then evaluate and hire.
Can anyone recommend good websites for recruiting developers? My company used stack overflow before with no success. Craiglist and hn's who's hiring were better. It seems like hacker news is the best place to go at this point ;)
Another disconnect is start ups tend to advertise "team lead" roles where you have the responsibilities of a manager, developer, and operations all at once while paid entry level salary. No thanks, but nice try.
I think this is a result of fear and marketing - if you have team leads, then you can still advertize a flat corporate structure, and startups are afraid to offer the management title because it means giving up control, which is a bit crazy - you'll give up 15% of your company for 100k, but not a bit of control to a manager who is just trying to do what he can for your company.
I'll tell you how to find the best people. It's not easy, but it works.
For a while I tried a very simple policy:
You come in when you want and go home when you want. Take as long as you want for lunch. Got errands to run that are important to you? Don't ask me, go do it. Need to go out of town to see a concert in the middle of the week? Have a good time. Bring pictures. In general, everyone in this group was allowed to be an adult and manage their time as they wished. There was no such thing as vacation time or sick time accounting. If you need time off, take it.
The only requirement was that the work get done, get done well and on time (within a schedule that was discussed by all and agreed-upon).
That's it.
What happened? Well, a few people abused it. They tended to be in the younger end of the spectrum and perhaps thought this was a license to fuck off and get paid. They didn't last long. The rest of this small group was great. They got their work done without a lot of supervision, were happy and actually went out of their way to push the project forward. It was an excellent experience and a great way, as far as I am concerned, to filter the idiots from the professionals.
This isn't easy to manage. That seems like an oxymoron. You are not actively managing people yet you say that it is hard to manage? Well, the problem is it takes a little bit of time to settle into a stable state. Every addition or change to the team creates a step change that needs to be allowed to settle. Once you have a stable team it pretty much runs itself and it runs well. Until then it can be a little chaotic.
I've done this once and was happy with the results. When you are under the gun and trying to put together a new team it is easier to go with a more conventional top-down approach and pretty much dictate what each person needs to do, when, how, etc. Not the best environment but sometimes you have no choice.
That said, in general terms I firmly believe in making people responsible for an area or reaching a certain milestone and pretty much leaving them alone. They should come to you if they need help or guidance. Other than that, if you are working with professionals there should not be any need to hover over them every day to see how they are doing.
1. You want to be stingy on salary and benefits, and avoid paying above market rates. You quibble over meeting trivial salary requests. Your company doesn't have proper review processes and doesn't give raises frequently enough. You don't provide equity in your company to your most valued employees
2. Your interview process sucks. You hand off the candidate to 5 different people, the interview lasts all day, you require too many interviews before making an offer, you have puzzle questions, your interviewer is non-technical and has never used the technologies you're hiring for, you rely on agency recruiters, you and your co-founders aren't involved in hiring, you don't spend enough time on hiring, it takes weeks for you to get back to candidates, it takes days for you to make an offer, you forget about scheduled interviews, your people doing the interviews aren't at work the day candidates have scheduled to come in, you ask inappropriate questions during interviews, you lie to candidates during interviews, interviewing is combat and not collaborative
3. You hire for "culture fit" which means you only hire people that fit whatever your version of the status quo is. You signal that older people or non-hipsters need not apply. You discriminate against people old enough to have spouses and children. Your office has a culture offensive to women and/or minorities. You have the words "rock star" or "ninja" in your description. You prefer "yes men" over free thinkers. You hire only people who are like you
4. You demand that every employee commute to your offices because you have an antiquated "asses in seats" busywork mentality or a "no remote work" policy. You treat remote employees as if they are second-class employees. You demand relocation to the Bay area or it's a 'no hire'. You don't provide relocation assistance. You don't help with visas
5. You require educational credentials for jobs that don't and shouldn't require them. You set up qualification barriers for great candidates. You don't respect candidates who have experience outside of your specific technology stack
6. You have a toxic office environment. Your offices are shabby and "Class B." You make people work in grey cubicles, Office Space-style. You don't provide catered lunch. You pay no attention to, and invest nothing in, office equipment. You don't provide up-to-date equipment and developer hardware
7. You require ridiculous hours that make work/life balance out of the question. You don't offer generous holiday time. You tell people they cannot take holiday time because it's "crunch time." You resent employees who take holiday time they are entitled to
Two years back I interviewed for a start up. After the technical rounds the founder came around to talk to me. The offer was so ridiculously low ball, I even had a tough time believing in what was given to me. The salary was way way below market standards, and equity was next to nothing, no health insurance, and the office was so far away there was no transport allowance, no food.. I mean this was nearly him asking me to work for him for free.
After negotiating a bit and listening to what he had to say.He seem to consider his high lofty goals as ambition. And my high lofty goals as greed.
He was almost saying, people were not sacrificing their lives to make him rich and how selfish and greedy they were in doing that.
Big mistake I see a lot re #7: Baking sick days into your PTO pool, so people have to decide whether to 'spend' PTO on staying out sick. This leads all your employees (especially the young ones) to show up sick all the time and 'power through it' so they can keep saving up PTO, and then they get the whole office sick. It's insane to me that this is so common.
I can see your point, but as someone with a long sting as a manager in Silicon Valley I can tell you what happens in real life. Employees divide into two groups: the "honest" ones and the "work the system" ones.
The honest ones take sick days when they are sick. Out of ten sick days they take one or three or eight. The number they take each year depends on how sick they got and how often.
The "work the system" ones take the full allotment every year.
The problem there is the word "allotment". How can you allocate in advance how many sick days to give? If you allot (say) four days sick each year, and an employee is sick three times, surely the rational choice towards the end of the year is to "use up" that allotment?
Without an allotment, employees will generally take a sick day when they're actually sick. Sometimes you'll notice someone who seems to take a lot of sick days. In that case you want to have a friendly chat with them - it's almost never the case that they're just taking free days, rather it's almost always situations like: they're not happy for some reason, they need flex working, they can't afford to repair a car and the commute is worse, they're suffering stress, etc etc. In other words, things it is useful to know about so you can help them (and hence help the company).
Sick day allotments are a way of ineffective managers avoiding confrontations with people: they just end up punishing everyone.
"work the system" employees will break whatever system you give them. I still think a separate sick day pool is better because sick people don't have a good reason to come to work other than having exhausted their sick days.
Solve the problem by weeding out the employees who work the system, not by moving to PTO-only and making your entire office sick more often to save a little money.
My current workplace has a policy of no sick day pool - just don't come in sick, no policy limit. If you're abusing the system, your manager will bring it up with you.
In the US, you have an "allotment" of sick days (say around 10), that defines how many days you can take off sick?
(In the UK) I don't think I've ever heard of such a thing. Surely people are sick however much they are sick? You can't limit your sickness to 10 days a year!
"paid" sick days. You can be sick for more than 10 days a year, but you won't be paid for all of them. Different companies have different policies. The company I work for has just a general PTO pool, and you take that for your sick days and your vacation.
Why bother splitting? Just give a full month off. Use it as you see fit. Spent all of it and now you're sick? Tough luck.
I'm sure there's labour laws that mandate the split. I just can't help but feel that nearly everyone would rather take a guaranteed month of time for "whatever comes up" than "two weeks vacation" and "better make sure you (and your family) aren't sick for more than two weeks annually." Just as I can't help but feel that employers actually prefer the split because dealing with the "'work the system'" ones is cheaper than just treating every employee like an adult by giving them more than a pittance of time away from the office.
The point is 'tough luck' gets the entire office sick by making sick employees come in to work. You almost never want this. It has a tremendous negative effect on productivity.
You also can't ignore the psychological effect of having to 'give up' time off (for a vacation with your kids, or a visit to your parents on their deathbed) in order to avoid going to work sick. It causes people to go to work sick a lot more often, because they can't anticipate when they will need time off. It also diminishes the rate at which they will use vacation time because they can't accurately estimate how often they'll get sick.
How exactly does 2 weeks paid vacation and 8 days paid sick leave change any of this? You're still out of luck if you end up bed-ridden for two weeks with the flu. My alternative of giving everyone a minimum chunk of four weeks --preferably six, but a minimum of four-- of paid time off for whatever reason gives people more breathing room, not less. They get more time off than they would have otherwise. This keeps more sick people out of the office, because they aren't having to worry about eating up precious PTO on what might get the office sick, or might just be a stomach bug.
Honestly, I sense people are latching on to my "tough luck" comment without bothering to think the rest of my comment through.
1. I once had a guy approach me to be the technical co-founder and build the entire server side of his app(which was almost all of it) and he offered to pay me 8% over 4 years with a meagre monthly salary. A cofounder!
2. Another startup once interviewed me for an hour, went back to discuss with their board of directors, came back and interviewed me for another hours, went back and discussed for another half hour and then said they would get back to me in a week.
Such practices seem to exist in so many places, initially I had thought it was the normal way of getting things done.
I kind of object to #6. Not every company can afford to rent or purchase the nicest wonderfulest offices ever. Plenty can only get offices out in some godawful office park where everyone has to, GASP, bring their own lunches or buy one off a local shop or food truck. That doesn't mean your company is bad, it means you've got fewer hipster pretensions -- though I would ask companies to please locate nearer to downtown centers rather than out in the exurbs.
I don't think his post was saying 'if you do any of these things your company is shit', he's just enumerating lots of common mistakes companies make. I've seen companies make all of them, and usually the bad ones make something like 20-40% of those mistakes all at once.
For a good gig it's pretty easy to overlook one or two problems; if you see half that list you head for the door.
I think that's reasonable, but note I didn't say expensive real estate. I've seen some pretty nice office space in converted warehouses and repurposed industrial areas. What I'm talking about is putting devs in a cube farm and stuff like that. I also don't think it's absolutely essential that you cater lunch (if you're in a city with lots of dining options and off-site opportunities for employees to eat together), but if you're in the exurbs it probably is at this point. Top devs expect these things, even if they might be willing to work without them for a certain startup.
Well I dunno. I just noticed it because I've never worked anywhere with catered lunches and have simply never come to expect them. Right now, I go out to a food truck or a local place every day and get my own damn lunch. It doesn't feel deprived or bad at all, and in fact I'd feel a little spoiled if the company started buying Thai food or health salads every day for us.
Mind, the company does have snacks, tea and coffee, so I basically eat breakfast from those on a lot of days, but still.
Agreed - I've never expected that ever (of course, some may object to referring to me as a 'top dev'). I may be too much of a picky eater to even want 'catered lunches'. Snacks/drinks are nice - even just subsidized (25c sodas, etc).
> "I've seen some pretty nice office space in converted warehouses and repurposed industrial areas. "
I've looked into these spaces before - they are surprisingly expensive. Even if you can find an empty disused warehouse, it takes a truckload of money to bring it up-to-spec for office use. Brand new plumbing, brand new wiring, TONS of interior work...
Repurposed industrial buildings look and feel great, and have a lot of soul, but they are counterintuitive frequently more expensive than a boring highrise office tower with drop ceilings.
I had to pick up a contract from a mobile gaming startup yesterday. 30 grim cubicles crammed together, shit literally everywhere on the floor like piles of cables, papers, discarded hardware...
There was even a gargantuan flatscreen that looped their product commercials and one of the guys sitting beside it I could see the flashing, seizure inducing graphics reflecting off his 2 screens and glasses. No windows, and unbearably hot from all the machines. How do you not go mad in that environment
i'd be worried about occupational health and safety in an environment like that. In fact, you can sue the employer for such an environment as unsafe. and if it turns out that they didn't do their due diligence to provide a good env, they might even have to cough up compensation. Food for thought!
You shouldn't say Class B in that case, it's more than adequate quality real estate (how you subdivide it has nothing to do with the class, and for that matter if the interior is nice enough I'm generally happy with Class C if I can get to it, but I'll agree its generally a step too far).
And ... well, I used to work at an organization where the crazy executive director killed it by moving us from Class B, which we could barely afford at that point, to Class A space (and of course, somehow there was only one office for all three techies at the end of the move). Ran out of money real fast when her marketing and sales plans didn't manage to flog sales of our obsolete current product and seriously hindered the project to develop the new one.
Taken to an extreme, there's the Edifice Complex, when a company that's "made it" has their own custom building made. Almost always a sign to sell.
I wouldn't expect catered lunches except in the case someone calls a lunch meeting, then its on them to supply lunch. This attitude could be a result of where I grew up as it is considered an insult to not feed people you invited to a lunch meeting.
I consider low rent a plus. It tells me that the owners are perhaps managing their cash flow to be maintainable, and take seriously the fact that people just handed them a heck of a lot of cash. (there is a lot of nuance I am not covering - of course a catered lunch can be a low cost way to get a bit more productivity out of a person, and so on, and things like bad chairs is just penny wise, pound foolish).
Yeah, I don't get all the hate on cubicles. Here in Europe they're uncommon but I'd love to have them - the alternative is open plan, fuck that (when you're sitting with dozens of people in a room, 4 or so is fine if they're all devs).
I know. Look at Yelp's careers page, you see devs all sitting in an office... but it's not one person's office, no ... 3 people sitting in the office, two on a couch, one laying on the floor, no desks at all... and they are all on macbooks (not that there's anything wrong with that, but what about diversity?). And they're all in their 20's.
You should be hiring for a "culture fit." But that doesn't mean every person has to fit the same mold. Many different types of people can fit the culture. And you are right, you don't want to be hiring "rockstars." Rockstars typically have ego problems, and won't fit the culture. Culture fit doesn't mean "you hire only people who are like you"
You've summarized a lot of the points I made to the Fastcomapny reporter for the article... and in the process you described a good number of seed stage companies, including ones coming out of YCombinator.
Is that really the salary structure in the bay area these days? It used to be that a senior developer's salary was easily 2x a junior developer's salary, but I thought senior and lead developer salaries were in the $130-$150k range in the bay area, at least for java developers.
Jeeze, I wonder why we don't see more start-ups appearing in other areas - I mean, there are lots of college towns pumping out brilliant engineers and coders that cost a lot less to live in. Your users don't care if you're located in Cambridge or Waterloo or the Bay area.
There is a field called economic geography that works to explain your question. It's too complex to summarize, but the short version is that SV has lots of startups, lots of investors, and lots of hackers in a small space, so people who want to do those things move there, creating a cycle.
Yes, but that's why I'm mentioning college towns. Lots of hackers in any town with a top-rate software/engineering department. And a start-up is just a hacker with a bit of extra ambition.
Investors and start-up culture sound like the missing ingredient more than any shortage of technical know-how.
Well, we don't get 8 weeks of guaranteed paternity leave if that's what you mean. But Texas has some nice protections for employees. Non-compete agreements, for example, are almost unenforceable in Texas, which is nice.
Talent is a commodity and is pretty fungible. But you can't replicate the pre-existing ecosystem of companies, nor the funding apparatuses that are present in major tech hubs.
What? I thought this was covered years ago. Extra people incur communication costs. Two people at half productivity will never be as effective as one at full productivity.
The senior:junior salary ratio is higher, I think, elsewhere.
In New York, for example, junior developers tend be around $75-95k while senior (5-10 years) are $140-200k (wide range). In the Valley, I'd guess that those numbers are $90-110k and $130-150k. The low end is higher and the high end is lower, in the Valley.
One thing New York has that the Valley doesn't (unless you're a nationally-known entity, like Jeff Dean) is people making $250k+ just writing code. That does mean you're probably in finance, but it's better than having to go into management if that's not what you want to do.
There are plenty of people (beyond Jeff Dean), who make $200k+ writing code in the bay area. I'm not really sure where you are getting your data from, but $150k is actually a bit low for a senior developer.
I am always a little bit flabbergasted by the developer salary numbers that get thrown around on HN but I think that the cost of living in NY & SF may skew the numbers higher than they are in the rest of the world.
edit: I am Canadian for reference and just Googling around a bit suggests anecdotaly that salaries are in the $50k-$100k range for most developers.
If you want to actually be able to save decent money in the US, you should aim for the second-tier (e.g. Boston, Seattle) or emerging (e.g. Austin, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Portland, Durham) tech hubs where salaries are 80-90% of NYC/SV but cost of living is a lot lower.
NY and SV are good places to build your career, but most people who are intent on being lifelong programmers (as opposed to being managers or founders by 40) get out after a decade or so. The cost of living is annoying but bearable; the culture it creates, however, sucks because everyone is competing to be a manager or founder before being judged "too old". The cultural effects of high rent (much less purchase prices at 30-50 years) are even more of a travesty than those high rents are standing alone.
$100k-$120k for undergrad? that's crazy. I guess this is one of the reasons why Facebook and Twitter decided to open offices in Vancouver _specifically_ to hire undergrad. Undergrad salary here can be half of that.
What happens to these developers after a few years in the industry? Is there an invisible salary ceiling they hit faster than developers in non-SV areas? Or does it increase at the same rate as developers in non-SV areas? I don't live in SV so I'm curious how high a typical senior dev salary is if the junior dev salary is already so high.
EDIT:
I just looked up Software Engineer III in San Jose on salary.com. The median is $108k and the upper 90% is $130k. So how can the salary for someone who just graduated be 100k+? Is that just for google and facebook? And all other companies in SV pay much less?
AFAIK, the offices in Vancouver are for people who for whatever could not obtain work visa, so most of them work there until they are able to relocate to SF.
Good luck. With real estate prices being the highest in north america in vancouver, i don't know if i should blame facebook or the candidates for taking what's less than market wage.
we can speculate for what reasons facebook opened an office in vancouver, but from what i was told is that it's all about simplifying the visa/foreign worker issue, and opening doors to more candidates/talent (e.g. western canada & beyond).
Honestly though. Unless if you have no experience in the real world, $50-$60k seems a bit low... ESPECIALLY in Vancouver.
> Good luck. With real estate prices being the highest in north america in vancouver, i don't know if i should blame facebook or the candidates for taking what's less than market wage.
I can say that in the Microsoft area, wages go up, house prices go up, rent prices go up.
When MS did their huge salary bump, apartment prices shot up 20%-30%. House prices went from 600k to 800k. Blech.
I'm curious to know if there is a single employer in Vancouver that could do that. I think given the city's layout, it would be very difficult for one single employer to have that sort of effect. (e.g. if EA Games boosted salary 20-30%, I doubt you'd see much impact locally, though maybe a pct pt or two citywide... maybe)
Pretty sure EA games closed up shop in Vancouver. Median salary is $70k for a developer here, usually less for junior devs. Keep in mind you'll be paying at least $15k income taxes so now your salary is $55,000.
Vancouver wasn't that expensive of a place to live before the Chinese started buying up all of the real estate. Also, many of these offices were planned before 2008, when the Canadian dollar was much weaker than today. Also, Vancouver IS a nice place to live, it has mild climate, nice mountains, and its quite a bit more international than the bay area (i.e. large Chinese and Indian populations). Where else can you live in North America where China Town is basically everywhere?
Vancouver is a delightful place to live, though personally I don't see the "Chinatown everywhere" as a merit. It's just a beautiful, cultured city that is very livable.
All of the "A-tier" companies pay $100K+ for undergrads with co-op experience. This is Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, among many others.
As a Canadian expat, Canadians who stay in Canada frankly get royally fucked in salary. The curve doesn't exactly close up either - I'm a few years out of school now and the gap between me and a salary I could command in Vancouver/Toronto is still about 100%.
Not really. If you go after top people from good universities (Waterloo, UBC), it's still 80-85k in Vancouver. Less than in Silicon Valley but not by much.
You mean ACM programming competitions. I believe Shanghai Jiaotong university often comes out #1 in those competitions, and no one is claiming that they are at the top of the computer science program rankings.
i can vouch that facebook was recently hiring people from Cornell for ~$100-$120 starting + $30 signing bonus ($50 if you interned) that admittedly you had to return if you quit in less than a year for any reason that wasn't explicitly their fault.
Yes. I believe you have to stay a year to keep the bonus, but everyone I know who graduated from Stanford last year was offered >100k salary, 100k signing bonus, and some stock (I think per year the stock was about 25k at current market value).
Even non-CS majors. If they studied a quantitative field, can code, and cleared the dev interview, they got that offer.
Those numbers, in general, are high. You might get that if you get them into a bidding war.
In general, a publicly traded company is not going to give that kind of package to an undergrad. Maybe $110-120k in salary, but the stock amount is more likely to be around $80k vesting over 4 years.
100k-ish stock vesting over 4 years is pretty standard among the big SV companies for new grads. It can be a lot more though if you're not a new graduate.
I don't think anyone else gives $100k signing bonus, so yes the numbers aren't representative of the whole but it hints at what an undergraduate can command out of college.
I'd say $100k salary is very typical, as are the RSUs (vesting over 4 years as you said).
Interesting - so even in startups you've got to be a member of 'the club'? If you went to a local state school and could write circles around the club members, that doesn't count? I would see that in some fortune 500 execs, but startups? odd.
Bunch of my peers were hired in the $100-140 range across the T3s straight from undergrad. Complete no-name school outside of US.
Attending an Ivy makes it easier for you to be recruited, since offers literally find you. At a lesser school you can still do well, it's just you have to find the offers.
It must've been the limit on H1B's and Canada's friendlier immigration climate.
But here's a point of reference https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6448448 Important to note that this is offered to a top-of-the class undergraduate, the average is likely to be substantially lower.
you don't even need to be a top-of-class graduate. if you are a successful intern at google, there is no reason for them to not give you an above-average salary.
you're good at what you do (proven), and the ramp-up costs of otherwise hiring someone else are non-existent.
If that's inclusive of signing bonuses, stock grants, etc. $120k is materially less than the major companies are offering these days.
Their Vancouver offices (certainly for FB, unsure of others) are visa holding tanks to hold graduates before they can be moved down to the SF offices. I would expect them to be receiving virtually equivalent offers.
I work as a W2 contractor (and 1099 at very high rates) and I always let my bosses know if they want me here after 5pm then they better be ready for me to charge it.
I might have to pay for my own benefits but I have full control over my hours this way. It's a nice compromise between salary and freelance, even if I do have to deal with a recruiting agency (just don't work with mom-n-pop recruiters and you'll be okay).
Here I thought the problem was we were in Phoenix, and we had hired all the Python Developers in the area. (with a few exceptions for those who work at NASA)
Phoenix has a pretty thriving tech community. I'm in Chandler, and in the last week I have gone to a Cassandra meetup at GoDaddy and am going to an Amazon cloud meetup at the Amazon offices in downtown Tempe tonight.
I run into Ruby and Python devs all over the place. The problem is, like this article touches on, the jobs advertisements I've seen for Python seem to be written for the "hipster" crowd (I've even seen some with "ninja", etc in the title).
Then they end up wanting to pay $30k less than the competition, so most people I know chose to go work at Intel, Freescale, Microchip, one of the aerospace companies... somewhere that has a professional atmosphere, pays well, and you get to work on interesting tech.
At the risk of getting flamed as an arrogant bastard. Which I am. The python talent in Phoenix is for the most part not talent.
The guys who want $75K would not fetch $50k in San Jose, and the guys who want $100K would not fetch $70k in San Jose.
I have been lucky to get some really great guys, but most of the guys are script kiddies who have never done anything hard, and are too high and mighty to learn to do the hard stuff.
We aren't competing with LimeLight very often for tech talent. We are competing with Silicon Valley. Because unless you have roots in Phoenix, if you are talented you aren't staying here.
I am very aware that if my guys wanted to leave Phoenix they would do well in Silicon Valley, and I'm very glad they choose to live here.
I can only speak to my experience, but I've turned down offers from Google and Netflix to stay in the Phoenix area. The cost of living (relative to salaries) in the valley is crazy, and you're competing for housing with people who just happened to "be around" when their company IPO'd. In Chandler I can afford a nice house near parks and good schools and I don't have to worry about earthquakes.
Speaking to your troubles hiring, I can only generalize based on some job ads that I've seen. Like I mentioned before, some ads just seem too targeted at the "early 20s fresh out of school" demographic that companies think they can lure in with free soda in exchange for 80-hour weeks. Senior devs just don't go for that, so they ignore those ads and go interview at Honeywell instead.
I am working mostly in Python these days. When I was in Silicon Valley I could go talk to Guido. When I had questions about AppEngine from Google I met with the PM's.
Phoenix doesn't have that. Also the place I rent in Tempe is with in 10% of the price of the same thing in San Jose.
That's more about personal connections than the quality of life of a region, right? Granted, geographically if you happen to know those people it makes it hard to connect with them, but most people can't just ring up Guido when they have a Python question.
As far as real estate... I don't know about your specific situation but as a whole the valley is much more expensive than the Phoenix area. San Jose, through Cupertino, up to Mountain View... on average you're easily paying twice as much for the same square footage (I just checked San Jose on Zillow. 2,000 sq ft is easily 600k).
Not knocking your decision to live outside of SV, believe me I understand it, but on the purely economic front one thing to recognize that while housing and other expenses may eat a lot of the salary, you are contributing (or rather, can) to 401K and regular savings at a higher percentage level than you would be with a lower priced job. Your standard of living might not be any better while living in SV, but you can invest in your future more in absolute dollars.
The flip side of that is that this place is just endless bubbles. Get on the wrong side of that and you'll never recover.
We have VERY rapid dev cycles, and often have to solve things as a team on the white board. We are starting to have some stuff that could be done remotely, but it is very hard to get someone remote up to speed on the vocabulary of the product.
We build things like Search Engines. Which have a Crawler, an indexer, a few dozen scorers, the front end, the Natural Language processor, the content extractor....
And all of those things have to talk to each other and be set up to run on your personal dev environment. That often means borrowing some know how from the guy next to you. That is much harder remotely.
I'm collaborating with some people on an application, too, which also consists of a few components that have to work together.
And all of those things have to talk to each other and be set up to run on your personal dev environment.
For this, we created (and keep updated) a textfile with requirements and a (terse) installation procedure a dev should be able to follow to set things up on his own machine.
That often means borrowing some know how from the guy next to you.
I once worked in a telecom company (open plan) where we also used this way of communication. Perhaps nothing wrong with it (from a social standpoint) but the senior devs were often complaining about being disturbed in their flow.
That is much harder remotely.
An alternative, which doesn't interrupt flow, could be email. But then you might have to wait hours for an answer...
Most likely you can't find programmers not because you hired all the Python devs but because you are looking for "Python devs with nltk experience". If you instead had asked for any programmer with nlp experience, you might have better results. Python is pretty easy to learn.
Put on your cynical hat for a moment (I have spares if you need one) and look at it from the point of view of someone hiring in SV. If employees aren't forced to live nearby, what happens to the million-dollar price tag on your house?
Now, if enough companies realize a competitive advantage from saving $100K/dev/year on salary and office space that a leak in the bubble becomes visible… well, it'll be fun to watch from a distance.
Back in the mid-90s when just out of school, working at MSFT, a buddy and I calculated that we were making about $15/hour after calculating all the long hours we worked (it wasn't 80 hours, but 60 was quite common).
...then the dot-com boom came and we all went and worked elsewhere. Which was good because our stock options never went up much after 1999 (to justify the salary anyway).
BTW, it was still one of the best jobs I've ever had working for someone else.
While I was reading this I kept thinking that although the points are sound it fails to point out the upside -- that making these kinds of mistakes also effectively signals the presence of undesirable traits in the leadership.
Just go through an open source mailing list and find people who seem to know what they are doing. Somewhere they probably have a consultant page, or git profile of work. Done, hire them remotely. If they need extra people tell them to find somebody they know who's competent and hire them too. No office, no recruiters, no insurance/rent to pay and no investment needed to buy hardware.
I would add that the low barriers to entry to become a startup founder (and to raise several hundred thousand dollars) leaves us with few great people to be employees (this goes for engineers & business folks alike).
Not all great developers want to run a startup. The founder of a startup has to do all sorts of stuff that most developers don't like doing: management, marketing, endless meetings with investors, etc.
Google stopped asking questions like "how many golf balls fit into a plane", but they didn't stop asking puzzles and programming trivia questions.
If you know how to ask these questions, and what insight you're looking for from them, they can be very insightful. Here's the different types of questions and puzzles you should ask, how, and what insight to get from them: https://www.sandglaz.com/blog_posts/104-How-to-interview-and...
>> Founders typically look for candidates who have a similar educational background to themselves and live within 25 miles of their office.
I go back to the stories of google rejecting mid-level management applicants because their college GPA's were 3.0 instead of 4.0 or they went to Georgia Tech instead of M.I.T. Seems like everybody makes these same mistakes.
Startups can't find (good) developers because they don't understand how high the demand is. Unless you're in the big league with the big money, you will have to settle.
There's a local startup here that I would absolutely love to work for, except for one thing. I have a lot of experience in their technology stack and some domain knowledge. They won't hire be because I'm not willing/interested in churning out 60 hour work weeks every single week. So.. alas, double-lose.
another interesting question is how to find the good candidates. We use the usual ways: personal connections, head hunting agencies etc.
we have also started to target top talents on meetup groups, hackathons & local technical bloggers.
If you have another creative & efficient way to find candidates please share.
Find, or entice to join after an offer is made? Two different processes.
The first can be solved by getting one's name out there: writing a tech blog, hosting meetups, coming up with novel perks. The second is harder and more objective.
Most startups give mediocre salaries, but people know that. There are two things about startups that damage them, though.
1. Low equity. Once the VCs get involved, equity allotments become so low that their motivational effect is pretty much nil. I feel like the current culture of startup mediocrity has a lot to do with the fact that seriously skilled people aren't interested in the laughable equity amounts they get in post-A startups, unless they can treat it as a 9-to-5 day job and have almost unlimited autonomy.
2. Low autonomy, which surprises people. You're more able to have a global effect on the company in a startup-- that's pretty much impossible for a big corporation-- but the amount of day-to-day personal autonomy people have over their own work and careers is often less in the startups. Big companies can't compete on options and usually pay market (because they set the market rate) so the good ones give their good people decent projects. A lot of startups have micromanagement and, worse yet, an increasing number that have that MBA douchebag culture are popping up (and if you work for a startup with MBA douchebag culture, you get the worst of both worlds between big and small companies; the risk and division-of-labor uncertainty of a small company, usually run by someone too unstable and arrogant to last more than 6 months-- which isn't even that hard to do-- in a large one). New York is full of startups run by MBA types who couldn't hack it in real finance but made enough contacts to raise VC.
I'm pretty sure I'd have no trouble hiring good developers. I'd run open allocation as far as possible, and I wouldn't give out any equity, but replace that with a far more generous profit-sharing program. There wouldn't be far-off payouts with messy tax implications as with options, but bonuses would be 200-500% in good years.
"but the amount of day-to-day personal autonomy people have over their own work and careers is often less in the startups"
That might be true if you work for a shitty, tyrannical founder. In my experience, a good startup will recognize that they need employees to be relatively autonomous and self-sufficient, simply because the higher ups don't have time to babysit. Startups lack the resources for multiple levels of engineering managers, and therefore shouldn't hire people that they don't trust to be autonomous.
> I'm pretty sure I'd have no trouble hiring good developers.
Honest question -- you have a bit of a reputation, I'd say mainly from your Hacker News rants. Do you think that those will help or hurt your recruitment prospects?
Honest question -- you have a bit of a reputation, I'd say mainly from your Hacker News rants. Do you think that those will help or hurt your recruitment prospects?
In the short term, it makes me unfundable (but that's OK, because I'm not interested in raising money right now-- too many douchebags in the game) because I've brought out too many unpleasant truths, but would be neutral-to-positive if I were the one doing the hiring. In the long term, I think it's favorable, because I think (hope) that the culture will evolve to a point where I seem prescient rather than pugnacious. If I'm wrong, and the startup culture devolves, then, I don't want to be a part of it anyway.
I have a lot of respect for your no-bullshit attitude towards VC-funded companies. I don't see why that would appear as a downside to employees. Most of what I've read is you talking about what a shitty deal it is for the employees; obviously you're imagining some kind of fairer compensation and I think that's nothing but a plus.
I agree. But I think that traditional VCs would be reluctant to fund me. I'm a known publicity risk; so they'd have to find a way to sell it as upside (we're so forward thinking that this guy endorsed us). LBJ had a darker view of that dynamic, "I'd rather have him in the tent pissing out than outside of the tent pissing in".
In the long term, everything I've said will seem prescient. But I'm pretty sure my chances of getting VC funding right now are zero. Those chances were never strong, because I wasn't born into that kind of connections, but I've pissed a lot of people off. That's OK, because I'm interested in starting something when the scene is clotted with douches. I'd rather wait 5-7 years for the douche tide to go out.
Companies put up barriers for applicants, then wonder why they can't find anyone.
A big thing for me is references. I have good references but I don't like to bother people. These are often from bosses who I worked with four years before and have only had sporadic contact with since, I don't want to be asking for favors every other contact.
Some companies, in e-mails before I even talk to anyone want me to send them references. I mean it's not like people ask for references as the last step before making an offer.
So what I have to do is when I'm looking for work, contact all my references, make sure my phone # etc. for them is current, and ask if they'll give me a reference - they always say yes. I figure I'm then good for the next few weeks/months in terms of that.
But it also means I basically have to make the major commitment of saying I want another job. Then I go looking and look until I find one.
If people were not so free with asking for references before I even talk to someone on the phone even, I could look for work at my leisure. If a headhunter contacted me, even if I wasn't looking, I could talk to the company. If they said they were almost set with the decision and just wanted some references, then I could do that as a last step.
Really it limits when I am available to hear offers. I am only open for offers every 2-3 years, in the weeks and months I am looking for a new job. I'm not open 18 months into a job, because I'm not going to hassle 3 old bosses for one company which hasn't even decided if they want to do a phone interview with me yet.
Of course I can always say I don't give references until later in the process, but usually it's some HR drone handing me a sheet and telling me to fill it out. If I don't put contact for references they tell me I should fill that in. It's like I'm sloppy for not bringing contact information, or have something to hide in not wanting to hand out reference information freely. People can say "tell 'them' so-and-so" but there's no them, there's an HR information sheet and some HR drone only peripherally connected with the hiring process.
It's not a big deal for me, it just limits my availability for talking to a 4-6 week cycle out of every 100-150 weeks. Companies throw up these barriers against themselves, then wonder why they can't find people.
There's other things as well. I work from 9 to 5. But companies want me to come in at 10 AM, I wait around 30 minutes for the first person to talk to me, then they want me to talk to someone else etc. Then two people who I have to talk to before getting hired are busy or not there. Also, if I schedule one a vacation day during the week, my current company might wonder what I'm doing. How am I supposed to make time for these long, drawn out interviews during the work week?
Then of course there is specialization. Wanting someone who knows a language like C++ is fine. Even wanting someone who knows OpenGL is fine. Or even more specifically, OpenGL ES if OpenGL is too general. But then they want people who know who Objective C for Apple hooks into C++ with OpenGL ES, as opposed to someone who has maybe been doing Java and JNI hooks into C++ with OpenGL ES. Or if that is not specific enough, then something even more specific.
Or it might say BSCS required. So if you're a few classes short - tough luck.
The entire interview process is geared towards company's establishing their dominance in the relationship from the get-go. You go hassle your old bosses, asking them to put in a good word for you. You come here when you're supposed to be working. And so on. Companies throw up these barriers as if there is a huge excess of good programmers they can pick and choose from. When that pool dries up, do they think, gee, maybe we should change how we interview? Of course not, they just complain how they can't find talented developers, and lobby Washington so that foreign programmers don't have to hop through the immigration hoops everyone else has to.
They don't see a lack of talented programmers, they see a lack of a large pool of talented programmers they can put over a barrel. Because otherwise they would have changed how they do interviewing.
While they only have the option of griping about lack of talent, we have options beyond griping about interviews. With the cloud, growth of mobile and app stores etc., as everyone says, now it's easier than ever to get your own personal (or partnered) income stream going. Hopefully mine grows to the point where the spectre about potentially having to go on a job interview ever again diminishes to nothing. I dislike enough the more easy interviews about whether I will consult on a project for a few months.
Headhunters who ask for references out of the gate are going to be shotgunning your resume across their hiring portfolio. Generally speaking, references and a background check are the last thing a company asks for before hiring.
It also sounds like you are applying for a lot of positions that are straw men - listed positions designed to be so specific that no good candidate can be found. It happens a lot in big companies (because sometimes HR makes it harder than it should be to promote from within) and companies that want to game the H1-B system.
Finally, you probably don't want work at a company that asks software engineers to fill out applications, unless the application is very domain specific (like the YC application). That's a signal that the company doesn't value software engineering like they should.
When In was younger I didn't trust people older than I.
As, I got older I became one of those people. In my
twenties, I had absolutely so patience for computers.
I felt like I was wasting my time looking into a computer
terminal. To be absolutely honest--all I cared about was getting laid--oh, and a little bit of beer money. As I got older, my physicality changed. I now cherish the time I can spend in front of a terminal. I still believe the best
minds are kids in their twenties, but don't rule out 40,
and 50 year olds. Their is a few exceptions though; I
would never hire a 'know it all'--young, or old. Eighty
hour weeks? Fine, but let them work from home.
I'm rather surprised that this wasn't a heading topic on its own: Don't Expect People To Work 80-Hour Workweeks. Bleary, burned-out, sleep-deprived, stimulant-addled engineers do not produce decent code no matter how many hours you make them stay at their desks. Obviously. You bloody idiot.
(...The startup founder, I mean, not the article writer.)
Although really this folds into "You’ve Got To Pay If You Want To Play" to make a larger point: If You Want Good Employees, Don't Treat Them Like Shit. Another of those blindingly obvious things that employers all over the world just can't seem to wrap their little heads around.