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.
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