"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.
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.
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.
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 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.)
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...
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).
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".
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.
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.
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).
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.
"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 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.
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.
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'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
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.
$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.
[+] [-] PhasmaFelis|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] minikites|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mratzloff|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Swizec|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rhizome|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crag|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] PhasmaFelis|12 years ago|reply
o_O
Apparently people feel pretty strongly about slavedriver bosses! I guess I shouldn't be surprised...
[+] [-] pastProlog|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toddmorey|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] robbyking|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 10098|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mac1175|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eli|12 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] michaelochurch|12 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] 7Figures2Commas|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Cookingboy|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Matt_Mickiewicz|12 years ago|reply
You hit the nail on the head.
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".
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Iftheshoefits|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] krstck|12 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] pastProlog|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rorrr2|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Cookingboy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mratzloff|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greenyoda|12 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] BrainScraps|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] chrissnell|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] danielweber|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Matt_Mickiewicz|12 years ago|reply
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.
I liked - http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/1/16/what-if-cars-were-...
[+] [-] vosper|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sedev|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lzecon|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tnuc|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] danso|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] RougeFemme|12 years ago|reply
For most/many founders this is closely related to "hire people you would want to hang out with on Sundays", another common hiring "mistake/tip".
The hiring pool shrinks considerably and diversity of perspective/ideas and any other attribute you value likely goes out the window.
[+] [-] rosspanda|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] polymatter|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buckbova|12 years ago|reply
Relying on recruiters.
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.
[+] [-] JakeStone|12 years ago|reply
"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.
Yeah, I'm getting a little cranky now. I'll stop.
[+] [-] takrupp|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] capkutay|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snorkel|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robomartin|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] teddyh|12 years ago|reply
“Whaddaya Mean, You Can't Find Programmers?” http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000050.html
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] wyclif|12 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] tunesmith|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edwinnathaniel|12 years ago|reply