I'm starting to be a bit disillusioned with this whole "we can't find great people" spiel that a lot of startups put up.
I have friends who are extremely good engineers (i.e., a mix of: contributors to major open source projects used by a lot of SV startups, have given talks at large conferences, published papers at ACM conferences, great portfolio of side/student projects, have worked at great companies previously, frequently write high quality tech articles on their blog, have high reputations on sites like Stack Overflow, etc.) and who have been rejected at interviews from those same companies who say that they can't find talent. (it also certainly doesn't help that the standard answer is "we're sorry, we feel like there isn't a match right now" rather than something constructive. "No match" can mean anything on the spectrum that starts at "you're a terrible engineer and we don't want you" and ends at "one of our interviewers felt threatened by you because you're more knowledgeable so he veto'd you").
Seriously, if you're really desperate for engineering talent, I can give you contact info for a dozen or so of friends who are ready to work for you RIGHT NOW (provided your startup isn't an awful place with awful people, of course) and probably another dozen or two who would work for you given enough convincing.
I'm honestly starting to believe that it isn't hard to hire, but that there's some psychological effect at play that leads companies to make it harder on themselves out of misplaced pride or sense of elitism.
Unless everyone wants to hire Guido Van Rossum or Donald Knuth, but then a) statistically speaking, you're just setting yourself up for failure and b) you need to realize that those kind of people wouldn't want to do the glorified web dev/sys admin'ing that a lot of SV jobs are.
>"I'm honestly starting to believe that it isn't hard to hire, but that there's some psychological effect at play that leads companies to make it harder on themselves out of misplaced pride or sense of elitism."
I expect that a fair portion of "We can't find qualified people!" is actually "We can't find qualified people for what we're willing to pay."
Beyond that, I wouldn't say that it isn't hard to hire, but it certainly seems popular to make hiring as hard or perhaps more accurately - to make passing as easy as possible whether it's via veto, "culture fit" or something else.
I was hoping that the vote of confidence in "behavioral interviews" [0] from Google over the summer would help things a bit - I guess not.
In my anecdotal experience, companies put far too much emphasis on finding unicorns that can solve problems on a whiteboard than they do on finding above-average developers that have a strong work ethic, can learn fast, and have shipped something.
As it stands, it seems the only people these companies hire are notable SV personalities, or people that excel at the formal interview format.
As a result, they are missing out on a lot of good talent.
I have never found it difficult to hire for my dev shop in San Jose and I don't pay anywhere near what I'm told the "market" rate is. I hire engineers fresh out of no-name colleges, self-taught programmers, former freelancers who decided they wanted the stability of a salary and people over the age of 35.
Basically I will hire the people who won't get the time of day from a lot of the big tech companies and rocketship startups and who wouldn't make it through the interview process there if they get through the front door. And you know what? Most of my hires turn out to be entirely adequate and the duds are not nearly as difficult to deal with as everyone says they will be.
Granted my company is not building database engines or running social networks with a billion users but we do enterprise web apps for good clients and we are profitable. This idea that you have to give every employee 10% of the company and 130k a year to get people who can get the job done is a terrible, terrible myth and posts like this perpetuate it.
> one of our interviewers felt threatened by you because you're more knowledgeable so he veto'd you
I interviewed at a place and turned them down (located in SF) for this very reason. I could immediately tell that one of the owners did not like me. After wrapping up my entire interview process one of the owners thanked me and told me that they would reach out to me with more information. I went to thank and shake the hand of the other owner (he had wandered off).
(They brought me in on a friday and they had a very open layout, engineers wandering about, beers in hand...etc)
I opened with a thank you and, "I spoke with XYZ and he said you guys would be following up with more information, i look forward to speaking with you again!"
He looked at me and said, in a very short and harsh tone, "Oh - I guess we will then..hm"
I was extended a job offer the next day and immediately began receiving terse calls that I needed to forward more information and get it to them NOW (from the one who was quite brash with me earlier).
Companies often give generic responses like "we feel like there isn't a match" to cover themselves legally.
More helpful responses can accidentally open you up to discrimination suits, and given the option of (A) bulletproofing every helpful response to make sure it won't come back to bite you and (B) just giving a generic and safe response every time, you can see why they'd choose the latter.
Is weird. I have more than +17 years on this job, and when I have apply to some oportunities (online) for the kind of things I could be good some companies expect to hire me testing for the things that are not related to the job itself!. Like testing algorithmic stuff instead of database (I'm a database/crud/backend guy).
I could understand the use of some general test, but the weird thing is that nothing at all related to the job is used.
I remember from some big internet recruitment agency that use a lot of time with me, but at the end I fail at them because they use the final testing unrelated to all the things hours and hours before we talked about.
Is like hire a mechanic, and ask only algebra stuff.
Indeed. This article says "if you’re going to recruit outside of your network (usually a mistake, but sometimes there are truly no other options)" WTF? You think you know all the good people already? Such a narrow minded view.
The Bay Area is a great place to be if you're an engineer. You get many job offers in your inbox every week. Your friends have long since stopped asking you if you want to work at their startups, but you know just how quickly that would change were you to signal that you wanted a new job.
I think the crunch is at least somewhat real. We've hired a couple great people we met through Hacker News -- I couldn't have imagined them working out any better. And recently I've been trying to hire more people at my startup and, frankly, it's tough to find good people.
We've worked hard to make our interview process quick, insightful, fun, and accurate. Do we do pair programming? Sure. Do we ask about data structures? Absolutely; any programmer worth anything knows something about data structures. Do we do whiteboarding? Yep. Programmers at our company, it turns out, need to be good at communicating with humans as well as with computers. Do we give people answers immediately, and tell them why we are rejecting them? Yes, we do. We are more humane and reasonable than so many other places.
(It drives me crazy how many bad interviewers there are out there. Some of my friends recently interviewed for entry-level positions and some shall-not-be-named companies in SF and were treated terribly: given the run-around by the recruiters, brought back in the office 4 separate times for interviews, and ultimately rejected by at least two companies when they decided they didn't want to sponsor H1Bs after all. Insane. In a war for talent, you'd think practices like this would cease.)
Anyway: this is all to say, I'd love to meet your friends or anyone else out there who's looking for a programming job. My colleagues and I are not awful people. We like to brew beer and write code and help make the world a better place. We have a book club and eat good food. Oh, and we pay well and sponsor visas and are generally, you know, warm and friendly folks.
The things in that article that are today considered vastly out-of-fashion (probably too much, the same way they were too in-fashion in 2000) are numerous, but this "
I have got the "We are not going to go forward with you but we are not going to give any reason for that either" more than few times now.
Happens one time, you think it was chance. Happens couple of times, you think you think there might not have been a cultural fit.
But you can't help but start questioning your skills as a developer sometimes. Times like those I could really use a reason why I am not a good fit. That includes "We don't think you are a good developer" because knowing the problem, I could try and fix it.
> Seriously, if you're really desperate for engineering talent, I can give you contact info for a dozen or so of friends who are ready to work for you RIGHT NOW (provided your startup isn't an awful place with awful people, of course) and probably another dozen or two who would work for you given enough convincing.
How can I get in touch with you? My email is in my profile page.
The generosity strategy Sam Altman outlines is coupled to a "fire fast" (here, "before cliff") strategy that is hard to execute in practice; it takes a degree of ruthlessness to fire someone not because they're incompetent but because they're not performing at the level required for their equity grant, and it's not the same ruthlessness required to succeed in business. It seems especially risky for the kind of startup team where all the engineers are hired by being referred in by their friends.
To me this is crazy - it's the most obvious choice to be generous with equity, with so little downside and such immense upside. Who cares how much of the company you own if it's worth nothing? And surely there's nothing more risky to an early-stage startup than unhappiness; if the founders and early employees have disagreements, or harbour any resentment that will cascade out of control.
Generosity begets generosity; treat your team better than they expect and the rewards will come naturally.
> if people are going to turn down the certainty of a huge salary at Google, they should get a reward for taking that risk.
I often see a disconnect between perceptions of expected success of founders and engineers. I've observed this is particularly pointed for non-technical founders. To generalize, a young entrepreneur with some success under his belt is starting a company. As far as he's concerned his company is all but guaranteed to succeed: he's got the experience and sophistication necessary to make this happen, the team he's hired to his point is top-notch, he's got the attention of some investors, the product is well thought out, etc. He approaches an exceptional engineer and extends an impassioned invitation and... the engineer balks.
What happened? Is he delusional about the company's prospects, thinking he's got a sure fire hit when he's actually in for a nasty surprise once his hubris collides with reality? Is the engineer a square who would rather work a boring job at a big company than live his life, and wouldn't be a good fit for the team anyway?
I propose a different resolution: our confident businessman is certain about the success of the company, not the success of the engineer as part of the company. He knows the company's success is going to rocket him into an elite circle of Startup Entrepreneurs. The engineer, on the other hand, doesn't see the correlation between the company's success and his own: even if the company takes off to the tune of eight to nine digits, his little dribble of equity is just barely breaking even over the comfortable stable position he's in now.
First, sf and the valley simply don't pay engineers well enough. This is the second, striving to become the first, most expensive housing market in the united states. $150k sounds great here until you look at that as a fraction of your housing cost and compare to anywhere else in the country, including manhattan (because unlike here, nyc isn't run by morons so they have functioning transportation systems). I don't want to just quote myself, but all this still applies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7195118
Second, immigration is a crutch to get around paying domestic employees enough. I see net emigration from the valley amongst experienced engineers in their 30s who start having families and can find better financial lives elsewhere. If companies paid well enough that moving to the bay area wasn't horrid financially, they'd find plenty of software engineering talent already in the united states. But consider my friend above: $165 total income in the midwest is (compared solely to housing cost) equivalent to approx $450k here, when holding (housing costs / post tax income) constant.
edit: not to mention, companies still don't want flexible employment arrangements or remote work. I'm a data scientist and I'm good at my job (proof: employment history, employers haven't wanted me to leave, track record of accomplishments.) I'd rather live elsewhere. 66 data scientist posts on craigslist (obv w/ some duplication, but just a quick count) [1]; jobs that mention machine learning fill search results with > 100 answers [2]. Now check either of the above for telecommute or part time. Zero responses for remote or part time workers. So again, employers want their perfect employee -- skilled at his or her job, wants to move to the valley enough to take a big hit to net life living standards, doesn't have kids, and doesn't want them (cause daycare or a nanny or an SO who doesn't work is all very expensive.)
> "$150k sounds great here until you look at that as a fraction of your housing cost and compare to anywhere else in the country, including manhattan (because unlike here, nyc isn't run by morons so they have functioning transportation systems)"
This really is it. I think employers are between a rock and a hard place. Engineering salaries are rising rapidly, but the engineers aren't really seeing the benefits of it - every raise is just as quickly swallowed by the ludicrous housing situation in the Bay Area. Nobody's getting rich except landlords.
And anecdotally as someone who moved from SF to NYC, $150K goes way further here than it does in San Francisco. SF housing is (nearly) just as expensive, and the lack of basic infrastructure means there are tons of little things bleeding you dry at every corner. Buses don't run where you need to go? Call for a Lyft or Uber - individually not very expensive, but it adds up. Death by a thousand paper cuts.
Living in a high cost of living area is a FANTASTIC way to get your retirement plans going. Putting 10% of your SF income into your 401k is way better than putting 10% of your Austin, TX salary into your 401k. So while you're young and single you bank away lots of cash. Then you move and start a family elsewhere and retire comfortably. The problem is that I don't think enough people life-hack in this way.
“The only thing you need to do is fix immigration for founders and engineers. This will likely have far more of an impact than all of the government innovation programs put together.” - this is so darn true it's not even funny.
Conversely, and I know this is pretty out there, this is what I think will be the killer app of virtual reality. If I can ship a $5K "pod" to a developer somewhere in the world which allows us to work together 90% as well as we can in person, then you're damn right I'm going to do that.
I believe VR tech will get good enough (3-5 years) before immigration issues will be sorted out (10-20).
Immigration issues are easy to sort out. H1-B's automatically convert to Green Cards after 12 months if the person is still employed at the company. Company is responsible for the expense of the security check.
It solves both the H1-B limit and the engineering shortage in one fell swoop.
However, NO company lobbies for this because they like their 5+year indentured H1-B servants.
Broken record: startups are also probably rejecting a lot of engineering candidates that would perform as well or better than anyone on their existing team, because tech industry hiring processes are folkloric and irrational.
I co-manage a consultancy. We operate in the valley. We're in a very specialized niche that is especially demanding of software development skills. Our skills needs also track the market, because we have to play on our clients turf. Consultancies running in steady state have an especially direct relationship between recruiting and revenue.
A few years ago, we found ourselves crunched. We turned a lot of different knobs to try to solve the problem. For a while, Hacker News was our #1 recruiting vehicle. We ran ads. We went to events at schools. We shook down our networks and those of our team (by offering larger and larger recruiting bonuses, among other things).
We have since resolved this problem. My current perspective is that we have little trouble filling slots as we add them, in any market --- we operate in Chicago (where it is trivially easy to recruit), SFBA (harder), and NYC (hardest). We've been in a comfortable place with recruiting for almost a year now (ie, about half the lifetime of a typical startup).
I attribute our success to just a few things:
* We created long-running outreach events (the Watsi-pledging crypto challenges, the joint Square MSP CTF) that are graded so that large numbers of people can engage and get value from them, but people who are especially interested in them can self-select their way to talking to us about a job. Worth mentioning: the crypto challenges, which are currently by far our most successful recruiting vehicle (followed by Stripe's CTF #2) are just a series of emails we send; they're essentially a blog post that we weaponized instead of wasting on a blog.
* We totally overhauled our interview process, with three main goals: (1) we over-communicate and sell our roles before we ever get selective with candidates, (2) we use quantifiable work-sample tests as the most important weighted component in selecting candidates, and (3) we standardize interviews so we can track what is and isn't predictive of success.
Both of these approaches have paid off, but improving interviews has been the more important of the two. Compare the first 2/3rds of Matasano's lifetime to the last 1/3rd. The typical candidate we've hired lately would never have gotten hired at early Matasano, because (a) they wouldn't have had the resume for it, and (b) we over-weighted intangibles like how convincing candidates were in face-to-face interviews. But the candidates we've hired lately compare extremely well to our earlier teams! It's actually kind of magical: we interview people whose only prior work experience is "Line of Business .NET Developer", and they end up showing us how to write exploits for elliptic curve partial nonce bias attacks that involve Fourier transforms and BKZ lattice reduction steps that take 6 hours to run.
How? By running an outreach program that attracts people who are interested in crypto, and building an interview process that doesn't care what your resume says or how slick you are in an interview.
Call it the "Moneyball" strategy.
Later: if I've hijacked the thread here, let me know; I've said all this before and am happy to delete the comment.
Given the offers I've heard people getting from early stage startups (engineer 2-5), I don't really get why someone would join them. Below market rate salary? 0.1% of a company that's going to exit at $80M with a 10% chance and $0 with a 90% chance? That comes out to $80k over four years of work, before taxes, in the typical successful case, which is itself atypical. And for what amounts to a relatively small bonus, I'd be expected to work 50-70 hour weeks? Sign me up!
"37 of the 511 companies that have gone through the Y Combinator program over the past 5 years have either sold for, or are now worth, more than $40 million."
This is the most insightful thing I've read about the engineer crunch in a while. The market needs to realize that good engineers have lots of options and that 0.1% is just not a meaningful amount. I'd like to see 5-8% for key engineering hires, even as companies approach Series A.
Does the founder really want to get greedy and keep that extra few percent when so much depends upon solid engineering execution? Also, don't forget that 4 year vesting with a 1 year cliff is standard, so it's not as if the worth of a meaningful equity offer isn't fully obvious before the shares are "spent" on a key hire (also, before vesting, the risk is totally borne by the employee).
I think the ideal situation for engineers would be to earn a solid equity offer and then have a secondary market to use to trade some of it (once it's vested) for fractional ISOs of other promising startups.
> Does the founder really want to get greedy and keep that extra few percent when so much depends upon solid engineering execution?
Yes, some of them do. I got forced out of a startup here in London - I was the _only_ full time engineer in the IT dept. (basically was acting CTO) and one part time guy in Russia for some period of time. The company had two sales guys as well, not sure of their compensation but they were making more than me... We all quit within a period of two months due to A) the CEO flat out lying to a customer about the nature of the data they were being sold, in order to secure the sale - the customer later made threats to sue after their patience had been exhausted due to one founder trying for a month to gaslight their board about the technical nature of the data B) lies about the "cash flow problem" which I was told was preventing another person to be hired to help me (the founders were skimming profit before paying everyone, months late) The CEO's wife, who liked to play lawyer, then dragged out paying us for what they owed, trying to arbitrarily reinterpret the language of the contracts, claiming utter nonsense as logic and being over the top abusive in contract negotiations. It was all too much for everyone.
Later I found out a $5 mil offer had been made to buy the company from a 3rd party - not much but enough to show the company was certainly going to be viable. So it made perfect economic sense to these sociopaths to drive out everyone who might have some moral claim to profiting from the company's success (i.e. promises were made early about "equity"). The founders deemed I was completely unnecessary at this point due to having built something that could be maintained well enough by cheap labor from India and eLance - to heck with looking into the future and seeing how an experienced engineer might open up new markets, etc. This company lost every bit of technical knowledge they had when I left.
But that's sociopaths for you and how business is done anymore. I'm sure SF is full of amateur sociopaths these days.
Wait, I thought we all agreed that there isn't an engineering crunch?
I am not sure what immigration has to do with this, we make plenty of STEM graduates each year, and we'd make more if the professions didn't look like they were under attack by every employer and politician. The smart kids you want to hire are smart enough to go into more protected professions, if they knew their jobs wouldn't be shipped over seas or their market flooded with foreign competition, then maybe we'd be able to attract them and keep them.
I worry that focusing on equity will just exacerbate the problem, because I think that a lot of people are becoming wise to the equity lottery and just don't see a difference between 0.1% and 5% of nothing. The problem will most certainly be solved by $$, but no doubt it is tough pill to swallow for a business to pay 150k now what was 100k a few years ago...
Keep in mind I am a software developer and self interested.
The other thing that is interesting to me is the ludicrously highbar, and "weed out" interview techniques that some these companies have for recruiting engineers.
They're looking for someone to work on a rails app but they won't hire them unless they have demonstrated Linus-Torvalds like ability and knowledge. But the question is, why would someone with that kind of skill level want to work for you?
What if you were able to grab smart engineers on their way to becoming engineering stars? Why not aim for getting a solid lead/architect and adding midlevel guys who you know are going to turn into superstars? Why not develop talent instead of competing all the way at the top of the market for the most expensive ones? Why not figure out an interview technique that can let you identify exactly these kinds of people?
Its all about being resourceful and nimble enough to adjust, after all, isn't that what a startup is all about?
I'm not sure if that qualifies as "regret", or if it's just greed, but it's one very public example of a company deciding they've given too many options to early employees.
>There are great hackers all over the country, and many of them can be talked into moving to the valley.
For all this "we work remote" stuff that is flying around this seems to be a direct contradiction. Is moving to the valley really necessary? I can postulate coming for a face-to-face interview, but I would never want to move to California.
What's up with the cliff anyway? You're already asking me to take a much higher level of risk and a much lower level of liquidity than I'd like in my compensation, by giving me stock options. In addition to that you want me to take on 100% of the risk of our working arrangement not working out, and in fact you insist on giving yourself a strong incentive to fire me before the first year is out? It seems ridiculously exploitative.
This implies a somewhat one-way relationship between companies and their engineers: engineers give their time and talents, and in return companies give their money and equity. Under this system, why not be selective about who you hire? If you want great work, you need to hire a great engineer.
In actuality, the truth is great people aren't found, they're made. The role of a good leader isn't to squeeze great work out of his employees, but rather to develop within them the capability to do great work. Applied to hiring, this means having an understanding of the support and growth capabilities within your organization, and finding candidates who have the most potential to gain from it, rather than hiring those who are already well-developed. Applied to hiring rockstars, this makes them even more valuable: not only would they be producing outstanding work on their own, they would actually be improving the quality of the work their peers produce.
There isn't so much a shortage of engineers as a shortage of people willing to relocate to a stupidly expensive area and gamble what they have in the process. From the outside, but as a reasonably regular visitor, the Bay Area has lost the plot completely.
The one part of the problem that the author missed is salary. Offering a small amount of equity is fine if you are offering an above-market salary, but it's the combination of below-market salary and minimal equity that causes the perceived crunch.
In my experience non-engineering roles are just as difficult to fill.
You can easily find a non-technical hire if you don't know what you want or don't care about quality. If you care about quality, you'll be stuck in the same crunch. For example, the skill of being able to write without run-on sentences eliminates 99.9% of the candidates in the pool, for any role. Want candidates who can write reasonably well? Hiring just got 100x more difficult. In a modern environment, if you're non-technical and can't write well, what can you do?
I'm surprised that "get out of the valley" isn't an option for that. I mean, there are a lot of cities that produce lots of talented developers that cost a lot less than Silicon Valley rates.
"Finally, most founders are not willing to spend the time it takes to source engineering candidates and convince them to come interview. You can't outsource this to a recruiter until the company is fairly well-established--you have to do it yourself."
This is very important. It needs to percolate into their immediate reports too. I've seen high tech companies lose great candidates because the first line managers were too busy to interview them right away. If the right talent is available, you have to maket he time.
[+] [-] GuiA|12 years ago|reply
I have friends who are extremely good engineers (i.e., a mix of: contributors to major open source projects used by a lot of SV startups, have given talks at large conferences, published papers at ACM conferences, great portfolio of side/student projects, have worked at great companies previously, frequently write high quality tech articles on their blog, have high reputations on sites like Stack Overflow, etc.) and who have been rejected at interviews from those same companies who say that they can't find talent. (it also certainly doesn't help that the standard answer is "we're sorry, we feel like there isn't a match right now" rather than something constructive. "No match" can mean anything on the spectrum that starts at "you're a terrible engineer and we don't want you" and ends at "one of our interviewers felt threatened by you because you're more knowledgeable so he veto'd you").
Seriously, if you're really desperate for engineering talent, I can give you contact info for a dozen or so of friends who are ready to work for you RIGHT NOW (provided your startup isn't an awful place with awful people, of course) and probably another dozen or two who would work for you given enough convincing.
I'm honestly starting to believe that it isn't hard to hire, but that there's some psychological effect at play that leads companies to make it harder on themselves out of misplaced pride or sense of elitism.
Unless everyone wants to hire Guido Van Rossum or Donald Knuth, but then a) statistically speaking, you're just setting yourself up for failure and b) you need to realize that those kind of people wouldn't want to do the glorified web dev/sys admin'ing that a lot of SV jobs are.
[+] [-] incision|12 years ago|reply
I expect that a fair portion of "We can't find qualified people!" is actually "We can't find qualified people for what we're willing to pay."
Beyond that, I wouldn't say that it isn't hard to hire, but it certainly seems popular to make hiring as hard or perhaps more accurately - to make passing as easy as possible whether it's via veto, "culture fit" or something else.
I was hoping that the vote of confidence in "behavioral interviews" [0] from Google over the summer would help things a bit - I guess not.
0: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...
[+] [-] nhangen|12 years ago|reply
In my anecdotal experience, companies put far too much emphasis on finding unicorns that can solve problems on a whiteboard than they do on finding above-average developers that have a strong work ethic, can learn fast, and have shipped something.
As it stands, it seems the only people these companies hire are notable SV personalities, or people that excel at the formal interview format.
As a result, they are missing out on a lot of good talent.
Don't even get me started on working remote.
[+] [-] throwaway022014|12 years ago|reply
I have never found it difficult to hire for my dev shop in San Jose and I don't pay anywhere near what I'm told the "market" rate is. I hire engineers fresh out of no-name colleges, self-taught programmers, former freelancers who decided they wanted the stability of a salary and people over the age of 35.
Basically I will hire the people who won't get the time of day from a lot of the big tech companies and rocketship startups and who wouldn't make it through the interview process there if they get through the front door. And you know what? Most of my hires turn out to be entirely adequate and the duds are not nearly as difficult to deal with as everyone says they will be.
Granted my company is not building database engines or running social networks with a billion users but we do enterprise web apps for good clients and we are profitable. This idea that you have to give every employee 10% of the company and 130k a year to get people who can get the job done is a terrible, terrible myth and posts like this perpetuate it.
[+] [-] killertypo|12 years ago|reply
I interviewed at a place and turned them down (located in SF) for this very reason. I could immediately tell that one of the owners did not like me. After wrapping up my entire interview process one of the owners thanked me and told me that they would reach out to me with more information. I went to thank and shake the hand of the other owner (he had wandered off).
(They brought me in on a friday and they had a very open layout, engineers wandering about, beers in hand...etc)
I opened with a thank you and, "I spoke with XYZ and he said you guys would be following up with more information, i look forward to speaking with you again!"
He looked at me and said, in a very short and harsh tone, "Oh - I guess we will then..hm"
I was extended a job offer the next day and immediately began receiving terse calls that I needed to forward more information and get it to them NOW (from the one who was quite brash with me earlier).
I thanked them and turned down the offer.
[+] [-] prostoalex|12 years ago|reply
1) Incorporate in SF for culture reasons or to allow founders to optimize their commute.
2) Find out it's extremely hard to find people in SF as anybody who lives there pretty much has to stay employed to justify the rent.
3) Find out people from Peninsula / South Bay / East Bay are not as excited about 45-60 minute one way commute as you thought they'd be.
4) Complain about engineer crunch.
[+] [-] rtfeldman|12 years ago|reply
More helpful responses can accidentally open you up to discrimination suits, and given the option of (A) bulletproofing every helpful response to make sure it won't come back to bite you and (B) just giving a generic and safe response every time, you can see why they'd choose the latter.
[+] [-] mamcx|12 years ago|reply
Is weird. I have more than +17 years on this job, and when I have apply to some oportunities (online) for the kind of things I could be good some companies expect to hire me testing for the things that are not related to the job itself!. Like testing algorithmic stuff instead of database (I'm a database/crud/backend guy).
I could understand the use of some general test, but the weird thing is that nothing at all related to the job is used.
I remember from some big internet recruitment agency that use a lot of time with me, but at the end I fail at them because they use the final testing unrelated to all the things hours and hours before we talked about.
Is like hire a mechanic, and ask only algebra stuff.
[+] [-] justincormack|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nqureshi|12 years ago|reply
If this were true, then engineer salaries would not be rising so much. The demand for good engineers vastly outstrips supply.
Also, any explanation that requires you to posit mass irrationality is usually a bad one.
[+] [-] martian|12 years ago|reply
I think the crunch is at least somewhat real. We've hired a couple great people we met through Hacker News -- I couldn't have imagined them working out any better. And recently I've been trying to hire more people at my startup and, frankly, it's tough to find good people.
We've worked hard to make our interview process quick, insightful, fun, and accurate. Do we do pair programming? Sure. Do we ask about data structures? Absolutely; any programmer worth anything knows something about data structures. Do we do whiteboarding? Yep. Programmers at our company, it turns out, need to be good at communicating with humans as well as with computers. Do we give people answers immediately, and tell them why we are rejecting them? Yes, we do. We are more humane and reasonable than so many other places.
(It drives me crazy how many bad interviewers there are out there. Some of my friends recently interviewed for entry-level positions and some shall-not-be-named companies in SF and were treated terribly: given the run-around by the recruiters, brought back in the office 4 separate times for interviews, and ultimately rejected by at least two companies when they decided they didn't want to sponsor H1Bs after all. Insane. In a war for talent, you'd think practices like this would cease.)
Anyway: this is all to say, I'd love to meet your friends or anyone else out there who's looking for a programming job. My colleagues and I are not awful people. We like to brew beer and write code and help make the world a better place. We have a book club and eat good food. Oh, and we pay well and sponsor visas and are generally, you know, warm and friendly folks.
[+] [-] danielweber|12 years ago|reply
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html grep for "no hire"
The things in that article that are today considered vastly out-of-fashion (probably too much, the same way they were too in-fashion in 2000) are numerous, but this "
[+] [-] MagicWishMonkey|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Matt_Mickiewicz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] suren|12 years ago|reply
Happens one time, you think it was chance. Happens couple of times, you think you think there might not have been a cultural fit.
But you can't help but start questioning your skills as a developer sometimes. Times like those I could really use a reason why I am not a good fit. That includes "We don't think you are a good developer" because knowing the problem, I could try and fix it.
[+] [-] azth|12 years ago|reply
How can I get in touch with you? My email is in my profile page.
[+] [-] tdumitrescu|12 years ago|reply
does this ever actually happen? it would never fly during any of the interview processes I've helped conduct.
[+] [-] Balgair|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pg|12 years ago|reply
Same here. I always advise startups to err on the side of generosity with equity.
[+] [-] tptacek|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryptoz|12 years ago|reply
Generosity begets generosity; treat your team better than they expect and the rewards will come naturally.
[+] [-] tomsaffell|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drpgq|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnny635|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfasi|12 years ago|reply
I often see a disconnect between perceptions of expected success of founders and engineers. I've observed this is particularly pointed for non-technical founders. To generalize, a young entrepreneur with some success under his belt is starting a company. As far as he's concerned his company is all but guaranteed to succeed: he's got the experience and sophistication necessary to make this happen, the team he's hired to his point is top-notch, he's got the attention of some investors, the product is well thought out, etc. He approaches an exceptional engineer and extends an impassioned invitation and... the engineer balks.
What happened? Is he delusional about the company's prospects, thinking he's got a sure fire hit when he's actually in for a nasty surprise once his hubris collides with reality? Is the engineer a square who would rather work a boring job at a big company than live his life, and wouldn't be a good fit for the team anyway?
I propose a different resolution: our confident businessman is certain about the success of the company, not the success of the engineer as part of the company. He knows the company's success is going to rocket him into an elite circle of Startup Entrepreneurs. The engineer, on the other hand, doesn't see the correlation between the company's success and his own: even if the company takes off to the tune of eight to nine digits, his little dribble of equity is just barely breaking even over the comfortable stable position he's in now.
[+] [-] x0x0|12 years ago|reply
First, sf and the valley simply don't pay engineers well enough. This is the second, striving to become the first, most expensive housing market in the united states. $150k sounds great here until you look at that as a fraction of your housing cost and compare to anywhere else in the country, including manhattan (because unlike here, nyc isn't run by morons so they have functioning transportation systems). I don't want to just quote myself, but all this still applies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7195118
Second, immigration is a crutch to get around paying domestic employees enough. I see net emigration from the valley amongst experienced engineers in their 30s who start having families and can find better financial lives elsewhere. If companies paid well enough that moving to the bay area wasn't horrid financially, they'd find plenty of software engineering talent already in the united states. But consider my friend above: $165 total income in the midwest is (compared solely to housing cost) equivalent to approx $450k here, when holding (housing costs / post tax income) constant.
edit: not to mention, companies still don't want flexible employment arrangements or remote work. I'm a data scientist and I'm good at my job (proof: employment history, employers haven't wanted me to leave, track record of accomplishments.) I'd rather live elsewhere. 66 data scientist posts on craigslist (obv w/ some duplication, but just a quick count) [1]; jobs that mention machine learning fill search results with > 100 answers [2]. Now check either of the above for telecommute or part time. Zero responses for remote or part time workers. So again, employers want their perfect employee -- skilled at his or her job, wants to move to the valley enough to take a big hit to net life living standards, doesn't have kids, and doesn't want them (cause daycare or a nanny or an SO who doesn't work is all very expensive.)
[1] http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/jjj?zoomToPosting=&catAbb...
[2] http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/jjj?zoomToPosting=&catAbb...
[+] [-] potatolicious|12 years ago|reply
This really is it. I think employers are between a rock and a hard place. Engineering salaries are rising rapidly, but the engineers aren't really seeing the benefits of it - every raise is just as quickly swallowed by the ludicrous housing situation in the Bay Area. Nobody's getting rich except landlords.
And anecdotally as someone who moved from SF to NYC, $150K goes way further here than it does in San Francisco. SF housing is (nearly) just as expensive, and the lack of basic infrastructure means there are tons of little things bleeding you dry at every corner. Buses don't run where you need to go? Call for a Lyft or Uber - individually not very expensive, but it adds up. Death by a thousand paper cuts.
[+] [-] Consultant32452|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OmarIsmail|12 years ago|reply
Conversely, and I know this is pretty out there, this is what I think will be the killer app of virtual reality. If I can ship a $5K "pod" to a developer somewhere in the world which allows us to work together 90% as well as we can in person, then you're damn right I'm going to do that.
I believe VR tech will get good enough (3-5 years) before immigration issues will be sorted out (10-20).
[+] [-] bsder|12 years ago|reply
It solves both the H1-B limit and the engineering shortage in one fell swoop.
However, NO company lobbies for this because they like their 5+year indentured H1-B servants.
[+] [-] Filligree|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|12 years ago|reply
I co-manage a consultancy. We operate in the valley. We're in a very specialized niche that is especially demanding of software development skills. Our skills needs also track the market, because we have to play on our clients turf. Consultancies running in steady state have an especially direct relationship between recruiting and revenue.
A few years ago, we found ourselves crunched. We turned a lot of different knobs to try to solve the problem. For a while, Hacker News was our #1 recruiting vehicle. We ran ads. We went to events at schools. We shook down our networks and those of our team (by offering larger and larger recruiting bonuses, among other things).
We have since resolved this problem. My current perspective is that we have little trouble filling slots as we add them, in any market --- we operate in Chicago (where it is trivially easy to recruit), SFBA (harder), and NYC (hardest). We've been in a comfortable place with recruiting for almost a year now (ie, about half the lifetime of a typical startup).
I attribute our success to just a few things:
* We created long-running outreach events (the Watsi-pledging crypto challenges, the joint Square MSP CTF) that are graded so that large numbers of people can engage and get value from them, but people who are especially interested in them can self-select their way to talking to us about a job. Worth mentioning: the crypto challenges, which are currently by far our most successful recruiting vehicle (followed by Stripe's CTF #2) are just a series of emails we send; they're essentially a blog post that we weaponized instead of wasting on a blog.
* We totally overhauled our interview process, with three main goals: (1) we over-communicate and sell our roles before we ever get selective with candidates, (2) we use quantifiable work-sample tests as the most important weighted component in selecting candidates, and (3) we standardize interviews so we can track what is and isn't predictive of success.
Both of these approaches have paid off, but improving interviews has been the more important of the two. Compare the first 2/3rds of Matasano's lifetime to the last 1/3rd. The typical candidate we've hired lately would never have gotten hired at early Matasano, because (a) they wouldn't have had the resume for it, and (b) we over-weighted intangibles like how convincing candidates were in face-to-face interviews. But the candidates we've hired lately compare extremely well to our earlier teams! It's actually kind of magical: we interview people whose only prior work experience is "Line of Business .NET Developer", and they end up showing us how to write exploits for elliptic curve partial nonce bias attacks that involve Fourier transforms and BKZ lattice reduction steps that take 6 hours to run.
How? By running an outreach program that attracts people who are interested in crypto, and building an interview process that doesn't care what your resume says or how slick you are in an interview.
Call it the "Moneyball" strategy.
Later: if I've hijacked the thread here, let me know; I've said all this before and am happy to delete the comment.
[+] [-] jamesaguilar|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryandrake|12 years ago|reply
EV = $80M exit x 0.1% equity x 10% success rate / 4 years = $2K
That awesome 0.1% equity is worth $2,000 a year. Less, because of time value of money, and the fact that you won't be cashing out yearly.
[+] [-] Matt_Mickiewicz|12 years ago|reply
http://www.businessinsider.com/startup-odds-of-success-2013-...
"37 of the 511 companies that have gone through the Y Combinator program over the past 5 years have either sold for, or are now worth, more than $40 million."
[+] [-] grandalf|12 years ago|reply
Does the founder really want to get greedy and keep that extra few percent when so much depends upon solid engineering execution? Also, don't forget that 4 year vesting with a 1 year cliff is standard, so it's not as if the worth of a meaningful equity offer isn't fully obvious before the shares are "spent" on a key hire (also, before vesting, the risk is totally borne by the employee).
I think the ideal situation for engineers would be to earn a solid equity offer and then have a secondary market to use to trade some of it (once it's vested) for fractional ISOs of other promising startups.
[+] [-] dfraser992|12 years ago|reply
Yes, some of them do. I got forced out of a startup here in London - I was the _only_ full time engineer in the IT dept. (basically was acting CTO) and one part time guy in Russia for some period of time. The company had two sales guys as well, not sure of their compensation but they were making more than me... We all quit within a period of two months due to A) the CEO flat out lying to a customer about the nature of the data they were being sold, in order to secure the sale - the customer later made threats to sue after their patience had been exhausted due to one founder trying for a month to gaslight their board about the technical nature of the data B) lies about the "cash flow problem" which I was told was preventing another person to be hired to help me (the founders were skimming profit before paying everyone, months late) The CEO's wife, who liked to play lawyer, then dragged out paying us for what they owed, trying to arbitrarily reinterpret the language of the contracts, claiming utter nonsense as logic and being over the top abusive in contract negotiations. It was all too much for everyone.
Later I found out a $5 mil offer had been made to buy the company from a 3rd party - not much but enough to show the company was certainly going to be viable. So it made perfect economic sense to these sociopaths to drive out everyone who might have some moral claim to profiting from the company's success (i.e. promises were made early about "equity"). The founders deemed I was completely unnecessary at this point due to having built something that could be maintained well enough by cheap labor from India and eLance - to heck with looking into the future and seeing how an experienced engineer might open up new markets, etc. This company lost every bit of technical knowledge they had when I left.
But that's sociopaths for you and how business is done anymore. I'm sure SF is full of amateur sociopaths these days.
[+] [-] djb_hackernews|12 years ago|reply
I am not sure what immigration has to do with this, we make plenty of STEM graduates each year, and we'd make more if the professions didn't look like they were under attack by every employer and politician. The smart kids you want to hire are smart enough to go into more protected professions, if they knew their jobs wouldn't be shipped over seas or their market flooded with foreign competition, then maybe we'd be able to attract them and keep them.
I worry that focusing on equity will just exacerbate the problem, because I think that a lot of people are becoming wise to the equity lottery and just don't see a difference between 0.1% and 5% of nothing. The problem will most certainly be solved by $$, but no doubt it is tough pill to swallow for a business to pay 150k now what was 100k a few years ago...
Keep in mind I am a software developer and self interested.
[+] [-] trustfundbaby|12 years ago|reply
They're looking for someone to work on a rails app but they won't hire them unless they have demonstrated Linus-Torvalds like ability and knowledge. But the question is, why would someone with that kind of skill level want to work for you?
What if you were able to grab smart engineers on their way to becoming engineering stars? Why not aim for getting a solid lead/architect and adding midlevel guys who you know are going to turn into superstars? Why not develop talent instead of competing all the way at the top of the market for the most expensive ones? Why not figure out an interview technique that can let you identify exactly these kinds of people?
Its all about being resourceful and nimble enough to adjust, after all, isn't that what a startup is all about?
[+] [-] bgentry|12 years ago|reply
A few years ago, Zynga told some early employees with lots of shares that they had to give back some of their stock or they'd be fired:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-57322150-17/zynga-to-emplo...
http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/11/10/zynga-stock-scanda...
I'm not sure if that qualifies as "regret", or if it's just greed, but it's one very public example of a company deciding they've given too many options to early employees.
[+] [-] Xdes|12 years ago|reply
For all this "we work remote" stuff that is flying around this seems to be a direct contradiction. Is moving to the valley really necessary? I can postulate coming for a face-to-face interview, but I would never want to move to California.
[+] [-] cia_plant|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfasi|12 years ago|reply
In actuality, the truth is great people aren't found, they're made. The role of a good leader isn't to squeeze great work out of his employees, but rather to develop within them the capability to do great work. Applied to hiring, this means having an understanding of the support and growth capabilities within your organization, and finding candidates who have the most potential to gain from it, rather than hiring those who are already well-developed. Applied to hiring rockstars, this makes them even more valuable: not only would they be producing outstanding work on their own, they would actually be improving the quality of the work their peers produce.
[+] [-] fidotron|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sheetjs|12 years ago|reply
"You get what you pay for"
[+] [-] jjoe|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coffeemug|12 years ago|reply
You can easily find a non-technical hire if you don't know what you want or don't care about quality. If you care about quality, you'll be stuck in the same crunch. For example, the skill of being able to write without run-on sentences eliminates 99.9% of the candidates in the pool, for any role. Want candidates who can write reasonably well? Hiring just got 100x more difficult. In a modern environment, if you're non-technical and can't write well, what can you do?
[+] [-] UK-AL|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pxtl|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathattack|12 years ago|reply
This is very important. It needs to percolate into their immediate reports too. I've seen high tech companies lose great candidates because the first line managers were too busy to interview them right away. If the right talent is available, you have to maket he time.