That linked 42Floors blog post is terribly self-unaware.
> Most startups take the building of their culture very seriously, especially when the culture is still new and quite fragile.
If your culture is so fucking fragile that a guy wearing a suit (as opposed to a T-shirt and jeans) poses an existential threat to it, you need to re-evaluate whether you are actually building a company 'culture', or just some random agglomeration of the personality traits of the company's earliest employees.
> My friend Shawn just brought organic heirloom carrots and a 6-pack of Sightglass coffee to an interview as a gift. That’s awesome.
If I were a founder and you were a candidate who tried to bribe me like this, I'd politely show you the door. Why does the gift need to come before the interview? If it's a token of appreciation, why not after the acceptance or rejection? Are you hiring candidates based on their technical credentials, or their hipster credentials?
> Sometimes we’ll have a thirty minute interview extend the rest of the day and into the evening. We don’t mandate it, and we don’t ding you if you have other plans. But when it works out organically, it’s a nice thing for everyone and it moves the process along much faster.
Yeah we're not going to penalize you if you don't have your schedule completely open. Like if you have kids or commitments or something. It's cool! But it's also sort of a strong signal that you're just not going to be a good fit here.
> My friend Shawn just brought organic heirloom carrots and a 6-pack of Sightglass coffee to an interview as a gift. That’s awesome.
If you want to improve your chances of getting hired just bring some awesome gifts along. Also it helps a lot if you're already a friend of someone here, which totally isn't insularity it's just having a strong network and connections.
I was very surprised that a guy interviewing for what's basically a sales position - representing 42Floors to its clients, and asking them for money - was being dinged because he turned up to his interview dressed professionally!
I'd like to think that the interviewee responded along those lines when the issue of his clothing was pointed out. Were I in his position, I'd be concerned I was being interviewed by a group of amateurs.
As a worker, if a company expected me to bring them a gift just to interview, I would figure that they either come from some strange foreign culture, or are complete arrogant assholes.
I have noticed this myself at a few places I have interviewed and after the 2nd or 3rd time you can kinda smell it. Most of the time the company is just a bunch of 20-somethings running around with their heads on fire, working ridiculous hours because they have no idea what their tech stack is supposed to actually be, all the while getting paid almost nothing for wasting their best years in a monoculture bubble.
Best thing you can do is just avoid those places like the plague. There are places that are run by grown ups and I don't mean people older than 20-something but people that are mature enough to understand what diversity and culture really mean. Places where there is a balance between work and personal life and where people don't pretend to be in a frat house because it is the only way they know how to handle themselves.
I think the only reason those cultures persist is because they are extremely cheap to maintain from a capital perspective and you can have 10 of them running in parallel to increase your odds of hitting a jackpot and getting acquired by google or facebook and raking in some nice returns for your investors which by the way are way older than 20-something. So if you look at it from that perspective it is all about maximizing returns from an investor's perspective and the rest of it is just-so story to keep the pipeline of 20 year olds churning. I think there are some nice parallels between virgins waiting in heaven and million dollar acquisitions. The tactics being used to exploit the minds of the impressionable are the same in both scenarios. The insular cultures that result from those tactics is just a natural byproduct.
> “Well, I grabbed coffee with the founder, and I had dinner with the team last night, and then we went to a bar together.”
I'm no teetotaler, but bars can be uncomfortable to downright hostile places for the majority of people (women + people who don't drink for religious or health reasons). It's absolutely inappropriate and unprofessional to incorporate one into an interview. This is typical "old boy's club" shit, just with hipster glasses and organic carrots.
I do drink. A bit. Not much, though, and I'm not the bar type. For me, that would likely kill the interview. Maybe that's for the best; maybe I wouldn't fit with them, and that's a good filter. They're clearly looking for social as well as technical fits, and I wouldn't be that.
> This implies that there is a large untapped talent pool to be developed. Since the tech war boils down to a talent war, the company that figures out how to get over itself and tap that pool wins...You want a juicy industry to disrupt? How about your own?
This is a great post, but I take issue with the author's conclusion.
The harsh reality is that most of these so-called Valley Culture startups aren't actually competing in a "tech war." Most have relatively simple CRUD apps with at best moderate usage. Founders delude themselves into believing that they need far more engineering resources than they really do for obvious reasons, and investors have plenty of reasons of their own for indulging and rewarding these delusions.
The good news is that no disruption is needed. The majority of the Valley Culture startups will die off in the next several years and at some point, the economic and monetary policy environment will ensure that they're not replaced with a new batch of Valley Culture startups.
In the meantime, there are plenty of opportunities (in the Bay Area and elsewhere) for folks who don't want to deal with the nonsense.
Indeed. And this is a particular problem in tech and the valley especially. In many other industries and other locations is perfectly acceptable to just run a business. Make stuff that people want and get on with your lives. But in an SV startup you exist in this bizarre world where if you're not changing the world with engineers who are the best of the best of the best then you're somehow fucking up. They don't actually hire the top 1% (or even 10%) of engineers but they create an elaborate kabuki dance which gives them plausible rationalizability that they do.
The downside is more than just passing up good engineers though. Lots and lots of research has shown that more diverse teams come up with superior and more robust solutions to problems. When everyone thinks the same way about a problem they come up with the same solutions, but this just exacerbates the problems of satisficing. When there's diversity and a true interchange of ideas combined with robust intellectual skepticism and criticism innovation is enhanced and it's easier to break out of the local minima trap.
Yes. I agree with you. The post is great but the conclusion is weak. I believe, a lot of this Culture constructo comes from marketing needs. They want to have a nice IstockPhoto start-up for investors.
> It’s not that we’re so petty or strict about the dress code
> that we are going to disqualify him for not following an
> unwritten rule, but we know empirically that people who come
> in dressed in suits rarely work out well for our team.
I suggest comparing this...umm... shallow attitude with this example from a very different end of the economic spectrum (which was a link I found here on HN late last year):
Type of job and income level seem to independent of the problem of gatekeepers (petty exercising of local power, often over superficial traits such as the current popular trends in apparel).
It's funny, really. Even poor white men are treated this way. People judge by appearances. People want to be around people that are like them. They want a 'tribe', not diversity. It's human nature.
This post is brilliant and correct. The best part is where he closes with the acknowledgement that the system works... to a limited degree. He's not just slamming it. It is actually an ok way to minimize risk at the cost of upside in the short term.
But it is unscalable for a couple key reasons. (1) Lack of diversity is lack of ideas and experiences, you may fail to find the "next big thing" simply because your echo chamber doesn't include that experience. (2) raw scale. There are only so many Stanford grads et al out there. When you need your 25th, 100th or 150th technical person you will need to have achieved either Google's cachet or start expending your parameters quite a lot.
Finding people's value is a very important management skill that seems to have been eschewed in this "cultural fit" culture. It's true there are some people that will be poison, but if the majority of people with the right skills are bad for your organization rather than the majority being able to be a positive, you should ask yourself if your organization is adequately healthy and robust, or is it an infant in an incubator, only surviving as long as you obsessively manage every input.
> Without a natural feedback loop, interviewing mostly runs on myth and survivor bias.
It is a law of human nature that a chaotic environment breeds magical thinking and ingroup allegiance, and there are few business environments more chaotic than Silicon Valley, where startups succeed or fail seemingly at random. The noise calls for reason, and because there are no true known causes for success our mind demands some explanation. How many times have we read the line -- often written by some very smart people -- "correlation isn't causation, but we've found a strong correlation between....". What follows the but in that sentence is what is known as superstition. Correlation doesn't equal causation, but no buts follow. Actually, correlation plus confirmation bias equals magical thinking, and "data driven" correlation (with no confirmation bias) equals bigotry. Failing to realize that correlation without causation provides us with exactly zero predictive abilities (it might be "predictive" on unknown present data, but not on future data) is the root of a lot of evil. In fact, "data driven" correlation -- because it disguises itself as knowledge -- creates (or, usually, reinforces) a reverse causation.
> Whatever else one can say about the Mirrortocracy, it has the virtue of actually working, in the sense that the lucky few who break in have a decent rate of success.
This is the worst of all fallacies belying the "SV logic". Even supposing it were true, a large-number statistical observation says little or nothing about the behavior of a single random variable, or a single startup in this instance. Yes, the startup system "works" (for whom is another question) on the whole, but the vast majority of individual startups still fail. Learning back from correlative observations on the large system and implying the so called lessons to an individual company has little grounds in any rigorous reasoning.
> You can protest your logic and impartiality all day long, but the only honest statement is that we're all biased.
Understanding this is one of the keys to progress. How many times have we seen posts discussing sexism in tech deemed "controversial" here on HN? But the truth is that the chance a member of a society imbued with biases for millennia is not sexist (or otherwise biased) is extremely slim. The only way to fight this bias is to seek it out and see it (because it's there).
"Correlation doesn't equal causation" I've noticed that people tend to misinterpret this sentence. In a lot of discussions it shows that people think that there can be correlation while the things don't have _ANY_ relationship between eachother, as in the correlation would arise purely trough random chance.
That is blatantly false. Correlation implies at very minimum a causal link trough a third effect. The traditional example of drownings and ice cream consumption has that third link. Nice summer days. So those two are linked.
I think one should say "Correlation doesn't imply direct causation". That's closer to the truth.
I am managing software development teams in small startups and big companies in the Valley for more than 10 years now. I've probably had several hundreds of interviews, looked at thousands of resumes and hired a couple hundred people directly. One of the things I always look for during the interview is how the candidate is different from me. I obviously don't want to have weird folks who behave outside of the social norm in my team. But I absolutely love employees with different than my experience, education, background, and especially I love people who disagree with me. The team members who can argue with me are my best employees. These are the people I will be chatting to bounce ideas. These are the people I will be working hard to convince that my proposal is the right one. And these are the people whom I will go to when I need an advice (simply because they might see the problem from a different angle than I do).
"The Company Culture" is important. But you do not create it by writing blog posts or even by having company off-sites every month. I create the culture in my team by re-enforcing my values every day during meetings or simple chats at the water cooler. Most software developers are smart and can easily see through the BS of startup or large company "culture building exercises" when the day-to-day processes in the company go in a completely opposite direction.
I would not call it *tocracy but business model. Company can pay under-market salary, if it inflates ego of its employees and make them feel special. It already works in science, fashion, medicine...
I think the article makes a mistake with its use of the word "diversity" here since these days the common use its ingrained more as a matter of race/gender and not so much opinions, and really you can find plenty of groups with that idea of diversity where everyone thinks the same and there's no debate whatsoever.
The word OP is looking for is groupthink, and the problem he's describing starts with deindividuation, the process when the group cohesiveness takes priority over individual freedom of expression.
And well the problem with this "mirrortocracy" (which is just a new word to describe Nepotism) is the typical conundrum of " I want either less corruption or more opportunity to participate in it", basically the problem wont be solved until the number of people trying to enter the inner circle becomes smaller than the number of people trying to tear it down. But the reward for those who do make it is so high most individuals would rather live in what's essentially a tragedy of the commons than a place where there is more equality at the expense of a much lower chance of "making it big".
"I want to stress the importance of being young and technical.
Young people are just smarter.”
— Mark Zuckerberg
I always chuckle to myself when I read this because I realize that one day Zuck's going to say "Hey, I'm older" and by extension he'll have to also say "Ouch, I'm dumber". I suspect he'll recant the statement due to "youthful arrogance" at some point!
There's a half truth there, a lot of young people think they are a lot smarter than they really are. They have false confidence that goes with not knowing what they don't know.
> Well, dude, no, actually you can overdress for an interview and you just did.
I can think of two reasons why someone would dress up for a dressed-down interview:
(1) They don't yet understand the social terrain they've entered well enough (particularly salient: people with class/cultural backgrounds underrepresented in tech).
(2) They're conscientious enough to go through the trouble of dressing well for an interview in order to signal they care about getting hired.
So that's some of what you're selecting against when you reject a candidate for failing the "go-out-for-a-beer" test: irrelevant cultural differences and conscientiousness. Bizarre.
What I find infuriating is how all these companies think they are so unique with their interviewing process then ask the same inane questions. This is worse when the same questions are asked by different people at the same company.
College qualifications or any real qualifications are being dismissed by more and more people but the vacuum that has been left is being filled with crap like 15+ rounds of interviews and/or 12 hour interviews.
The hiring process is currently broken. I think the only fix is to have proper, trusted qualifications (again?).
Oh, come on! Where is this myth coming from? I don't know about USA, but here in London there is an over-abundance of IT workforce (what else would justify the sub £60k senior dev job offers).
Every time I hear about salaries in London it makes me mad. Why is the pay so bad? How is it possible that the value isn't recognized? Are you able to demonstrate the value that you bring, or is it so much an old boys club that dev's are thought of as factory workers?
On a related note - why aren't there more senior software dev's building their own businesses? It seems like you have so little to lose.
FWIW, hiring/interviews aren't just problems in SV culture. They're problematic all across the industries I've worked in.
This article is simply pointing out how the lack of established practices manifests itself within SV culture.
You could write a similarly outrageous article about how the people at one of my former employers knew next-to-nothing about interviewing people and how that resulted in a pileup of even more people who knew even less :)
The thing that strikes me is that this isn't new. There is a famous story of Steve Jobs and his group abusing some guy who had shown up to an interview in a suit. DeMarco and Lister in Peopleware can be read as justifying aspects of this (see chapter 22).
> "The notion that diversity in an early team is important or good is completely wrong. You should try to make the early team as non-diverse as possible."
Why the bloody hell would you optimize for uniformity?
[+] [-] austinz|11 years ago|reply
> Most startups take the building of their culture very seriously, especially when the culture is still new and quite fragile.
If your culture is so fucking fragile that a guy wearing a suit (as opposed to a T-shirt and jeans) poses an existential threat to it, you need to re-evaluate whether you are actually building a company 'culture', or just some random agglomeration of the personality traits of the company's earliest employees.
> My friend Shawn just brought organic heirloom carrots and a 6-pack of Sightglass coffee to an interview as a gift. That’s awesome.
If I were a founder and you were a candidate who tried to bribe me like this, I'd politely show you the door. Why does the gift need to come before the interview? If it's a token of appreciation, why not after the acceptance or rejection? Are you hiring candidates based on their technical credentials, or their hipster credentials?
[+] [-] lilsunnybee|11 years ago|reply
Yeah we're not going to penalize you if you don't have your schedule completely open. Like if you have kids or commitments or something. It's cool! But it's also sort of a strong signal that you're just not going to be a good fit here.
> My friend Shawn just brought organic heirloom carrots and a 6-pack of Sightglass coffee to an interview as a gift. That’s awesome.
If you want to improve your chances of getting hired just bring some awesome gifts along. Also it helps a lot if you're already a friend of someone here, which totally isn't insularity it's just having a strong network and connections.
[+] [-] minikomi|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scrumper|11 years ago|reply
I'd like to think that the interviewee responded along those lines when the issue of his clothing was pointed out. Were I in his position, I'd be concerned I was being interviewed by a group of amateurs.
[+] [-] DanBC|11 years ago|reply
I have no idea how they avoid legal trouble.
[+] [-] danielweber|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s_husso|11 years ago|reply
It seems it has been taken down (http://blog.42floors.com/interviewing-at-a-startup/), or is someone getting content?
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gaius|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gadders|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dkarapetyan|11 years ago|reply
Best thing you can do is just avoid those places like the plague. There are places that are run by grown ups and I don't mean people older than 20-something but people that are mature enough to understand what diversity and culture really mean. Places where there is a balance between work and personal life and where people don't pretend to be in a frat house because it is the only way they know how to handle themselves.
I think the only reason those cultures persist is because they are extremely cheap to maintain from a capital perspective and you can have 10 of them running in parallel to increase your odds of hitting a jackpot and getting acquired by google or facebook and raking in some nice returns for your investors which by the way are way older than 20-something. So if you look at it from that perspective it is all about maximizing returns from an investor's perspective and the rest of it is just-so story to keep the pipeline of 20 year olds churning. I think there are some nice parallels between virgins waiting in heaven and million dollar acquisitions. The tactics being used to exploit the minds of the impressionable are the same in both scenarios. The insular cultures that result from those tactics is just a natural byproduct.
[+] [-] rayiner|11 years ago|reply
I'm no teetotaler, but bars can be uncomfortable to downright hostile places for the majority of people (women + people who don't drink for religious or health reasons). It's absolutely inappropriate and unprofessional to incorporate one into an interview. This is typical "old boy's club" shit, just with hipster glasses and organic carrots.
[+] [-] CapitalistCartr|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] opendais|11 years ago|reply
It is quite amazing how many people are completely oblivious to their own biases.
[+] [-] hsod|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 7Figures2Commas|11 years ago|reply
This is a great post, but I take issue with the author's conclusion.
The harsh reality is that most of these so-called Valley Culture startups aren't actually competing in a "tech war." Most have relatively simple CRUD apps with at best moderate usage. Founders delude themselves into believing that they need far more engineering resources than they really do for obvious reasons, and investors have plenty of reasons of their own for indulging and rewarding these delusions.
The good news is that no disruption is needed. The majority of the Valley Culture startups will die off in the next several years and at some point, the economic and monetary policy environment will ensure that they're not replaced with a new batch of Valley Culture startups.
In the meantime, there are plenty of opportunities (in the Bay Area and elsewhere) for folks who don't want to deal with the nonsense.
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|11 years ago|reply
The downside is more than just passing up good engineers though. Lots and lots of research has shown that more diverse teams come up with superior and more robust solutions to problems. When everyone thinks the same way about a problem they come up with the same solutions, but this just exacerbates the problems of satisficing. When there's diversity and a true interchange of ideas combined with robust intellectual skepticism and criticism innovation is enhanced and it's easier to break out of the local minima trap.
[+] [-] lucasnemeth|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pdkl95|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gretful|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasallen|11 years ago|reply
But it is unscalable for a couple key reasons. (1) Lack of diversity is lack of ideas and experiences, you may fail to find the "next big thing" simply because your echo chamber doesn't include that experience. (2) raw scale. There are only so many Stanford grads et al out there. When you need your 25th, 100th or 150th technical person you will need to have achieved either Google's cachet or start expending your parameters quite a lot.
Finding people's value is a very important management skill that seems to have been eschewed in this "cultural fit" culture. It's true there are some people that will be poison, but if the majority of people with the right skills are bad for your organization rather than the majority being able to be a positive, you should ask yourself if your organization is adequately healthy and robust, or is it an infant in an incubator, only surviving as long as you obsessively manage every input.
[+] [-] throneaway|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pron|11 years ago|reply
It is a law of human nature that a chaotic environment breeds magical thinking and ingroup allegiance, and there are few business environments more chaotic than Silicon Valley, where startups succeed or fail seemingly at random. The noise calls for reason, and because there are no true known causes for success our mind demands some explanation. How many times have we read the line -- often written by some very smart people -- "correlation isn't causation, but we've found a strong correlation between....". What follows the but in that sentence is what is known as superstition. Correlation doesn't equal causation, but no buts follow. Actually, correlation plus confirmation bias equals magical thinking, and "data driven" correlation (with no confirmation bias) equals bigotry. Failing to realize that correlation without causation provides us with exactly zero predictive abilities (it might be "predictive" on unknown present data, but not on future data) is the root of a lot of evil. In fact, "data driven" correlation -- because it disguises itself as knowledge -- creates (or, usually, reinforces) a reverse causation.
> Whatever else one can say about the Mirrortocracy, it has the virtue of actually working, in the sense that the lucky few who break in have a decent rate of success.
This is the worst of all fallacies belying the "SV logic". Even supposing it were true, a large-number statistical observation says little or nothing about the behavior of a single random variable, or a single startup in this instance. Yes, the startup system "works" (for whom is another question) on the whole, but the vast majority of individual startups still fail. Learning back from correlative observations on the large system and implying the so called lessons to an individual company has little grounds in any rigorous reasoning.
> You can protest your logic and impartiality all day long, but the only honest statement is that we're all biased.
Understanding this is one of the keys to progress. How many times have we seen posts discussing sexism in tech deemed "controversial" here on HN? But the truth is that the chance a member of a society imbued with biases for millennia is not sexist (or otherwise biased) is extremely slim. The only way to fight this bias is to seek it out and see it (because it's there).
[+] [-] sharpneli|11 years ago|reply
That is blatantly false. Correlation implies at very minimum a causal link trough a third effect. The traditional example of drownings and ice cream consumption has that third link. Nice summer days. So those two are linked.
I think one should say "Correlation doesn't imply direct causation". That's closer to the truth.
[+] [-] lsh123|11 years ago|reply
"The Company Culture" is important. But you do not create it by writing blog posts or even by having company off-sites every month. I create the culture in my team by re-enforcing my values every day during meetings or simple chats at the water cooler. Most software developers are smart and can easily see through the BS of startup or large company "culture building exercises" when the day-to-day processes in the company go in a completely opposite direction.
[+] [-] fnordsensei|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielweber|11 years ago|reply
"He showed up in a suit, so he wasn't going to be hired, and we didn't tell him for the whole night! HA HA HA HA!!"
[+] [-] qwerta|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JVIDEL|11 years ago|reply
The word OP is looking for is groupthink, and the problem he's describing starts with deindividuation, the process when the group cohesiveness takes priority over individual freedom of expression.
And well the problem with this "mirrortocracy" (which is just a new word to describe Nepotism) is the typical conundrum of " I want either less corruption or more opportunity to participate in it", basically the problem wont be solved until the number of people trying to enter the inner circle becomes smaller than the number of people trying to tear it down. But the reward for those who do make it is so high most individuals would rather live in what's essentially a tragedy of the commons than a place where there is more equality at the expense of a much lower chance of "making it big".
[+] [-] smoyer|11 years ago|reply
I always chuckle to myself when I read this because I realize that one day Zuck's going to say "Hey, I'm older" and by extension he'll have to also say "Ouch, I'm dumber". I suspect he'll recant the statement due to "youthful arrogance" at some point!
[+] [-] epochwolf|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamesbritt|11 years ago|reply
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/08/12/jagger-satisfaction/
[+] [-] jmromer|11 years ago|reply
I can think of two reasons why someone would dress up for a dressed-down interview:
(1) They don't yet understand the social terrain they've entered well enough (particularly salient: people with class/cultural backgrounds underrepresented in tech).
(2) They're conscientious enough to go through the trouble of dressing well for an interview in order to signal they care about getting hired.
So that's some of what you're selecting against when you reject a candidate for failing the "go-out-for-a-beer" test: irrelevant cultural differences and conscientiousness. Bizarre.
[+] [-] vfxGer|11 years ago|reply
College qualifications or any real qualifications are being dismissed by more and more people but the vacuum that has been left is being filled with crap like 15+ rounds of interviews and/or 12 hour interviews.
The hiring process is currently broken. I think the only fix is to have proper, trusted qualifications (again?).
[+] [-] CmonDev|11 years ago|reply
Oh, come on! Where is this myth coming from? I don't know about USA, but here in London there is an over-abundance of IT workforce (what else would justify the sub £60k senior dev job offers).
[+] [-] seestheday|11 years ago|reply
On a related note - why aren't there more senior software dev's building their own businesses? It seems like you have so little to lose.
[+] [-] tptacek|11 years ago|reply
(I'm in London at the moment and I do acknowledge that this place is fucking fabulously expensive).
[+] [-] digita88|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KaiserPro|11 years ago|reply
don't be hatin' bro, or what ever the vernacular is.
[+] [-] clavalle|11 years ago|reply
Sure there is; don't join the clique. There is no law, private or otherwise, that says you can't play your own game and win.
Despite the hype, the Valley isn't the only game in town even today.
They can self-reinforce all they want but if they start losing because of outside forces then they will have to reexamine their assumptions or fail.
[+] [-] chillingeffect|11 years ago|reply
This article is simply pointing out how the lack of established practices manifests itself within SV culture.
You could write a similarly outrageous article about how the people at one of my former employers knew next-to-nothing about interviewing people and how that resulted in a pileup of even more people who knew even less :)
[+] [-] earljwagner|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cafard|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|11 years ago|reply
Why the bloody hell would you optimize for uniformity?