Types of People Startups Should Hire, but Don’t | Hacker News Reader

Types of People Startups Should Hire, but Don’t

trifinlabs.com

48 pointsShanerostad68 comments

I'm sorry but if your resume shows you've never spent more than 12 months in a job over the past X years then I pretty much drop it.

I don't really care why your career has played like that.

At best, you are a an awesome employee who won't stay with them more than your "frequency period".

At worst, you get discovered and fired within your frequency period.

Especially true for senior roles. Team lead for 5 months? Drop the resume.

Not always true, but in general terms if you are a great employee then you tend to hang around.

I know these are generalisations but when I am sitting there reading 300 resumes in a row and trying to work out who is going to get through an employers gruelling assessment process then if you hop jobs then it's just not worth the effort to even try to assess you.

In software development, there is a co-investment between employer and employee in which time spent in a job tends to result an an increase of value through knowledge of the systems and therefore productivity. Job hoppers don't accumulate such value, and leaving early removes that value from the employers side of the relationship.

I think the blog post was written specifically for you. Maybe you're wrong?

Specifically with job-hoppers, I've found that they can hit the ground running very fast and make solid contributions in compressed time-frames. The best ones cherry pick the best practices from a more diverse set of previous employers.

Sure, maybe they are good at getting right to work. But then they are gone and all that institutional knowledge goes with them and you have to start over with someone else.

There is a lot of value to having long term employees that have been around and know what is going on.

This is why a documentation culture is so very important. Even on the best terms, the average tenure of a tech employee is two years. That's just today's economic reality. As a leader, a project should not be considered 'done' until its documented to such a level that a well-meaning new employee can come in, read the docs, and be mostly up to speed with at least the daily 'care-and-feeding' tasks and the top 5 failure modes.

There is a lot of risk of long term employees entrenching bad practices by leveraging their political clout due to seniority. In some ways that's worse than the scenario you describe.

Shouldn't this argue for everyone having long tenures, since it's unlikely you'll actively fire competent employees just because they started at their job too long and got too well trusted.

Having a few long term employees and a bunch of short term ones is the worst case scenario, since it only accentuates the disparity in company-specific reputation and clout.

Well in the UK as a DevOps my role is in such a high demand that many workers (including me) only take contract roles as they pay roughly double than permanent. But as a contractor my CV is going to be 3 months, 6 months, 12 months and not years at a place.

This is how it is here and personally I think I have accelerated experience accumulation as every contract excercises a different set of my skills.

Maybe other markets don’t have a contracting culture but I don’t think my CV should automatically be trashed for having short but concentrated employers.

I see where you're coming from but OTOH the path to increase your pay in the tech industry seems to be switching companies. It's not like you're going to see a 10-20% raise every year staying with the same company. Obviously this usually only works for a finite number of years at the beginning of your career.

Exactly. If it goes both ways then it is also on the company to retain the employee.

I think this is tough for both sides.

I work with early stage companies, and those companies don't always exist a year. I've also worked with companies (for multiple years) that were bought & sold a few times, so two employment stints can easily look like five.

> companies (for multiple years) that were bought & sold a few times, so two employment stints can easily look like five

You can make it clear on your own resume that corporate changes differ from changes in your role.

> those companies don't always exist a year

You're not necessarily at fault for that, but being part of multiple failed businesses would probably not earn you any bonus points.

What if I was part of a university co-op program where I work for 4-8 months at a time between academic terms (which I am) ? I've left an interview where I could hear the CTO say "so why was he fired after 4 months?" as I walked out the door.

I understand you have 300 resumes, though -- should I put Co-op or Internship in big red letters before the item?

Just make the heading on the section be “4 month internship at blah”. That should be fine.

You may have met a CTO that wasn’t paying attention but that’s not the problem here. Having short periods of work while you’re studying is fine.

Flipping more than a couple of full time jobs is a big red flag. You need a really good reason.

Agree with you. Caveat is that a "couple" can vary based on the length of your career. If you have been working for 20 years and in that time, you had 3 jobs that you only held for 6 months, I'd look at that very differently than someone with a shorter career span.

That’s fair. It’s the narrative that counts. If you look like you’re a good investment then you might be asked to explain but, at least, you’ll probably have the opportunity.

If your history says risk then you need something special to counteract it or you won’t get the chance.

Any reasonable or legitimate circumstance for short job periods can be explained with a well written resume, but yes it should be extremely clear one way or another that you aren't dropping into a series of short jobs and either getting fired or leaving for better job offers.

This runs counter to your initial statement: "I don't really care why your career has played like that."

Which is probably why he's had such a hard time explaining it in the first place. Lots of people aren't going to take the time to actually read and understand the situation.

This is my experience, yes. I suspect many hiring staff look over the job titles and snap onto company/dates employed -- and never see the word "co-op". Thus my idea.

Having attended a university that was coop-based, I've had this discussion (or did when it was more relevant) and the key truly is "a well written resume" (plenty of coop positions come and go so...)

Often I would have conversations with people about resumes where they had problems and those problems would be things like: * How long is your resume...? (way too long, often) * Can you drop/compress any positions? (keep recent/relevant) * Instead of "Employment", can you say "Coop Experience"? for the section? * etc.

(thought questions, not asking for responses). I do agree, you definitely have to make the "coop" part super obvious otherwise you won't make it past initial filters.

Make it clear. Seeing this on a resume is actually a bonus in my mind compared to someone without that experience.

Of course the farther into your career the less important this is, but for new developers I would say this is an important and positive detail to highlight.

Internships don't count to the general rules around job tenure.

You should probably be putting "Intern" after your job title on your previous roles, if you aren't already.

It might be worth it to also clear up your work history during the on-site interview too.

I sympathize with your position but bad management/toxic culture are also systemic problems in the software world. It could be that the person just had a string of bad projects and was trying to avoid getting burned out. It would suck if someone got locked out of a good job that might have helped their career due to that.

> Not always true, but in general terms if you have a great employer then you tend to hang around.

FTFY

Your statemen in the last paragraph about increased value is correct. Alas, too often that does not correspond to the proportional increase in pay. For some reason other companies are willing to pay more.

There is also “people join companies but leave managers“.

I don't know, would it hurt to have one person on the team only interested in pulling tasks and banging out code? They rest of the team could use the extra time to deepen their knowledge of the business.

Given the expense that goes into hiring, on-boarding, and off-boarding employees, yes having to do that more than once a year can hurt. If it's fine, they should be contractors, not employees.

I understand the sentiment, but think about it like this: You've been working at a company for six months. Recruiters, good and bad, have been sending you offers to interview for all sorts of jobs. A recruiter finally sends you an opportunity that you can't turn down (2x compensation, more vacation, dream position at dream company, shorter commute with same pay, etc). You interview, you ace it, you get the offer.

Do you turn it down to build more tenure at your current company? Or do you accept because it improves your situation right now?

Rinse, wash, repeat.

Based on the number of emails I've gotten from recruiters (on a stale resume, mind you!), I'd say that "the market" doesn't care about length of time at an employer as much as one might think.

All other things being equal yeah you have to screen resumes somehow.

But I think the point made in the OP is worth reflecting on: job hoppers may actually illuminate desirable candidates.

One could apply these recommendations to all companies really.

I guess the one interesting point was hiring freelancers but in my experience good freelancers are really expensive amd moreover if someone is not invested with a long term view they usually end up taking a lot of shortcuts which leads to a lot of technical debt. Of course, this is just my experience.

I think its more important to consider who startups should NOT hire and give large 'management' roles to. Namely middle managers who come from large bureaucratic, declining public companies.

they bring in all the baggage that startups are supposedly supposed to operate without.

of course there are exceptions (the individual is creative, very high IQ etc)...but if your sole reason for hiring them is 'oh they were the senior director of x at [fortune 500 company]'...just no.

Funny thing about "declining companies", some of these will see more money in their bad times than the sexiest startups in their heyday. It's cruel, but true.

I wouldn't look down on a manager who comes from such a company; they bring a different set of experience that a startup has not gotten to yet. I also think having access to relatively more money allows these managers to develop different kinds of skills.

There's a stage in a startup's growth when that different set of experience is valuable, and at other stages it's often harmful.

I.e. the experience of a manager coming from a 500 person organization is valuable when the startup is scaling to 100 people and is building the structures and processes required for those 100 (and later on 200 and more) to work efficiently; there's a lot of organizational know-how and perspective that would be useful to take into account. The same experience/perspective from the same person are not that valuable and potentially wrong/misleading if you're currently scaling from 10 people to 20.

This assumes that the middle manager knows what they are doing. Sadly in my case I haven't been lucky enough to get someone who understands the job, nevermind the process and politics which has just resulted in a lot of firefighting, inconsistent policies, and then being blamed when we don't know what the policies actually are. No matter where you are having the right people for the actual problems seems to be the correct plan of action.

I think you're losing out. The types of middle/upper management that look to startups from the enterprise have seen how to operate their part of the business at scale, even if it did mean a lot of meetings and red tape, and they are usually looking to work in a startup environment for the challenge and the ability to "make a change."

They might not be a good fit at the very beginning of the business, but they're probably essential post-funding.

> startups should NOT hire and give large 'management' roles to. Namely middle managers who come from large bureaucratic, declining public companies.

Couldn't agree more, and the worst part is that they're unable to adapt and drink the "big company" kool aid.

As someone definitely in the intersection of "weird dude", "freelancer", and "successful alumnus of a startup", I'm on board with this, strangely enough.

One of the advantages of freelancers is that you get a little bit more consultative relationship than with employees. For myself at least, I bring strategic perspective not just boots on the ground, and that can make a big difference in heading off pitfalls.

I see a lot of startups running from three alarm fire to three alarm fire without the ability to tie things up over the longer term, and that often comes back to bite them. Automate and standardize all the non-core parts of your business or you will pay in distraction.

> running from three alarm fire to three alarm fire without the ability to tie things up over the longer term

No offense but that is incredibly frustrating for employees. It really sucks being in a team that is continually chasing fires with no time to do something strategic -and the a manager will bring some highly paid freelancer who works 9-5 without stress telling you how it should be done. What I'd like is the managers to bring in people to do the shitty work while employees get some downtime to improve things for a change.

Doing the shitty work is hard and unpredictable. I wouldn't be very likely to want to hire per-hour contractors to fix bugs.

Agreed, that's usually why I start a gig - they've hit a wall on technical scaling and need someone to help them dig out of it, so I can take over the firefights and provide the guidance on how to go about it, mentorship on whether a particular path is worth trying, that kind of thing.

And when they don't fix that bad habit early either in their business or their implementing new tech, they become larger companies with the same problems.

I'm not sure about hiring the job hopper. Sure you may get a great talent, but my experience is they will leave you at the worst possible time for your startup.

Me either. I think maybe swap that out for the "Old Heads" of IT and it's a solid list.

I agree, lots of wise "old heads" out there who could make a large contribution. Super smart idea because they're being ignored by everyone else in the talent search.

I'm more interested in "Types of People Startups do Hire but shouldn't"

Friends.

People who have no experience operating without the support of a Fortune 500.

People who are addicted to trends.

I'm quite disappointed to not find something along the lines of "Hiring employees of different races, ethnicities, sex, socio-economic backgrounds, etc."

You probably should just hire the best person for the job and ignore their race, ethnicity, sex, socio-economic background.

It's a poor perception to think that those factors wouldn't have any relation to who is the "best" candidate. Especially when you apply context and subjectiveness to what "best" really means at its core.

You can analyze things to death, but sometimes those factors truly aren't relevant.

What frequency of changing jobs is considered job hopping?

It's subjective and depends on the field. Software engineers tend to move around more frequently than say, petroleum engineers, probably owing to the larger number of companies who they can potentially work for. For me, looking at a software engineering resume, ideally I'd want to see at least a few stints lasting two years or more, but I'll forgive occasional short stints, since even great engineers can be bad fits in some companies.

I tend to look at this from a Bayesian perspective. If someone has left a lot of jobs after short stints, then that's a red flag. There's a possibility that they just got very unlucky (e.g. they are an amazing worker, but 5 companies they worked for folded within a few months), but it's also possible that they, for example, don't get along with people or lose interest in things very quickly. The more of a discernible pattern I see, the more likely I am to conclude the latter.

I might decide to hire that person anyway, but it's probably something that's going to weigh against them in the hiring decision.

Perfect. I'll send this with my cover letter next time :D

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