Happy to answer any questions — though we definitely don’t presume we have all the answers, we’re constantly learning!
We are also hiring remote engineers — https://zapier.com/jobs/. Would lov to talk to anyone in the JS, k8s, and Python community!
Is there any truth to this rumor?
We try to be respectful of people’s situations — EG: it’s never appropriate to contact a current employer without permission. We don’t do that.
By the way I read a little on your job site and Zapier sounds like a great place to work :-)
We definitely do not do that. As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, I'll double check internally and make it super clear that isn't acceptable.
It was a disappointment because I expected better from a YC company's process. Of course, I can't really blame Zapier for passing, as I'm sure there are a great deal of applicants and, since I never talked to anyone, I can't know whether we'd be a good match, technically or culturally. For example, many remote companies, especially those that are primarily staffed with offshore employees, are just trying to pinch pennies and paper over it by talking about the hipness and uniqueness of their remote workforce.
Zapier is a custom Q&A intake application [or, at least the applications I filled out were], so it's irksome to write real answers to those Qs and get nothing back. I'd much rather write an HN post where I can wear my rightly-deserved downvotes and critiques with pride -- then I at least get something for the effort! ;)
So, note well, potential applicants: "would love to talk" seems to mean "would love to have you languish in our HR system after you've taken the time to fill out our bespoke long-form questionnaire". Like I said above, usually it's hard to fault companies too heavily for this, but when the CTO is making a personal appeal on HN, I feel like a counterpoint is warranted.
Hiring in general seems to go very slowly these days. I don't know if everyone is flooded with fake resumes from "bootcamp grads" or what now, but 5 years ago or so, you could normally expect to hear back within a few days if someone was interested. It's a different ball game now. In the last couple weeks I've gotten two replies to applications I sent in around Christmas time -- one "an invitation to interview" from a well-known company (which I ignored), and one a message from another company that they'd closed out my application in their HR platform.
Disclaimer: my experience from memory. Intervals and dates may be fuzzy. Not going to dig up the correspondence.
Half a day??? Talk about dedication :)!
Anyway, Zapier's process appears to have improved from 2 years ago -- they commit to and usually succeed in responding to your application within a week now.
This has been my experience and observation as well. I have regularly gotten responses from recruiters months after I applied for roles and have already taken something something elsewhere.
And curiously the recruiters don't ever bother to even acknowledge that months have passed since I applied. Or bother to ask if I am even still looking.
I am curious if anyone knows what the cause of this is. Is this simply the proliferation of incompetent recruiters? Is it just companies advertisings roles that aren't "actually" hiring for at the moment in order source CVs? Something else?
But as you mentioned this was not always the case. This seems to be recent-ish phenomenon in my observation(last ~3 years.) Not even large fortune 500s move as this glacial pace. What's more baffling is that this phenomenon exists at all in a tight labor market.
We definitely do get a lot of candidates, but that doesn't excuse poor experiences and we truly try to do our best. Hiring truly is an flawed and messy process on both sides.
Generally, we've found it best not to look away from the mistakes we make, and we make our fair share of them! By doing that we hope to not repeat them, or at least repeat them less often.
There are many valid and plausible reasons that they could've chosen not to move forward in the interview process: maybe they got to another hireable candidate before they even seriously considered my application, maybe there is some specific technical need that I clearly don't meet and which I'm not picking up on from the job description, maybe something else.
And I can't see anyone else in the candidate pool either; while I'm good at things, undoubtedly there is a non-trivial quantity of people who are better. Candidates are compared and contrasted against the pool of other applicants; if there is someone else whose qualifications blow mine out of the water, or who is technically comparable but much cheaper, then who can blame Zapier for taking the obviously-superior option? I can't see the other applicants, so I can't know whether or not there was a slam-dunk applicant who made the merely "great" applicants pale in comparison.
Even if I'm highly qualified and there isn't anyone clearly superior in a comparable price range, people often can't quantify a firm rational basis for their specific preferences between candidates (and this becomes even more apparent once you're on the other side of the table).
This is when the infamous "culture fit" is broken out. I was once told that I had been passed over because I "wasn't assertive enough" after I spent most of an interview blasting the use of MySQL in a specific industrial application. There's no way that note wasn't intended as passive-aggressive retaliation. :P
Recently I was dismissed from a candidate pool because my answer to "Tell me about a time you resolved a problem with a colleague" hadn't been rehearsed to the satisfaction of the interviewer, who was one of those "I'm technical because I read WIRED and like being nerdy" types. That is just a different preference in technical depth as far as I'm concerned. Technically strong people are going to worry about technical interview content and focus on that rather than their answers to tired cliches.
Sometimes even things that seem trivial or silly can be a bigger impediment in context. For example, my first name is Jeff. I know of at least a couple of gigs that I've lost solely because there were already 3 or more Jeffs involved in the work on a daily basis and they didn't want to make the situation worse! "Jeff" is a somewhat common name but it's not super common -- sometimes I wonder how frequently this happens to Johns or Steves.
tl;dr it's just impossible to know whether a hiring decision is justified or not without having the insider dialogue and insight, and even then, don't expect stellar rationale. As bryanh said elsewhere upthread, hiring is a messy process.
I don't think Async solves the problem you mention -- that is more of a cultural thing. We expect folks to message each-other frequently (preferably in a public room with an @ mention) but set the expectation that you don't need to respond immediately. The public aspect is important as you will often get "drive-by help" from someone else on the team!
I have phone set up to not disturb me with notifications between 10pm and 7am so I wouldn't mind as long as nobody expects a response before next working day morning. Before I could do that I simply did not have company's chat/email on my phone.
My day starts with reviewing any received messages (no matter what channel -- email, chat...) and responding to them. I would find it unprofessional if someone did not. If this wasn't just an occasional oversight, then I would take it up with them.
Yeah...this is why I close down slack when I don't want disruptions. There's no point in a DND if others can do it anyway. It shouldn't be an option. If someone at work has an emergency and needs to get hold of me, they can give me a phone call. Non-verbal communications have a tendency to be abused, but the reality of actually having to have a conversation with the person you're disturbing means only serious calls seem to get made.
It's a much more scalable approach than trying to read the backscroll in Slack, IMO.
It has a few special features, but on the whole it's basically like a company-wide journal.
It does make it harder to hire, but it would be even harder at the other extreme -- if no one applied!
you started the company having already a pool of people you knew and trusted.
What if you don't have that? I'm worried about security aspects, hacking, etc...
How is it possible to start a company with remote hires and still have trust that they won't run away with your code, etc... Especially if the remote hires are in another jurisdiction where legal recourse might be hard or impossible?
Thanks
If you're really worried, just stick to people in developed countries with a sane legal system. But honestly finding people with great communication and technical skills should be a much more important criteria to the success of your company. You're company is much more likely to die from self inflicted wounds than because someone sold your source code to a competitor.
Thanks!
Are most of your people in the Western hemisphere? I find that with Slack I need to pay close attention to the stream which can be a major distraction. Also it can be kind of a pain going through scrollback if I was asleep for a few hours while others are working.
I never feel like I'm overwhelmed keeping track of things, since everything is so accessible thanks to Async. It frees me up to let Slack kind of drift past when I'm not working.
2. We're globally distributed. I'm in the UK, for instance, but we have folks in the Eastern Hemisphere too. I will admit that most folks are in the US so right now, we do skew towards the Western Hemisphere, but that might not always be the case.
Also, in support, we have a summary channel in Slack where we post the most important things that someone coming online would need to know about. For example, outages, recent issues, policy changes, important messages, etc. all get posted to a specific channel in Slack so you can read them _without_ the noise of chat involved.