The Real Reasons I Don’t Hire You
charity.wtf
charity.wtf
Do we still need to discuss about the barn that long hours do to health and productivity. If your business model needs developers that don't sleep enough and have no personal live then your company does not deserve to exist.
It is frustrating how entitled business are. Work/live balance is a human right. You have to sacrifice your life so I earn more money is a horrifying statement.
I think that, on the whole, in the long run, unionization ends up doing more harm than good… but if tech workers ever _do_ unionize, business owners will really, really, really have brought it on themselves.
that said, there are, absolutely, startups that milk their non-founders purely for the founders' gain
On #10 I would caution you, startup founder or engineering manager, that while we mostly feel this way about most people that we run into, at the end of the day, it's the person on the other side of the table who gets to decide what will make them happy. I've seen people get turned down for offers because the company they were applying to thought they were "too senior," and "wouldn't be happy," and so on.
The definition of happiness for some people is having a job, providing for themselves or their family, and doing good work. That doesn't make them lazy or any less committed to your start up. In fact you might want to consider whether your culture and team could use a mix of people who are dependable, stable, and reliable -- people who don't see your company and their work as extensions of their selves but simply want to do good work and be professional.
The really passionate people can burn out quickly and bring down the morale of the team when things get tough and aren't going their way. They can see problems as personal failures. The person who isn't invested emotionally in their work but in themselves, in my experience, can reliably weather the ups, downs, and shifts in the wind.
Compare this to Amazon's famous first job ad, which was just "we want top developers". Top devs are going to learn the tech skills that are needed. And hiring managers don't have the magical ability to peer into peoples' souls to determine what makes them happy.
As a general principle, it's always good to focus on areas where you have leverage rather than dwelling on areas where you don't. You can always improve your skills and your CV (and you should!) but you also shouldn't take a rejection email as strong evidence that you're not heading in the right direction.
> If we brought you in for an interview, we already think you’re awesome. Period. Now we’re just trying to figure out if you narrowly intersect the skill sets we are lacking that we need to succeed this year... We know this is as much of a referendum on us as it is on you. And we are not perfect.
Not always. Sometimes it's someone people know or their resume seems just a perfect fit if they're half as good in person.
But, in my experience, more often than not making it to the onsite stage means they got through some pretty preliminary screening.
I think there’s a prejudice here for huge American cities where an in-person interview might be hours of commuting both ways on top of the actual interview.
In Europe it’s most likely a 20 minute drive or a short bus/metro ride away, something you can tackle just by arriving a bit late to your actual job or leaving early. Or just during a long lunch.
I assume things like:
* regular meetings to ensure people are in the loop
* blameless post-mortems
* allowing people time to mentor/work together
But was wondering what y'all thought.
You foster a team environment when you find ways for every one to care for/after every other one, in the perspective of the group (because the group cares for each part of itself, and each part cares about the group).
Ways may be motives/needs/desires, stories, behaviours (part of which are rituals).
So the specific steps depend highly on the chemistry of the team you get to start with, and where you want to go together. And that is why generic methods are just like cooking books: interesting, useful, but not enough to get a good dinner and a good spirit.
Basically this only exists if all the profits the group makes are shared equally between members. (if not all profits are shared, like being employed by an organization that takes a cut, the group will care enough to leave and form their own organization)
Here's a more verbose take on SE Project Management: https://pm.stackexchange.com/questions/26952/how-to-guide-a-... (disclaimer: am the author)
Don't hire toxic people. We had one interviewee who, when asked a question by my female coworker, would only talk to me, a male. It was quite obvious that this wasn't going to keep us working as a team.
Allow social time. We have always had a freeform morning meeting that was supposed to be kind of like a standup, but we talked about anything and everything, and stopped when we ran out of stuff to talk about. One of our team went remote and that meeting went from something that Management didn't worry about to something that was mandatory to keep up the team. We're about a month or so in, and I'm happy to say that everything feels basically the same as before, just without that team member physically in a desk here. The real test will be when we next hire someone for the team, but that's a very infrequent thing.
They may not look sexy, but that basic dynamic will keep your best talent around for years, prevent people from making horrible mistakes driven by politics, etc. etc.
And I think the key is showing respect for everyone and having very little tolerance for successful assholes. Or, if you're in a position of power, paying attention to how well your stars treat people beneath them, not how well they treat you.
In general, make sure to hire people who can do the job. It's still okay to take a chance on someone; or hire people who can learn. The problem is that someone who is fundamentally incapable, or has an attitude problem, will drain on goodwill within the team.
The second thing is to make sure that your internal processes are agreed upon, well-known, and trained to newcomers. There are the basics like ticketing systems and code reviews; but then there are things that are specific to your business, like the design patterns you follow; the specific information your testers must collect when they find a defect; and basic troubleshooting procedures your support team needs to follow. Training newcomers when they make a mistake, because they were blissfully unaware of process, or because the managers decided to ignore it, hurts a team environment.
And finally: Fire toxic people, and people who just can't do their job. This doesn't mean firing people who make mistakes, but it does mean firing the support guy who just can't handle basic troubleshooting steps; or the manager who won't train their team through basic, agreed upon, processes.
People who are in a management position in software or end up somehow instructing more than one person should definitely read it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project...
Wait, what's the point here?
Plus where else would you show off your collection of pictures you have of yourself eating ice cream?
I read an article by a Netflix hirer who basically bragged about how arbitrary and capricious their hiring was. "I noticed most of our staff were musicians, so I made sure to hire plenty of those, too, and they did great." People in my cubicle block have names with N in them, too, and we seem pretty good too.
Honestly, it sounds cynical but I think that's the primary reason people write these articles, to appear to be thought leaders when people search for their names.
But good on them, I suppose. It is useful to share ideas, and eventually the good ones will percolate up to the top (hopefully).
You need to filter more :). Good technical articles don't read like self-promotion, but more like someone discovering an idea and playing with it, or someone explaining an idea in detail, describing relevant trade-offs.
Smaller organizations can't afford to just play a numbers game and bank on hires being good enough to fit in somewhere.
In objectivity everything is a data point and each of those data points have competing levels of validity with regards to a given problem. It doesn't matter what you want or find more important or even emotionally compelling. What matters is what collisions of data express to your planning calculus. This sounds dry and mathematical like some machine calculation, but it is actually a personality component that some people are more capable of applying than others. This is the chief reason Magnus Carlsen refuses to play chess against chess software applications.
Honesty is a skill and its hard to really nail. Honesty includes things like directness, transparency, communication, and most importantly listening. If you are a person who is easily offended your honesty skill is weak. If you are a person who has trouble communicating something important to the business that may hurt peoples' feelings your honesty skill could use some improvement.
Empathy is the ability to perceive the emotions and needs of others. Empathy in absolutely not a means of sharing or expressing an emotional state, which is sympathy. In order to solve people problems and really, I mean REALLY, gel as a team you need empathy. In army warrant officer school we had 7 minutes to wake up, be dressed, make our beds, and be outside in morning formation. I didn't have time to feel sorry for people, but I did have time to help people be ready or help make other peoples' beds.
It's basically though the ability to not think, "this person is a jerk who is wrong," but "this person has his reasons for reaching his conclusions and although I am angry with him after our disagreement, I see the personal factors that must have gone into it."
It's very useful to work in teams of people who have that sort of basic emotional intelligence. How do you work with someone that just gets angry and projects everything onto you? I think the model of the "pissed off code badass" is thankfully going away, because programming is becoming more collaborative and more professional.
Yeah, it's extremely important to have strong technical competence on your team, but it's more important to be able to work with others and integrate everyone's perspective. Because no matter how technically smart you may be, you have your blind spots. It's important to listen to the junior who is worried that the implementation strategy might lead to X, Y, Z, that only she sees because she is seeing it with fresh eyes.
Empathy?
I conducted some ethics investigations last year. I had to interview people and make assessments that resulted in potential harms to persons careers, forfeiture of pay, and possibly other legal consequences. You don't want to pass harmful judgement lightly. You really want to get the most detailed picture possible and recommend solutions that do more benefit than harm. You need to have a feel for what people were thinking, at the time, and why even when they may lie to you or withhold necessary information.
>It's basically though the ability to not think, "this person is a jerk who is wrong," but "this person has his reasons for reaching his conclusions and although I am angry with him after our disagreement, I see the personal factors that must have gone into it."
Avoid the fundamental attribution error?[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
Perhaps another analogy is worth considering: the military. How can a group of incredibly diverse individuals form effective teams? Things aren't always socially rosy but there are two things which allow them to gel as a team: common purpose and they are stuck with each other.
How often do programmers find common purpose with the other members of their team or the company as a whole? Maybe this was the genius of Steve Jobs, turning Apple (and later Pixar) into a revolutionary crusade and preaching sermons more than giving leadership at times. As programmers we're frequently hired to solve a problem nobody else could or had time for. When's the last time a new hire was put on new feature development so that more seasoned devs could go tackle technical debt? I'm not saying that would be a good thing but without a sense of common purpose it's hard to build a team.
And that second aspect that allows military teams to gel... we're not stuck with our co-workers in civilian life -- we're free to leave (or be let go) at any time. It's very rare to find teams where three or more programmers (who are keen on keeping up with technology) have been there for more than ten years. I can only think of two where I've worked: one was an RPG/AS-400 shop and I was the boat-rocker being brought in to move things to .NET (and was resisted every step of the way until I left) and the other was a shop where I was brought in to help convert a VB6 app to .NET Core microservices.
Also, I have been in the military 22 years. Diverse people form excellent teams all the time. By diverse I mean different career interests, national cultures, economic backgrounds, and so forth. I have never experienced diversity on that level as a developer in the corporate world even though a good number of my coworkers have always been from India. One thing the military is really good at enforcing is group failure and group consequences. The closest thing I have seen to that in the corporate world are layoffs.
These are all necessary evils when you work for yourself, but if I was interviewing with a potential employer and they had this attitude? No thanks.
It's not 'attitude', it's just reality: you simply can't have all of these things and a thriving startup. You'll have to give in on some or all of them at some point in time during the next 2-5 years. This is the life of any entrepreneur by the way, any sector.
Organization helps, tremendously — night and day, quite literally (sigh) — but doesn't magically create more time.
You are not an entrepreneur if you work at a startup. You are just a worker, and more often than not, a worker who is not well compensated for the work you do.
I'd agree you shouldn't work at a startup unless you're personally vested in its success — the core team, with equity.
Seeing the photos evokes the same reaction as seeing ads: I'm being forced to look at side-loaded content that I don't care about, in exchange for content that interests me.
My beef though: point #8.
I don’t understand why early stage startup has to equal long hours and uncompetitive salary and benefits, especially in an industry where early engineers are often not getting the kind of equity they actually deserve.
Remember, many of these startups including Honeycomb are funded by immensely wealthy venture capitalists, they aren’t bootstrapped. These <0.5%-ers can afford to hire a proper amount of staffing but choose not to in order to maximize their return on investment.
In reality, no tech employee (actually, no person) should have to work beyond 8 hours a day, and I’d argue that 8 is even stretching it. Working nights and un-rotated on-call is not sustainable and will burn out literally everyone.
Having a smaller number of employees should mean that stellar benefits and salary are easier to provide, especially since you’re more selective on those candidates in the first place so their productivity is maximized (while larger companies are inevitably less efficient on hiring).
I’ve got another comment on this thread about that topic - having crappy/nonexistent 401k matching, bad healthcare, and an expectation of after-hours availability is effectively ageism.
You’ll end up with employees who don’t yet have families (young), employees without health issues (young), and even employees who don’t yet thoroughly understand how many important benefits work (young).
If you are big enough, you are basically looking for some level of fit and talent, and to avoid bad hires. It's hard to get right still, but it's basically a crank you turn all the time at a rate to fill your growth/turnover.
When you are hiring early stage, especially for the initial team it isn't the same at all. You have overall goals for the team but nothing is really fixed yet. Lots of the time you may be looking at three good candidates, A/B/C but reasoning along the lines of I can hire A & C, or B & C, but not A & B. B & C might not work. But B is strongest candidate, do I look for a D?
At the very early stage of hiring nearly every hire can change what you are looking for "next". And if multiple people have hiring authority, you can end up having this conversation: "We just hired X, they are great and we didn't want to miss to opportunity. Maybe they're a better fit for your team though?" It sounds stupid but happens quite often in the crazy first months/years of a startup.
How many times at different companies did people not get hired because of illegal reasons?
Has there been research done anonymously that would show when illegal criteria was used?
I’ve overheard coded conversations by my DEI department about holding off on hiring candidates because the ones they found immediately weren’t “diverse” enough.
Of course, that doesn’t make sense. A single entity can’t be diverse.
Instead, “diverse” is a code word for “not white male.”
Look, I don’t want to work in a boys club, either, but there has to be a better way to do diversity right.
And the thing about hiring is, as long as you don’t say the illegal thing out loud, and you use that coded language, you can do whatever you want.
Not truly illegal, but I also think that companies with poor 401k and healthcare benefits have no interest in improving them even if the business becomes wildly profitable because the kind of employees who know better are either older or not docile enough, i.e. they’re not going to drink the kool aid and work long hours and give up competitive compensation just because they’re “changing the world.”
The last thing a startup wants is a transactional employee who considers employment an exchange of cash for time. They want “believers.”
which is unfortunate because transactional employees will generally be less impacted by the various ups, downs, and drama that startups typically experience
My intention isn't to shame this attitude, by the way, I generally hold similar attitudes and start (casually) looking for new employment if things get too spicy at my place of work.
Depending on experience, I would also expect them to be better at identifying potential bullshit and to be motivated to resolve uncertainty and ambiguity earlier in a process so that they can avoid working unnecessarily long hours.
This, seems like as long as you say a candidate "isn't a good culture fit", then it's fine to discriminate based on whatever criteria you want as long as you aren't stupid enough to say out loud or in an email "we don't need any more blacks/latinos/asians/whites/women/men/etc."
Well, I don’t know about you, but every place I’ve worked in the past 20 years has been mostly Indian (men and women, pretty equally). By any definition of the word, I’m actually a diverse candidate in those offices… but I still get dinged with the “is a white male” penalty.
I don’t think being a white male prevents one from getting any kind of job. Being a white male is about the most privileged one can be in Western society.
I’m just saying that the solution to imbalances isn’t to introduce other imbalances.
What scares me is that recruiters actually believe they can.
My wife works at a YC startup and has great work life balance. We just got back from a vacation in Europe. She tried to check in on slack halfway through and they basically told her to gtfo, you’re on vacation!
She’s definitely worked late nights by choice. But in my experience those are rare, and they’re also usually voluntary. She’s a highly motivated self-starter (which is probably why she got the job) so she and I are often hacking on random things outside of work hours. Sometimes her hacks involve stuff she’s doing at work. But I never got the impression it was anyone’s decision but hers.
9 to 5 working hours are also important for parents. And if you think parents shouldn’t be in startups, Vlad from webflow (YC) has lots of persuasive reasons why that’s not true.
I think startups are figuring out that the way to win is to be generous. pg even said as much about 10 years ago when a piece “Why I won’t work for your YC startup” came up on HN.
* Many companies have bonuses tied to individual performance goals. * Climbing the ladder is competitive and, again, tied to individual merits. * It is ingrained in our language and mentality. We talk about Rock stars, not Rock Bands or Orchestras.
We do? Who's "we"? As a metal fan, when I talk about music with other metal fans, we're talking about bands, not rock stars. And for all the other people who don't like metal, they don't like bands or rock stars or rock music at all; they listen to manufactured pop groups or singers. The whole "rock star" thing died in the 80s.
What is often not addressed is the elephant in the room -- startup hiring is /mutually/ risky. As much as a company takes a risk on candidates, so too does the candidate take a risk on the company -- a much more larger and more dedicated risk. If a candidate doesn't work out with a company, the company can find a new candidate, backfill more capacity to soft replace them, etc. But for the candidate, if the company doesn't work out, they've got to find a new company. Those stakes are high. Additionally, the financial incentives attached to startups, even in a best-case scenario, are not competitive with big companies for senior candidates. So, what do you do if you want to hire in an environment where a lot of your top options for talent are going to be unavailable to you? You might try to find out where you can outcompete other companies in attracting candidates. You might figure out where you can find candidates that will be a great fit but may have been passed over by more conventional shops. In short, you innovate with your hiring.
You figure out where, from a candidate's eyes, you're more competitive than other companies. In particular, autonomy over career growth, culture and team formation, and white space to set up a project from scratch are things that can be hard to find at big companies, or which are reserved for candidates who are able to successfully angle for them. If you get a chance as an early engineer to work directly with an impressive CTO on a hard problem, that mentorship and experience can really level you up as an engineer. Startups can compete by offering these things to folks looking to pay for that with risk, which is a high cost indeed.
You figure out what you need, where there's wiggle room and where there's not. For your leaders, you likely cannot compromise on several fundamentals, such as communication skills, ability to reason from first principles, and systems thinkings as it pertains to design and analysis. However, for your ICs, you likely just need to answer affirmatively that the candidate will be competent, consistent, curious, pleasant to work with and able to grow. Many candidates check those boxes, but of those candidates who are interested in working for startups, it's challenging to get them to join your one in particular.
It's easy to gloss over how hard seed-stage recruiting and engineering teambuilding intrinsically is if you've never had the responsibility fall on your shoulders before -- it's REALLY hard. Not only is it exhausting, but you need to have the proper mental model for what its success and failure modes are. Success comes from curiosity, persistence, collaboration, and a baseline of autonomous capability. Failure comes from poor decision making regarding data modeling, build vs buy, organizational planning, hiring, roadmap planning, and even more things that may not have to do with engineering but will impact it. It's with this mental model that one sees an overly romanticized and infantilized idea of fit, which is that certain engineers aren't a fit for the startup world, and certain ones are. What makes it so? What specific engineering role is being hired for that makes it that way? Has that been thought through enough for it to be specific? While it may be true at a shallow level that some engineers will not succeed at startups, it conflates correlation with causation.
--
With that analysis in mind, here are the issues I had with specific points:
1. Scarcity: This is a dubious rephrasing of reality. The truth is that while there are on the whole not that many slots for engineers at an early startup engineering team, there is quite a bit more scarcity on the other side of candidates who are competent enough to handle all the responsibilities necessary to execute well.
3. Team vs Individuals -- "We simply need what we need and you are who you are" this is another questionable thought that foreshadows poor leadership and begs further questioning. What's the next dubious reason?
4. "We can't make you successful in this role" -- ah, here's the buried lede. Two things, competency, and training are conflated into some kind of fuzzy idea of "fit" that allows the company to elide its own responsibility in teasing those two apart. What things are fundamentals that an engineer must have to be successful? What things can and will be trained or learned while ramping up? Not putting this into clear enough detail almost ensures that this lack of proactive planning will not be addressed.
6. "We don't have the work you need or want" -- more muddled thinking here. You see the phrase "we couldn’t spare an engineer to pair with them full time" which belies the authors thinking, which is that pairing is necessarily a less efficient way to get things done. There's no thought given to whether a pair of junior and senior engineers produce better work and more momentum for the organization long term as a whole. The idea of certain tasks being "entry-level work" is also ridiculous -- a junior engineer can learn a lot from working on challenging engineering project with a senior engineer, and if they do so with the right support, will level up immensely in the process. It's one of the cheapest ways to grow your own talent in a more cost effective manner than you can purchase it on the open market.
8. "You don't actually want to work at a startup" -- most candidates I've talked to have wanted the same things. Respect, autonomy, growth opportunities, work life balance. That the author belittles "work/life balance, high salary, gold benefits, stability, working from 10 to 5 on the dot, never being on call, never needing to think or care about work out of hours" just speaks to their own idea that those things must intrinsically be sacrificed to work at a startup. For others, this idea is anathema to having a healthy culture that doesn't burn out -- if those things are occurring regularly, there's an internal problem in organizational process, culture, product roadmap, technical debt, and resources (or maybe all of the above) that's not getting addressed.
10. "I truly want you to be happy" -- more red flags ahead. "I have no interest in making a hard sell to people who are dubious about Honeycomb" " I want to join with people who see their labor as an extension of themselves" -- all coded speak for a desire to find exploitable labor. How do you convince yourself that in the competitive hiring market, you don't have to at least make a compelling soft sell to candidates that would consider working for you who are competent enough to have compelling competing offers? Do you fool yourself into believing they weren't good enough for you anyways because they don't want to make it their "life's purpose" to build a better APM tool?
i do disagree with one thing: i've definitely turned people down due to not being technical enough ESPECIALLY when their resume suggests otherwise. tech can be learned, yes, but you've gotta be willing to learn it too
My confidence is what counts for me. Why do you think that your confidence in me counts? I am not going to make myself dependent on somebody else's confidence.
No offence meant, but no, just not.
Your customers (whoever you're selling your labor or products to) need to have confidence in you and your ability to deliver whatever it is they are paying you for.
Sure, I need it to sell, but that's a different part of the job or a later stage if you will.
2. "We're trying to build a team here, not hire individuals." I can't stress how important this is, and how many companies SAY this in the interview and then do jack squat to foster a team environment once someone is hired. It's also hard in an industry where individual merits matter so much and we all know that our individual skills are such we can walk and be hired somewhere else immediately: the motivation for individuals to become team players can be lacking, especially when it's not made clear what the benefits of being a team player will be.
It's totally okay if you didn't get the metaphor... there's lot's of symbolism that goes over my head in lots of media, but I don't think it's fair to say the photos aren't relevant to the content.
I took it more along the lines of a metaphor of the power dynamic of the interviewee/hiring manager. Whereas the interviewee may be stressed and concerned about getting a job to put food on the table to feed their family or keep a roof over their head, the person in power doesn't give a shit about you...its all about them and their desire, which happens to be eating ice cream while flexing their power to deny you a job.
In the authors own words:
>Why take the outcome personally?
Yeah why take the outcome of your career and livelihood personally
When I reject someone: It's not about me, it's about your ability to do the job.
Getting a technical job is like dating: I had to interview at a lot of different companies before I chose the company that I work at. It took me about 6 weeks, full-time, to find my current role.
Software engineering involves some learned skills, but also an aptitude that can not be learned. The same is true for athletics, musicianship, entrepreneurship, ect.
If you're frustrated in your job search, it may be time to evaluate both the kind of career you're trying to have, the lifestyle it affords. Sometimes making ends meet means living more frugally with a more appropriate career.
The author said something very similar in her blog.
Maybe interviewing and hiring isn't anything like dating, and the people in power who treat it as such should reflect on that.
>It's not about me, it's about your ability to do the job.
If it were, you probably wouldn't equate it with dating. Or you wouldn't hear SV companies continually talk about cultural fit.
There's a easy way to adjust the tone: Keep the headshot at the beginning, and crop the ones in the middle of the article to just the ice cream.
After the conclusion, include a blurb that says something like, "hiring is like choosing an ice cream cone; you can't have all the flavors," and then put in a ton of face shots with ice cream.
Keeps the focus in the article and still allows personal expression!
(And, otherwise, it's a damn good article.)
I miss people just expressing who they are with all their quirks and originality. I feel that the internet is too bland these days. Or maybe I should just stop frequenting medium.com....
It was as if you were reading along and then every paragraph your coworker would tap you on the shoulder and shout "ice cream!"
* 3-tier ice cream cone - fancy club
* vanilla ice cream - looking for scarcity
* multi-flavor ice cream cone - assembling a team
* giant scope with tons of flavors and toppings - different level
* 3 scopes with one on the side - team fit
* just a cone - low bar
Only, you don't know how to read them. And that distracts you.
It makes sense/speaks to me, in a reassuring way.
And it reminds me how the web was, a few years ago, so free from judgement in how "messages are supposed to look such or such".
The web was never a place where technical blogs included vapid selfies. There'd be a bio pic at the most. What message do the vapid selfies convey on this page? What sense do they make to you that others are missing out on?
Well, I'm definitely never going to apply there after reading this, so it's working!
While I can't speak for the specific people at Honeycomb, this request for clarification usually results in the interviewers clarifying that they're talking about the case where the interviewee _never_ responds to them, even when they are the one asking the questions. Responding to the person who asked the question is 101 conversation stuff.
In my experience, while some sexist folks who would be terrible coworkers hide it well, many don't. I interviewed someone once whose answer to the over-the-plate softball question of "What's a weakness of yours that you're working on?" was "Women don't get along with me. We're like this. mimes punching hands together" This was for a role where he'd be expected to work with customers who were primarily women. Amazing.