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Comment by SmellTheGlove | Hacker News Reader

I'm really surprised this thread isn't more active! CEO of a newly public startup opened a thread and is active in the comments. This is great stuff.

- Just rewinding back to when you decided to get started - how did you convince yourself to leave a (presumably) comfortable, reasonably paying job to starting your own thing? It's that leap that scares me the most, so curious of your take.

- If you have anything you'd care to speculate, what would be easier and what would be harder about doing a startup now versus when you all kicked off a decade ago?

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I was doing high frequency trading before starting Amplitude. It was a great job: incredibly smart people, rewarding problems, great money and career progression. The only thing I didn't like was the ethos of secrecy in the industry.

It was clear the long term potential of positive impact on the world was way greater through building a company than anything else. And if you didn't quit you were very likely to get there. One of the things that most resonated with me was one of the Airbnb founders talking about how they were having the same dilemma as you. But then they saw someone who had started a company and realized the only difference was that they had made the decision to start a company and that's what made them realize they could make the same choice. I wouldn't recommend it if you have other life circumstances like debt or significant family obligations that constrain you. But if you don't have that I think it's a great path.

Better: Markets are way bigger and so the ecosystem has adapted around that. Funding is incredibly abundant (kids these days...). Information on how to start a company is more widely available. There's much more experienced help available. Tooling is much easier. What's crazy is people said the funding market was too hot in 2014: https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/05/its-time-for-vcs-to-run-to...

Worse: Hiring is harder. There is a lot more competition but I think it's outweighed by markets being bigger. I think talent is still the rate limiting factor overall for the growth of the ecosystem.

Surely the hiring issue is a market inefficiency, then, no? There's got to be plenty of engineers out there, but maybe not for typical startup cash/equity structures.

I believe a few things are happening:

1) The number of software engineers is growing quickly, but the market for software is growing even more quickly. So engineers are becoming more scarce relatively speaking and that pushes prices up. I don't know that I'd call that an inefficiency so much as markets working properly! OTOH, that's also why you see the explosion of coding bootcamps and alternative paths into the industry. Both my brother and sister in law did a coding bootcamp and 2x'd their salaries in 6 months! I don't think there's any sort of career investment you can make that comes close. So yeah- we haven't reached an equilibrium yet, there needs to be a lot more software engineers, and everyone is struggling to hire.

2) The market is not efficient at pricing top engineering talent in particular. It's hard for most companies to tell who the top engineers are (pg has written extensively about this). As a result, top engineers are underpaid by and large across the industry and companies that figure that out can get an edge. I've always said I'm for paying 10x engineering talent 2x above the average as you're getting 5x the value! You see a lot of FAANG taking this approach as well which is why salaries for the top end for engineers is growing at an outsized rate relative to engineers as a whole.

Makes me curious about your recruitment process :-)

(I agree with everything you wrote btw)

For example, screening questions? Work sample? Take home? Coding interview? Whiteboard or type on computer or something else?

(Best wishes btw)

When it comes to startups in particular, it might be a case of actual shortage. Not everyone wants to work at a startup, particularly in the earlier stages, even if comp is similar to what one could get in a public company. Couple that with the relative rarity of actually good engineers among the population of qualified software engineers, the fact that you don't want to hire juniors or new grads at very early stages, and the general difficulty of hiring SWEs, and, although I'd like to see data before making a definitive statement, I can see how it could be many times more difficult to hire at a small startup than a larger and more established company.

Does anybody happen to know whether data on this actually exists or not?

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