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Comment by manuelabeledo | Hacker News Reader

If there is one thing I have learnt from working at startups, successful or not, it would be that turnover is extremely high in the first few years, and that’s fine.

I have interviewed countless candidates who have a romanticised idea of what a startup is. Perhaps it didn’t help that HR kept using euphemisms like “fast paced” or “extreme ownership” in job postings, I don’t know. Reality is, not many people are ready to work in a constant state of uncertainty. When the company didn’t get the expects funding, uncertainty might as well be seen as almost chaos.

The author softens it a little bit by saying that, in startups, everything is a “variable”, which I believe is, again, an euphemism.

But I guess that it would be way harder to hire if you said the bad parts out loud: in their early stages, startups are messy, chaotic, and you never know if you are going to make it to the next week, regardless of how awesome the product is.

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The startup I worked for had essentially 0 attrition for many years. Attrition didn't really pick up until years later after the company was acquired.

Not sure I buy that high turnover is inevitable

I agree that acquisitions tend to cause larger departures of talent.

> Not sure I buy that high turnover is inevitable

I guess it also depends on the context, e.g. labour market, geography, culture, etc. In my case, my first two were based in Europe, and many hires found the risk/pace to reward ratio unacceptable.

It’s also a matter of how good you are at hiring. I obviously wasn’t, if we look at the results.

Yeah this was in SF, and early days were early-mid 2010s.

To be honest I don't know why anybody would join a startup at today's inflated valuations. Though they seem to be coming down now.

You work much harder just to have a chance to make a FAANG equivalent pay it you get really lucky. I'd only join one again if ownership % was very high and protected from dilution.

I owned a fair amount of my company, joined at low valuation and still came away just roughly equivalent to mid level FAANG comp. Though I was young/dumb and could have negotiated much higher equity, in retrospect.

To be fair I came in with an untraditional background, and the journey/experience certainly was fulfilling in it's own right

It is only fine if you are running your business on the assumption that people can and do leave for different reasons and you plan or adjust for it.

A startup I worked in struggled because someone had been given too many shares and then the CEO wanted them out but didn't want to leave equity with someone who wasn't working there any more. If they had planned that in from the beginning and not been so quick to hand out large equity amounts, they could have much more easily fired them and moved on.

Same issue with people who can't do their job for whatever reason. If you don't realise that is a possibility, then you don't think of success measures, targets etc. and so they end up staying too long before you realise they are not working, at which point it is even harder to get rid of them rather than saying up-front, "we expect X within 3 months".

Another blog I read recently said your hiring process is number one priority bar-none and I think I agree. So much of success is down to the right people that you need to consider all of this before your first hire.

Interesting points. “Startup on steroids” aka “startup within a big company” is a euphemism for a business unit with bad organisation inside a company that is too chaotic to introduce new products through normal channels necessitating a direct to video spinoff.

It might be harder to hire, but you'd probably end up with people who thrive in that environment.

Will this get you to where you want to be faster? Dunno.

> It might be harder to hire, but you'd probably end up with people who thrive in that environment.

This is a key point.

As you do when you run startups, you wear many hats, and one of the hats I frequently wore was that of interviewer.

In that role you very quickly develop a smell-test for the corporate-type.

It is an inevitable fact that the majority of responses from any job ad will come from people whose immediately previous job(s) were in the corporate environment.

That's fine, nothing wrong with that. But you have to structure your interview technique as such that you try to determine if they are more the corporate-type who has become accustomed to the cushy life of the corporate world (teams, departments, tight job descriptions, guaranteed 9–5 life etc.).

The problem with those who have become accustomed to the corporate world is that they'll never change. The mentality becomes too engrained, they seriously struggle and cause headaches for their colleagues. The more years they've spent in corprate-land, the worse it is.

I would often find the classic "do you have any more questions for me?" at the end of the interview to be the most revealing of all as to the mindset of the candidate.

Do you mean that corporate types ask thee wrong questions - “how much vacation do I get” or don’t ask questions at all?

The former.

They ask about vacation, perks/benefits etc. ... basically all the fluffy intangible stuff.

The most classic one I remember was a guy had an interesting CV, interviewed reasonably well, then at the end of the interview his choice of question to ask was "where's my office ?".

The briefest of glances at his surroundings whilst being led to the interview room would have made it quite clear there were no private corner offices with a view on offer (it was a small open-plan office, the only two closed off rooms were the interview/meeting room and the kitchenette ... both had glass partitions, so it was clear to see).

Aside from the obvious, the other problem with the question was that the job ad did state this was a primarily field-based role.

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