How to hire a lot of talented people, very quickly | Hacker News Reader

How to hire a lot of talented people, very quickly

ryanleecarson.tumblr.com

123 pointswwdevries86 comments

I am running a bootstrapped start-up (by choice). We pay salaries to 5 people (three MIT EECS grads, one Berkeley CS). I think these people are very good. From my prospective, if you operate without VC money, I.e. from the actual revenues that you get, what's described in the post is irrational exuberance. It's a sign of a VC investment bubble. We absolutely could NOT work 4 days a week and remain competitive ( we could not even run the existing service that way, with user all complaints, attack threats, vendor interactions, hardware failures).

I'm a member of the product team at Treehouse, and was employee #3. We don't go around talking about the 4 day work week because it's something that we think is a great gimmick that we were fortunate enough to be able to pull off because we hit the VC lottery. It's something at the core of who we are as a company and something we've seen help us compete - not only in hiring but also in productivity. We see a huge benefit in rest, fresh thinking, and a healthy balance between our work and the rest of our lives. The 4 day work week builds that into who we are. It's not the only way to achieve those goals, but one of the primary ways we pull it off.

We've been working the 4-day work week far longer than we've had VC money. Our first investment came in the fall of 2011, long after we existed as a company, and we were profitable prior to raising VC.

I think it's great that you guys are trying out new ways to work. I'm an entrepreneur myself, and while I don't have employees yet I'm open to new business models. I wish more companies, funded or not, would be more daring.

So how do you address the points made in the GP post? Specifically, attacks, hardware failures, other issues that immediately impact customers? I assume that you don't wait until monday to address a failure that occurs thursday night, right?

When it comes to keeping the service running, there's always one person on call. We're really flexible on our team about hours, so if you need to do something on Saturday night you can cut out a little early a different day - honestly if you feel done for the day you can be done any day, but most of us are super driven and don't want to stop working when it's time. Despite the general 9-6 guideline we're not super formal about our hours.

Our support team also works a bit on the weekend (around 3 hours per day), and that's something we're working on fixing by adding to the team.

Are you saying that in general people work more than 32 hours a week? What is the average number of hours you work each week?

I work between 32 and 35 hours each week. I think about Treehouse a ton more (if I'm not asleep I've probably thought about Treehouse in the past couple of minutes), and answer email from time to time, but I don't know anyone who doesn't do that, and I usually get mean looks from my wife when I spend much time outside of my normal work hours answering email or playing around with code.

In general I don't think people on our team work more than 32-35 hours or so. One exception is our support team, and that's something we're working on remedying.

Spot on.

Look, I know little about Treehouse, but I read the blog when things appear on HN. It looks like a useful product, and seems to be run by sincere guys. But you're talking about attracting good talent when you're able to offer amazing benefits, salaries and a 4 day work week. That is only possible because you're swimming in cash, and you're only swimming in cash because this space is still riding the upswing of the business cycle. The market will sort this out, and one only has to look around to see that. It's unsustainable. How old is your business? Let's see if you're still working 4 day weeks in five years.

That said, it's probably a great place to work. Kudos for sharing the wealth with your employees.

I've been running businesses that work a 4-day week since 2007. Two of those businesses were acquired (one in 2008 and one in 2011).

I'd say that's pretty good proof that it's not just sustainable, it's also very smart.

I keep forgetting that SV operates under completely different definitions than the rest of the business world. I don't mean offense by that, it's just the truth.

You started a business in 2007 using a 4 day work week and it was acquired in 2008? That's not evidence of sustainability. Smart? Yes, apparently. But is that business still using a 4 day week?

We're not based in SV. I live in the UK and the rest of the Team is spread around the US with our main office in Orlando.

Yes, the acquired company still runs a 4-day week.

You might be right or you might wrong for bootstrapped companies but in my experience working at different small and big companies working long hours really don't translate into profitability and productivity.

In general I saw that developers working on "a secret sauce" (i.e., engineers in Oracle working on RDBMS, etc.) are not working more than 35 hours a week while developers working on some generic CRUD crap work all days and night.

Now the challenge is to hire developers which can work on or develop your "secret sauce"... which is point of this post.

You should consider the possibility that you are wrong.

As I understand it, Henry Ford chose a 40-hour work week because he found that it maximized the total output of his employees. Computer programming is (minute-for-minute) considerably more demanding than working an assembly line. Maybe an average programmer maximizes her total output when she works substantially less than 40 hours a week. In fact I'd be surprised if that weren't the case.

And of course you could still run the service if you guys worked four-day weeks. Just make sure somebody's working on any given day.

Have you ever worked on an assembly line (or in a factory of any kind)? It's hard, backbreaking work that from my experience sucks much, much harder than any programming job I've ever had.

Hacking code may be more mentally taxing, but if you need to take break (for the bathroom or whatever) you can do it on your own schedule -- not on your lunch break like a lot of factory workers.

First of all, I'd like to congratulate Ryan Carson on the idea of 4-day work week. Hopefully this would start the ball rolling on the whole discussion of work/life balance here in the states. It is such a great concept and I'm sure will attract a lot of top talent.

The only thing is, it needs validation. I hope the company does really well in the long run, and therefore puts 4-day work week on the table for others to follow. Wouldn't that be great...

I'm not sure how sustainable this 4day work week will be. Will it last the acquisition? Imagine buying a company that either makes your existing employee unhappy, make you lose the talent you just got, or forces you to convert the entire company into a 4 day week operation.

Two comments, you assume they intend to be acquired, and why optimize for something that late stage when you are trying to remain an competitive edge? (The edge in this case is a skillful happy workforce)

Thanks for the kind words :)

We've been doing a 4-day week since 2007, so it's been five years and thankfully we've been successful.

Hi Ryan, I've never worked at a place that had a 4-day week and I'd love if you could one day do a blog post about it (forgive me if you you've already done this before). The things that changed, adjustments that needed to be made, how it has affected productivity. I would like to run a company like that someday, but it feels so scary to lose 8 hours of paid work a week.

Have you seen this article yet?

I covered quite a bit of it here: http://ryanleecarson.tumblr.com/post/21708810513/4-day-week and also here: http://ryanleecarson.tumblr.com/post/21776487625/a-lot-of-fo...

Thank you.

the video was exactly what I was looking for.

You could take validating from the original 5 day week (instead of the then norm of 6 day week) which Henry Ford introduced about 100 years ago.

I don't follow. If validation of the 5 day week implies the validation of the 4 day week, then... well, I am sure you see where this is going.

Well the logical conclusion is a 0 day week which is obviously not going to work. There must be some sort of balance somewhere.

Not really. The logical conclusion is that productivity becomes high enough to just use fewer employees.

I don't think the 4-day week makes sense. Once everyone switches to 4 days, what then? 3 days?

I think limited hours per day makes more sense. People can be laser focused for 5 or 6 hours per day if you give them a good work environment. Once you move to the usual 9 or 10 hours per day, personal life gets in the way and people goof off, achieving as much productivity as in the focused 5 hours.

We don't work a 9-10 hour day. I've written up the whole thing here if you're curious: http://ryanleecarson.tumblr.com/post/21708810513/4-day-week

Well, your blog post says 9am-6pm, which is 9 hours, lunch included. But I wouldn't expect anything less if you're going to do 4 days per week. I'd much rather work five days a week, 11am-5pm or 12pm-6pm, without a lunch break. Can you really put off your personal life every day from 9-6? I think the two biggest interruptions to a programmer's concentration are lunch (or other food) and meetings. Basically, anything that's on the clock.

If you want to reduce the total hours per week, doesn't it make more sense financially to work fewer hours per day but for five days and be able to pick up your kids at an earlier time each day? I would think that would be the case for most family folk. Don't your kids get off school or child care at somewhere around 3pm? Who takes care of them between 3pm and 6pm and how much does it cost you?

Finally, what a family person wants differs from what a single 20-something year old wants. 9am works great for a family man. 9am does not work fine for a 20-something year old, but in the majority of companies the family man is the boss and dictates the 9am start time.

My wife is a full-time Mother and she picks up our kids from school.

It's interesting how you think a 20-year old can't fit into the world's normal working hours. I managed just fine working normal hours when I was in my 20s.

Ah, ok, your choice looks to be in line with your situation.

Regarding younger folks, most people work regular work hours in their 20s, but if you take a poll, I bet plenty of them would prefer other arrangements. In a city like New York, there's plenty to do between the hours of midnight and 4am any night of the week, regardless of one's view of such activities. To paraphrase one founder from a previous job, "it's fun going out Sunday nights. You get to meet the people who don't have a 9-to-5 job." If you think back to college, where people could more or less choose their daytime schedule, most students did not go to sleep before 1am. Being stuck signing up for the 9am class was a major disappointment for people. At the same time, though, lining up your schedule to have every Friday off (which was a rare possibility) was highly prized!

My generalization is that people in their 20s favor flexibility to accomodate nightlife (and fun in general), whereas family folk favor a set reliable schedule structured around their kid's schedule and maximizing time with the significant other.

Bottom line though, employers should sit down with their hires on the first day and ask them what's important to them in their personal life so it can be accommodated.

I've never heard of getting out of school at 3pm. Unless you are in college and intentionally choosing that class schedule, this make no sense. When I was in high school, it was 4pm, and I went to school at 8am, except my junior and senior years, which was 7am.

Explain why 9am does not work for a 20-something. Yes, I am a family guy as well, but even when I was single, I was at work by 9am almost every day at the ripe old age of 21. If you said your reason was, "I don't like waking up before 9am," I'll buy that, but the position you state is an empty one at best without some sort of evidence.

I think thats it. There are tons of people who dont like waking up early, and it could be an underlying genetic predisposition. Generally speaking, forcing adults to do something they really dont want to do can create some nasty issues. If an employee isnt a morning person but is expected to show up early regularly, its only a matter of time until something gives. Everyday presents a challenge, and if there is no balance, something starts to accumulate (resentment, anger, jelousy).

At least in school you get a whole summer to recover.

Most of the companies I've talked with said they had a preferred time that you come in (typically 9am), but if you wanted some other arrangement, they'd take it into consideration or try it out. The company I'm currently at has people come in as early as 7am to as late as 11am.

As one of Helidor's other posts mentioned, it needs to be mentioned that a flexible schedule/later "clock-in" time is acceptable as long as you get your work done if that's what an individual truly cares about. This all comes back to the position that I and most others I know hold, and that being that you pick your values that you won't budge on, make them known, and poke around until you find something that fits.

To your point of being forced to do something you don't want to do, having been in a company that "forced" me to work 60+ weeks on a regular basis and having almost no time to spend with my family drove me up the wall. I bounced out as soon as I found something better. That presented a very big challenge for all three of us in my family to the point where my kid wondered if I was going to be home in time to put her to bed some days. Hearing those kinds of statements from your kid really puts things into perspective and makes you see if what you are doing is really worth it.

Helidor is referencing the fact that Ryan has / was in the UK, where the school day typically runs 9am -> 3pm or thereabouts (maybe 3.15 / 3.30)

Was not aware of this. Learn something new everyday. Thanks!

I understand lunch being a distraction, but anything less than 3 meals a day is AFAIK know bad for health. I know it detoriated mine. So I think a good lunch break is important. I'm still in college, so have no idea what being in office is like.

> I don't think the 4-day week makes sense. Once everyone switches to 4 days, what then? 3 days?

You could say the same about lowering prices: "why should I lower my prices to $X, what's next, $X-1?" If it gives you a competitive advantage, and yet you are still able to profit and succeed, then the economics of it make sense.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope ?

Let me start by saying that I don't know anything about Treehouse or their profitability... but based on that benefit list, they're either REALLY profitable or they've got a bunch of upfront investor money to burn through.

Given how young they are and that their investor list includes the likes of Kevin Rose and Reid Hoffman, I'm going to go with the latter.

I operate a small ecommerce company with about 15 employees that include everything from developers to warehouse workers. There's no way I could sustain such benefit list and I know none of my competitors could either. There's just not a high enough margin (and we're in a high margin business).

The answer might be that a company whose product is "knowledge work" might be in a different boat, but it really makes me wonder if you can sustain that kind those kinds of benefits when you're standing on your own two feet.

We were profitable before we raised any money.

Now that we've raised $5m, we can increase our burn to outpace our revenue to speed up customer acquisition and product development.

Well then congrats to you sir. When a company can manage that kind of profit, it's nice to see them using those resources to invest in serious talent for the long haul.

Gracias

Back in November, Ryan Carson revealed that they were earning ~$150,000 in revenue per month and growing rapidly. Venture capital money + revenue money = lots of money to pay benefits.

http://mixergy.com/treehouse-ryan-carson-interview/

It's great that they are having success with the 4 day work week.

However, one thing that would still appeal to me more though as a developer would be the ability to work remotely.

It's surprising even to me that I'd rather do 20% more work for the same money if it's at home!

I also suspect this would make it easy to 'hire talented people, very quickly' as it opens up the whole world to you in terms of candidates.

What are your thoughts on this Ryan?

A lot of our Product and Marketing Team Members work remotely. The only folks required to be at our Orlando office are the Video Pros and Teachers.

How often are they required to travel to your head offices for face to face meetings?

We have a huge company-wide meeting for a week, every quarter.

Money, it grows on trees and its great for balling up and hurling toward people.

I like this approach, it is very straightforward and allows for easy internal collaboration. Obviously, buckets visualize the amout of people in different stages of your hiring process very well. If I had to hire people, I'd try this instantly.

Edit: I have to apologize. I overlooked that the names are made up, so the following statement is incorrect. Sorry Ryan!

Sadly, I have to whine about some privacy issues: I don't approve of Ryan Carson's publishing the names of his applicants how it can be seen in the screenshot at [1]. I'm quite sure these are real names beloging to their applicants, and I wouldn't like to see my name published when I'm applying for a position at this company. On top of that, I would feel sad to see that my name had been greyed out but Person XY has advanced to the next stage.

Perhaps it is better to anonymize the information as I suspect it was not Ryan's intention to publish these names.

[1] http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4s36gOUJz1rneiz8.png

As someone with access to the Treehouse's real hiring board I can say that those aren't real names :)

Oops, sorry for the mistake. Its time to get off the computer I suppose :) Thanks!

He says, "I’ve created a public example that you can view, copy and then edit." [1] and the names there match his screenshot. They also include ringers like "Jenny Craig" and "Billy Jean". How/why are you "quite sure these are real names"? If you're right, I agree with you, but it seems hard to believe.

[1] https://trello.com/board/hiring-process/4fc4942316b650d22d09...

Those are just fake names ;)

We've been doing four-day weeks since 2008, with two offices in Australia and remote team-members in Berlin and the Phillipines. Apart from the obvious 50% more weekend for 20% less work, and the flexibility to work from anywhere, doing it this way has a less-tangible benefit: it requires and inculcates discipline and responsibility. Your attention is like a gas: it'll diffuse to fill the space available. Timeboxing your energy provides more work potential -- and your downtime is more productive too.

It's also a great talking point with clients. The 4DWW is gaining traction in the wider world: I was interviewed this week on dot-au national television to talk about it.

Also, move to a "developing" startup market, like Portland, where a Treehouse is one of the top 5-10 startup employers, vs. SF or Silicon Valley, where you are competing with a lot more startups, and where the Giants (FB, Google, Palantir, ...) are stronger competition than the giants in Portland.

(and living on 50-60k in Portland is fine even if you have kids; it is poverty unless you're either long established (own a home from the 1990s, or cheap rent), or alone. This opens up a lot more potential hires for non engineering roles)

Everyone is competing with Silicon Valley for talent, regardless of where you are.

True for the high end (where it's worth relocating), but not for any of the jobs I've seen posted on treehouse's site.

Reading this post makes me fear for a bubble -- when I read stuff like this it brings me back to 2000 all over again: "401(k) contribution matching, 100% matching up to 6% of your salary + Full coverage for medical, dental, and vision". I'll grant you that this isn't quite on the level of "your own private sushi chef" but it makes me uncomfortable that a company that's a startup would do this. I realize that good talent is hard to find, but this scares me...

What's more expensive?

1) Paying $20k-$50k to a recruiter, per person 2) Taking good care of your team so you get tons of applications for every job opening, from very talented people

Keep in mind that there's also a huge cost to attrition. Every person that leaves your company, because the culture is so-so, costs you a huge amount in time and cash resources to replace

"401(k) contribution matching, 100% matching up to 6% of your salary + Full coverage for medical, dental, and vision"

Those are normal benefits in corporate America. The 6% 401k match level is an IRS safe-harbor threshold most large employers try to meet each year. Even the vacation time (18 days) is modest for your European competition. I don't see where any of that is getting bubbly.

Additional step: Write a post like this and have it make the front page of Hacker News

Guess that always helps :)

I have to admit it caught my interest and I am not even really looking at the moment

> we’re about to hit 40 people at Treehouse and we’ll be at 60 in three more months. There was only seven of us 12 months ago, so we’ve grown very fast.

For a small company that's growing this quickly, it's probably going to take more than 12 months to know for sure if a hire is good or not. Declaring them as good does not make them so. I'd be interested to see a follow up post 12 months from now giving an update on retention rates and any hiring process updates they've subsequently made.

Treehouse is my fourth company and I've been running a 4-day week with all my teams since 2007.

I have a pretty good sense, based on experience, whether someone is a good hire or not. You often know within 30 days.

Major props on pulling off the 4-day week. I hope it catches on.

My criticism was limited to your early declaration of victory on your hiring binge. The bottom line is that you can't know if someone is going to end up ROI positive until they actually get there. After 30 days you can tell if someone is a good dude and they can get stuff done, but you can't tell if some other company will come along in 2 months and poach him. Shit happens.

By building a strong culture you are taking good steps to minimize the chances of losing people, but you won't really know if you've succeeded with these hires until they are a net positive.

You shouldn't hire someone unless they are going to add value to the business. If you're not sure about that then you shouldn't be giving them a job.

But hiring comes at a cost. Recruiting, on boarding, and getting new employees up to speed all cost money and resources. My only point is employees need to stay long enough to recoup those losses.

Interesting they don't hire any technical talent it seems, or am I missing something?

    Product
    Marketing
    Sales
    Teaching
    Video

If that's the case (which I'm now doubting considering what they teach) I can only see the bottle neck being onboarding. It can take a lot of effort and time to get one developer up to speed, never mind dozens of them in a matter of months.

Product encompasses the overall engineering / design talent.

That's correct - product for us includes development, design, and support.

Interesting. Hope that leads to a new blog post, how to bring all of these talented engineers up to speed at the same time while keeping the product on track.

I'm very happy to have found your blog. I'm also happy to see a company focusing on what's important... gaining that elusive talent.

I am currently just starting to use treehouse to train a group of new grads for the company I work at. I'm very impressed with the site.

@Ryan : if I was in your region, I would so be applying for a job ;)

Thank you! :) We're working really hard to improve the service as fast as we can.

How does the 'Project Trial' work for people who have full-time jobs already? I am sure it is great for evaluating those who are able to commit to such a thing, but aren't you leaving potentially valuable team members unable to pass muster due to time (rather than lack of fit) reasons?

Nice benefits indeed.

I would prefer to have to be 5 days a week in the office, but only have to work for 4 days. One day should be dedicated for your own projects. Whatever you want, but, in the office.

That's no good for people who have interests outside of the office. For example, I have two young boys and I want to spend my time with them on a Friday, not in the office.

Well, it should't be a day off, you should do something that has to do in general with what you do at work if possible. I haven't though about it that much, it was just an idea. If you get the day off, most people would probably just do what they want and "waste" the day (which means not being productive).

This whole idea of being productive every single day is why burnout happens. Using that extra day to not be productive (say, get the shopping done while the shops are quite and everything is open) means you can spend the weekend relaxing, so you're way more productive come Monday.

Been there. Most people are not motivated enough to do something like that, and it ends up feeling like a chore. In that case it's more productive to not be at the office.

It makes some kind of sense: boxing the time for creativity ends up killing it.

> boxing the time for creativity ends up killing it.

John Cleese argues the opposite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VShmtsLhkQg

From the rest of your comment, it seems to me that the feeling that it's a chore might be more the reason it kills creativity - not the setting aside time in and of itself. If you don't look forward to that time (not saying that's a bad thing, one way or the other), you probably won't get much out of it.

What I meant is that it can feel like a chore because it's something 'imposed' by the company. You have to do creative work on xxdays - doing it any other day is a waste, 'cause xxday is the alotted time - and it has to be related to your job, otherwise it's a waste too. It's not a very happy proposition, as good as the intention may be.

The problem is who is going to own the project built on that one day?

At Treehouse at various times we've had quite a few developers use their Friday for personal projects, but they just develop their own open source and personal projects on their own time on Friday (or whenever they choose to work on them during the week).

Spend VC money like this, work 4 days a week and then finally go down. !! :(

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