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As someone who considered applying to PostHog but never to Google (even though Google recruiters reached out to me, while PostHog’s did not), I can explain why they attract applicants.

First, in several countries, working at Google won’t make you rich—they don’t always offer the highest salaries in the region. You’ll have a comfortable life, but you’ll still need to work for the rest of your career. Second, Google is not a remote-first company, which is a dealbreaker for some.

My (perhaps flawed) reasoning was that, in its early days, PostHog was a very small company with a great product that people genuinely enjoyed using. If you received stock options, the potential for a big financial upside seemed high. Plus, working at a small company is simply more exciting—your contributions actually make a difference.

Does Google not offer RSU’s to employees outside of the US? You won’t ever get rich off of salary alone, salary and RSU’s of a growing publicly traded company is a different story though.

As you alluded to, it’s very rare for even founders to make a life changing amount of money from a company they start, it’s exceedingly rare for early employees to have this happen and should not be a reason you consider working at a small company.

The right reasons to work at a small company are the other ones you mentioned: high impact, like working in small teams, interesting work, cool product, etc… but my point is that the interview process for the small company and the big company are often times very similar even though the amount of risk, scale, future career opportunities, and potential financial gain are worlds apart from each other, which isn’t right.

The level of effort I should have to put into an interview should be proportional to what I stand to gain by getting the job. This is kind of already how it works naturally because more desirable jobs have more applicants which makes it more competitive and requires more preparation. I stand to gain much more working at Google than I do at posthog, so why am I spending around the same amount of time interviewing at each place? Is working on a smaller team and having more impact on a smaller product worth it to me to do that? Personally that answer is no which is why I don’t understand the interview similarities (mainly time spent interviewing and acceptance rate in this case).

PostHogs seed round was 3 million USD, but the likelihood that Google at this point of time is going to lets say 20x in a decade is vanishingly small. And remember, even in the early days customers loved them, so certain risks where lowered.

Remote-first also changes the dynamic of who gets promoted.

I mean each to his own, but personally I would rather bet big iff I wanted to quit my current job. I think now the PostHog sail has long gone with the risk and reward ratio.

The idea that engineers at Google don't get rich is not based on reality.

Sure as long as you realize you are really betting big, if you’re lucky and after dilution you own 0.1% of the company, posthog needs to sell to someone for a billion dollars for you to make one million.

And that’s one million before tax, before the preferred stock gets paid out to the big investors, after the lock out period where you can sell your stock a few months after the deal goes through. That’s not 1B valuation either, that’s someone buying the company for 1B in cash. Not impossible, but definitely unlikely.

If you work at google for 5 years you will almost definitely make more than you would working at posthog and getting acquired in the same amount of time, but yes if lighting strikes twice in the same place and posthog did an IPO and the stock 20xed you would miss out on that money

In Brazil, it seems to offer, but it amounts to a very good compensation, not a retirement-in-10-years compensation.

Levels.fyi puts the total compensation of a L5 at ~$140k/year

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...

Having attended a SuperDay, I can hands down state that their interview process is the best I've ever had (didn't get the job tho, which was probably for the best at this phase of life). Designed to perfectly lift signal and minimize noise, for what they're trying to achieve. Don't change a thing PostHog.

I personally think there are more efficient ways to get a high signal to noise ratio on if you are going to be a good hire or not without having the candidate invest almost 9 hours into an interview process, but that’s just me

A 9 hour investment to make a decision that will strongly affect 50% of your waking life for years or decades doesn't seem like a big ask.

It's not that it's a 9-hour investment. It's that for someone looking for a new job, it's 9 hours * N jobs they're applying to. That adds up quick.

> A 9 hour investment to make a decision that will strongly affect 50% of your waking life for years or decades doesn't seem like a big ask.

You only apply for one job a year? Twice a year?

There are very many good candidates a company will miss out on by asking for a full unpaid day from the candidates.

What happened at the SuperDay?

what was the process like? What made it so good? Asking because I'm trying to build out a process as well

This was one of the reasons why I applied. I wasn't entirely sure it was the right fit (my current job is flexible, which is good, vs a grind, and I'm happy there) but I wanted to study their ways a bit and see what I could bring back, because my company has made some remarkably terrible hires over the past few years.

In short, it's a very well designed "build an app" take home test. There isn't a solution so to speak, but its designed to test your product-engineer aptitude as well as your execution speed, as there are things to get done and requires some thoughtfulness. One can go in a lot of different directions with it. Code can look great, but did you build the right thing, something actually relevant? That's what's important.

Its the sort of test that would instantly filter out 99% of applicants, because of the product emphasis vs the code emphasis, and good product engineers are rare. One could be the best coder around but not have a clue what to build. They want people who know what to build.

I had a lot of fun working on it and loved the challenge, but ultimately didn't know what to build and was fishing a bit, being more of a platform engineer vs product engineer.

>There must be a better way to do interviews.

Interviews are a game of asymmetric information. The job seeker has much more knowledge of what they can and cannot effectively do than the job offerer. And the job offerer has much more knowledge of what is and is not required for true success than the job seeker.

Given that, no, there really doesn't have to be a better way than just "interview a lot of people and take your best guess". If you stop taking the time to do that you will eventually be outmaneuvered by someone who does.

Your premise that it is a hard task (that I agree with) doesn’t lead to the conclusion that stopping doing how it is done now will be harmful to the company. It just might be the opposite.

Also, the GP seems to wonder about better ways to do interviews, not stop doing those entirely

Sure but the burden is on the company to understand what skills they need to hire for well enough to hire for the role, not on the candidate to just prepare for everything and roll the dice in a 9 hour interview

This is where interviews can and should be done differently. In my career some questions I’ve been asked in interviews are: serialize and deserialize a binary tree, create an in memory cache from scratch, design an elevator system for a building, sequence DNA strands together using dynamic programming, build a flight control system for an airport, recreate atoi function, etc…

Sure enough, none of these interview questions had pretty much anything in common with what work I would end up doing at the company, so this was an inefficient way to hire that wasted a lot of my time.

This would be like trying to find a plumber to fix my sink by having them come over, showing them the sink, then sitting them down to grill them on the theory behind some thermodynamics, Bernoulli’s principle, maybe throw in some design questions about how to redo my sink. This is surely how you find the best plumber because only the best will take the time to really understand what they are doing when they fix a sink right?

Like it or not the vast majority of work in the software industry is e-plumbing where you fix sinks and connect pipes together to start the flow of CRUD from one end to the other, which is why our way of interviewing people is insane.

As an exercise for the reader, see if you can figure out which interview questions I listed above were asked to work at a FFANG company vs small startup companies that are all bankrupt now. Pretty hard isn’t it?

>[T]he burden is on the company to understand what skills they need to hire for well enough to hire for the role

It's best not framed as a burden, but a tradeoff. Companies who understand better what skills they need to hire for quite reliably higher higher quality candidates, or are able to get away with paying them less, or both.

Take McDonald's as an extreme example. I am certain McDonald's has paid good money to figure out exactly what someone needs to be able to do in order to be an able burger flipper. That's a big part of why they're able to hire such folk quickly, at scale, at $10 an hour.

Most software companies face economic conditions which incentivize them to take the other end of the tradeoff. The work often is percieved to span such a vast possibility space it's nearly impossible to precisely specify the requirements a software engineering job has, in a way anything like the McDonald's position can be.

One of the mechanisms they choose to employ to minimize false positives despite this huge uncertainty in their own requirements is "Offer a lot of money and let the cream rise to the crop via pre-hiring competition". Hiring someone at $100/hr who is obviously and clearly very smart and hardworking is a much safer bet than hiring someone at $85/hr who you think could probably handle the job with a lot of effort, assuming nothing in their personal life derails them over the next 6 months or anything.

Final aside:

>This is surely how you find the best plumber because only the best will take the time to really understand what they are doing when they fix a sink right?

Nobody's ever looking for the best. They're looking for good enough, within tolerances.

I do have an uncle who did become a plumber after a long career as a chemical engineer. He is extremely sought after, and charges to match. He doesn't usually take "change my sink" jobs.

Superday is a paid day of work with a 30-minute talk with a founder + a 30min review about the day with an engineer

Ah ok my mistake, so that’s 8 hours including the review and discussion portion for the super day, then let’s say 45 minutes for the technical interview so 8 hours and 45 minutes of time spent interviewing at a minimum.

I had a superday, which to their credit was paid. It was for a technical product role which they wanted to hire people with some baseline technical ability, but it wasn't a coding job. I was up front that while I can code, and do build my own projects, I'm not a app developer. The superday was an app development exercise, and they let me know I didn't pass because my app development skills were not up to snuff. Not really sure how or why that played out that way, but at least I was compensated.

>> Wow. 900 applications down to 10 "SuperDay" participants down to 4 hires. All to work at.... posthog. What a depressing statistic.

Yeah, at first I thought it was some kind of parody, then I realized it's a serious article and was astonished.

> “If you aren't excited about what you're working on, pivot. It's as simple as that. You'll achieve more if you're working on something that feels yours.”

I doubt the rank and file ICs feel this way at all. It's analytics plumbing, and it's all for the sake of the paycheck.

Ya I have yet to meet anyone who is passionate about analytics plumbing surprisingly, I’m glad posthog has found the 4 people in the world who truly are.

What this really translates to is the founders saying “we think posthog is our golden ticket to becoming rich in an exit event someday, so don’t mess it up for us”. It’s just not politically correct to say that, so it’s expressed as being “passionate about the problems the company solves” or “working on something that feels yours”.

And if you’re not someone who wants to dance and clap along with the founders as they sing “I’ve got a golden ticket!” on the way to the chocolate factory, only to be left standing behind the gate as they enter, then ya go ahead and pivot because you’re killing the vibe here…

If you’re very product or customer focused, you can be passionate about anything.

When I’ve worked at shops that made products I, personally, didn’t care about, it was always satisfying to see a customer be excited about a feature or be thankful for the tool I’m building.

The first time that happened was when an admin thanked me in a support ticket for speeding up the generation of expense report spreadsheets way back.

I've had finance thank me for writing a perl script that reduced the time they spent on daily (yes, daily) work from 2 hours to 2 minutes (ok, maybe 5 minutes).

Never underestimate the benefit of having the finance department on the side of IT's innovation.

Have you bothered to spend any time looking at their entirely open source product, docs, handbook, etc? There are many different things going on here. A gross and frankly ignorant simplification, considering what they've built.

No I didn’t bother to read their documentation after seeing their website was apparently made on Myspace.

As someone who has gone through the roughly 9 hour interview process in the past, was it the docs and open source product that made you want to work there?

At my current job, we use some variety of each tool that PostHog has built. We have analytics, feature flags, session replay, surveys, error logging and more. We spend an astronomical amount of money for these services, and where was that login again? Everything about managing (and utilizing) these subscriptions is inefficient, and coordinating all of these different views into our data is a terrible chore.

As an engineer wanting to build a successful product, I hate the fact that this is how it is. And then there's PostHog, where each of these tools is right there, connected to one another, ready to make my job (and my company's success) that much easier. Being able to work on something that simplifies all of this for others is very enticing.

Combine that with their open-company ethos (check out their handbook), and high-trust/high-performance product-engineer mindset, and yah... sign me up. This is a company that legitimately makes other people's lives easier, and thus makes for better products. Something to feel proud about.

> Wow. 900 applications down to 10 "SuperDay" participants down to 4 hires.

You’re almost 10 times more likely to be accepted to Stanford’s undergraduate program than to ever work as a hogger

> You’re almost 10 times more likely to be accepted to Stanford’s undergraduate program than to ever work as a hogger

You have to pay for Stanford whereas Hog pays you. Wrong direction?

The funny thing is that small companies that create a hiring process like this because they will only tolerate working with the best people actually end up selecting the best of the most desperate people, which was usually not the intention.

I've worked at many startups over the years and I've always been very involved in hiring, I call this the MDE (most desperate engineer) effect and it's something I always try to make founders, other engineers, etc... understand when the company starts to discuss hiring processes more.

The premise is simple, the difficulty of your hiring process needs to be directly corelated to the perceived future value of said company. If you are an OpenAI right now, you can have the most difficult, convoluted, time intensive hiring process in the world and the best engineers will still sit through it because they score very high in potential future value. Other companies cannot / should not have as difficult of a hiring process because you will end up selecting from a pool of people who are willing to endure anything just to get a job, get experience, get a job that pays in USD, renew their H1B visa, etc...

This doesn't mean these people are bad engineers or shouldn't be considered, but if I had a dollar for every time a founder or CTO at a startup said that this company is only hiring the best, most passionate people bar none I would be a rich man, and a lot of the people in this category just need a job to put food on the table (which seems to be exactly the kind of people the company wants to avoid at all costs funnily enough).

We had enormous success at the startups I worked at where we would talk to great engineers who worked at FFANG companies and explain the problems we wanted to work on, how we were thinking of approaching it, why it was interesting to us, where we saw the company going, and how they could help us get there as opposed to trying to squeeze them through a long tedious interview cycle. Granted these people did have previous work experience to help vet them, but again the process is something that can be adjusted depending on where the company is and what you are looking for.

Sheep mentality hard at work at companies. Just because Google does it (processes, technologies, systems etc), lets also adopt it without thinking whether its relevant in our context and use-cases. I bet the same devs from these firms who are asking to traverse a minimum spanning tree would fumble at even the slightest variation of the problem appearing in daily life.

A general rant.

> Let me know when you're on par with Google in terms of revenue or benefits or prestige

Do you really choose your employer based on their revenue? or prestige??

I would bet a majority of engineers at FAANG companies are there primarily - or in large part - because of the prestige.

If I’m going to sit through 9 hours of interviews to maybe get an offer, then yes absolutely.

I’m not going to work my rear end off for 4 years to get 0.5% of potentially nothing and go through your dog and pony show of an interview cycle

And 0.5% is generous, to boot - after dilution and share classing and options expiring you would probably be better off just working a big tech job.

Absolutely. Both majorly impact my long term earning potential.

It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money. - Albert Camus

If i was that good why would i work for posthog instead of hft shop lol

Delusional web slop companies strike again

After some googling turns out it’s an analytics company but they behave ad they do fission.