Somewhat Verbatim Conversation with a Startup Recruiter
blog.galler.io
blog.galler.io
The three biggest takeaways, I think, when seeking employment at a startup:
1. Money v. Experience is a false dichotomy.
2. It is worth your time and effort to quantify the actual value of things like free lunches and insurance.
3. Follow patio11's advice on evaluating equity:
Roll d100. (Not the right kind of geek? Sorry. rand(100) then.)
0~70: Your equity grant is worth nothing.
71~94: Your equity grant is worth a lump sum of money which makes you about as much money as you gave up working for the startup, instead of working for a megacorp at a higher salary with better benefits.
95~99: Your equity grant is a lifechanging amount of money. You won’t feel rich — you’re not the richest person you know, because many of the people you spent the last several years with are now richer than you by definition — but your family will never again give you grief for not having gone into $FAVORED_FIELD like a proper $YOUR_INGROUP.
100: You worked at the next Google, and are rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Congratulations.
Perceptive readers will note that 100 does not actually show up on a d100 or rand(100).
(Read the whole article, it's wonderful.)
This is simply incorrect. For example, a d6 goes from 1 to 6, a d8 from 1 to 8, etc. The bounds are implicit in the notation of dX. A d100 roll is meant to be 1-100; you roll two d10s and each die represents one digit. 00 is taken to be 100.
Now, if you're rolling a percentile, you follow the same procedure except 00 might represent 0%. In that case, 100% is excluded. However this is never called a d100.
Another familiar talking point: working at our startup will be a massive learning opportunity; your twenties and thirties should really be spent learning as much as possible. You can start earning money in your forties.
(
I wonder if this is designed to attract that demographic who went to school primarily to take hard courses because they literally feel like they are not learning unless an external factor challenges them.
)
I think it's best to be earning and learning. You shouldn't have to choose between one or the other. There's no reason to stop learning at 40; many people alive will make it to 90, which means they're less than a third of the way through adult life.
Also, compensation is important. Most people think professional achievement and status beget compensation, but the reverse can happen. You tend to get better projects if you're highly paid, because it's expensive to waste your time on low-end work.
I've worked mainly at startup organizations since I got out of school. I turned 30 last week. None of the startups I worked at panned out, all but the last has folded (try getting references when every company you've worked at no longer exists), and all the equity I ever vested is worth less than the papers I had to sign to get it.
So, I'm 30, still job hopping, have no meaningful financial assets to speak of, and I sit around and listen to people say your 20s are for building up a massive hoard of cash and investments so you can live the rest of your life. Ouch. Failureland. Yes, it's my fault. I didn't recalibrate my salary when insanity struck and fresh bumbling BSCS graduates started making more than me with eight years of relevant experience. I could have gone to a Big Corp and had a Soul Crushing Job with Better Pay for the past eight years. I could be a millionaire by now with careful saving. But, no. Move fast and ruin your life. Let the 20-something founders "take money off the table" while watching the rest of the company honestly believe they are amazing, almost touched-by-god people. Work for sub-market wages with free lunches, work-on-whatever-you-want policies, and unlimited vacation days. Shoot for the stars. Enable the dreams of the founders and first five employees who were hired five years ago to cash out. Just keep moving diagonally. (pretend I made an elaborate chess joke at the end there)
Perhaps we just need better transportation so I can commute to jobs in SF and NYC while living in Iowa.
This is not really true all the time, you know. You should probably pick up and try it out for a while.
There are different levels of big corp, but there's a price on every side.
That was uncalled-for.
None of the startups I worked at panned out, all but the last has folded (try getting references when every company you've worked at no longer exists), and all the equity I ever vested is worth less than the papers I had to sign to get it.
I just turned 30 as well, so I'm the same age as you are.
This is fairly typical, and you shouldn't feel bad about it. Most of the information that you need to evaluate a startup job is not available to an engineer in his 20s.
I've concluded that you don't do startup jobs for employee equity. You do them for high positions (as the firm matures) and introductions. This means you have to ask yourself: will the CEO be making introductions on my behalf, so I could do my own startup if I wanted, in 24-36 months? If yes, continue on. If no, don't.
The worst thing that happens isn't joining a startup and getting low equity, because that's typical and not really insulting or a reflection on you-- it's just business. Market conditions are such that you don't really have position to ask for more equity. Much worse is joining a startup and having it grow above you. It's not only humiliating, but it means you've irreversibly fallen into the "not a real player" bucket and should leave because it's only going to get worse.
However, the job volatility of the startup market does make you a less attractive candidate in the future, and people don't talk about it much, but the "job hopper" stigma is still alive outside of VC-funded startups.
I sit around and listen to people say your 20s are for building up a massive hoard of cash and investments so you can live the rest of your life. Ouch. Failureland.
If it makes you feel better, I bet that less than 5% of people our age have more than $25,000 in net worth. Our generation has been screwed but, to our benefit, demography favors us being politically powerful in the 2020s to '40s. We'll be broke in the near future, but the political torch is passing to us.
Being a large/dominant generation (which we are, like the Boomers) is bad when you're young because of wage depression and competition-- this is part of why the Boomers rebelled in the 1960s; compared to what their parents faced, the workplace was getting much more competitive-- but it starts to favor a generation in middle age because they become the political core.
Move fast and ruin your life.
Well said. The real crime of this system isn't that startups don't pay well and that equity slices are small. The deep injustice is in the long-term career effects that no one talks about. If you have 5 no-name startups on your resume, that hedge fund job is a lot harder to get. Ten years ago, finance was pretty hot for technical talent of any kind; but, in 2013, the typical job-hopping of our world gets you creamed on "cultural fit". Hedge funds are a different world-- they pay better and I think their cultures are usually better than what most startups have-- but more conservative, more superficially conformist, and (because of the trade-secret risk) not likely to hire someone who seems to leave jobs quickly (even though, with most startups, you can tell if you're wasting your time at 6 months). Startups know that the degenerate job hoppers out there (which are a small fraction of all job hoppers; most of us leave quickly not because of character flaws, but just because most jobs aren't worth keeping) aren't an existential danger, because amassing the connections and managing investors and building a brand is very hard; but hedge funds have a justified fear of people stealing their trading strategies and don't want to hire people with quick feet.
If I wanted to go gray hat, my startup would be to generate a bunch of shell companies (staffed by people who offer references) with nice websites and offer career plastic surgery "as a service" for people with damaged resumes. One could even typo-squat established companies ("tell me about your time at Göldman"). The sad thing is, it's probably the best startup idea I've ever had. I know there's a market (startup peons with damaged careers) for it, making money would be ridiculously easy, and it would probably be good for society. Unfortunately, the reputation issues would be pretty severe; it'd be the last startup I ever did.
Work for sub-market wages with free lunches, work-on-whatever-you-want policies, and unlimited vacation days.
I'm a huge champion of open allocation (which is not as extreme as "work on whatever you want"; you're still responsible for working on something of value to the firm) but any startup that has a "work on whatever you want" policy is either lying or destined for failure. Startups need focus, and they need implicit focus (low management overhead) which means there isn't an open/closed allocation distinction yet because they work as one team. Open allocation starts to be the right way to go around 15-50 people.
Perhaps we just need better transportation so I can commute to jobs in SF and NYC while living in Iowa.
This is what I've learned. If you work in New York or the Valley in your 20s, that is your savings. You lose everything to rent, which means that the reputation premium you get from working high-status jobs better be strong.
I think that, as our generation gets increasingly jaded and as a larger number of smart people return from NYC and SF empty-handed, society will absorb the signal and the next decade of technical talent will want to avoid the high-rent cities (which will remain expensive for other reasons). I could see Austin or Seattle or even Chicago (which, by rights, should have a strong tech scene) taking the lion's share of the new action.
Um... what else are we talking about here.
Oh, right. Loserdom.
Well, I don't feel bad about anything. I enjoy having had a series of jobs where I could show up at 10am and leave at 3pm or take a week off to do a 600 mile bike ride or tell my boss "No, I won't do what you ask. It's unreasonable." knowing he has no real power in the organization.
With all the startups I worked at, I never exercised my options. It was clear they were loser startups with loser founders and loser execs. They were comfortable for a time though. HN money boasting brings out all the people who have been at google since they were 23 and have been making $250k/year for the past eight years though. That kinda hurts. But, the world is big—we can be better than The Safe Path.
I'm not sure how much damage the "job hopper" stigma imparts. People know shit happens. Some people.
Your "one new tech hub outside SF/NYC" is way too timid. Try twelve new ones. I've got a writeup about that in my head needing to make its way out through my fingers soon.
Your rent-is-overgrown-evil rants are top notch. We're one step away from landlords demanding to know how much you make so they can set the apartment price to exactly 1/3rd of your take home pay.
Honestly, the best thing we (as people who haven't achieved greatness in the face of media constantly focusing solely on 18 year olds becoming millionaires) can do is to stop reading the news. Get out of your head. Mindfulness. Talk enough to change the direction of opinion in the world. Let it sink in. Talk some more. Shut up for a while and create good things. At least try. There is no try.
We're only left with one practical path to greatness: Make good art.
Happy 4th.
In defense of good startups:
1- Some of us pay equal to or more than BigCo, so you're not always making a salary trade-off.
2- Options are a lottery, but with better odds than most people give them credit for: 13% of VC-backed startups exit for over $10M, 5% exit for over $50M, and 2% exit for over $100M, which is what I'd call a meaningful exit for all parties involved [1]. Everybody's experience is different, but many of our early employees can attest that options sure can be worth quite a lot.
3- You get to have real impact at a startup. Try doing that at BigCo.
4- The culture isn't soul-sucking.
If you find the right startup, I think you are "optimizing for happiness". Get paid market, be in an environment where you can have autonomy and impact, get stuff done and shipped, and focus on what you enjoy doing.
You don't have to worry about the millions of ups and downs of starting your own or freelancing. And you have a 1/50 lottery ticket of making it big, and a pretty decent chance of picking up some sizable savings.
Obviously, I am biased :)
[1] http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-truth-behind-9-out-of-10-st...
True, but BigCo's also have consistent (if meager) raise policies.
2- Options are a lottery, but with better odds than most people give them credit for: 13% of VC-backed startups exit for over $10M, 5% exit for over $50M, and 2% exit for over $100M, which is what I'd call a meaningful exit for all parties involved [1]. Everybody's experience is different, but many of our early employees can attest that options sure can be worth quite a lot.
With a typical engineer slice, a $10m or even $100m exit isn't meaningful. You might get $10-20k per year of vesting. Even in bad years, bankers get better bonuses (without the tax problems.)
3- You get to have real impact at a startup. Try doing that at BigCo.
Startups win that comparison, no question. A startup doesn't guarantee an impact, but the odds are a lot better.
4- The culture isn't soul-sucking.
There are soul-sucking startups and non-soul-sucking big companies. Cultures tend to regress to the mean with size, so the really amazing and really horrible companies tend to be startups, while all the big companies tend to be somewhere in the middle.
We have consistent (and not meager) raise policies.
> With a typical engineer slice, a $10m or even $100m exit isn't meaningful. You might get $10-20k per year of vesting. Even in bad years, bankers get better bonuses (without the tax problems.)
Depends on when you join. If you join early, $100m will damn well be meaningful. If you join later, I hope you'd only consider doing so if the company has significant traction and should be worth many times more than $100m.
> There are soul-sucking startups and non-soul-sucking big companies. Cultures tend to regress to the mean with size, so the really amazing and really horrible companies tend to be startups, while all the big companies tend to be somewhere in the middle.
I will give you that there are both good and very bad startups. My experience with large companies is that they regress towards the 25th percentile, at best.
Spend more time around the startup before joining and decide what the culture is like for yourself. Any founder can blow smoke up your ass about how awesome the culture is in an interview; spend a week working and you'll get a pretty good idea.
Most startups, even many claiming otherwise pay less than market. You could probably capture at least half that $50k/year in cash, particularly if you're willing to work for goog/fb/msft/etc. That doesn't even touch the variance of that payout.
Also, in expectation and off the top of my head with your success statistics, that $252k is under $50k.
We too had a low 9 figure exit. Although the money wasn't life changing for employees, the experience was. Winning feels good, man.
a) startups mostly fail, and aren't for most people b) don't join to get rich, join for the team c) remember pmarca's insight that market is more important than team for success. d) whatever the outcome, don't be bitter, or gloat.
How's business? Any good stories?
This isn't to say that I preferred the big-corp work over the startup work--ultimately, I see them as two sides of the same coin of corporate cargo-cultism. It's a rare thing to find a company that respects productivity, be it big or small. But to me, it stands to reason that you're more likely to find it in a company that has a track record of being profitable. I prefer to work for myself now, on my own projects and as a consultant (B2B has an interesting effect of putting you on your "employer's" level. As a businessman, I am now my clients' pier, not their peon. It's a difference that makes all the difference).
But the biggest-impact work I've done in my life was for one of the largest manufacturing corporations in the world. At 25 years old, I had a team of developers and support technicians that I managed for a product that went out to thousands of customers around the world to facilitate them in planning and executing major, industrial construction projects. It was a combination of them giving me a chance because of successes I had in other projects (over a very short period of time, I spent longer just trying to get my coworkers to hang out with me after hours in startups), me taking initiative, and them looking the other way when I bent their rules and delivered results.
Second job out of college. Why me? Because I tried, that is all. And this was not even in the suburbs, this was RURAL. You think you need to be in the valley or NYC or Boston? Please, opportunity is everywhere.
Sure, go be employee #3 at the next bullshit iPhone app. Ooooh, you're using Sinatra and Handlebars and a flat UI. Big whoop. What does any of it mean? Put your balls on the table and show me that you can make an app that works across browsers, going back to IE 6, with a hostile network admin and DBA (who even has a DBA anymore), do it like it was nothing, and not complain about it. "oooh, web standards, boohoo" GET OVER IT! Do the work! Get it done. Preferably NOW!
Go to work for Ford or General Electric or Kellogs and if you just stand up every once in a while and toot your own horn, not expect people to recognize your "clear brilliance" over the chaos of their own lives and just hand you things, then you can do a lot of really great work and get compensated very well for it.
And they're much less likely to ask you to sleep in the office overnight. Actually, yeah, that's NEVER going to happen at a big corporation. They will know for a fact that the only reason you're doing that is to make up for goofing off during the daytime hours and come very quickly down on disciplinary action. You think it's cool your startup employer lets you work whenever your want? How do your friends feel about not getting to see you during normal social hours? Oh, what's that, you don't have any friends outside of work.
Yerp.
A long time ago, an engineer who used to work at a big old east-coast company told me that management said, "If you can't get your work done in 8 hours, then either you're incompetent and you should be fired, or your boss is incompetent and your boss should be fired."
I don't entirely agree. It's possible to do it at BigCo too. You make it sound as if it's impossible. It's probably harder than at a startup, but not the impossible tone you give to it.
"It's like twitter. Except we charge people to use it."
App.net seems to be doing fine sans a time machine.
I'm having a hard time verifying its authenticity. There are at least a few claims (unsurprisingly, by the other party in the exchange) that the entire thing is fake.
Name and work history matches perfectly.
Edit: Here's a counterarticle arguing David Thorne is a cyberbully: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/funnyman-of...
He tried to hire my friend and it was weird.
Case in point: It wasn't until I began interviewing for business development roles with startups that a dialogue around high-level employment was simply ended with no follow-up.
I had spoken with one particular five-person shop (with a TechStars pedigree and a new wave of Series A under their belt) for a month or so. I had met the entire team and had an incredibly good rapport with the CEO/Co-Founder. We were down to the point of salary negotiations...
...and then, radio silence. That was eight weeks ago. I even sent two short emails every ten days just to see if there was any other insights or thoughts I could provide to help firm up their decision. The emails were ignored; I even bumped INTO the founder one day, and said founder promised to "follow-up this week". That was three weeks ago.
My time as a recruiter for my consulting firm taught me to treat each candidate with empathy and respect (unless they give you a reason not to do so). Unfortunately, by mishandling the process these startups lose not only a potential future employee, but also a potential user and partner in the instance that you have a leading role elsewhere.
I do occasionally wonder how some founders have the time & money to travel to every conference/meetup/event on the circuit. I suppose some of them are simply uber-talented and can balance that with the needs of their business... but between coding and talking to customers it's all I can do to find time to sleep or eat (and occasionally read HN ;)).
That realization prompted me to become a founder. If I was going to work on a company that was hard to explain, it better damn well be my own, and I better like it.
1. You need an entry level job, and this is a good resume builder
2. You are dreaming of being rich
I always feel that non entry level people at startups like this are getting duped and that makes me feel depressed about the state of our industry.
Hopefully once you're passed 5 employees you have at least some of your shit together. Otherwise it's hard to recruit employees.
The people that are very successful today all started somewhere. Many of them started at a startup, built something, and made a name for themselves. In their 30s, they are now in demand execs who have proven track records of building out teams and products.
At the end of the day no one is going to give you 50% of a company, not test you to see if you can write code and think logically, and not check to see if you are a good cultural fit in an early stage startup. It sounds like this a huge issue for you so you have two choices:
1. Go do your own startup. 2. Turn down the job and work somewhere else. 3. Go work for some mega-corp that pays you well.
In the end, you are just spamming the board with your pointless posts.
This recruiter is throwing out a lot of red flags, from being in stealth mode (frequently if not generally a company killer, something I've observed first hand), to not having much respect for the recruitee, which suggests he won't get much respect if hired.
Although his apparent dislike of coding on a whiteboard is a red flag if I put on my interviewer hat; if he can't prove he can code one way or another, you don't hire him.
(1) now backed by google's data http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...
I'm deadly serious about this; the last time I played this "game", back in 1997-8, we were using one of the 2 best D.C. area head hunters, were already receiving well screened resumes which we further screened, and even then a solid 1/2 of the "programmers" we interviewed couldn't program.
They showed no signs of "do this in public" performance anxiety, e.g. we would have been flexible on all but one of the tests by e.g. not hovering over the interviewee and/or providing an EMACS or Visual C++ editing buffer (the exception was "find bugs in this block of code on the board", which I think is a different sort of thing, especially since public code checking is something people do). And our write some code tests were simple, reverse a doubly linked list (C or C++), and compute the factorial of a number, which we supplied the definition of for those who'd forgotten.
Side note: I was their first programmer employee, back when they couldn't afford head hunters, just a classified ad (they'd already tapped out their networks), and the #1 reason I was hired was I was the only one who passed the white board programming test. Which I viewed as so trivial that when that fact was mentioned I didn't really remember the details of it.
Anyway I don't think I'll be able to argue you out of your long-held beliefs per se. All I (and other engineer employers reading this) need to know is, Google has been the foremost purveyor of this method since it began hiring engineers and they now say their data shows it doesn't work. That's enough for me to renounce it and find other ways to screen talent (and yes, we're currently looking for a senior hacker in the Bay Area).
PS. btw, you might want to see a specialist about that deadly seriousness... before it gets, you know, too deadly ;-)
I'm sorry I wasn't clear, specifically:
The find bugs test was code we supplied, sprinkled with bugs subtle and not so subtle, and simple syntax wasn't being tested, but things such as using an uninitialized variable. The candidate had to find "some" of them, but there was never a problem in deciding who passed and who failed the test.
We also weren't at all particular about syntax in the examples that had to be written from scratch; the interviewee did had to signal to us he did knew proper syntax, but, come on, getting it all right is the job of an editor (well, so I, an EMACS user since 1980 think) and of course the compiler.
Otherwise you might try rereading what I wrote, e.g. I said "performance anxiety" in the context of writing the from scratch code examples. I.e. if we'd cued into that, or the interviewee had asked, we would have left them alone to write them, or put them in front of an edit buffer to do so while we didn't hover over them.
Counterwise, wow, I must really be coming across as a hard case, for "while a senior engineer watches you like a hawk (without any intention of helping you out)" was very much not true, see the above not watching option and we most certainly helped the interviewee out if he asked the right sorts of questions or paused at certain points while writing it.
I.e. while it would be a negative to have forgotten the difference between * and ->, we would have told them and then seen if they grocked pointers, that and recursion were the higher level things we were looking for (they were requirements for what we were doing). But it was never even close, it was never difficult deciding if someone passed or failed these three tests.
Seriously, deadly or not, while it was possible we had some false negatives, it really didn't seem to be the case, and enough other people I respect endorse this that I'm not about to stop advocating it.
As far as I can tell the Fizz-Buzz test, which is intended to be easier than reversing a linked list, has no connection to Google. "Google has been the foremost purveyor of this method since it began hiring engineers" might be true today, but in my days Microsoft was best known for this, before Google was even officially founded.
This was of course back when Microsoft was famous for being fairly well run, and their "hidden" "secret" was being consistently able to write software that "worked", i.e. didn't core dump (much)), one of the reasons all their big DOS era competitors fell behind or died in the transition to Windows.
I suppose that seeing the situation turned around might help convince people of the truth of the maxim that when selling a product, you should set your price according to the value it has to the purchaser, not what it cost you to make...
Do not jump to respond aggressively without any actual thought.
"getting slammed by investors" That's their job. They need to grow up. As an engineer, we get slammed by other engineers. Criticism is a good and necessary thing.
"probably have put in more hours and more capital than you ever will" Capital yes. Hours is debatable. Early stage employees can surpass the hours a founder is putting in.
"Zoom out a bit and their chances of failing" As are yours then as an early employee.
I think the line of risk and effort between founders and early employees is slim...and the tilt of rewards is heavily slanted towards the founders. That being said, it largely makes sense as they founders have done (typically) a lot of proof of concept work as well as handling a lot of the dirty work (HR, initial sales, fundraising, etc.).
"I presume you founded something. That means you take risks. Don't over-estimate yourself, because you may just be desperate, and therefore more willing to take risks. Or you're a gambler. Either way, founding a company isn't exactly a badge of honor.
If your idea/company isn't getting traction it would do your well to reflect on why. Others have given you clues. You may disagree with them, but you still don't have traction. Why not? Being angry won't help improve your idea or convince people to help you, with talent or advice. Of course, perhaps your idea/company just won't work. The typical case is that no one wants what your startup is trying to sell. Refine, repair, pivot or move on. "
Regardless, I found this part amusing:
> not test you to see if you can write code and think logically
The article you are commenting on doesn't suggest that you shouldn't have to write code during an interview. Quite the opposite, in fact.
> check to see if you are a good cultural fit
Oh, and this doesn't mean what you think it means. Let me put this another way: it doesn't mean professional. In fact, it instead values the opposite of what that word implies.
>1. Go do your own startup. 2. Turn down the job and work somewhere else. 3. Go work for some mega-corp that pays you well.
man, that looks like 3 choices.