Startups, please stop calling it your 'Careers' page | Hacker News Reader

Startups, please stop calling it your 'Careers' page

robmcfeeley.com

27 pointsrmcfeeley34 comments

Wow, people get so worked up over such minutiae these days.

I finally registered just to show my full support over this comment. I found the title to be more of a link-bait than anything else. While I agree with the article that joining a startup is not exactly secure work, but what is? Joining a startup does generally have a lucrative personal growth opportunities and within the company itself. So yes, it should be called "career".

Indeed. I think I would indeed call what, for instance, Mark Zuckerberg is doing a "career". It's indeed a classic example of a Hacker News "look at me"-post, where the content seems to be less important than the title. While the quantity of these posts seem to increase, fortunately most post on HN still have real content.

right. Who cares what the page is called.

This was the proper response.

"Career" has become the formal version of "job" anyway. I would be wholly unsurprised if A/B testing showed that applicants for "career" are more experienced on average.

Proper = 1 = Black ________ Improper = 0 = White Presumably?

The world is very gray...

Would love to see the results of that test.

Now, if you want to talk about helping people A/B test their lives & careers, I'm interested :)

We've become so comfortable that we obsess over the title of a web page on some random startups website.

Absolutely incredible.

Thanks for the feedback - though I'd hardly describe myself as comfortable ;)

Quite the opposite actually - the main point here, and perhaps I could do a better job of getting that across, is that the traditional concept of a "career" as a series of deliberate, fairly obvious steps is eroding (if not entirely gone), but the word, and its connotations, remains.

More of a nit-picky linguistic thing perhaps, but psychology & first impressions are important here, and I get suspicious whenever I see what looks like folks labeling something relating to other peoples lives with a loaded term without consideration of its implications.

Stay uncomfortable - R

I get the point(s) - I think, but. . .careers don't have to be within one company. And these days, they rarely are. Also, once you're a few years out from your multiple start-up jobs, you may see how some hard or soft skill you acquired has contributed/is contributing to your career progression. Several years ago, I looked around at my peers in my current job and thought. . .I really was on a career path (though it was not particarly planned and it spanned a number of organizations and industries); I really do have more breadth and depth of knowledge and experience than I thought; even though I feel that my talents are often wasted, I really am viewed as more senior than I thought (salary ranges here are an open secret, if you know how/where to look). . .

Good point. "Imposter syndrome" is definitely a thing.

I think a lot about the hyphenated person these days (i.e. artist-programmer-writer-marketer-lover). Your point about retroactively realizing that you were on a path is a good one - my point here is that the notion of a "careers page" implies that you know where the hell you're going... or at least that working for startup X is a natural step along that path.

Most people, plainly, do not (or companies, for that matter), know where the hell they're going. Diving into the startup world is a great way to find that out--FAST. And that's definitely not a bad thing.

But 'career' is too loaded a word, IMHO, to capture all of this..

Actually, now that I think about it the foundation of the OP's case against the naming could be flawed.

From my perspective a career is made up of a number of jobs done through the life of that type of work. For a marketer it would be a few or many marketing jobs.

The perception for a potential future employee that a new job/gig/etc. with a start-up or a larger company is a good addition to building this foundation and progress in their career as a marketer/writer/programmer/etc. is an important image.

And hence start-ups should definitely continue calling it a career page.

The only exception is if the start-up believes that it is going to hurt the recruits career.

Also, I have never heard the word security associated with career as in "Career Security"; Job Security on the other is thrown around all the time.

Working for a start-up is a career opportunity, no matter how short the duration.

Most people who join start-up companies, have long term goals to start something later on in life, and the experience you get from working on almost all aspects of the business, and take part in critical decision making is highly invaluable in this regard.

Some people just like the excitement that comes with the uncertainty, and if all things fail, you can always get another job or start something if you are adventurous.

This post appears to come from a Sales (or businessy) person who tend to prefer a stable environment as against risk and excitement imo.

Author, please stop taking words so literally. This isn't that complicated. If I'm on a startups website and I want to apply for a job there I will look for two words. Those words are "jobs" and "careers" and to me (and probably most) they mean the same damn thing. Nobody arrives at a website and sees careers and automatically thinks anything you talked about.

"Author, please stop taking words so literally" is a wonderful sentence

I think calling it "careers" is much nicer than calling it "jobs."

Nobody is staying at jobs for 10-15 years anymore. You should be switching jobs every 3-5 years to refresh your skillset and stay updated. The days of working for Kodak for 40 years and then retiring are over.

I don't think you necessarily should be switching. . .depending on the company, you may be able to refresh and update by simply transferring to a different team or project. But yes, the reality is that, for most of us, that's what we need to do.

The college I went to had an online job posting board, I would check it weekly. Often there would be some startup on the careers page with the Title: "Rock Star Code Monkey Ninja wanted - Start your Career"

Guess which ones didnt receive my resume?

This is unfortunately an anti-thesis to the OPs opinion. I am guessing this was not your intention.

He talks of a "career" page. As in the title. The only time this matters is if you are already on their website.

If this was an obscure start-up, the reason you'd land on that page would be because something about them made you go to their website.

Now ask yourself this, when you visit a website would you prefer them calling the page with their job listings a gigs page, jobs page, job listing page or careers page?

Which one would you look for?

I think that career gives the person some optimism about the posting but it may give false hope to someone they are hiring just to get the product built or for only one project.

The only ones I dont like are the ones with a lot of buzzwords or code monkey type lingo.

Does he have any hard examples of this?

I've never seen this on any startup site I've looked at. Typically they're labeled "jobs" or "work with/for us."

https://coinbase.com/careers - which seems particularly "uncareerlike" given the volatility of what they deal with.

Seems like a startup should have much more important things to worry about than what to label their jobs page.

I don't think it's the name so much as the attitude that matters. I've definitely seen startup founders that expected a longer term commitment from employees than they did from themselves. The founders wanted employees to believe 100% that they would be at the company for years to come, even though the founders fully expected to guide the company from inception to acquisition as quickly as possible and then split. I think the reality is that startup industry people, regardless of whether they're in a founding or hired role, are in it to create businesses and learn how to do so. Once those opportunities evaporate, they're not going to see value in sticking around to turn the gears. Startups that try to hire for long-haulers are bringing in the asylum-seekers, not the risk-takers.

Full disclosure: I worked with the author for six months.

I'm just talking about worrying about the name. They should absolutely think long and hard about the actual page. I've just always treated jobs and careers as synonyms in that context.

For sure there are other things to worry about... but it's not a label, it's a first impression.

We didn't originally spend a lot of time thinking about our jobs pages at http://www.thinkful.com/ until candidates started asking about them. Then we realized the number of people who were turned off from talking to us because we explained the company so poorly.

There's still a lot of work to do, but that's always the case!

I don't think they should ignore the jobs page, actually the opposite. It's hugely important. I don't think they should worry about calling it jobs vs. careers is all (basing this on my experience just viewing them as synonyms).

I haven't quite formed an opinion on the authors point yet, but to answer your question I wen't over to angel.co[0] and checked the websites for the first three featured jobs and out of those two call it a career.

[0] https://angel.co/ [1] http://www.nimble.com/company/careers/ [2] https://poptip.com/careers/

I've noticed it, laughed to myself, and moved on. I didn't think it was that big a deal. Just wishful thinking on the company's part. No big deal.

Hi Joel -- quick search in response to your comment:

http://www.knewton.com/careers/ http://www.shopify.com/careers http://www.quirky.com/about/careers

I dont have a posting but there was one company that always had the title "Ignite your career."

I found out later the average turnaround was 6 months. Glad I turned down that job. Out of 5 classmates that chose them, only one was working 9 months later.

Ha - well said. Employee churnover in startupland is hilarious. This is not always obvious to those diving into this world for the first time.

A job sounds like something a person barely getting through high school looks for.

A career sounds like something you find yourself having once you've had three or four jobs.

If all(or some) three or four jobs were in the same fields such as writing/marketing/programming one would correctly argue that the career started with the first job of its kind, it just took you X number of jobs to realize that it was your career.

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