How to Game Silicon Valley’s System
wired.com
wired.com
Of course, to win, it's not sufficient to be contrarian — you have to be both contrarian and right. Whether or not these choices are right for you is probably highly dependent on what you're doing. But the idea of being contrarian, and not always following the received wisdom, is sound.
Not something like "what kind of music do you like". That shouldn't be a factor in hiring. Right?
Crap like this is why I stay far away from silicon valley. The saddest part is, it is mostly true.
Usually the founders are older. Or the work is harder / involves a whole bunch of C & C++.
Hence the point that companies (say in San Jose) should allow remote work to attract employees in SF.
you're preaching to the choir
I don't think this is necessarily conscious; I just think that businesses sense a power differential that comes with remote work: part of it being a tacit acknowledgement that this really expensive area is not the best place ever for talent, part of it being that this employee has a much better living situation comparatively, and part of it being that not seeing them in person regularly means less warm fuzzies for management.
Progressive minded businesses make it work by realizing that empowered workers produce better work. Everyone else hobbles by doing what everyone else does to stay into the warm blanket we call groupthink (aka 'best practices').
And then there are the jobs were you work remote with a week of office time every couple of months. Still a far cry from "working a day or two a week from home".
http://weworkremotely.com/ claims to be a directory of mythical places :-)
This has resulted in one of the most diverse and fun developer groups I've ever worked with. We all love code, and we're a mix of ethnicities, genders, and ages.
I imagine that Silicon Valley is missing out by not following a similar path.
So if you've been successful without this ritual, you have my attention. But what (if anything) are you doing to see if someone is good at writing software. Do you know the candidates you interview already, by reputation?
It's true that socially isolated young live-for-work white males are the most prepared to crank out code. But if we were just a little better at supporting different kinds of people, we'd have far more productive and healthy workplaces, while still being fun and weird.
My company is getting there. Interviewing more for values and velocity versus having all the geek merit badges. Plus we're getting more geographically distributed.
"Culture fit" is actually really important when you have 5-10 people working on a new company. It's better to have hegemony than a diverse set of opinions when your runway is 6-12 mths and you need to make concise decisions to survive.
The reverse is true for huge tech companies. Lack of diversity hurts their business in many ways.
Pretty much everything this article says is startup advice misapplied to major tech companies who are well beyond startups.
Culture is super-important-- in large part, to help make sure that the 47-year-old female Haskell badass and the 22-year-old male Ruby rockstar work well together-- but "cultural fit" is often used as an excuse for shitty behavior and exclusionist hiring practices.
Older developers, for example, bring a lot to the table. One study found that developers actually get better with age.
Very true. But people who've been around the block aren't going to carry a pager except for a project that is absolutely career-making for them (with both internal and external credibility as rewards) or when they're owners (and 0.05% ain't ownership). I hate the age discrimination culture but I know why it's there: there's a fear that older developers will "poison" the young with, you know, real world experience and knowledge about the industry and how it actually works, and of the games often played against politically inept engineers.
People often say that tech companies must be near other tech companies in order to succeed.
The Valley's about funding, not other tech companies. The west coast of the US is the easiest place in the world to raise VC. It's still difficult, and the process takes a long time and is generally obnoxious, but it's easier there than elsewhere.
Also, don't downplay "managed outcomes" (e.g. acqui-fails) that are bad for employees but good for founders' careers. Bay Area VCs can call in a favor they're owed, have the thing bought, and get the founders popped into executive positions at Google or Facebook. Harder to do that in Utah. This doesn't matter to employees but it's important for many VC-funded founders, especially since the VCs will push you to take on a much higher degree of risk than most founders would otherwise want.
They want privacy. “They say they work in an open office plan and wish they could go back to a cubicle,” he tells us.
Cubicles suck, too. Private or semi-private (i.e. two people) offices are the way to go. They're not that expensive. If you must use an open-ish plan, then give engineers booth-style seating where they have walls at their back. Open-back visibility is borderline abusive.
Don’t have the money for Swedish massages or an in-office coffee bar? There are less expensive perks.
Google's "free massage" perk is overstated. When I was there, you got one (for free) per year. Any more, and you have to pay for it. (That said, the price is quite fair.) This is not to nick Google-- I don't think that any company should be expected to pay for unlimited massage-- but just to point out that the competition ain't that stiff on the massage front. One 60-minute massage per year? That's about $80.
Many of those perks are cheap insofar as they're effective marketing expenditures. For $80 per employee, Google gets "free massage" out there.
Still, as a cynical 31-year-old, I'd rather have few of the "cute" perks and more salary. 401k matching and health benefits are important; massage, I can get on the market.
Finally, for one item that was missed... Rethink equity. Personally, I think finance-style profit-sharing (even if the bonus system can be really political) is superior. Also, equity has an uncanny valley. The amounts that non-executive employees get in startups are, quite often, so insignificant that I'd rather have it all in cash. If you are going to make equity part of the package, cut out slices that will make people actually care. This means 3-5% for employee #10 and 0.5-1% for employee #50... the actual numbers seem to be closer to 0.3% and 0.04%, which are in the "who gives a fuck" range.
People gripe about Wall Street's bonus system (in which profits are shared but employees, except for upper-tier executives, are not expected to acquire stock in the company) but it's a much better and fairer model of profit-sharing than what Silicon Valley does.
The reason why the equity slices are low from what I understand is in the end of a VC funded company the numbers are something like %70 investors, %15 founders and %15 employees. If your a unicorn performer like facebook, it's more %40 investors, %30 employees and %30 founders.
But you'll notice the pattern that all employees combined get the same equity as founders.
Also profit sharing is hard to do with the red ocean strategy of VC companies that give equity in the first place. When the company is around for 3-5 years concentrating on getting hundreds of millions of users first before collecting cash, profit sharing is going to be $0. Profit sharing is only something enterprise or product companies can do initially, and it cuts out the new search engine, the new social/messaging network and other long lead time companies that eventually dominate the software world. WhatsApp was purchased for billions because in a couple of years, it could of easily become the world's next Facebook at their growth rates. With under 40 engineers...
So to make the numbers work, angel list is going to be giving %0.25-%0.50 of the company to initial employees.
If my anecdotal skimming of AngelList job postings is any indication, even those numbers are, sadly, pretty high in today's market. It's not uncommon to see something like 0.25% being offered to lead engineers in the first batch of 10. I've also seen things like 0.025% for an Employee #25. Numbers like these are, quite frankly, insulting to anyone who knows better. For some reason, maybe a lot of people still don't know any better? It definitely strikes me as a weird sign of the times that companies can get away with stingier and stingier equity offers. The founders of these sorts of companies are basically taking on massive amounts of risk, then selling that risk down the foodchain to their employees.
I'm not sure what explains this behavior, since I'd always assumed that today's young engineers, in the era of the VC blogger and the founder/author, were better informed about the way things really work.
There are, of course, plenty of startups that don't play these sorts of games. Life's too short to work for a startup that does.
"It [the tech industry] often shuns women, minorities, and others who don’t fit into the rising “brogrammer” culture."
down right distasteful and a generalization that is pretty outrageous. I would go out on a limb and say most of the tech industry isn't racist, sexist, or anything else.
I'm petty sure the number of women in "tech" reflect the number of women graduating with C.S. degrees. If anything, women seem to get an unfair advantage just because they are women and "under represented."
I'm not saying that there aren't issues, but the author of the article pretty much calls everyone in tech a racists and sexist. Then goes on to write an article that these "techies" are suppose to read.
On the other hand there are a lot of barriers in place, of access and unconscious bias, which cause some very different outcomes.
How else would you explain the wide disparities? There are hardly any women or non-white non-Asians in technology in North America. And it's way out of line with comparable disciplines like mathematics or other sorts of engineering. CS is the only discipline where the number of women is actually going down.
http://flowingdata.com/2014/10/30/decline-of-women-in-comput...
The education system is part of the tech industry as a whole, and, of course, there's a feedback loop at play that reinforces the tech stereotypes over time. So even if no one person in the tech industry is consciously trying to discriminate against women, the industry in aggregate can play that role. I would argue that the numbers alone demonstrate a gender bias.
The women in tech who I've talked with about this issue certainly don't feel that they have an unfair advantage, and I've heard some pretty interesting criticisms. A couple examples:
- senior technical talent hiring practices are typically defined by men (since the industry is predominantly male), so the selection criteria for career progression is likely to have male-oriented biases.
- it's more socially awkward for a man and woman to get together for a drink after work in a career capacity, so it's correspondingly harder for a woman to share in the bonding experiences that build career-long relationships. (And no, I'm not just referring to our common "brogrammer" after-work partying stereotype -- the ritual of meeting up after work for a drink is probably as old as work itself.)
the author of the article pretty much calls everyone in tech a racists and sexist
I certainly didn't get that from the article. The article quoted someone who thinks that Silicon Valley investment scene is an "old boy's club", and says:
"The tech industry is notoriously ageist. It often shuns women, minorities, and others who don’t fit into the rising “brogrammer” culture."
I don't really buy into the last clause of that sentence, but IMO the percentage of women and certain minorities speaks for itself. I also believe (hope?) that, as I mentioned above, this bias can be attributed to unconscious bias in the industry as a whole, rather than overt -isms. I think that this is something we can help to fix, but a critical first step is to acknowledge that the diversity profile of the tech industry doesn't match up to the population as a whole, and that at a certain point that leads to practices that are self-reinforcing.
During the interview, they had mentioned that they were having trouble expanding at their headquarters due to lack of available qualified employees. Gee. I wonder why.
Weekly hour expectations for salaried exempt workers is already a suspect practice, in my view, but expecting work outside of normal business hours is definitely selecting against candidates who are not unmarried and childless. Schools, preschools, and day care businesses operate based on normal business hours. Generally, if your spouse works, you want to come and go at the same times of day. You don't want to live the rest of your life in cubicle farms.
Maybe the tech industry is not racist. Maybe there is just one particular demographic that just cares less about exploitative work arrangements. Maybe that demographic has historically had less reason to distrust authority. Maybe the quality selected for is not age, race, or sex, but sheer naivete.