426 karma · joined June 3, 2009
f804288e0af39623eb0595f036cc83549e3aca6485655810b568fa2bd50df667
You should be upfront with the employer. "I think the best way for me to showcase my skills would be to come onsite for a day, and tackle whatever projects you're working on currently. After 8 hours, you'll have a good assessment as to whether or not it's a fit, and vice-versa."
I definitely agree that keeping salaries secret until the very last second - when you've spent days or weeks in an interview process, and become emotionally vested in the outcome - is a tool that's been wielded against the benefit of Engineers.
Our goal is to break that cycle, and shed some transparency on this otherwise opaque part of the hiring process and get better alignment upfront about comp. expectations before time gets wasted by either party.
1.) Data is stored in a central database, and not across dozens of email accounts, LinkedIn Recruiter accounts, etc.
2.) Working with over 1100 companies, and hundreds of candidates every week, we have a huge sample size to draw on
3.) We actually have a full time Business Intelligence Analyst on our team, and we subscribe to data analysis tools such as "Looker" to build internal dashboards, and metrics which help us drive marketplace efficiency... we also have a Data Scientist on staff, whom we found on Hired (naturally!)
I've heard about a few instances of the past year of startup founders treating their employees really badly... from lying about work hour expectations, to the details of the day to day job in order to get someone to sign on the dotted line. Even firing people, without cause, within days of them starting.
It's been amazing to watch the growth of Optimizely from seed stage to the massive success story it is today.
Rapportive captures the contact info of every person whose email you open (or who you write to).
A typical advance is $4000 - $10,000 (for well known authors), split into several parts.
Royalties vary, 8-15% is standard. Programatic Programmers is much more generous.
$1000 advance is unusually low.
It's a massive lift for our team (based on tax savings) when an eventual liquidity event occurs, with no downside for the company other than additional paperwork and some legal costs.
Unfortunately, we see this more often than not at seed stage companies.
http://www.businessinsider.com/startup-odds-of-success-2013-...
"37 of the 511 companies that have gone through the Y Combinator program over the past 5 years have either sold for, or are now worth, more than $40 million."
Remote is a non-starter for 99% of start-ups... and a lot of companies that are selling pants online are searching for PhD-level engineering talent to run their shopping cart.
UPVOTE!! I'm shocked at how many companies are unwilling to pay for a $500 Southwest ticket to fly someone in for a day to interview from Texas or Georgia... relocation costs are easily offset by a slightly lower salary, and the person you're interviewing is unlikely to have 4 or 5 paper offers in hand.
Check out Gild.com, Sourcing.io, 3Sourcing, Entelo, etc.
There's no way for you to remove yourself or opt out of their databases.
The number of positions filled through job boards has dropped by more than half in the last decade.
Last year, only 1.3 percent of hires came from Monster.com and 1.2 percent from CareerBuilder... yet Monster.com alone sucked up nearly $1 Billion in revenue from ad postings that are largely ineffective.
For more, see: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2013/08/ask-the-hea...
A request for "weekly updates" is also quite burdensome on founders, and they also have the optionality of a board seat (also unusual for investments at this stage).
If you're not in your 20's, don't drink alcohol everyday, don't have a degree from Stanford/MIT/UC Berkley, and want to get home to see your wife/children by 7PM then you're "not a cultural fit"
Most of the VC-funded startups in SF that we're working with are more than happy to pay for a Southwest flight and a hotel room upfront, rather than doing the reimbursement thing.
As a general rule, the "submit receipts & wait for reimbursement" methodology is a bad idea. If a company truly wants you, they should be rolling out the red carpet, which includes not inconveniencing you.
On the flip side of the coin, we've had 2 separate occasions where the start-ups paid for airfare, only to have the engineers not show up to interview. So it definitely goes both ways...
https://devauc-static.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/2013/10/Late-Sta...
As an anecdote, the one time I left a 1-star review, the next day I had a 20-min wait to get a car. Not sure if it was bad luck or I was getting penalized for leaving a bad review...
"Job descriptions heavily larded with keywords make it virtually impossible to find good candidates. But every day that an impossible job requisition remains unfilled, the employment system vendors make more money while companies keep advertising for the perfect hires."
... I'm a big believer that the market will shift to "pay for results", not "pay for subscription access to an aggregated database that you have to hire 4 people full-time just to sift through".
"...employers believe they save money when they leave jobs vacant, because their accounting systems track the cost of having workers on the payroll — but cannot track the cost of leaving work undone."
The standard fee charged to companies is 25%, though that is often negotiable. At Hired.com we charge 15% (20% of which goes back to the Engineer/Designer/Data Scientist when they get hired).
It might be worthwhile investing in a 9 or 12 week course to pick-up rails at Hackbright Academy, or one of the other programming intensives. Given your years and years of experience, I'm sure you'd have no trouble picking it up quickly.
Google alone has 900 recruiters who scour the entire world with an open checkbook for the best talent, while offering some of the highest comp packages in the industry.