If you are a startup and are trying to compete head to head with Google / FB / Amazon / Apple / Microsoft for the same people, you are going to have a really hard time recruiting.
But there are plenty of great engineers that don't want to work at those companies for various reasons. There are plenty of great engineers that want to work remotely and don't have that option at the large companies. There are also plenty of inexperienced engineers with high potential that can't yet get hired at those companies and can be great additions to your startup. Do what you can to find and recruit those people.
Very true. For both of our companies [1][2] we pay a fair salary plus a quarterly bonus on top of that based on what we can give (based on the company's quarterly profit results). We also offer remote retreats (so far Cape Town, Thailand, Martinique, Spain and Skiing in the Alps) and the biggest contributor to everyone's satisfaction is that we let everyone work from where ever they want and as much as they want as long as it is planned properly.
The result: we've had a couple of employees who received job offers from companies like Apple, Google and Facebook. But after going to the interview process and talking to other employees there they've all (with the exception of one) decided to stay with us, with a significantly lower salary, but a lot more freedom and work-life balance.
Not saying that we've a better offer than Google & co, but saying that our offer is different than theirs and there are enough people out there who care more about other things than just money.
The problem is there's no way to know how true the promises are. What do "flex hours" mean to them? Is it conditional, if so, on what? How far does their trust really go?
Compensation doesn't have this problem. You can't offer me $160k and then pay me $120k six months down the road. I mean, you can, but not with a straight face.
The soft benefits you described are one CTO/manager/investor change, or engineer bus accident, away from vanishing and it's not looked at the same way as cutting pay, furloughs, and things of that nature.
While I want to take one of these "work to live" jobs, I always end up taking the salary. I have a much easier time carving out a bastion of sanity in a given company that doesn't advertise the benefits, than to take a significant pay cut along with the risk I just described.
Totally agree. A lot of it is based on trust and a future that no one can predict nor guarantee. We're a small company of 20 (in my opinion) great people and we just have a different relationship with our employees than most other business owners.
While I totally get that the future is always uncertain, I think past actions of myself and our management team (which also includes employees) speak a lot for how we are probably gonna do things in the future. Our philosophy is called Optimizing for Happiness, because we try to base our decisions on what is best for everyone's happiness, even if it means to sometimes make less of an profit as long as the overall profit is still positive.
It's difficult to explain how we do things, but to give you one example of the past. We had always very successful quarters, except of one where we couldn't pay bonuses. In that quarter people did not complain, but also offered us to voluntarily work less (and get paid less) to overcome this situation. In the end it didn't come that far but I highly appreciated it. And I think this can only happen if it's a give and take from both sides and everyone genuinely caring about each other.
> We're a small company of 20 (in my opinion) great people and we just have a different relationship with our employees than most other business owners.
If that's not embodied in contract then it's, regrettably, close to worthless. Companies change, managers change, leadership changes, philosophy changes, contracts only change when they're renegotiated.
> I think past actions of myself and our management team (which also includes employees) speak a lot for how we are probably gonna do things in the future
In my experience it doesn't.
Soon the company is too big to known everyone, new managements and leaders emerge, whether you want it or not.
There are a lot of people joining in a growing startup. They will outnumber the current employees quickly and shift the current culture with them. Startups change in all aspects, very fast
That is true, if you build a company for growth. We built our company for lifestyle. We don't need to show off that we have 200 employees and make X million in revenue. While other people are busy bragging about it, we go skiing together. Different mindset.
I think the "not with a straight face" thing depends on what you're willing to get in writing up front and then insist on. As you say, companies can cut pay like they can change any other terms (depending on jurisdiction, natch, but mostly true in the US). The difference is that they know people take that very seriously. So if you want those other things to stay true, you have to be just as serious. Agreements don't enforce themselves.
I'm not sure how many companies would agree to it, but you could potentially work those items into your contract so that they are on the same level as other benefits (e.g., salary, health care).
The risk I described is separate from startups. A company of any size/age/growth rate can substitute soft benefits for compensation. To be clear, I was not talking about the job stability risk of working at a startup, or startups at all.
I'm always curious about companies who talk about "caring about things other than just money". Maybe I'm missing somethings but if you are a for-profit company by definition you care about money, any claims other wise feel like marketing.
I used to work for a proprietary financial trading firm, where we turned the founders' pile of money into a bigger pile of money. It's the purest "only care about the money" circumstance, and even there they occasionally cared about things other than money. E.g., the people they worked with.
More broadly, though, you misunderstand what companies are about. They're just a collection of people who get together to do a thing. They are only soulless to the extent that the people there are. (Or decide to pretend they are.)
The best places I've worked and visited actually care about the thing they're doing. E.g., I have friends who do catering. They love making people's events go well. They love making people happy. They fucking love the physical acts of making food and serving it to people. Sure, they have to get paid, or the enterprise isn't sustainable.
They are, legally, a for-profit business. But if clubbing seals or trading bonds got them 10% more annualized ROI, they wouldn't do it. Because they're not really there for the profit. They're there to please and delight people by doing something they enjoy.
(That isn't to say that reptiles in suits won't put on the mask of "changing the world!" when it gives them an advantage. We could all name examples like that. But there are plenty of sincere people out there.)
Never said we don't care about money. But we care also about other things than just money. And that a lot more than most other for-profit companies out there.
There's nothing wrong with making a profit either. The more profit we make the better. But it's important to decide what you do with that profit. And I much rather pay for our employees to join me for a week of skiing in the Alps than buying myself a Ferrari.
This is the right approach. Build a business you want to work at and your employees want to work at. Focus on maintaining operating costs and expenses, everything else is gravy. The buy in and work output isn't necessarily greater or worse than others, but I would argue the quality of life is through the roof. Kudos on what you're doing.
Average US commute time is about half an hour [1], add to that another 15 minutes on each side for context switching and "settling in" and it's an easy 10 hours a week at least you're saving.
Remote work isn't for every job or person, but the financial difference would need to be significant to drag me back into an office.
I find I have context switching and settling in time just as much (sometimes more) at my home office as I do at my office office. (IOW, I don't think I'd be inclined to count it as a cost of commuting.)
I think the distinction isn't making money as that's necessary to keep the doors open, it's more about corporate motivations. Some firms want to be a unicorn and some like where I work are more focused on building a business we all want to work at. While both are motivated, there are different buy in strategies with the employees. We have great growth, but we regularly turn down clients because they're not a fit for our team. I realize this isn't as feasible in all areas of expertise.
There definitely is a bit of marketing though and too much talk of culture is usually a good red flag.
This is a pet peeves mine. It's one thing to be honest but another to brainwash people into thinking that taking less pay is some how good for the employees.
Just wanted to reply exactly that. Obviously fair is very subjective and different to both parties involved. But we try to find a good combination of salary + bonus and also investment in the company itself (be it retreats or taking risks with new products like Bugfender), which then results in temporarily lower bonuses, but an expected bigger payoff and possibilities for everyone in the long turn.
Yep, exactly that. A while ago I took a consulting gig where the company couldn't afford my rates; we just negotiated working 30 hours instead of 40 at a weekly rate that fit within their budget. They got the expertise they wanted, while I got time on the side to work on other stuff. Win-win.
If you can't match salaries, then you can move other levers (work/life balance, flexibility, etc.) in order to get an agreement that's suitable for both parties. For example, I don't think Google allows for part-time engineers for the majority of the rank and file. For a startup, if they're more concerned about results than butt-in-chair hours, it might work out depending on the role.
Am I the only one that when I hear about retreats wonders how much it costs per employee, and given the same situation would rather have that money in my pocket?
I've heard that Google often has A class talent doing B or C class work; e.g. an expert in PL will often be working on ads. Sure the pay is great, but it can feel soul sucking. A startup can be appealing to some talented people if the work is interesting, even if the pay isn't as good.
Their attention span for products and tendency to half-ass things that aren't highly visible (Android SDK and documentation comes to mind) supports this notion. It's exactly what I'd expect from a company hiring 100% A players but needing 95% B-C work—avoid and shirk until you can land on a greenfield project, work on that until it's boring, then jump ship to another company or a more interesting project, because god knows you didn't go to MIT and then cram algos/structures for 6 months to update developer docs 8 hours a day.
Being/becoming good at CS-riddles (i.e. passing Google-like interviews) doesn't necessary correlate to being A player on the real job. So one might say Google employs a lot of B/C players (who just passed their interviews) where being A is a requirement for the job.
Yes, this. Also, if you look at the source of the output that is publicly available, you find that the overall quality is actually much lower than one might expect if they were hiring people that were truly great at making software more of an "art" rather than a blob shoved out the door that passed QA testing.
This describes the target of hiring at all levels in the Bay Area. Everyone wants A class talent for their B or C class CRUD. A major contributor to this is that the industry is relatively immature with respect to engineering practices.
Does the class A talent describe their education or their work ethic?
I've been on projects with incredibly knowledgeable and talented people that just couldn't stay on track, and I've been on projects with people that weren't the best and brightest but they were focused and put in a lot of work. You need both kinds.
I have a former colleague from academia with a PhD in math (his focus was algebraic number theory) who works at Google...writing a lot of JavaScript - the kicker is he enjoys it a lot more than his time in academia (I feel the same way as a PhD dropout myself - I primarily write JS/manage engineers now).
I definitely believe that there must be people who enjoy this, in fact they are probably in the majority. It's just that some of us don't, and these are who startups should be pursuing.
Ugghh... this exactly. I recently turned down a "we will fly you to the west coast" interview with one of the big five because I couldn't be bear the idea of spending weeks preparing for the 4-8 hour day of whiteboard coding (only to not get selected anyways).
Spent the time hanging out with my girlfriend instead. Worth every minute.
I think you almost played this right, with one caveat. You should have taken the flight to the west coast and done the interview, with minimal (hour or two) to no prep at all.
Why? First, you never know. Maybe they legitimately want your skillset - why fake up some crap you hate for a job you don't need? Second, you'll get practice taking interviews in a very low pressure situation. Worst-case they laugh at you and you fly home. Best-case you get an unexpected job offer you can evaluate. Either way you got some practice and "game time" with the process so if you're ever in a more high pressure situation (e.g. you really need the job) it's a lot easier.
Plus, smart people meeting other smart people is never a bad thing.
> You should have taken the flight to the west coast and done the interview, with minimal (hour or two) to no prep at all.
Having done this when I was younger and more foolish, I would not recommend it at all. I felt like I did pretty well overall, but ultimately flubbed a couple of [simple] questions that torpedoed my chances. While things worked out for the best (that company's future looks grim and I'm very happy where I am now), it was a blow to my confidence at the time.
I probably wouldn't have had to have prepared for a month or two to get that offer. A week of glancing at my notes for 30 minutes to an hour a day to refresh would have been sufficient. I think you owe it to yourself and the company who is paying to fly you out to at least brush up a _little_ bit (within reason) beforehand. It's almost like basic hygiene.
I think the worst case is a little hairier than that.
Companies keep records of their applicants and interview feedback. I'm dramatically oversimplifying, but your feedback will spell out two things in isolation: your fit for the role you applied for, and your fit for the company in general. If you do badly enough not to clear that second hurdle, you're going to have a hard time getting future interviews at the company.
So I wouldn't recommend winging it in a Big 5 interview unless you're comfortable with the possibility that a bad performance might blackball you there. But hey, some folks are fine with that risk. Others are confident enough that they feel their seat-of-the-pants performance will still clear the basic hurdles. If that's you, then more power to you.
Meh, personal experience has been that demand for SE's is high enough that every company will give you another shot after a year. That is important to note though: you don't get another shot for a year.
> So I wouldn't recommend winging it in a Big 5 interview unless you're comfortable with the possibility that a bad performance might blackball you there.
After going through "interview training" for one, they do blacklist people. But it's probably not as bad as you think. Also, even after getting pushed out of one org, another was extremely happy to offer me a job years later despite having all the info on me (even if I turned it down).
Individual hiring managers can have a good amount of discretion.
Failure really hurts me on a psychological level. I don't have any interest in half assing stuff. If I can't crush it, I don't want to play.
The cost of the flight & hotel is pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things. By that I mean relative to stuff like going to a place you want to see, the value of spending a vacation day, etc...
I do agree that the meeting smart people is fun... but the full on crash-and-burn on an algorithm + whiteboard interview would really have a massive negative impact on my confidence & self-esteem. Not worth it.
I am horrible at checking my comment replies, so sorry about the lateness. Hopefully you see this.
This is a fair point, but I simply want to point out that was half the reason I suggested it. Learning how to fail :)
I very much understand the mental aspect here though, so that's a tough one and my advice is not for everyone. I will say that at some point in your career you will fail though - or you aren't pushing yourself very hard. I believe this was one of the harder things I had to "train" myself to deal with; the mental load of failing at something and how to recover.
If you're not in a mental space to make that experience a positive for you? Absolutely skip it.
It's really worth it, IMO. There's really a HUGE element of luck: from the personality and opinions of those interviewing you to the questions they happen to choose that day. Seriously - internalize that and just try it out!
It's really insulting that the exact same interview steps and questions are being handed to all levels of applicants. If you want to see a different screening process that focuses on the skills you've acquired (technical and soft) and not just trivia and knowledge of one exact stack, you'd have to move on to a management or exec position. Those that stay developers will find themselves sharing their screen while literally doing FizzBuzz and reversing linked lists with 10+ years of experience on their resume.
On the flip side, it takes a huge amount of forethought to create different tests, projects, and screening practices for every position and then re-shaping for each experience level, particularly if the team is young and inexperienced; it's difficult to test for what you don't have yet.
I have no problem with a five minute check to make sure that I'm not just flat out lying when I claim to be able to code. There are a surprising amount of "senior architect" types that can talk all day but can't write very simple code.
I'm never doing another hour-long whiteboard interview again in my life however. The whole process has become so gamified now that most new entrants have practiced the exact types of questions asked hundreds of times. I'm not interesting in spending a month of my life doing that any more and I no longer need to.
The whole SAT-prep feel of the interview process now is tiresome.
Since when does remote mean a lower salary? I work remotely in the US and I expect (and receive) a market rate salary that's not based on my location. Offering me a lower salary because I've chosen to live in a lower cost-of-living city will ensure that I don't consider working for you. It's not always an employee's market, but while it is, I intend to take full advantage of it.
There are some number of jobs out there and most of them don't want remote workers. Job applicants that are willing to take jobs that forbid remote work can also apply to those that permit remote work, while workers that will only look at jobs that allow remote work can only apply to the small subset that allow it.
It's straightforward micro-economic exercise to see that the when you hold all other things equal the market clearing rate for a particular employee is higher if he is willing to take on-site work than if he is not.
It'd be the same thing if an employee was only willing to work at companies whose names started with a-m.
It works both ways. Even in this "perfect market" model, the remote salary will be higher if there is lower labour supply in the empolyer's local labour market than the global remote labour market.
I don't think there is more aversion to remote work on the employer side than on the employee side, so that effect should not turn the tables.
Why? How does the value of the work I provide change based on where I'm located? Is an if statement somehow different if done in the Bay Area vs the Midwest?
> What does the value of your work have to do with your salary, though?
Delivering more value can justify more compensation. But unless you're on contract for a percentage of the take, you don't necessarily get compensated based on output. Most software people get paid based on market rates which can be a lot lower than the actual value they deliver on the high-end--they're paid their "replacement cost" rather than per value added.
I don't think you understood what he said. He was saying that one of the attractions of a startup, which couldn't pay the $350k salary like Google, was that remote work would be possible, and some developers would like that flexibility. He wasn't claiming that startups pay remote workers less than in house ones.
In my experience that is an incorrect argument to begin with: many large tech companies seem to have more flexible work hours and remote working capabilities just like startups. I would rather focus on work-life balance, working on products that matter, having equity in the company, being able to experiment with technologies and be part of the decision making process rather than a cog in the machinery as reasons to prefer a start-up.
There's no reason it ought to mean a lower salary. However, I would very happily work at half-price for a fully remote job I actually want. But even with that concession, the vast majority of companies I'd like to work for still don't offer the option.
>But there are plenty of great engineers that don't want to work at those companies for various reasons. There are plenty of great engineers that want to work remotely and don't have that option at the large companies.
They don't have that option at startups either, because the startups all want people who'll be at the office 18 hours a day with "team spirit".
I think this article is useless. Startups are only for people who are under ~25 (maybe 30), have no families, are willing to spend all their waking hours pursuing someone else's dream, and think they're going to make bank doing it and are willing to take that gamble. This is not the kind of engineer who goes to work at most large companies; they're two entirely different hiring pools.
> Startups are only for people who are under ~25 (maybe 30), have no families, are willing to spend all their waking hours pursuing someone else's dream, and think they're going to make bank doing it and are willing to take that gamble.
OR those over 55 whose kids have left school, have mostly paid off their debts, already achieved a few things and have the experience, strength of character and financial stability to look their 23 year old CEO in the eye and say "sorry, I'm busy this weekend" when necessary.
Rapid exit focused startups are no place for those in their 30's and 40's. I say this as someone who spent their 30's and 40's in startups but survived.
The odds of getting a six figure payout at a startup is lower than the odds of getting a six figure annual salary at bigco. Which dramatically changes the math.
The real startup appeal is you don't need to be great or play the game, you just need to be lucky.
> The odds of getting a six figure payout at a startup is lower than the odds of getting a six figure annual salary at bigco.
Well-funded, small start-ups that are high growth can still get to 80% of "bigco" salaries--well into six figures. If you are fine on a bit less (which is still a LOT more than many make), then you can also get more freedom and a few lottery tickets thrown in.
Some even build a "diversified portfolio" out of those tickets.
I'm 35 and have only worked at startups. I'm at the largest company I've ever worked for now, and we've grown since I started from ~20 to ~80 employees. Previous companies I was in the first 10.
I think you need to pick your startups better. Every company I've worked at has pad me reasonably well(admittedly less than the big companies), has not required more than 40 hours/week except literally for one or two days around a high pressure launch or demo.
I guess you're right, in that I wouldn't go work for a large tech company - it would be hard to convince me to give up the level of freedom I have and ability to contribute to company direction.
I treat startup stock like lottery tickets. It'll almost certainly not pay off, but it's a nice dream. All the companies I've worked at are still around and doing well, so the payout(s) still might happen someday.
I am copying this to Evernote because you pretty much described everything that is wrong with startups.
Now, to be fair, there are good things as well, but they are more rare. 37 Signals comes to mind as innovative company that is doing things just right. They never wanted to even be associated with startup world.
37 Signals isn't really a startup in the traditional sense in that it isn't designed to scale up. It's more like a "small business" or "lifestyle business". And there's nothing wrong with that but it's a different type of organization.
Also, almost certainly, you don't want to hire engineers after they end up working at one of the tech giants, and the more experienced they are the worse. Having had the unfortunate experience of working along side some of the 'veterans' of one of these tech giants, it was a little disconcerting how easily they would form cliques based on perceived 'proven vs unproven' folks - if you hadn't worked at one of the tech giants, naturally you were unproven.
There were also tangible side effects. You couldn't generally expect them to work on what they perceived to be work which is low profile but actually important for some unquantifiable metric such as morale of the customer support team. You couldn't generally expect them to play by the same rules when it came to check in policies, documentation standards etc.
But best of all, the actual code they wrote would uniformly fall on either end of the astronaut architecture spectrum - either completely ignoring maintainability and turning the entire team into Schlemiel the painter, or being so convoluted that they themselves couldn't make quick progress a few years down the line on the code that they wrote.
The cliques are not the fault of the engineers from Big Co - it is the fault of your management who perceives them as "proven" and you as "unproven".
This is a self-perpetuating thing too, when most of the promotions go to people from the "proven" cliques, and those who got promoted, promote more of their "proven" brethren.
If you noticed this problem at your company "from below", your upper management completely failed to notice it, and it's their fault for not noticing the strain and for letting people behave lazily and arrogantly in the first place.
Good managers would reeducate or remove the veterans on a case by case basis, ensuring everybody follows the rules and collaborates productively.
There are also a lot of startups that simply need to focus on some of the basics of management, such as "be reasonable" or at least "don't be completely psycho".
One example that was discussed on Hacker News previously:
> But there are plenty of great engineers that don't want to work at those companies for various reasons.
There's something in the water at the big companies, many employees there think they have passed a rite of passage and that EVERYONE NOT WORKING THERE simply didn't pass.
I wish I wasn't exposed to evidence of this, but unfortunately I have. Many people don't consider the idea that others just don't want to work there.
In one example of this, I was brought in to interview at one of the big ones, referral, special project. I liked the idea of not necessarily being just some pawn in the never-ending recruitment draft, but someone on a special project.
And here I am, talking with the project manager and how other organizations sometimes do custom integrations into their enterprise product. Regarding those other organizations, and I quote "Now this is some 100 million dollar company in Canada, so you know their engineers don't know anything"
and I'm like YOU KNOW I WORK FOR 100 MILLION DOLLAR COMPANIES... RIGHT? I work in Series A and Series B startups primarily, after their 12 million funding rounds close they its often at a 50 - 100 million paper valuation.
The hubris....
Other examples are what I've heard from bus drivers talking about their riders, other engineers that disagree with the hubris, and just the general society that also puts Googlers and other big tech company employees on a pedestal because of the enviable compensation and perks.
The person that had asked to interviewing me at one of those companies liked my competence and experience in certain areas, seemingly missing that I worked for the same scale of companies that he decided to rail against
Just to add, it is rare for most companies to be able to compete with the Googles or Facebooks of the world in pure compensation. You have to win these people on other grounds such as increased autonomy, more work flexibility (working from wherever - I have had co-workers who got to spend time working remote from eastern Europe and Nepal at my small company for example), promotions (smaller companies are more able to offer title promotions than big companies for new hires), or other perks such as fantastic environments for employees. These are especially important for retention and hiring better employees than the norm.
There's also a lot of candidates abroad who are willing to work as contractors for your startup for usually lower salaries than you'd pay a local employee.
But there are plenty of great engineers that don't want to work at those companies for various reasons. There are plenty of great engineers that want to work remotely and don't have that option at the large companies. There are also plenty of inexperienced engineers with high potential that can't yet get hired at those companies and can be great additions to your startup. Do what you can to find and recruit those people.