One item in particular you note is that Recruiters are "Not Worth It"
But also disclose that you got scared off of the $15k/fee and haven't tried that route.
In my experience the right recruiter can combine the utility of the "First-degree friends" and "Referrals" sections you list out.
I used to be anti-recruiter until we made it a point to "recruit a recruiter" and qualify them as hard as we would if we were looking for an internal role.
Interviewing recruiters through a process landed us a recruiter that is well known and respected in his niche, has built trust with dozens of candidates, and delivered strong hires.
We've gotten 6 amazing people in ~6 months and from an investment return basis I can't think of better money that we've spent.
The product side improvements that the new team members are delivering + reducing the brain damage you go through with bootstrapping hiring are high return investment categories in my view.
And the punchline is I think you $15k/hire is off - we've averaged $45k per hire (30% of first year) for engineering & sales talent in the $120 - 200k/yr range.
PS - As others have commented the "We spent less than $1,000 on hiring" should probably be amended, it weakens the rest of what is a very good article on boostrapping hiring!
I agree, if you have 10 hires to make in a quarter then the recruiter fee starts to be eye-watering (better to bring that role in-house), but for your first 5-10 engineers (with say 2-4 reqs open at any given time) I found recruiters to be the best source after direct referrals.
Note that finding a good recruiter is hard, especially as a very early-stage startup. We spent a long time digging through mediocre resumes until we happened upon some good recruiters. It seems mostly trial and error so I'd recommend re-rolling a few times before making a judgement on recruiters as a general strategy. The benefit of the commission model is that you pay nothing if you make no hires, so that makes it lower risk to try a few interviews from a new recruiter.
I'll second this, I've worked with a few really good recruiters.
Most of them are so-so, but the great ones are great and can find amazing candidates in a matter of days.
You are basically paying to hire someone whose only job is to keep in touch with great people.
The so-so recruiters go through LinkedIn, the best recruiter I ever worked with, when I told her the type of person I was looking for, had someone immediately in mind and got back to me the next day with a phone number.
If you are not my client then I will happily poach your people till you have none left.
If you are my client, then I will only find a job for your employees if the employee in question has already left the company, or if the client has explicitly said to me "can you find a job for this employee who has left us?"
Rules - there's rules for how to behave with integrity.
> If you are not my client then I will happily poach your people till you have none left.
That was his point, as soon as your client is no longer your client you poach their engineers on behalf of your new clients. It might not work exactly like that with you, but I bet a lot of recruiters have no moral qualms about poaching from an ex-client.
I see nothing wrong with this. Employers are not entitled to their employees. While bad employers moan about getting poached, good employers make sure that their employees have meaningful reasons to stay.
In sectors with no such pressure, employees have to pee in bottles just to shave a little bit of productivity.
Employees don't leave because a head hunter made them leave.
They leave because they want to leave. Because someplace else offered them a job that they think will be better, be it pay, work environment, commute, work/life balance, or some other factor(s).
Recruiters and head hunters just helped the ex-employee find out about a job that will, potentially, make them happier.
I will third this, I have a specific recruiter who works at an agency who I find superb. I always use her for hiring if possible. She finds solid candidates and takes the time to understand what you need, works her network, filters out what you don't like, and pitches your company properly.
Well worth the fee if you can get the right person!
My LinkedIn is full of spammy recruiter messages. Every message is a copy pasted blurb with the name substituted. I like to compare it to online dating: those poor women getting dozens (or hundreds on the dating sites) of messages by people just spamming messages to as many people as possible.
Maybe one day I’ll meet a recruiter who has actual value
A good recruiter knows his shit. I have a contact on LinkedIn,who specialises in Salesforce recruitment. He probably knows more about Salesforce than an average consultant he's trying to place.The guy buys and reads books on the subject,tries to understand new features and etc.Also seems to be able to cut through a lot of crap companies and candidates try to pull on him occasionally. He is the opposite of the idiot,who contacted me and asked to sign NDA before he would discuss the job,even though the same job ad was on their website(go figure?!). Opposite of those who have no idea about the industry they operating in( i.e. to be able to recruit SAP consultants, I'd expect a bit more than 'this thing comes from Germany').A good recruiter would give a balanced overview of the company,what things you might like,how they operate and etc.This is the opposite of those who paint everything in pink and promise unicorns.
Well, since they got 10 employees by spending time instead of lots of money (e.g. at least 10 x $15k), then it may well be a good tradeoff for a company/founder that's (relatively) time-rich/cash-poor.
The talent pool? I was hiring in LA and the pool was an inch deep and a mile wide. Lots of shifting through the bad to get to the good, and then good luck competing with google, Netflix, and to some degree Snapchat.
Disagree, many more companies are comfortable with remote, and a LOT more employees are happy to work outside of the coast these days. The traditional tech hubs in the US are oversaturated and cannot deliver cost of living value anymore.
They only got 6 engineers and I am not sure their method would have scaled if they needed a few more. Since they had investment money it might have been better to spend more to find people faster.
Having gone on the journey of trying to spend the absolute minimum on recruiting to now effectively not caring what recruiters charge I think that paying, say, 15k for a strong senior engineer is a bargain. Stop wasting time generating leads at a pitiful rate, pay a pro to do it and concentrate on actually running your team and shipping product.
My experience has been that HR stonewalls all efforts to use external recruiters due to perceived cost. Yet at the same time they can’t deliver quality candidates so a position stays open for 6 months; incredibly infuriating.
Same attitude for any type of employee towards any external consultant. They think: that's my job, I can do it cheaper, otherwise I'll just leave and hire myself back as a consultant and double my salary - but never have the skills or the guts to actually do it.
If the pathological culture is being established from the top, probably not.
But with principled leadership and monitoring, guidance, and procedures from HR, a great deal of this (and the legal, risk, and financial pain resulting) can be avoided, or at least, caught early.
Compared to how it manifests without HR constraints, boy it absolutely does. Are there examples of these bad behaviors in big companies? Sure, and that’s hardly the point.
This way of thinking displays a baffling lack of imagination. Even the mere existence of the Justice Department constrains President behavior considerably compared to having no such office.
It’s incredible to think that you’re taking the existence of bad behavior that happens despite these checks & balances as evidence that the checks & balances do nothing.
Yeah but the US government has checks and balances the average private company does not. The president has to get an attorney general confirmed, there are laws preventing him from using political considerations to affect civil service hiring, etc.
In a private company, the CEO can simply fire anyone in HR who stands up to them, no questions asked. In toxic situations HR often actively covers for bad behavior because the perpetrator signs their pay checks.
Not to say HR is useless and many times they can be an effective check on behavior. But as we've seen in some of these high profile cases of misconduct, HR has enabled abusers by taking their side against victims.
> Yeah but the US government has checks and balances the average private company does not.
That's less true within the executive branch than between it and other branches; the main one relating to DoJ is the Senate confirmation process and the hope that the Senate won't confirm stooges of a corrupt President to leadership roles in the DoJ.
That isn't particularly reliable, however, making DoJ not a consistently strong constraint.
Yep. Normally we'd like to think that the Senate confirmation process would stop outright unethical enablers of presidential misconduct from getting confirmed. But, here we are.
Sure they do, they just outsource it to one of the all-in-one HR/Payroll startups or actual companies. Whether that results in startups having effective HR is a separate question.
I also upgraded to LinkedIn Premium and started reaching out to engineers in my 2nd degree network. These people were complete strangers, and I had no reason to think they might be interested in Kapwing. This tactic definitely didn’t work. Not only did I not get a single response to my messages, I got one angry response from a Recruiting Director asking me to buzz off and stop pinging people at her company.
Does anyone find LinkedIn useful? The importance some people put on having an updated LinkedIn profile with updated contact lists seems outrageously disproportional to the actual value the site provides. It seems odd, too. Social media site around making business contact, keeping your cv online, yadda yadda... but the promise of the platform never seems to have materialized.
I've gotten my last two jobs through LinkedIn (and likely otherwise wouldn't even know about the companies). Yes, the signal/noise ratio is very very EXTREMELY low, but the variance (all on the upside, there's really no downside to LinkedIn) is well worth it.
(To clarify: this weren't just "last two jobs in the past 4 months while I was job hopping aggressively", but rather, 1 job that allowed me to from a low-income country to a high-income country, and another where I've significantly progressed in the past 4 years and have no intention of leaving it anytime soon as I expect the progress to continue.)
Yeah, I find it super useful as an employee. You can get tons of spam mail but it's worth it when that company you really want to work for reaches out.
Of course, that means from a recruiter's perspective, when you are cold-messaging you need to be able to differentiate from the other cold-messages people are receiving, get their attention, seem like some place they would want to work, and be attractive enough that people are willing to quit their current job for you. That's hard if you're not a recognizable name and, with all due respect, not working on something really sexy. Otherwise you are just noise.
LinkedIn is very useful to people outside of the tech community, especially those in law, accounting, and HR. It's also fairly useful for people in other white-collar job fields.
Anecdota, but still data: I know close to a dozen people "1st degree network contacts" (i.e., former co-workers) who found new jobs through LinkedIn...without needing to go through a recruiter. I used a recruiter to find my current position...but I found the recruiter through LinkedIn.
All but useless for agri/bio/medtech and optics/physics/chem. I've gotten nothing but spammers and black-holes. LI has a nasty habit of not taking job openings offline when they are closed. So even though the job search returns results, the companies/firms aren't hiring anymore and haven't for months to years. As such, even for lead generation of companies to contact it's useless as the firm may not even exist anymore and you just send emails into void. The few times you do get a job that is 'live', it's usually just a spammer from India or the Philippines (4/5 times) that then sells your data onwards and you get a burst of spam calls for about 3 months afterwards.
I never got contacted by FAANGs until I got on Linkedin and made my account public. Seems like it has value in exposing people to big companies that otherwise might not have you in their network.
It’s been great for me as an experienced finance/investment banking professional. I’ve gotten two great jobs from it.
I’ve never experienced a bad recruiter or the level of spam I hear about from software engineers. About 3-5 approach me per year, and they tend to be very legitimate and well connected/informed.
I find it useful in the biotech field for putting people in touch with other people and finding people that can introduce me to interesting people. For example, a paper author that I want to speak with I'll look them up on LinkedIn, hope for a connection, then get an introduction.
The article says their best channels were friends and referrals via friends. As Patty McCord likes to say, the first 20 hires are easy, you just hire your friends and their friends. It's the next 100 that are tough, because at that point you've exhausted all your friends.
This article is arguing strongly for the core value of the recruiter - time saving.
True that founders must spend time recruiting, but this person has essentially turned the job of company founder into the job of recruiter. Founders should have better things to do than make the incredible time commitment this person describes.
OK recruiters cost money, but isn't the founder's time worth something?
>> I’ve had coffees or breakfasts with probably hundreds of candidates.
This is not how to do recruiting, it's wasteful of the recruiter and the job seekers time.
The first interview should be a phone interview and it should be sufficiently detailed that any in person meeting coming out of it appears to meet many of the requirements.
If you are doing hundreds of coffee meetings then you're wasting vast amount of time.
It may sound trivial but the denim thing is signalling "young".
I work with a few software engineers who do not have CS degrees - they have extensive industry experience and are fantastic to work with.
At the same time, I do a lot of SDE1 level hiring and have found that while there are good bootcamp grads, it is just so much more work to sort through / screen the bootcamp grads. Some of them have been some of the worst interviews I've ever conducted (no idea what a class is), my guess is due to the variation in quality of bootcamp.
In the end I'd (selfishly) rather have my fresh grad pipeline coming through college rather than bootcamp just because I'll be able to get someone more quickly and with less effort. Not that there aren't good people out of both pipelines.
It makes a lot of sense. People don't need a CS degree to do programming or even to be really good programmers. They just need to have a passion for constantly learning and solving problems. Then they'll be able to figure things out as they go, just like all of us do. There's only so much pre-training you can do.
Also, a much better predictor than school, of how well someone will do at a job, is how they get along with their team. If they have a great degree from an amazing school, but they don't get along with their teammates, they will perform very poorly.
> It makes a lot of sense. People don't need a CS degree to do programming or even to be really good programmers.
Even more so (and maybe more shockingly) you don't need to be a capable programmer to get a CS degree. I have worked with people who have master's degrees from respectable universities who have not used Git or a command line in their life.
And yes, both are teachable -- but then, everything is. It is hard to quantify exactly how much inexperience in any given discipline hurts the outcome to what degree, but I feel there is a strong bias towards algorithms over practical skills, including having worked on and completed real life projects, that does not correlate well with their importance in common real world situations.
This is an ever green topic that we aren't going to solve here, but for what is worth my take is that if you find someone that's self taught that nonetheless knows the asymptotic behavior of the common data structures and can fizzbuzz that's likely to be a better hire than a fresh CS degree applicant. Because you are less likely to get someone that "wants to work on interesting problems" or try to write a new project in Idris on the sly. But that said if you open the door to non-traditional applicants you are going to find yourself with a higher proportion that don't know O(1) from busy beaver and/or can't declare a variable in their supposed language of choice.
Kind of funny this came up. I used fizz-buzz in all my interviews for about two years (at first as a joke). Not a single new CS grad ever solved it in about a dozen interviews. The best I got was pseudo code like "if (i divisible by 5) { ... } else if (etc... "
Wow. I was using fizzbuzz as stand-in for basic ability to code problems and I guess I don't really care if someone doesn't happen to know modulo, but I am surprised. I certainly would expect modulo to be more well known that left and right shift for example.
> I have worked with people who have master's degrees from respectable universities who have not used Git or a command line in their life.
This is kind of a strange bar to set. There are entire companies that don't use git. In fact, most projects hosted on Google Code (now defunct) were using Mercurial.
While you believe this to be strange, it is just another metric.
If you've not used Git or GitHub or any of the cloud providers for Git, it's a signal. To me it signals that someone uses open-source software or has some passing familiarity with it.
As a person that conducts interviews, the things that people leave public on a GitHub profile have been a pretty invaluable signal of attention to detail or code quality. If I see someone with a dotfiles repository, it likely means that they care about their craft a bit, and it factors into a part of the whole evaluation pie.
I've worked with at least a dozen people with master's degrees who learned just enough git to get by and then went learned helplessness on anything further. I don't understand this behavior.
to be charitable to the GP, I think they are using git as a stand in for any version control system, and it doesn't surprise me at all that many CS grads have not used any VCS
Part of the value a good school provides is learning how to get along with teammates, during many class projects one has to do to graduate from a good CS program.
Re passion: you need a lot more of that to be "constantly learning and solving problems" for 4 years, rather than for 3 months.
What do you think people do in college? Party non-stop?
Learning to get along with teammates can happen in many different environments. I learned those things from sports, working construction, military experience, and a few other places.
Also I think the formal education system weeds out people with major personality problems. People who have trouble with authority or showing up to places in time don't graduate.
Oddly all of my worst coworkers had degrees. The folks who would bullshit their way through life, never really do work, expect their coworkers would pickup the slack.
Most of the self-taught or folks with blue collar or military background have been the best. Hungry and resilient. Strange crowd at times, but great people.
> They just need to have a passion for constantly learning and solving problems. Then they'll be able to figure things out as they go, just like all of us do.
The best people can learn on their own everything college teaches.
College is designed to help ensure there aren't any skill gaps. It isn't perfect, but I'd expect someone from a good university to be able to:
1. Put together a professional looking presentation.
2. Have good to above average written communication skills
3. Sit in a meeting with engineers from a different discipline and have at least some vague idea what is going on, and have less of a ramp up before they can start contributing.
4. Have an understanding of statistics and calculus.
5. Be at least familiar with all of the main hard sciences (chemistry, physics biology)
6. Have a greater than average understanding of, at minimum, the society that their college was based in.
When it comes to technical abilities, 4 years of learning is going to better prepare someone than 6 months to 1 year of learning. Multiple programming paradigms help a lot as well, someone who knows just JavaScript or C# is going to have less mental tools at their disposal than someone who has programmed in purely functional programming languages, used pattern matching, and who understands what code actually compiles down to.
I've hired from boot camps, 4 year programs focused on games, and CS programs.
The best boot camp graduates are of course amazing, but just coming out of school they are lacking a lot of skills, and there is no guarantee that any random boot camp graduate will be able to pick up those skills (again, of course the best ones can). CS programs have no problem failing students out if they hit the C++ courses and can't hang in there.
Graduates from schools like DigiPen can hang in there, but they also have huge gaps in their knowledge that have to be filled. (On the flip side, they also have skills that people with CS degrees don't have!)
A student from a good CS program should be well rounded. Ideally they should be able to join a team doing low level systems programming and ramp up on embedded C just as easily as joining a team writing some sort of insane load balancing / network caching system.
You're demonstrably correct, but that's not going to stop the "team work makes the dream work there is no I in team" types from insisting that "soft/people skills" are the only thing that matters in any sort of work.
Thanks. To elaborate more, evolution mandate that in order to be the top 1% performer, you must practice in a specific setting, which in case of a programmer implies dealing with logical , precise structures of programming, than the messy, sometime illogical world of humans (also known as politics).
>> logical , precise structures of programming, than the messy, sometime illogical world of humans (also known as politics).
In my Computer Science libraries and applications are written by people and people make political, marketing, historical and technical choices that directly influence the design of the said software.
So whatever you're saying about "precise structures of programming" is clearly heavily dilluted by "the messy, sometime illogical world of humans".
It seems like in your world Spectre would never happen. But it did happen in mine.
Dunno how this applies across the world, but, my 2 cents:
I'm fully "self educated" like in not even bootcamps, just jumped straight into taking client work from zero programming experience (well, I did hack on some research/side projects while in med school before abandoning that), and having been ob both sides of the hiring process I'd say that hiring CS grads is 100% worth it you can hire the top 10%, probably not worth it after that. People who learn on their own tend to be passionate and motivated, people getting into CS at a good uni have a variety of motivations - they might be smart and capable, and if you're a big corporation you'll always find room for smart and capable people that can play by the rules... but not necessarily what you want. OK, maybe for US ivy-league or whatever that 10% might go to 25%-40%, but a fresh company might still not afford that...
And really, be honest with yourself, having a CS/EE university degree, would you really hire anyone but the top 10% of your classmates?! You know how it is, the 10% are there to study, the rest are there to study 10% of the time (and paaaaarty the rest ;)...) And... would you have any chance to afford to hire those top 10%?
They're a twelve month old startup. In that time they've had the chance to see one career fair at a good school and a half a dozen batches of grads from a bootcamp.
Your team appears to lack diversity with regards to age, and your conclusion makes it sound like that was almost a goal. Older engineers can offer a lot of wisdom and save a lot of wasted effort
Seed stage startup. Extremely likely it's not just salary but also equity.
How many highly experienced individuals are going to join a seed stage startup as a regular employee?
It's founder or no deal with early startups for most people I know above 40. You join as regular employee - maybe get 1-3% at the high end. Founder? Order of magnitude more.
I know VCs like to appear as if they provide an advisory role. I don't know how many actually contribute more than capital to their portfolio companies, my guess would be that you have to seek out a reputable company that provides more than money to get more than money.
fwiw, having been at a company from 6-160 people, early stages, investors aren't a great source of ICs. They end up a lot more useful when you are hiring senior leadership and an executive team. These roles align better with their own personal and professional networks.
We had a little luck tapping YC and YC alums early on though to some extent, and posting job reqs here on HN definitely helped.
It's generally a signal for hiring and sales/marketing, similar to how universities create prestige for individuals. Highly subjective and immeasurable.
The part on recruiters is very so so. $15K in fees,in a place like SF,where devs don't come cheap, is peanuts. Meeting tens of candidates means a lot of time spent not doing something else, something more important,so the cost doesn't become lower. There are some crappy recruiters out there, however a good one would not just get a good candidate but also save a lot of time.
This is blatantly false for embedded systems developers. We spend all day with computers, key being multiple computers, all which require tons of space.
From my experience hiring in startups (and personal life experience, having left the startup world at 28), over-30s have higher salary requirements than startups can afford. It's not even just a Bay Area thing; in pretty much all markets you pay a premium for experience.
If you can’t afford the salary required to hire the right people, then you’re not a start-up, you’re a side project looking to rip other people off by suckering them into accepting meaningless equity.
The ageism stems from having a harder time suckering older applicants. It’s disingenuous to use language making it sounds like the older candidates’ requirements are “too high.” It’s not about that. It’s about who can this self-absorbed start-up sucker.
Two comments, both directly replying about his age to separate claims that no one is over 30, is "spamming?" And from this you can predict his age? Seriously?
Personal attacks aren't allowed on HN. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here? We're trying to avoid having an internet mudslide and need everyone's help.
Why? I'm 30+ and would love a good online image editor. All of the ones I've used over the years do something to make them inconvenient.
Granted my use case is doing minor modifications to graphics on occasion. But it's not like everyone that needs photo editing wants to have to install an app on their machine.
And there's nothing about photo editing that a web browser can't do fairly effectively these days. Video editing is definitely tricky but something like Windows Movie Maker I can see working well in a browser. But not anything for professionals.
recipe for disruptive startup ... identify existing and free 'native' application, select three features from application and implement as web-app/SaaS, host in cloud, sell subscription.
Not always true. I've worked with several older people who were willing to take a pay cut to get to work on something they where more interested in. Especially if they felt their existing career path had stalled out.
And experienced people will generate more value for the company than their salary. Having an inexperienced team is a great way to waste a lot of time. Having a good mix of experience levels is the best balance between wasted time and financial costs.
Sure.
Still, you might not be able to afford their salary and they migth have different job security expectations. Not all start-ups live in VC lala-land.
Also, experienced people usually don't jump for your entry level dev position. They are changing jobs to advance their career. In a start-up, you might not even have the positions they are looking for.
Not the poster, but I assume the idea is because a company of only young people often don't consider or understand the limitations/responsibilities of family life. Once you have kids, suddenly "corporate weekend trips!" and "hackathon all-nighters!" and even "beers after work on Friday!" become complicated commitments that require adjustments from the whole family. With a couple family-havers in the mix there is usually more acceptance of the work-life divide, or even that one exists (or should).
Because he goes home at night and has stuff to do thats not work and he isnt jealous of you for having that. Worst managers I ever worked for are divorced (and to an extent single) and hate seeing happily married employees
The ideal thing is a mix that is somewhat representative of the population at large. It's good to have different perspectives and attitudes and experience. Sometimes lack of experience to question 'why we do it that way', but it's also usually good to have someone who knows that we do it that way not "because", but because doing it another way can lead to subtle problems that are hard to diagnose.
On average a startup < 200 employees will spend around 15k+ on hiring efforts anyway. Recruiters can simplify, and streamline the process. Had many high quality recruits that stayed 2+ years with the company from recruiters.
It is a huge myth that the hiring experience with recruiters is poor. It is a huge myth that the quality is low.
Find the right recruiter. Get good candidates. The onus is on you to do your research.
Not a recruiter. Just someone who has worked with some amazing recruiters in the past. I've interviewed thousands of candidates, hired many of them, passed on quite a few. Hiring is always the same. Don't make it harder.
When you look at some of the ideas that are being done you have to think that the idea here is simply the investors are funding acquihire special purpose vehicle (for lack of a better way to put it). That is they invest in a company that they know has less than a solid chance of working out long term because of a good idea (or even forking to a better idea). And they know this. Then what happens is they have one of their other investments acquire the company a few years later as well as the fully vetted workforce.
Their products are meme generators and what appears to be a frontend on ffmpeg. Not sure this kind of work couldn't be outsourced for bottom dollar rates overseas?
This. I expected the 'Remote Hires' section would discuss why they needed a local dev, and why a virtual/home-based hire would not work. This section should have been named 'Outsourcing' - since that is what they actually discuss in that paragraph.
Indeed, hiring a fulltime offsite employee is very different from outsourcing to a 3rd party.
Small nit-pick: Remote hires and outsourced teams are very different things.
Hiring full-time remote individuals is great if your company puts in the work to be remote-friendly.
Successful outsourcing work to a dev shop (usually remote to some degree) depends on your ability to communicate your product's technical needs precisely.
This focuses on hiring channels - but wouldn't an economist recommend competing on salary/equity or other benefits? Why isn't that a part of the strategy in such a competitive labor market?
Well, the application, a web-based image editor, is kind of retro. Those go back to Ofoto, 1991, which became Kodak Gallery. Which failed. Not likely to become big.
startup without VC in SF, is this still possible these days?
bootstrapping can happen anywhere but not in SF these days in my opinion due to cost associated, It used to be a startup in your garage, nowadays it's called lean-startup with remote peers(sometimes overseas to save costs further)
You say it yourself, you pretty much have to go lean to do an effective bootstrapped startup, and focus on profitability very quickly. Otherwise the salary costs will kill you unless you have very deep pockets.
One model that I would like to see more of is a type of co-op, maybe even part time. This allows you to defer payment in lieu of equity, at the obvious cost of not having people's attention as fulltime employees, and slower iteration time. The benefit is that you can actually get FAANG caliber engineers to work with you since you are paying entirely in equity
physically, to make startup a success out of 99% failure rate, you have to laser focused with a small capable team to break through somewhere. A loose team is really hard to make profit before everyone is burned out. Hiring is painful, or the most painful plus it's super time consuming and distracting, finding nice peers sharing equity is even harder, harder than finding a wife on tinder I feel. I don't have better ideas though.
I think I would have an easy time finding peers to share equity from my personal network, although I could only know for sure when push came to shove and it was actually time to start working. But yeah it could be really hard running an actual business where everyone is only working 8-25 hr/week.
For it to be viable, you would need to focus on getting an MVP up fast and reaching ramen-profitability. Then once there's enough money for everyone to pay their bills, you could start transitioning people to fulltime. Again since you are sharing equity generously, as long as you find like-minded peers, ramen profitability for each employee/co-founder is all you need
The fact that the article states the cost of $1000 at the outset is a bit disturbing given that it goes on to describe the intense amount of time and effort taken in the search for hiring.
It indicates to me that the person writing this article doesn't consider their time to be valuable, and raises all sorts of red flags about how they would value the time and energy of their employees.
Throw in the combination of the shared jean jackets and incredibly forced (almost desperate) smiles in the Hero/Footer image and the cult vibe is overwhelming screaming RUN AWAY.
Is this a coded cry for help? Should we rescue these developers?
And it ends with this quote :
"By the end of our 8-hour workday, we had: - Put up 352 posters - Spent $96.16 ($31.08 for tape + $65.08 for printing) - Taken 25,497 steps - Walked 11.2 miles - Used over 400 ft of tape"
Nowhere in there does it say anything about the cost of paying the people to do that work.
They're very clearly and plainly stating that they do not put any value on the time of their employees.
> [Cold outreach] Rating: Not successful. Kapwing’s most senior engineer said that he gets multiple cold emails from recruiters daily, so it seems impossible to cut through the noise.
I think the thing that a lot of people doing cold outreach really don't understand this. Pinging someone on LinkedIn with, "Hey we have a job!" is not differentiating you from the other 10 people that contacted that person this week.
But a good engineer already has a job. What makes your job's value proposition attractive enough that this gainfully employed engineer should engage with you?
One easy way to set yourself apart is to tell people what salary range you're working with up front. A good senior engineer is probably already getting paid well, so if your salary range is attractive, they're much more likely to respond. If they're not getting paid what they're worth, you may get their attention immediately. If your salary range is too low, your response rates will reflect that.
Beyond salary, find a way to communicate the most attractive and unique features of the job up front. Don't start with, "we have PTO, health insurance, 401k, etc." because almost everyone offers that. What sets your company apart? What about the work is compelling and interesting?
To me it's different when a founder/hiring manager contacts me about a job, rather than a recruiter. On LinkedIn ~90% of job messages are from recruiters, once you filter them out, not many are left, and I typically respond, even if with just "Thanks for reaching out, I'm not available currently".
I don't want to hear about the salary right off the bat. That's the least interesting part about things. Founders looking for early engineers should take a different tack. After all, I'm not going to be employee 3 just for high comp. The task had better be damned interesting.
Really? The photos that include a photo with one white guy, one Asian guy, and one black guy talking about who they trust for referrals makes it _obvious_ that they don't hire minorities?
Well, I suppose the real question is what you expect. Assuming no racial bias I would assume that hiring rates mirror local demographics. Well, about 7% of the Bay Area is black (SF itself is less so let's just bias upwards a bit here). So, given that any hire has a 7% chance to be black and a 93% chance to be non-black, that gives us a 45% chance there are no black employees, an 82% chance there is at most one black employee, and a 96% chance there are at most two black employees, assuming no bias.
As for the other question, yes, there is a 31 year old there. Listen, I'm going to be honest with you: I'm in my 30s too, and there is no age bias against 30-year-olds in SF.
And “I’ve had coffees or breakfasts with probably hundreds of candidates”
The real cost is over $1,000 unless the value of your time is $0.
Also, as someone else commented. So out of hundreds you interviewed, it doesn’t appear that anyone over 30 was hired. What did the age breakdown look like? Ageism does exist in tech.
"We’ve spent less than $1000 on hiring, but I’ve had coffees or breakfasts with probably hundreds of candidates. Measured by hours, recruiting is one of our largest investments"
Wierdly he mentions an extra $2000 in the article: "Two of our engineers were good friends of the existing engineers, and we give a $1000 bonus to employees who refer people that are hired.". And "Got coffee, drinks, and meals with friends that we know are strong engineers". Drinks and meals are surely quite expensive too.
But as implied, time and opportunity cost is what really matters, the dollars are minimal in comparison.
When founding our company, actual costs were low. Opportunity cost was large (not earning our existing salaries). Now the business is good and salaries vastly outweigh all other expenses (and we are in a low tech town, unlike SF).
> So out of hundreds you interviewed, it doesn’t appear that anyone over 30 was hired. What did the age breakdown look like? Ageism does exist in tech.
Not affiliated with the company in the article, but this isn't necessarily a symptom of ageism.
Early-stage startups generally pay toward the lower end of the SF engineer pay scale (<$150k). At that salary, it can be hard to find local experienced candidates. For $150k/year it's impossible to buy a house and put down roots, so people at a stage in life that value that (which is a significant percentage of the over-30 demographic) will often move out of the Bay Area. You'll make a bit less money in Denver, Austin, Boise or Salt Lake City, but you'll be able to buy a house with a yard and raise a family if that's your thing.
Of course, there are still experienced engineers around, but they're disproportionately making $300k+, which can still buy you a decent quality of life in the Bay Area.
When the outcome of a process results in a disparity (along racial, gender, etc. lines), people generally agree that the process is discriminatory, regardless of whether there was an intent to discriminate.
If the output of a hiring process results in all men being hired and no women, people would be correct to raise a concern. So if the output of a hiring process results in all hires being young and none old, should there not be similar concerns?
> When the outcome of a process results in a disparity (along racial, gender, etc. lines), people generally agree that the process is discriminatory, regardless of whether there was an intent to discriminate.
No, people do not generally agree that a process with a clear cause resulting in an explainable distribution that doesn't reflect society at large is discriminatory. A very specific political view suggests that.
You don't see a lot of female construction workers. Sometimes only a specific group is willing to do, or capable of doing, a job for a perfectly acceptable reason.
Not that I don't agree that age discrimination exists in tech, but this could just be an artifact of startups in the Bay Area.
North of 30 is when people tend to settle down and start a family. That's enormously expensive in San Francisco. My guess is that most over-30s in tech either A) decamp to a lower cost of living metro, B) have very high-paying FANG jobs that startups can't compete with, or C) are independently wealthy from prior ventures.
Either way they're not showing up to a relatively low-paying, very high-risk, low-security startup job based on the outside chance of their stock options hitting it big. Lottery tickets don't pay the mortgage or pre-school tuition.
I think the underlying issue isn't so much age chauvinism as geographic chauvinism. Why do blank-slate companies continuously insist on basing themselves in the Bay Area? There's no shortage of talented engineers in Columbus, Philadelphia, Huntsville, Dubuque or Boise. Certainly enough for a dozen-employee seed-round.
The author worked at Google prior to founding this startup. Presumably Google Bay Area. So they founded a company where they were, and where their contacts were.
Yes, they could have moved out of the area, but that has its own costs, not just financial.
[This is Julia, the OC] My intention was to point out that even though I haven’t actually spent a lot of money on hiring, I have invested a ton because of my time. The actual cost is very high, even if you’re not hiring recruiters.
This article was not intended to say our hiring process is perfect. It definitely is not. Just wanted to offer our experience for other first-time founders.
The previous comment was hinting at opportunity cost, e.g. how much $revenue could you generate for the business if you weren't spending time recruiting?
It’s ridiculous to expect him to add an opportunity cost to a concrete cost in this example. They’re different units, even if they can be expressed nominally in dollars. He described both in their own terms, it doesn’t invalidate his claim.
Those sentences were not disconnected. They were part of one thought, joined by a “but”, indicating that one modified the other in a qualifying manner.
>We’ve spent less than $1000 on hiring, but I’ve had coffees or breakfasts with probably hundreds of candidates. Measured by hours, recruiting is one of our largest investments
Reads as: “we committed a small amount of resource X, BUT we spent a lot of resource Y.”
They didn’t miss the fact that they were burning resources. They stated it explicitly.
> “We spent less than $1,000 on hiring
> And “I’ve had coffees or breakfasts with probably hundreds of candidates”
Just being humorous here. Let's say he spent $999 and spoke to 200 candidates. The previous statement is not against the claim of the author.
Does that mean, he spent ~$4.99 for coffee or breakfast per candidate? Is it possible to have coffee or breakfast for 2 people in SFO for that money? Or, he could have either bought coffee for only the candidate and stared at him/her while he/she drank the said coffee or asked the candidate to pay for his/her own coffee. Yikes! :-P
> So out of hundreds you interviewed, it doesn’t appear that anyone over 30 was hired.
I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of their applications were younger than 30. Their landing page is marketed toward meme generation. Most older folks won't make it past the landing page before seeking opportunity elsewhere.
When I was a young 20 something starting out in the bay (20 years ago) I ran across quite a few older engineers (some of them in their 50's).
All the best things I know came from them.
I remember at one point one of them handed me a spiral bound book of the papers from an early 90s (or late 80s) unix conference. Papers, actual papers, from a conference, BOUND (pre internet right there) --- there were a lot of interesting insights that came from that book that still impact me to this very day.
If they only have $120K budget, they are interviewing for relatively junior positions in this area and at this time, and thus they are mostly going to get young people interviewing.
I mean, a lot of times this is coded in the job descriptions. "rockstar ninja" "10x engineer" or similar words generally mean they are unable to pay experienced people wages and are looking for someone new to do the work of an experienced person.
A lot of people think this is bad, as it almost always implies overwork, but I have mixed feelings. My first programming job? I was 17, no education, and I was hired as a "Staff Programmer" but only paid slightly under $40K (this was in '97, so while that was great money for a 17 year old, that was... not market rate for an experienced engineer, much less a "staff" level title.)
In a lot of ways it was a great experience for me. My shitty C code ran on production and in turns vastly improved and degraded user experiences for literally millions of people. For a company that wants to 'roll the dice' - I was probably a good deal, 'cause I did some pretty amazing things. (in both directions, really... but it did work out well sometimes?)
(I can't find the quote right now... by Vixie; something about how many CERT notices he was responsible for, and how it showed that in his youth, he could code, but he didn't learn to manage risk until later.)
But, I mean, my experience of the valley (and SF is not silicon valley, but it is... adjacent.) is that startups hiring young people can partly be explained by the phenomena that startups aren't willing to pay market rate for someone with experience; even at my age, I see pressure to move to management.
If something bad happened and I had to work at a startup again, one of the big tells I'd look for would be the number of older engineers that are working as direct hires (not contractors); This is usually a good indicator that they are willing to pay reasonably.
If they advertised for a junior position (with the associated salary expectations) then it'd be reasonable to expect that nobody with that experience would apply; I mean, why would they?
I have former coworkers who are beginning to look and have moved to lower career roles basically aging out. No pressure of running teams but the experience of budgeting and knowing how to code a multitude of systems.
But also disclose that you got scared off of the $15k/fee and haven't tried that route.
In my experience the right recruiter can combine the utility of the "First-degree friends" and "Referrals" sections you list out.
I used to be anti-recruiter until we made it a point to "recruit a recruiter" and qualify them as hard as we would if we were looking for an internal role.
Interviewing recruiters through a process landed us a recruiter that is well known and respected in his niche, has built trust with dozens of candidates, and delivered strong hires.
We've gotten 6 amazing people in ~6 months and from an investment return basis I can't think of better money that we've spent.
The product side improvements that the new team members are delivering + reducing the brain damage you go through with bootstrapping hiring are high return investment categories in my view.
And the punchline is I think you $15k/hire is off - we've averaged $45k per hire (30% of first year) for engineering & sales talent in the $120 - 200k/yr range.
PS - As others have commented the "We spent less than $1,000 on hiring" should probably be amended, it weakens the rest of what is a very good article on boostrapping hiring!