
The Curious Story of the Smart Developer Who Couldn't Find a Job (he liked) - calbucci
http://blog.calbucci.com/2012/02/curious-story-of-smart-microsoft.html
======
k33n
This post strikes me as pretty arrogant, and maybe even a little deluded. 3-4
high-level Microsoft engineers are asking to join your startup every week, and
you're sending them emails like that? If you can't afford to pay them what
Microsoft does, you shouldn't even be entertaining the idea of bringing them
onto your company unless you're going to offset the decrease in salary with a
generous equity stake.

Just "working at a startup" isn't worth much. In fact, it's a major sacrifice
for an engineer like that to make. I checked out EveryMove and it seems to me
that engineers like that would be pretty dramatically underutilized anyway. It
seems like you should just tell people like this that they are overqualified
and to stay at Microsoft.

~~~
gavanwoolery
I came here to say pretty much this. I will add:

10 years of experience at a high-profile tech company in addition to numerous
awards, and you want to turn him down? Do you have any idea how much job
recruiters would bend over backwards to get a candidate like that? I have
worked for myself, for startups, and at a bigger company - and I can attest
that work does not differ much, except that startups pay crappy wages and
demand crazy hours. Experience is experience - it does not matter if he was
trained on the MS stack - I was too, and quickly became proficient in OSS,
Mac, and mobile development.

~~~
geori
I agree. Marcelo is a moron for turning down this guy. Although we don't run
the MS stack, my startup would kill to have a guy like this to join.

It is completely laughable to me that this guy has to do a side project to
prove he is worthy of a startup. Just have a few beers with him and talk over
the problems you are working on and see if he has good ideas on how to solve
them. If he does, you've got a hire. If he really needs hand holding (and
seriously does an award winning guy like this need hand holding???) then say
it isnt a good fit.

------
potatolicious
> _"Besides that, there are some mental hurdles you have to overcome by
> yourself about understanding the risk-reward of a startup. Taking a 30-40%
> salary cut is just one of those."_

Uh... how about... _no_.

So very, very tired of founders trying to convince everyone that tiny stake as
an employee in a startup is worth a giant haircut, or really, any haircut at
all.

If you want me to take a huge haircut, _bring meaningful equity to the table_.
It's laughable how some startups want you to take a $20-30K haircut in
exchange for equity that, if the startup exits big after years of toil, might
buy you a Smart car.

Sometimes recruiters cold call me and try to pitch me on some startup or
another, and then ask if I'm amenable to taking a haircut in exchange for
equity. At this point I'm tempted to just issue a blanket "hell no".

~~~
halefx
Haircut..? Is this some meme I don't know?

~~~
brown9-2
Not a meme, it's a common euphemism for taking less than the full amount on a
payment: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haircut_(finance)>

For example, "The bondholders will have to agree to take a large haircut in
order for the Greek debt restructuring agreement to go through."

------
bad_user
If Pete, the fictional character, did indeed work on the TCP/IP stack, Visual
Studio and Bing ... it would be pretty easy to identify whom this person is,
which would make Marcelo Calbucci an asshole for publishing this, as Pete
could get into trouble.

On the other hand if these deliverables were made-up / picked at random, then
the story holds no value, because the context of such anecdotes is everything.
Like in this case we are led to believe that Pete doesn't have the chops to
work for a startup because he supposedly hasn't worked on small and agile
teams delivering products straight to customers.

But I've got news for you, even inside big corporations, there are small teams
that struggle to innovate and appeal to customers without much support (or
control) from their peers.

And if somebody can do it inside a corporation where they have to struggle not
only for winning the hearts and minds of customers, but also with internal
politics, then that somebody is a lot more valuable than people that worked in
startups for their whole carrier doing yet another vertical social network or
shopping cart.

~~~
rbanffy
Let's imagine he worked, instead, on the SMB stack, Office and Hotmail. Or DAV
integration into Explorer, SQL Server and Dynamics.

I can come up with many 3-sets of Microsoft products roughly in the same areas
as Calbucci did.

OTOH, once about every 6 months or so someone from Microsoft recruiting calls
me. At first, I told them right away I'm not interested (I had enough contact
with MS in the late 90's). Now I just let them go on. It usually takes them a
couple weeks to google my name and conclude I wouldn't be a good fit.

~~~
brown9-2
You are missing the point - the number of Microsoft employees who worked on
those 3 projects, or any 3 projects, in the past 10 years is likely very low,
considering the thousands of other projects active in the same timeframe.

------
rickmb
Like many people deep inside the startup scene, the author completely forgets
that much, if not most, developer jobs are with neither startups nor "big
companies".

There are thousands of small to medium sized companies out there that can
offer a decent balance between various aspects mentioned, including most of
the stuff the author considers typical for a startup.

If you think your startup is competing for talent with the likes of Microsoft
and Google, you may be looking in the wrong direction.

~~~
varelse
Agree 100%! I made a grand total of $18,000 in stock from failed startups I
joined over the years. And that was with 2% of the one company that earned
anything in my pocket. OTOH I did a lot better joining growing post-IPO
companies where my 0.1% was 0.1% of _something_ , _something_ already selected
for success by earning the IPO achievement badge. Which is to say I'm a
contrarian that believes if one were to go someplace like facebook right now
and fit in, things would probably turn out reasonably well in the long-run.

After all, Google was minting millionaires a good two years past their IPO...

------
amcintyre
_"Pick a “side project”, a web product, and build it from beginning to end."_

Maybe Marcelo's immediate concern is that this fictional developer doesn't
know "HTTP, Razor, MVC 3, ASP.NET, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, jQuery, jQuery UI,
Facebook Connect, Twitter API, SQL, service monitoring, and analytics" like
the back of his hand, but to assume that he's _never_ built something from
beginning to end just because he works at a big company is a bit much.

Anybody that's done really hard work like this fictional developer (especially
if they're feeling constrained by Microsoft culture) has probably built
multiple tools from beginning to end in order to make his life easier. He may
even have built tools (perhaps even web tools that use a lot of the buzzword
technologies in his list) that were used internally by large numbers of users.

But did Marcelo ask? No, he just assumes the guy doesn't have the chops
because he chose to work at the wrong place for the last ten years.

Also, one of the commenters says, _"Yeah let's be clear, once you hit L65
startups are not going to be interested in you. Ever."_ Does this really
matter to people that are running startups?

~~~
jcc80
The fact that the author previously worked at Microsoft himself leads him to
draw all sorts of (potentially false) conclusions about this engineer.

~~~
amcintyre
I admit that it might be tempting to automatically associate "Pete" with any
not-so-capable principal devs he may have worked with at Microsoft, but that
seems like a bad prejudice to be carrying around if you're interested in
hiring the best people to make your business successful.

At least he's open about his prejudice, which I guess is doing those job
hunters from Microsoft a favor.

------
nchuhoai
The one part that striked me:

My biggest concern about you joining a startup is that you don’t have enough
breadth of expertise in building products.

This sort of runs counter to what my beliefs are and I thought the ethic in
this country is: As long as you have that urge or passion in you (he mentions
it himself), it doesn't matter what your "expertise" is. Sure, you need to
have a baseline of "technical" skills, but this candidate clearly has it.
Especially in these days where it is hard to find willing talent, I dont think
you can afford to be picky, especially with such seemingly arrogant(right
word?) demands

~~~
dannyc
I don't know, there seems to be a lot of people here disagreeing. I agreed
with most he had to say. I speak as someone who did exactly what he is
describing- worked at huge company doing a pinhole role and going to a start-
up doing end-to-end full stack (including DB stuff!) application. My technical
skills were there but there was still a very big learning curve for all the
frameworks out there. Especially since at large companies there is a lot more
homegrown stuff and legacy infrastructure and at start-ups there is a ton of
reliance on opensource. I agree that his statement only makes sense if they
really have a lot of applicants then they can chose to be picky and maybe pass
up top-talent like that until they get their feet wet. The flip-side of that
coin is losing out on the opportunity, but again it only makes sense if all
applicants are top-talent and they only need to choose between them.

~~~
wisty
So he doesn't know how to configure nginx, or the db. So what? It's already
running. Database skills are fairly important (since they are your
bottleneck), and it's important to have some internet knowledge (to prevent
security breaches), but if a startup is hiring it should already have the
stack in place. The big advantage of a "starup generalist" is they have
probably played with a few different stacks, and know which one to pick, but
it's too late for that.

And big company people know all the stupid mistakes that big companies do, and
can help warn you about them as you grow.

------
cageface
The tone among startup mavens is increasingly reminiscent of the odious
arrogance of all the johnny-come-lately bandwagon jumpers that were crawling
out of the woodwork in 1998, with the same lack of originality and hand-wavy
business plans.

I think this is the fifth or six social health & fitness startup I've
discovered _this week_.

~~~
AznHisoka
to be fair, I don't think it's fair to judge their business plan from this
blog post, but their attitude towards potential hires is pretty arrogant

------
meiji
I would have to say that as a tech person in general, the blog post would have
me avoiding looking for jobs there full stop. Sometimes you find good people
who aren't perfect for you but you know will work out. I worked with an
engineer who was an exceptional perl/systems developer. I bumped into a former
colleague who asked how the other guy was doing and said that he would love to
hire him despite the fact he had no experience with his new job's technology
as he knew that he would be an asset. This is why saying "You need to have
worked on product" or "You need experience in industry X" is very short
sighted. In some roles, it's required, in other roles it's an added bonus.
Founders, recruiters and hiring managers need to understand the difference.

------
yalogin
The example he chose strikes me as odd. The guy worked on really varied
projects - TCP/IP stack, the IDE and Bing. I would be really really impressed
if someone managed to work on such varied fields at such a high level at a
company like MS. It would mean he's got a wonderful drive and motivation. The
OP would be lucky to have him apply.

~~~
latch
It isn't uncommon for large companies to offer quite a lot of internal
mobility between teams / projects.

I agree with everyone else that the post came off as arrogant, but...Working
at a startup involves wearing a lot of hats. It also tends to mean web or
mobile work these days. Does Pete know anything about managing servers,
designing database schemas or deploying code to production? Does he know
jQuery/backbone/html, memcached/lucense, any NoSQL, Linux..AWS...

Unlike the OP, I wouldn't write Pete off, but I'd probably have a more
technical interview than normal with him (specifically focusing on end-to-end
development...client-side through to the database).

~~~
cageface
Anybody with the chops to do meaningful work on the TCP/IP stack and the MS
IDEs can pick up anything to do with web development in a month or maybe two.
Brogrammers that only know web dev generally don't seem to realize that most
of that work is on the pretty easy end of the difficulty spectrum unless
you're working at Twitter scale or something.

~~~
minimax
> Brogrammers

Can we please not make this a thing?

~~~
cageface
Too late: [http://www.quora.com/Brogramming/How-does-a-programmer-
becom...](http://www.quora.com/Brogramming/How-does-a-programmer-become-a-
brogrammer)

------
tom_b
This is scary to me because of the similarity to HR drone-speak.

"oh, we need a candidate who has written blub on corporate blub platform X
instead of corporate blub platform Y. thanks for your interest."

The worst part is that this hypothetical candidate has worked on and been
successful at wildly different tech pieces.

If I was this candidate, I would expect to come to an interview at a startup
and talk about each of those different experiences. I would frame the
discussion around each different project and what aspects of these projects
translated to how I could contribute to the startup. Did I have to learn new
approaches? Did I create an API? Did I mentor and train other devs? How did I
get up to speed on "hard-core backend optimization for fast retrieval of large
data sets" in Bing after working on Visual Studio?

------
tlogan
Question regarding salary... I'm not sure if I'm wrong but when was looking
for a new job back in 2004-2005, I cannot recall a single startup which was
recruiting engineers and offering salary below market rate and they end up
being successful.

As far as I remember, when Facebook was a startup (~2006) they were offering
market rate salary. Were they?

~~~
wyclif
"There's no shortage of smart, hardworking engineers. There's a shortage of
smart, hardworking engineers willing to work for very little money." ~ David
"Pardo" Keppel

------
jcc80
"He thought that he could talk to me and see what they are and if there’s a
match, but also learn a thing or two about startups."

I missed the part where, "Pete", the Microsoft Engineer asks this guy for all
his sage advice.

------
shiven
Startup (and bigger) companies can learn a lot from this. If anything, this is
a good example on how _not_ to go about recruiting talented people. Firmly
filed under the dickhead _ed_ category.

------
anonymoushn
I wonder if he also sends emails like this to fresh graduates. You know, the
kind of people who don't have any experience building and managing a product
from top to bottom, but also don't have 10 years of experience at Microsoft.

------
prtamil
If you have talent just build better project than EveryMove .After that He
will come to you , He will Respect you , He will Fear you. He will Pay you
whatever you want and more, even he will laugh at your awful jokes and dance
to your tunes. Building Better Project takes just Ramen,Pizza,Coke and
Knowledge not Mr.Marcelo Calbucci's Permission.

So If i have good experience and knowledge .I would build better project and
Shove it up to his "Startup owning Arrogance"

~~~
nlz1
Unlikely.

------
varelse
Long-winded reply, but 3 years in the valley during the dotcom boom working at
a variety of ultimately failed startups taught me:

1) The expected return of a startup does not compensate for the loss in
compensation because 0.1% ownership assuming even a generous 10% chance of
success times $1M (assuming a magical $1B buyout/IPO) is only $100,000 divided
by the number of years worked. You wanna take a 30% haircut for those odds?

2) This equation shifts dramatically if you get one of those fancy three-
letter titles and the equity that comes with it. Which is to say do not go to
a startup without one. Failing that, the more of a George Carlin outlook you
develop towards the three-letter title sorts blowing smoke up your keester,
the better off you'll be.

3) Override number 2 for a sufficiently high consultant rate. Crossing my
palms with silver cures all ills and shows that either you're an utter fool
with too much money (most of the time) or you have a relatively good grasp of
the costs of getting things done right.

4) Why bother with a startup in this day and age when, as the author said, you
can just build something yourself without leaving your current gig? 100%
equity times a 1% chance of success times ~$10M equals the same expected
return without any sort of haircut whatsoever.

------
calbucci
1) This post is not about technical skills or competency, it’s about a person-
company fit and motivation. If you hire an average developer you expect
average results, and if you hire an awesome developer you expect an awesome
product. But what if this developer has the skills but not the motivation?
What if after he joins your startup he realizes it’s not what he was really
looking for? The impact on your team will be huge, if he stays or leaves. Get
the cards out on the table before you join forces.

2) Some people on Hacker News are talking about the absurdity of taking a
below Market Rate salary. I don’t know where you got that from, but on the
post I said startups would pay less than Microsoft. I think some people on HN
don’t really know how much Microsoft pays (or Google, Amazon or FB). It’s a
lot more than you are thinking. A 10-12 year veteran at Microsoft has a base
salary of $140,000-$180,000 and 20% bonus (pretty much guaranteed). That’s
between $170K-$220K in comp, excluding Stock Awards, unbeatable health care
coverage, and many other perks. Yes, no startup that I know of can afford
that.

3) I’m not rejecting “Pete”. I’m asking him to do a self-assessment (a side
project) to understand his own interest in building products end-to-end and to
“get” what doing code at a startup might be like.

4) For the people attacking me or my startup, you should look yourself in the
mirror and try to find the source of so much anger.

5) My post lacks context in the sense of who I am and why do I get so many
Microsoft developers that want to talk to me. And just to clarify, I’ve worked
at MSFT for 7 years, I left to do a startup, which I did for 4.5 years and I
failed and I was very public about it. I set out on a mission to help educate
others who were following a similar path, to help them avoid the similar
mistakes I’ve made. I founded the Seattle 2.0 organizations to help that
mission. Over the last 4 years, I helped approximately 2,000 people who went
through some of the events I put together. You can read the full story of my
first startup here:

[http://blog.calbucci.com/2009/07/anything-and-everything-
abo...](http://blog.calbucci.com/2009/07/anything-and-everything-about-
sampa.html)

You can read the story of Seattle 2.0 here:

[http://blog.calbucci.com/2011/12/seattle-20-from-humble-
begi...](http://blog.calbucci.com/2011/12/seattle-20-from-humble-beginnings-
to.html)

------
jtbigwoo
What if he's making a moneyball-type play and doesn't even know it?

High-level Microsoft engineers are fairly valued or slightly overvalued by the
job market as a whole. When hiring for a startup, he should be looking for
undervalued assets. If he can make a convincing case to his stakeholders that
high-level Microsoft engineers are not a good fit, maybe he can gain an
advantage over other startups.

------
ootachi
And people don't believe me when I say that even talented developers can't
find jobs these days because there aren't enough positions.

------
chrisbennet
I guess I'm going against the flow but I didn't find his (calbucci's) post as
disagreable as most commenters. As engineers, we learn stuff on the run our
whole careers and we are rightfully upset when we don't get a job because we
don't have something on our resume' that we feel/know we could pick up pretty
quick. I get it.

But look at it from the startup founder's perspective. He's in a race and he
can't really afford to take on someone who _can_ "get in shape" after joining
the team. He really needs someone who can start running _right now_.

I agree with most that the pay cut for worthless equity is a nonstarter
though.

~~~
vonmoltke
"But look at it from the startup founder's perspective. He's in a race and he
can't really afford to take on someone who can "get in shape" after joining
the team. He really needs someone who can start running right now."

Yes, the emphasis is on right now. That leads to the question: is it better to
have someone like Pete now, even though he needs to learn a few things as he
goes, or leave a hole in your company for 3, 6, 9 months until your perfect
fit comes along?

~~~
chrisbennet
Excellent point.

------
sday
There is some merit in the article & story, however -The startup ends up with
no engineer & lots of openings and time spent hiring for a year. -In a
startup, one is trying to change the world with the product and change
themselves, this is opening another battlefront, on recruiting, trying to
change the world of hiring instead of changing to adapt to the world.

------
rgbrgb
On a different note, would Pete even be allowed to work on a side project? I'm
considering joining a BigCO and the contract really makes it seem like that
would be forbidden.

~~~
dakliegg
Depends on the state. Microsoft in Washington has non-compete which can get in
the way. If you are only looking at IP restrictions, those are weak and
difficult to enforce. It's really there to keep the dev from suing the BigCo
for personal IP that leaked into BigCo's code base.

On the other hand, would you ever go work for a company that went after a
small entrepreneur for some minor breach? They'll scare all the smart code
monkeys away.

------
latch
Aside from his concluding bullet points (which should probably be the focus),
his main reply to "Pete" seems to be: doing the same thing every year for 10
years does not give you 10 years experience.

~~~
dlo
He worked on the Windows TCP/IP stack, Visual Studio, and Bing. These are
hardly the same thing.

------
OneBytePerGreen
I am surprised at all the negativity here.

Working at a startup is obviously very different from working in a corporate
environment. You have to thrive on risk and be so passionate about new
technologies that you can't help but learn all that stuff and chomp at the bit
to use it.

I can't imagine working at Microsoft and NOT having learned HTTP, Razor, MVC
3, ASP.NET, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, jQuery, jQuery UI, Facebook Connect,
Twitter API, SQL at this point. It is stunning how much a single person can
get done these days thanks to all the cool technologies that have come along
in the last few years. If that guy is truly dying to join a startup, why
doesn't he have his own side project yet?

I think Calbucci is just trying to find people with true passion. I would
definitely worry that this person moves on to a job with more $$$ if the
startup isn't a huge success right out of the gate. After all, financial
motivations are keeping him at his current job right now.

The founder probably took a 100% paycut to get it started. I don't think it's
too much to ask for someone to take a financial risk to come onboard;
especially when it's before launch, which means their cash flow is probably
close to $0. Obviously, these kinds of decisions are not for everyone. But,
when you're truly passionate, it's not really a choice at all.

~~~
seamusmc
This is one of the points Marcello is making. I have almost 20 years
experience, spent 5 years at Microsoft, 18 months on the .Net framework team
before it released, and have yet to write a line of code for the web.

The vast majority of work at MS is not web based, its API, OS, Dev Tools,
Server, etc ... And devs are very much in silos. (IOW they 'own' a specific
piece of functionality within their product.)

Internal Tool devs on the other hand ... Internal Tool teams are run very much
like startups and many fail. ;)

BTW there is a lot of grey here, its not black and white. There are many devs
at MS that do side projects and contribute to OSS. Many do this work off the
MS stack.

