
What stopped me from working for 20+ startups - CodeLikeAGirl
https://code.likeagirl.io/what-stopped-me-from-working-for-20-startups-375e3ffd842
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bsdpython
It's a good list and these points are indeed very bad signals. When you break
it down most points fall under the category of basic professional courtesy and
it's shocking how rare that is. Most people that I interview and give prompt
and honest feedback really appreciate it. You do have to deal with the
occasional rude response however - it's the cost of being a professional.

"They tell you they like you, you’d be a great fit, your code looks great, but
then discontinue because they just noticed you don’t have a piece of paper."

It could be that they somehow didn't notice and then singularly rejected you
for that reason. It's also possible that they were willing to overlook it but
once they had the chance to evaluate you as a whole they decided that the
total package wasn't enough and the degree was the reason given. To me the
degree is more about proving that the candidate has true interest in the
subject and has been able to commit to it over an extended period of time more
than anything else. I am asking them for a big commitment over an extended
period of time to join my company after all.

~~~
birken
> It's a good list and these points are indeed very bad signals. When you
> break it down most points fall under the category of basic professional
> courtesy and it's shocking how rare that is. Most people that I interview
> and give prompt and honest feedback really appreciate it. You do have to
> deal with the occasional rude response however - it's the cost of being a
> professional.

This is very true. Interviewing is critical for basically every company, but
the actual interview process sucks for the employee who actually is doing it.
A lot of companies, and startups especially, don't have the discipline or
foresight to realize this and instill in their employees that professional
courtesy is important, even if the actual interviewing process is annoying and
that professional courtesy is likely to be "wasted" on somebody you won't
hire.

But I do think it is a useful (bad) signal, because a company that doesn't
have the foresight to create a decent interview experience probably is
dropping the ball in other critical areas and should be avoided.

------
jroseattle
Interesting article! This is pretty timely for me as someone hiring engineers
right now. I've been in her shoes before, and know both sides of the table.
For those reading this and identifying with the situation, allow me to
challenge in good faith the commentary in this post.

I'd summarize the overall tone of the post as this:

"I'm working hard to grow my career. I want to find the best place and role to
help me do that. Please approach your side of the conversation as prepared and
excited as I am, otherwise don't waste my time in getting there."

For a young engineer, this is simple and to the point. It's also wrong.

First, it attempts to minimize exposure to failure based on perceived value.
The thing with failure is that you can choose to learn from it or ignore it.
Trying to determine what failures are valuable beforehand is folly. Soak it up
and become knowledgeable. I learned things early that frustrated the hell out
of me, and figured out the lesson much later.

Second, hiring decisions include lots of legal situations. Here's the truth:
you'll never really know why someone really didn't want to hire you. When you
hear lots of glowing things but you're not hired....there's a big issue
somewhere. If you want feedback to be useful, you must look for trends, which
means multiple attempts (and failures.)

Third, don't take the title literally as "startups". These are all personal
interactions, and organization size or makeup isn't a useful filter here. I
doubt the author intended this post to be limited to just small companies,
though.

------
payne92
I'd be interested: how many OFFERS did she get (or plausibly could have
gotten)?

It seems easy to read this article and conclude that a junior developer in
similar circumstances might be picking and choosing between working at 20
different companies.

The reality might be more like picking between 1-2, and the "reasons [she]
didn't work for them [the rest]" were THEIR reasons, not hers.

~~~
brooklyn_ashey
I'm interested too. Most junior devs I've known recently have to apply to
hundreds of companies before anyone is "interested" in what they are offering.
(which is just ridiculous if there is actually a "skills gap". Companies
should take some responsibility in training, if they can.) After that, they
have to take jobs that pay less than restaurant server work. I wonder why she
had so many interviews. Good for her, though. I'm glad she was able to be
picky with a goal of working with a team who could help her improve over time.
Everyone should get to work with people who inspire and support them.

~~~
kareemsabri
> I'm glad she was able to be picky

I'm not sure she was that picky. She doesn't explicitly say the reasons were
all _her_ reasons. For example, one of the main things that stopped me from
working at Facebook is that they declined to make me an offer.

~~~
user5994461
Doubt she was picky. Half the points would get her rejected by the company,
not the opposite.

------
analyst74
I like the mentality of the author, this is how you land good jobs at good
companies for good pay.

If you think that you're lucky to have a job offer, like I did when I first
started out, then you'll sure get to work with people who think they're doing
you a favor by underpaying you for some shitty work.

~~~
andriesm
I actually hate the attitude of the author, maybe because I'm almost 40? I
would NEVER hire someone so clueless and demanding. You get to be demanding
when you have exceptionally valuable skills princess.

It is not 20 startups that are (mainly) the problem, it is YOU who expect
other people to train and baby you. You don't have formal training from a
university degree, neither are you willing to self learn your way to becoming
a master coder. Why would a high stakes startup engage a liability like you?

This is what I would tell the author.

~~~
brandall10
I'm 41 w/ a degree in CS from UCSD (what was at the time a top 10 CS school),
spent about 15 years primarily in enterprise healthcare doing C++/C#, then the
last 6 years as a Rails/React/Angular dev. I also helped advise a friend on
her path to becoming a dev by way of a coding bootcamp, career advice, etc.

I think the author is on point. A high-functioning team should embrace a
mentor-mentee approach between their sr. and jr. staff. That doesn't preclude
self-learning, it accelerates it. Otherwise you're leaving productivity on the
floor, and quite frankly, if your sr. staff isn't adept at doing it they
probably are not all that sr (being a sr. dev is alot more than simply being a
good coder).

~~~
arghIdontwantto
Mind sharing your recommendations for your friend? I have a friend in a
similar position that asked me for help but I'm a bit at lost on what to
recommend her.

I've been a professional developer for over 20 years. I honestly don't
remember what it is not to know what a for loop is and can't find any decent
paths from 'non-developer' to 'junior developer' in an easy to follow manner.

~~~
brandall10
The route taken was:

\- Do some pro-bono work as an intern of sorts on side of current job for at
least a few months - in this case you could help her out with any friends of
yours who perhaps have a web consulting business, otherwise go to local
meetups and offer her services (just moderate HTML/CSS is fine). Live lean
during this time and pocket savings if she doesn't have at least 6 months of
cushion + any expenses for a bootcamp. This way she'll have some real-world
experience coming out of the bootcamp and some cushion while trying to land
her first job.

\- Find a good bootcamp known to have a decent conversion rate and block out
everything else from her life... it can be intense.

\- Try to find a decent job ASAP after graduation, the initial salary isn't
important and (IMO) it's still not a bad idea to do any pro-bono or below
market contract work if the experience itself would be esp. good. My friend's
first year or so ended up being a mixture of moderately paid and poorly paid
contract work.

\- In the end though, she ended up making $70k w/ great benefits, fully remote
in San Diego (roughly equiv to ~$100k in SV) in less than two years from
graduation, nearly double what she made at her previous job. With her first
year and some 4-5 projects under her belt interviews were considerably easier
to get.

~~~
arghIdontwantto
Thanks.

I run a consultancy business and she can intern/learn with me. That isn't the
problem. Is actually finding resources for her to start from zero. Where we
live there aren't really any bootcamps. Was looking more for information on
books or online courses that really do assume zero knowledge from the student.

I can try and do it myself (and of course, I'll help when I can) but it is
hard to even think of where to start. Should she learn Javascript on an online
editor? Install node and try typescript locally? Just install a full version
of Visual studio and let her click the buttons until she can understand what
is going on?

I remember learning how to program by reading the QBasic manual that came with
my computer at the time and try to modify some source code (probably
Gorila.BAS) but not sure if that is the most efficient way to do it nowadays
(and I was young, had all the time in the world, so if it took me 2 months to
get a square moving onscreen wasn't a problem).

~~~
brandall10
I've tried training people in the past who have zero knowledge and it's pretty
hit or miss, mostly miss... it really will only work if they are highly self-
motivated and find it _really_ interesting, otherwise things start to go
downhill quickly when coming to the more difficult material. I initially tried
this with her and she ended up getting pretty flustered and annoyed with me
when it came to trying to explain how object oriented programming works, so
much so that we didn't talk for awhile. And she is an extremely bright person
- HS valedictorian, graduated w/ honors from Berkeley with a liberal arts
degree.

She ended up moving to SV for the bootcamp she did (Coding Dojo). There are
some remote ones that I believe are supposed to be good but I wouldn't be able
to recommend any in particular. For most people I recommend doing something
like this because of the total immersion, access to a variety of fairly strong
engineers (the instructors) and other students in the same boat. Aside from
that, my friend is a big fan of the Udacity nanodegree programs and has done a
couple since her bootcamp to level up her skills and stay sharp.

For some basic getting your feet wet right now sorts of things, I am def a big
fan of material like Eloquent Javascript, Learn Python the Hard Way, Hartl's
Rails Tutorial etc.

I would say though the best thing you can do for her right now is to give her
tasks that are actually productive or helpful for you and then build on those.
Like perhaps you have a bunch of unused css on a project that you want culled,
throw her a basics on CSS guide that maybe takes an hour or two to go thru,
then create a story for her and walk thru it. Get her familiar with source
control, the layout of the project, etc. Getting a sense of accomplishment
quickly and repeatedly will help get someone over the initial hump, and will
esp. drive them forward when they get stuck.

~~~
arghIdontwantto
Thanks so much. She is very driven and smart, and knowing her, she does have a
good analytical mind, but since she was young, she was pushed more to
humanistic areas and never really focused on IT/Math, etc. But I've seen her
work when she was pushed in finance at a firm and with other accounting things
and I think she has the smarts for it (if she didn't I wouldn't recommend her
to try development).

Bootcamp wise, we live in a country without much access to those, and due to
her family situation, she can't really move.

I will try Eloquent Javascript with her. I have Hartl's Rails tutorial but
from what I remember, it was a bit complicated at the start if you didn't have
any decent computing experience.

I have some projects that could use some clean up in the html area, maybe I'll
write a few stories for that and will see how she does.

Again, thank you so much for the time and ideas!

------
thesmallestcat
"Dropping the ball on follow ups"... well yea, I too find a company losing
interest to be a substantial barrier to starting work there.

------
rdiddly
I laughed darkly at the part about being strung along forever. I've been on
both sides of it. Sometimes the wheels of consensus grind slowly and there's
nothing you can do to speed things up, even if you're really excited about
hiring someone.

That said, I think pestering should be done once or twice weekly. But let it
be done by an email bot, preferably custom-written by the candidate. It might
even impress them, who knows. Then while that's going on, you can continue
with your job search.

~~~
jarofgreen
There is something you can do - keep the candidate up to date with what's
going on. If the candidate has to write a sodding bot to pester the company,
that's a sign the company has dropped the ball on communications.

I've been there. Had coffee with start up boss when unemployed, was good. Had
chat with current senior Dev, was good. Ask about discussing further, nothing.
Chase, nothing. 2 months later I have a different job, I see boss at event, we
wave across room and the next day he emails asking if I'm still looking. No.
How is this a professional way to deal with someone?

In contrast, good interviews have always told me clearly when things would
happen and have stuck to that. It only takes a minute to communicate well, and
it really pays off.

~~~
rdiddly
Agreed, but I guess I'm saying those people deserve bots. There's a certain
amount of justice in it.

------
pb001
Meritocracy is the goal in this space, whether you have a degree or not should
not matter. By asking for a degree some companies just want to know whether
you can study and achieve on your own. At the same time expecting mentorship
is wrong. Asking for apprenticeship is not. Mentor-mentee approach is often
taken in the wrong direction. The onus is on the mentee to ask for help, study
and better his or her skills, with slight correction from someone willing to
help you. BTW, there are many other ways to get help from outside of the
company without whining about it (Stackoverflow? RTFM?). You want to work for
a startup - you have to have a self-starter mentality. Sort of like: Give me a
training budget that I can use to my advantage, and an environment to apply
what I have learned. And leave me alone to produce better code. I want to be a
viable contributor to the team. I can only do so when I can stand on my two
feet. Nothing personal. Many developers are not opposed to help, far from it.
It's just that when the student is ready the master comes. Mentors should
select their mentees though earned relationship, potential, performance, IMHO.

------
JonasJSchreiber
I have to respectfully disagree with many points in this post. I think many
points of contention boil down to the norms of startups. Yes, they may seem
cliquey, but you quickly become part of the clique when there's just a few
people there.

I agree that degrees shouldn't be mandatory at a startup, but I've never seen
one that requires them.

Miscommunications: I'm not sure how one gets into an interview where one of
the requirements is 5+ years with Java, and that person has only JS.

Dodging questions: startups often are making the rules as they go, and might
not have a concrete answer for you. Drill down and find out what direction
they might take.

Dropping the ball on follow ups: they probably don't want to give you a hard
"no". Just move on and keep (or try to have) a positive attitude.

They need someone more experienced: take a job requiring no experience, and
then you'll have more experience.

------
wils124
A lot of the replies in this thread seem to conflate demanding basic respect
with being unwilling to start at the bottom. All of the signals OP lists are
good indicators of either toxic culture or disorganization.

Why is it such a sign of millennial moral decay to ask for everything you can
get? The company on the other side of the table is certainly going to.

------
brooklyntribe
Why work for a company that has a +95% chance of failure, a fraction of the
cash you would make at a FANG, after 3 years at FB think the "average" hire is
now worth like $3M.

Why work at a startup? Makes zero sense.

Source: Work at a startup. Have not been paid in 2 years. But I do get to go
to the beach when I want. And learned how to live on nothing. :-)

~~~
davidjnelson
Some good points but 1.6MM/year pre tax, 840k/year after tax / 740k after
expenses not living somewhere nice total comp? That's roughly what you'd need
with an 8% return to get to 3MM in 3 years. They pay well but that sounds
pretty far fetched. I could see 300k/year pre tax, 185k/year after tax / 85k
after expenses not living somewhere nice. After 3 years at an 8% return that'd
be roughly 350k... Not 3 million.

If you're getting promoted regularly you might be able to hit 3MM in 15 years,
10 if promotions went faster and you lived super cheap with 8 roommates.

~~~
brooklyntribe
That's quoting from Chaos Monkey. His numbers. Includes stock options.

------
carapace
Ive noticed sometimes in interviews the interviewer will start to try to
"sell" me on the company. Once, they didn't even ask me any questions, just
kept telling me all about the company and how great it was. Generally when
this happens it has correlated with other red flags... YMMV

------
ryanx435
Why did she retract her applications from companies during salary negotiations
just because of the way the ask for first bid was phrased? ("How much are you
expecting us to pay him you?")

Seems like she should have asked for more than she wanted with the expectation
that the company would make a lower counter offer.

I mean, a job is literally money in exchange for services. It's reasonable for
both sides to talk about what the exchange rate is going to be during the
interview process.

Edit: she admits that she is a junior developer and often doesn't know what
she is doing in her post. It's reasonable for this to be factored into her
salary. None of you downvoters have yet to provide an answer to my question of
why she withdrew applications because of the way salary negotiations where
phrased to her.

~~~
borplk
You ignored the "So given that you don't really know what you are doing" part.

With that included the question sounds rude and makes it sound like the
candidate should be grateful for whatever they are going to pay.

It's like a candidate going to an interview at a company in bad technical
shape and saying "So given your product is an outdated buggy piece of crap,
how much are you paying me to put up with it?".

~~~
ryanx435
Yeah, that's a common negotiating tactic, which is why I'm confused as to why
she withdrew her applications

~~~
borplk
That's not a negotiating tactic. That's called being an ass.

There are more professional and polite ways of saying "we are able to offer
you a junior-level salary".

