
A note I sent to YCombinator - dclapp
First, I guess I should say that I have started five companies. All were successful; two had successful NASDAQ small-cap IPOs.  I have also had a few books published, and spent a number of years as a widely read computer columnist in the 1980s.  Meh.<p>Of late, I have been doing medical technical writing for large medical companies. I'm pretty financially secure, so I only work on short-term contracts, and only when I feel like it. But it does put me in the world of highly skilled contract workers, which is interesting, and the reason for this note.<p>First, I agree with 99% of what you say about entrepreneurship. The one thing that I would add is that people who want to be successful had better be nice people.<p>Smart talented people don't want to work with jerks, no matter what the compensation. Here, of course, we come to Steve Jobs. Steve asked me to come to Apple to write one of two "first books" about the Macintosh. (the other was written by Cary Lu, much missed.). So I spent 1983 at Apple, hanging around, being nosy.  And got to spend quite a bit of time with Steve. That made me want to start my own company…to see if I could do it and succeed. More importantly, it made me want to start a company and not be an asshole, and see if I could succeed. The answer was yes.<p>So it was with some interest that I looked at the job postings for the companies that you are involved with. Of the 12 companies listed, 10 of the openings were for programmers. No surprise.<p>The humor, to me, is in the consistency. They all want really really really really good programmers. Not one company is willing to put forth a salary number, but they all say they offer excellent compensation.  In the bay area, that must be a lot of zeros!<p>And most wave their hands about how hard they work. Get the code?  We intend to work you like a dog. To enrich the founders, of course.<p>And most offer the added incentive of equity. Although only a fool or a recent graduate would fail to realize how easily one can be washed away in later rounds.<p>So here we have greed and capitalism operating in its purest form.  You want to make a lot of money by funding startups. The start ups want to make a lot of money by making things.  But…as you so correctly state, the wealth will primarily be created by the programmers. And they don't have programmers! Or at least not the really really good programmers they need to make a really really big bunch of money.<p>If Marx were alive today...you get the idea.  It is obviously hard to exploit the working class, when the workers you need are so rare and so valuable to your aspirations.  Hence all the frenetic handwaving in the job postings on your site<p>I have a friend. A young man who has an international tea distribution company, which services bubble tea shops, owned by his father and other investors.  He wants business advice. I keep saying: dude, you have an international tea distribution business!  Run with it!<p>But I really like the guy. So I dug deep, to come up with the best business advice I could offer. I finally arrived at this: make sure that everyone who works for you, and everyone who works with you, makes a ton… an absolute boatload of money. Do that, and make sure that they really do, and you will do fine.  No worries. And you will become a better person in the process; which is the only justifiably selfish reason to be in business in the first place.<p>Maybe some of your companies could take those notions into their efforts to hire ditch diggers?<p>Doug Clapp<p>ps -- All this we work really hard bullshit? As if it is a merit badge or something? Your fundees should realize that the very best code written in this century was written for the space shuttle. And the folks who wrote it, without going into too much detail, worked 40 hour weeks. And were not allowed to work more than that. Period. It is no fun to win if you don't play by the rules. A 40 hour week is a good rule. I suspect that a 36 hour week is a better rule. :-)
======
nhashem
A lot of the job postings to me from YC startups seem absurd, since a lot of
them seem to be looking for "expert"-level roles. For example, a lot of them
are looking for a "growth engineer." My interpretation is that they're
basically saying, "We have a cool product and anyone that hears about us seems
to like us, so we need someone that can write code that will help more people
hear about us."

Or, more generalized: "We have some huge thing we want to do, and can't do it
ourselves, so we're looking for someone that can pretty much just come in and
do it for us."

And all the postings offer in terms of describing/selling why such a immensely
talented individual would work for them is: "We're reinventing the future of
everything, we work hard and play hard, we can offer competitive salary and
equity."

The OP seems to feel this is borne out of some sort of maliciousness, but I
really think this is mostly just cluelessness. When you get a little bit of
traction and you have a little bit of money in the bank, and you're trying to
go even faster and you have 20 major initiatives you want to do and you can
only work on like 2 at a time, it's easy to conclude, "We need to hire! We
love our company, this is so much better than working at some corporate stuffy
job, why wouldn't anyone think the same?"

Most of these companies would probably just be better served forgetting about
hiring and building out the core product until they have more product-market
fit, so they have enough revenue/funding to compensate employees closer to
their talent level, and have a "popular" brand that people would want to
actively work for.

Unfortunately this would mean delaying that 3rd party API, or porting your
applcation to iOS, or started using SEO/SEM to drive some traffic, which all
have huge learning curves that are tough to navigate while you have a ton of
other things to do. But if they were THAT critical, I would suggest those
startups prioritize them over those other things and doing it themselves.

~~~
david_shaw
_> The OP seems to feel this is borne out of some sort of maliciousness, but I
really think this is mostly just cluelessness._

I agree with you there, but not necessarily on your second point (that they
shouldn't be hiring).

I think the "work hard, play hard" line is so thoroughly seared into most
founders' ideas of the "startup game" that it doesn't even occur to them that
a normal working schedule is possible -- and for founders and CEOs, it often
isn't. But if you're asking employees to work to their very core, then you
either need to either pay them a crazy amount of money, or look for a another
co-founder.

In terms of hiring positions like a "growth engineer" as a fifth employee,
you're absolutely right. Often times, buzzwords can get the best of people:
maybe what you actually need is just a _marketing guy_ , but, you know, you've
been reading all these Growth Hacks articles and maybe if you find a marketing
guru who can code and also mock up your UI/UX and-- and then, all of a sudden,
you're trying to hire some superman to do all of the things your organization
needs. It's better to hire people in positions for which they're qualified and
pay them well to work their 40 hour work-weeks than it is to try to find the
one Super Expert Growth Hack Architect Team Lead Manager, try to bribe him or
her with equity, and expect 120 hour work-weeks.

------
david_shaw
These are some great insights, and well worth the read.

I think that at a core level, many of us -- especially in the managerial world
-- understand that working people to death, especially technical people, never
works out well.

The adage of "work smarter, not harder" is absolutely correct. Just like it's
better to write five lines of algorithmically beautiful code than a hundred
lines of obfuscated spaghetti, it's also better to work reasonable hours in an
atmosphere that is comfortable and enjoyable. Working less is often
_exponentially_ more productive. Will there be a crunch time, especially in
the world of startups? Of course there will, and anyone who would promise
otherwise is just plain wrong. That said, it shouldn't be crunch time _all the
time_.

There needs to be a balance. Everyone needs to take their job seriously, and
needs to get their work done in an acceptable amount of time... but stressing
people out to the point of misery is counter-productive. My engineering team,
for example, allows flexible work hours. I lead the team, and usually get into
the office around 9:45am. I am rarely in the office before 9:30am, and I'm
only in before 9 if I have an important call or meeting. I usually stay until
six or six-thirty at night, because that's when I start to feel my
productivity slipping. Some of my guys are early risers, and work 7am - 3pm.
Some of them sleep later than me, but then go home and work until 3am. As long
as their work is getting submitted on time, I don't mind at all: I want people
to be comfortable, and not sit in a desk chair for the sake of keeping it
warm.

Different companies work in different ways, but I agree with the points that
Doug is putting forward in his post. The trend of "we work 18 hours a day to
get anything done!" might sound super enthusiastic to a potential investor,
but think about the message you're sending your potential talent. Founding a
company is one thing, and it's going to require longer days than working on
the codebase (unless that's what the founder does at your organization...),
but there _needs_ to be a balance. Hopefully, we'll get there soon.

~~~
dclapp
What you call crunch time is what I call poor project management. I started
out as the managing editor of a daily newspaper. We shipped an entire product
every day. We never slipped, we never missed a daily deadline… Just like every
other daily newspaper. And there was never a OMG OMG crunch time as the daily
deadline neared. If you manage a project correctly, when the deadline arrives
you'll be sitting around telling jokes and admiring your work. I've done it
many times. It can be done and it is not that difficult.

~~~
katravax
To be fair, making the average daily newspaper is a different kind of project
than how most software is made. Print is mostly a fixed process with few
creative unknowns. You know how long it takes for something to get through
editorial or advertising, how long it takes to lay it out or drop in a
replacement, what time the printer needs the layouts to be able to get the
final papers to distribution, and what price and time are involved in special
features or changes, like spot color or losing some number of copy inches at
the last minute. But much of software is something new, the automation of some
process or creation of efficiency. Software projects, almost by definition,
have some of the players doing something they've never done before. Parts of
the processes are similar, but software and daily print projects aren't really
comparable for most of the cycle.

~~~
dclapp
I have been a manager in both businesses. of course there are differences; but
there are also many similarities. the big idea is that if there is a firm,
inflexible deadline, you will meet it. You may not ship the product that you
really wish to ship, but you will ship. and, to be honest, feature X that has
to be in the product, probably can just as easily go in the next release.
Don't let the best be the enemy of the good. Be realistic about your
capabilities.

~~~
katravax
Then yes, if you limit it to the subset of software projects that can cut
features and still be considered to have met the deadline, then you can meet
inflexible deadlines in software projects. You've defeated technical unknowns
and external dependencies with the escape hatch of "Feature x, or whatever
ship-worthy part of that you can have done by date y".

In that scenario, I think you're implying that meeting a deadline is the most
important metric. I consider that far more likely in periodicals than
software. For the common varieties like commercial software, contract
development, and in-house development, the only one likely to permit that idea
is the commercial product. Contracting and in-house projects will adjust the
ship date or renegotiate requirements.

------
jaems33
It's kind of ridiculous that some mod or admin must've hidden this post
because it's now missing from the front page.

~~~
swang
Anyone figure this out? Can't find it in new nor in the first 4 pages.

~~~
dclapp
Based on emails, I'd say it was a person, who I won't name, at ycombinator.

------
Caligula
I always found job postings by YC companies surreal. The ideology espoused by
YC is to be a founder of a startup. If you are a talented engineer, why would
you work for 1-2%(if your lucky) equity and less salary than
google/facebook/etc.

~~~
tokenadult
_If you are a talented engineer, why would you work for 1-2%(if your lucky)
equity and less salary than google/facebook/etc._

If you are a sufficiently young engineer (I am neither young nor an engineer,
but I know people who are both), you might want to work at a startup before
launching your own because

a) the startup might hit it big enough to make you rich enough to have a lot
of runway for your own project,

and

b) you might learn something about the process of founding and running a
startup if you get enough personal interaction with the founders.

So it's not always a dumb choice to work for a startup as one of the early
employees. It's rare for an early hire's equity share to turn into serious
money, and it's commonplace for startups to fizzle out and leave their early
employees looking for a new job, but some young people like that atmosphere
and think it provides learning opportunities that more "secure" jobs don't
provide. There is also, of course, a case to be made for working at Google,
Facebook, etc., but I am attempting to answer your question.

~~~
tmcclarren
As a seasoned startup engineer, it's bad advice, every time.

Mark Zuckerberg controls 28% of Facebook's voting equity.

Think about it. You're getting totally fucked, kids.

------
yalogin
To add insult to working like a dog, most companies now say "they don't track
vacation" and paint it as an incentive trying to imply employees can take as
much vacation as they want. The reality is because of peer pressure no one
takes a vacation. I for one stay as far away as possible from such companies.

------
stcredzero
Funny, but I just moved to the Bay Area and I've thinking about exactly this
subject for the past two days.

I am looking for the following in a company, in this order:

    
    
        - A culture of morality
        - A culture of respect
        - A culture of good listening
        - A modicum of intelligence and talent
    

If a company has all of these, with just a bit of luck, they will succeed, and
do it by truly generating value. Lots of companies headed by jerks will also
succeed, but I'd rather not be in them.

------
Wisqnet
I'm honestly not really seeing the fuss here. Doesn't every company want
"really really really good programmers"? Don't most companies offer stock
options? Am I really supposed to see a lack of info about how hard they work
and assume the worst?

If there were some inside knowledge from people who have taken these offers
and lived to regret doing so, then maybe this would have some substance. To
me, without more info and being willing to give people the benefit of the
doubt, it just seems like speculation and pessisism.

------
vorg
> A 40 hour week is a good rule. I suspect that a 36 hour week is a better
> rule.

By saying "36 hour week" instead of "35-hour week is better", you're showing a
bias that better working hours means working less days or taking longer
weekends (i.e. 9 days every two weeks), rather than less hours per day (i.e. 7
hours a day). Certain types of people (including you I guess) would prefer the
extra day as reward, other types prefer the extra hour each day. Don't forget
about the latter types of people.

~~~
tripzilch
In the Netherlands, where a 36 hour work-week is pretty standard, it usually
means 4.5 days, so one day you work half and go home earlier. Another common
scheme is to alternate 4x8 and 5x8 work weeks. But I suppose most bosses would
not mind if you want to keep an even different schedule as long as it adds up
and doesn't inconvenience the rest of the team.

~~~
vorg
I didn't think of the 6x6 work week when I wrote my first comment, just the
35-week used in France. I guess the 6x6 is what I was promoting (i.e. less
hours per day rather than less days), but taken to a greater extreme.

------
neilk
> I suspect that a 36 hour week is a better rule. :-)

According to a lot of sources, including Tom DeMarco's PeopleWare, 35 hours a
week is the only sustainable pace for intellectual work. Plus or minus a few
hours, maybe.

But that was about stable companies. I'm not sure that startups are trying to
be sustainable.

Arguably a startup is really exploring a space of possibilities, searching for
a profitable niche. So probably delivering crappy code that delivers three
features is better than producing one solid thing. I've been on the cleanup
crew for a couple of acquired startups, as well as products that were
developed in 20% time at large corporations and grew into larger teams. My
impression is that code quality barely mattered to their initial success. So
I'm not sure what the optimum workload in a YC-style startup should be.

Also, we have to modify DeMarco et al's advice for a team composed of two or
three twentysomethings. It seems likely that their stamina is going to be well
above average and their knowledge and experience is going to be well below. So
perhaps they are playing their cards right to bet on stamina.

------
gwern
> ps -- All this we work really hard bullshit? As if it is a merit badge or
> something? Your fundees should realize that the very best code written in
> this century was written for the space shuttle. And the folks who wrote it,
> without going into too much detail, worked 40 hour weeks. And were not
> allowed to work more than that. Period. It is no fun to win if you don't
> play by the rules. A 40 hour week is a good rule. I suspect that a 36 hour
> week is a better rule. :-)

This is a bad example. The Shuttle code is a extremely narrow, well-specified
piece of functionality where they had many years to work on and refine it
using formal methodologies like Z specifications (IIRC) and I don't even
remember how many millions of dollars the _Fast Company_ article said was
spent developing the code over the years.

Every single one of those qualifiers and adjectives is likely to be false in a
startup context.

------
prtamil
Your Advise reminds me a Quote from the movie God Father Part-II. "Hyman Roth
always makes money for his partners. One by one, our old friends are gone.
Death, natural or not, prison, deported. Hyman Roth is the only one left,
because he always made money for his partners. ". Anyway good Advice.

------
michaelpinto
Doug I know I'm just a silly fanboy -- but I'd be curious about what else you
got to see at apple during that era, and any other insights you have on
startups...

~~~
dclapp
Hi Michael. I think that Apple in those days is a field that is well-plowed.
folklore.org is a particularly fun site.

Start-ups? Business is business. it can be as high-stress or as peaceful as
you decide to make it. Software development, these days, is often dysfunction
practiced as an artform. :-) Give SCRUM a shake, and waterfall drops to the
floor, quivering in embarrassment. Add your examples here. My best development
advice is solve the hard problems first, not last. If there are no hard
problems, look again. If all parts of the development process are equally
difficult, then it should be fairly easy to estimate time to complete...to
over-simplify...

This has worked through-out history. Alexander The Great attacked the enemy
line at its strongest point, with well-rested, fired-up troops, who knew the
battle would be fierce but short. Ditto Patton and Colin Powell. And Karl Rove
perfected going at an opposing candidate's greatest strength; a lesson learned
by the Obama campaign…thank goodness. :-)

~~~
dclapp
Okay, one last thing. Richard Branson, a business genius, said "Praise people
and they flower; criticize them and they wilt." So praise and cheerlead and
mentor relentlessly. And, like the best baseball managers, put people in
positions where they can succeed. I could go on... :>)

~~~
tluyben2
My Bangladesh team actually tell me the opposite; they want critique, not
praise. If they get praise they will stop working as they feel they over
delivered. Guess it depends on where your people are and what culture they are
from.

~~~
jernfrost
I believe there is some subtlety to this. As a Norwegian I notice Americans
co-workers often crave more praise and positive feedback than say Northern
European co-workers. Americans also more actively give praise. However that
doesn't mean that Northern Europeans don't like to be praised. But one needs
to feel that the person giving it is honest about it. I try to give praise
when I know people have performed better than is normal for them.

I know myself that I find it just irritating if I get praise for mediocre
work, which should be plain to see for anybody who care that it isn't anything
special.

I don't know Bangladesh culture but I would expect that there would be similar
mechanisms at work. They don't want unwarranted praise. They wanted when they
have performed well.

I am guessing because from when I lived in the US, there was one thing I could
find common ground among all other foreign students whether they were Japanese
or Spanish and that was that American optimism and positivism is a bit alien
to everybody. Don't misunderstand I think it is quite admirable that Americans
are so positive and can-do attitude. The rest of the world could certainly
learn a bit from that. But as with most things there is always a flip side of
the coin.

Sometimes Americans seem to hit the wall of reality a bit too hard because
optimism was running a too high compared to what was realistically possible.

~~~
tluyben2
It is common here in Northern EU to see Americans as almost 'crazily
optimistic'. Like you say (and this goes especially for the very 'sober'
people like the Dutch and scandinavians); the first time you run into
Americans in real life it's really jikes. You look SOO good, that's SOOO GREAT
what you do etc. I (from Netherlands) got more compliments in one week in the
US than I ever did in the Netherlands my whole life (that's probably not true,
but I felt like that). So as we are very sober, those compliments are rapidly
filtered and then they are not compliments anymore. But on the other hand, I
do admire it more than the other side of not getting compliments mostly and I
like the optimism much more. I do like well founded criticism but I believe
that's different than what my BD colleagues want.

It's interesting to see the differences anyway.

~~~
jernfrost
Hehehe cool I didn't know you were dutch. I lived in Holland for 3 years. It
was eerie how similar I found Dutch to be to Norwegians despite living in
countries with very different history and physical appearance. I find that
foreigners complain about the exactly same thing about Norwegians as Dutch.
Being too direct, blunt, cold etc.

Anyway interesting with the BD colleagues of yours. I am most familiar with
Vietnamese. I can't remember anything in particular about their view on
criticism. But they preferred very detailed descriptions of what they were
supposed to do.

------
happywolf
A lot of pointy-hair bosses, especially in Asia (I am now working in China)
assume longer working hours = higher productivity. In other words, they are
having the 'factory mindset' whereby an hour not working is equal to an hour
of productivity loss. However this assumption won't work for R&D, especially
anything related to software.

~~~
gbog
Fellow China expat here. I work at douban.com and the culture seems to be
closer to US tech companies than what you describe.

------
nlz1
jwz said the same thing: [http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-
name-to-se...](http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-name-to-sell-
a-con/)

> What is true is that for a VC's business model to work, it's necessary for
> you to give up your life in order for him to become richer.

Let's get a movement going here.

------
harryh
Who says they don't have programmers? I would wager that almost every YC
company has at least 1 and generally more than one programmer on the founding
team.

I also think you're being far too presumptuous about the comp packages these
startups are offering. You seem to imply that they're being too stingy. Do you
have any evidence for this?

~~~
taocoyote
"Not one company is willing to put forth a salary number, but they all say
they offer excellent compensation."

The implication being that the salaries offered are low. If they were
confident that what they were offering was competitive then maybe they
wouldn't be afraid to be up front about it? I've never had to hire someone so
I don't know what the reasons are for not stating a salary range are.

~~~
harryh
You aren't going to get uniform applicants. Different applicants will command
different salaries. There's not a reasonable way to put a single number on it.
It's not just YC companies that do this, it's basically everyone. Go try to
find a salary number on google.com/jobs. You won't find one, and yet Google is
known to pay quite well.

When was the last time you saw a salary number for any programming job?

For that matter seeing a salary number in a job add for any high skill
professional job is extremely rare.

~~~
cfn
Almost every job add on the IT sido of jobserve.co.uk has a salary number and
that includes job offers made directly by companies.

------
ssylee
Interesting take on how many businesses and startups are being run by the
founders these days. Doug, I have one question for you: how do you feel the
sales and marketing (or the neglect of them) affect how the founders are able
to treat their staff?

~~~
tluyben2
I'm interested in that too, but I guess it depends on the type of company
probably and the type of sales? I know some commission driven sales in a
services companies definitely killing people rapidly by selling insane amounts
of work and then throwing it over the fence. You need a very strong account/pm
to counteract this if you want to not die and keep clients happy at the same
time.

For products I have seen sales guys adding features because the client asks
and the doing this with the founder's permission because 'that big client we
cannot miss'. Resulting in misery for the rest of the staff.

~~~
dclapp
Well, you just have to say no. if your business works for clients, the clients
will always kill you if you let them. insane demands, low ball bids, etc. this
is as old as capitalism, and particularly found in advertising agencies... and
printing companies. I am sure you can add examples. If you want to run your
business like a third world country, you obviously can.

~~~
tluyben2
You have to say no, but not like that or you won't be servicing clients in
hard times.

------
tmcclarren
Excellent stuff, Doug!

Tim McClarren

------
applefanner
I had an interview with a YC company. They were going to bring me on board
with a low salary, lots of equity, and a seven day work week, with what seemed
to be 8-10 hours a day. But hey, they have a cool office and free food!

~~~
dclapp
While I realize that the plural of anecdote isn't data, this is pretty much my
point exactly. The venture capitalists take a large position for a small
amount of money... minimizing the risk and maximizing their potential profit.
the founders try to play a similar game with their highly skilled employees.
Welcome to capitalism.

------
mpeg
I want to work for you.

Coming out of two startup sales, I have to say if you want to make money you
shouldn't be an early employee anyway; you should join when the company is
willing to pay good money.

~~~
dclapp
The way to get good people to work with you is to be the kind of person people
want to work with. Seems obvious to me. I have worked with jerks, and with
people I continue to love and admire to this day. Like many of you, I'm sure.

Since I am sadly a shitty programmer, I had to take my inspiration from
baseball managers… people who did not play the game, but tried their best to
make sure that the team won. you don't win by leaving your best pitcher in for
nine innings. (Usually :-). You try to put people into situations where they
can succeed, day after day.

