
How to Game Silicon Valley’s System - hugs
http://www.wired.com/2015/02/moneyball-for-startups/
======
martinkl
The article is essentially arguing that entrepreneurs should be contrarian:
not set up shop in the same place as everyone else, not try to hire the same
people as everyone else, not have the same office setup as everyone else, etc.

Of course, to win, it's not sufficient to be contrarian — you have to be both
contrarian and right. Whether or not these choices are right for you is
probably highly dependent on what you're doing. But the idea of being
contrarian, and not always following the received wisdom, is sound.

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csbrooks
I always took "cultural fit" to mean stuff like, do you prefer to work only
with Big Design Up Front, or are you cool with a more Agile process? Are you
more comfortable at a big company, or a small one? Do you take yourself
seriously, or are you willing to joke around a bit? How do you deal with
changing requirements?

Not something like "what kind of music do you like". That shouldn't be a
factor in hiring. Right?

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nakedrobot2
The main idea of this article is that you should hire normal "older" (aka
people over 30 with children, and women, and minorities? really!?) people and
allow them to have a life.

Crap like this is why I stay far away from silicon valley. The saddest part
is, it is mostly true.

~~~
mahyarm
There are a lot of companies that hire these people in silicon valley,
including startups!

Usually the founders are older. Or the work is harder / involves a whole bunch
of C & C++.

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PaulHoule
My experience is that there are two places where you can't sell remote work:
the bay area and NYC. In both of these areas people refuse to believe that the
best talent (or the best talent that will work form them) doesn't come from
next door.

~~~
vonmoltke
Exactly. The Bay Area in particular bitches and moans about "lack of talent"
but has such hiring myopia that only a few companies can see talent that is
more than 50 miles away.

~~~
hugs
I once had a co-worker (who lives inside the San Francisco city limits) say:
"San Jose? Why would I ever drive that far south?! As for as I'm concerned,
San Jose is Southern California." He was serious.

~~~
chubot
So? Nobody who lives in SF would drive themselves to San Jose every day. The
traffic is insane. You would kill 3-4 hours a day easily.

Hence the point that companies (say in San Jose) should allow remote work to
attract employees in SF.

~~~
hugs
Sorry, I should have connected the dots to the parent comment. It means he
wasn't interested in recruiting new hires from San Jose or anywhere else that
wasn't a short commute into the city... unless of course, they agreed to move.

~~~
x0x0
Because it would be a bad hire. Those 50 miles are at _least_ a 90 minute
drive each way most of the day.

~~~
hugs
Of course a 90 minute commute is a horrible idea. So why would they have to
drive? Why couldn't they work from home? If code is checked into GitHub and
deployed to cloud servers, why are we requiring new hires to work in the SF
office every day? (That was my point.)

~~~
x0x0
ah, I understand

you're preaching to the choir

~~~
hugs
:-) I could have also mentioned that this particular co-worker had influence
over recruiting and office policies...

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bovermyer
At the Minneapolis Star Tribune, we hire almost entirely based on "cultural
fit." And that culture has only two requirements - you must be really excited
by development, and you must really like to learn. There are no technical
questions in the interview process, and beyond a cursory glance to see if the
candidate's got an active Github account, not much in the way of code review.
We'll ask about hobbies, but it's totally OK if they're not the same things
everyone else is into - it's mostly because we're curious.

This has resulted in one of the most diverse and fun developer groups I've
ever worked with. We all love code, and we're a mix of ethnicities, genders,
and ages.

I imagine that Silicon Valley is missing out by not following a similar path.

~~~
geebee
That's interesting. I'm not a huge fan of the technical interview either. I'd
really like to see the industry find a way to assess technical ability without
forcing developers to re-take their data structures and algorithms exam every
time they interview for a new job.

So if you've been successful without this ritual, you have my attention. But
what (if anything) are you doing to see if someone is good at writing
software. Do you know the candidates you interview already, by reputation?

~~~
bovermyer
The first couple months tell us whether they can write good code or not. We're
not going to get a good sense of their coding skill from how well they can
spout off buzzwords, or even from a code test. Only by giving them tasks we'd
expect one of our devs to do and seeing how they interact with other devs, use
information-gathering tools (Google, books, coworkers, etc.), and solve
complex problems in a social scenario (no dev is an island) do we really get a
sense for whether they can write good software.

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neilk
I've been thinking about Moneyball as a metaphor for how we should hire, for
quite a while. In my opinion there's just a vast amount of talent out there
that the tech industry is discarding. It's not like you have to take the
dregs, it's the wine that the rest of the industry is pouring into the gutter.

It's true that socially isolated young live-for-work white males are the most
prepared to crank out code. But if we were just a _little_ better at
supporting different kinds of people, we'd have far more productive and
healthy workplaces, while still being fun and weird.

My company is getting there. Interviewing more for values and velocity versus
having all the geek merit badges. Plus we're getting more geographically
distributed.

~~~
x0x0
I think you'd be stunned whom you can hire (and for how much money) in any
area where a basic middle class home doesn't go for over $1m and a 500 ft^2
apartment in soma reasonably close to offices for $2.6k/mo, ie the first $52k
of pretax income is solely for rent.

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bpatel576
I remember watching an interview of Jack Ma with Charlie Rose during Davos.
Charlie asked him about his experience wit Tai Chi and Jack immediately
related the art with his practice in business, which boiled down to something
like, "for every misstep, there is an opportunity." The current startup world
has been successful at recruiting talent because they separated themselves
from traditional corporations by providing a better atmosphere to work.
Startup 2.0 will figure out something. It's the nature of evolution.

------
rcarrigan87
This article is trying to apply startup advice to massive tech companies.

"Culture fit" is actually really important when you have 5-10 people working
on a new company. It's better to have hegemony than a diverse set of opinions
when your runway is 6-12 mths and you need to make concise decisions to
survive.

The reverse is true for huge tech companies. Lack of diversity hurts their
business in many ways.

Pretty much everything this article says is startup advice misapplied to major
tech companies who are well beyond startups.

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michaelochurch
_“Cultural fit” is one of the most corrosive ideas in the tech industry._

Culture is super-important-- in large part, to help make sure that the
47-year-old female Haskell badass and the 22-year-old male Ruby rockstar work
well together-- but "cultural fit" is often used as an excuse for shitty
behavior and exclusionist hiring practices.

 _Older developers, for example, bring a lot to the table. One study found
that developers actually get better with age._

Very true. But people who've been around the block aren't going to carry a
pager except for a project that is absolutely career-making for them (with
both internal and external credibility as rewards) or when they're owners (and
0.05% ain't ownership). I hate the age discrimination culture but I know why
it's there: there's a fear that older developers will "poison" the young with,
you know, real world experience and knowledge about the industry and how it
actually works, and of the games often played against politically inept
engineers.

 _People often say that tech companies must be near other tech companies in
order to succeed._

The Valley's about funding, not other tech companies. The west coast of the US
is the easiest place in the world to raise VC. It's still difficult, and the
process takes a long time and is generally obnoxious, but it's easier there
than elsewhere.

Also, don't downplay "managed outcomes" (e.g. acqui-fails) that are bad for
employees but good for founders' careers. Bay Area VCs can call in a favor
they're owed, have the thing bought, and get the founders popped into
executive positions at Google or Facebook. Harder to do that in Utah. This
doesn't matter to employees but it's important for many VC-funded founders,
especially since the VCs will push you to take on a much higher degree of risk
than most founders would otherwise want.

 _They want privacy. “They say they work in an open office plan and wish they
could go back to a cubicle,” he tells us._

Cubicles suck, too. Private or semi-private (i.e. two people) offices are the
way to go. They're not that expensive. If you must use an open-ish plan, then
give engineers booth-style seating where they have walls at their back. Open-
back visibility is borderline abusive.

 _Don’t have the money for Swedish massages or an in-office coffee bar? There
are less expensive perks._

Google's "free massage" perk is overstated. When I was there, you got one (for
free) per year. Any more, and you have to pay for it. (That said, the price is
quite fair.) This is not to nick Google-- I don't think that any company
should be expected to pay for _unlimited_ massage-- but just to point out that
the competition ain't that stiff on the massage front. One 60-minute massage
per year? That's about $80.

Many of those perks are cheap insofar as they're effective marketing
expenditures. For $80 per employee, Google gets "free massage" out there.

Still, as a cynical 31-year-old, I'd rather have few of the "cute" perks and
more salary. 401k matching and health benefits are important; massage, I can
get on the market.

Finally, for one item that was missed... _Rethink equity_. Personally, I think
finance-style profit-sharing (even if the bonus system can be really
political) is superior. Also, equity has an uncanny valley. The amounts that
non-executive employees get in startups are, quite often, so insignificant
that I'd rather have it all in cash. If you are going to make equity part of
the package, cut out slices that will make people actually care. This means
3-5% for employee #10 and 0.5-1% for employee #50... the actual numbers seem
to be closer to 0.3% and 0.04%, which are in the "who gives a fuck" range.

People gripe about Wall Street's bonus system (in which profits are shared but
employees, except for upper-tier executives, are not expected to acquire stock
in the company) but it's a much better and fairer model of profit-sharing than
what Silicon Valley does.

~~~
mahyarm
So by employee #50, you have about %50+ of the company tied under employee
stock options alone. So either you inflate away everyone else's original
equity significantly to pay for new employees or you soon run out of equity.

The reason why the equity slices are low from what I understand is in the end
of a VC funded company the numbers are something like %70 investors, %15
founders and %15 employees. If your a unicorn performer like facebook, it's
more %40 investors, %30 employees and %30 founders.

But you'll notice the pattern that all employees combined get the same equity
as founders.

Also profit sharing is hard to do with the red ocean strategy of VC companies
that give equity in the first place. When the company is around for 3-5 years
concentrating on getting hundreds of millions of users first before collecting
cash, profit sharing is going to be $0. Profit sharing is only something
enterprise or product companies can do initially, and it cuts out the new
search engine, the new social/messaging network and other long lead time
companies that eventually dominate the software world. WhatsApp was purchased
for billions because in a couple of years, it could of easily become the
world's next Facebook at their growth rates. With under 40 engineers...

So to make the numbers work, angel list is going to be giving %0.25-%0.50 of
the company to initial employees.

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bpatel576
click bate

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lettergram
I find phrases like:

"It [the tech industry] often shuns women, minorities, and others who don’t
fit into the rising “brogrammer” culture."

down right distasteful and a generalization that is pretty outrageous. I would
go out on a limb and say most of the tech industry isn't racist, sexist, or
anything else.

I'm petty sure the number of women in "tech" reflect the number of women
graduating with C.S. degrees. If anything, women seem to get an unfair
advantage just because they are women and "under represented."

I'm not saying that there aren't issues, but the author of the article pretty
much calls everyone in tech a racists and sexist. Then goes on to write an
article that these "techies" are suppose to read.

~~~
neilk
There's a difference between being structurally racist, and viciously,
personally racist. The tech industry isn't filled with KKK members or open
chauvinists (and anyone expressing such sentiments in public would be ejected
immediately).

On the other hand there are a lot of barriers in place, of access and
unconscious bias, which cause some very different outcomes.

How else would you explain the wide disparities? There are hardly any women or
non-white non-Asians in technology in North America. And it's way out of line
with comparable disciplines like mathematics or other sorts of engineering. CS
is the only discipline where the number of women is actually going _down_.

[http://flowingdata.com/2014/10/30/decline-of-women-in-
comput...](http://flowingdata.com/2014/10/30/decline-of-women-in-computer-
science/)

