
Somewhat Verbatim Conversation with a Startup Recruiter - sgustard
http://blog.galler.io/startup-dialog
======
jmduke
This article is a cheap shot, though my friends' anecdotal experiences suggest
that this kind of thing is unfortunately grounded in reality.

The three biggest takeaways, I think, when seeking employment at a startup:

1\. Money v. Experience is a false dichotomy.

2\. It is worth your time and effort to quantify the actual value of things
like free lunches and insurance.

3\. Follow patio11's advice on evaluating equity:

 _Roll d100. (Not the right kind of geek? Sorry. rand(100) then.)

0~70: Your equity grant is worth nothing.

71~94: Your equity grant is worth a lump sum of money which makes you about as
much money as you gave up working for the startup, instead of working for a
megacorp at a higher salary with better benefits.

95~99: Your equity grant is a lifechanging amount of money. You won’t feel
rich — you’re not the richest person you know, because many of the people you
spent the last several years with are now richer than you by definition — but
your family will never again give you grief for not having gone into
$FAVORED_FIELD like a proper $YOUR_INGROUP.

100: You worked at the next Google, and are rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
Congratulations._

~~~
drusenko
To be fair, there are good and bad apples in any general population. Startups
are no different, and the posted conversation is a complete trainwreck.

In defense of _good_ startups:

1- Some of us pay equal to or more than BigCo, so you're not always making a
salary trade-off.

2- Options are a lottery, but with better odds than most people give them
credit for: 13% of VC-backed startups exit for over $10M, 5% exit for over
$50M, and 2% exit for over $100M, which is what I'd call a meaningful exit for
all parties involved [1]. Everybody's experience is different, but many of our
early employees can attest that options sure can be worth quite a lot.

3- You get to have real impact at a startup. Try doing that at BigCo.

4- The culture isn't soul-sucking.

If you find the right startup, I think you are "optimizing for happiness". Get
paid market, be in an environment where you can have autonomy and impact, get
stuff done and shipped, and focus on what you enjoy doing.

You don't have to worry about the millions of ups and downs of starting your
own or freelancing. And you have a 1/50 lottery ticket of making it big, and a
pretty decent chance of picking up some sizable savings.

Obviously, I am biased :)

[1] [http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-truth-behind-9-out-
of-10-st...](http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-truth-behind-9-out-
of-10-startups-fail)

~~~
michaelochurch
_1- Some of us pay equal to or more than BigCo, so you 're not always making a
salary trade-off._

True, but BigCo's also have consistent (if meager) raise policies.

 _2- Options are a lottery, but with better odds than most people give them
credit for: 13% of VC-backed startups exit for over $10M, 5% exit for over
$50M, and 2% exit for over $100M, which is what I 'd call a meaningful exit
for all parties involved [1]. Everybody's experience is different, but many of
our early employees can attest that options sure can be worth quite a lot._

With a typical engineer slice, a $10m or even $100m exit isn't meaningful. You
might get $10-20k per year of vesting. Even in bad years, bankers get better
bonuses (without the tax problems.)

 _3- You get to have real impact at a startup. Try doing that at BigCo._

Startups win that comparison, no question. A startup doesn't guarantee an
impact, but the odds are a lot better.

 _4- The culture isn 't soul-sucking._

There are soul-sucking startups and non-soul-sucking big companies. Cultures
tend to regress to the mean with size, so the really amazing and really
horrible companies tend to be startups, while all the big companies tend to be
somewhere in the middle.

~~~
drusenko
_> True, but BigCo's also have consistent (if meager) raise policies._

We have consistent (and not meager) raise policies.

 _> With a typical engineer slice, a $10m or even $100m exit isn't meaningful.
You might get $10-20k per year of vesting. Even in bad years, bankers get
better bonuses (without the tax problems.)_

Depends on when you join. If you join early, $100m will damn well be
meaningful. If you join later, I hope you'd only consider doing so if the
company has significant traction and should be worth many times more than
$100m.

 _> There are soul-sucking startups and non-soul-sucking big companies.
Cultures tend to regress to the mean with size, so the really amazing and
really horrible companies tend to be startups, while all the big companies
tend to be somewhere in the middle._

I will give you that there are both good and very bad startups. My experience
with large companies is that they regress towards the 25th percentile, at
best.

Spend more time around the startup before joining and decide what the culture
is like for yourself. Any founder can blow smoke up your ass about how awesome
the culture is in an interview; spend a week working and you'll get a pretty
good idea.

~~~
x0x0
Let's take your $100m exit and do an example. Say you're granted .4% as an A
round employee, 30% dilution for a round B, 10% dilution at a round C, then an
exit so no round D gives a final ownership percentage of 0.4% * .63 = 0.252%.
Say you worked there for four years, you get 100e6 * 0.252 * 1e-2 = $250k
before taxes plus strike. Pretax that's a $62k per year spiff, and at best,
with good tax advice, $50k / year after taxes. We can quibble about
meaningful, but $250k is an ok down payment for a relatively modest $1mm house
on the peninsula. We apparently have different ideas about meaningful.

Most startups, even many claiming otherwise pay less than market. You could
probably capture at least half that $50k/year in cash, particularly if you're
willing to work for goog/fb/msft/etc. That doesn't even touch the variance of
that payout.

Also, in expectation and off the top of my head with your success statistics,
that $252k is under $50k.

~~~
burgreblast
Can't disagree with your math, and that's after a $100M exit.

We too had a low 9 figure exit. Although the money wasn't life changing for
employees, the experience was. Winning feels good, man.

a) startups mostly fail, and aren't for most people b) don't join to get rich,
join for the team c) remember pmarca's insight that market is more important
than team for success. d) whatever the outcome, don't be bitter, or gloat.

------
ryanmcbride
This post reminds me a lot of David Thorne:
[http://www.27bslash6.com/p2p2.html](http://www.27bslash6.com/p2p2.html)

~~~
doktrin
Not being familiar with his work, is it a known satire or assumed to be an
actual exchange?

I'm having a hard time verifying its authenticity. There are at least a few
claims (unsurprisingly, by the other party in the exchange) that the entire
thing is fake.

~~~
peterjancelis
Here is the Linkedin from the 'project idea' guy:
[http://www.linkedin.com/in/simonedhouse](http://www.linkedin.com/in/simonedhouse)

Name and work history matches perfectly.

Edit: Here's a counterarticle arguing David Thorne is a cyberbully:
[http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/funnyman-
of...](http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/funnyman-of-the-
internet-just-a-bully-say-former-colleagues-20110621-1gdht.html)

~~~
angersock
The linked cyberullying article is an interesting read; then again, I'd hate
to use an internet where I never had to fear running across a mean person--
would be quite dull.

------
matt_brushlabs
I'm curious to understand the varying experiences of a technical vs. non-
technical candidate, but I also will offer a hypothesis that many startups
simply are very, very poor at managing a recruiting process.

Case in point: It wasn't until I began interviewing for business development
roles with startups that a dialogue around high-level employment was simply
ended with no follow-up.

I had spoken with one particular five-person shop (with a TechStars pedigree
and a new wave of Series A under their belt) for a month or so. I had met the
entire team and had an incredibly good rapport with the CEO/Co-Founder. We
were down to the point of salary negotiations...

...and then, radio silence. That was eight weeks ago. I even sent two short
emails every ten days just to see if there was any other insights or thoughts
I could provide to help firm up their decision. The emails were ignored; I
even bumped INTO the founder one day, and said founder promised to "follow-up
this week". That was three weeks ago.

My time as a recruiter for my consulting firm taught me to treat each
candidate with empathy and respect (unless they give you a reason not to do
so). Unfortunately, by mishandling the process these startups lose not only a
potential future employee, but also a potential user and partner in the
instance that you have a leading role elsewhere.

~~~
moron4hire
I've had clients that wouldn't even take delivery of _work I had done for them
that they had paid for_. But that's not just startups, that's everyone these
days.

------
panther2k
“Our co-founders travel a lot between TED talks and angel pitches. You
understand.”

I do occasionally wonder how some founders have the time & money to travel to
every conference/meetup/event on the circuit. I suppose some of them are
simply uber-talented and can balance that with the needs of their business...
but between coding and talking to customers it's all I can do to find time to
sleep or eat (and occasionally read HN ;)).

~~~
chime
In my experience, the business-minded founder runs the circuit generating
interest while the tech-minded founder keeps building, recruiting. Both are
equally valuable when done properly.

~~~
lettergram
The key is done properly.

------
bifrost
I have to admit, I've been on this phone call as the person being recruited, a
lot. I realized after a while that a lot of the ideas and companies I was
being pitched on weren't interesting, especially after I realized that most
recruiters know very little about the companies they're working for.

That realization prompted me to become a founder. If I was going to work on a
company that was hard to explain, it better damn well be my own, and I better
like it.

------
aaronsnow
The punch line is that after the in-person interview, they'll take more than a
month to get back to you -- and then invite you back for another all-day.

------
mathrawka
I can see two main reasons for working at a startup like this...

1\. You need an entry level job, and this is a good resume builder

2\. You are dreaming of being rich

I always feel that non entry level people at startups like this are getting
duped and that makes me feel depressed about the state of our industry.

~~~
orthecreedence
At least our industry hires entry-level people. A lot of industries right now
are looking for entry-level persons _with 8 years experience_.

------
mtanski
For every opening at a start up like this there is another one at a start-up
that pays market rates, offered comparable benefits and gives a fair piece of
equity (realizing that there is a tension between salary and piece of the
pie).

Hopefully once you're passed 5 employees you have at least some of your shit
together. Otherwise it's hard to recruit employees.

~~~
phamilton
What are "market rates"? As far add I know, most startups can't compete with
Google, Facebook, Microsoft or Netflix on salary (plus bonus). If market
salary is what big cos like Cisco and oracle are paying the I guess some
startups pay market rate for a software engineer. But assuming I'm talented
enough to join your startup, I don't think it'd very accurate to say I'm being
paid market rate when I could get a lot more somewhere else.

------
joeblau
That was pretty entertaining story. I feel like almost every interview with a
startup that I've done has aspects of this story. It's like "We can't tell you
what we're doing but we're gonna be rich."

------
andrewstuart
Everyone is so snide about recruiters and recruiting until they start their
own company then want to employ people. Then they get serious about it. "We're
hiring!"

------
VeejayRampay
This is funny until I realized that as a Rails developer in France, startups
are pretty much the only option.

------
tekjeff
Awesome.

------
electic
The founders are taking all the risk, getting slammed by investors, and
probably have put in more hours and more capital than you ever will. Zoom out
a bit and their chances of failing is 90%.

The people that are very successful today all started somewhere. Many of them
started at a startup, built something, and made a name for themselves. In
their 30s, they are now in demand execs who have proven track records of
building out teams and products.

At the end of the day no one is going to give you 50% of a company, not test
you to see if you can write code and think logically, and not check to see if
you are a good cultural fit in an early stage startup. It sounds like this a
huge issue for you so you have two choices:

1\. Go do your own startup. 2\. Turn down the job and work somewhere else. 3\.
Go work for some mega-corp that pays you well.

In the end, you are just spamming the board with your pointless posts.

~~~
hga
The above is a strawman, e.g. where did you get the "give you 50% of a
company"?

This recruiter is throwing out a _lot_ of red flags, from being in stealth
mode (frequently if not generally a company killer, something I've observed
first hand), to not having much respect for the recruitee, which suggests he
won't get much respect if hired.

Although his apparent dislike of coding on a whiteboard is a red flag if I put
on my interviewer hat; if he can't prove he can code one way or another, you
don't hire him.

~~~
chetanahuja
I am the founder of an engineering intensive startup and I've always detested
"write code on a board" interviews for their apparent uselessness(1) and
awkwardness. There are better and more pleasant ways to ascertain engineering
suitability (including coding ability in realistic coding conditions)

(1) now backed by google's data
[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-
hunting-b...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-
data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html?partner=socialflow&smid=tw-
nytimesbusiness&_r=0)

~~~
hga
Errr, the point of "write code on a board" is _not_ to determine engineering
suitability, but to weed out the majority of people who style themselves as
programmers but who can't actually program. See e.g.
[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-
programmer...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmers-
program.html)

I'm deadly serious about this; the last time I played this "game", back in
1997-8, we were using one of the 2 best D.C. area head hunters, were already
receiving well screened resumes which we further screened, and even then a
solid 1/2 of the "programmers" we interviewed couldn't program.

They showed no signs of "do this in public" performance anxiety, e.g. we would
have been flexible on all but one of the tests by e.g. not hovering over the
interviewee and/or providing an EMACS or Visual C++ editing buffer (the
exception was "find bugs in this block of code on the board", which I think is
a different sort of thing, especially since public code checking _is_
something people do). And our write some code tests were simple, reverse a
doubly linked list (C or C++), and compute the factorial of a number, which we
supplied the definition of for those who'd forgotten.

Side note: I was their first programmer employee, back when they couldn't
afford head hunters, just a classified ad (they'd already tapped out their
networks), and the #1 reason I was hired was I was the _only_ one who passed
the white board programming test. Which I viewed as so trivial that when that
fact was mentioned I didn't really remember the details of it.

~~~
chetanahuja
Apart from all the humble-bragging, and unsupported assertions ("They showed
no signs of anxiety" !! Right... not one candidate you got was anxious on the
day of the interview.) the content I'm getting out of that post is minimal.
And yes, I completely believe you that writing a syntactically complete piece
of code on the whiteboard and finding bugs in it in while a senior engineer
watches you like a hawk (without any intention of helping you out) is an
everyday occurrence for a software engineer.

Anyway I don't think I'll be able to argue _you_ out of your long-held beliefs
per se. All I (and other engineer employers reading this) need to know is,
Google has been the foremost purveyor of this method since it began hiring
engineers and they now say their data shows it doesn't work. That's enough for
me to renounce it and find other ways to screen talent (and yes, we're
currently looking for a senior hacker in the Bay Area).

PS. btw, you might want to see a specialist about that deadly seriousness...
before it gets, you know, too deadly ;-)

~~~
hga
Given that few if any of us are in a position to do the sorts of filtering
Google can or afford to do outside of the interview (e.g. it's been said
they're enamored of Ivy League and equivalent degrees), I'm not very
interested in claims that proving a candidate can code is worthless. Whereas I
_know_ from being in companies that didn't do this before I learned it in 1997
that failing to do this results in bad hires, which can be fatal, if you'll
excuse my vocabulary, for a start up.

I'm sorry I wasn't clear, specifically:

The find bugs test was code we supplied, sprinkled with bugs subtle and not so
subtle, and simple syntax wasn't being tested, but things such as using an
uninitialized variable. The candidate had to find "some" of them, but there
was never a problem in deciding who passed and who failed the test.

We also weren't at all particular about syntax in the examples that had to be
written from scratch; the interviewee _did_ had to signal to us he did knew
proper syntax, but, come on, getting it all right is the job of an editor
(well, so I, an EMACS user since 1980 think) and of course the compiler.

Otherwise you might try rereading what I wrote, e.g. I said "performance
anxiety" in the context of writing the from scratch code examples. I.e. if
we'd cued into that, or the interviewee had asked, we would have left them
alone to write them, or put them in front of an edit buffer to do so while we
didn't hover over them.

Counterwise, wow, I must really be coming across as a hard case, for "while a
senior engineer watches you like a hawk (without any intention of helping you
out)" was very much not true, see the above not watching option and we most
certainly helped the interviewee out if he asked the right sorts of questions
or paused at certain points while writing it.

I.e. while it would be a negative to have forgotten the difference between *
and ->, we would have told them and then seen if they grocked pointers, that
and recursion were the higher level things we were looking for (they were
requirements for what we were doing). But it was never even close, it was
never difficult deciding if someone passed or failed these three tests.

Seriously, deadly or not, while it was possible we had some false negatives,
it really didn't seem to be the case, and enough other people I respect
endorse this that I'm not about to stop advocating it.

As far as I can tell the Fizz-Buzz test, which is intended to be easier than
reversing a linked list, has no connection to Google. " _Google has been the
foremost purveyor of this method since it began hiring engineers_ " might be
true today, but in my days Microsoft was best known for this, before Google
was even officially founded.

This was of course back when Microsoft was famous for being fairly well run,
and their "hidden" "secret" was being consistently able to write software that
"worked", i.e. didn't core dump (much)), one of the reasons all their big DOS
era competitors fell behind or died in the transition to Windows.

~~~
chetanahuja
I find it hard to pick what to answer from such a long message but suffice it
to say, any engineers interesting in working with packetzoom would never be
confined to a small room and asked to write code on the board. And despite
that, for coding roles, we'd find out one way or another whether you can code,
and at what level (not all coding roles are created equal either).

