The Breakout List seems to be a better list of "hot startups." It's still VC heavy, but there are a few other companies listed that aren't your traditional VC-backed startup. The companies listed are going after large markets (for the most part), growing fast in terms of revenue and generally have good financial backing (although that's not a prerequisite from what I can gather).
I'd look into Berlin and Hamburg. Berlin is changing rapidly with a lot of opportunity and Hamburg is already quite wealthy with a ton of resources available to it.
I've been leaning away from Silicon Valley for awhile. It's expensive here; SV used to be the only game but now startups can legitimately be anywhere. SV doesn't especially offer anything that can't be found/done elsewhere. Indeed it feels oversubscribed here.
When I was there, the Berkeley EECS Undergraduate Handbook (basically your graduation contract) said that the prestige of a Berkeley degree increases with distance. Translated into English that means get out of Dodge. Similarly, an SV pedigree counts for something elsewhere, maybe more than it does here.
I agree with you. I came to SV in 2012 to study and loved it here up until 2015 or so. Ever since then I got tired of the life here and how crowded it is everywhere. If I wanted to stay here, I would also need a visa after I am graduating in Spring 2017.
So, right now my plan is to use what I already have (a European Passport) and move back and take advantage of the stuff Europe offers me!
And if you ask many Germans, the economic situations in both have their own problems as well. No where is perfect, instead of uprooting, people that want change need to become a part of the movement rather than waiting for others to do it for them.
I'm not directing this at you, just making the comment.
I'm not the biggest fan of Linkedin, but this strikes me as quite cynical. I've been recruiting internally for a number of good startups and I've used salary transparency to advocate for better offers for prospective candidates. There will be a few bad actors as there already exist, but I do think this is a step in the right direction towards at least giving prospective employees a better understanding of their own worth.
Exactly. Good companies understand the value of great employees and I've found these tactics are for companies that penny-pinch and can't/won't budge. No better way to lose out on great talent that to only offer 10% more when other companies realize the value they're getting and offer significantly more.
I've been recruiting for a few years now, and I've always hated asking how much someone is making currently. Have always found it better to ask "what are your compensation expectations?" Puts the ball in the candidate's court and I prefer asking this early in conversations as to make sure we're aligned and no one wastes each others time.
Most negotiation experts disagree with this advice. The first person who gives a number anchors the conversation to that number. When you name a number you certainly do set a max on negotiation, but you also get to set the starting number. And many negotiation experts think the latter is more valuable than the former.
So they can start off trying to negotiate you down from your max, or up you can spend your time trying to negotiate them up from their min.
If you're doing something like selling your startup, you want to set the anchor price, yes. There is such a huge range of outcomes, it's best for you to shoot high (as long as you're comfortable with the risk of scaring the buyer off) as the seller. (Or to start and shoot low as the buyer; with the walkaway risk reversed.)
For something like salary negotiation where results are more well-bounded and there is a lot more commoditization (ie replacements are relatively easy to find, or are perceived to be relatively easy to find), you generally don't want to anchor. An anchor that's way out of whack is easy to shoot down (show comp data). Anchoring slightly high/low doesn't buy you much as there is no real anchor... you're just in the established/known range... and so it's more valuable to see where the counterparty starts off an dplay from there.
There are unique situations / exceptions of course. For example, you might have uniquely valuable skills for a given company (or be able to convince them you do) and therefore move into a less-bounded zone of negotiation, in which making the ask/establishing the anchor would again be a good idea. But for a normal, well-established position, there is literally no benefit in "anchoring" as the bounded range is already fairly well established and that is the anchor.
Still, coming up with that first number is very tricky. A application of mine once reached the salary negotiation phase, and the company asked me what I was expecting. I didn't want to go so high they were insulted, so I took what I thought was a reasonable number and bumped it by 40%.
They said "okay". No negotiation, no fireworks, nothing. I've always wondered what I could have gotten out of them.
I guess the fear is that you'll anchor it "lower" than they would have. Example if they are intending to pay 120, and you say "I'm hoping to make 110" they might just come down to 110. But I suppose if you start at your high range that might be in your favor. Some of us (myself included) just don't know what we're worth so it's hard to know how to start the deal...
Also if your problem is every time you look for a job people keep on wanting to throw more money at you than you could ask for with a straight face. Well then dang I wish I had that problem :)
This problem is usually because people just set their starting price too low, or aren't firm enough on it. One tactic(I haven't used yet, but I'll try the next time I apply to a job) is ask the hiring manager how selective they are. Many time they'll brag about how hard it is to join their company. They'll say things like "We only accept 1 in 10 developers". Boom now they just admitted that if they were paying fair market value their offer should be about $153k :). [0] This is a great place to start a salary negotiation. Also glassdoor is a good place to find information for where to start a salary negotiation as well.
[0] 80% of devs get paid between $57k(10th %) and $153k(90th %).
That sounds similar to the idea the Overton window[0]. I've thought for a while that I hope I get to say what I want before they say what they're offering. The hope is that if I say a high number then we will be negotiating based on that high number rather than some unknown, possibly lower one.
The other school of thought on this is that the first person to talk numbers has the upper hand due to anchoring power
> Just like the word suggests, you want to set a reference point around which the negotiation will revolve. Making the first offer can be to your advantage, as this offer might set the height of the negotiation bar. This anchor is the arena where the two parties will wrangle in a tug and pull negotiation scenario. Interestingly enough, many studies have shown that the first offer has a strong psychological pull, almost a magnetic lure. The resulting agreement is often strongly attracted towards the person who proposes the first offer.
This works iff you shoot very high/low and if it's a very fungible range of possible outcomes. In something that is fairly well-bounded like job compensation (or most residential real estate transactions, as another example) it's usually better to let the counterparty turn the first card.
That's a sensible rationale as well, but if you are already familiar with the bounds of compensation, may it not be preferable to throw out a number that's slightly higher than the upper bounds of that yourself?
Since employers know the bounds as well, letting them name the first price would seem likely to result in a number that's near the mid range and not take into consideration you as an individual (skills & personality), it would be irresponsible for them not to try to mid-ball you even if they really like you, no?
Yours is a good thought too. Here is my perspective/experience:
Scenario 1: You start at the high end of the range or just a bit above it, I think you risk the employer coming in low as a counterplay, expecting to meet in the middle. Now, it's up to you whether you do actually meet in the middle, or hold firm and move them way up, or just end the negotiation entirely. But I think this opens up their strong counterplay and establishes their ability to take the reasonable-seeming ground that it's fair to meet in the middle (even if it isn't).
Scenario 2: They throw out the first price.
Scenario 2a: They throw out the first price, and it's low for the range. Now you can counterplay by going high. You also can take the strong moral high ground here by showing comp data and basically saying that it seems like they're not being fair or don't value your experience and skills correctly, which is a concern to you. Often, this will be enough to get them to offer a higher price, and you can then spring from there to continue negotiations from this higher spot. Whether they offer a higher price or not, you can start high and employ meet-in-the-middle even from the low starting point. So, Scenario 2a is no worse than Scenario 1, and has some chance of being better.
Scenario 2b: They throw out the first price, and it's mid- or high for the range. Hey! Free money! Now you can safely shoot higher and hopefully end up somewhere between where they started (already on the good side of the range) and where you countered. :-D So, again, Scenario 2b is at least as good as Scenario 1. Very rarely will a company demand no negotiation whatsoever (and maybe you want to tell them kiss off if they do, unless they have a very good philosophical / values-based reason for doing this, and they do it consistently with all candidates), so you're only bettering your position by opening the possibility for them to start somewhere above the low-end of the established market range.
By combining all the above logic, you don't want to go first.
In practice, I think this works a lot better for prospective employees too. :-) I personally think companies should offer first, for this reason (even though it's bad "negotiation" on the company's part... I actually don't think employing people is a zero-sum game, let alone a one-turn game... so I think you're better off trying to position them well. But of course not all employers think this way, and it seems in fact most do not.)
I don't mind giving a range, but that results in a tricky situation that isn't always easy to handle. If you give a range of let's say $130k-$150k for a role, candidates' expectations are now set that if they get anything below $140k, that they're not as valued as a potential new hire.
I'm a heavy Lyft user, and I only tip when I have a particularly impressive ride (i.e. Driver goes above and beyond to be accommodating or I had a very insightful conversation). There is no expectation to tip, and I have never met a driver that's been offended with there being no tip. This with over 1k rides...
I head up recruiting at the company I work for. The biggest reason I ask this is that I'm worried a candidate's expectations are outside of what our budget is. There really is no other legitimate reason to ask in my opinion. Having said that, I'm always happy to share a range (depending on experience level and how the interview process goes of course). What I don't understand is that most startups do put ranges on AngelList these days, so I'm confused as to why there's so much of a cat and mouse game. I'm running an experiment right now to simply be transparent about our ranges, even in initial reachouts. I'm curious what the data suggests in terms of my response rates and ultimately hires made...
Still, what you really need is the candidates expected/required compensation, not their current compensation?
Ther are jobs I'd take at half my current salary, and jobs I wouldn't take at 3 times my current salary. In an interview situation I'm happy to provide a ballpark figure as to not waste time, but I won't provide my last salary (my tax details are public!), and I won't negotiatiate salary until I have a good bargaining position.
Entelo - San Francisco (SOMA), CA - Full-time - http://www.entelo.com/ ; we're unfortunately are not hiring remote or part-time at the moment as we're committed to building a strong internal engineering culture at this stage before opening the doors.
Entelo's mission is to help organizations build great teams. Our goal is to help any organization recruit for any of their open roles. We've currently built a powerful people search engine that indexes hundreds of millions of social profiles and looks for signals to predict who may be more receptive to a career change. It's our belief that the the HR/Recruiting world deserves many of the same powerful tools that sales and marketing organizations have had, and it's our responsibility to deliver.
The Hacker News community has been great to us as we've made 4 engineering hires through the HN community. We care about building a thoughtful and considerate engineering environment with true work-life balance and personal flexibility (no one works more than 50 hours in the office and we're flexible with work schedules).
We're currently looking to rapidly expand the engineering team. Here are a few of our open roles:
-Sr. Data Engineer. Salary Range: $130k-180k
We're looking for our first data team hire. The ideal candidate will have had experience building out analytics frameworks for which we can run large scale data analysis on. The person that fills this role will work alongside our VP of Engineering to build the data team long term and will be expected to have their own opinions on how to build an analytics framework from the ground up. We're currently using a combination of Scala, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, AWS, Amazon Redshift and are open to "big data" technologies such as Hadoop, Storm, Kafka, etc.
We're looking for someone to own our backend infrastructure. We index hundreds of millions of profiles, and this requires crawling, parsing, normalization (data is semi-structured) and matching of these social profiles. We're currently using a stack that includes Scala, MongoDB, Golang, Java and AWS although we've been considering using Amazon's new Postgres solution.
-DevOps Engineer. Salary Range: $110k-140k
We're looking for our first dedicated DevOps engineer as we've currently been doing DevOps by committee. We're looking for someone that isn't rigid in thought and is open to using tools/technologies to solve our internal upkeep problems. We take a software-centric approach to DevOps and do try to use a modern stack here: Docker, New Relic, Loggly, PagerDuty, Rails, ElasticSearch but we're open to those that may have more traditional DevOps experience but open to using newer technologies.
-Full-Stack Rubyists. Salary Range: $100k-$170k (wide range depending on experience and ability to play some of the other roles)
We're always in the market for talented full-stack engineers. Our stack includes RoR, MySQL, AWS, Javascript, Bootstrap, Redis, ElasticSearch
If you're interested, please don't hesitate to reach out to me directly at vivek at entelo.com. I head up recruiting here and will make sure to get you in touch with our VP of Engineering as quickly as I can!
This seems like a complete copy of Sprig to be honest. The food is only part of the battle though- will they be able to tackle the actual backend logistics? We'll have to wait and see...
