"A certain amount of people don’t give two shits about your company mission and that’s actually fine"
Furthermore, sometimes the not-give-a-shit people are better quality and get things done better than the give-a-shit people who may refuse to do something or fix a process because it doesn't fit 'mission' or 'culture' or 'brand' or some other intangible based off of their personal interpretation of it.
I don't think I agree with you about false negatives. A false negative is only bad if you can't fill the position.
Like say you interview Anne, and you're on the fence so you turn her down. Later you interview Betty and hire her. What have you really lost by not hiring Anne? A week or two of work? If you hire Anne, the position is filled and you won't hire Betty, so either way you lose out on a good employee.
Meanwhile, if you hire Anne and she turns out to be a bad employee, that can cause you real damage. Potentially could even cause some of your existing employees to leave because they don't want to deal with Anne.
Two things: Rare Southern India Christian-derived name is rare! I know exactly one couple with this last name. It's a rad name.
Second thing: I think I agree with you in the sense the delays aren't too long, my selection process is actually providing real benefit to my chances at long term success, and the hiring is limited, i.e. I hire Betty a week later and she's great and Anne would have sucked. All well and good, totally a situation that happens, and especially OK if the job isn't incredibly vital.
But now imagine that I'm perpetually understaffed in a rapidly growing organization, I need five engineers and I haven't hired *any* engineers in a month. And imagine my selection process is questionable - like, I'm being very very careful to make sure I have a guy who answers "tell me about a time..." questions with the right level of confidence, but nothing actually relevant to the job.
In the space I work in, "I'm losing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of progress a month" isn't a rare sentiment. So while I agree with you that "be extra careful, what's the harm" is a situation that exists, it's not every situation.
I wonder if you have anything to share about employee stock incentives.
From an employee perspective these are only worth as much as I expect the founders and investors not to screw over employees. Subsequent funding rounds can result in dilution, and beyond that employee stock tends to be in a separate class that can be given terrible preferences.
My history: I worked at one startup that was acquired but not on good terms a year after I left, stock completely useless. I did get stockholder comma that included some payout information for different share classes as well as how many shares were issued, and calculated that the whole company sold for $120,000. Talking with some former coworkers I found that this was basically for patents. Almost everyone was laid off, development halted, and a skeleton crew remained to service remaining customers.
From there I jumped to another startup. I worked there for two years before departing for Big Tech. They had two successful exits, but my hail from both was worth less than one of my quarterly Big Tech RSU vests.
Big Tech was just RSUs, publicly traded, no nonsense.
I’m now at another startup. I’m somewhat confident the founders will do right by us, since they are alums of the same Big Tech and worked there when we were doing a fantastic job screening out jerks. The VC firms involved also have minted some millionaire engineers. But still, even if the company does fantastically, there’s no guarantee I would even be able to break even on the exercise price.
How would you convince a candidate that their stock options will really be worth something in a successful exit?
The only successful argument for anyone with first-hand knowledge of startup financing would not be based on money comparison, but on the future earning potential driven by fast career growth.
There's simply no way to reliably match what the largest companies are offering, dollar for dollar. When someone tries to say otherwise, they lose credibility instantly. I recall a founder gushing about the opportunity and the potential and that the offered share would easily buy a large house. I carefully redid their math using the same (already extremely ambitious) assumptions and arrived at low six figures; that's at most a downpayment in my area. Another early stage startup offered tiny fractions of a percent; even at a billion dollar exit (already rarefied territory) that equity stake would be worth less than the sign-on bonus offered by second-tier tech companies today, in the midst of layoffs and an uncertain economic outlook. There are incredible success stories, to be sure, but there are also hundreds of people who have won hundreds of millions in the lottery but we all know it to be statistically a pointless affair.
Moving away from the money aspect, we are on a firmer ground. Startups turn on a dime and have little process that stands in the way of getting things done. That can speed up skill acquisition and personal growth dramatically, and if the startup successfully becomes a scale-up, the responsibility and title growth can be very fast. At large companies, huge amounts of time are wasted on process, planning, reporting, and working around people "resting and vesting" or desperately defending their tiny fiefdoms from obsolescence. Career growth, once the "terminal" level is reached, is also usually slow -- there just aren't as many spots freeing up in the pyramid, and there's a lot of very skilled competition gunning for the few empty spaces, resulting in very long hours and burnout.
There's another reason for preferring a small company for career growth. Large companies generally hire for things you've successfully done already (same level) or have already went beyond (downleveling), in part because organizational complexity and system complexity at scale makes everything harder so one needs to be more experienced and strategic to do the same job satisfactorily. Startups don't have such luxury, and might need to take a chance on someone who haven't done a thing yet (a senior aspring to staff; a team lead aspiring to become a manager) simply because they can't yet attract the correct-level experienced folks with what their budget and culture permit.
So first, and I want to be really careful to emphasize this, *you probably know more about this than me*. It's not an area I've been called on to talk about a lot, and I'm fundamentally a creative, so I tend not to know anything about areas I haven't talked about before.
That said, this seems more like an offer-letter-stage communication for most companies - i.e. at the point the employee is already in active negotiations. Adding in that stock options are an inherently risky thing, it seems like this falls into the category of "things I don't have to talk about much" simply because they aren't (as much) something you'd put in a job offer.
I think if I was trying to approach this today (while, again, knowing nothing) I'd probably settle for something like "This is an equity level position. We encourage candidates to negotiate hard at the offer letter stage - we are comfortable saying no if it's something we can't do, but we want to make sure we arrive at a salary and equity position that makes sense to secure good candidates for the long-term."
From a communications level, I'm signaling that I'm open for negotiation and you trying to get what you are worth which (on some level) protects you from me - you at least know you can bring up what you want to get, even if you aren't guaranteed to get it. Someone knowledgeable on how to protect themselves here could then use that to negotiate for that protection.
From a very primitive, ignorant place, it seems like the actual ways a person could be protected from dilution in the way you are talking about would be something like "If we dilute our hundred shares to 500 shares, your shares get multiplied by five, no questions asked and committed to on paper". But my instincts are that there might be hurdles to companies doing this that I don't see here - maybe having X amount of your stock tied up in a way that cant' be diluted makes it hard to get funding in later rounds, or something.
I'm guessing this is *not a great answer*, but that's about the best I have working from ignorance.
I’m reading McKeown’s Essentialism right now. I know people love it but... I don’t. The chapter I like LEAST is on hiring, and your post is an exact response to all the reasons why his chapter is absurd. He goes ALL IN on never, ever, ever having a false positive and being okay with having no one in the role. I’m a worker bee (well compensated to be fair) and I get screwed and work too much because we don’t want to hire badly. One anecdote in the book has a founder saying, “unless I can imagine the person as one of our founding team, the person would be a bad hire.” What?! Founders and engineers or whatever are different categories. People care about money! People who care about money and would never start a company could very well be the perfect hire because they are careful and have some degree of risk aversion. To say nothing of getting generally different viewpoints to make the business better. So: as I prep to talk about this chapter with a group of us reading this, thanks for the ready-made points I can use!
I haven't read that book (I'm currently reading a story where the main character is a sword, for context), but I feel a little bit like I can see the echos of that book or others like it on the "be maximally committed to avoiding false positives" culture we see. And I think it's a bit crazy both for the reasons you state and also because - shit, how long does it take to hire a founding team member, like a director-or-above level talent? How much do they deserve to get paid?
I've seen this on a lot of teams, the thing where you are chronically understaffed because there's a 0-risk policy that ends up with you still eating about the same amount of risk (because how good is your hiring process, really) and you just end up being a half-dozen team members short month over month for no real gain.
I don't mean there shouldn't be any caution at all, but at some point I think there's justification to hire people and see how they do, rather than just languishing in under-staffed-ville forever.
In the Liabilities section, “unpaid time off” appears twice - the first is “consider the following variation on unpaid time off, which I’ve simulated based on several job ads I’ve seen:”
I think these should be “unlimited”, not “unpaid”? (Always possible I’m badly misreading)
I think on a fundamental level there are two issues. First, companies recruit by thinking about what they want and not what the kind of person they want to hire wants. Secondly, companies are unwilling to have frank discussions about what they are and their strengths and weaknesses as employers.
To take an example, can you get people who are so mission driven they don't care about money? Absolutely. But what does that sort of person want? A really compelling mission! So, how compelling is your mission? Are you saving millions of lives? Revolutionizing how politics is done? Building stuff that's cooler than any lab in the world?
You're building a marketplace for chemical lubricants? Yeah, sorry. Doesn't work. No matter how much you put the words "revolutionary" or "impactful" in the description. And that's fine! To be clear it's a really needed service and a great idea for a company. But maybe don't expect to find an amazing senior engineer who feels insanely passionate about chemical marketplaces to the point they're willing to take a salary cut.
The best way to recruit people is to think: Who do I want to recruit? Drill down. Don't say "Interested in chemicals," ask why you want that in the first place. For example, if you want someone interested in chemicals because then they'll go the extra mile with clients... Well then you don't actually care about whether they're interested in chemicals you just want someone who will go the extra mile with clients.
Once you've got that, what does that person want and what can we offer them? Be brutally honest. Money is part of it. What about work environment? What kind of people work on your team already and who likes that sort of person or dislikes them? How about time off? Career advancement? Lifestyle accommodation? Do they get to brag to their friends? Are they going to get access to certain products? (If you're a clothing line you'll get a lot of interest from fashionistas!) Are you primarily recruiting young women into an industry filled with well earning, fit single men? (Hello, medicine.) Etc.
Compile a list of what is standard in your industry and then add some unique things on top of it. If you're small then focus in. Specialize. You're not going to out-benefit Google but maybe you can be the company that really does family benefits well. A great daycare or even just a culture of automatic accommodation for seeing school plays or picking kids up from school. This kind of stuff can drive companies' entire cultures and give it a recruiting edge long past the early stages. And it's much more memorable than a generic list of benefits everyone has.
But always remember: your culture is only what you're willing to pay and/or fire for. If you won't pay for people to take time off to see their kids and if you won't fire someone for preventing engineers from taking time off then you don't actually have a culture that's parental friendly. Culture is what your employees experience, not what you write in an orientation book.
As always, I strongly urge you to write a blog. But about this section of your post:
***But always remember: your culture is only what you're willing to pay and/or fire for. If you won't pay for people to take time off to see their kids and if you won't fire someone for preventing engineers from taking time off then you don't actually have a culture that's parental friendly. Culture is what your employees experience, not what you write in an orientation book.***
I agree with this, but I think from a hiring perspective there's a question of "While that's true, how do we then communicate positive things about our culture in a way that will be believed?"
I don't think anything will fix the "be believed" problem 100%; there's too many people talking out of their asses in job postings and then not living up to it. But I think you can get part of the way there by saying "Here's this benefit - and here's how we make sure you use it. Here's this potential bullshit part of culture we think you don't like, here's us being opposed to it AND here's your recourse if you don't find us living up to that".
Outside of job posts, in "bigger formats" I've had some luck with that - essentially organizing from a 1,000' view frontpage down to really specific deep dives - here's how this particular team works, does performance reviews, really what you are getting into in a really granular sense.
I don't think that works for everybody (most people don't get to the frontpage, those who do mostly skim it, etc.) but I think it works disproportionately well for a particular type of potential applicant who is in a zone of "I have made a lot of money, that's an experience I've had, what's next for me", who has a lot of choices, and who is being choosy. Especially if said person left a job after getting burned in some way.
I'm not 100% sure that's the right way to pull that off, but I generally think of efforts like that as a sort of treadmill you have to run on - people who apply for jobs see hundreds of job posts relevant to them, and become expert in them pretty quick. Anything you can do to say "Hey, I'm one of the ones who is really trying to make sure this isn't hell for you" helps.
I'd say being believed is actually reasonably easy. Very few people believe the promises are an outright lie. The issue is, for lack of a better term, BS.
Let's say a page says Unlimited PTO. The chances of that being a lie are quite low. On the other hand, does it mean you can actually take a few weeks off or does it mean they don't want to give you time off or the bonus more corporate roles would? In neither case is it a lie so it's not a matter of being believed. But obviously those mean very different things!
The issue is precision and credibility (or signaling if you prefer). A bullet point saying "Unlimited PTO" communicates (in effect) "we are a generic tech company." Likewise Ping Pong Table or Unlimited Kind Bars. And a story about how much you care about employee's work life balance then the message is "we are a tech company that hired a copywriter." On the other hand if you put out specific stories with specific people on your team who got something extraordinary then there is a claim there even if it's non-specific. If you say, "RC was a mid level developer and, after working overtime for three weeks straight, took two weeks off to go hiking with pay" then even though there's no future forward claim it's credible. And if it isn't then RC can make it credible by vouching for it.
Of course, the issue there is you need to actually have such stories and people at your company! Which many don't because they haven't honestly confronted what their culture is like.
Likewise if you craft your policies intentionally that can shine through in how they're described. Often I find policies are just a laundry list stereotype of what a "good place to work" is. This bleeds through in the generic trendy list of policies. And sometimes that's fine but it's not putting your best foot out. Well reasoned policies jump off the page because the reasoning justifies itself. For example, "We have 2 weeks mandatory PTO. Why? Because we buck trends. We value work life balance so when we found no one was actually using the "unlimited" PTO we changed the policy. If you work here you're taking two weeks of vacation. If you want to burn out go work somewhere else." But again, the issue is you have to actually have such well reasoned policies.
A decent trick is to ask your leadership why they decided on each policy. If none of them light up their eyes or have a unique answer then you're just polishing a generic stone. Which is fine. Maybe you have other selling points.
And once you do that it's a brand, not a treadmill. You are Resident Contrarian LLC, the company that Takes Work Life Balance Seriously(tm). Or the Company That Invests In Employee Education. Or whatever. (But seriously, do pick something or you'll struggle.) And then you get all the high end talent who are interested in that kind of thing. Even if the entire industry moves onto your standard the residue of being the people who did it first and best will stick to you through your experience operating with those benefits and the stories you can tell.
I'm happy that I no longer have to deal with this from either side, now that I've retired, but I certainly don't find it boring. I mostly haven't dealt with it from a start up perspective, but I spent my career as a software engineer, and the last 25 years of it in Silicon Valley. Everything you say rings true, except that the problem is not at all unique to startups. If anything, it's worse for small companies which aren't startups, including private companies well past the startup stage (often misrepresented to prospective employees as "startups".)
I don't have solutions for any of this.
I've seen companies get themselves excellent hires simply by ditching the usual requirements. You don't need a comp sci degree to do software QA, and approximately no one with such a degree wants to work in QA - but it's a very common requirement. But in one company I worked at, there were several excellent QA people, who'd been there longer than the usual (short) Silicon Valley tenure (loyalty to the company - what a concept) - who didn't have the right degree. At one time, back in the early days of the company, some hiring manager had decided to give a few non-traditional applicants a chance, in spite of the common wisdom of the industry, and it had worked out incredibly well.
I've also seen companies do well by recruiting new graduates from colleges that weren't on the tiny list of top tier institutions. Those top tier U graduates are in very high demand, which falls off pretty fast for institutions which are almost as good.
Finally, of course, getting a reputation for honesty or good working conditions really helps, but while it's easier to be unusually good (or bad) if you are small, it's harder to get any kind of reputation. (But don't bother with the "best companies to work for in ..." lists. I think everyone knows they are gamed, at least by the time they are looking for their second position.) There's no substitute for word of mouth, and your best recruiters are the employees you already have - but not if they're hitting up all their contacts looking for a better job themselves.
The other thing I'd suggest is flexibility, and non-standard value propositions. Some number of potential good hires want something unusual. If your company is honestly trying to do well by doing good, you can get the ones with an altruistic streak. If you are located in the right place, you can get the skiers, or the hikers, or the surfers. And these are just banal, obvious examples. What has your workplace got that most of its obvious competitors lack?
I'm glad you brought up degree requirements. Those were the bane of my existence when I was trying to break into the industry. I have a computer programming background, but because my degree was an obscure one (compsci + art, focusing on the technical aspects of CG animation) instead of pure compsci, very few companies wanted to give me the time of day. Never mind that it included just as many programming courses as a compsci degree. I also had several employers tell me that I needed to go back and take additional courses, even though the courses would be 100% review. If I learned how to solve differential equations in my calc 2 course, and can prove that I can solve them correctly, why in the world do I need to waste money taking another course on it?!
As an employee, this is still the bane of my existence. My employer has a rule that everyone on the team needs an engineering degree. This is true even for things like Agile leadership roles, which should not need it. We've passed up some very good hires because they didn't have the right degrees. Meanwhile, the engineers we do have are forced to fill multiple people's roles, since we're constantly understaffed, which leads to attrition.
"Some companies are overly-afraid of overhiring and are afraid of firing without an awful lot of just cause."
This is a trade-off between making companies efficient and disrupting people's lives. It's a hard trade-off because even if you decide that you only care about the efficiency part, making people's lives miserable by hiring and firing them often will make them less productive.
It depends on which way you look at it. Consider me a decade ago: I had just graduated into the Great Recession. I couldn't find an engineering job with anyone, anywhere, so I spent a year working in retail inventory. Finally I found a firm that was explicitly hiring only on a 3-month contract; they were up front with me that 'we don't know if we'll still have work for you after that', but they hired me, and I got my first nine months of actual industry experience before the work finally dried up. But with that first nine months experience doing real engineering work I could talk about, and networking with real engineers, I could bootstrap myself back onto the career track.
That was the opposite of making me miserable! They wouldn't have hired at all if they didn't know they had the option to dump me quickly, in which case I'd have spent two years working in inventory. I knew that, because none of the secure places were hiring at all. Or maybe I'd still be working retail...there comes a point where an employer would rather not take a chance on someone who couldn't get a job in industry.
Now, it's true that I eventually moved on, partially because I wanted more security. But I'm still grateful to that company for giving me that initial opportunity, and when I'm ready to retire, I'll consider working for them seasonally, whenever I get bored with housework.
Any system with good protections will also have provisions for temp or entry level work. They're usually bound to be not more than X% of the company's workforce so that it's not abused but it's a solved problem. What shouldn't be allowed are the current layoffs that are explicitly happening for no reason than to suppress workers' wages.
I'll comment on your actual post in a minute. For now, I just have to comment on substack. They just made me climb through a fairly minor hoop in order to comment. According to them "for your security, we need to re-authenticate you". Of course they do. Perhaps they'd like to buy some well watered land in Florida, for *their* security.
The relevance, of course, is to your section "There's a 'liar's version' of everything you want to say." Sadly, I "trust" substack to do whatever it takes to garner more money, or at least whatever they believe might get them more money, regardless of honesty, let alone costs to their users, with the *possible* exception of unambiguous law-breaking.
So while I don't know how/why this waste of my time potentially benefits their bottom line, I don't believe it had anything to do with *my* security.
And if people with my level of trust in them are common, they will eventually have a problem.
Serious question - do you have two substack accounts, by chance? Or another account in the same house using the same IP? I ask because I see the same message all the time, but almost always when I've been in my work's substack account changing things; it appears to confuse the system.
Nope. Only one. I imagine it's just that their security policies require periodic re-logins; or possibly that logins are maintained using cookies, which have a tendency to get expired/dropped by browsers for reasons not legible to either their users or the server-side programmers who set them.
I only overreacted because of the attempt to present this as being for my own good, which registered as very very typical corporate speech.
"A certain amount of people don’t give two shits about your company mission and that’s actually fine"
Furthermore, sometimes the not-give-a-shit people are better quality and get things done better than the give-a-shit people who may refuse to do something or fix a process because it doesn't fit 'mission' or 'culture' or 'brand' or some other intangible based off of their personal interpretation of it.
I don't think I agree with you about false negatives. A false negative is only bad if you can't fill the position.
Like say you interview Anne, and you're on the fence so you turn her down. Later you interview Betty and hire her. What have you really lost by not hiring Anne? A week or two of work? If you hire Anne, the position is filled and you won't hire Betty, so either way you lose out on a good employee.
Meanwhile, if you hire Anne and she turns out to be a bad employee, that can cause you real damage. Potentially could even cause some of your existing employees to leave because they don't want to deal with Anne.
Two things: Rare Southern India Christian-derived name is rare! I know exactly one couple with this last name. It's a rad name.
Second thing: I think I agree with you in the sense the delays aren't too long, my selection process is actually providing real benefit to my chances at long term success, and the hiring is limited, i.e. I hire Betty a week later and she's great and Anne would have sucked. All well and good, totally a situation that happens, and especially OK if the job isn't incredibly vital.
But now imagine that I'm perpetually understaffed in a rapidly growing organization, I need five engineers and I haven't hired *any* engineers in a month. And imagine my selection process is questionable - like, I'm being very very careful to make sure I have a guy who answers "tell me about a time..." questions with the right level of confidence, but nothing actually relevant to the job.
In the space I work in, "I'm losing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of progress a month" isn't a rare sentiment. So while I agree with you that "be extra careful, what's the harm" is a situation that exists, it's not every situation.
I wonder if you have anything to share about employee stock incentives.
From an employee perspective these are only worth as much as I expect the founders and investors not to screw over employees. Subsequent funding rounds can result in dilution, and beyond that employee stock tends to be in a separate class that can be given terrible preferences.
My history: I worked at one startup that was acquired but not on good terms a year after I left, stock completely useless. I did get stockholder comma that included some payout information for different share classes as well as how many shares were issued, and calculated that the whole company sold for $120,000. Talking with some former coworkers I found that this was basically for patents. Almost everyone was laid off, development halted, and a skeleton crew remained to service remaining customers.
From there I jumped to another startup. I worked there for two years before departing for Big Tech. They had two successful exits, but my hail from both was worth less than one of my quarterly Big Tech RSU vests.
Big Tech was just RSUs, publicly traded, no nonsense.
I’m now at another startup. I’m somewhat confident the founders will do right by us, since they are alums of the same Big Tech and worked there when we were doing a fantastic job screening out jerks. The VC firms involved also have minted some millionaire engineers. But still, even if the company does fantastically, there’s no guarantee I would even be able to break even on the exercise price.
How would you convince a candidate that their stock options will really be worth something in a successful exit?
The only successful argument for anyone with first-hand knowledge of startup financing would not be based on money comparison, but on the future earning potential driven by fast career growth.
There's simply no way to reliably match what the largest companies are offering, dollar for dollar. When someone tries to say otherwise, they lose credibility instantly. I recall a founder gushing about the opportunity and the potential and that the offered share would easily buy a large house. I carefully redid their math using the same (already extremely ambitious) assumptions and arrived at low six figures; that's at most a downpayment in my area. Another early stage startup offered tiny fractions of a percent; even at a billion dollar exit (already rarefied territory) that equity stake would be worth less than the sign-on bonus offered by second-tier tech companies today, in the midst of layoffs and an uncertain economic outlook. There are incredible success stories, to be sure, but there are also hundreds of people who have won hundreds of millions in the lottery but we all know it to be statistically a pointless affair.
Moving away from the money aspect, we are on a firmer ground. Startups turn on a dime and have little process that stands in the way of getting things done. That can speed up skill acquisition and personal growth dramatically, and if the startup successfully becomes a scale-up, the responsibility and title growth can be very fast. At large companies, huge amounts of time are wasted on process, planning, reporting, and working around people "resting and vesting" or desperately defending their tiny fiefdoms from obsolescence. Career growth, once the "terminal" level is reached, is also usually slow -- there just aren't as many spots freeing up in the pyramid, and there's a lot of very skilled competition gunning for the few empty spaces, resulting in very long hours and burnout.
There's another reason for preferring a small company for career growth. Large companies generally hire for things you've successfully done already (same level) or have already went beyond (downleveling), in part because organizational complexity and system complexity at scale makes everything harder so one needs to be more experienced and strategic to do the same job satisfactorily. Startups don't have such luxury, and might need to take a chance on someone who haven't done a thing yet (a senior aspring to staff; a team lead aspiring to become a manager) simply because they can't yet attract the correct-level experienced folks with what their budget and culture permit.
So first, and I want to be really careful to emphasize this, *you probably know more about this than me*. It's not an area I've been called on to talk about a lot, and I'm fundamentally a creative, so I tend not to know anything about areas I haven't talked about before.
That said, this seems more like an offer-letter-stage communication for most companies - i.e. at the point the employee is already in active negotiations. Adding in that stock options are an inherently risky thing, it seems like this falls into the category of "things I don't have to talk about much" simply because they aren't (as much) something you'd put in a job offer.
I think if I was trying to approach this today (while, again, knowing nothing) I'd probably settle for something like "This is an equity level position. We encourage candidates to negotiate hard at the offer letter stage - we are comfortable saying no if it's something we can't do, but we want to make sure we arrive at a salary and equity position that makes sense to secure good candidates for the long-term."
From a communications level, I'm signaling that I'm open for negotiation and you trying to get what you are worth which (on some level) protects you from me - you at least know you can bring up what you want to get, even if you aren't guaranteed to get it. Someone knowledgeable on how to protect themselves here could then use that to negotiate for that protection.
From a very primitive, ignorant place, it seems like the actual ways a person could be protected from dilution in the way you are talking about would be something like "If we dilute our hundred shares to 500 shares, your shares get multiplied by five, no questions asked and committed to on paper". But my instincts are that there might be hurdles to companies doing this that I don't see here - maybe having X amount of your stock tied up in a way that cant' be diluted makes it hard to get funding in later rounds, or something.
I'm guessing this is *not a great answer*, but that's about the best I have working from ignorance.
I’m reading McKeown’s Essentialism right now. I know people love it but... I don’t. The chapter I like LEAST is on hiring, and your post is an exact response to all the reasons why his chapter is absurd. He goes ALL IN on never, ever, ever having a false positive and being okay with having no one in the role. I’m a worker bee (well compensated to be fair) and I get screwed and work too much because we don’t want to hire badly. One anecdote in the book has a founder saying, “unless I can imagine the person as one of our founding team, the person would be a bad hire.” What?! Founders and engineers or whatever are different categories. People care about money! People who care about money and would never start a company could very well be the perfect hire because they are careful and have some degree of risk aversion. To say nothing of getting generally different viewpoints to make the business better. So: as I prep to talk about this chapter with a group of us reading this, thanks for the ready-made points I can use!
I haven't read that book (I'm currently reading a story where the main character is a sword, for context), but I feel a little bit like I can see the echos of that book or others like it on the "be maximally committed to avoiding false positives" culture we see. And I think it's a bit crazy both for the reasons you state and also because - shit, how long does it take to hire a founding team member, like a director-or-above level talent? How much do they deserve to get paid?
I've seen this on a lot of teams, the thing where you are chronically understaffed because there's a 0-risk policy that ends up with you still eating about the same amount of risk (because how good is your hiring process, really) and you just end up being a half-dozen team members short month over month for no real gain.
I don't mean there shouldn't be any caution at all, but at some point I think there's justification to hire people and see how they do, rather than just languishing in under-staffed-ville forever.
In the Liabilities section, “unpaid time off” appears twice - the first is “consider the following variation on unpaid time off, which I’ve simulated based on several job ads I’ve seen:”
I think these should be “unlimited”, not “unpaid”? (Always possible I’m badly misreading)
Nope, you got it - weird mistake on my part. Fixing now!
I think on a fundamental level there are two issues. First, companies recruit by thinking about what they want and not what the kind of person they want to hire wants. Secondly, companies are unwilling to have frank discussions about what they are and their strengths and weaknesses as employers.
To take an example, can you get people who are so mission driven they don't care about money? Absolutely. But what does that sort of person want? A really compelling mission! So, how compelling is your mission? Are you saving millions of lives? Revolutionizing how politics is done? Building stuff that's cooler than any lab in the world?
You're building a marketplace for chemical lubricants? Yeah, sorry. Doesn't work. No matter how much you put the words "revolutionary" or "impactful" in the description. And that's fine! To be clear it's a really needed service and a great idea for a company. But maybe don't expect to find an amazing senior engineer who feels insanely passionate about chemical marketplaces to the point they're willing to take a salary cut.
The best way to recruit people is to think: Who do I want to recruit? Drill down. Don't say "Interested in chemicals," ask why you want that in the first place. For example, if you want someone interested in chemicals because then they'll go the extra mile with clients... Well then you don't actually care about whether they're interested in chemicals you just want someone who will go the extra mile with clients.
Once you've got that, what does that person want and what can we offer them? Be brutally honest. Money is part of it. What about work environment? What kind of people work on your team already and who likes that sort of person or dislikes them? How about time off? Career advancement? Lifestyle accommodation? Do they get to brag to their friends? Are they going to get access to certain products? (If you're a clothing line you'll get a lot of interest from fashionistas!) Are you primarily recruiting young women into an industry filled with well earning, fit single men? (Hello, medicine.) Etc.
Compile a list of what is standard in your industry and then add some unique things on top of it. If you're small then focus in. Specialize. You're not going to out-benefit Google but maybe you can be the company that really does family benefits well. A great daycare or even just a culture of automatic accommodation for seeing school plays or picking kids up from school. This kind of stuff can drive companies' entire cultures and give it a recruiting edge long past the early stages. And it's much more memorable than a generic list of benefits everyone has.
But always remember: your culture is only what you're willing to pay and/or fire for. If you won't pay for people to take time off to see their kids and if you won't fire someone for preventing engineers from taking time off then you don't actually have a culture that's parental friendly. Culture is what your employees experience, not what you write in an orientation book.
As always, I strongly urge you to write a blog. But about this section of your post:
***But always remember: your culture is only what you're willing to pay and/or fire for. If you won't pay for people to take time off to see their kids and if you won't fire someone for preventing engineers from taking time off then you don't actually have a culture that's parental friendly. Culture is what your employees experience, not what you write in an orientation book.***
I agree with this, but I think from a hiring perspective there's a question of "While that's true, how do we then communicate positive things about our culture in a way that will be believed?"
I don't think anything will fix the "be believed" problem 100%; there's too many people talking out of their asses in job postings and then not living up to it. But I think you can get part of the way there by saying "Here's this benefit - and here's how we make sure you use it. Here's this potential bullshit part of culture we think you don't like, here's us being opposed to it AND here's your recourse if you don't find us living up to that".
Outside of job posts, in "bigger formats" I've had some luck with that - essentially organizing from a 1,000' view frontpage down to really specific deep dives - here's how this particular team works, does performance reviews, really what you are getting into in a really granular sense.
I don't think that works for everybody (most people don't get to the frontpage, those who do mostly skim it, etc.) but I think it works disproportionately well for a particular type of potential applicant who is in a zone of "I have made a lot of money, that's an experience I've had, what's next for me", who has a lot of choices, and who is being choosy. Especially if said person left a job after getting burned in some way.
I'm not 100% sure that's the right way to pull that off, but I generally think of efforts like that as a sort of treadmill you have to run on - people who apply for jobs see hundreds of job posts relevant to them, and become expert in them pretty quick. Anything you can do to say "Hey, I'm one of the ones who is really trying to make sure this isn't hell for you" helps.
I'd say being believed is actually reasonably easy. Very few people believe the promises are an outright lie. The issue is, for lack of a better term, BS.
Let's say a page says Unlimited PTO. The chances of that being a lie are quite low. On the other hand, does it mean you can actually take a few weeks off or does it mean they don't want to give you time off or the bonus more corporate roles would? In neither case is it a lie so it's not a matter of being believed. But obviously those mean very different things!
The issue is precision and credibility (or signaling if you prefer). A bullet point saying "Unlimited PTO" communicates (in effect) "we are a generic tech company." Likewise Ping Pong Table or Unlimited Kind Bars. And a story about how much you care about employee's work life balance then the message is "we are a tech company that hired a copywriter." On the other hand if you put out specific stories with specific people on your team who got something extraordinary then there is a claim there even if it's non-specific. If you say, "RC was a mid level developer and, after working overtime for three weeks straight, took two weeks off to go hiking with pay" then even though there's no future forward claim it's credible. And if it isn't then RC can make it credible by vouching for it.
Of course, the issue there is you need to actually have such stories and people at your company! Which many don't because they haven't honestly confronted what their culture is like.
Likewise if you craft your policies intentionally that can shine through in how they're described. Often I find policies are just a laundry list stereotype of what a "good place to work" is. This bleeds through in the generic trendy list of policies. And sometimes that's fine but it's not putting your best foot out. Well reasoned policies jump off the page because the reasoning justifies itself. For example, "We have 2 weeks mandatory PTO. Why? Because we buck trends. We value work life balance so when we found no one was actually using the "unlimited" PTO we changed the policy. If you work here you're taking two weeks of vacation. If you want to burn out go work somewhere else." But again, the issue is you have to actually have such well reasoned policies.
A decent trick is to ask your leadership why they decided on each policy. If none of them light up their eyes or have a unique answer then you're just polishing a generic stone. Which is fine. Maybe you have other selling points.
And once you do that it's a brand, not a treadmill. You are Resident Contrarian LLC, the company that Takes Work Life Balance Seriously(tm). Or the Company That Invests In Employee Education. Or whatever. (But seriously, do pick something or you'll struggle.) And then you get all the high end talent who are interested in that kind of thing. Even if the entire industry moves onto your standard the residue of being the people who did it first and best will stick to you through your experience operating with those benefits and the stories you can tell.
I'm happy that I no longer have to deal with this from either side, now that I've retired, but I certainly don't find it boring. I mostly haven't dealt with it from a start up perspective, but I spent my career as a software engineer, and the last 25 years of it in Silicon Valley. Everything you say rings true, except that the problem is not at all unique to startups. If anything, it's worse for small companies which aren't startups, including private companies well past the startup stage (often misrepresented to prospective employees as "startups".)
I don't have solutions for any of this.
I've seen companies get themselves excellent hires simply by ditching the usual requirements. You don't need a comp sci degree to do software QA, and approximately no one with such a degree wants to work in QA - but it's a very common requirement. But in one company I worked at, there were several excellent QA people, who'd been there longer than the usual (short) Silicon Valley tenure (loyalty to the company - what a concept) - who didn't have the right degree. At one time, back in the early days of the company, some hiring manager had decided to give a few non-traditional applicants a chance, in spite of the common wisdom of the industry, and it had worked out incredibly well.
I've also seen companies do well by recruiting new graduates from colleges that weren't on the tiny list of top tier institutions. Those top tier U graduates are in very high demand, which falls off pretty fast for institutions which are almost as good.
Finally, of course, getting a reputation for honesty or good working conditions really helps, but while it's easier to be unusually good (or bad) if you are small, it's harder to get any kind of reputation. (But don't bother with the "best companies to work for in ..." lists. I think everyone knows they are gamed, at least by the time they are looking for their second position.) There's no substitute for word of mouth, and your best recruiters are the employees you already have - but not if they're hitting up all their contacts looking for a better job themselves.
The other thing I'd suggest is flexibility, and non-standard value propositions. Some number of potential good hires want something unusual. If your company is honestly trying to do well by doing good, you can get the ones with an altruistic streak. If you are located in the right place, you can get the skiers, or the hikers, or the surfers. And these are just banal, obvious examples. What has your workplace got that most of its obvious competitors lack?
I'm glad you brought up degree requirements. Those were the bane of my existence when I was trying to break into the industry. I have a computer programming background, but because my degree was an obscure one (compsci + art, focusing on the technical aspects of CG animation) instead of pure compsci, very few companies wanted to give me the time of day. Never mind that it included just as many programming courses as a compsci degree. I also had several employers tell me that I needed to go back and take additional courses, even though the courses would be 100% review. If I learned how to solve differential equations in my calc 2 course, and can prove that I can solve them correctly, why in the world do I need to waste money taking another course on it?!
As an employee, this is still the bane of my existence. My employer has a rule that everyone on the team needs an engineering degree. This is true even for things like Agile leadership roles, which should not need it. We've passed up some very good hires because they didn't have the right degrees. Meanwhile, the engineers we do have are forced to fill multiple people's roles, since we're constantly understaffed, which leads to attrition.
"Some companies are overly-afraid of overhiring and are afraid of firing without an awful lot of just cause."
This is a trade-off between making companies efficient and disrupting people's lives. It's a hard trade-off because even if you decide that you only care about the efficiency part, making people's lives miserable by hiring and firing them often will make them less productive.
It depends on which way you look at it. Consider me a decade ago: I had just graduated into the Great Recession. I couldn't find an engineering job with anyone, anywhere, so I spent a year working in retail inventory. Finally I found a firm that was explicitly hiring only on a 3-month contract; they were up front with me that 'we don't know if we'll still have work for you after that', but they hired me, and I got my first nine months of actual industry experience before the work finally dried up. But with that first nine months experience doing real engineering work I could talk about, and networking with real engineers, I could bootstrap myself back onto the career track.
That was the opposite of making me miserable! They wouldn't have hired at all if they didn't know they had the option to dump me quickly, in which case I'd have spent two years working in inventory. I knew that, because none of the secure places were hiring at all. Or maybe I'd still be working retail...there comes a point where an employer would rather not take a chance on someone who couldn't get a job in industry.
Now, it's true that I eventually moved on, partially because I wanted more security. But I'm still grateful to that company for giving me that initial opportunity, and when I'm ready to retire, I'll consider working for them seasonally, whenever I get bored with housework.
Any system with good protections will also have provisions for temp or entry level work. They're usually bound to be not more than X% of the company's workforce so that it's not abused but it's a solved problem. What shouldn't be allowed are the current layoffs that are explicitly happening for no reason than to suppress workers' wages.
I'll comment on your actual post in a minute. For now, I just have to comment on substack. They just made me climb through a fairly minor hoop in order to comment. According to them "for your security, we need to re-authenticate you". Of course they do. Perhaps they'd like to buy some well watered land in Florida, for *their* security.
The relevance, of course, is to your section "There's a 'liar's version' of everything you want to say." Sadly, I "trust" substack to do whatever it takes to garner more money, or at least whatever they believe might get them more money, regardless of honesty, let alone costs to their users, with the *possible* exception of unambiguous law-breaking.
So while I don't know how/why this waste of my time potentially benefits their bottom line, I don't believe it had anything to do with *my* security.
And if people with my level of trust in them are common, they will eventually have a problem.
Serious question - do you have two substack accounts, by chance? Or another account in the same house using the same IP? I ask because I see the same message all the time, but almost always when I've been in my work's substack account changing things; it appears to confuse the system.
Nope. Only one. I imagine it's just that their security policies require periodic re-logins; or possibly that logins are maintained using cookies, which have a tendency to get expired/dropped by browsers for reasons not legible to either their users or the server-side programmers who set them.
I only overreacted because of the attempt to present this as being for my own good, which registered as very very typical corporate speech.