The Art of the Job Offer: Encourage Candidates to Turn You Down

http://summation.typepad.com/summation/2008/06/the-art-of-the-job-offer-encourage-candidates-to-turn-you-down.html

by djb • 18 years ago

24 21 18 years ago

summation.typepad.com

Tamerlin• 18 years ago

Hm... # We work long hours. We believe great things are accomplished 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration.

Translation: We can't plan, so we make up for it with burnout.

# We believe the perfect is the enemy of the good. This means we focus on getting things done, not on building the most perfect system. We strongly believe in rapid iteration."

Translation: Don't try to get it right, just get it done again and again.

It's a recipe for generating technical debt, not developing software. Unless, that is, the goal is software that's just as buggy and unmaintainable as most corporate software.

mrtron• 18 years ago

The truth lies somewhere in between those two extremes!

gojomo• 18 years ago

I think many great startup successes finance much of their initial development via 'technical debt'.

If you go bust, it's free! (You can default.)

If you win big, you pay it off out of your winnings.

Perhaps it should be treated like any other possible source of financing... does the advantage (speed out of the gate) justify the cost (fixing it later, in only the positive outcomes)?

timr• 18 years ago

This is absolutely true. And as a prospective employee, it's your job to make sure that you don't get screwed.

Obviously, you can't predict the future; you'll never know if a company is going to go public at a valuation of billions, or go broke in a year. But you can use certain guidelines: How many companies in the industry have gone public/sold/failed? What were the successful companies' valuations? What's your employer's current valuation? Etc.

Moreover, anything less than a percent of equity in a startup really isn't worth your excitement. Only a tiny handful of startups ever sell for valuations of >$50 million. In the event of a sale at that valuation, your 1% stake is worth (at most) $500,000 -- nothing to sneeze at, certainly, but not enough to retire young. Yet very few engineers are granted that much equity; unless you're one of the first employees, a more typical stake is 0.1% or less. So now, that $50 million exit is going to pay you $50,000 -- a nice down-payment on a house (in Ohio, maybe). About the only way to get rich via employment is through extreme luck (i.e. find the next Google and join early), or through the gradual accumulation of shares over a long period of time.

Bottom line: demand fair compensation, and don't sell yourself out for stock options. Startups can be great places to work, they're fun, and you'll learn a lot, but unless it's your startup, you're most likely not going to get rich.

martythemaniak• 18 years ago

So they're cheap, offer low pay AND long hours? Wow, where do I sign up?!

Honestly, unless they do some incredible work and/or have great prospects and generous options, I can't see why anyone would want to work there. And based on their product, none of those seem to be true.

Apart from this, the article itself doesn't say much - the problem being that no matter how honest you want to be, listing a few things like in his example won't be enough to give a candidate anything more than a vague idea of what the place will be like and offering below-market rates is always wrong.

This company seems to have a much better idea: http://thisisremarkable.blogspot.com/2008/05/zappos-remarkab...

narag• 18 years ago

>listing a few things like in his example won't be enough to give a candidate anything more than a vague idea of what the place will be like

In fact long hours, low pay and "your opinion can't be better than others'" say a lot. Well, at least one thing clearly: run like hell!

tptacek• 18 years ago

Most companies think they're good at hiring. I'm guessing the ones that deliberately offer below-market salary in exchange for illiquid private company options aren't.

sealedidentity• 18 years ago

Nonsense. Anyone who knows his talent and worth, and has an ounce of pride wouldn't stand being jockeyed or lowballed. If I figure at any interview that it's being played like the article says, I'd walk right out. It's the company's freaking loss. Any guy worth his salt should do it.

gaius2• 18 years ago

Yeah, it's not a test of "does this candidate really want to work here". It's an attempt to establish a subservient relationship right off the bat.

There was another article on HN that I don't have a reference to offhand but it was something like, hiring an employee at a small company isn't like buying services from a supplier, it's like inviting someone to be a member of a community.

Tekhne• 18 years ago

I wish I still had the links handy, but there's over a century's worth of research out there showing that it's a bad idea to go over 40 hours in a workweek for any extended period of time.

Of course, everyone's different, but I've noticed I have 4-6 hours of productive time in me per day for knowledge work (e.g. programming). I'm guessing I could get multiples of 4 provided there were long breaks in between, enjoyed what I was doing, and wasn't constantly being interrupted.

DaniFong5• 18 years ago

Perhaps this is true in a corporate environment, but some of the more productive periods in, say, open source development, or research, are pretty much whole life affairs. Einstein's Annus Mirabilis, for example.

gaius2• 18 years ago

No-one can sustain crunch time indefinitely.

sofal• 18 years ago

"We believe great things are accomplished 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration."

Sounds like one of those banalities you might see on the back of a T-shirt.

I'd have a real hard time working for anyone who really thinks that programming has that kind of ratio. It smells too much like the construction-worker metaphor.

DocSavage• 18 years ago

In case you didn't know, it's a slight alteration of Thomas Edison's famous quote: "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration."

37signals has been beating the drum that inspired programming can greatly decrease the required perspiration, and even then, perspiration doesn't mean Rapleaf's long hours.

smanek• 18 years ago

Had Edison thought out his work and spent more time in preparation, he would not sweat so much.

-- Nikola Tesla

fuzzythinker• 18 years ago

"We believe the perfect is the enemy of the good. This means we focus on getting things done, not on building the most perfect system. We strongly believe in rapid iteration."

This is the only quote that I think has any meat. All others either I don't agree on or nothing profound. _However_, it also makes them seem like an hypocrite since it clearly says they prefer speed+good over perfect+slow. But if they mean what they say, then they are clearly looking for perfect candidate(filtering out good ones) + slow (process of the interview and wasting time looking for the perfect one(s) ).

DaniFong5• 18 years ago

I'm not sure if this is totally over the board here, but Rapleaf has a number of... unusual hiring practices. So I want to weigh in before others decide to copy their practice without thinking.

For example, the job description for an 'Amazing Software Engineer' is a little over the top.

http://blog.rapleaf.com/jobs/#engineer

- Amazing coder who takes no prisoners. Master of all things Internet. One of the best coders in existence. - Intensely driven and proactive person. - Extremely hard working. This is a start-up - team members work long hours. - Quick learner and real doer. Err on execution over strategy. - Thrive on working with A-players. Too good to spend long hours with B-players. - Likeable person who garners respect on and off the job. - Thrive on chaos, risk, and uncertainty. - Should be easy to get along with, nice, fun, smart, ethical, and low-maintenance. - Strong desire to build a more ethical society. - Desire to be an early employee and want to be a real owner in Rapleaf’s future. - Want to work with extremely large datasets and build portable APIs that thousands of other companies can build applications on top of.

Note: this job is really hard. You’ll be working with some of the top search engineers in the world and they are going to expect that you kick ass. We’re doing things that no one has ever done before and solving problems that have been open for years.

---------------------------------------

I think this attitude would be totally fine, were it actually consistent with the work they're doing. But it's not. I applied for an interview there, and after making a massive deal about it, they sent me this, honestly, trivial test. They chose the time -- 4pm - 5pm on a Friday, and I got it back to them, while pointing out the errors on their test, in fifteen minutes. They then said they'd get back to me Monday.

Then there's a product. It's basically just security rooted in email addresses. I admit that it's a halfway decent heuristic, but it doesn't really solve any security problems because email isn't a secure channel. I asked them about this, and they gave me absolutely no indication they knew what I was talking about. Patient rephrasings lead them to say 'oh, I understand, yes, we can't do that, that's impossible.' But it doesn't answer the question of why they're building this product with this approach in the first place.

So take what you can learn from it, but with a grain of salt.

CSchonwald• 18 years ago

i actually went through their interview process too, and I do agree that the questions were a joke for anyone with a real CS background, and I really think that part of the interview process was in fact meant to filter out people with strong personalities that don't reflexively subscribe to the culture they're located within.

DaniFong5• 18 years ago

Also, on trying to convince the candidate not to come on board, it is instructive to contrast this with Steve Job's approach.

http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...

" Apple was interesting; Larry was working on the Lisa, which was starting to look like a real computer, but for some reason it didn't appeal to me. At one point, though, Larry realized that I'd be a better fit in the Mac group, and introduced me to Andy Hertzfeld. Andy (the "soul" of the Mac software group) showed me some demos that were so amazing that I somehow thought that they didn't really need me--that the software was almost done! But I was impressed and intrigued, and mulled it over...

Meanwhile, I went to interview at VTI. The people there were wonderful. I'd be working with folks I knew and respected, and Doug even offered me a $15K signing bonus, a huge amount of money for a recent college graduate. I'd be working on advanced chip design tools, a new area for me, and it would be an interesting challenge. So I accepted the job. That was Thursday.

On Friday evening, I got a phone call. "Bruce, it's Steve. What do you think about Apple?" It was Steve Jobs. "Well, Steve, Apple's cool, but I accepted a job at VTI."

"You did what? Forget that, you get down here tomorrow morning, we have a lot more things to show you. Be at Apple at 9am." Steve was adamant. I thought I'd go down, go through the motions, and then tell him that I'd made up my mind and was going to VTI.

Steve switched on the Reality Distortion Field full-force. I met with seemingly everyone on the Mac team, from Andy to Rod Holt to Jerry Manock to the other software engineers, and back to Steve. Two full days of demos, drawings of the various designs, marketing presentations--I was overwhelmed.

On Monday I called Doug Fairbairn at VTI and told him I had changed my mind.

I was going to join Apple, where we would change the world with a little computer called the Macintosh. "

The Art of the Job Offer: Encourage Candidates to Turn You Down

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