The Curious Story of the Smart Developer Who Couldn't Find a Job (he liked)

http://blog.calbucci.com/2012/02/curious-story-of-smart-microsoft.html

by calbucci • 14 years ago

110 65 14 years ago

blog.calbucci.com

k33n• 14 years ago

This post strikes me as pretty arrogant, and maybe even a little deluded. 3-4 high-level Microsoft engineers are asking to join your startup every week, and you're sending them emails like that? If you can't afford to pay them what Microsoft does, you shouldn't even be entertaining the idea of bringing them onto your company unless you're going to offset the decrease in salary with a generous equity stake.

Just "working at a startup" isn't worth much. In fact, it's a major sacrifice for an engineer like that to make. I checked out EveryMove and it seems to me that engineers like that would be pretty dramatically underutilized anyway. It seems like you should just tell people like this that they are overqualified and to stay at Microsoft.

dotBen• 14 years ago

I think the issue is not whether EveryMove can afford to pay developers what Microsoft does, but specifically that at Microsoft (or any big company) you may not have the kind of experience of actually building a product and bringing it to market.

The dynamics of a large company mean you are often working on one part of the delivery, that crucial parts of the product building process are owned by other people, release cycles are much longer and many projects don't even ship.

IMHO that's a fair point and the author's suggestion that the candidate build a side project as a way of demonstrating they can build + ship in a startup-like manner seems valid to me, personally. Esp for a company with just a handful of devs.

lsc2• 14 years ago

Sure, sure. But If you are a top-end Engineer that can land a top-end Engineer job /and/ can build and ship a product in a startup-like manner, there's zero reason for you to join a startup as an underpaid employee. If you want to do a startup and are willing to take a pay cut, once you are at that level, you should join as a founder.

nbclark• 14 years ago

Came across as arrogant to me as well, though I agree with the mentality that a startup needs to find people that have built their own apps, tools, whatever on their own. Nothing is more valuable than having someone who can get stuff done.

sliverstorm• 14 years ago

The most frustrating part is not that he would say those things, but that he would now post it publicly. It almost feels like he is bragging. "Look, Microsoft engineers want to be at my company! Look, I am talking down to them and turning them away!"

billpatrianakos• 14 years ago

Not only that but there's this subtext that's screaming out "Startups are cool, right? Startups are cool, right? This is worth it, right? I'm cool because I'm part of a startup, right? If I speak condescendingly in blog posts itll seem like I'm successful and awesome, right?". I don't know this guy so I shouldn't pass judgement. I'm just saying that's how it comes off. I'm sure he's a nice guy otherwise.

droithomme• 14 years ago

I agree with you. The post read to me to be an elaborate fantasy constructed in the author's imagination justifying why his firm was hot stuff for offering severely below market wages.

gavanwoolery• 14 years ago

I came here to say pretty much this. I will add:

10 years of experience at a high-profile tech company in addition to numerous awards, and you want to turn him down? Do you have any idea how much job recruiters would bend over backwards to get a candidate like that? I have worked for myself, for startups, and at a bigger company - and I can attest that work does not differ much, except that startups pay crappy wages and demand crazy hours. Experience is experience - it does not matter if he was trained on the MS stack - I was too, and quickly became proficient in OSS, Mac, and mobile development.

geori• 14 years ago

I agree. Marcelo is a moron for turning down this guy. Although we don't run the MS stack, my startup would kill to have a guy like this to join.

It is completely laughable to me that this guy has to do a side project to prove he is worthy of a startup. Just have a few beers with him and talk over the problems you are working on and see if he has good ideas on how to solve them. If he does, you've got a hire. If he really needs hand holding (and seriously does an award winning guy like this need hand holding???) then say it isnt a good fit.

peacemaker• 14 years ago

Completely agree... I'm in kind of a similar situation to the fictional MS employee myself but I have also built things on the side. If I received this kind of email from a company I would laugh and then click 'Delete' and never consider them again.

Someone with the level of experience he describes will be hounded by recruiters for all sorts of companies every day - I know because I put my resume online recently and it has been non-stop from both big companies and startups. None of the startups have any issues with my big company experience and neither should the author. So if we're generalising, then from that post it seems to me the author is rather arrogant and a bit deluded about what it takes to work at his startup...

tlogan• 14 years ago

Question regarding salary... I'm not sure if I'm wrong but when was looking for a new job back in 2004-2005, I cannot recall a single startup which was recruiting engineers and offering salary below market rate and they end up being successful.

As far as I remember, when Facebook was a startup (~2006) they were offering market rate salary. Were they?

lsc2• 14 years ago

I've known several bootstrapped startups that did pretty okay paying below-market wages to Engineers.

On the other hand, the Engineers taking those below-market wages? Their reward is usually something like market-rate salaries. It's a good deal for people that have been unemployed for a long time or that otherwise have a difficult time landing market-rate jobs, but for people that are both good and confident, it's a pretty bum deal.

wyclif• 14 years ago

"There's no shortage of smart, hardworking engineers. There's a shortage of smart, hardworking engineers willing to work for very little money." ~ David "Pardo" Keppel

latch2• 14 years ago

Aside from his concluding bullet points (which should probably be the focus), his main reply to "Pete" seems to be: doing the same thing every year for 10 years does not give you 10 years experience.

dlo• 14 years ago

He worked on the Windows TCP/IP stack, Visual Studio, and Bing. These are hardly the same thing.

anonymoushn• 14 years ago

I wonder if he also sends emails like this to fresh graduates. You know, the kind of people who don't have any experience building and managing a product from top to bottom, but also don't have 10 years of experience at Microsoft.

nchuhoai• 14 years ago

The one part that striked me:

My biggest concern about you joining a startup is that you don’t have enough breadth of expertise in building products.

This sort of runs counter to what my beliefs are and I thought the ethic in this country is: As long as you have that urge or passion in you (he mentions it himself), it doesn't matter what your "expertise" is. Sure, you need to have a baseline of "technical" skills, but this candidate clearly has it. Especially in these days where it is hard to find willing talent, I dont think you can afford to be picky, especially with such seemingly arrogant(right word?) demands

dannyc• 14 years ago

I don't know, there seems to be a lot of people here disagreeing. I agreed with most he had to say. I speak as someone who did exactly what he is describing- worked at huge company doing a pinhole role and going to a start-up doing end-to-end full stack (including DB stuff!) application. My technical skills were there but there was still a very big learning curve for all the frameworks out there. Especially since at large companies there is a lot more homegrown stuff and legacy infrastructure and at start-ups there is a ton of reliance on opensource. I agree that his statement only makes sense if they really have a lot of applicants then they can chose to be picky and maybe pass up top-talent like that until they get their feet wet. The flip-side of that coin is losing out on the opportunity, but again it only makes sense if all applicants are top-talent and they only need to choose between them.

wisty• 14 years ago

So he doesn't know how to configure nginx, or the db. So what? It's already running. Database skills are fairly important (since they are your bottleneck), and it's important to have some internet knowledge (to prevent security breaches), but if a startup is hiring it should already have the stack in place. The big advantage of a "starup generalist" is they have probably played with a few different stacks, and know which one to pick, but it's too late for that.

And big company people know all the stupid mistakes that big companies do, and can help warn you about them as you grow.

yalogin• 14 years ago

The example he chose strikes me as odd. The guy worked on really varied projects - TCP/IP stack, the IDE and Bing. I would be really really impressed if someone managed to work on such varied fields at such a high level at a company like MS. It would mean he's got a wonderful drive and motivation. The OP would be lucky to have him apply.

latch2• 14 years ago

It isn't uncommon for large companies to offer quite a lot of internal mobility between teams / projects.

I agree with everyone else that the post came off as arrogant, but...Working at a startup involves wearing a lot of hats. It also tends to mean web or mobile work these days. Does Pete know anything about managing servers, designing database schemas or deploying code to production? Does he know jQuery/backbone/html, memcached/lucense, any NoSQL, Linux..AWS...

Unlike the OP, I wouldn't write Pete off, but I'd probably have a more technical interview than normal with him (specifically focusing on end-to-end development...client-side through to the database).

cageface3• 14 years ago

Anybody with the chops to do meaningful work on the TCP/IP stack and the MS IDEs can pick up anything to do with web development in a month or maybe two. Brogrammers that only know web dev generally don't seem to realize that most of that work is on the pretty easy end of the difficulty spectrum unless you're working at Twitter scale or something.

jcc802• 14 years ago

"He thought that he could talk to me and see what they are and if there’s a match, but also learn a thing or two about startups."

I missed the part where, "Pete", the Microsoft Engineer asks this guy for all his sage advice.

ootachi2• 14 years ago

And people don't believe me when I say that even talented developers can't find jobs these days because there aren't enough positions.

amcintyre3• 14 years ago

"Pick a “side project”, a web product, and build it from beginning to end."

Maybe Marcelo's immediate concern is that this fictional developer doesn't know "HTTP, Razor, MVC 3, ASP.NET, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, jQuery, jQuery UI, Facebook Connect, Twitter API, SQL, service monitoring, and analytics" like the back of his hand, but to assume that he's never built something from beginning to end just because he works at a big company is a bit much.

Anybody that's done really hard work like this fictional developer (especially if they're feeling constrained by Microsoft culture) has probably built multiple tools from beginning to end in order to make his life easier. He may even have built tools (perhaps even web tools that use a lot of the buzzword technologies in his list) that were used internally by large numbers of users.

But did Marcelo ask? No, he just assumes the guy doesn't have the chops because he chose to work at the wrong place for the last ten years.

Also, one of the commenters says, "Yeah let's be clear, once you hit L65 startups are not going to be interested in you. Ever." Does this really matter to people that are running startups?

jcc802• 14 years ago

The fact that the author previously worked at Microsoft himself leads him to draw all sorts of (potentially false) conclusions about this engineer.

amcintyre3• 14 years ago

I admit that it might be tempting to automatically associate "Pete" with any not-so-capable principal devs he may have worked with at Microsoft, but that seems like a bad prejudice to be carrying around if you're interested in hiring the best people to make your business successful.

At least he's open about his prejudice, which I guess is doing those job hunters from Microsoft a favor.

alexbowman• 14 years ago

I agree completely. And a suggestion on Marcelo's style - to identify someone listening is important. This is a general point applicable here and other situations: listen.

Asd open ended questions without framing them or signalling one's own intentions. Let an individual express themselves, do not focus on technical details which can be learnt quickly but success factors in the hiring organisation, and let the candidate express their own experiences and motivations, then after the interview / informal chat match them against one's own organisation's characteristics.

This is something that can and should be done across all organisation types. De-focus on immediate need - that's a contractor, or specialist in an unchanging position - focus on the longer term fit of the individual and the hiring organisation.

rickmb• 14 years ago

Like many people deep inside the startup scene, the author completely forgets that much, if not most, developer jobs are with neither startups nor "big companies".

There are thousands of small to medium sized companies out there that can offer a decent balance between various aspects mentioned, including most of the stuff the author considers typical for a startup.

If you think your startup is competing for talent with the likes of Microsoft and Google, you may be looking in the wrong direction.

varelse2• 14 years ago

Agree 100%! I made a grand total of $18,000 in stock from failed startups I joined over the years. And that was with 2% of the one company that earned anything in my pocket. OTOH I did a lot better joining growing post-IPO companies where my 0.1% was 0.1% of something, something already selected for success by earning the IPO achievement badge. Which is to say I'm a contrarian that believes if one were to go someplace like facebook right now and fit in, things would probably turn out reasonably well in the long-run.

After all, Google was minting millionaires a good two years past their IPO...

prtamil• 14 years ago

If you have talent just build better project than EveryMove .After that He will come to you , He will Respect you , He will Fear you. He will Pay you whatever you want and more, even he will laugh at your awful jokes and dance to your tunes. Building Better Project takes just Ramen,Pizza,Coke and Knowledge not Mr.Marcelo Calbucci's Permission.

So If i have good experience and knowledge .I would build better project and Shove it up to his "Startup owning Arrogance"

nlz1• 14 years ago

Unlikely.

potatolicious• 14 years ago

> "Besides that, there are some mental hurdles you have to overcome by yourself about understanding the risk-reward of a startup. Taking a 30-40% salary cut is just one of those."

Uh... how about... no.

So very, very tired of founders trying to convince everyone that tiny stake as an employee in a startup is worth a giant haircut, or really, any haircut at all.

If you want me to take a huge haircut, bring meaningful equity to the table. It's laughable how some startups want you to take a $20-30K haircut in exchange for equity that, if the startup exits big after years of toil, might buy you a Smart car.

Sometimes recruiters cold call me and try to pitch me on some startup or another, and then ask if I'm amenable to taking a haircut in exchange for equity. At this point I'm tempted to just issue a blanket "hell no".

lrobb• 14 years ago

That describes the typical job post on angel list... It makes me wonder how guys can make it past an algorithms class yet not be able to do a simple spreadsheet projection.

halefx• 14 years ago

Haircut..? Is this some meme I don't know?

brown9-22• 14 years ago

Not a meme, it's a common euphemism for taking less than the full amount on a payment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haircut_(finance)

For example, "The bondholders will have to agree to take a large haircut in order for the Greek debt restructuring agreement to go through."

amcintyre3• 14 years ago

>So very, very tired of founders trying to convince everyone that tiny stake as an employee in a startup is worth a giant haircut, or really, any haircut at all.

Agreed. If engineering matters so little to a company that they can neither spend money nor equity on decent engineers, then I don't need to be there.

rdl• 14 years ago

I'd take less cash to work for a really awesome startup (or a really awesome group within a larger company), with great coworkers, solving an important problem, etc.

That's the reason for taking a pay cut to work for a startup; the equity from the startup is just a bonus on top of that.

bad_user• 14 years ago

If Pete, the fictional character, did indeed work on the TCP/IP stack, Visual Studio and Bing ... it would be pretty easy to identify whom this person is, which would make Marcelo Calbucci an asshole for publishing this, as Pete could get into trouble.

On the other hand if these deliverables were made-up / picked at random, then the story holds no value, because the context of such anecdotes is everything. Like in this case we are led to believe that Pete doesn't have the chops to work for a startup because he supposedly hasn't worked on small and agile teams delivering products straight to customers.

But I've got news for you, even inside big corporations, there are small teams that struggle to innovate and appeal to customers without much support (or control) from their peers.

And if somebody can do it inside a corporation where they have to struggle not only for winning the hearts and minds of customers, but also with internal politics, then that somebody is a lot more valuable than people that worked in startups for their whole carrier doing yet another vertical social network or shopping cart.

rbanffy• 14 years ago

Let's imagine he worked, instead, on the SMB stack, Office and Hotmail. Or DAV integration into Explorer, SQL Server and Dynamics.

I can come up with many 3-sets of Microsoft products roughly in the same areas as Calbucci did.

OTOH, once about every 6 months or so someone from Microsoft recruiting calls me. At first, I told them right away I'm not interested (I had enough contact with MS in the late 90's). Now I just let them go on. It usually takes them a couple weeks to google my name and conclude I wouldn't be a good fit.

brown9-22• 14 years ago

You are missing the point - the number of Microsoft employees who worked on those 3 projects, or any 3 projects, in the past 10 years is likely very low, considering the thousands of other projects active in the same timeframe.

shiven• 14 years ago

Startup (and bigger) companies can learn a lot from this. If anything, this is a good example on how not to go about recruiting talented people. Firmly filed under the dickheaded category.

meiji• 14 years ago

I would have to say that as a tech person in general, the blog post would have me avoiding looking for jobs there full stop. Sometimes you find good people who aren't perfect for you but you know will work out. I worked with an engineer who was an exceptional perl/systems developer. I bumped into a former colleague who asked how the other guy was doing and said that he would love to hire him despite the fact he had no experience with his new job's technology as he knew that he would be an asset. This is why saying "You need to have worked on product" or "You need experience in industry X" is very short sighted. In some roles, it's required, in other roles it's an added bonus. Founders, recruiters and hiring managers need to understand the difference.

chrisbennet2• 14 years ago

I guess I'm going against the flow but I didn't find his (calbucci's) post as disagreable as most commenters. As engineers, we learn stuff on the run our whole careers and we are rightfully upset when we don't get a job because we don't have something on our resume' that we feel/know we could pick up pretty quick. I get it.

But look at it from the startup founder's perspective. He's in a race and he can't really afford to take on someone who can "get in shape" after joining the team. He really needs someone who can start running right now.

I agree with most that the pay cut for worthless equity is a nonstarter though.

vonmoltke• 14 years ago

"But look at it from the startup founder's perspective. He's in a race and he can't really afford to take on someone who can "get in shape" after joining the team. He really needs someone who can start running right now."

Yes, the emphasis is on right now. That leads to the question: is it better to have someone like Pete now, even though he needs to learn a few things as he goes, or leave a hole in your company for 3, 6, 9 months until your perfect fit comes along?

chrisbennet2• 14 years ago

Excellent point.

cageface3• 14 years ago

The tone among startup mavens is increasingly reminiscent of the odious arrogance of all the johnny-come-lately bandwagon jumpers that were crawling out of the woodwork in 1998, with the same lack of originality and hand-wavy business plans.

I think this is the fifth or six social health & fitness startup I've discovered this week.

AznHisoka• 14 years ago

to be fair, I don't think it's fair to judge their business plan from this blog post, but their attitude towards potential hires is pretty arrogant

tom_b• 14 years ago

This is scary to me because of the similarity to HR drone-speak.

"oh, we need a candidate who has written blub on corporate blub platform X instead of corporate blub platform Y. thanks for your interest."

The worst part is that this hypothetical candidate has worked on and been successful at wildly different tech pieces.

If I was this candidate, I would expect to come to an interview at a startup and talk about each of those different experiences. I would frame the discussion around each different project and what aspects of these projects translated to how I could contribute to the startup. Did I have to learn new approaches? Did I create an API? Did I mentor and train other devs? How did I get up to speed on "hard-core backend optimization for fast retrieval of large data sets" in Bing after working on Visual Studio?

OneBytePerGreen• 14 years ago

I am surprised at all the negativity here.

Working at a startup is obviously very different from working in a corporate environment. You have to thrive on risk and be so passionate about new technologies that you can't help but learn all that stuff and chomp at the bit to use it.

I can't imagine working at Microsoft and NOT having learned HTTP, Razor, MVC 3, ASP.NET, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, jQuery, jQuery UI, Facebook Connect, Twitter API, SQL at this point. It is stunning how much a single person can get done these days thanks to all the cool technologies that have come along in the last few years. If that guy is truly dying to join a startup, why doesn't he have his own side project yet?

I think Calbucci is just trying to find people with true passion. I would definitely worry that this person moves on to a job with more $$$ if the startup isn't a huge success right out of the gate. After all, financial motivations are keeping him at his current job right now.

The founder probably took a 100% paycut to get it started. I don't think it's too much to ask for someone to take a financial risk to come onboard; especially when it's before launch, which means their cash flow is probably close to $0. Obviously, these kinds of decisions are not for everyone. But, when you're truly passionate, it's not really a choice at all.

cunac• 14 years ago

as much as I am passionate about developing I share same passion to be paid fairly. I love what I do but that doesn't mean I will do it for you free or with huge discount.

dakliegg2• 14 years ago

If you are going to take lower income in exchange for increased risk, why take that risk with someone like Marcello? Why not find a talented PM and biz guy and come up with your own product idea?

seamusmc• 14 years ago

This is one of the points Marcello is making. I have almost 20 years experience, spent 5 years at Microsoft, 18 months on the .Net framework team before it released, and have yet to write a line of code for the web.

The vast majority of work at MS is not web based, its API, OS, Dev Tools, Server, etc ... And devs are very much in silos. (IOW they 'own' a specific piece of functionality within their product.)

Internal Tool devs on the other hand ... Internal Tool teams are run very much like startups and many fail. ;)

BTW there is a lot of grey here, its not black and white. There are many devs at MS that do side projects and contribute to OSS. Many do this work off the MS stack.

varelse2• 14 years ago

Long-winded reply, but 3 years in the valley during the dotcom boom working at a variety of ultimately failed startups taught me:

1) The expected return of a startup does not compensate for the loss in compensation because 0.1% ownership assuming even a generous 10% chance of success times $1M (assuming a magical $1B buyout/IPO) is only $100,000 divided by the number of years worked. You wanna take a 30% haircut for those odds?

2) This equation shifts dramatically if you get one of those fancy three-letter titles and the equity that comes with it. Which is to say do not go to a startup without one. Failing that, the more of a George Carlin outlook you develop towards the three-letter title sorts blowing smoke up your keester, the better off you'll be.

3) Override number 2 for a sufficiently high consultant rate. Crossing my palms with silver cures all ills and shows that either you're an utter fool with too much money (most of the time) or you have a relatively good grasp of the costs of getting things done right.

4) Why bother with a startup in this day and age when, as the author said, you can just build something yourself without leaving your current gig? 100% equity times a 1% chance of success times ~$10M equals the same expected return without any sort of haircut whatsoever.

jtbigwoo• 14 years ago

What if he's making a moneyball-type play and doesn't even know it?

High-level Microsoft engineers are fairly valued or slightly overvalued by the job market as a whole. When hiring for a startup, he should be looking for undervalued assets. If he can make a convincing case to his stakeholders that high-level Microsoft engineers are not a good fit, maybe he can gain an advantage over other startups.

calbucci• 14 years ago

1) This post is not about technical skills or competency, it’s about a person-company fit and motivation. If you hire an average developer you expect average results, and if you hire an awesome developer you expect an awesome product. But what if this developer has the skills but not the motivation? What if after he joins your startup he realizes it’s not what he was really looking for? The impact on your team will be huge, if he stays or leaves. Get the cards out on the table before you join forces.

2) Some people on Hacker News are talking about the absurdity of taking a below Market Rate salary. I don’t know where you got that from, but on the post I said startups would pay less than Microsoft. I think some people on HN don’t really know how much Microsoft pays (or Google, Amazon or FB). It’s a lot more than you are thinking. A 10-12 year veteran at Microsoft has a base salary of $140,000-$180,000 and 20% bonus (pretty much guaranteed). That’s between $170K-$220K in comp, excluding Stock Awards, unbeatable health care coverage, and many other perks. Yes, no startup that I know of can afford that.

3) I’m not rejecting “Pete”. I’m asking him to do a self-assessment (a side project) to understand his own interest in building products end-to-end and to “get” what doing code at a startup might be like.

4) For the people attacking me or my startup, you should look yourself in the mirror and try to find the source of so much anger.

5) My post lacks context in the sense of who I am and why do I get so many Microsoft developers that want to talk to me. And just to clarify, I’ve worked at MSFT for 7 years, I left to do a startup, which I did for 4.5 years and I failed and I was very public about it. I set out on a mission to help educate others who were following a similar path, to help them avoid the similar mistakes I’ve made. I founded the Seattle 2.0 organizations to help that mission. Over the last 4 years, I helped approximately 2,000 people who went through some of the events I put together. You can read the full story of my first startup here:

http://blog.calbucci.com/2009/07/anything-and-everything-abo...

You can read the story of Seattle 2.0 here:

http://blog.calbucci.com/2011/12/seattle-20-from-humble-begi...

sday• 14 years ago

There is some merit in the article & story, however -The startup ends up with no engineer & lots of openings and time spent hiring for a year. -In a startup, one is trying to change the world with the product and change themselves, this is opening another battlefront, on recruiting, trying to change the world of hiring instead of changing to adapt to the world.

rgbrgb• 14 years ago

On a different note, would Pete even be allowed to work on a side project? I'm considering joining a BigCO and the contract really makes it seem like that would be forbidden.

dakliegg2• 14 years ago

Depends on the state. Microsoft in Washington has non-compete which can get in the way. If you are only looking at IP restrictions, those are weak and difficult to enforce. It's really there to keep the dev from suing the BigCo for personal IP that leaked into BigCo's code base.

On the other hand, would you ever go work for a company that went after a small entrepreneur for some minor breach? They'll scare all the smart code monkeys away.

The Curious Story of the Smart Developer Who Couldn't Find a Job (he liked)

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