Tell HN: Two YC companies in a row hired and then didn't take me on
In both cases I went through long recruitment processes, spoke at length with the founders and technical staff, did a (paid) trial project, in one case this lasted for almost a month. In both companies everyone I talk to was extremely positive, even gushing, so I was not surprised to be hired.
I was very surprised though that in both cases they changed their minds before the formal employment had begun, due to their financial situation.
They were never rude, and they did pay me for the hours I had worked, but it still wasted a lot of my time since I didn't seek any other jobs while trial working for them.
It's hard to imagine that it was some kind of ruse to get very short term work done, but it's also hard to see how they couldn't plan better. Perhaps they started hiring on the expectation of being able to raise money, but that seems unprofessional and disrespectful towards the candidates, no?
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadHang in there.
> Perhaps they started hiring on the expectation of being able to raise money, but that seems unprofessional and disrespectful towards the candidates, no?
They were 100% doing this, and that's pretty much the base case for any VC-funded startup. If you believe this to be disrespectful than I advise you to stick with profitable/public employers.
If anything, appreciate that they didn't try to hire you in spite of their financial squeeze, then end up laying you off a few months later with minimal severance because they overran their runway.
FWIW: Most startups fail. Most startups will evolve to be a place that you won't like. There is a reason why startups have such high turnover.
In my case, often when I ask a founder tough questions, I get rejected. It's okay, because I probably won't have the patience to work for someone who can't answer my tough questions.
But, getting back to you: I suspect "funding" is a convenient excuse, but I wouldn't read too much into it. Instead, I suggest being a lot more defensive in the process: Don't do 1-month contracts.
Instead, target ~6-month contracts with a ~1-week trial and a ~3 week severance. Explain that you've found that 1-month trials are impractical given how much time you spend interviewing. Point out that, just like the contracting status protects the company, you need severance to protect yourself too.
However, the funding market is very poor. It's likely they realized that someone of your calibre, while useful to the org, wasn't absolutely, 100% needed to the survival of the company. That's not to say you weren't impressive. It's just that founders right now are in survival mode, not "Let's hire the best talent we can find" mode. Founders are trying to use the minimum resources possible to get to their next milestone.
It sounds like the YC founders made a tough call but one that protected their runway.
I've always been frustrated by startups that hire over-optimistically. I worked for one that doubled headcount twice from 15 to 30 to 60 in just a few months (with a heavy emphasis on engineering) pre-PMF only to turn around just a few months later and layoff half of the company, then a few months after that, half again. That obliterated the culture and morale, and then also follow-on effects of more people leaving that made it even worse.
They are a rare success story that went on to eventually re-raise a "seed" round two more times (!), rebuild and eventually achieve unicorn status. However, in the process it required changing virtually the entire company (90+%) including all new C suite, the founders being demoted, etc.
I can't help but wonder in a parallel universe what could have happened had we not hired excessively to begin with.
I think too many founders today expose themselves to being overly dependent on venture capital by growing headcount too fast.
I would encourage you to think of the YC investment (or any investor's "stamp of approval") as an indication of a potentially successful return of capital for investors. Not a good company for you as an employee to achieve your goals.
Inherently, labor and capital are in conflict with each other. The things which make a company successful for the investors are usually not aligned to what makes it a great experience and outcome for the employee.
I did a retrospective on my journey interviewing at this YC company and my key insight was to evaluate the leadership, not the investors. The hiring manager was great. But after retrospectively vetting the CEO and leadership team, I came to the conclusion that they were really struggling with building a healthy business in a really competitive space.
As part of my retrospective I tried to take an analytical view of the competitive dynamics. It's pretty clear in the near term that the LowCode space I was looking at is going to face pressure from incumbents amidst a general re-pricing —
https://blog.devnos.com/posts/2022-12-20-lowcode/
This is simply not true. Having happy employees is very good for business profitability.
The unions are always trying to recast the relationship as adversarial, which is a huge mistake.
Yes, sure, in the broad sense they're all part of the same ecosystem and if that ecosystem does well it can get to a happy stable state where each community prospers. That's certainly true.
But also on a day to day level one of the parties is literally trying to consume the other one.
That is not inherent. Businesses have mutually beneficial relationships with suppliers and customers. Transactions are win-win. There's nothing fundamentally different between a business and its employees, and no reason why the relationship cannot be win-win.
But unions frame their negotiations in terms of win-lose. This is a sad state of affairs.
https://customerservice.costco.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/8...
I inherently agree that this is a good Code of Ethics. It comes down to whether the people at these organizations conduct themselves in a way that embodies these principles. In the OP and my specific cases it was not the case. My position is that these principles are difficult and not particularly well adopted.
Although it can be win-win in theory, it frequently isn't in practice. A well-known example of companies working against their own employees is the "anti-poaching" policy illegally agreed to by Google, Apple and others a few years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
There was no union here trying to create an adversarial situation. It was simply corporate greed (on the part of some of the most profitable companies in the world).
I.e. win-lose.
Is it any surprise that companies don't like being treated like that? Would you?
What if, instead, unions framed it as a partnership for improved success of the company. Like, for more benefits, we'll improve productivity to more than pay for it. Win-win! What a concept.
Its relatively uncommon if your baseline is status quo ante (though I’ve seen it in repeatedly in public sector unions in downturns, and I’ve heard of it happening in private sector unions when the employer is in particularly dire straits), but not at all uncommon if your baseline is the employer’s offer.
> Like, for more benefits, we'll improve productivity to more than pay for it.
Unions don't control productivity, so they can’t promise that. Of course, if employers want to give labor a stake in productivity by offering equity, they are free to do so.
Of course they do. They're not mindless automatons. They're in the position with the best view of where productivity choke points are, and how to fix them. They can also run seminars to improve the training, and can help find positions where the unproductive members can be productive.
I'm sad I even have to point this out.
> not at all uncommon
I've never heard of it. The Starbucks strike has been in the news in the last week, and the union offered nothing whatsoever but threats and demands.
That probably explains why most VC-funded businesses these days aren't profitable, even after they IPO :-)
Liquidation preference does not make for happy employees.
It's what these companies pretend to believe, at least.
Whether they actually, in reality, act in a way that make their employees happy -- or in a manner that is even fair or rational, by any detached observation -- is an entirely different matter.
If it was true, then you'd think more companies would care about their employees. Amazon treats their warehouse and delivery people as disposable.
> The unions are always trying to recast the relationship as adversarial, which is a huge mistake.
If employers were treating their employees well, they wouldn't need a union.
https://www.starbucks.com/careers/working-at-starbucks/benef...
This is not the same for Amazon. What you care about is delivery time and choice and they are doing well in that front.
I bet if they wanted to hire you, but circumstances disrupted that, they saw value that others would see.
Dude's looking for a job as a senior iOS dev and the advice is to start his own company?
/s obviously
Maybe, "You're an iOS dev, have you ever considered making and releasing your own app?" would've had a different impact.
"Been there done that." I'm an excellent developer, and I tried to start my own company. The workload when starting your own company is very different than merely developing software.
Although I won't go so far as to say it takes a special someone to start their own company; many of us know what we want to do with our careers and know the where we want to stretch our comfort zones and where we want to stay in them. Joining an early stage company is often a stretch in itself, especially if someone just wants to spend most of their day programming.
I do. It's a shitty suggestion that makes the assumption that the OP has enough money in their bank account to go without a paycheck for several months.
Also, starting a company is an entirely different skillset from software engineering. Just because someone is excellent at writing code doesn't mean they'd be a good leader.
I asked a question.
The rationale behind the question is that perhaps the person would want to try running a tiny consultancy.
I’ve known many who have done that successfully with similar experience level.
Not everyone can be the person in charge; and it's counter productive to force people into leadership roles that they really don't want.
It also made assumptions about assumptions the question never made, which is self-referentially amusing.
There have been numerous posts over the years with sole proprietors citing that they clearly started profitable iOS businesses as side projects while working other jobs.
The only thing I would fault you on is going after trial positions in this economic situation. Think of the opportunity cost of not going after positions that could be for sure, while you are working on a trial position.
>that seems unprofessional and disrespectful towards the candidates, no?
Nobody can predict the future. You don't know what investor will suddenly come up short on cash or what economic factor will clobber your balance sheet. It sounds like the whole process (interview + trial) lasted nearly a quarter and that's definitely on cycle for major financial changes.
I would be surprised if this were something the candidate suggested — it was probably a part of the company's recruiting process. It may have been optional, or it may have been mandatory.
> Honestly doesn't sound like anything YC specific
Possibly, though they are big on "hire slow, fire fast".
Ryan here at YC. I help build YC’s workatastartup.com, and also work with companies to help them find great people for their teams. Part of that includes teaching them to hire well -- communicating clear expectations, having fair/reasonable questions, paying for the interviewee's time, and hiring when they’re in a good position to do so.
What you experienced sounds incredibly frustrating. Sorry that you went through that. I don’t know the details on the company side, and the market is obviously pretty bad. But that still shouldn’t be a catch-all excuse for you having a bad experience.
If you’re open to it, would love to connect live and learn more about what happened. And I’m also happy to make intros to founders/companies that might be a better fit -- especially ones that are in a strong economic position to do so.
My email is ryan AT ycombinator.com if you’d like to connect. Hope to hear from you, and help if I can.
but in seriousness, i'm one of the people here trying to uplevel hiring at YC startups, and at startups more broadly.
this thread is helpful for me to know what we can do to make startup hiring (and working at a startup) better. i'm appreciative for the comments/voices here so i can keep learning.
thank you very nice PR man. u r doing a very good job of preventing founders from experiencing discomfort and making the meat feel cared for.
> but in seriousness, i'm one of the people here trying to uplevel hiring at YC startups, and at startups more broadly.
That's cool, but what pressure is there actually against practices like this if the companies aren't even named? Am I supposed to believe you call up a founder and go: 'uh hey, can you get your churn under control? We're getting complaints'.
What does this conversation sound like? Is it like: 'Oh, is negative word getting out publicly?' 'nah, they didn't name you, its under control' 'ah good. Well Ryan, we want the best, the absolute best and that requires trying lots of candidates I just don't see a problem, OP was nice person but just not a good fit for us' 'ok, makes sense, thanks founder, you guys are doing great, keep up the good work'
I think you are meaning to say that it can bring accountability to these companies, in which case I'd agree.
In a larger company I’ve worked at (and have hired for), they had a process where if the candidate passed the first 2 interviews, you basically get a formal “intent to hire” process started which reserves money for the position that cannot be withdrawn except for VP-level intervention.
I think lots of companies are seeing a longer/harder sales cycle as well, so they're still growing, but at a reduced rate, which when combined with that investor advice can lead to reqs the company thought they had, not really being available when it comes to deciding on making an offer.
What I don't know about, is if there's a bit more slack in the job market, where a year ago if you completed the interview you would get an offer, instead companies now have the ability to select among multiple good candidates.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/19/yc-advises-founders-to-pla...
We did see a lot of our YC startups stop/slow down hiring at that time and throughout the summer. It has picked up since, as a function of 1.) a new batch of YC startups graduating, 2.) raising a healthy seed round and 3.) hiring a few early employees.
OP told me his experience was more recent, and that's a big time gap between the memo and now. I can't speak to any specifics, but I do think all startups (and definitely YC ones) are continually re-evaluating their business position: revenue, projected growth and corresponding headcount. And with a pull-back in industry spending during a downturn (and more expected going into 2023), vendors/sellers/startups will all have to re-adjust their 2023 plans pretty quickly.
Poor fiscal planning isn't an excuse for what happened to OP. It does shed light on how some companies (including YC startups) are continually trying to adapt during this downturn.
Note: The above comments about industry spend isn't from anything in particular I'm seeing from our YC startups, but rather from having worked at B2B startups twice previously during downturns -- and personally being on both sides of the equation (as seller and buyer of SaaS software).
While I (and YC) am trying to help founders create postive interview experiences for candidates, there's clearly more work to be done. As I mentioned previously, I give hiring/interview training for our founders. From our conversation (and this broader thread), I need to reiterate/add points to my training around:
- More education to founders around who should/shouldn't be hiring. This market is (and will continue to be) tricky to navigate, but that's not an excuse for rescinding an offer. (We actually do a lot of training -- and our partners repeatedly tell our founders not to overhire, but we can do more here, especially now.)
- Paid trials are good. From my conversation with job seekers -- and with OP -- this is a good practice to respect an interviewee for their time, and more founders should do this.
- Keep trial periods short. 1-2 weeks is a good amount of time; any longer and you risk wasting the candidate's time, which a founder/hiring team should be respectful of, always.
Again, there's more to do, and I'll try to work more closely with our startups to really dig into their hiring plans for 2023. I don't want job seekers to be experiencing this kind of thing (on workatastartup.com or otherwise), so we'll do what we can within our network to prevent it.
Who would do that if not than an YC-backed aspiring unicorn in an hustling environment ?
Also a month long ? For a startup without money ? How many more arguments do you want to see it for what it is ?
In the current market, you are probably right about the problem being the funding situation; most companies in general, and startups (I suppose) specifically, are desperately bad about foreseeing bad outcomes. There's a hefty bias there.
On the other hand, I guess you just have to keep looking for a job until you get an actual commitment---don't stop because you might have one.
Ah, that's an interesting explanation, seems much more likely than a hustle to get (not even very cheap) short term labour. That could be the case at least for the second of the companies, for the first one I think it might be more down to inexperience or recklessness.
In a way, yes. Hiring isn’t a game of finding the first person who walks through the door who passes an arbitrary bar. It takes some time to collect candidates, interview multiple people, and choose which one to hire.
However, that process should stop after the offer letter is extended. A company that rescinds offers as part of their normal hiring process would be very unusual. I suspect in this case the companies’ explanations (financial situation changed) is honest.
I always try to get candidates through the interview process as fast as possible, but recently it’s usually the candidates who are extending the process out. A lot of people like the idea of shopping around at different companies with your offer letter in hand, which can take weeks or months if you let them. At some point we have to thank the candidate for their time and inform them that we’re moving on to other candidates, because we need to hire someone.
In a strong market, candidates have been able to shop around, get multiple offers (based on interest, comp, etc) and pick the best one for them. If for nothing else, it's useful to get multiple data points to understand the state of the market. Candidates should absolutely do this -- to make sure they're making the right decision based on the possible options out there.
We tell our founders that setting deadlines to accept an offer are not effective, especially given the above. It adds unnecessary stress to the situation, and it sets a bad tone for the relationship.
We also tell our founders to ask what timeline the candidate is looking at, and say when the company is hoping to make a decision. And if those don't align from the start, to note it upfront. (We also ask out founders to write one-pagers on their interview process, to communicate and set those expectations at the beginning of the process. That's fairly new, and taking some time to adopt, but we're working on it.)
If a company doesn't have a hiring plan that doesn't end in 4-6 weeks, I'm not interested in even communicating with that company. I have no issues with trials or paid projects: I would actually prefer a trial or a paid project to starting somewhere only to find out that half the infrastructure including their MongoDB instances are running on Windows servers.
(Ironically enough, in the Medical field, it takes 12-18 months to get hired because of the due diligence involved: my significant other was shocked when I was able to go from looking to hired in less than 28 days back in 2017!)
If you need or want stability, early stage companies probably aren’t worth your attention. Even if they hired you and even if you started, you’d be no less at risk of being let go. If you’d like stability, you’ll need to look for companies that are well capitalised and are executing on a long term strategy rather than fighting for survival (and even then, there’s still a risk — even FAANG’s are rescinding offers).
Although what happened isn’t ideal, I don’t think it reflects too badly on the startups in question because they did pay you — and likewise, it’s fair for you to be annoyed / disappointed / frustrated.
Yeah, sure. Ideally I'd like to see them being super optimistic in their own mind, and perhaps with potential investors, media etc, but more realistic when communicating with people like prospective employees. I would still have gone through the trial work and all the interviews even if I had known that their finances were shaky, the only difference is that then I wouldn't have stopped my job seeking efforts, and it would also have been less of a shock.
Of course, pausing job seeking was my decision and my responsibility, but it wouldn't have cost them anything to be more forthcoming. If changing financial fortunes was indeed the true reason.
There are founders who will only accept defeat when they are physically unable to make payroll or even when payments to employees start bouncing: that’s bad behaviour but it’s the sort of behaviour that is closely related to the same type of behaviour required to succeed.
I completely agree that they would ideally be more open with prospects, people they’re interviewing etc. but I am not sure if that’s something we can expect to get. I spend a lot of time looking at the workatastartup website listings and (perhaps naively) I feel like I can identify which companies are flying by the seat of their pants (and therefore might one day wake up and realise “oh shit, we have to fire the new guy”) vs. the ones that I could expect to disclose to me a few months in advance when things are looking dicey.
As applicants, we have to assume the worst and plan accordingly.
And the candidates needn't even be a tie. Maybe they have one candidate that's less experienced or a significantly less expensive hire but that is sufficient enough for what the role requires.
It can be really difficult to make a call like that, but at the end of the day, the smaller the company is, the more tightly controlling runway and burn rate could increase chances of survival.
I think this matters less once a company passes a sufficient headcount threshold. It's hard to draw a specific line in the sand, but perhaps ~75–100 people.
If you're in a position, hold on to it... if you are looking, look for company+industry stability first and foremost. If it's like a couple decades ago, it could last a year or three.
That is, the founders may have said something to each other along the lines of "well, he's really expensive but maybe he's worth the price if he performs equivalently to 2-3 engineers. Let's hire him for a month or two and see how it goes."
Did you ask for an outsized salary and then perform poorly (or even "averagely") during the trial period? This might explain it.
> since I didn't seek any other jobs while trial working for them
IMO a trial project is just another step in the interviewing process so you should have continued to interview with others. You might have even gotten another offer in the meantime and forced their hand to make a decision before the trial period is over.
I was given a trial project by one company and I told them I'm still interviewing and I could commit only 10 hours a week (if I'm not mistaken). Two weeks in, I had gotten another offer and told them that they had to make a decision now.
That advice has long been old startup lore even before Michael was at YC.
But wrt literal IQ (I recall the advice being "smarter" than the average person in the room, not IQ specifically), I think the intended meaning is more "cognitive ability" or i.e., ability to learn quickly.
I think this is why most early stage startups can do well with mostly strong junior engineers and a lesser percentage of seniors to oversee the cloud engineering concerns like scale, architecture, infrastructure, security, etc.
I made a decision to just suck it up next year and practice algorithms. I have no problem getting offers from average companies. However, all the big dogs want data structures and algorithms. It doesn't feel right for me, but oh well.
In theory, they could be a better approach. In practice, my experience has been that many companies don't actively monitor and interests go unseen or trivially dismissed. I had companies like Dropbox mark my interest on Triplebyte as "no relevant experience" after viewing my profile for less than a minute and for which I've actually been doing and have 5+ years of relevant experience.
For me, watching how someone solves a problem is just as important as the actual solution if I'm going to be working with them on a daily basis.
I've seen this misnomer hundreds of times over the course of a 20 year career. It's a comfort-falacy. If someone interviews well they're going to give you a false sense of comfort and security in their ability. Interviewing well doesn't translate directly to working well. Interview processes in tech are overly hostile to the candidate - and I mean hostile in the sense that they apply unneeded pressure in condensed periods of time that don't reflect the majority of the work environment. Yes, we want people who can perform in crunch time, but that should not represent the bulk of work and if it does, there's another problem (I digress).
Another point that people seem all too eager to ignore is that how someone problem solves now is not as important as their potential or ability to improve and learn. A candidate that is excellent in interviews may not have the capacity for learning beyond what they're being run through in the interview. I've personally seen this happen at least a dozen times.
If one thinks a 30 minute coding exercise if giving them a good sense of a candidate's ability in both writing code and problem solving, they're part of the problem with hiring in tech.
Sadly a lot of startups are still doing that. I was too, but I learned from my mistakes.
You're not freaking Google, good candidates (the ones you should hire) have multiple offers and are not going to wait until you make up your mind. Being able to send an offer fast might not guarantee a great hire, but being slow drastically increases chances of getting a mediocre one. You get 90% of the signals in the first interview anyway, and there's a lot of evidence that even the best hiring processes are not very far from coin flip.
Bundle all your interviews in a single day. Send offer in one day at most. After all, startups are about moving fast.
Here is the problem! Always have backup job or gig to fall back on.
But that was a long time ago. Still, in a competitive market it seems a sensible approach.
Investor and CEO sentiment has been a roller coaster the last couple of years and very few ceo's have a steady hand on the tiller. I've seen companies go from hiring like crazy to laying off then back to hiring like crazy in way to short of a time period.
If interviewing right now I would flat out ask about runway, burn rates and hiring plans and be looking for a company that raised at the right time, has a decent amount of cash and has a pathway to being profitable. And make sure the founders seem to have a steady hand on the tiller.
I was an early employee at my last co and we figure out pretty fast the trial work / lengthy process thing doesn't scale at all. YC seems to push this (do things that don't scale) and it might make sense for your first couple of employees (when there is high risk of a bad hire and you suck at interviewing and are scared to fire people). But even short ~1 hour take home projects filter out too many good good candidates. Get good and comfortable at making a decision based on a normal day long interview and get good at firing people who aren't working out to mitigate risk.
Is the trial project something that could be used by the startup?
If so, there's a hazard that a startup could accidentally or intentionally use the carrot of a supposed/potential FTE hiring as a way to get contract work on better terms (more available, more committed, lower cost).
It could additionally be a way for the startup to fill their hiring funnel, and then (even bigger win) keep it in a holding pattern.
This would be a multiple win for a startup that isn't ready to hire, but needs work done relatively inexpensively and well on their schedule, and would like to have the option to hire when necessary (people it's keeping captive), with lower risk, and all while keeping more equity. The worker correspondingly loses multiple ways.
I doubt this was the intention this time, but I guess this could easily become a practice, especially if it ends up being wisdom quietly passed around in startup circles.
The amount of time and effort they would have to spend on ramp-up and context sharing... seems it would be a nightmare. Unless its just some grunt work but even then, seems much more reliable to have a contracting partner in that case.
Say, you need to have a consumer iOS app or CRUD backend/site to show seed/angel investors, and it needs a high-skilled person to execute quickly. You might not yet be able to afford the hire to do that, and you might not want to give away that kind of equity that early contribution would rate. But you can have a highly-motivated experienced person do it for just an engagement fee they normally wouldn't take, if they think they're sealing a hiring deal.
In the current rapidly-worsening economy, I probably wouldn't consider it obviously improper (just unfortunate) for a company to not make an offer even when it had previously planned to do so. At some level it would depend on exactly how specific they'd been (and whether it was reasonable to take decisions like giving notice to current employer based on that).
While there are posts that have lower points and were posted longer ago that are still on the front page.
This post is potentially very relevant to HN's startup founders and workers, for what OP mentions, and my comment about the risk of a hazard becoming a practice.
Honestly if that's how a co-founder treats potential employees and their working relationships, that to me is a reflection on who they are as a person and the culture they'll end up building, which isn't one I'd want to be a part of.
Same role (iOS), I'm coming from another YC company. I wouldn't be surprised we applied for the same role and had the same experience.