It's too light for me too. Mac, Firefox. It's probably readable in perfect conditions (indoors, low ambient light), but if you're tired or it's sunny it becomes uncomfortable.
Thanks, huge improvement! Was using Chrome in Windows 7, on a rather old Dell monitor at work. After working on WCAG 2.0 compliance on my own sites I have ironically gotten more sensitive to poor contrast ratios everywhere.
"Silicon Valley’s best-kept secret: AngelList is disrupting the hiring industry", or "AngelList is useful for hiring people (as just about everyone already knows)"
Is AngelList Jobs unknown (never mind a secret!) amongst start up founders (who generally have AngelList profile for both themselves and their companies)?
Is this job board "disrupting" the hiring industry which is composed of other job boards and recruiters that post to other job boards?
Very much so. Getting so many high quality applications in such a short time is not disruptive to the recruiting industry. Then what is?
If you're familiar with how recruiters work or the general quality and response on job boards, it's hard to characterize it as anything short of disruptive.
Then what is it? It's every job board at this stage of the hype curve. It's got critical mass among it's niche and it's not yet hit the big numbers and experienced the inevitable regression to the mean.
Hmm, honestly someone else has probably done more hiring than I and remembers the names, I can only remember the embarassingly famous ones.
I remember when Craigslist was the place to hire people who were ahead of their peers, when it was mostly unknown and considered too sketchy to be associated with any corporation concerned about their image that did have someone in the loop enough to have heard of it.
Stackoverflow was never like that, but it was more like that at the beginning than it is now.
The best examples are all sites that I've completely forgotten the names of because they pivoted or went out of business a long time ago. But they were cool for a time among subcultures that have good programmers so that's where you went to look. Plus by both being part of the same little unknown thing there was more trust at the beginning as well and it made the whole process easier.
A lot of IRC channels and mailing lists and forums are still like that and manage to stay like that because they are so anti-corporate/anti-recruiter. AngelList is the opposite, no one trying to make money tries to keep the majority of potential customers out like communities do. Doing so is a failure. And it makes a lot of sense to have both fundraising and recruitment on AngelList, so it will get popular and therefore worse at being a small community with a talent bias.
I got my current job in Germany via AngelList, although I was living in UK at the time. I got several other interesting options in Europe too. It's definitely a great tool in my book.
The last time I looked at them, the salaries and equity shares advertised on many of their job listings were mostly chuckle-worthy at best. Some were appallingly lowball. If they're truly "disrupting" the hiring industry, it certainly isn't to the benefit of the labor pool.
Certainly AL doesn't control what companies offer. I can't comment on "so many applicants". It is entirely subjective and without context (e.g. for quality of applicant, on any scale you choose). All I can say about it is this: when I narrow the region to my region and the compensation range so that my current compensation is the low end of the bar, the pickings are very, very thin (and I'm pretty sure I'm being paid less than similarly experienced and capable engineers can command, for a variety of reasons). I have a hard time picturing anybody but a desperate or naive person taking most of the listings seriously.
If you are saying that density of jobs posted varies by region I totally agree - that sounds reasonable. I don't want to defend other companies postings but that's a somewhat weak generalization to make, esp for Silicon Valley.
No, I'm saying that when I add a compensation bracket with the low end matching (slightly below, actually) my current compensation, the number of listings in my region/role specification falls substantially. This has nothing to do with the absolute density of jobs in the region. And, by the way, the salaries attached to over 90% of the listings I see (by region/role only--no filter for compensation or anything else) are a joke especially in Silicon Valley, even for startups (which typically offer low salary to begin with), although the equities are, sadly, not terribly out of line.
Maybe the salaries are actually that high. It's really difficult to hire engineers in the valley. And there are tons and tons of funded startups looking for them.
Unless you're a startup with celebrity status, you might just have to pay up.
When they aren't lowball, they are fake high-ball in order to get more buzz from investors and more applicants coming in from AngelList. When the offer is handed over for real, they low-ball. Of course not all startups do this.
I experienced this first hand. After interviewing with a company I met on Angelist they said their best offer was 80% of the bottom of their advertised range. It was a tremendous waste of time for everyone involved, and I'm not sure who thought that was a good idea. Even if I'd accepted, they would have landed a candidate who felt misled/disgruntled on Day 1. Not a great way to build a company, in my opinion.
That's a really bad hiring strategy. What the company doesn't realize is that they are still paying 80%. If the company flipped their position and added an extra 10% to the 100%, it's conceivable that the motivation could actually make the employee 30% more productive and engaged with making the company successful.
Great companies are not built this way. And sorry to hear you went through this - though you are probably better off not working there.
FWIW this doesn't hold true for the data scientist salaries I'm seeing in NYC. True "data scientist" roles (not data analyst) seem to line up with market rates.
How are you valuing equity shares? Presumably you're looking at absolute percentages, but remember equity is impossible to value without putting a valuation on the company itself. 0.5% of a company with great product, great team, great opportunity, great go-to-market is definitely worth more than 5% of a company without those things.
If you're saying that AngelList doesn't have those kind of companies, then ok, that's logically consistent. But don't make the mistake of eyeballing ranges based on absolute equity percentages alone.
As a general thought, you should only value cases of equity when the company is $100MM + up in exit mode or your have more than fractional percentages. I think that's what the earlier poster was trying to communicate.
Almost more important: in the 9 of 10 chance that the company fails, what is being done to maximize the marketability of the staff? YC adds a lot of brand value to "failed" projects. Just one example of how the whole picture needs to be taken into account. If you lose $15K a year taking a haircut, but your next job search sees $30K in extra value from your past experience, how does that add up?
If that were true then angel investment would never make sense. In practice, you can value equity at any stage of a company. What matters is the company and its potential, not just the percentage.
Not sure I follow you. Angel investing may or may not make sense (for the average punter). But for those who do it sucessfully, it seems rare to take <fractional> percentages. Maybe you can give some worked examples using math? I've updated my comment to be more clear below:
As a general thought, you should only value [as part of your employment] cases of equity when [either, (a)] the company is [potentialy worth] $100MM + up in exit mode; or [b] your have more than <fractional> percentages [ie, granted stakes >1%].
In other words, unless you expect the stake to be worth a substantial six-figure sum. In order for this to be true, the equity stake needs to be in the upper six figure under some reasonable probability. So, a 600k stake with a 1/3 chance of you "winning" it is only worth $200K. Once you spread this out over the time to get it, it boils down to a number closer to say 50k/year for 4 years.
Now, that is a nice bump in salary. But in order to get this in a realistic sense with a 0.6% stake, you need a 1 in 3 chance of exiting out of a $100 million dollar company.
Since a 1/3 chance of a 100 million exit is unrealistic for an average portfolio company, you need to correct the math a bit more. Since a 1/10 chance is a more likly number, lets divide our $50k/ye by 3, and we get something in the $15 to $20K range per year.
In other words, we get a number which is about a 10-12% boost on a $150K base salary. This is nice, but not worth taking larger paycut/mispricing for. So using this back of the envelope framework, small fraction percentages of ownership don't as a rule compensate for salary mispricing, when that mis-pricing is order of magnitude 10% or greater. Which just brings us back to the initial point but hopefully with more clarity.
I imagine if it become mainstream, it'll not have the same level of talent and it'd become just another board. It will remain special so long as it does not broaden.
So long as it focuses on the creme, then it'll disrupt that 'market' but it cannot disrupt the 'hiring industry' because at that point, it would become diluted and another 'disruptor' would cater to the 'cream'.
You could say that about discussion forums too. But reddit and HN would disagree. Quality has to be managed and maintained. It's plausible to me that by designing the right mechanisms you could scale AL and maintain quality.
It's somewhat hard to argue with a generalization like this. It's like saying: you give loans to 100 people meeting some very specific criteria, and the return rate is great. When you scale it to a million, the return rate isn't the same any more.
Of course the return rate won't be the same with 1 million people. But if you are grameen bank (http://www.grameen-info.org/), you institute mechanisms so keep the return rates high. That doesn't mean that there are no defaulters at grameen bank. It just means they were able to work creatively on a problem and actually meet their metrics (maybe sligtly relaxed) at very high scales.
It's non-trivial, but not impossible.
I think a measure of low quality is: do users/participants actually stop using it because of bad quality? It's a point of debate, but for me HN's quality is as good (probably better) that it was several years ago. Just my opinion.
HN is very industry specific. It would be like saying HN is disrupting forums. It's not. It has a very specific audience. Reddit has lots of above average and also has below average forums too. So, yes, the AL jobs board could become the board for all jobs, but then, it'd hardly be better than job boards now.
Seen another way, let's say the top talent is 10,000 individuals. There are way more positions and candidates than that out there. So if they became the Reddit of job boards, they'd have tens (dom)/hundreds (int'l) of millions of applicants in search of tens (dom)/hundreds (int'l) of millions of jobs. Neither the applicants nor jobs are going to become "great" just because they are on the Angellist board.
Yelp is an example of a system where it'd have been easy to be cynical about their system scaling up. It's nowhere near being a perfect system, but I use it frequently and I'm able to repeatedly find great restaurants there. It does work reasonably well at scale for me.
And the whole site is based on people actually spending tens of minutes crafting reviews. Who'd have thought it'd work out as well as it does?
It's great on the applicant side, too. I got my last job from AngelList, and they have gotten me the best-quality leads (apart from referrals from friends) this time around as well. The profile has most of the relevant information for job-seekers that you would never get from an intro from a recruiter (investors, total investment, etc).
Salaries are always negotiable, but seeing them up-front gives you a good idea of what the company is looking at paying.
Yes, some of that company information is written with investors in mind, but AL allows you to share that with job candidates. Since that doesn't really contain super-sentitive info, it's almost a no-brainer to share with candidates (at least for us).
It would be nice to have a bit more transparency on salaries. Yes, they are negotiable, but only within narrow bands. And if you ask for anything outside of those bands, the result is often not a counteroffer, but dropping the discussion entirely. That makes it time-consuming to determine what the market rate for your skill-set actually is, particularly since the "no"s don't typically come with reasons attached.
AngelList is acting as a niche job board. It's definitely cool, but I wouldn't call it disruptive or revolutionary. As soon as people figure out how to use it as an efficient hiring channel, AngelList will become saturated with companies hiring & candidates looking, just like every other formerly disruptive hiring channel.
I dunno. I tried advertising on AngelList for someone to make big-ticket sales to big companies. I keep getting responses from people who claim to be able to grow website traffic.
I propose we change every occurrence of "disrupt" to "perturb". Or better yet: "Angellist is promoting perturbations" Seems more appropriate, and I'm sick of seeing "disrupt" everywhere.
"I emailed everyone I knew, posted the job on LinkedIn, got it posted to the jobs list at several universities, and also posted on some paid sites. End result: nothing very good to show for all the effort."
Exactly how much effort was 'all the effort'? Did it take you all of 2 hours to post the job on several sites?
53 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadI checked Chrome, too; it's clearly less awful but not good.
Is AngelList Jobs unknown (never mind a secret!) amongst start up founders (who generally have AngelList profile for both themselves and their companies)?
Is this job board "disrupting" the hiring industry which is composed of other job boards and recruiters that post to other job boards?
If you're familiar with how recruiters work or the general quality and response on job boards, it's hard to characterize it as anything short of disruptive.
I remember when Craigslist was the place to hire people who were ahead of their peers, when it was mostly unknown and considered too sketchy to be associated with any corporation concerned about their image that did have someone in the loop enough to have heard of it.
Stackoverflow was never like that, but it was more like that at the beginning than it is now.
The best examples are all sites that I've completely forgotten the names of because they pivoted or went out of business a long time ago. But they were cool for a time among subcultures that have good programmers so that's where you went to look. Plus by both being part of the same little unknown thing there was more trust at the beginning as well and it made the whole process easier.
A lot of IRC channels and mailing lists and forums are still like that and manage to stay like that because they are so anti-corporate/anti-recruiter. AngelList is the opposite, no one trying to make money tries to keep the majority of potential customers out like communities do. Doing so is a failure. And it makes a lot of sense to have both fundraising and recruitment on AngelList, so it will get popular and therefore worse at being a small community with a talent bias.
https://github.com/richardharrington/disrupt-to-bullshit
One reason we got so many applicants is maybe because our compensation feels fair.
Unless you're a startup with celebrity status, you might just have to pay up.
Great companies are not built this way. And sorry to hear you went through this - though you are probably better off not working there.
If you're saying that AngelList doesn't have those kind of companies, then ok, that's logically consistent. But don't make the mistake of eyeballing ranges based on absolute equity percentages alone.
Almost more important: in the 9 of 10 chance that the company fails, what is being done to maximize the marketability of the staff? YC adds a lot of brand value to "failed" projects. Just one example of how the whole picture needs to be taken into account. If you lose $15K a year taking a haircut, but your next job search sees $30K in extra value from your past experience, how does that add up?
As a general thought, you should only value [as part of your employment] cases of equity when [either, (a)] the company is [potentialy worth] $100MM + up in exit mode; or [b] your have more than <fractional> percentages [ie, granted stakes >1%].
In other words, unless you expect the stake to be worth a substantial six-figure sum. In order for this to be true, the equity stake needs to be in the upper six figure under some reasonable probability. So, a 600k stake with a 1/3 chance of you "winning" it is only worth $200K. Once you spread this out over the time to get it, it boils down to a number closer to say 50k/year for 4 years.
Now, that is a nice bump in salary. But in order to get this in a realistic sense with a 0.6% stake, you need a 1 in 3 chance of exiting out of a $100 million dollar company.
Since a 1/3 chance of a 100 million exit is unrealistic for an average portfolio company, you need to correct the math a bit more. Since a 1/10 chance is a more likly number, lets divide our $50k/ye by 3, and we get something in the $15 to $20K range per year.
In other words, we get a number which is about a 10-12% boost on a $150K base salary. This is nice, but not worth taking larger paycut/mispricing for. So using this back of the envelope framework, small fraction percentages of ownership don't as a rule compensate for salary mispricing, when that mis-pricing is order of magnitude 10% or greater. Which just brings us back to the initial point but hopefully with more clarity.
So long as it focuses on the creme, then it'll disrupt that 'market' but it cannot disrupt the 'hiring industry' because at that point, it would become diluted and another 'disruptor' would cater to the 'cream'.
Of course the return rate won't be the same with 1 million people. But if you are grameen bank (http://www.grameen-info.org/), you institute mechanisms so keep the return rates high. That doesn't mean that there are no defaulters at grameen bank. It just means they were able to work creatively on a problem and actually meet their metrics (maybe sligtly relaxed) at very high scales.
It's non-trivial, but not impossible.
I think a measure of low quality is: do users/participants actually stop using it because of bad quality? It's a point of debate, but for me HN's quality is as good (probably better) that it was several years ago. Just my opinion.
Seen another way, let's say the top talent is 10,000 individuals. There are way more positions and candidates than that out there. So if they became the Reddit of job boards, they'd have tens (dom)/hundreds (int'l) of millions of applicants in search of tens (dom)/hundreds (int'l) of millions of jobs. Neither the applicants nor jobs are going to become "great" just because they are on the Angellist board.
And the whole site is based on people actually spending tens of minutes crafting reviews. Who'd have thought it'd work out as well as it does?
Salaries are always negotiable, but seeing them up-front gives you a good idea of what the company is looking at paying.
"I emailed everyone I knew, posted the job on LinkedIn, got it posted to the jobs list at several universities, and also posted on some paid sites. End result: nothing very good to show for all the effort."
Exactly how much effort was 'all the effort'? Did it take you all of 2 hours to post the job on several sites?