With all due respect, I think the author has to be careful not to be jaded. While burnout and echo chambers are a real problem in the valley, an engineer who genuinely enjoys short sprints and hackathons, or staying up all night occasionally to prototype something they're excited about is not necessarily a bad hire.
Some of my fondest memories are of building something alone, or with colleagues, all night because it was time-sensitive or something we were really passionate about. That does not inherently make me bad at thinking strategically, working "normal" hours, or building long-term successful projects.
They are different skill sets, but one person can be great at both. The author seems to imply that's not true, which is a common misconception, IMHO.
It seems the author is discouraging the practice of staying up all night but not throwing it out entirely. In my reading the article suggests that this shouldn't be the rule but leaves space for times when it may be required, or not so bad.
I wonder how the author would respond to having people, say once every few months or so, do an intense overnight hack session. I would guess he'd be fine with it, but suggest keeping a close eye out so that it doesn't become the rule.
How am engineer chooses to work shouldn't be up to the author. Some people genuinely do their best work late at night. Just as you shouldn't expect everyone to work into the wee hours, you should also not expect everyone to work not to. Work-life balance is a personal choice, and should be up to the individual engineer. Managers who force their idea of balance on others end up with a different kind of groupthink instead.
There's a difference between being willing to stay up all night to finish something and being proud of that kind of thing. I got the impression the author understood the difference.
Right; my point is that some people genuinely enjoy it and are proud of when they have moments of inspiration and end up working late nights to complete something. Some people genuinely work best at night, and I get the impression that if an engineer doesn't fit into the author's specific idea of "work life balance" they are considered "young."
In my experience, that's not necessarily true; some engineers just genuinely enjoy working late at night, and are often proud of the results. Otherwise, they would presumably stop working late at night.
I read it more as referring to the way the engineer approaches the problem vs what time of day they work.
An engineer who starts hacking away a solution and keeps at it 90+ hours a week (or whatever amount) but then because of this burns out and looses interest in 2,3 or 6 months is not as valuable as an engineer who can consistently keep working at something until the product is delivered. The engineer that is burned out probably won't be able to last X years at the company, and since the author is trying to somewhat maximize the time the employee stays the "burn-out approach" engineer is not desired.
Kind of like that other article that popped up in HN a few weeks ago that basically said "discipline over motivation", which I read as "it's better to be able to work 2-3 hours a days every day for 5 years, than being able to work 15+ hours a day for 3 weeks".
Obviously your opinion might vary as to how useful this strategy is, but I think it has a different meaning than just "an engineer that works at night".
Some people just like to work like that, and that's ok. What's wrong is when you require people to work like that or when people who work like that get ahead disproportionately.
The author makes some good points about hiring and working, but what's with this fixation on diversity? If you're a small start up (i.e. 5 or 10 people in his words), your goal should be to build a product and get it to market. And if you happen to be a 30s something white male workaholic who knows a few other 30s something white male workaholics who will work with you to get it out, why shouldn't you just throw diversity out the window and work with what you have to get a project to completion.
Diversity is very useful because companies pivot and having a diverse* team allows you to better consider more options.
Note: By diversity I don't mean a team of 30 year old workaholic that graduated from Stanford and then worked at Google/MS for a few years that happen to have different skin colors. I mean a diversity of experience, fresh college student, a 60 year old near retiree, and someone that just spent six months backpacking in South America etc. It might seem like having a bind person on your team will slow you down, but plenty of dumb products get created because everyone has the same exact background and can't see just how tiny the market is.
PS: The world has ~7 billion people and most of them are not like you.
No diversity = blind spots. How many startups aren't serving needs because they're simply not the needs of those founding the company? And how many are missing the bigger picture on the product because they don't have someone on staff who sees things differently?
Taking a slightly roundabout example: AFAIK Pinterest was founded by men and the core team is the standard valley profile, however it has primarily a female userbase. In that case the user demographic doesn't match the initial team's demographic. However, one has to wonder whether Pinterest would have happened sooner if there were more women in the startup community, and whether there are other similar opportunities that address a huge need for a demographic not usually represented in the valley. Another example: pigeonly. A really cool company, an idea that springs forth from a different experience in the world.
Nice theory, but optimizing for the pivot over the running state is not a great strategy. Even if it was you do not need the kind of diversity you mention on the team as much as in their network.
The benefit of having a particular life experience and point of view is not something you need 24/7. You need it, if at all, at decision points.
The obvious rejoinder is that those decision points make the difference between a failed startup and a multi-billion dollar company.
As empiricists, though, it's worth asking if there are any real examples of companies exploiting hidden market opportunities thanks to a diversity of viewpoints. A lack of examples wouldn't be quite damning--maybe there's just not enough diversity at all to rise above the noise level--but it'd be a useful test of how valuable diversity actually can be.
This all stands apart from moral and ideological reasons to try to foster diversity, which are in my view more compelling but are understandably less effective when it comes to influencing decision makers.
How are the people you've described actually going to help a company that is pivoting? You've just claimed that they will without explaining why you think so.
As an ethnic person who evaluates a company's demographics before joining, I want to say diversity is unnecessary for being financially successful. Working with people who are different can even be difficult.
But at the end of the day, what is the founder trying to achieve? His or her personal and broader definition of success might include being inclusive.
Anecdote: working in a homogenous environment can suck for minorities. Maybe starting out diverse makes it easy to stay that way?
I imagine the founder is trying to make a successful company. Being that diversity is correlated with financial performance, it makes sense to try to have a diverse team. On the other hand, you're right in that you can't just throw different people in a room and let them work things out.
As has been said many times before, correlation is not causation though, and other studies have shown that the more females you have, the better a team performs so maybe we dont need diversity and just need more women. I do remember reading other articles about the benefits of racial diversity as well but I'm sure you won't have trouble finding them.
But I dislike the studies that suggest diversity improves financial performance, because I find the conclusions are too politically convenient. Most of the ones I read suggest a sketchy correlation at best. Yet people talk as if it's as conclusive as global warming.
Yes, the diversity of founders can be the reason for a startup's success. There are also many examples where it wasn't needed: Apple, Microsoft, Samsung.
Perhaps because building a diverse workforce that gives everyone opportunities regardless of culture/ethnicity/sex/gender/sexuality is the right thing to do? I mean, having a culture of shipping is great and all, but it shouldn't trump ethical and moral concerns.
"It's ok if our company fails in an entirely preventable way as long as we failed while meeting some arbitrary standard of not hiring people according to the actual demographics of our hiring base."
Because "diversity" is the catchphrase of the day when it comes to programming and most technology in general. Some butthurt people see a bunch of white males sitting on computers and making really good money, and wonder why we can't have moms do it at home part-time while taking care of kids (it's just typing, right?), or why we can't just hire 1,000 minimum wage people of (color|poor economic means|criminal backgrounds|dragon-kin) to hack something together.
Our industry is seen by outsiders as an old-boys club full of young boys who viciously hate and destroy any attempt at diversifying. Unfortunately, when these sjw types score a small victory, they see it as a big victory. The rest of us see it like a quota system -- we're forced to deal with less talented people just so somebody doesn't get butthurt that there's not enough females or black people or whatever.
It is a kid's club. Within the last two years: I discovered my cto, who used to supervise hundreds at google, and therefore absolutely positively had sexual harassment training, was sending candidate engineers a code test that ended up printing a naked woman in ascii art. The answer to the code test was the number between her legs. I realized this when a prospective female engineer emailed basically asking WTF?
Another workplace had 2 female engineers, out of 8 or so. A candidate commented we had, "a lot of secretaries" and was stunned when I pointed out that 2 of the secretaries were engineering peers.
An engineering peer spent lunch speculating about whether the ceo was fucking his secretary until I stopped being subtle and flatly told him to fucking shut up.
I have more stories, but let's stop there for now. Or quietly ask female peers -- most of them will have similar stories.
Further -- like any other industry, the startup / tech world has received enormous dividends from America. From massive investments in early tech, to R&D subsidies, to R&D tax breaks, to the education of the vast majority of the employees at the companies. Demanding diversity is part of fulfilling their social compact with America, and most of the whining is the companies attempting to duck it.
This article is partly about the longevity of startup dev teams.
Here is a simple true fact:
If your hiring pipeline isn't diverse (in a bunch of different ways, but in particular in the ways that represent "the opposite of the approach you just spelled out for building up a team"), then it may be fast and effective, but it is also brittle.
Every team loses people, no matter how carefully designed they are. Companies with huge traction and close-knit management teams where everyone likes each other lose cofounders. People leave, for all sorts of reasons.
On brittle teams, when one person leaves, a whole bunch of people follow.
You want to build a team that is resilient to one or two people leaving every once in awhile. Diversity --- not in the "Benetton ad" sense, but in a more fundamental sense --- is an extremely good mitigating strategy.
You may not care about team resiliency and longevity; "throw it out the window" to get to release and all of that. I think that's a bad plan (getting to a reasonable successful first release only to have your team implode is not a really good use of your very limited window of time to build companies in, is what I think), but that's neither here nor there.
I kept scanning this article for talks about money, but there were none. It isn't even about underpaying - it's that changing jobs supplies one of the best sources for engineering pay raises.
There are evolutionary flows through the work force that don't require this (moving into leadership positions) but as they mentioned, generally hiring into the top levels comes from a tight circle of people, having gone to the same school, or some other such limitation. So if you didn't go to Stanford, what's your play?
I could understand why someone running a company wouldn't want to address this, but paying your engineers solidified salaries while company profits rise, and possibly with limited amounts of share in the company, is a good way to guarantee that they'll have to jump ship at some point, just to keep up with inflation.
But then you deal with the wage problem -- managers (especially ones without a tech background) are often of the "my reports make less than me" school of thought. More money = more power = more respect. So when a manager who makes $90k/yr is talking with a 30yo who wants $150k/yr, he might be insulted or put off. And let's not forget that a lot of developers probably should be in the 200-250 range.
The only thing to look for in a company, in my eyes, is how well they pay their employees. They can glad-hand all they want about open workspaces and ping-pong tables and catered lunches, but none of that matters. Show us the money.
One possible approach to this problem is to separate day-to-day management from staff budget/pay negotiations. If you're employing line managers who are worth only $90k a year and have the attitude you describe, someone else needs to be making those staffing decisions. That doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't be employing those line managers, but you need to think carefully about the nature of the role. The traditional all-in-one hierarchy probably isn't appropriate in that situation.
Your manager should make more - because nobody should be a manager of software devs who is not a software developer himself and should be able to command more than a young engineer.
You shouldn't get to be an officer unless you were first enlisted.
Managers should rarely have sole power over the people hired on their team, for exactly that reason. It's easy to fall into "empire building" mode, and you want checks and balances for that.
Salary envy is just a minor side problem of that approach. One of the bigger issue is that bad managers surround themselves with yes people, compounding any possible damage.
Especially when a lot of the big companies are facing heat (and/or lawsuits) for artificially capping engineer salaries because they didn't want to pay more?
"Your goal, as a hiring manager, is to find the people who want to invest in their careers, who are aiming for mastery and not just looking to make more money or build a shiny resume."
Why are these two concepts mutually exclusive? Experience, money, and mastery are just a few of the side effects of a successful career.
I think the point is that people who are looking exclusively for money or shine will make poor employees. If someone is looking to be a master, the others will naturally follow.
Yeah, that made me see red. Just money? Money is food in my mouth, money is attention from a qualified doctor in a good hospital when I get ill, money is a good place to live in a nice and safe area, with heating that turns on in the winter, money is a car that starts when you turn the key, with a tank full of gas. Money is fucking important.
In the context of software engineering in silicon valley, money isn't the difference between being able to afford a car that starts or not, it's mostly about how much money you have sloshing around in a rainy day fund.
Point one: if you want me to want to stick around, your company has to have challenges I want to work on over time.
Point two: do not underpay me. I will tolerate a fuzz around market rate, and I will adapt to market conditions. I will quit as soon as I can if you systematically undervalue me (see point one: my value will go up).
Point three: build a company designed for fifty years, to deliver use and value, and you might get people looking to stick around for fifty years.
All great points. I work with a consulting company, and we have a lot of really great people. They come to us because we pay fair (good hourly rate on w2 (paid overtime) + benefits), we work with a wide variety of companies and industries, and we're not looking to sell out or get acquired.
Are these hard rules for you? Do certain harder (more challenging) challenges make up for lower pay? Are there culture benefits or actual benefits that can make up for lower pay?
I ask because I hear things like this all the time, and there seem to be two schools of thought: 1) intangibles matter, 2) tangibles (money) is all that matters.
If the latter is true for you (or anyone in a position to be making as much as SV engineers make, excluding those with debts like children's schooling and loans), that makes me really sad. Jumping to the opportunity that will pay more solely because they pay more seems like a shortsighted, materialistic view of life.
I'm not saying you see it that way, but there are certainly a not insignificant amount of people who view money as more important than challenges. Thats not wrong, of course, just saddening to me.
Don't underpay me; value me at an appropriate valuation. Do challenge me; do provide me with opportunity to grow.
The total compensation is a somewhat viscous[1] weighted combination of tangibles and intangibles.
Barring economic disaster, there are financial levels I won't go below, in part to maintain future-valuations, as well as to just keep my financial situation in order.
[1] Buying a house, for instance, would increase my baseline need for cash. Raising a child would increase my baseline need for managing healthcare and other cash needs. A few years down the road, I will be looking for new challenges, increasing intangibles. :-)
I think the logic train the parent is espousing goes like this.
Works on challenges (intrinsic) --> gets new skills + generates increasing value for the company
Repeat this cycle for many moons and the worker now has a significantly upgraded skillset that has and continues to produce significant value for the corp. All that is asked is that the salary grows with respect to the skill set being utilized and the value being produced for the company.
If you end up in a situation where skill sets and value are increasing substantially but compensation is stagnating, you end up in a situation where people will eventually take a look around at the market and realize other people with similar skillsets who provide similar value are getting offers at a substantially higher rate (even assume inflation increase of 3-5% for several years, that adds up). Yes, the work might be challenging and the worker might enjoy the work intrinsically but extrinsically they're now asking whether pursuit of the intrinsic challenge is worth it given the disparity in how they're valued compared to their peers.
Pay isn't necessarily about the tangibles but more about how the company values you (scorecard). If your salary gets out of line with market by a substantial amount relative to skills, experience, and value generated, that indicates the company doesn't necessarily value you as much or isn't willing to expend the capital necessary to keep their employees satisfied.
The other angle one could take with this argument is that while intangibles are nice, they cannot offset the increase in price of other things like housing, and food. Without pay raises over time, the percentage increases in basic cost of living will eat into the paycheck more and more. Induced pressure from external sources can undermine intrinsic motivation, especially if there are dependents, and increase the importance of the paycheck amount.
> Pay isn't necessarily about the tangibles but more about how the company values you (scorecard). If your salary gets out of line with market by a substantial amount relative to skills, experience, and value generated, that indicates the company doesn't necessarily value you as much or isn't willing to expend the capital necessary to keep their employees satisfied.
The other angle one could take with this argument is that while intangibles are nice, they cannot offset the increase in price of other things like housing, and food. Without pay raises over time, the percentage increases in basic cost of living will eat into the paycheck more and more. Induced pressure from external sources can undermine intrinsic motivation, especially if there are dependents, and increase the importance of the paycheck amount.
In line with these points but more nuts and bolts: if you want people who won't leave within at least N years, give them N-year guaranteed contracts that can be terminated only for cause/good reason (these are terms with specific legal meaning). Since I will have agreed in advance to the pay rate for each year, you can't undervalue me unless I'm complicit, and you can't lay me off just because your company is doing poorly. At the same time, I can't pick up and leave "right when I become most valuable". If both sides want greater security than an at-will termless contract offers, the solution is in the contract, not the interview.
Who in the world would sign such a contract? The only employee would be one that couldn't get a better deal elsewhere and the only employer would be one you wouldn't want to work for.
To me, that's sort of the point – you can understand why it's hard to keep employees for N years by thinking about what the terms of an N-year contract would have to look like, and whether anyone would sign it.
These are standard contracts in many places of the world with stronger labor laws than the US.
It does not mean you have tenure, or any non sense like that. It means there are specific, objective causes to terminate your contract, which include but may not be limited to: gross incompetence, contempt for workplace discipline, frequent absenteeism, criminal/delinquent activity against or otherwise involving company assets, etc.
If the employer cannot or will not prove this kind of behaviors from the part of the employee, he still can terminate the contract, but there's a minimal severance mandated by law, which depends both on current monthly salary and on seniority.[1]
i.e In my country, you are supposed to get 3 months salary, plus 20 days per each full year you held the position. Some employers will still low ball you if they think they can get away with it, but they will still give you more than what you'd get after suing and paying the lawyer's commission.
If you don't understand this, put yourself in the shoes of someone who has to work for a living. Is the flexibility to change jobs at will worth a 30% chance of being out of work for 2 years when you get laid off during a bust (when no one else is hiring either)? Most people would say no. The reality, one that more people are accepting these days, is that every employer offers pretty much the same work environment and pay, whether a product of collusion or parallel evolution. Ceteris paribus, as it usually is, security is a perk.
As a more concrete answer to your question, professional athletes do it all the time. The elite among them get the longest-term contracts, and actively push for them. There are other jobs as well that involve guaranteed terms, many of which don't have the unique attributes (limited prime years, injury risks) associated with being an athlete. Those same athletes' coaches, for example. Actors. Corporate-to-corporate contracts often have minimum terms and guaranteed spend, too.
Why would the company offer such terms? I think the OP covered that pretty well. Turnover is expensive.
CEOs sign agreements like this regularly - well, maybe structured a bit differently. The company doesn't want the CEO to leave shorter than some nominal time - so some portion of the compensation is structured to mature over time. The CEO doesn't want some uncontrollable market or political shift to put him out of work (with some reputation cost), so some compensation for early separation is negotiated.
Employees generally don't get that kind of consideration - especially in established companies. Companies used to have incentives such as pensions that were a generally applicable, long-term retention incentive. However, the market decided that carrying that type of long-term obligation wasn't desirable for companies. In some ways workers benefited too by lowering of their employment switching costs and not carrying the risk that a company doesn't survive or honor those obligations.
It depends who you think the average bay area engineer is. If you've bought into the view that it's a 23 year old single white man who lives with 4 indistinguishable roommates in a small house in San Francisco, believes he's God's gift to engineering, and wants to job-hop his way to CTO and millionaire status by 27, you're probably right. After all, he's a 10x A-player, everyone is killing it, and the last time there was a bust he was in second grade. Security's for losers!
The reality is that most people who make a living writing software in the bay area are middle-aged, married or partnered, have children and a fat mortgage, and aren't really a part of "silicon valley". They live quietly, don't go to meetups or write blogs, and they're mediocre to decent contributors at work and they know it. A large minority, perhaps even a majority, are not white; they are Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, and from almost every other national or ethnic background you could name. Many are women, despite the oft-repeated myth of sexist hiring practices. In a nutshell, they're ordinary people with ordinary concerns nothing like the HN echo chamber's perceptions of the world. And you can bet your ass they'd like a little security.
Besides all the waffling here, what I'm reading is that some people want insurance against a bubble popping.
And that seems reasonable, but I'm not sure how you expect that to work, given the last bubble caused entire companies to go under, and multi-year commitments to staff might cause even more to go under, or at least through bankruptcy proceedings where they will shed those staff anyway.
And let's not forget point four: If you want me to stick around, getting more responsibilities (usually via promotion) should be easier to achieve within than without.
I know more than a few engineers who work at larger companies who have climbed up the ladder by switching outside and back.
And no, they've not acquired magical properties in a short stint elsewhere, outside of the "working elsewhere" property.
You can't complain about missing loyalty if you enforce it as a career path.
He both expects people to be very loyal, but for people like him or Mark Suster loyalty flows upwards only. I looked through the whole article for how he rewards loyalty, but couldn't find anything. He claims he wants people who are productive day one -- " hires need to be able to do their jobs on day one", then admits that early engineers don't need (won't?) to be your future cto or coo.
So basically he's whining that it's hard to find skilled engineers who need no training and want to stay at companies for long periods of time in order to be underpaid and who don't demand promotional opportunities. Weird.
From personal experience, the thing ctos and hiring managers miss is this: if you want me to be at your company for the long term, particularly if I have options, I expect you to come through for me. That means demonstrable company growth on a regular basis. If you spend 1.5 - 2 years frittering away a B round with little to show for it besides headcount growth, I'm out. And even after the company growth requirement, and growth in value of my options, I demand raises. We all would love an ipo, but in the meantime, my landlord takes cash only, and rents go up 10%/year. Sandwiches near the office now go for $9-$10 before tax.
It's certainly legal. But short of expecting you to sign a binding 2-year contract, what exactly are they going to do about it? "I believe in this company and want to be here for the long haul" has got to be one of the most commonly told lies in job interviews.
Probably, but who cares? If you want the job just say that you are planning to stick around, then you can always change your plans once a better job turns up.
the problem is more on the money and product/marketing side than on the engineering side.
while working on banks that would hold true. a engineer was worth revenue per month while the system was up.
on silicon valey, the engineer is worth a lot as soon as the product is live, but then that means IPO or something and now he is worthless. Remember that most companies in the valley do not even have the concept of revenue...
And when the company does have revenue, then the issue shifts from the money to the product side. The engineer is the guy building the factories. and product can use a better or new factory because they have the talent to build it. but there is nothing they want to build, because, well, they have revenue with the old one, so why bother?
now, when you see all that, it is easy to understand why the engineer VPs on the top drive them to exhaustion. because they know in the end the short term in a engineer work life is all that matters to his financial/product peers.
I've always found this market inefficiency fascinating. It's conventional wisdom (not just in the software industry) that the best way to get a big raise is to switch jobs, but your employer "should" be aware of the market rate for your work, and have the most information about your value and the most incentive to keep you around. I've always wondered if new employers are overvaluing new hires, or whether current employers fail to keep up due to some sort of bureaucratic issue.
Alternatively, if new employers were not paying a premium, they would have a harder time attracting talent, so they are willing to pay more to fill the slots they really need to fill.
And employees have a switching cost, if you're getting paid 5% below market, that's probably not enough to get you to jump ship by itself.
My lord, I just don't agree at all with this article. The author parrots his source, who seems to think the entirety of the problem is "engineering culture".
It is absolutely not. That assertion - seemingly the crux of the article, if you take the perspective of the primary source - is total nonsense. There are definitely issues in engineering culture, and some good ones are mentioned. But the actual, and most material problem, is in the business culture - not paying employees their actual market value, consistently, and then balking at those employees when adjustments are asked for.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadSome of my fondest memories are of building something alone, or with colleagues, all night because it was time-sensitive or something we were really passionate about. That does not inherently make me bad at thinking strategically, working "normal" hours, or building long-term successful projects.
They are different skill sets, but one person can be great at both. The author seems to imply that's not true, which is a common misconception, IMHO.
I wonder how the author would respond to having people, say once every few months or so, do an intense overnight hack session. I would guess he'd be fine with it, but suggest keeping a close eye out so that it doesn't become the rule.
In my experience, that's not necessarily true; some engineers just genuinely enjoy working late at night, and are often proud of the results. Otherwise, they would presumably stop working late at night.
An engineer who starts hacking away a solution and keeps at it 90+ hours a week (or whatever amount) but then because of this burns out and looses interest in 2,3 or 6 months is not as valuable as an engineer who can consistently keep working at something until the product is delivered. The engineer that is burned out probably won't be able to last X years at the company, and since the author is trying to somewhat maximize the time the employee stays the "burn-out approach" engineer is not desired.
Kind of like that other article that popped up in HN a few weeks ago that basically said "discipline over motivation", which I read as "it's better to be able to work 2-3 hours a days every day for 5 years, than being able to work 15+ hours a day for 3 weeks".
Obviously your opinion might vary as to how useful this strategy is, but I think it has a different meaning than just "an engineer that works at night".
Note: By diversity I don't mean a team of 30 year old workaholic that graduated from Stanford and then worked at Google/MS for a few years that happen to have different skin colors. I mean a diversity of experience, fresh college student, a 60 year old near retiree, and someone that just spent six months backpacking in South America etc. It might seem like having a bind person on your team will slow you down, but plenty of dumb products get created because everyone has the same exact background and can't see just how tiny the market is.
PS: The world has ~7 billion people and most of them are not like you.
Taking a slightly roundabout example: AFAIK Pinterest was founded by men and the core team is the standard valley profile, however it has primarily a female userbase. In that case the user demographic doesn't match the initial team's demographic. However, one has to wonder whether Pinterest would have happened sooner if there were more women in the startup community, and whether there are other similar opportunities that address a huge need for a demographic not usually represented in the valley. Another example: pigeonly. A really cool company, an idea that springs forth from a different experience in the world.
The benefit of having a particular life experience and point of view is not something you need 24/7. You need it, if at all, at decision points.
As empiricists, though, it's worth asking if there are any real examples of companies exploiting hidden market opportunities thanks to a diversity of viewpoints. A lack of examples wouldn't be quite damning--maybe there's just not enough diversity at all to rise above the noise level--but it'd be a useful test of how valuable diversity actually can be.
This all stands apart from moral and ideological reasons to try to foster diversity, which are in my view more compelling but are understandably less effective when it comes to influencing decision makers.
But at the end of the day, what is the founder trying to achieve? His or her personal and broader definition of success might include being inclusive.
Anecdote: working in a homogenous environment can suck for minorities. Maybe starting out diverse makes it easy to stay that way?
Can you back that up?
As has been said many times before, correlation is not causation though, and other studies have shown that the more females you have, the better a team performs so maybe we dont need diversity and just need more women. I do remember reading other articles about the benefits of racial diversity as well but I'm sure you won't have trouble finding them.
But I dislike the studies that suggest diversity improves financial performance, because I find the conclusions are too politically convenient. Most of the ones I read suggest a sketchy correlation at best. Yet people talk as if it's as conclusive as global warming.
Yes, the diversity of founders can be the reason for a startup's success. There are also many examples where it wasn't needed: Apple, Microsoft, Samsung.
Our industry is seen by outsiders as an old-boys club full of young boys who viciously hate and destroy any attempt at diversifying. Unfortunately, when these sjw types score a small victory, they see it as a big victory. The rest of us see it like a quota system -- we're forced to deal with less talented people just so somebody doesn't get butthurt that there's not enough females or black people or whatever.
Another workplace had 2 female engineers, out of 8 or so. A candidate commented we had, "a lot of secretaries" and was stunned when I pointed out that 2 of the secretaries were engineering peers.
An engineering peer spent lunch speculating about whether the ceo was fucking his secretary until I stopped being subtle and flatly told him to fucking shut up.
I have more stories, but let's stop there for now. Or quietly ask female peers -- most of them will have similar stories.
Further -- like any other industry, the startup / tech world has received enormous dividends from America. From massive investments in early tech, to R&D subsidies, to R&D tax breaks, to the education of the vast majority of the employees at the companies. Demanding diversity is part of fulfilling their social compact with America, and most of the whining is the companies attempting to duck it.
Here is a simple true fact:
If your hiring pipeline isn't diverse (in a bunch of different ways, but in particular in the ways that represent "the opposite of the approach you just spelled out for building up a team"), then it may be fast and effective, but it is also brittle.
Every team loses people, no matter how carefully designed they are. Companies with huge traction and close-knit management teams where everyone likes each other lose cofounders. People leave, for all sorts of reasons.
On brittle teams, when one person leaves, a whole bunch of people follow.
You want to build a team that is resilient to one or two people leaving every once in awhile. Diversity --- not in the "Benetton ad" sense, but in a more fundamental sense --- is an extremely good mitigating strategy.
You may not care about team resiliency and longevity; "throw it out the window" to get to release and all of that. I think that's a bad plan (getting to a reasonable successful first release only to have your team implode is not a really good use of your very limited window of time to build companies in, is what I think), but that's neither here nor there.
There are evolutionary flows through the work force that don't require this (moving into leadership positions) but as they mentioned, generally hiring into the top levels comes from a tight circle of people, having gone to the same school, or some other such limitation. So if you didn't go to Stanford, what's your play?
I could understand why someone running a company wouldn't want to address this, but paying your engineers solidified salaries while company profits rise, and possibly with limited amounts of share in the company, is a good way to guarantee that they'll have to jump ship at some point, just to keep up with inflation.
The only thing to look for in a company, in my eyes, is how well they pay their employees. They can glad-hand all they want about open workspaces and ping-pong tables and catered lunches, but none of that matters. Show us the money.
You shouldn't get to be an officer unless you were first enlisted.
Salary envy is just a minor side problem of that approach. One of the bigger issue is that bad managers surround themselves with yes people, compounding any possible damage.
Why are these two concepts mutually exclusive? Experience, money, and mastery are just a few of the side effects of a successful career.
Point two: do not underpay me. I will tolerate a fuzz around market rate, and I will adapt to market conditions. I will quit as soon as I can if you systematically undervalue me (see point one: my value will go up).
Point three: build a company designed for fifty years, to deliver use and value, and you might get people looking to stick around for fifty years.
I ask because I hear things like this all the time, and there seem to be two schools of thought: 1) intangibles matter, 2) tangibles (money) is all that matters.
If the latter is true for you (or anyone in a position to be making as much as SV engineers make, excluding those with debts like children's schooling and loans), that makes me really sad. Jumping to the opportunity that will pay more solely because they pay more seems like a shortsighted, materialistic view of life.
I'm not saying you see it that way, but there are certainly a not insignificant amount of people who view money as more important than challenges. Thats not wrong, of course, just saddening to me.
No one deserves to be underpaid. It's not an outrageous demand, in fact, he is just demanding baseline respect.
The total compensation is a somewhat viscous[1] weighted combination of tangibles and intangibles.
Barring economic disaster, there are financial levels I won't go below, in part to maintain future-valuations, as well as to just keep my financial situation in order.
[1] Buying a house, for instance, would increase my baseline need for cash. Raising a child would increase my baseline need for managing healthcare and other cash needs. A few years down the road, I will be looking for new challenges, increasing intangibles. :-)
Works on challenges (intrinsic) --> gets new skills + generates increasing value for the company
Repeat this cycle for many moons and the worker now has a significantly upgraded skillset that has and continues to produce significant value for the corp. All that is asked is that the salary grows with respect to the skill set being utilized and the value being produced for the company.
If you end up in a situation where skill sets and value are increasing substantially but compensation is stagnating, you end up in a situation where people will eventually take a look around at the market and realize other people with similar skillsets who provide similar value are getting offers at a substantially higher rate (even assume inflation increase of 3-5% for several years, that adds up). Yes, the work might be challenging and the worker might enjoy the work intrinsically but extrinsically they're now asking whether pursuit of the intrinsic challenge is worth it given the disparity in how they're valued compared to their peers.
Pay isn't necessarily about the tangibles but more about how the company values you (scorecard). If your salary gets out of line with market by a substantial amount relative to skills, experience, and value generated, that indicates the company doesn't necessarily value you as much or isn't willing to expend the capital necessary to keep their employees satisfied.
The other angle one could take with this argument is that while intangibles are nice, they cannot offset the increase in price of other things like housing, and food. Without pay raises over time, the percentage increases in basic cost of living will eat into the paycheck more and more. Induced pressure from external sources can undermine intrinsic motivation, especially if there are dependents, and increase the importance of the paycheck amount.
Wow, that said it better than I did.
It does not mean you have tenure, or any non sense like that. It means there are specific, objective causes to terminate your contract, which include but may not be limited to: gross incompetence, contempt for workplace discipline, frequent absenteeism, criminal/delinquent activity against or otherwise involving company assets, etc.
If the employer cannot or will not prove this kind of behaviors from the part of the employee, he still can terminate the contract, but there's a minimal severance mandated by law, which depends both on current monthly salary and on seniority.[1]
i.e In my country, you are supposed to get 3 months salary, plus 20 days per each full year you held the position. Some employers will still low ball you if they think they can get away with it, but they will still give you more than what you'd get after suing and paying the lawyer's commission.
As a more concrete answer to your question, professional athletes do it all the time. The elite among them get the longest-term contracts, and actively push for them. There are other jobs as well that involve guaranteed terms, many of which don't have the unique attributes (limited prime years, injury risks) associated with being an athlete. Those same athletes' coaches, for example. Actors. Corporate-to-corporate contracts often have minimum terms and guaranteed spend, too.
Why would the company offer such terms? I think the OP covered that pretty well. Turnover is expensive.
Employees generally don't get that kind of consideration - especially in established companies. Companies used to have incentives such as pensions that were a generally applicable, long-term retention incentive. However, the market decided that carrying that type of long-term obligation wasn't desirable for companies. In some ways workers benefited too by lowering of their employment switching costs and not carrying the risk that a company doesn't survive or honor those obligations.
The reality is that most people who make a living writing software in the bay area are middle-aged, married or partnered, have children and a fat mortgage, and aren't really a part of "silicon valley". They live quietly, don't go to meetups or write blogs, and they're mediocre to decent contributors at work and they know it. A large minority, perhaps even a majority, are not white; they are Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, and from almost every other national or ethnic background you could name. Many are women, despite the oft-repeated myth of sexist hiring practices. In a nutshell, they're ordinary people with ordinary concerns nothing like the HN echo chamber's perceptions of the world. And you can bet your ass they'd like a little security.
And that seems reasonable, but I'm not sure how you expect that to work, given the last bubble caused entire companies to go under, and multi-year commitments to staff might cause even more to go under, or at least through bankruptcy proceedings where they will shed those staff anyway.
I know more than a few engineers who work at larger companies who have climbed up the ladder by switching outside and back.
And no, they've not acquired magical properties in a short stint elsewhere, outside of the "working elsewhere" property.
You can't complain about missing loyalty if you enforce it as a career path.
He both expects people to be very loyal, but for people like him or Mark Suster loyalty flows upwards only. I looked through the whole article for how he rewards loyalty, but couldn't find anything. He claims he wants people who are productive day one -- " hires need to be able to do their jobs on day one", then admits that early engineers don't need (won't?) to be your future cto or coo.
So basically he's whining that it's hard to find skilled engineers who need no training and want to stay at companies for long periods of time in order to be underpaid and who don't demand promotional opportunities. Weird.
From personal experience, the thing ctos and hiring managers miss is this: if you want me to be at your company for the long term, particularly if I have options, I expect you to come through for me. That means demonstrable company growth on a regular basis. If you spend 1.5 - 2 years frittering away a B round with little to show for it besides headcount growth, I'm out. And even after the company growth requirement, and growth in value of my options, I demand raises. We all would love an ipo, but in the meantime, my landlord takes cash only, and rents go up 10%/year. Sandwiches near the office now go for $9-$10 before tax.
Don't start counting "accrued vacation days" in .01 hourly increments to get you "two weeks per year" allow flexible work hours / work from home
Allow for movement between different departments ...
Dont simply look at employees as an interchangeable unit of resource to exploit ...this street has to go two mays...
IF (this company is as great as you say) && (I'll be doing interesting work) && (the culture is good) && (the pay/benefits is fair)
THEN I believe in the company and will stick around.
while working on banks that would hold true. a engineer was worth revenue per month while the system was up.
on silicon valey, the engineer is worth a lot as soon as the product is live, but then that means IPO or something and now he is worthless. Remember that most companies in the valley do not even have the concept of revenue...
And when the company does have revenue, then the issue shifts from the money to the product side. The engineer is the guy building the factories. and product can use a better or new factory because they have the talent to build it. but there is nothing they want to build, because, well, they have revenue with the old one, so why bother?
now, when you see all that, it is easy to understand why the engineer VPs on the top drive them to exhaustion. because they know in the end the short term in a engineer work life is all that matters to his financial/product peers.
If programmers can get a promotion and a 20% raise by switching employers, and a 3% raise by staying, why would they stay?
I find it funny that startups would expect to attract "missionaries" when most of them lack missions of any substance.
And employees have a switching cost, if you're getting paid 5% below market, that's probably not enough to get you to jump ship by itself.
It is absolutely not. That assertion - seemingly the crux of the article, if you take the perspective of the primary source - is total nonsense. There are definitely issues in engineering culture, and some good ones are mentioned. But the actual, and most material problem, is in the business culture - not paying employees their actual market value, consistently, and then balking at those employees when adjustments are asked for.