The Real Reasons I Don’t Hire You
I found many of the reasons questionable, most notably 1, 3, 4, 6, 8 and 10. I also found the off-topic ice cream selfies to be alarmingly flippant for a piece that talks about a topic as serious as who does and does not get hired -- is that the kind of flippancy I want to see in a leader I work for? But before I dig into them in more detail, I&#x27;d like to note that folks who come from big companies who have never stood up a team from scratch before in a startup environment, or seen it done by someone else (both competently and not) have can have some terrifying blind spots when it comes to building a team properly from a kernel to an entire team. How can these founders approach product innovation with so much reverence, and then approach hiring and org building with so little of that zeal?<p>What is often not addressed is the elephant in the room -- startup hiring is &#x2F;mutually&#x2F; risky. As much as a company takes a risk on candidates, so too does the candidate take a risk on the company -- a much more larger and more dedicated risk. If a candidate doesn&#x27;t work out with a company, the company can find a new candidate, backfill more capacity to soft replace them, etc. But for the candidate, if the company doesn&#x27;t work out, they&#x27;ve got to find a new company. Those stakes are high. Additionally, the financial incentives attached to startups, even in a best-case scenario, are not competitive with big companies for senior candidates. So, what do you do if you want to hire in an environment where a lot of your top options for talent are going to be unavailable to you? You might try to find out where you can outcompete other companies in attracting candidates. You might figure out where you can find candidates that will be a great fit but may have been passed over by more conventional shops. In short, you innovate with your hiring.<p>You figure out where, from a candidate&#x27;s eyes, you&#x27;re more competitive than other companies. In particular, autonomy over career growth, culture and team formation, and white space to set up a project from scratch are things that can be hard to find at big companies, or which are reserved for candidates who are able to successfully angle for them. If you get a chance as an early engineer to work directly with an impressive CTO on a hard problem, that mentorship and experience can really level you up as an engineer. Startups can compete by offering these things to folks looking to pay for that with risk, which is a high cost indeed.<p>You figure out what you need, where there&#x27;s wiggle room and where there&#x27;s not. For your leaders, you likely cannot compromise on several fundamentals, such as communication skills, ability to reason from first principles, and systems thinkings as it pertains to design and analysis. However, for your ICs, you likely just need to answer affirmatively that the candidate will be competent, consistent, curious, pleasant to work with and able to grow. Many candidates check those boxes, but of those candidates who are interested in working for startups, it&#x27;s challenging to get them to join your one in particular.<p>It&#x27;s easy to gloss over how hard seed-stage recruiting and engineering teambuilding intrinsically is if you&#x27;ve never had the responsibility fall on your shoulders before -- it&#x27;s REALLY hard. Not only is it exhausting, but you need to have the proper mental model for what its success and failure modes are. Success comes from curiosity, persistence, collaboration, and a baseline of autonomous capability. Failure comes from poor decision making regarding data modeling, build vs buy, organizational planning, hiring, roadmap planning, and even more things that may not have to do with engineering but will impact it. It&#x27;s with this mental model that one sees an overly romanticized and infantilized idea of fit, which is that certain engineers aren&#x27;t a fit for the startup world, and certain ones are. What makes it so? What specific engineering role is being hired for that makes it that way? Has that been thought through enough for it to be specific? While it may be true at a shallow level that some engineers will not succeed at startups, it conflates correlation with causation.<p>--<p>With that analysis in mind, here are the issues I had with specific points:<p>1. Scarcity: This is a dubious rephrasing of reality. The truth is that while there are on the whole not that many slots for engineers at an early startup engineering team, there is quite a bit more scarcity on the other side of candidates who are competent enough to handle all the responsibilities necessary to execute well.<p>3. Team vs Individuals -- &quot;We simply need what we need and you are who you are&quot; this is another questionable thought that foreshadows poor leadership and begs further questioning. What&#x27;s the next dubious reason?<p>4. &quot;We can&#x27;t make you successful in this role&quot; -- ah, here&#x27;s the buried lede. Two things, competency, and training are conflated into some kind of fuzzy idea of &quot;fit&quot; that allows the company to elide its own responsibility in teasing those two apart. What things are fundamentals that an engineer must have to be successful? What things can and will be trained or learned while ramping up? Not putting this into clear enough detail almost ensures that this lack of proactive planning will not be addressed.<p>6. &quot;We don&#x27;t have the work you need or want&quot; -- more muddled thinking here. You see the phrase &quot;we couldn’t spare an engineer to pair with them full time&quot; which belies the authors thinking, which is that pairing is necessarily a less efficient way to get things done. There&#x27;s no thought given to whether a pair of junior and senior engineers produce better work and more momentum for the organization long term as a whole. The idea of certain tasks being &quot;entry-level work&quot; is also ridiculous -- a junior engineer can learn a lot from working on challenging engineering project with a senior engineer, and if they do so with the right support, will level up immensely in the process. It&#x27;s one of the cheapest ways to grow your own talent in a more cost effective manner than you can purchase it on the open market.<p>8. &quot;You don&#x27;t actually want to work at a startup&quot; -- most candidates I&#x27;ve talked to have wanted the same things. Respect, autonomy, growth opportunities, work life balance. That the author belittles &quot;work&#x2F;life balance, high salary, gold benefits, stability, working from 10 to 5 on the dot, never being on call, never needing to think or care about work out of hours&quot; just speaks to their own idea that those things must intrinsically be sacrificed to work at a startup. For others, this idea is anathema to having a healthy culture that doesn&#x27;t burn out -- if those things are occurring regularly, there&#x27;s an internal problem in organizational process, culture, product roadmap, technical debt, and resources (or maybe all of the above) that&#x27;s not getting addressed.<p>10. &quot;I truly want you to be happy&quot; -- more red flags ahead. &quot;I have no interest in making a hard sell to people who are dubious about Honeycomb&quot; &quot; I want to join with people who see their labor as an extension of themselves&quot; -- all coded speak for a desire to find exploitable labor. How do you convince yourself that in the competitive hiring market, you don&#x27;t have to at least make a compelling soft sell to candidates that would consider working for you who are competent enough to have compelling competing offers? Do you fool yourself into believing they weren&#x27;t good enough for you anyways because they don&#x27;t want to make it their &quot;life&#x27;s purpose&quot; to build a better APM tool?