Comment by ChrisCinelli | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChrisCinelli | Hacker News Reader

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You could say:

"It is a funnel, you look at the stages, and at the end there is a great engineer that is usually working for a long period for the company.

Each level has expenses and conversions. Go an optimize keeping in mind the constraints."

But what I noticed is that is all about your company specifics and how you overcome the trade off...

For example the average new startup in unsexy industry has problems to get any body in the funnel. Getting somebody that know how to write some code can be a challenge... interview is more about persuading them to accept the job.

Great "sexy" companies have ton of people applying and would do everything they ask them to do. The problem for the company is to efficiently select those people.

When you have enough candidates, somebody may think: "We can save time and make accurate evaluations by giving a screening test offline to evaluate most of the relevant skills of the person!". Unfortunately the test takes on average 10 hours to finish.

Result: mediocre candidates desperate for a job try so hard to get everything done, but the great engineer has plenty of options and does not want to spend 10h on a test. In the end all great people that you would like to hire quit in the process.

I work in Europe in a city of startups, Berlin. I can tell you most of the startups here have no concept of or simply don't care about hiring great candidates. A great number of them run on selecting for candidates who are most willing to bend over to exploitation.

Screening tests and "case studies"/homework that takes 10-20 hours of time are abundant to weed out anyone who might be a pain to manage. They don't want independent thinkers or challengers who think out of the box, they just want 'doers' who will follow every twist and turn of senior management 'vision'.

As a non-German or non-EU, they then offer you a craptastic package of maybe 40-60k EUR before taxes (local Germans will get anywhere from 60-90k for a similar position). If you say no, congrats, they've succeeded in weeding out the next group of annoyances: anyone who wants to be compensated fairly.

The result is startups get the exact kind of workers they love - the kind that is easily exploited both in terms of work quantity and financially.

European startups like to whine about "shortage of talent" but what they're really complaining about is the lack of total naive locals and foreign talent willing to move to be exploited. Also startups in Europe usually DO NOT adhere to the "EU work life balance" that is parroted around the internet. You get worked like you're in America, minus the American salaries.

Trying to place Berlin as the whole of Europe is pretty unfair to the rest of Europe (considering it contains a wide variety of cultures and expectations on working life). Also, people referring to 'EU work life balance' are probably really talking about the much more substantial labor laws in the EU compared to the US, rather than meaning that they only work 2.5 hours a week for 90k$ or something.

I can't say I've had the same experience working for start ups in London, in fact I've had the opposite - competitive pay (probably about 20% less than working in tier 1/2 banks but above market in industry), good benefits (incl. private health, gym etc.), fair work life balance (incl. holiday days and WFH policies) and rewarding work with intelligent colleagues. Non-EU/UK workers that I've worked with have the same experience as far as I can tell (perhaps even more positive, considering that some of them require visa sponsorships).

> Trying to place Berlin as the whole of Europe is pretty unfair to the rest of Europe

I can't say that I've found the attitude of the companies in London or Amsterdam to be materially different from what was described. That doesn't mean that it is the whole of Europe, but I'm willing to doubt that it is an isolated cultural thing.

Given that we both have wildly differing experiences with London, I'm willing to grant that London might have unique and positive offers now (my experience is from at least 3-4 years ago) or that I have at the time completely missed the healthy companies.

If I can allow myself to chime in...

I think social / cultural differences actually is not enough to differentiate European start-ups. If nothing else, there is a tremendous (deliberate?) effort to follow American standards of management and GTD. However, at the same time, Venture Capital and management overall seem to be a bit more risk averse in Europe than USA.

But thats just my opinion of what is the common denominator here in Europe.

I imagine it's easy to be in love with a philosophy that dehumanises employees when you are an employer. Startup founders are no exception.

I always wonder... Would you take a job if you heard 20-40% of people who accepted the job were fired within the first month?

If an organization was good at firing fast, would people be willing to take a job there? Would you be able to truly assess an engineer within a month in a way you wouldn't in an hour?

The first two weeks are usually a wash. But you might be able to get more signal in that second two weeks?

Does that same equation hold true if it's contract to hire? Would you take such a job?

> If an organization was good at firing fast, would people be willing to take a job there?

It's an interesting question. Having worked for organisations that fire fast, and those that don't, in general I tend to see it as a positive cultural indicator [1] - albeit one that needs some digging to verify - but I can understand that it might unsettle some applicants.

In fact nowadays I favour it strongly enough that next time I'm the one going through the interview process I'll probably investigate. I may even ask outright although, again, "What does somebody have to do to get fired around here?" is a question open to some misinterpretation.

[1] Working with difficult or unproductive people for long periods can be hugely draining on a team, not to mention hugely damaging commercially. Left unchecked it can even destroy your business.

I mean, we have plenty of people take ~this offer every year. The term is more like 3 months, and we call them "interns".

For people who already have full-time jobs it seems like a much worse deal, though. I certainly wouldn't take it, at least - it makes very little sense to give up the certainty of my current job in exchange for being maybe unemployed in a month.

That’s absolutely not the same. An internship has a defined start and end date and you need to do something egregious not to make it to the end. In that sense it’s more like a short term contract than anything else and contractors get paid a lot more than salaried employees to compensate them for the risk involved.

Most internships are for hiring, not the labour the company gets from them. They function as three month long interviews but unlike a short term contract leading to hire it’s expected that they won’t immediately convert into a job as students return to university for another year. They’re also far more opaque to other employers on a cv. If someone did internships at three different companies over their degree they could have wanted to see many different companies or they could have performed below expectations at all three places. If you see their cv you won’t know.

It still sounds awfully similar. If you're firing ~30% of hires after the first month, then you're clearly treating it as an extended interview. And the first month of any job (in software, at least) includes a lot of training/ramp-up, so you don't expect to get much labor out of that period. The main difference is just that an internship has a several-month unpaid leave starting 3 months after hire.

I suppose it diverges more if you consider internships prior to the final one due to the weird optionality on following intern seasons, but I think that's a minority of internships due to the hiring goal (once you start looking at 2+ year lead-times before a potential full-time start date it becomes much harder to justify).

To be fair, we call it "contract to hire."

If the company fires 20-40% within first month, I would assume they are looking for too specific mold to fit in. I do not like places with too much pressure on conformity, so I would pass.

People in places where they fire easily and often are too insecure. That means taboos over things that should be discussion and fear of disagreement.

...and that's why we have these ridiculous interviewing systems. It's one thing to take a chance on someone who may have had a bad technical interview but might be fine if they're not currently in a gig, but it's another for us to hire from a stable gig.

So, we as an industry default to "no" instead of "yes."

I have in the past accepted a job at a company that professed they had a 60+% turnover of employees within the first six months. At least half of that number was fired within the first month. It did not bother me that they did so, I just needed work at the time and I was confident I was good enough to stay.

It's why I prefer quick phone interviews. It gives me enpugh of a glimpse into their culture.

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