Startup Hiring 101: A Founder's Guide | Hacker News Reader

Startup Hiring 101: A Founder's Guide

notion.so

129 pointsivankirigin22 comments

Super interesting to read and get the hirers' perspective, but there's a lot here that feels really creepy and manipulative to me as a potential employee, and I think I'd drop out of the funnel the instant someone tried one of these things on me. (Which, maybe, win-win? Maybe I'm not the employee you're looking for.)

> Sometimes a candidate’s current company will counteroffer, which throws a big wrench in everything. The good news is that you can follow a few simple steps to position yourself well before a counteroffer is made:

> - Candidates are less likely to reneg once they officially sign, so get them to sign your offer before they tell their employer.

Good news! Employ your mark's commitment bias to advance your own position at their expense.

Similarly the section just a bit later on exploding deadlines — first a few tactics on how to use exploding deadlines yourself, and then just a few sentences later, with no shame, arming the candidate with phrases to push back on exploding deadlines from other companies...

I can't recommend strongly enough, patio11's classic on salary negotiation: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

But I think I might start recommending this one to job-hunters too. As a way of saying "this is what you're up against, be aware what some people will try to do to you to get you to compromise your negotiating position."

That author(patio11) needs to learn copywriting.

He tells people to "suck less". What a shakespeare.

"If I were a little more paranoid and a little more Marxist, I’d honestly think that..." you'd disparage a good article to get fewer people to read it and learn how to be better at salary negotiations ;)

Seriously though, Shakespeare or not, patio11 has probably helped a lot of engineers do a lot better for themselves with this.

Aside: One of the worst trends we have going is emojis in articles, commit messages, readmes and PRs. Emojis are great for chat when you want to express emotions. When it comes to reading text anywhere else:

- It distracts from years of training we have in recognizing characters of a particular language and word shapes

- It takes an extra second to process the symbol since we're not used to it. For example, "Notice a _bug_emoji_ ? Send us an email." [1]

- It draws eyes to the Emoji's first because they're foreign symbols and they're painted in color.

- Notion is one of those products that encourages this. I really don't see the benefit. Perhaps in labels it is ok - since its a symbol that's used to categorize things, and it is not prose.

[1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/...

And Notion stops me from zooming on the text and disables reader view (iOS feature that shows the text only). Why? Zooming is core feature of a web browser.

Now imagine if you're a user who's grown up in a generation that have always had emojis:

- They are part of our language and easily recognized from years of training

- Emojis are recognized immediate before reading a word and add to the speed and efficiency (as well as depth) of communication

- It becomes easier to understand sentiment before reading a word

- You're rules about where you should and shouldn't use emojis seem arbitrary

It's not as easy as it used to be to understand what all users want - your intuition about your preferences don't necessarily apply as broadly as they might once have.

As more young people build software products and become bigger audiences for other products, you're probably going to have to broaden your perspective on what experiences are common to all users.

Instead of arguing from first principles and the origins of Emojis, we're arguing - "Just get used to it". This is, my friend, how we regress as a society as no one challenges the status-quo.

I was hoping you'd provide some objective reasons that my comment was lacking, but you did none of those. I am open to hear and listen. We don't broaden the perspective for flat earthers, right? If we did, we would regress.

If there is any glimmer of hope - it would turn Emojis like symbols in Japanese Kanji script. They'd become logographic characters that are universally recognized across all languages. But, we're far from that. It needs to be formally included in the language, dictionary and schools.

My point is that _some_ users don't need to "just get used to it" at all since it's part of what they are already used to.

I'm not trying to convince you that you're wrong, just that you're not representative of all users. Your arguments are heavily biased by your age/experience. Young people matter too, right?

> Your arguments are heavily biased by your age/experience. Young people matter too, right?

I flagged your comment, this type of judgemental attitude has no place on HN.

Really not trying to dismiss your perspective. Just pointing out your bias. Your views aren't entirely objective and pointing that out isn't being judgemental. Sorry if it came across that way.

hard disagree. Even if you don't like emoji , they have become a part of digital communication, and there are lots of ways they improve communication. I use them most of the time to indicate that I'm saying something playfully, as that tone can often get lost in communication. We wouldn't want that, would we?

But more than that bemoaning the natural progression of language as an indicator of societal decline isn't very useful .

>> early-stage startups who have raised enough money to hire their initial team

Is it just me who sees this as backwards? raise money => hire => build? shouldn't you have done something before you raise money, or is this my old-fashioned ideas colliding with the new "growth hacker" startup mentality?

In my case I have built something I believe could be a compelling business interest. It works well enough for complex and sophisticated demos but still has a ways to go for commercial readiness. Once I finish my current military deployment I would like to raise capital so that I can hire developers to get this to the finish line. No matter how confident I am in my strengths as a developer I suffer no illusions about doing everything myself.

I think there's a fairly common story that goes like: two people, founders, spend a few months hacking on an idea together, without getting paid, build a functional MVP, run a beta, get positive feedback from beta users, maybe start making revenue, enough to have confidence in product-market-founder fit, want to start taking salaries so they can work on the nascent product full-time, reach a level of codebase complexity where adding another developer would add a lot of value, decide the right path forward is to raise a seed round to launch and reach a revenue milestone in 12-18 months, raise enough money to pay the founders salaries + make a few hires...

And now you're in the situation where you have put in enough upfront work to have confidence in product-market fit but still choose to raise money and build out an initial team ahead of real revenue / traction.

The world is flush with seed money. So if you have a good team and a relatively good idea you will fairly easily raise a seed round from someone.

And it's generally an awful idea for founders: (1) because most assume they will raise a Series-A when statistically they won't and (2) you don't learn to hustle when you have millions in the bank.

The best way is to follow companies like Buildkite. Hustle your way to a few million a year in ARR and then you can reach out to Series A investors on your terms instead of theirs.

Buildkite is an awesome story.

$20.2 million in Series A funding at a $145 million valuation [0] is stellar for a bootstrapped company. I'll take this as inspiration for my startup. Of course, it's much harder to build this way, but money breeds complacency, so it's probably best not to look for it.

Do you have experience with the seed/Series-A dynamic?

[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/18/melbourne-based-ci-cd-plat...

On (2), you don't learn to hustle either when you have nothing in the bank, the runway ran out, credit card debt, and no time because of the two day jobs to cover domestic and business expenses. A few customers won't bring enough to give you time to work on the product or sales.

Having no money is generally an awful idea for founders too.

> most assume they will raise a Series-A when statistically they won't

> The best way [...] Hustle your way to a few million a year in ARR and then

Rather than just highlighting likely failure with just the first approach, I think you need to compare both.

Because statistically they won't succeed at hustling to a few million a year in ARR either.

Having no money might make them even less likely to succeed. (I'm not sure about this though, it would be interesting to see a good study.)

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Yes, and a lot of the best software writing I've ever seen was an advertisement for Fog Creek Software. Having an ulterior motive doesn't make this a bad article.

If you're refering to Joel's writing, yes he always cast Fog Creek in a good light and was always recruiting but I don't remember him selling fogbugz via hsi writing.

Read the first section and has already been super helpful for a newbie founder. Thanks!

Wow, fantastic resource. Thanks for sharing!

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