The result: we've had a couple of employees who received job offers from companies like Apple, Google and Facebook. But after going to the interview process and talking to other employees there they've all (with the exception of one) decided to stay with us, with a significantly lower salary, but a lot more freedom and work-life balance.
Not saying that we've a better offer than Google & co, but saying that our offer is different than theirs and there are enough people out there who care more about other things than just money.
EDIT: formatting
Compensation doesn't have this problem. You can't offer me $160k and then pay me $120k six months down the road. I mean, you can, but not with a straight face.
The soft benefits you described are one CTO/manager/investor change, or engineer bus accident, away from vanishing and it's not looked at the same way as cutting pay, furloughs, and things of that nature.
While I want to take one of these "work to live" jobs, I always end up taking the salary. I have a much easier time carving out a bastion of sanity in a given company that doesn't advertise the benefits, than to take a significant pay cut along with the risk I just described.
While I totally get that the future is always uncertain, I think past actions of myself and our management team (which also includes employees) speak a lot for how we are probably gonna do things in the future. Our philosophy is called Optimizing for Happiness, because we try to base our decisions on what is best for everyone's happiness, even if it means to sometimes make less of an profit as long as the overall profit is still positive.
It's difficult to explain how we do things, but to give you one example of the past. We had always very successful quarters, except of one where we couldn't pay bonuses. In that quarter people did not complain, but also offered us to voluntarily work less (and get paid less) to overcome this situation. In the end it didn't come that far but I highly appreciated it. And I think this can only happen if it's a give and take from both sides and everyone genuinely caring about each other.
If that's not embodied in contract then it's, regrettably, close to worthless. Companies change, managers change, leadership changes, philosophy changes, contracts only change when they're renegotiated.
In my experience it doesn't.
Soon the company is too big to known everyone, new managements and leaders emerge, whether you want it or not.
There are a lot of people joining in a growing startup. They will outnumber the current employees quickly and shift the current culture with them. Startups change in all aspects, very fast
More broadly, though, you misunderstand what companies are about. They're just a collection of people who get together to do a thing. They are only soulless to the extent that the people there are. (Or decide to pretend they are.)
The best places I've worked and visited actually care about the thing they're doing. E.g., I have friends who do catering. They love making people's events go well. They love making people happy. They fucking love the physical acts of making food and serving it to people. Sure, they have to get paid, or the enterprise isn't sustainable.
They are, legally, a for-profit business. But if clubbing seals or trading bonds got them 10% more annualized ROI, they wouldn't do it. Because they're not really there for the profit. They're there to please and delight people by doing something they enjoy.
There's nothing wrong with making a profit either. The more profit we make the better. But it's important to decide what you do with that profit. And I much rather pay for our employees to join me for a week of skiing in the Alps than buying myself a Ferrari.
I don't want to make this look like marketing (as you already mentioned), but if you're really curious I talked a bit about it just recently on this podcast: https://mobilejazz.com/blog/our-ceo-stefan-klumpps-interview...
Average US commute time is about half an hour [1], add to that another 15 minutes on each side for context switching and "settling in" and it's an easy 10 hours a week at least you're saving.
Remote work isn't for every job or person, but the financial difference would need to be significant to drag me back into an office.
1 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/25/how-m...
10 hours a week is an extra book you can read or 5 movies to watch or just...10 hours to relax and work on your side projects.
520 hours per year.
There definitely is a bit of marketing though and too much talk of culture is usually a good red flag.
Just wanted to reply exactly that. Obviously fair is very subjective and different to both parties involved. But we try to find a good combination of salary + bonus and also investment in the company itself (be it retreats or taking risks with new products like Bugfender), which then results in temporarily lower bonuses, but an expected bigger payoff and possibilities for everyone in the long turn.
If you can't match salaries, then you can move other levers (work/life balance, flexibility, etc.) in order to get an agreement that's suitable for both parties. For example, I don't think Google allows for part-time engineers for the majority of the rank and file. For a startup, if they're more concerned about results than butt-in-chair hours, it might work out depending on the role.
I've been on projects with incredibly knowledgeable and talented people that just couldn't stay on track, and I've been on projects with people that weren't the best and brightest but they were focused and put in a lot of work. You need both kinds.
Spent the time hanging out with my girlfriend instead. Worth every minute.
Why? First, you never know. Maybe they legitimately want your skillset - why fake up some crap you hate for a job you don't need? Second, you'll get practice taking interviews in a very low pressure situation. Worst-case they laugh at you and you fly home. Best-case you get an unexpected job offer you can evaluate. Either way you got some practice and "game time" with the process so if you're ever in a more high pressure situation (e.g. you really need the job) it's a lot easier.
Plus, smart people meeting other smart people is never a bad thing.
Having done this when I was younger and more foolish, I would not recommend it at all. I felt like I did pretty well overall, but ultimately flubbed a couple of [simple] questions that torpedoed my chances. While things worked out for the best (that company's future looks grim and I'm very happy where I am now), it was a blow to my confidence at the time.
I probably wouldn't have had to have prepared for a month or two to get that offer. A week of glancing at my notes for 30 minutes to an hour a day to refresh would have been sufficient. I think you owe it to yourself and the company who is paying to fly you out to at least brush up a _little_ bit (within reason) beforehand. It's almost like basic hygiene.
Companies keep records of their applicants and interview feedback. I'm dramatically oversimplifying, but your feedback will spell out two things in isolation: your fit for the role you applied for, and your fit for the company in general. If you do badly enough not to clear that second hurdle, you're going to have a hard time getting future interviews at the company.
So I wouldn't recommend winging it in a Big 5 interview unless you're comfortable with the possibility that a bad performance might blackball you there. But hey, some folks are fine with that risk. Others are confident enough that they feel their seat-of-the-pants performance will still clear the basic hurdles. If that's you, then more power to you.
After going through "interview training" for one, they do blacklist people. But it's probably not as bad as you think. Also, even after getting pushed out of one org, another was extremely happy to offer me a job years later despite having all the info on me (even if I turned it down).
Individual hiring managers can have a good amount of discretion.
The cost of the flight & hotel is pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things. By that I mean relative to stuff like going to a place you want to see, the value of spending a vacation day, etc...
I do agree that the meeting smart people is fun... but the full on crash-and-burn on an algorithm + whiteboard interview would really have a massive negative impact on my confidence & self-esteem. Not worth it.
This is a fair point, but I simply want to point out that was half the reason I suggested it. Learning how to fail :)
I very much understand the mental aspect here though, so that's a tough one and my advice is not for everyone. I will say that at some point in your career you will fail though - or you aren't pushing yourself very hard. I believe this was one of the harder things I had to "train" myself to deal with; the mental load of failing at something and how to recover.
If you're not in a mental space to make that experience a positive for you? Absolutely skip it.
It's really worth it, IMO. There's really a HUGE element of luck: from the personality and opinions of those interviewing you to the questions they happen to choose that day. Seriously - internalize that and just try it out!
On the flip side, it takes a huge amount of forethought to create different tests, projects, and screening practices for every position and then re-shaping for each experience level, particularly if the team is young and inexperienced; it's difficult to test for what you don't have yet.
I'm never doing another hour-long whiteboard interview again in my life however. The whole process has become so gamified now that most new entrants have practiced the exact types of questions asked hundreds of times. I'm not interesting in spending a month of my life doing that any more and I no longer need to.
The whole SAT-prep feel of the interview process now is tiresome.
I was at SXSW. All the startups I talked to bemoaned their hiring problem, yet none of them wanted to even consider remote workers.
Sorry, I'm not sympathetic to that.
There are some number of jobs out there and most of them don't want remote workers. Job applicants that are willing to take jobs that forbid remote work can also apply to those that permit remote work, while workers that will only look at jobs that allow remote work can only apply to the small subset that allow it.
It's straightforward micro-economic exercise to see that the when you hold all other things equal the market clearing rate for a particular employee is higher if he is willing to take on-site work than if he is not.
It'd be the same thing if an employee was only willing to work at companies whose names started with a-m.
I don't think there is more aversion to remote work on the employer side than on the employee side, so that effect should not turn the tables.
Why? How does the value of the work I provide change based on where I'm located? Is an if statement somehow different if done in the Bay Area vs the Midwest?
Delivering more value can justify more compensation. But unless you're on contract for a percentage of the take, you don't necessarily get compensated based on output. Most software people get paid based on market rates which can be a lot lower than the actual value they deliver on the high-end--they're paid their "replacement cost" rather than per value added.
In my experience that is an incorrect argument to begin with: many large tech companies seem to have more flexible work hours and remote working capabilities just like startups. I would rather focus on work-life balance, working on products that matter, having equity in the company, being able to experiment with technologies and be part of the decision making process rather than a cog in the machinery as reasons to prefer a start-up.
They don't have that option at startups either, because the startups all want people who'll be at the office 18 hours a day with "team spirit".
I think this article is useless. Startups are only for people who are under ~25 (maybe 30), have no families, are willing to spend all their waking hours pursuing someone else's dream, and think they're going to make bank doing it and are willing to take that gamble. This is not the kind of engineer who goes to work at most large companies; they're two entirely different hiring pools.
OR those over 55 whose kids have left school, have mostly paid off their debts, already achieved a few things and have the experience, strength of character and financial stability to look their 23 year old CEO in the eye and say "sorry, I'm busy this weekend" when necessary.
Rapid exit focused startups are no place for those in their 30's and 40's. I say this as someone who spent their 30's and 40's in startups but survived.
The real startup appeal is you don't need to be great or play the game, you just need to be lucky.
Well-funded, small start-ups that are high growth can still get to 80% of "bigco" salaries--well into six figures. If you are fine on a bit less (which is still a LOT more than many make), then you can also get more freedom and a few lottery tickets thrown in.
Some even build a "diversified portfolio" out of those tickets.
I guess you're right, in that I wouldn't go work for a large tech company - it would be hard to convince me to give up the level of freedom I have and ability to contribute to company direction.
I treat startup stock like lottery tickets. It'll almost certainly not pay off, but it's a nice dream. All the companies I've worked at are still around and doing well, so the payout(s) still might happen someday.
Now, to be fair, there are good things as well, but they are more rare. 37 Signals comes to mind as innovative company that is doing things just right. They never wanted to even be associated with startup world.
There were also tangible side effects. You couldn't generally expect them to work on what they perceived to be work which is low profile but actually important for some unquantifiable metric such as morale of the customer support team. You couldn't generally expect them to play by the same rules when it came to check in policies, documentation standards etc.
But best of all, the actual code they wrote would uniformly fall on either end of the astronaut architecture spectrum - either completely ignoring maintainability and turning the entire team into Schlemiel the painter, or being so convoluted that they themselves couldn't make quick progress a few years down the line on the code that they wrote.
This is a self-perpetuating thing too, when most of the promotions go to people from the "proven" cliques, and those who got promoted, promote more of their "proven" brethren.
Escape from the cult of google.
One example that was discussed on Hacker News previously:
There's something in the water at the big companies, many employees there think they have passed a rite of passage and that EVERYONE NOT WORKING THERE simply didn't pass.
I wish I wasn't exposed to evidence of this, but unfortunately I have. Many people don't consider the idea that others just don't want to work there.
In one example of this, I was brought in to interview at one of the big ones, referral, special project. I liked the idea of not necessarily being just some pawn in the never-ending recruitment draft, but someone on a special project.
And here I am, talking with the project manager and how other organizations sometimes do custom integrations into their enterprise product. Regarding those other organizations, and I quote "Now this is some 100 million dollar company in Canada, so you know their engineers don't know anything"
and I'm like YOU KNOW I WORK FOR 100 MILLION DOLLAR COMPANIES... RIGHT? I work in Series A and Series B startups primarily, after their 12 million funding rounds close they its often at a 50 - 100 million paper valuation.
The hubris....
Other examples are what I've heard from bus drivers talking about their riders, other engineers that disagree with the hubris, and just the general society that also puts Googlers and other big tech company employees on a pedestal because of the enviable compensation and perks.
Anyway, I only work for trillion dollars companies (by some metrics). Bigger is often better.
But there are plenty of great engineers that don't want to work at those companies for various reasons. There are plenty of great engineers that want to work remotely and don't have that option at the large companies. There are also plenty of inexperienced engineers with high potential that can't yet get hired at those companies and can be great additions to your startup. Do what you can to find and recruit those people.