My experience as the first employee of a Y Combinator startup

Re:My experience as the first employee of a Y Combinator sta... by dpritchett on Monday July 12, 2010 @01:58PM (#1508759)

Obviously it's not bad in and of itself, it's just an additional layer of homogeneity that a prospective teammate will consider before applying.

The 90+ hour workweeks are already a big red flag to anyone with a spouse and/or children. It's hard to get along at work when everyone else is comfortable contributing in ways that you can't match directly. No one wants to be the odd man out in a high pressure work environment.

Edit: Fwiw I am also a white 20something male! I have always worked in relatively diverse environments and I have enjoyed it and would look for the same in my next employer.

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Re:My experience as the first employee of a Y Combinator sta... by jacoblyles on Monday July 12, 2010 @02:36PM (#1508896)

In an 100 person office, racial and sexual homogeneity would be creepy.

In a 3 person office, who cares?

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Re:My experience as the first employee of a Y Combinator sta... by yummyfajitas on Monday July 12, 2010 @02:25PM (#1508858)

I have always worked in relatively diverse environments and I have enjoyed it and would look for the same in my next employer.

My current company had no diversity until I joined (the founder and employee #1 even went to the same school), but it never struck me as being worth thinking about. I'm honestly curious, what benefits do you get from a company with ethnic diversity?

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Re:My experience as the first employee of a Y Combinator sta... by rdl on Monday July 12, 2010 @02:36PM (#1508894)

Racial and ethnic diversity really seem like non issues...they are pretty superficial differences within a work environment. Age, children, and sex are a little more relevant, and even those are pretty minor and only loosely correlated with traits relevant in a work environment.

Bringing a windows guy into a unix shop, or hiring a sales guy too early at a product development stage startup, or hiring a stupid or lazy person would be real diversity of a bad kind. Good diversity is bringing in people with domain expertise outside your core specialty, like having a font and calligraphy aficionado on your os team.

Superficial diversity is really overvalued.

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Re:My experience as the first employee of a Y Combinator sta... by _delirium on Monday July 12, 2010 @03:02PM (#1509004)

I've often found cliquishness when there's, say, five people, of which four are from the same age/sex/ethnic/cultural/etc. background, and the fifth is from something different. It's worse when the four are from a quite narrow background of similarity, like four guys of the same age/race/major/etc. from Stanford, or four immigrants from the same country.

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Re:My experience as the first employee of a Y Combinator sta... by rdl on Monday July 12, 2010 @04:35PM (#1509328)

If you put it that way I sort of agree, although I think Americanized ethnicity or race is much less dominant as a trait than other traits.

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Re:My experience as the first employee of a Y Combinator sta... by _pius on Monday July 12, 2010 @11:41PM (#1510295)

Racial and ethnic diversity really seem like non issues...they are pretty superficial differences within a work environment.

Superficial diversity is really overvalued.

And very undervalued by people in the majority ...

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Re:My experience as the first employee of a Y Combinator sta... by rdl on Tuesday July 13, 2010 @06:24AM (#1510926)

For the past 12 years I have often been either the only American in a group, or the only white guy, or the only person who went to a top-tier tech school. I've been in groups that have been totally multicultural, or groups where one other ethnicity or race predominated. (admittedly, everything has been at most 30% female).

I really haven't observed ethnicity or race as a primary factor in team dynamics. Even first language, assuming people have a minimal level of fluency, hasn't been a major factor; even with my minimal French, I've ended up hanging out with French video gamers and sci fi fans (all 3 of them at a big base; they spoke maybe 100 words of English) vs. a bunch of other Americans.

Volitional things like the kind of music you like, the job you do, your hobbies, etc. are really a much bigger factor, at least in my limited experience, than race or ethnicity.

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