"We’ve spent less than $1000 on hiring, but I’ve had coffees or breakfasts with probably hundreds of candidates. Measured by hours, recruiting is one of our largest investments"
You quoted that extremely disingenuously.
But as implied, time and opportunity cost is what really matters, the dollars are minimal in comparison.
When founding our company, actual costs were low. Opportunity cost was large (not earning our existing salaries). Now the business is good and salaries vastly outweigh all other expenses (and we are in a low tech town, unlike SF).
The author is female.
Not affiliated with the company in the article, but this isn't necessarily a symptom of ageism.
Early-stage startups generally pay toward the lower end of the SF engineer pay scale (<$150k). At that salary, it can be hard to find local experienced candidates. For $150k/year it's impossible to buy a house and put down roots, so people at a stage in life that value that (which is a significant percentage of the over-30 demographic) will often move out of the Bay Area. You'll make a bit less money in Denver, Austin, Boise or Salt Lake City, but you'll be able to buy a house with a yard and raise a family if that's your thing.
Of course, there are still experienced engineers around, but they're disproportionately making $300k+, which can still buy you a decent quality of life in the Bay Area.
If the output of a hiring process results in all men being hired and no women, people would be correct to raise a concern. So if the output of a hiring process results in all hires being young and none old, should there not be similar concerns?
No, people do not generally agree that a process with a clear cause resulting in an explainable distribution that doesn't reflect society at large is discriminatory. A very specific political view suggests that.
You don't see a lot of female construction workers. Sometimes only a specific group is willing to do, or capable of doing, a job for a perfectly acceptable reason.
Not that I don't agree that age discrimination exists in tech, but this could just be an artifact of startups in the Bay Area.
North of 30 is when people tend to settle down and start a family. That's enormously expensive in San Francisco. My guess is that most over-30s in tech either A) decamp to a lower cost of living metro, B) have very high-paying FANG jobs that startups can't compete with, or C) are independently wealthy from prior ventures.
Either way they're not showing up to a relatively low-paying, very high-risk, low-security startup job based on the outside chance of their stock options hitting it big. Lottery tickets don't pay the mortgage or pre-school tuition.
I think the underlying issue isn't so much age chauvinism as geographic chauvinism. Why do blank-slate companies continuously insist on basing themselves in the Bay Area? There's no shortage of talented engineers in Columbus, Philadelphia, Huntsville, Dubuque or Boise. Certainly enough for a dozen-employee seed-round.
Yes, they could have moved out of the area, but that has its own costs, not just financial.
Isn't it a funding issue? It's my understanding that it's easier to get funding here than anywhere else.
That's literally the next sentence of the article after “We spent less than $1,000 on hiring." The article explicitly acknowledges this issue.
This article was not intended to say our hiring process is perfect. It definitely is not. Just wanted to offer our experience for other first-time founders.
>We’ve spent less than $1000 on hiring, but I’ve had coffees or breakfasts with probably hundreds of candidates. Measured by hours, recruiting is one of our largest investments
Reads as: “we committed a small amount of resource X, BUT we spent a lot of resource Y.”
They didn’t miss the fact that they were burning resources. They stated it explicitly.
Just being humorous here. Let's say he spent $999 and spoke to 200 candidates. The previous statement is not against the claim of the author.
Does that mean, he spent ~$4.99 for coffee or breakfast per candidate? Is it possible to have coffee or breakfast for 2 people in SFO for that money? Or, he could have either bought coffee for only the candidate and stared at him/her while he/she drank the said coffee or asked the candidate to pay for his/her own coffee. Yikes! :-P
I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of their applications were younger than 30. Their landing page is marketed toward meme generation. Most older folks won't make it past the landing page before seeking opportunity elsewhere.
When I was a young 20 something starting out in the bay (20 years ago) I ran across quite a few older engineers (some of them in their 50's).
All the best things I know came from them.
I remember at one point one of them handed me a spiral bound book of the papers from an early 90s (or late 80s) unix conference. Papers, actual papers, from a conference, BOUND (pre internet right there) --- there were a lot of interesting insights that came from that book that still impact me to this very day.
Could be plenty of noobish 40 year olds out there.
cough
I mean, a lot of times this is coded in the job descriptions. "rockstar ninja" "10x engineer" or similar words generally mean they are unable to pay experienced people wages and are looking for someone new to do the work of an experienced person.
A lot of people think this is bad, as it almost always implies overwork, but I have mixed feelings. My first programming job? I was 17, no education, and I was hired as a "Staff Programmer" but only paid slightly under $40K (this was in '97, so while that was great money for a 17 year old, that was... not market rate for an experienced engineer, much less a "staff" level title.)
In a lot of ways it was a great experience for me. My shitty C code ran on production and in turns vastly improved and degraded user experiences for literally millions of people. For a company that wants to 'roll the dice' - I was probably a good deal, 'cause I did some pretty amazing things. (in both directions, really... but it did work out well sometimes?)
(I can't find the quote right now... by Vixie; something about how many CERT notices he was responsible for, and how it showed that in his youth, he could code, but he didn't learn to manage risk until later.)
But, I mean, my experience of the valley (and SF is not silicon valley, but it is... adjacent.) is that startups hiring young people can partly be explained by the phenomena that startups aren't willing to pay market rate for someone with experience; even at my age, I see pressure to move to management.
If something bad happened and I had to work at a startup again, one of the big tells I'd look for would be the number of older engineers that are working as direct hires (not contractors); This is usually a good indicator that they are willing to pay reasonably.
And “I’ve had coffees or breakfasts with probably hundreds of candidates”
The real cost is over $1,000 unless the value of your time is $0.
Also, as someone else commented. So out of hundreds you interviewed, it doesn’t appear that anyone over 30 was hired. What did the age breakdown look like? Ageism does exist in tech.