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Who Y Combinator Companies Want

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Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#151

Post by lpolovets »

TimPC wrote: post #136
chatmasta wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not only the applicants who have limited time. The startup founders are also time constrained. You can't found a successful startup if you spend 10+ hours a week interviewing potential employees. I suspect much of the initial bias and "hard line" preferences are due to a startup's unwillingness to spend inordinate amounts of time interviewing candidates to find that one diamond in the rough. Imagine 4 of every 1…

Many successful people who've built and exited massive start-ups have suggested that it's worthwhile on the start-up side to spend 25% of your time on hiring when you're actually hiring as so you can easily get above 10 hrs a week given a full time role on this and have that be a good result. Optimizing to minimize the cost of hiring an early engineer is definitely solving the wrong problem, given the early engineers…

My data as an investor supports your point. For a lot of young startups -- especially those with =10 hours per week on recruiting. Not every person at the company will spend that much time, but a lot of founders spend a huge chunk of their week on recruiting.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#152

Post by zachrose »

bjacks wrote: post #76

I'd really like to know what it is about a resume or in an interview that makes someone seem like more of a 'product programmer'. Is it the particular things they have worked on at other jobs, i.e. their experience, or is it the way they talk about what they want to build? I'd be really interested to hear how I can make myself sound like more of a product programmer.

Use white space and minimal typeface variation in all your written materials.

Describe past work in terms of what was made, not tech used to make it. Relegate tech buzzwards to a minimal "skills" section of your resume.

Use the words "make," "things," and "world" liberally. Say you got into programming to make the things that you wanted to see in the world.

Have examples of things, especially small things, that a non-technical person could use or see.

Have a BFA in some quasi-technological process like stone lithography or ceramics. Describe approaching software with a similar sense of craft.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#153

Post by Jagerbizzle »

kelnos wrote: post #110
scarmig wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience in the Bay Area, jobs fall into one of three categories: 1) No paid vacation at all 2) 15-25 days of vacation a year 3) "Unlimited vacation," which is usually a hip facade for 1 or 2.

2) 15-25 days of vacation a year Really? 25 days is 5 weeks; I feel like the standard for PTO is 10-15 days, and often it's 10 days, but you get bumped up to 15 after you work at a place for a year or two. 3) "Unlimited vacation," which is usually a hip facade for 1 or 2. Is that really true? I have very limited first-hand experience; only two of my employers have offered unlimited vacation. For one of them, it was a…

My girlfriend worked for a startup in Seattle that offered "unlimited vacation", mainly because they didn't want to pay out employees that stock-piled unused vacation days.

In reality, it was nowhere near "unlimited vacation" as everything still needed to be approved, and it was very common for vacation requests to not be approved for a variety of business reasons. She probably ended up with ~20-25 days off per year, including stat holidays, which is the same as you'd get at Google or Microsoft.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#154

Post by ammon »

vonmoltke wrote: post #133
ammon wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they sort of are, just not explicitly. The standard process is to have 2 to 5 interviewers, each asking their own question, and pass everyone who get at least one strong yes, and no strong noes. This ends up with a random factor, but ultimately favoring people at least one real strength. The interviewer who sees this strength will fight for them. We've seen people with high skill variance (great at one thing, b…

> no strong noes This is the problem. It allows one interviewer with a pet peeve to torpedo an otherwise excellent hire. Where I work, whoever ends up on the wrong side of the majority needs to make a case good enough to convince the majority to switch. Being strongly in the minority is not good enough. The culture of accepting high false negative rates leads to the "no weaknesses" hiring the GP was complaining about…

Yeah, I totally agree. We actually asked YC Companies about their fire rates. The fire rate at most of the companies was under 6% (documenting a high false negative rate approach)

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#155

Post by shimon »

throwaway456789 wrote: post #105
alexwebb2 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring manager here, and after many interviews with enterprise programmers, I do find myself putting more and more of them into the "no" pile right off the bat. The problem is that those candidates, in my experience, tend to throw up way more red flags than others - their code is extremely verbose, they rattle off factory patterns like they're reading a textbook without any inkling what sort of problems they're actua…

It's funny you say that. I can't name one factory pattern off the top of my head... Never needed to learn one. I should clarify -- I'm in my late twenties, and I've spent my entire career (10 years) writing Java code. I don't understand how that negatively hiring managers against me.

Have you worked at multiple jobs over those 10 years? As a hiring manager (working with only the limited data you've provided here) I'd be concerned that you value stability very highly, and you might be thrown by the rate of change (in requirements, tools used, business goals, desired feature set, etc) that is typical of a startup. Long tenure at a single job suggests you enjoy getting deeply specialized and developing mastery of a stable set of tools, which is needed at a certain stage of company but not at most early-stage startups.

Is that true of you? I.e. would you be frustrated by 3-4x/year significant churn in your technological tooling and top-level business goals? Would you be excited to learn a few new toolsets? If so, why haven't you done that on your own?

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#156

Post by krmmalik »

I really liked how this analysis was done. Though i dont work in recruitment i have to work with CEOs often and notice similar approaches to hiring for other job roles as well. Way too similar in fact. I'd love to meet a recruitment company that is taking the same approach as TripleByte or perhaps TripleByte will aim to address other fields at some point. Either way its exciting.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#157

Post by vinceguidry »

pauldelany wrote: post #135
vinceguidry wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found my current job through a recruiter, I think I will find all subsequent jobs through one as well for this reason. Applying for a position is fundamentally an act of sales, so it behooves you to either be a salesman yourself or to hire someone to do it for you. Otherwise you're throwing yourself at the mercy of people's deep-seated fears and prejudices.

True, but also consider that you're the product in this case, and the salesman (in many cases) doesn't care who he makes the sale to. It may be better to first research and shortlist companies that you want to target, and then find a recruiter who has them as a client? Never done that myself, so don't know how practical it might be.

Ultimately it comes down to how many expectations you're placing on the company you work for. If you're one of those who vets the company harder than the company vets prospects, then by all means cut out the middleman and do the legwork yourself. A hired gun is just going to get in the way.

If your job is just a vehicle to enable your lifestyle, like mine, then you'll be able to establish a set of criteria and only work with a recruiter that respects those criteria.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#158

Post by _delirium »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #104
ammon wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definitely true. The filters that companies and recruiters use mostly trend in a meaningful direction. There are a higher percentage of good programmers among MIT grads than SUNY Potsdam grads. But this fact does nothing to help the good programmers who look bad on paper who everyone is ignoring. This is precisely the problem that we're trying to fix with Triplebyte. We want to make actual technical evaluatio…

The filters that companies and recruiters use mostly trend in a meaningful direction. There are a higher percentage of good programmers among MIT grads than SUNY Potsdam grads. Imagine how mistaken that would sound if you substitute "startup founders" for "programmers." The reason you feel company filters are anything except random noise is personal bias. It's disheartening that your article notices that company pref…

> Imagine how mistaken that would sound if you substitute "startup founders" for "programmers."

Isn't that pretty common among incubators and VCs? It's not the only factor, but for first-time founders, being from Stanford is a large plus when it comes to getting in the door. If you already have a track record then of course they just go by that. But when it's your first company, I don't think the "startup ecosystem" is any less reliant on these kinds of signalling credentials to filter the large volume of people who want funding.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#159

Post by enraged_camel »

kelnos wrote: post #110
scarmig wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience in the Bay Area, jobs fall into one of three categories: 1) No paid vacation at all 2) 15-25 days of vacation a year 3) "Unlimited vacation," which is usually a hip facade for 1 or 2.

2) 15-25 days of vacation a year Really? 25 days is 5 weeks; I feel like the standard for PTO is 10-15 days, and often it's 10 days, but you get bumped up to 15 after you work at a place for a year or two. 3) "Unlimited vacation," which is usually a hip facade for 1 or 2. Is that really true? I have very limited first-hand experience; only two of my employers have offered unlimited vacation. For one of them, it was a…

10-15 days is definitely the norm.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#160

Post by mendelk »

ScottBurson wrote: post #118
qntty wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm also older than the average age of a start-up employee (late twenties) I took this to mean that the average startup employee is in their late twenties, and he is somewhat older than that

Oh, you must be right. Silly of me.

Actually, it seems your first understanding was actually correct: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10698634
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