How to Hire
blog.samaltman.com
How to Hire
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Re: How to Hire
#2Recruiting is a very hot industry right now, but be warned - I've talked to companies that are hiring fast, and they get 20+ offers a day from recruiting startups trying to offer their services.
Recruiting is needed because there is a signal vs noise for developers.
But there is also a signal vs noise for recruiters - it's a very hard industry to crack into. (AngelList is one company doing a great job here - talking to companies, it seems like AngelList talent is a fantastic resource - also Naval has talked multiple times about hiring/recruiting being a far bigger market than crowd-investing.)
Regarding the personal network hiring tool: I actually started working on this recently - it looks at Facebook connections currently, so that the person who is incentivized to be hiring can just allow an employee to Auth their FB profile, and then go and browse away.
A friend of mine is working on 'Tinder for Startup Jobs' - he's very close to done (iOS app, meteor.js web app is also almost ready), so if you would like to be swiping companies left and right and want to know when he pushes that and when I push this hiring tool, I whipped up a Google Form (as is all the rage these days). [1]
[1]: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1xijiSr7QsQ0d-fcg_fXm9dLgOXe...
Re: How to Hire
#3And why does Stripe need top developers? To make a REST API for payments? What am I missing?
Re: How to Hire
#4And why does Stripe need top developers? To make a REST API for payments? What am I missing?
I suspect it's to do with the 100% uptime they should be aiming for.
They might have some other interesting stuff they're working on as well.
Re: How to Hire
#5“Experienced” people often have higher personal burn rates and sometimes you’ll need to pay them more, but remember that great companies are not usually created by experienced people (with the exception of a few roles where it really matters a lot.)
Scary statement for me to read. I'm getting older and worry that the above thinking will eventually cut off cool and even just new opportunities for me. Also hard to audition for longer periods as suggested, but I'm definitely in favor of building a strong professional network and having a good portfolio of work.
Re: How to Hire
#6And why does Stripe need top developers? To make a REST API for payments? What am I missing?
You are missing an understanding of the complexities of the credit card payments industry.
Re: How to Hire
#7[deleted]
Re: How to Hire
#8“Experienced” people often have higher personal burn rates and sometimes you’ll need to pay them more, but remember that great companies are not usually created by experienced people (with the exception of a few roles where it really matters a lot.) Scary statement for me to read. I'm getting older and worry that the above thinking will eventually cut off cool and even just new opportunities for me. Also hard to audi…
Ageism should scare you--and it should scare the author of this post. The inevitable forward progress of time means that literally every, single one of us will be on the wrong end of this equation at some point.
The (possible) saving grace is that a lot of people who came up in the 2000s tech scene are now on the "other side of 30" and becoming quite "experienced" themselves. Hopefully, that group's attitude will change these biases. Too often though, you can read between the lines and discover what they're really talking about is: "You can't convince experienced people to take less money to work obscene hours--especially when their perception is likely that much of their job will cleaning up for all the 'inexperienced' folks you hired."
The idea that "great companies are not usually created by experienced people" strikes me as exceptionally hyperbolic and based more on the publicity of Wall Street Darlings than any evidence that highly experienced people can't (or don't) build something great.
[edit: Just thought that I'd add that I agree with just about every other point made in this post and focusing on one issue generally isn't constructive so I apologize for going down the rant hole without first acknowledging that the post, overall, is quite spot on.]
Re: How to Hire
#9I'd love if more companies adopted auditioning over the traditional interview process.
It was counter intuitive to me at first but it's potentially a cheaper way to hire. There's less downtime for the hiring team - everyone can more or less continue what they're working on.
It's a better quality of interview too - candidates have a more realistic platform to show their worth.
Re: How to Hire
#10“Experienced” people often have higher personal burn rates and sometimes you’ll need to pay them more, but remember that great companies are not usually created by experienced people (with the exception of a few roles where it really matters a lot.) Scary statement for me to read. I'm getting older and worry that the above thinking will eventually cut off cool and even just new opportunities for me. Also hard to audi…
> Also hard to audition for longer periods as suggested
He did follow that up by saying you should pay the candidate for the "audition" as a contractor. I've personally experienced this, and love it, and I advocate it strongly if not outright insist on it going forward. It's the employment equivalent of dating before marriage. And it's about Getting Real as much as you can, as early as you can.