A note I sent to YCombinator

Of late, I have been doing medical technical writing for large medical companies. I'm pretty financially secure, so I only work on short-term contracts, and only when I feel like it. But it does put me in the world of highly skilled contract workers, which is interesting, and the reason for this note.

First, I agree with 99% of what you say about entrepreneurship. The one thing that I would add is that people who want to be successful had better be nice people.

Smart talented people don't want to work with jerks, no matter what the compensation. Here, of course, we come to Steve Jobs. Steve asked me to come to Apple to write one of two "first books" about the Macintosh. (the other was written by Cary Lu, much missed.). So I spent 1983 at Apple, hanging around, being nosy.  And got to spend quite a bit of time with Steve. That made me want to start my own company…to see if I could do it and succeed. More importantly, it made me want to start a company and not be an asshole, and see if I could succeed. The answer was yes.

So it was with some interest that I looked at the job postings for the companies that you are involved with. Of the 12 companies listed, 10 of the openings were for programmers. No surprise.

The humor, to me, is in the consistency. They all want really really really really good programmers. Not one company is willing to put forth a salary number, but they all say they offer excellent compensation.  In the bay area, that must be a lot of zeros!

And most wave their hands about how hard they work. Get the code?  We intend to work you like a dog. To enrich the founders, of course.

And most offer the added incentive of equity. Although only a fool or a recent graduate would fail to realize how easily one can be washed away in later rounds.

So here we have greed and capitalism operating in its purest form.  You want to make a lot of money by funding startups. The start ups want to make a lot of money by making things.  But…as you so correctly state, the wealth will primarily be created by the programmers. And they don't have programmers! Or at least not the really really good programmers they need to make a really really big bunch of money.

If Marx were alive today...you get the idea.  It is obviously hard to exploit the working class, when the workers you need are so rare and so valuable to your aspirations.  Hence all the frenetic handwaving in the job postings on your site

I have a friend. A young man who has an international tea distribution company, which services bubble tea shops, owned by his father and other investors.  He wants business advice. I keep saying: dude, you have an international tea distribution business!  Run with it!

But I really like the guy. So I dug deep, to come up with the best business advice I could offer. I finally arrived at this: make sure that everyone who works for you, and everyone who works with you, makes a ton… an absolute boatload of money. Do that, and make sure that they really do, and you will do fine.  No worries. And you will become a better person in the process; which is the only justifiably selfish reason to be in business in the first place.

Maybe some of your companies could take those notions into their efforts to hire ditch diggers?

Doug Clapp

ps -- All this we work really hard bullshit? As if it is a merit badge or something? Your fundees should realize that the very best code written in this century was written for the space shuttle. And the folks who wrote it, without going into too much detail, worked 40 hour weeks. And were not allowed to work more than that. Period. It is no fun to win if you don't play by the rules. A 40 hour week is a good rule. I suspect that a 36 hour week is a better rule. :-)

I think that at a core level, many of us -- especially in the managerial world -- understand that working people to death, especially technical people, never works out well.

The adage of "work smarter, not harder" is absolutely correct. Just like it's better to write five lines of algorithmically beautiful code than a hundred lines of obfuscated spaghetti, it's also better to work reasonable hours in an atmosphere that is comfortable and enjoyable. Working less is often exponentially more productive. Will there be a crunch time, especially in the world of startups? Of course there will, and anyone who would promise otherwise is just plain wrong. That said, it shouldn't be crunch time all the time.

There needs to be a balance. Everyone needs to take their job seriously, and needs to get their work done in an acceptable amount of time... but stressing people out to the point of misery is counter-productive. My engineering team, for example, allows flexible work hours. I lead the team, and usually get into the office around 9:45am. I am rarely in the office before 9:30am, and I'm only in before 9 if I have an important call or meeting. I usually stay until six or six-thirty at night, because that's when I start to feel my productivity slipping. Some of my guys are early risers, and work 7am - 3pm. Some of them sleep later than me, but then go home and work until 3am. As long as their work is getting submitted on time, I don't mind at all: I want people to be comfortable, and not sit in a desk chair for the sake of keeping it warm.

Different companies work in different ways, but I agree with the points that Doug is putting forward in his post. The trend of "we work 18 hours a day to get anything done!" might sound super enthusiastic to a potential investor, but think about the message you're sending your potential talent. Founding a company is one thing, and it's going to require longer days than working on the codebase (unless that's what the founder does at your organization...), but there needs to be a balance. Hopefully, we'll get there soon.

HOWEVER, I can name 5-6 people who started their own YC company as a result of this. If those people had spent 4 years sitting at Google vs 4 years with us, they wouldn't have gained those same skills.

FWIW: I totally agree with the author about working too much. I genuinely don't understand what startup's obsession with working people to the bone is at all.

Or, more generalized: "We have some huge thing we want to do, and can't do it ourselves, so we're looking for someone that can pretty much just come in and do it for us."

And all the postings offer in terms of describing/selling why such a immensely talented individual would work for them is: "We're reinventing the future of everything, we work hard and play hard, we can offer competitive salary and equity."

The OP seems to feel this is borne out of some sort of maliciousness, but I really think this is mostly just cluelessness. When you get a little bit of traction and you have a little bit of money in the bank, and you're trying to go even faster and you have 20 major initiatives you want to do and you can only work on like 2 at a time, it's easy to conclude, "We need to hire! We love our company, this is so much better than working at some corporate stuffy job, why wouldn't anyone think the same?"

Most of these companies would probably just be better served forgetting about hiring and building out the core product until they have more product-market fit, so they have enough revenue/funding to compensate employees closer to their talent level, and have a "popular" brand that people would want to actively work for.

Unfortunately this would mean delaying that 3rd party API, or porting your applcation to iOS, or started using SEO/SEM to drive some traffic, which all have huge learning curves that are tough to navigate while you have a ton of other things to do. But if they were THAT critical, I would suggest those startups prioritize them over those other things and doing it themselves.

I agree with you there, but not necessarily on your second point (that they shouldn't be hiring).

I think the "work hard, play hard" line is so thoroughly seared into most founders' ideas of the "startup game" that it doesn't even occur to them that a normal working schedule is possible -- and for founders and CEOs, it often isn't. But if you're asking employees to work to their very core, then you either need to either pay them a crazy amount of money, or look for a another co-founder.

In terms of hiring positions like a "growth engineer" as a fifth employee, you're absolutely right. Often times, buzzwords can get the best of people: maybe what you actually need is just a marketing guy, but, you know, you've been reading all these Growth Hacks articles and maybe if you find a marketing guru who can code and also mock up your UI/UX and-- and then, all of a sudden, you're trying to hire some superman to do all of the things your organization needs. It's better to hire people in positions for which they're qualified and pay them well to work their 40 hour work-weeks than it is to try to find the one Super Expert Growth Hack Architect Team Lead Manager, try to bribe him or her with equity, and expect 120 hour work-weeks.