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Things we've learned about building products

newsletter.posthog.com

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Re: Things we've learned about building products

#71

Post by fdlaks »

andrewmutz wrote: post #66
fdlaks wrote: post #52

Wow. 900 applications down to 10 "SuperDay" participants down to 4 hires. All to work at.... posthog. What a depressing statistic. This felt like a humble brag to help make their point about hiring good talent and how many people want to be a hogger (or whatever they call people that work there) but this just really highlights how brutal the job market is. Yes the market is also flooded with unqualified applicants an…

> Let me know when you're on par with Google in terms of revenue or benefits or prestige Do you really choose your employer based on their revenue? or prestige??

If I’m going to sit through 9 hours of interviews to maybe get an offer, then yes absolutely.

I’m not going to work my rear end off for 4 years to get 0.5% of potentially nothing and go through your dog and pony show of an interview cycle

Re: Things we've learned about building products

#72

Post by fdlaks »

sibeliuss wrote: post #68
fdlaks wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya I have yet to meet anyone who is passionate about analytics plumbing surprisingly, I’m glad posthog has found the 4 people in the world who truly are. What this really translates to is the founders saying “we think posthog is our golden ticket to becoming rich in an exit event someday, so don’t mess it up for us”. It’s just not politically correct to say that, so it’s expressed as being “passionate about the probl…

Have you bothered to spend any time looking at their entirely open source product, docs, handbook, etc? There are many different things going on here. A gross and frankly ignorant simplification, considering what they've built.

No I didn’t bother to read their documentation after seeing their website was apparently made on Myspace.

As someone who has gone through the roughly 9 hour interview process in the past, was it the docs and open source product that made you want to work there?

Re: Things we've learned about building products

#74

Post by sibeliuss »

fdlaks wrote: post #72
sibeliuss wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you bothered to spend any time looking at their entirely open source product, docs, handbook, etc? There are many different things going on here. A gross and frankly ignorant simplification, considering what they've built.

No I didn’t bother to read their documentation after seeing their website was apparently made on Myspace. As someone who has gone through the roughly 9 hour interview process in the past, was it the docs and open source product that made you want to work there?

At my current job, we use some variety of each tool that PostHog has built. We have analytics, feature flags, session replay, surveys, error logging and more. We spend an astronomical amount of money for these services, and where was that login again? Everything about managing (and utilizing) these subscriptions is inefficient, and coordinating all of these different views into our data is a terrible chore.

As an engineer wanting to build a successful product, I hate the fact that this is how it is. And then there's PostHog, where each of these tools is right there, connected to one another, ready to make my job (and my company's success) that much easier. Being able to work on something that simplifies all of this for others is very enticing.

Combine that with their open-company ethos (check out their handbook), and high-trust/high-performance product-engineer mindset, and yah... sign me up. This is a company that legitimately makes other people's lives easier, and thus makes for better products. Something to feel proud about.

Re: Things we've learned about building products

#75

Post by kridsdale1 »

andrewmutz wrote: post #66
fdlaks wrote: post #52

Wow. 900 applications down to 10 "SuperDay" participants down to 4 hires. All to work at.... posthog. What a depressing statistic. This felt like a humble brag to help make their point about hiring good talent and how many people want to be a hogger (or whatever they call people that work there) but this just really highlights how brutal the job market is. Yes the market is also flooded with unqualified applicants an…

> Let me know when you're on par with Google in terms of revenue or benefits or prestige Do you really choose your employer based on their revenue? or prestige??

Absolutely. Both majorly impact my long term earning potential.

Re: Things we've learned about building products

#76

Post by re-thc »

NotDEA wrote: post #65
fdlaks wrote: post #52

Wow. 900 applications down to 10 "SuperDay" participants down to 4 hires. All to work at.... posthog. What a depressing statistic. This felt like a humble brag to help make their point about hiring good talent and how many people want to be a hogger (or whatever they call people that work there) but this just really highlights how brutal the job market is. Yes the market is also flooded with unqualified applicants an…

> Wow. 900 applications down to 10 "SuperDay" participants down to 4 hires. You’re almost 10 times more likely to be accepted to Stanford’s undergraduate program than to ever work as a hogger

> You’re almost 10 times more likely to be accepted to Stanford’s undergraduate program than to ever work as a hogger

You have to pay for Stanford whereas Hog pays you. Wrong direction?

Re: Things we've learned about building products

#77

Post by baxtr »

kevmo314 wrote: post #4

This list mentions A/B testing a few times and it's worth noting that A/B testing is great but it's not free. I've seen a nontrivial number of smart engineers get bogged down in wanting to A/B test everything that they spend more time building and maintaining the experiment framework than actually shipping more product and then realizing the A/B testing was useless because they only had a few hundred data points. Dat…

You need to have a lot of traffic for it to make sense. And then the effect size needs to be big enough to notice. Not easy.

Re: Things we've learned about building products

#78

Post by danielscrubs »

fdlaks wrote: post #52

Wow. 900 applications down to 10 "SuperDay" participants down to 4 hires. All to work at.... posthog. What a depressing statistic. This felt like a humble brag to help make their point about hiring good talent and how many people want to be a hogger (or whatever they call people that work there) but this just really highlights how brutal the job market is. Yes the market is also flooded with unqualified applicants an…

As someone who considered applying to PostHog but never to Google (even though Google recruiters reached out to me, while PostHog’s did not), I can explain why they attract applicants.

First, in several countries, working at Google won’t make you rich—they don’t always offer the highest salaries in the region. You’ll have a comfortable life, but you’ll still need to work for the rest of your career. Second, Google is not a remote-first company, which is a dealbreaker for some.

My (perhaps flawed) reasoning was that, in its early days, PostHog was a very small company with a great product that people genuinely enjoyed using. If you received stock options, the potential for a big financial upside seemed high. Plus, working at a small company is simply more exciting—your contributions actually make a difference.

Re: Things we've learned about building products

#79

Post by xarope »

dartos wrote: post #63
fdlaks wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya I have yet to meet anyone who is passionate about analytics plumbing surprisingly, I’m glad posthog has found the 4 people in the world who truly are. What this really translates to is the founders saying “we think posthog is our golden ticket to becoming rich in an exit event someday, so don’t mess it up for us”. It’s just not politically correct to say that, so it’s expressed as being “passionate about the probl…

If you’re very product or customer focused, you can be passionate about anything. When I’ve worked at shops that made products I, personally, didn’t care about, it was always satisfying to see a customer be excited about a feature or be thankful for the tool I’m building. The first time that happened was when an admin thanked me in a support ticket for speeding up the generation of expense report spreadsheets way bac…

I've had finance thank me for writing a perl script that reduced the time they spent on daily (yes, daily) work from 2 hours to 2 minutes (ok, maybe 5 minutes).

Never underestimate the benefit of having the finance department on the side of IT's innovation.

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