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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

#81

Post by fdlaks »

danielscrubs wrote: post #78
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…

Does Google not offer RSU’s to employees outside of the US? You won’t ever get rich off of salary alone, salary and RSU’s of a growing publicly traded company is a different story though.

As you alluded to, it’s very rare for even founders to make a life changing amount of money from a company they start, it’s exceedingly rare for early employees to have this happen and should not be a reason you consider working at a small company.

The right reasons to work at a small company are the other ones you mentioned: high impact, like working in small teams, interesting work, cool product, etc… but my point is that the interview process for the small company and the big company are often times very similar even though the amount of risk, scale, future career opportunities, and potential financial gain are worlds apart from each other, which isn’t right.

The level of effort I should have to put into an interview should be proportional to what I stand to gain by getting the job. This is kind of already how it works naturally because more desirable jobs have more applicants which makes it more competitive and requires more preparation. I stand to gain much more working at Google than I do at posthog, so why am I spending around the same amount of time interviewing at each place? Is working on a smaller team and having more impact on a smaller product worth it to me to do that? Personally that answer is no which is why I don’t understand the interview similarities (mainly time spent interviewing and acceptance rate in this case).

Re: Things we've learned about building products

#82

Post by bsder »

simonw wrote: post #32
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…

I think A/B testing is one of the most expensive ways of getting feedback on a product feature. - You have to make good decisions about what you're going to test - You have to build the feature twice - You have to establish a statistically robust tracking mechanism. Using a vendor helps here, but you still need to correctly integrate with them. - You have to test both versions of the feature AND the tracking and test…

> You have to build the feature twice

Erm, isn't it three times, or am I missing something?

You have what you are currently doing (feature Null), feature A, and feature B.

Otherwise, you can't distinguish that the feature is what is causing the change as opposed to something else like "novelty" (favoring a new feature) or "familiarity" (favoring an old feature).

If all you have is "what you are currently doing" as "feature A" and "new thing" as "feature B", you're going to have a murderous time getting enough statistical power to get any real information.

Re: Things we've learned about building products

#83

Post by whstl »

simonw wrote: post #32
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…

I think A/B testing is one of the most expensive ways of getting feedback on a product feature. - You have to make good decisions about what you're going to test - You have to build the feature twice - You have to establish a statistically robust tracking mechanism. Using a vendor helps here, but you still need to correctly integrate with them. - You have to test both versions of the feature AND the tracking and test…

Something that is always a problem for me when doing A/B testing was that the C-Suite just reads the landing page of A/B testing tools where it says things like "Ridiculously easy A/B Testing" and they assume the tool is gonna do everything for them, including changing the page layout by simply adding some HTML in TagManager.

In my career I had the discussion to explain that this is not the case more times than it's appropriate.

A/B testing is possibly the most misunderstood tool in our business, and people underestimate even the effort it takes to do it wrong... let alone to do it right.

Re: Things we've learned about building products

#85

Post by j4coh »

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…

I had a superday, which to their credit was paid. It was for a technical product role which they wanted to hire people with some baseline technical ability, but it wasn't a coding job. I was up front that while I can code, and do build my own projects, I'm not a app developer. The superday was an app development exercise, and they let me know I didn't pass because my app development skills were not up to snuff. Not really sure how or why that played out that way, but at least I was compensated.

Re: Things we've learned about building products

#86

Post by danielscrubs »

fdlaks wrote: post #81
danielscrubs wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Does Google not offer RSU’s to employees outside of the US? You won’t ever get rich off of salary alone, salary and RSU’s of a growing publicly traded company is a different story though. As you alluded to, it’s very rare for even founders to make a life changing amount of money from a company they start, it’s exceedingly rare for early employees to have this happen and should not be a reason you consider working at…

PostHogs seed round was 3 million USD, but the likelihood that Google at this point of time is going to lets say 20x in a decade is vanishingly small. And remember, even in the early days customers loved them, so certain risks where lowered.

Remote-first also changes the dynamic of who gets promoted.

I mean each to his own, but personally I would rather bet big iff I wanted to quit my current job. I think now the PostHog sail has long gone with the risk and reward ratio.

Re: Things we've learned about building products

#87

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

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…

>There must be a better way to do interviews.

Interviews are a game of asymmetric information. The job seeker has much more knowledge of what they can and cannot effectively do than the job offerer. And the job offerer has much more knowledge of what is and is not required for true success than the job seeker.

Given that, no, there really doesn't have to be a better way than just "interview a lot of people and take your best guess". If you stop taking the time to do that you will eventually be outmaneuvered by someone who does.

Re: Things we've learned about building products

#88

Post by soneca »

fdlaks wrote: post #81
danielscrubs wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Does Google not offer RSU’s to employees outside of the US? You won’t ever get rich off of salary alone, salary and RSU’s of a growing publicly traded company is a different story though. As you alluded to, it’s very rare for even founders to make a life changing amount of money from a company they start, it’s exceedingly rare for early employees to have this happen and should not be a reason you consider working at…

In Brazil, it seems to offer, but it amounts to a very good compensation, not a retirement-in-10-years compensation.

Levels.fyi puts the total compensation of a L5 at ~$140k/year

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...

Re: Things we've learned about building products

#89

Post by andrewingram »

adamgordonbell wrote: post #40
skyyler wrote: post #37

In the first image in the article, what is a "SuperDay"? Is this like a trial day where you're invited to do a day of work for free?

They pay you for it, but it is a trial work day. Story time. I interviewed for a job at posthog. I knew that I really loved their communication style. But I hadn't used their product and didn't know a ton about them except that their writing is fantastic. The 'product for engineers' focus that they is cool but when I had an interview, it was clear that I wasn't a 'product for engineering' person. When they proposed t…

I did a "trial week" at Linear a few years ago, essentially the same thing but for an entire week.

Nice to get paid, but even getting paid is stressful if you're used to working PAYE and not having to think about how to do taxes on foreign income. The process works out very well for Linear, but as a candidate... not so much. It was probably the most stressful week of my professional career. You can't really simulate a typical work day or week with the stress of a sword of damocles over your head.

The thing I was tasked to do was pretty simple on the surface, but had some unexpected dead-end avenues that ate up quite a bit of time. So ended the week with "you're not fast enough". If I'd hit on the correct approach from the start i'd have probably easily finished early, so it really felt like a coin toss to me.

Re: Things we've learned about building products

#90

Post by soneca »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #87
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…

>There must be a better way to do interviews. Interviews are a game of asymmetric information. The job seeker has much more knowledge of what they can and cannot effectively do than the job offerer. And the job offerer has much more knowledge of what is and is not required for true success than the job seeker. Given that, no, there really doesn't have to be a better way than just "interview a lot of people and take y…

Your premise that it is a hard task (that I agree with) doesn’t lead to the conclusion that stopping doing how it is done now will be harmful to the company. It just might be the opposite.

Also, the GP seems to wonder about better ways to do interviews, not stop doing those entirely

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