91–100 of 121 posts
The problem with having such a specific, prescriptive formula for success is that it never actually works out that way. Sure, there are high-level principles, the PostHog team executes brilliantly, and I love the product, but I think we're really bad at connecting the dots on what actually made something successful. Instead, we assign credit to random things just to make it all make sense. A lot of times, it's the eq…
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…
A general rant.
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…
Having attended a SuperDay, I can hands down state that their interview process is the best I've ever had (didn't get the job tho, which was probably for the best at this phase of life). Designed to perfectly lift signal and minimize noise, for what they're trying to achieve. Don't change a thing PostHog.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having attended a SuperDay, I can hands down state that their interview process is the best I've ever had (didn't get the job tho, which was probably for the best at this phase of life). Designed to perfectly lift signal and minimize noise, for what they're trying to achieve. Don't change a thing PostHog.
I personally think there are more efficient ways to get a high signal to noise ratio on if you are going to be a good hire or not without having the candidate invest almost 9 hours into an interview process, but that’s just me
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…
This is where interviews can and should be done differently. In my career some questions I’ve been asked in interviews are: serialize and deserialize a binary tree, create an in memory cache from scratch, design an elevator system for a building, sequence DNA strands together using dynamic programming, build a flight control system for an airport, recreate atoi function, etc…
Sure enough, none of these interview questions had pretty much anything in common with what work I would end up doing at the company, so this was an inefficient way to hire that wasted a lot of my time.
This would be like trying to find a plumber to fix my sink by having them come over, showing them the sink, then sitting them down to grill them on the theory behind some thermodynamics, Bernoulli’s principle, maybe throw in some design questions about how to redo my sink. This is surely how you find the best plumber because only the best will take the time to really understand what they are doing when they fix a sink right?
Like it or not the vast majority of work in the software industry is e-plumbing where you fix sinks and connect pipes together to start the flow of CRUD from one end to the other, which is why our way of interviewing people is insane.
As an exercise for the reader, see if you can figure out which interview questions I listed above were asked to work at a FFANG company vs small startup companies that are all bankrupt now. Pretty hard isn’t it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Pos…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Pos…
And that’s one million before tax, before the preferred stock gets paid out to the big investors, after the lock out period where you can sell your stock a few months after the deal goes through. That’s not 1B valuation either, that’s someone buying the company for 1B in cash. Not impossible, but definitely unlikely.
If you work at google for 5 years you will almost definitely make more than you would working at posthog and getting acquired in the same amount of time, but yes if lighting strikes twice in the same place and posthog did an IPO and the stock 20xed you would miss out on that money
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Salespeople are what make a successful company, from a revenue point of view. There's only one company that I know of that's been successful at that level without sales: Atlassian. Everyone else has salespeople. If you if you don't have salespeople then you need to make a product that works and fulfills user needs. And it has to be good enough for word of mouth...which is where posthog's experience comes in.
> There's only one company that I know of that's been successful at that level without sales: Atlassian. It's not precisely so. They do and have had partners that did sales / consulting work.
In my limited experience partners are usually small integrators that do maybe a small urban area. Did they get a big consulting partner/implementor or something?