Several hundred million people are willing to invest a portion of their finite time every day visiting and interacting with content only available via Facebook. Winning people's attention is a zero sum game (if you gain it your competitors lose it) and attention is a scarce resource. The strong network effects of having all your friends in one place makes facebook's position very defensible. All that adds up to high intrinsic value.
They are neither art nor design. Startups are businesses. And a business exists to profit. Nothing else.
Also, a startup does not aim to solve a problem in an industry. That is a common but rather poor approach. A startup aims to profit by filling a need in a given marketplace. Two different things altogether.
The basis of a product is design. But design is not art. Design is engineering. Even UI design, a process commonly thought of as artistic. That is where I disagree with your point. I don't reason anything in a startup is about art.
The difference about solving a problem and filling a need is pretty simple. You don't profit by solving a problem. You profit by filling a need.
Problems inside industries may not have profits hidden inside. But needs, everyone always has money to solve their needs. Your job is to find those needs and engineer a product that fills it.
Edit
--Added this part from my workstation. The text above was from my phone (makes it harder to type in detail).--
Everyone will always have problems. You solve one, two more pop up. The very nature of problems make people be wary of any solution that aims to solve them. And to be frank, a lot of people dont even want to solve their problems. Businesses also share this.
Now needs. Well needs are something entirely different. Needs are wants. What people want, they pay to get. Your job in a business is to find those needs, and give the need what it wants. In software, a need may be to save them money on their accounting. Why is this a need? Maybe the business owner wants to buy a new car, and he/she needs the money to get that new car. There is no problem to solve. Their accounting might not need to be solved. But the owner has a need for money to buy the car.
Typing in my phone is frustrating. I end up writing differently. It makes me compress ideas into short sentences to avoid the pain of writing with the poor UI.
It may seemed like I was trying to debate your point, but I agreed from the start. Now that my hands are free to do so, I wanted to let you know.
Would you be willing to expand your original post? It was rather short in nature.
Also, mind sharing an email? Mine is on my profile.
They fail because they're not losing sleep over how well they execute their sales funnel.
As someone who is losing sleep over the same issue, I appreaciate the fact that you understand it. I never get why so many startups focus on the minor things when the sales funnel is the most important part of the deal. Seems like people are just doing startups because its IN. Not because they want to build a profitable business.
The problem is not the software. The problem are the employers. Everyone wants the perfect candidate. But no candidate is perfect. Everyone has good skills and bad baggage to carry from job to job. The aim should be to find people who will add to the team rather than building a perfect team. You can't do that with software (yet).
Well you're agreeing with me when you say "yet", and hence my comment about opportunity.
The problem is the software and the software is not going to go away. The opportunity is to make the software more intelligent so that the output is more in line with what would work.
Considering that it costs 20% for a match by a recruitment company, there is enourmous ROI for a program like that. It would almost be as good as the ability to print money.
Not to mention the cost you could get for the unemployed to sign up ("It costs you on average 2k/month not to use our service").
I'd like to see software engineers who are part of the hiring process in their company apply for their own position anonymously. Go through the whole enchilada: the phone interview, the code tests, the puzzles, the questions regarding optimization and performance, etc. Let's see if they can pass all the hurdles.
I have $100 here that says most won't (if any).
*
If we can't hire people due to a broken system, how do we expect to succeed?
I've been on the hiring manager's side and the employee's side, more the former than the latter.
I don't get your beef.
The phone interviews are there to screen the 80% of the applicants who don't merit the time of my team to interview them. The puzzles are there to watch people think on their feet. The detailed questions are to see if you're looking at someone superficial or someone with deep knowledge of the subject matter. The programming challenges are to see if the applicant wants the job badly enough to spend a couple of hours working on a programming problem that can then be used as a showcase for how they write some software.
Earlier in my career, I didn't have all those interview techniques in place. When I started, hiring people was a complete crap shoot and I ended up with some total lemons. Like the warning labels on products you buy, each interview technique I added to the process was the result of a lame hire that in hindsight, I could have avoided had I used that technique.
The last job I had to interview for used all the techniques above. I found the interview process to be thorough and challenging. I appreciated the rigor of the interview process since it meant that the people hiring really gave a shit about the quality of the people joining their small team. I got the job. In point of fact, if they hadn't had a thorough interview process, I probably would have passed on the job offer since that would have been an indication to me that they were naive and didn't have their crap together.
"Have you ever asked the people you have interviewed what they think about the process?", especially, perhaps, the people you didn't hire?
Almost without exception, people who don't get hired never hear back from a company as to why. Yes, I know all about "everyone's afraid to get sued for saying something wrong". So... develop a neutral feedback form to candidates as to why they were passed over, skills the interviewer(s) thought were lacking, etc. This will mean that people can get better, perhaps get another job (yes, maybe at a competitor, but also maybe somewhere else entirely), and continue to earn income, pay taxes, and contribute to society in a productive way. Some people can contribute without a job, sure, but right now most people need jobs.
Telling someone "we're sorry - we had 8 candidates apply for this position, and we ended up taking on someone with more experience in X, Y and Z compared to your experience level. We wish you the best of luck in your job search". This would be courteous, professional and helpful all at the same time. Between my own experience and that of several colleagues, fewer than 5% of employers ever provide something even remotely useful in terms of feedback.
How do we expect the job seeking population to get better without providing feedback mechanisms for them to learn from?
Telling someone "we're sorry - we had 8 candidates apply for this position, and we ended up taking on someone with more experience in X, Y and Z compared to your experience level.
And what about the cases where your reasons are not "more experience in X, Y, Z"? Cultural fit is a biggie - one might turn down a candidate who is more qualified because his banking attitudes would go over badly at a startup, for example.
That's true, and in those cases, a more generic "we had other qualified candidates" letter/email would be fine. but all too often corporate america just ignores people altogether - won't return emails/phone calls, and basically leaves the person out to dry. Working via a recruiter, you at least have a person at the agency who might be sympathetic.
Companies don't seem to realize that treating applicants bad is just as detrimental in many cases as poor customer service. I've had bad experiences with job application processes, and I've told many people chapter and verse about the companies involved. If they can't even treat people well who want to work there, how will they treat customers after the money is received?
That's true, and in those cases, a more generic "we had other qualified candidates" letter/email would be fine.
If unskilled candidate X gets "other candidates had more specific skillz" while uncultured candidate Y gets "sorry, you suck for unspecified reasons", it sounds like a lawsuit risk.
Telling the candidate anything specifically negative invites argument and misinterpretation. In practice, the better companies always use the "other qualified candidates" letter. The worse ones tell you nothing.
> PS. Have you ever asked the people you have interviewed what they think about the process?
Specifically asked? I've received lots of feedback from people who made it through the process. They've added to my bag of interview techniques here and there. In general, they appreciated a hiring manager who spent a lot of time and effort fielding good people. Those kinds of comments tend to be a bit self-selecting, though.
I've had a couple of candidates who didn't make it get frustrated with the process. One in particular lost his cool just trying to pseudocode a routine to determine prime factors of the input or something like that. If you lose your composure doing something like that, I don't want you in the trenches with me late at night when we have a demo to show to customers the next day and something isn't working.
When people have asked me for feedback on why they weren't made an offer, I've always tried to be as candid as possible; especially when it seemed that they were sincerely trying to improve. Screw HR and their obsessive need to CYA.
I agree with everything you've said except for the bit about puzzles -- I've never found any correlation between the results from burn-the-ropes/odd-shaped manhole cover-type questions and strong programming skills. I've had at least one candidate who did superbly on the puzzlers (had clearly not seen them before)- best performance we'd seen-and could not program his way out of a wet paper bag. We stopped the puzzlers shortly thereafter. Brain teasers are a waste of time.
Yea I have to agree with other posters. This is easy money for most software engineers because they have exactly the skills that will be posted on the ads, criteria that are checked, etc. I think even your challenge misses the point of the article which is when we post wanted ads we put down such specific skill sets that if we rigidly stick those skill sets, just like our software does, we'll miss the people that can grow into those roles.
The irony is that software engineers are so much rarer than everyone else in the market we can easily be hand screened thus bypassing the very software we created. Finding software engineers is really hard because there are so few so either you don't get a lot of people applying, which makes it easy to screen by hand, or you set the bar very low to get people in the door. Then you go through 6 months to find the right person.
If you aren't a software person its much much harder to find a job because there are so many other people looking for jobs. You have to compete much harder, downward wage pressure, etc. Hence the volume increasingly demands automated solutions that make it even harder to get past the screeners.
I happen to agree with this article that we do a poor job of specifying the skills that are absolutely mandatory vs. what's nice to have. If we back off on rigid skill set we can find great people than can grow into a job.
That makes no sense to me. I know exactly what skills my company needs (or rather, what the hiring people look for on the CV). I know exactly what the interview is looking for. I know exactly what programming language to brush up on, and I know the complete set of coding problems set in the interview.
I know it so well that the last person I recommended (for the recruitment bounty) breezed through after I tipped her off on the coding questions. I could get through the whole process easily. I doubt I'm the only person.
What kind of people set questions in interviews without knowing what answer they're hoping for? How do they know if the candidate is any good if they don't know the answer themselves? That sounds.... well, it sounds insane.
I think you are missing the point. The challenge is to design a set of hurdles that are equivalent to those faced by potential hires, not the exact ones. Of course you ought to know what your company asks for. Furthermore, I don't think its all about the questions. Part of the challenge is to design the exact same circumstances, i.e. puzzles, phone interviews, travelling, amount of time to review what the company requires, length of interviews, and so on.
breezed through after I tipped her off on the coding questions
I probably botched an interview where they expected me to come up with an RB tree fast enough (it was a company that has posted on HN).
Tipping people off to questions is cheating the test, so you have some people trying to temporarily bulk memorize algorithms that they'll forget in another month before an interview. Does anyone else not find this stupid?
I'll add another $100. I think the fundamental problem is that employers are unwilling to take on someone unless they are absolutely certain that the candidate is the right person because firing is extremely difficult and complicated (with potential for law suits) if the new hire does not prove to be a good fit.
I thought this was what probationary periods were for; evaluating a new employee with the opportunity to not continue their employment at the end of it.
Maybe the CEO got a not so gentle nudge from the investors to hurry up and hire somebody and you were the one they were interviewing next. Stuff like that happens a lot. The process is more about outside factors than the actual interviewing process itself.
I've never received an offer to work as a software engineer other than by going through the whole interview process. My impression was that the vast majority of other people who became software engineers at the companies I applied to had done the same.
I'll take your bet, if you are still inclined to give away money.
In most cases that's how the engineers got hired on in the first place, so I don't understand your beef. Plus, what you really want is to hire people better than the ones you already have.
Well if I am working at a place that would tend to imply I did get through all that. Why would my chances be less a second time around? That said, I do agree that the hiring process is rather broken, just not sure that this would be a good test to show that.
Its not that people hate receiving mail, they just hate mail that tries to make a quick buck out of them.
You should really email your customers and prospects. But don't just send them a boring borchure. Approach them in a personal way. Ask them what is bugging them at the moment? Offer to help. Give them some love in the form of an email.
I've been emailing people from HN for about a month. Everyone responds. They all just keep the conversation going as if we were old friends. Some even go out of their way to help me build my startup.
How do I do it? I really care about them. Every time I contact somebody, it is because I think they are someone worth knowing. Not for networking connections, but as a person.
Treat your customers in the same way. Talk to them. Be friendly. I know this is hard for some people to do. It used to be so hard for me to do it. But I realized that people want to deal with those who relate to them. In fact, thats my biggest marketing weapon: I focus on making a connection with people. To really interest myself in their dealings. The sales just happen by themselves after that.
Note: This does sound like a lot of self-help books. I know. And it doesn't work with everybody, because not everybody likes you. But it works with a lot of people. I'd rather be mistaken for a friendly fool, than for an arrogant know-it-all.
Do a quick exercise. Click on the usernames in this thread. Find someone who posts their email on their profile. Send them a message with the title: "Just saying hello from HN". Inside, say hello, and ask them what they have been up to. Everyone will answer. Everyone.
I'm glad you are writing the book. It seems like a worthy addition to my bookshelf. Will you be blogging about specifics mentioned in the book?