hiring // Vivek's web

I’ve made a ton of mistakes in hiring people and wanted to write down the lessons I’ve learnt till now. I’m not sure how many parts this post would have, here’s the first one anyway.

Speed vs hire
Why does a company having 5x more programmers than you, move slowly or at the same pace as you? Apart from the overhead to manage more people, it’s the failure to maintain a high hiring bar that’s causing the slowness. I made this mistake. It’s a very rationale thing for anyone to ensure that the hiring bar is kept high. But why do we slip? or more precisely, why did I slip? Some of the reasons below may resonate with you. Let’s call the bad hire, Joe.

Insecurity
I had an insecure feeling that if I didn’t replace the programmer who quit, immediately, my product would slow down, it’d affect customers, revenue would go down and so on. It’s bad to hire (or even interview) anyone with that sort of a mindset. It makes you twist facts, rearrange some of the evaluation parameters just to make that hire and feel “secure”. Ironically, all the things I feared started to happen, before I asked Joe to leave.

Size
The most dumbest way to evaluate a company is to base it on it’s size ^[1] and more often than not that seems to be the metric everyone is bothered about. The first question anyone (friends/investors/press) you meet asks is “How big are you now?” This made me feel weak as a founder since I thought I wasn’t “growing”. Thankfully I didn’t make any hires based on this but I did have those moments.

Betting
Someone with a really impressive profile is interested in your company but doesn’t completely convince you. What do you do? I made a mistake of hiring Joe thinking he’ll eventually contribute because he has a strong profile. That never happened. The “eventual” in a startup is a few weeks or maybe even days.

Goal
One bad goal that you can set for the company is determining how many people you want to hire in the next x months. How many times have you heard a statement similar to this “We’d like to double our team by next quarter“. That’s a sure sign of lowering the bar at some stage in order to meet the goal.

All of the reasons directly relate to desperation to hire someone to grow the company. It’s okay to wait for 3 months with a slow growth and then hire someone who’ll make the growth exponential to match the goal at the end of the year, than hiring when you’re not completely sure of.

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Notes
[1] Instagram was worth $1B when they were just a 12 people team.

Enough has been said about the war for talent in the valley. It’s definitely hard to hire good engineers and it’s just ending up in a zero sum game where Google tries to poach from Facebook, Facebook from Twitter, Twitter from … and so on. And then there are a few engineers in these companies who’d like to work for a startup mostly because they’d want to do one in the near future. In fact, someone built a site for that.

It’s getting increasingly easy for good hackers to start companies. Startups are becoming almost risk-free because even if you fail, a team of good developers might be worth $1M * no. of hackers, going by the recent acqui-hires.

Background
I’m one of the founders of Interviewstreet and we conduct programming contests to match programmers with companies. ^[1] Over the last year we conducted a lof of contests and what surprised us most was, out of the 40-50 developers who were hired through us, 85% were international candidates. The companies which hired weren’t large enterprises but really good tech companies like Quora, PocketGems, Evernote, RocketFuel, etc. They got some of the best hackers to work for them.

Sweet spot
There’s a cap on the number of H-1b’s that can be issued, primarily because the US govt. fears that immigrants are going to eat away local jobs. This is SO wrong. Increasing the cap will make the world much better or at least the US economy. Here’s why:

Talented hackers are everywhere and since it’s so easy to know about different technologies, the geographical limitations don’t come into play.^[2] The odds of finding a good hacker in India might just be about the same as finding one here. And talented hackers want to move to the valley because they love building things and valley is the epicenter of it.^[3] They’d love to get plugged into the ecosystem, work for a great startup and eventually build something on their own. This almost sounds like a biopic of some of my friends who’re doing fantastic right now creating more jobs. I personally know people who’ve rejected offers from Google & Amazon in India to work for lesser-known startups in the valley because it’s worth in the long term. This is a sweet spot for both the companies to get great talent and hackers to work on the path breaking companies.

We conducted a contest for all the IIT’s in India. The top rankers are going to join Facebook this fall. Increasing the cap will only help creating more companies or greater value in a much faster pace. It’s sad that the H-1b cap for this year is already full and if you make an offer to someone right now, she can join only in Oct 2013. It’ll be fantastic if the immigration policies and rules can be relaxed or more favorable. It’s only going to create a much better place.

Notes
[1] Lets not debate whether ACM style programming contests are the right way to judge a programmer. There needs to be some starting point and this seems to work best at least for programmers from 0-2 years of experience.
[2] It’s not true for designers. I don’t know why, but the odds of finding a good one here is much higher than India.
[3] Why can’t hackers build stuff wherever they are? or why is Silicon valley a better place?

a. Access to investors (money) is higher. Web startups aren’t cheap to build, servers are. To hire one developer + a designer, you’ll need to spend at least $200k/year.
b. There are no technology limitations here. For eg: you can assume a large number of people have iPhones and a good majority are always connected to internet. This leads to identifying a lot of interesting ideas to work on.

Shameless plug
We’re conducting a series of monthly programming contests starting October to hire the best international candidates before the larger companies take them on board. If your company is interested to participate, e-mail me: vivek [at] interviewstreet

Hiring lessons – Part 1

Immigration

Vivek’s blog