22 ms·

The Engineer Crunch

• ronaldx 13y ago
  Also, a cliff is very unattractive because we know you're motivated to fire us before the cliff - probably even if we do a good job. Indeed, you openly admit it.
  • danielweber 13y ago
    Does ERISA protect employees from that?
• pg 13y ago
  "I have never seen a startup regret being generous with equity for their early employees." Same here. I always advise startups to err on the side of generosity with equity.
  • tomsaffell 13y ago
    Can you put a number (or range) on what is generous for the first engineering hire? 2%? 3%? 5%?
    • jusben1369 13y ago
      I think the answer is all of the above. Are they pre funding? More risk = closer to 5%. Are they on their third startup with two successful exits and raised $1.5 - $3 mil in Angel already? 1 - 2%. But you're in the right range for sure. (this is the first true outside hire)
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    • toby 13y ago
      Play out the numbers (assumptions completely speculative): - How much more would this person make at a big company? ($50k?) - What's the time frame for success? (4 years vesting?) - What's the distribution of possible exits? (5% chance of $100M, 30% chance of $10M acquihire, 0.1% chance of $1B) Under these assumptions, you hit about 2.3% to make the expected values match assuming absolutely no investor preferences (which is itself silly). It would be interesting to use real seed fund data to generate the distribution and proper salary comparisons.
    • balls187 13y ago
      This is a great post by Fred Wilson about this subject. http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/04/how-to-allocate-founder-and-employee-equity.html http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/04/how-to-allocate-founder-and-... Essentially, figure out what market rate is for their salary. Since you'll likely pay a discount rate, the equity should bring them at or above market. So if Market is 105k, and I'm going to pay 55k, I will give you 50k in equity (based on a reasonable valuation--assuming you don't have an actual valuation). Using a flat rate percent can get tricky, and you can easily end up unnecessarily diluting yourself. I also think it's important to think of your first 1-3 hires as Key hires, the same way a new CEO or VP of Sales would be a key hire post Series-B. You want them to get a big chunk of money if there is a positive liquidation event.
      • jbail 13y ago
        A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. If market rate is $105k and you're paying me $55k in cash, then I'd want $100k in equity, not $50k. This is something many startups get wrong. It isn't a one-to-one swap. Even if you have some sort of reasonable valuation, equity is worthless until there's someone to sell it to. There needs to be an uncertainty/illiquidity multiple applied. Otherwise, I'll take the cash. That has literally always worked out to my benefit throughout my 15 year career in software development (even working for companies that got acquired for 9 digits).
        • scott_s 13y ago
          I think another way to put it is you need to pay them for the risk they are taking. That's why you can't do a one-to-one swap. If they get the same total amount of money that they would in a more stable position, they have no reason to take the risk.
        • balls187 13y ago
          Fair enough. I was paraphrasing the actual formula. That said, if you think equity is worthless, why are you considering being employee 1 at a startup?
          • 13y ago
    • candybar 13y ago
      Aside from where the startup is, it is also hugely dependent on who that first engineering hire is. If it's a junior developer with a lot of potential but not much experience that they are taking a chance on because one or more of the founders are quite advanced technically themselves and are willing to mentor, train, etc, even 1% is quite generous. If the hire is either on par with the founders in terms of technical skills and experience or even the sole technical employee expected to be lead the effort and eventually build the team, even 5% can be considered quite low, depending on what the founders bring to the table.
    • pg 13y ago
      Depends on the situation. If you're a single founder and you've only been working on the company for a couple months and the person you're hiring is as competent and dedicated as you are, 50% could be reasonable.
  • cryptoz 13y ago
    To me this is crazy - it's the most obvious choice to be generous with equity, with so little downside and such immense upside. Who cares how much of the company you own if it's worth nothing? And surely there's nothing more risky to an early-stage startup than unhappiness; if the founders and early employees have disagreements, or harbour any resentment that will cascade out of control. Generosity begets generosity; treat your team better than they expect and the rewards will come naturally.
    • wpietri 13y ago
      I agree completely, but I'll add that equity feels weird to spend. You've got a fixed quantity of it, it has to last you forever, you're spending it on things with hard-to-predict values, everybody wants some, and an important aspect of the fundraising game is protecting equity from predators. At least for me, these things activated my scarcity-related cognitive biases. Suddenly the obvious choice gets a lot harder to see.
      • acgourley 13y ago
        Don't think of it it as a % amount but a $ amount - this better matches the reality equity (as dollars) grows as the company grows, and thus isn't finite. Obviously i'm not saying equity is cash, but it IS a high risk investment worth a quantifiable amount of cash.
  • tptacek 13y ago
    The generosity strategy Sam Altman outlines is coupled to a "fire fast" (here, "before cliff") strategy that is hard to execute in practice; it takes a degree of ruthlessness to fire someone not because they're incompetent but because they're not performing at the level required for their equity grant, and it's not the same ruthlessness required to succeed in business. It seems especially risky for the kind of startup team where all the engineers are hired by being referred in by their friends.
    • rguzman 13y ago
      It doesn't need to be coupled to "fire fast". It is only the first quarter (or even 6th in some vesting schemes) that vests after the cliff. In my vastly more limited anecdotal experience than both of you guys', companies are not just stingy with equity, but they are also overly stingy with salaries.
      • tptacek 13y ago
        Another way I could say the same thing that sidesteps your argument is that the more generous you are with equity grants, the more ruthless you need to be about firing.
        • freyrs3 13y ago
          So then why take options at all? Statistically and economically there's little incentive to at that point, especially if management is going to create this toxic ruthless "fire fast" environment.
          • tptacek 13y ago
            The fact that employees and company principles value startup equity very differently is another reason why some companies are stingy about granting equity.
      • beat 13y ago
        That's especially true about the ongoing startup myth of underpaying because the equity is supposed to make up for it - and then being stingy with equity. Sheesh. 0.1% of a $50M buyout is $50k... how many years of salary loss is that worth at the risk? And that's assuming that 0.1% doesn't get diluted down to more like 0.05% by later funding rounds.
  • drpgq 13y ago
    Isn't the problem more that the investors are against this rather than the startup founders?
  • johnny635 13y ago
    Yup, otherwise have fun with 100% turnover in a year's time. People are jumping companies at a rate I have never ever seen before right now.
• OmarIsmail 13y ago
  “The only thing you need to do is fix immigration for founders and engineers. This will likely have far more of an impact than all of the government innovation programs put together.” - this is so darn true it's not even funny. Conversely, and I know this is pretty out there, this is what I think will be the killer app of virtual reality. If I can ship a $5K "pod" to a developer somewhere in the world which allows us to work together 90% as well as we can in person, then you're damn right I'm going to do that. I believe VR tech will get good enough (3-5 years) before immigration issues will be sorted out (10-20).
  • Filligree 13y ago
    Taxing that is going to be fun.
    • eru 13y ago
      Why? It's no more complicated from a tax perspective that remote work is today.
  • bsder 13y ago
    Immigration issues are easy to sort out. H1-B's automatically convert to Green Cards after 12 months if the person is still employed at the company. Company is responsible for the expense of the security check. It solves both the H1-B limit and the engineering shortage in one fell swoop. However, NO company lobbies for this because they like their 5+year indentured H1-B servants.
• sheetjs 13y ago
  The one part of the problem that the author missed is salary. Offering a small amount of equity is fine if you are offering an above-market salary, but it's the combination of below-market salary and minimal equity that causes the perceived crunch. "You get what you pay for"
  • Rami114 13y ago
    Agreed, unless you have some extremely appealing concept going you're not going to get interest with below-market salary offers even with average equity offering. I'd put it more brusquely: "You pay peanuts, you get monkeys". When we have jobs - infrequently mind you - at slightly below-market salary we always offered a phased increase to slightly-above market salary over the 6 month trial period. That being said, I'm seeing a lot of mentions of single week or single month trials. Is this a US trend? Across the pond here, in the UK, I've certainly not seen them.
    • TheCoelacanth 13y ago
      The norm in the US is no trial period. You start with the assumption that it's going to be permanent and if it doesn't work out you get fired.
      • Rami114 13y ago
        Crazy, we're used to probation periods here with a short notice time, that protects both sides. I assume you have to negotiate any notice period for being fired, or do you simply get no statutory notice period?
        • TheCoelacanth 13y ago
          Usually, there is no notice required from either side except in the case of mass layoffs (two weeks are expected out of politeness, but aren't legally required). That can be changed by a contract, but that usually doesn't happen for anyone but high-level executives.
• grandalf 13y ago
  This is the most insightful thing I've read about the engineer crunch in a while. The market needs to realize that good engineers have lots of options and that 0.1% is just not a meaningful amount. I'd like to see 5-8% for key engineering hires, even as companies approach Series A. Does the founder really want to get greedy and keep that extra few percent when so much depends upon solid engineering execution? Also, don't forget that 4 year vesting with a 1 year cliff is standard, so it's not as if the worth of a meaningful equity offer isn't fully obvious before the shares are "spent" on a key hire (also, before vesting, the risk is totally borne by the employee). I think the ideal situation for engineers would be to earn a solid equity offer and then have a secondary market to use to trade some of it (once it's vested) for fractional ISOs of other promising startups.
  • dfraser992 13y ago
    > Does the founder really want to get greedy and keep that extra few percent when so much depends upon solid engineering execution? Yes, some of them do. I got forced out of a startup here in London - I was the _only_ full time engineer in the IT dept. (basically was acting CTO) and one part time guy in Russia for some period of time. The company had two sales guys as well, not sure of their compensation but they were making more than me... We all quit within a period of two months due to A) the CEO flat out lying to a customer about the nature of the data they were being sold, in order to secure the sale - the customer later made threats to sue after their patience had been exhausted due to one founder trying for a month to gaslight their board about the technical nature of the data B) lies about the "cash flow problem" which I was told was preventing another person to be hired to help me (the founders were skimming profit before paying everyone, months late) The CEO's wife, who liked to play lawyer, then dragged out paying us for what they owed, trying to arbitrarily reinterpret the language of the contracts, claiming utter nonsense as logic and being over the top abusive in contract negotiations. It was all too much for everyone. Later I found out a $5 mil offer had been made to buy the company from a 3rd party - not much but enough to show the company was certainly going to be viable. So it made perfect economic sense to these sociopaths to drive out everyone who might have some moral claim to profiting from the company's success (i.e. promises were made early about "equity"). The founders deemed I was completely unnecessary at this point due to having built something that could be maintained well enough by cheap labor from India and eLance - to heck with looking into the future and seeing how an experienced engineer might open up new markets, etc. This company lost every bit of technical knowledge they had when I left. But that's sociopaths for you and how business is done anymore. I'm sure SF is full of amateur sociopaths these days.
• jjoe 13y ago
  What protects an equity-holder employee from being viciously or prematurely fired prior to the exit or cash out event?
  • jusben1369 13y ago
    Well once you get past your cliff you're vesting so they're yours if you want to exercise them.
  • potatolicious 13y ago
    Nothing. See: Mark Pincus & Zynga.
    • gphil 13y ago
      There are clauses in some agreements to prevent this from happening. Presumably, Zynga employees just didn't get these kind of rights.
  • atomical 13y ago
    Unjust enrichment.
  • troels 13y ago
    That depends on the contract. Be sure to read the fine print.
  • danielweber 13y ago
    If you don't have a seat in the board room, assume you have a giant target on your back. As soon as the company has a reason, you can be diluted to nothing. You can get a lawyer, but the proceeds are so uncertain, especially if you successfully sue. What do you get, 1% more of a company that has just lost an expensive lawsuit? (Request: court records for a normal middle-class equity-owner in a small company fighting his rapid dilution, successfully or not.)
  • argonaut 13y ago
    What prevents a company from not paying you the salary you're owed for the month? What prevents a company from firing you because you're a woman, or because you're black? The answer to your question, and these questions is the same: lawyers and lawsuits. In California, firing without cause in order to deprive an employee of a cash out event is legally actionable. How easy it is to prove is a different matter that I am completely unfamiliar with (it could be very easy or very hard).
• mathattack 13y ago
  "Finally, most founders are not willing to spend the time it takes to source engineering candidates and convince them to come interview. You can't outsource this to a recruiter until the company is fairly well-established--you have to do it yourself." This is very important. It needs to percolate into their immediate reports too. I've seen high tech companies lose great candidates because the first line managers were too busy to interview them right away. If the right talent is available, you have to maket he time.
• GuiA 13y ago
  I'm starting to be a bit disillusioned with this whole "we can't find great people" spiel that a lot of startups put up. I have friends who are extremely good engineers (i.e., a mix of: contributors to major open source projects used by a lot of SV startups, have given talks at large conferences, published papers at ACM conferences, great portfolio of side/student projects, have worked at great companies previously, frequently write high quality tech articles on their blog, have high reputations on sites like Stack Overflow, etc.) and who have been rejected at interviews from those same companies who say that they can't find talent. (it also certainly doesn't help that the standard answer is "we're sorry, we feel like there isn't a match right now" rather than something constructive. "No match" can mean anything on the spectrum that starts at "you're a terrible engineer and we don't want you" and ends at "one of our interviewers felt threatened by you because you're more knowledgeable so he veto'd you"). Seriously, if you're really desperate for engineering talent, I can give you contact info for a dozen or so of friends who are ready to work for you RIGHT NOW (provided your startup isn't an awful place with awful people, of course) and probably another dozen or two who would work for you given enough convincing. I'm honestly starting to believe that it isn't hard to hire, but that there's some psychological effect at play that leads companies to make it harder on themselves out of misplaced pride or sense of elitism. Unless everyone wants to hire Guido Van Rossum or Donald Knuth, but then a) statistically speaking, you're just setting yourself up for failure and b) you need to realize that those kind of people wouldn't want to do the glorified web dev/sys admin'ing that a lot of SV jobs are.
  • MagicWishMonkey 13y ago
    A lot of times an otherwise great engineer will be passed over due to culture fit.
  • nqureshi 13y ago
    "I'm honestly starting to believe that it isn't hard to hire" If this were true, then engineer salaries would not be rising so much. The demand for good engineers vastly outstrips supply. Also, any explanation that requires you to posit mass irrationality is usually a bad one.
    • 13y ago
• Xdes 13y ago
  >There are great hackers all over the country, and many of them can be talked into moving to the valley. For all this "we work remote" stuff that is flying around this seems to be a direct contradiction. Is moving to the valley really necessary? I can postulate coming for a face-to-face interview, but I would never want to move to California.
  • AnimalMuppet 13y ago
    It's all about communication bandwidth. How well can I communicate with you face-to-face, via voice, or via text? Standard numbers are that 7% of the communication is in the words, 38% is in the tone of voice, and 55% is in the body language. If you're not face-to-face, your communication bandwidth drops dramatically. But if you're both online at the same time, and you have videoconferencing or some equivalent, you can talk "face-to-face" without being on the same continent. I don't know how efficient that is compared to being in the same room, but I suspect it's somewhat less (you have to activate the app before you can have the conversation, and you never have a useful but accidental conversation because you ran into each other in the lunchroom).
    • falcolas 13y ago
      I work with a 90% remote, 10% local team, and due to the nature of engineering work, I find that the daily standup and and hour of shared development time while on a Hangout shares as much information as I share locally. This matches up with the amount (and quality) of interaction I had with a 100% local team as well.
    • nawitus 13y ago
      >Standard numbers are that 7% of the communication is in the words, 38% is in the tone of voice, and 55% is in the body language. Source? I'm pretty skeptical of these kinds of numbers. If you say 100 bits worth of words face-to-face, what is exactly the content of the remaining 1428 bits?
      • Domenic_S 13y ago
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonverbal_communication http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonverbal_communication
• tptacek 13y ago
  Broken record: startups are also probably rejecting a lot of engineering candidates that would perform as well or better than anyone on their existing team, because tech industry hiring processes are folkloric and irrational. I co-manage a consultancy. We operate in the valley. We're in a very specialized niche that is especially demanding of software development skills. Our skills needs also track the market, because we have to play on our clients turf. Consultancies running in steady state have an especially direct relationship between recruiting and revenue. A few years ago, we found ourselves crunched. We turned a lot of different knobs to try to solve the problem. For a while, Hacker News was our #1 recruiting vehicle. We ran ads. We went to events at schools. We shook down our networks and those of our team (by offering larger and larger recruiting bonuses, among other things). We have since resolved this problem. My current perspective is that we have little trouble filling slots as we add them, in any market --- we operate in Chicago (where it is trivially easy to recruit), SFBA (harder), and NYC (hardest). We've been in a comfortable place with recruiting for almost a year now (ie, about half the lifetime of a typical startup). I attribute our success to just a few things: * We created long-running outreach events (the Watsi-pledging crypto challenges, the joint Square MSP CTF) that are graded so that large numbers of people can engage and get value from them, but people who are especially interested in them can self-select their way to talking to us about a job. Worth mentioning: the crypto challenges, which are currently by far our most successful recruiting vehicle (followed by Stripe's CTF #2) are just a series of emails we send; they're essentially a blog post that we weaponized instead of wasting on a blog. * We totally overhauled our interview process, with three main goals: (1) we over-communicate and sell our roles before we ever get selective with candidates, (2) we use quantifiable work-sample tests as the most important weighted component in selecting candidates, and (3) we standardize interviews so we can track what is and isn't predictive of success. Both of these approaches have paid off, but improving interviews has been the more important of the two. Compare the first 2/3rds of Matasano's lifetime to the last 1/3rd. The typical candidate we've hired lately would never have gotten hired at early Matasano, because (a) they wouldn't have had the resume for it, and (b) we over-weighted intangibles like how convincing candidates were in face-to-face interviews. But the candidates we've hired lately compare extremely well to our earlier teams! It's actually kind of magical: we interview people whose only prior work experience is "Line of Business .NET Developer", and they end up showing us how to write exploits for elliptic curve partial nonce bias attacks that involve Fourier transforms and BKZ lattice reduction steps that take 6 hours to run. How? By running an outreach program that attracts people who are interested in crypto, and building an interview process that doesn't care what your resume says or how slick you are in an interview. Call it the "Moneyball" strategy. Later: if I've hijacked the thread here, let me know; I've said all this before and am happy to delete the comment.
• rgarcia 13y ago
  "If someone performs and earns their grant over four years, they are likely to increase the value of the company far more than the 1% or whatever you give them." This argument seems flawed. If I think someone is going to double the value of my company, should I be comfortable giving them up to 100% equity? Put another way: percentage growth of your company from an early stage to some point in the future most often exceeds 100%.
  • chime 13y ago
    You need to add a factor for risk in there. If there is a 10% chance that they will double the value of your company, you can give them 5%. If there is a 100% chance that they will double the value of your company, you can give them 50% and make them a co-founder. Think in terms of marginal utility. Keep giving equity until it no longer raises your expected value.
  • lincolnq 13y ago
    No, the math is slightly different (sama was approximating). http://paulgraham.com/equity.html http://paulgraham.com/equity.html
• fidotron 13y ago
  There isn't so much a shortage of engineers as a shortage of people willing to relocate to a stupidly expensive area and gamble what they have in the process. From the outside, but as a reasonably regular visitor, the Bay Area has lost the plot completely.
• Pxtl 13y ago
  I'm surprised that "get out of the valley" isn't an option for that. I mean, there are a lot of cities that produce lots of talented developers that cost a lot less than Silicon Valley rates.
  • compuguy 13y ago
    Honestly I don't get why there isn't more push to have startups in areas such as the Washington DC metro area (for example).
    • danielweber 13y ago
      And if you really need to have "an office," then build a remote office in a second-tier city and grab up all the candidates there. Fly people back and forth occasionally.
• michaelt 13y ago
  I frequently hear startups say [...] can't find a single great candidate for an engineering role no matter how hard they look. While I agree that offering better compensation is a wise move for individual companies, if the market has 10 job openings and 9 engineers, regardless of how much pay they offer one of the companies won't be able to fill the opening. Offering more money might fix hiring problems for one company, stopping one person complaining, but to stop all people complaining the only solution is to increase the supply or reduce the demand. (Increasing the supply doesn't have to mean immigration reform - it could mean training or lowering hiring standards or a bunch of other things)
  • Phlarp 13y ago
    If the market has 10 openings and 9 engineers the companies should fight over the 9 by increasing overall compensation, soon another intelligent hard working individual will be sufficiently incentivised to join the industry workforce.
    • michaelt 13y ago
      Sure, but if you want to hire someone with nonzero industry experience, your options are more limited :) this is what I mean when I say companies will have to lower their standards - inexperienced people into experienced-person positions, people who've been coding since they were 18 instead of people who've been coding since they were 10, people without university degrees instead of with them, and so on. No amount of demand can create people with two years of experience in less than two years, or people with four-year degrees in less than four years.
      • danielweber 13y ago
        You can also stop engineers from leaving for finance.
      • GFK_of_xmaspast 13y ago
        You can't go on the interstate with a vespa.
• j_baker 13y ago
  > In fact, probably less than 5% of the best hackers are even in the United States. Startups clearly need to be basing more of their decisions on unfounded conjectures. I have to say that startups seem to have unreasonable expectations of what kinds of programmers they can hire. We have plenty of viable hackers in the US, but startups don't want to hire them because they're not the next Knuth or they're "not a good cultural fit". http://www.businessinsider.com/the-real-truth-about-the-stem-shortage-that-americans-dont-want-to-hear-2013-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/the-real-truth-about-the-stem...
  • fredgrott 13y ago
    I would state that MAster with no time limit is not the same as those who cod under time limits..not knocking Knuth contributions but the requirements are somewhat different.
    • GFK_of_xmaspast 13y ago
      I'd rather have one Don Knuth than a hundred ninja rock stars.
      • jfb 13y ago
        BURNS This is a thousand monkeys working at a thousand typewriters. Soon, they'll have written the greatest novel known to mankind. (reads one of the typewriters) "It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times"?! you stupid monkey! (monkey screeches)
• djb_hackernews 13y ago
  Wait, I thought we all agreed that there isn't an engineering crunch? I am not sure what immigration has to do with this, we make plenty of STEM graduates each year, and we'd make more if the professions didn't look like they were under attack by every employer and politician. The smart kids you want to hire are smart enough to go into more protected professions, if they knew their jobs wouldn't be shipped over seas or their market flooded with foreign competition, then maybe we'd be able to attract them and keep them. I worry that focusing on equity will just exacerbate the problem, because I think that a lot of people are becoming wise to the equity lottery and just don't see a difference between 0.1% and 5% of nothing. The problem will most certainly be solved by $$, but no doubt it is tough pill to swallow for a business to pay 150k now what was 100k a few years ago... Keep in mind I am a software developer and self interested.
  • rwissmann 13y ago
    If you think your equity is worth zero you either work for the wrong company or do not understand how to use mathematics/probability theory.
    • thedufer 13y ago
      One person can only play that particular lottery maybe half a dozen times (more likely 2-3). That isn't nearly enough for the law of averages to even things out, so if you don't have a lot of room for risk, the rational thing is to value the equity at 0 (in terms of long-term planning) and be pleasantly surprised if things turn out better than that.
• x0x0 13y ago
  This post, I think, makes 2 mistakes. First, sf and the valley simply don't pay engineers well enough. This is the second, striving to become the first, most expensive housing market in the united states. $150k sounds great here until you look at that as a fraction of your housing cost and compare to anywhere else in the country, including manhattan (because unlike here, nyc isn't run by morons so they have functioning transportation systems). I don't want to just quote myself, but all this still applies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7195118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7195118 Second, immigration is a crutch to get around paying domestic employees enough. I see net emigration from the valley amongst experienced engineers in their 30s who start having families and can find better financial lives elsewhere. If companies paid well enough that moving to the bay area wasn't horrid financially, they'd find plenty of software engineering talent already in the united states. But consider my friend above: $165 total income in the midwest is (compared solely to housing cost) equivalent to approx $450k here, when holding (housing costs / post tax income) constant. edit: not to mention, companies still don't want flexible employment arrangements or remote work. I'm a data scientist and I'm good at my job (proof: employment history, employers haven't wanted me to leave, track record of accomplishments.) I'd rather live elsewhere. 66 data scientist posts on craigslist (obv w/ some duplication, but just a quick count) [1]; jobs that mention machine learning fill search results with > 100 answers [2]. Now check either of the above for telecommute or part time. Zero responses for remote or part time workers. So again, employers want their perfect employee -- skilled at his or her job, wants to move to the valley enough to take a big hit to net life living standards, doesn't have kids, and doesn't want them (cause daycare or a nanny or an SO who doesn't work is all very expensive.) [1] http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/jjj?zoomToPosting=&catAbb=jjj&query=data+scientist&excats= http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/jjj?zoomToPosting=&catAbb... [2] http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/jjj?zoomToPosting=&catAbb=jjj&query=machine+learning&excats= http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/jjj?zoomToPosting=&catAbb...
  • Consultant32452 13y ago
    Living in a high cost of living area is a FANTASTIC way to get your retirement plans going. Putting 10% of your SF income into your 401k is way better than putting 10% of your Austin, TX salary into your 401k. So while you're young and single you bank away lots of cash. Then you move and start a family elsewhere and retire comfortably. The problem is that I don't think enough people life-hack in this way.
• zallarak 13y ago
  Excellent essay. This really nails what I'd want in a dream job; knowing my effort influences my payout (via legitimately sized equity grants) and working on a mission I empathize with. Best article I've read in a while on hiring.
• jfasi 13y ago
  > if people are going to turn down the certainty of a huge salary at Google, they should get a reward for taking that risk. I often see a disconnect between perceptions of expected success of founders and engineers. I've observed this is particularly pointed for non-technical founders. To generalize, a young entrepreneur with some success under his belt is starting a company. As far as he's concerned his company is all but guaranteed to succeed: he's got the experience and sophistication necessary to make this happen, the team he's hired to his point is top-notch, he's got the attention of some investors, the product is well thought out, etc. He approaches an exceptional engineer and extends an impassioned invitation and... the engineer balks. What happened? Is he delusional about the company's prospects, thinking he's got a sure fire hit when he's actually in for a nasty surprise once his hubris collides with reality? Is the engineer a square who would rather work a boring job at a big company than live his life, and wouldn't be a good fit for the team anyway? I propose a different resolution: our confident businessman is certain about the success of the company, not the success of the engineer as part of the company. He knows the company's success is going to rocket him into an elite circle of Startup Entrepreneurs. The engineer, on the other hand, doesn't see the correlation between the company's success and his own: even if the company takes off to the tune of eight to nine digits, his little dribble of equity is just barely breaking even over the comfortable stable position he's in now.
• Matt_Mickiewicz 13y ago
  "Third, if you’re going to recruit outside of your network (usually a mistake, but sometimes there are truly no other options), focus on recruiting outside of the valley. There are great hackers all over the country, and many of them can be talked into moving to the valley." UPVOTE!! I'm shocked at how many companies are unwilling to pay for a $500 Southwest ticket to fly someone in for a day to interview from Texas or Georgia... relocation costs are easily offset by a slightly lower salary, and the person you're interviewing is unlikely to have 4 or 5 paper offers in hand.
• jamesaguilar 13y ago
  Given the offers I've heard people getting from early stage startups (engineer 2-5), I don't really get why someone would join them. Below market rate salary? 0.1% of a company that's going to exit at $80M with a 10% chance and $0 with a 90% chance? That comes out to $80k over four years of work, before taxes, in the typical successful case, which is itself atypical. And for what amounts to a relatively small bonus, I'd be expected to work 50-70 hour weeks? Sign me up!
  • Matt_Mickiewicz 13y ago
    Net Present Value is always an interesting calculation... You can run the math on YC companies relatively easily: http://www.businessinsider.com/startup-odds-of-success-2013-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/startup-odds-of-success-2013-... "37 of the 511 companies that have gone through the Y Combinator program over the past 5 years have either sold for, or are now worth, more than $40 million."
  • ryandrake 13y ago
    You forgot to include the probability of success in your calculation, for Expected Value: EV = $80M exit x 0.1% equity x 10% success rate / 4 years = $2K That awesome 0.1% equity is worth $2,000 a year. Less, because of time value of money, and the fact that you won't be cashing out yearly.
    • jamesaguilar 13y ago
      Thanks for the correction, but I did not forget it. I explicitly called out that the $80k total was only in the successful case, which is atypical, and had not been divided by time yet. That could have been worded better, I admit, but you and I are in violent agreement.
    • mattmanser 13y ago
      And that's before dilution, so you're talking much less in reality.
• jfasi 13y ago
  This implies a somewhat one-way relationship between companies and their engineers: engineers give their time and talents, and in return companies give their money and equity. Under this system, why not be selective about who you hire? If you want great work, you need to hire a great engineer. In actuality, the truth is great people aren't found, they're made. The role of a good leader isn't to squeeze great work out of his employees, but rather to develop within them the capability to do great work. Applied to hiring, this means having an understanding of the support and growth capabilities within your organization, and finding candidates who have the most potential to gain from it, rather than hiring those who are already well-developed. Applied to hiring rockstars, this makes them even more valuable: not only would they be producing outstanding work on their own, they would actually be improving the quality of the work their peers produce.
• crassus 13y ago
  Double the equity. 9 month vesting cliff. Market salary.
• cia_plant 13y ago
  What's up with the cliff anyway? You're already asking me to take a much higher level of risk and a much lower level of liquidity than I'd like in my compensation, by giving me stock options. In addition to that you want me to take on 100% of the risk of our working arrangement not working out, and in fact you insist on giving yourself a strong incentive to fire me before the first year is out? It seems ridiculously exploitative.
  • spacehome 13y ago
    I'm not sure of the details, but I think it's rooted in tax law -- that the options are classified differently if they're exercised within a year of their creation.
    • cbr 13y ago
      If that's the issue the options could vest monthly but just prohibit you from exercising them for a year. (not a lawyer) The standard reason for the cliff is that at first an employee slows everyone else down as they come up to speed, and then they start to help.
• w_t_payne 13y ago
  Or, y'know, maybe locate outside of the Valley?
• trustfundbaby 13y ago
  The other thing that is interesting to me is the ludicrously highbar, and "weed out" interview techniques that some these companies have for recruiting engineers. They're looking for someone to work on a rails app but they won't hire them unless they have demonstrated Linus-Torvalds like ability and knowledge. But the question is, why would someone with that kind of skill level want to work for you? What if you were able to grab smart engineers on their way to becoming engineering stars? Why not aim for getting a solid lead/architect and adding midlevel guys who you know are going to turn into superstars? Why not develop talent instead of competing all the way at the top of the market for the most expensive ones? Why not figure out an interview technique that can let you identify exactly these kinds of people? Its all about being resourceful and nimble enough to adjust, after all, isn't that what a startup is all about?
• rqebmm 13y ago
  The interview process is still something that hasn't been solved. A lot of companies make hiring decisions based almost entirely on how well someone does non-coding work under extreme social pressure, which is about the worst possible way to measure the prospects of a developer! Personally I really like the interview process a previous empoyer used: shortly before the interview starts we had them look over a roughly CS 102-level programming project, then we ask them to design the architecture on a whiteboard while the interviewers ask questions/give guidance. What we're really looking for here is: a.) how do they handle the social aspect of working with a superior who will often (gently) criticize your work and/or ask you to thoroughly explain why you're doing what. b.) that they have enough chops to architect a simple program. If they can pass those test I'm confident they'll be an effective team member, because at the end of the day all you really want is someone who is competent enough to be useful, and fits into your culture/team. Everything else will shake itself out. You don't need some "superstar/rockstar/ninja" (unless you're solving a particularly hard domain-specific problem) so stop looking for them and excluding everyone else. Instead start building an effective team.
• lkrubner 13y ago
  Regarding this: "Sometimes this difficulty is self-inflicted." I want to emphasize how strong this point is. In most ways, the computer programming industry is a shrinking industry in the USA. There are less computer programming jobs in the USA than there were 20 years ago. Stats from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (USA): http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/computer-programmers.htm http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/c... 1990 Number of Jobs 565,000 2010 Number of Jobs 363,100 2012 Number of Jobs 343,700 There is a tiny subset of the industry that is growing, and we associate these with the startups in San Francisco and New York. But so far these startups have not created enough jobs to offset the jobs lost due to other factors. This suggests that there must be a vast reservoir or programmers who would like programming jobs, but they can't work as programmers because the jobs have disappeared. If the numbers were smaller, you could argue that the loss of jobs was due to inaccuracies in the way Bureau of Labor gathers statistics. But the drop from 565,000 jobs to 343,700 is too large to be a spurious blip. This is a shrinking industry. Computer programming jobs are tied to manufacturing so as manufacturing leaves the USA, so to do the computer programming jobs. Don't get caught up in the hype about startups: look at the actual numbers. The government tracks these jobs. The numbers are shrinking. Especially worth a look: http://americawhatwentwrong.org/story/programming-jobs-fall/ http://americawhatwentwrong.org/story/programming-jobs-fall/ "In its 1990 Occupational Outlook Handbook, the U.S. Department of Labor was especially bullish: “The need for programmers will increase as businesses, government, schools and scientific organizations seek new applications for computers and improvements to the software already in use [and] further automation . . . will drive the growth of programmer employment.” The report predicted that the greatest demand would be for programmers with four years of college who would earn above-average salaries. When Labor made these projections in 1990, there were 565,000 computer programmers. With computer usage expanding, the department predicted that “employment of programmers is expected to grow much faster than the average for all occupations through the year 2005 . . .” It didn’t. Employment fluctuated in the years following the report, then settled into a slow downward pattern after 2000. By 2002, the number of programmers had slipped to 499,000. That was down 12 percent–not up–from 1990. Nonetheless, the Labor Department was still optimistic that the field would create jobs–not at the robust rate the agency had predicted, but at least at the same rate as the economy as a whole. Wrong again. By 2006, with the actual number of programming jobs continuing to decline, even that illusion couldn’t be maintained. With the number of jobs falling to 435,000, or 130,000 fewer than in 1990, Labor finally acknowledged that jobs in computer programming were “expected to decline slowly.” "
• wpietri 13y ago
  My approach to equity was to offer a range. We'd offer base equity and salary numbers, and then give them an ability to trade salary for equity. If I recall rightly, they got a modestly better deal than investors did. In doing that, it became clear that not everybody even wants more equity. That was a little hard for us as founders to take, because we of course thought the equity was awesome, and wanted engineers to feel a real sense of ownership. But from the numbers, it was clear that some people would rather we sold more equity to investors and just gave them the cash. I get that. If you've been around the industry for a while, you can accumulate quite a collection of expired startup lottery tickets. Landlords, mortgage-holders, and kids' orthodontists don't take options; they take cash.
  • silverlake 13y ago
    Wouldn't it make more sense if I chose 0 equity and all salary, but then bought equity with my excess salary? Now there's no vesting period. I get it all now just like an investor.
    • wpietri 13y ago
      You'd be paying with post-tax dollars rather than pre-tax dollars, and you have to be an accredited investor [1] for it to be legal. If somebody really had said, "I want to bet my whole salary on the company," I'm sure we would have be happy to accommodate them with a deal that was fair. There'd still be a vesting period, of course, for the same reason you don't get your annual salary up front on the first day. The tricky question would be the cliff, but I'm sure something could be worked out. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor#U.S._criteria http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor#U.S._criter...
      • randomdata 13y ago
        According to your link, you only need a $200K income to qualify, which you could reasonably expect in the midst of a real engineer crunch.
• pistle 13y ago
  >"Don't hire outside your network." If nobody in your network has a track record of results, become a sycophant? What if all the hackers in your network are US as well? You got less than a 5% chance of a hope to do anything according to Altman.
  • ben336 13y ago
    ...Thats not how percentages work :)
• _random_ 13y ago
  There is a gold crunch as well - I can't find 999% gold at 1$ per kg.
  • quietthrow 13y ago
    Haahahah!! Good one :)
  • whatthefox 13y ago
    Well said! If this doesn't convey the message I don't know what will. Most of the "Founders" are nothing but facades that just want to make money in the Tech world. They don't give a damn about technology or improving the world.
• kreek 13y ago
  "For most startups in the bay area"... time to move or be open to remote developers.
• strlen 13y ago
  There are two unmentioned issues in regards to stock grants and hiring: 1) Information asymmetry or just plain symmetric lack of information in regards to stock grants. 2) The price of a home in a decent school district within a "reasonable" (< 1 hour each way, i.e., no more than 2 hours a day total) commute to any cluster of software companies in Bay Area (whether SOMA, Peninsula, or South Bay). The two are closely related. When startups are competing for people against Google or any of the young public (or pre-IPO) technology companies, the issue at stake isn't salary (post series-A, startups may pay a slightly below market salary, but not an egregiously low one) but RSUs ("restricted stock units" or essentially outright stock grants: while these are treated as income for the purpose of taxation, there's also no strike price and AMT trap to worry about). The reasons why these grants (which are generally very far from the "retire on a yacht category") matter is that their ball-park value is known, they're often refreshed as part of the performance review cycle (as opposed to fixed during offer negotiation time), and if you plan on staying in Bay Area and having kids, you're relying upon them to either afford a house in a decent school district and with a reasonable commute, or to afford private school tuition. Changing grant tactics can help with information asymmetry problem (transparency about finances and valuation is nowadays the rule rather than exception in early stage companies), but they can't help with mutual lack of information: neither the founders nor the investors know with certainty a general ballpark figure of what the value of the company price will be at a liquidity event, or if there will be a liquidity event in the first place. What this means is that unless housing problems in Bay Area are addressed, in addition to the already well discussed negative externalities, startups will have an increasingly harder time hiring engineers that haven't yet experienced a liquidity event or spent four or more years at bigger companies. They would love to join a start-up, but not at the cost of their (future or existing) children's education. --- Unrelated to the above points, this paragraph is also as important as it should be obvious: "Finally, most founders are not willing to spend the time it takes to source engineering candidates and convince them to come interview. You can't outsource this to a recruiter until the company is fairly well-established--you have to do it yourself." If I receive a message from an external recruiter, it's hard to tell whether they really reasonably believe there's a good match between my skills and interest and the company, or if they're just employing a shotgun approach. I usually disregard these messages, even when I may be open to a new opportunity. On the other hand, if I receive a message from a founder or a tech lead, I try to reply even if (as, e.g., now) I'm not interested in interviewing: at the very least, it's likely they did actually mean to approach me specifically (not just anyone who has "Hadoop" in their profile), and I've an obligation to let them know that I'm not available at the moment as not to string them along. --- Finally, to underscore something else said in the article, in general, best way to hire good people, is to work on something good people enjoy working on, whether it's a greater mission or a good technical challenge. If neither of the two is there, the most straight forward startup recruiting pitch -- "come work on something cool with other smart people" -- fails.
• pastProlog 13y ago
  The beautiful girl crunch For most guys in the bay area, the beautiful girl crunch is a bigger problem than the Series A crunch (this somewhat applies to designers as well). The difference in difficulty between dating a beautiful girl and an unattractive one is remarkable--I frequently hear guys say that for unattractive girls they can find multiple great candidates without really looking but can't find a single beautiful girl for a dating role no matter how hard they look. First, of all the canonical terrible advice advisors give, being cheap is among the worst. I have never seen a hardup guy regret being generous. For most beautiful girls, this is as much about fairness and feeling valued as it is about the money. And of course, if girls are going to turn down the certainty of dating a handsome, confident sales guy, they should get a reward for taking that risk. If you’re going to look outside of your network of friends from your Defense of the Ancients guild (usually a mistake, but sometimes there are truly no other options), focus on recruiting girls outside of the valley. Finally, most engineers are not willing to spend the time it takes to develop a normal social life with regular non-technical people whereas they might develop normal personality traits and meet someone nice. You can't outsource this though--you have to do it yourself. Footnote: * Every time someone from the government asks me what they can do to help hard-up engineers, I always say a version of "The only thing you need to do is fix immigration for beautiful girls." We need more beautiful, financially desperate girls from third world countries whose standards are not as high as American ones.
  • dfraser992 13y ago
    EXCELLENT metaphor!
  • YokoZar 13y ago
    I once (sarcastically) argued in a student newspaper that attractive people should be favored in college admissions, since students would much rather share a campus with more attractive people. To me it made more sense in terms of promoting the desirability of attending the school than a whole lot of existing practices, such as favoring athletes or the children of alumni.
  • GFK_of_xmaspast 13y ago
    And sometimes when you interview at a place you get the feeling it's full of creeps and fedoras and you moonwalk on out of there as soon as you possibly can.
• cratermoon 13y ago
  tl;dr: There's no engineering crunch, just companies that don't want to pay market rates. The Free Market from startup/VC perspective: It works when we profit, but when we want to hire cheap labor it's because there's not enough people.
  • puppetmaster3 13y ago
    word.
  • CmonDev 13y ago
    Even so called "market rates" are actually unrealistically low. http://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valleys-most-celebrated-ceos-conspired-to-drive-down-100000-tech-engineers-wages http://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valley...
• bgentry 13y ago
  I have never seen a startup regret being generous with equity for their early employees. A few years ago, Zynga told some early employees with lots of shares that they had to give back some of their stock or they'd be fired: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-57322150-17/zynga-to-employees-give-back-our-stock-or-youll-be-fired/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-57322150-17/zynga-to-emplo... http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/11/10/zynga-stock-scandal/ http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/11/10/zynga-stock-scanda... I'm not sure if that qualifies as "regret", or if it's just greed, but it's one very public example of a company deciding they've given too many options to early employees.
  • prostoalex 13y ago
    Everybody else fires, they were nice enough to say "if you like it here, you can stay". Most of people involved came through acquisitions, not early hiring.
• coffeemug 13y ago
  In my experience non-engineering roles are just as difficult to fill. You can easily find a non-technical hire if you don't know what you want or don't care about quality. If you care about quality, you'll be stuck in the same crunch. For example, the skill of being able to write without run-on sentences eliminates 99.9% of the candidates in the pool, for any role. Want candidates who can write reasonably well? Hiring just got 100x more difficult. In a modern environment, if you're non-technical and can't write well, what can you do?
  • UK-AL 13y ago
    Founder =P
• puppetmaster3 13y ago
  It's bogus. There is no shortage of engineers. But there are many badly managed corps that only H1 would work at.
• randunel 13y ago
  As a non-us engineer, I've had 2 visa applications denied. I guess Europe wins :D
• RogerL 13y ago
  I would like to share how inhuman a lot of the interview processes are. Some examples: * recruiter says a startup is interested, introduces me to the HR person via email. I get a 2 sentence email from HR, telling me that I have to schedule a phone technical interview in the next day or two, they need to onboard FAST. Okay, I don't know what the job is, who the client is, and the last thing I want to do is be grilled over the phone. I'm certainly uninterested in your time crunch and am not going to rearrange my life to meet your schedule requirements (there were narrow stipulations on acceptable times). * Talk with a company, and explain that I don't do whiteboard interviewing. Oh, a session is no problem, but the interview has to be as much letting me interview and question you. 'No problem, we just want to talk and see where you'll fit in'. Come the day, and I barely get a 'hi', just nonstop whiteboard coding in an intense environment. Took the whole day off for that time waste. Two of the sessions had me solve essentially the identical problem - I waste my day, they don't take 5 minutes to plan out what I'll be asked. Then they call me back, and tell me I have to come in for another series a day later, which was entirely unexpected, and not communicated to me prior to agreeing to interview. And if my requests for how the interview is conducted can't be honored, fine, tell me, and either I'll change my mind or decide not to waste a day taken from work. The cap to all of that was the 'shoot the messenger' emails when I said I was not accepting due to how this all went down (and oh, I didn't respond quickly enough to that email, meaning it took me a few hours, so more grief for that). * Just general, insistent demands as if I have nothing to do but interview with your company. If you have your resume out there, all you do is field phone calls and emails. I'm not going to pursue anything without knowing quite a bit about the job because I don't have to. There is always going to be better, low hanging fruit - cold emails with very accurate, detailed descriptions of a wickedly cool start up, recruiters that actually get to know your skill sets and desires, and so on. * No exposure to what the work will be like. It's so secret they can't tell you, or there is a 'variety of work', or whatever. No work environment tour. No discussion of compensation, work hours, and so on until you've wasted a day or more in interviews. * 'Go and study this book for a month, and then apply'. Um, I'm 47 and have a very successful career of inventions and products. Surely you don't have to quiz me on red-black tree implementation to access my abilities. If I need to know that, I'll open the book and learn it. It was, by and large, very unpleasant. Perhaps it is not the best proxy, but I go in assuming the interview process is the time you are trying to impress and woo me the most, and judge you on that.
• frodopwns 13y ago
  There is no engineer crunch. Only wannabe founders who can't do anything but talk big. "Hey do you want to join my startup? We are reinventing analytics....again."
• chris_mahan 13y ago
  "Great hackers also want the opportunity to work with really smart people and the opportunity to work on interesting problems, and the nature of mission-oriented companies is such that they usually end up offering these as well." Uh, I don't care if it's "saving the world and the whales" or "enhancing legal resolution outcomes through analytics". I care that I am granted enough latitude to design and implement a good solution, instead of being handed a software toolbox and told to "bang on nails" all day.
• puppetmaster3 13y ago
  Would you say there's not a shortage of lawyers, and why is that?
  • PeterisP 13y ago
    There's an overproduction of lawyers in USA, as evidenced by falling entry-level wages in that area and growing rate of law school graduates who are unpaid interns, unemployed or work less-than-their-education jobs.
    • puppetmaster3 13y ago
      That sounds like propaganda. I am paying a lawyer in SV $600 /hr. Show me a link where I can get one for $65? I'll also argue that software engineers train harder and maintain more than lawyers. If the market worked, the wages would raise till the supply catches up. But the market appears to be manipulated.
• arbuge 13y ago
  Recruiting good web developers is tough, no question, but I remember trying to recruit good analog IC design engineers at my previous startup. That made hiring developers look like a cakewalk in comparison. There were maybe 100-200 worldwide who fit the bill, all of whom were already happily employed at very comfortable jobs.
  • vonmoltke 13y ago
    > I remember trying to recruit good analog IC design engineers at my previous startup ... There were maybe 100-200 worldwide who fit the bill You have atrociously high standards for "good" if that is the size of your pool.
    • arbuge 13y ago
      Nope.
• prathammittal 13y ago
  Talent crunch debate is an elusive one. No credible data is available and we interpret to make ourselves feel good- sour grapes. One thing I would say (in my capacity as having gone to high school in India) is that there are thousands of great engineers (I'm talking about my friends from IIT and IIT) who would die to work for a Dropbox or an Airbnb. I'm guessing its a similar situation in S.America, Europe, China (?) etc. Now, as far as I know, these companies don't hire in most of these countries. But why don't they? I don't understand. Visa stuff is less of a concern actually.. its been thrashed more than it deserves. Indian consulting companies got like 30K H1Bs last year. 30,000 engineers moved from India to the US. Surely, Dropbox can get 20 good ones. And your startup could probably get a handful too. These engineers grew up on hacker news - so culture is not the problem. They are moving seven seas - so they work hard and aren't dicks. Their options in India are limited - so the salary negotiation is less of a nightmare. Not sure if there are any republicans here, so I'll not defend the "Indian developer taking away American job" phenomenon. Hopefully, HNers get why immigration makes sense. We are trying at VenturePact.com to build a vetted international talent marketplace. We launched a couple of weeks ago in Delhi and a few tech hubs in India and got hundreds of apps from developers wanting to work in the valley or NY. Well, many applications were not suitable BUT many were. Would love to read what people think of hiring internationally. And what would the preference be between getting them to work remotely vs relocate.
• EGreg 13y ago
  Why not use oDesk and overseas developers? Today's teams communicate using remote tools even when in cubicles next door. Why severely limit yourself geographically in your search?
• joesmo 13y ago
  Pay 20% or more above the so called market rate and you'll sew there is no crunch. It's that easy.
• timedoctor 13y ago
  We find it moderately difficult, but definitely possible to find great people. The secret is NOT looking in Silicon valley and the bay area where thousands of extremely well funded companies are looking for talented developers. Totally agree with the last sentiments that if you're in the bay area why should you ONLY considering hiring in the same area? It shocks me that technology companies can be so parochial. You can hire across the entire US, Canada is just nearby and then there is ... the rest of the planet!
• erichocean 13y ago
  As a teenager, I came to the conclusion that I would never get a job as a result of an interview. I'd be even less likely to get past HR and get an interview. So I haven't interviewed for a single job for the last 18 years. Sometimes people ask me for my resume; I don't have one. What I did instead is take a problem I was interested in, solve it on paper, and then approach a company to pay me to implement that solution for them (along with an estimate of the cost). That has worked out really, really well for me. If you find that interviewers or HR aren't sizing you up correctly, this approach might be an option. Businesses, when it comes to tech, mostly just want problems solved. If you can do that, you'll get hired. Nothing shows you can do something like bringing them the (on paper) solution, and offering to built it.