30 ms·

Inside the Mirrortocracy

393 points by ahupp 12y ago

x0x0 12y ago
Carlos sounds like a wanker who spends too much time reading trust fund assholes on gawker bitch (and lie! Hi Sam) about startups. Way over here in reality: I've worked for 6 startups, some you've heard of, and some you haven't. At the smallest I was employee 6; at the largest ~60. Now, I'm not claiming I've never seen unprofessional behavior, but 1 - the interview process has been pretty obvious. Yes, I've grabbed dinner with founders at one company. What the hell do you think eating dinner with two people you just met to discuss their company is, exactly? 2 - In 6 startups, I've never gone drinking with the team before starting, nor do I know of anyone who has. None of my friends from those startups who are on im right now has either. 3 - At one startup, some engineers went to strip clubs. Not my thing. No known ill effects. 4 - I don't go drinking with coworkers except maybe once every three months. And drinking means 1-2 beers then out; it's been probably 3 years since I spent a whole night drinking with coworkers. No known ill effects. 5 - perhaps some people should leave sf and see the peninsula and valley. There's a whole world of startups here that have 30+ year old employees, some with kids. At many of these adult companies it's fine to come in around 9, bust ass, and walk out the door at 5:30. If you don't fuck around with pingpong and scooters all goddamn day, you'll find you don't have to spend 12 hours in the office to get your job done. Me personally: no fucking scooters, no ping pong. No known ill effects. 6 - I do wonder if Carlos would complain similarly if an employee came to an interview severely underdressed and the company held it against him or her. Probably not. So learning not to wear a 3-piece suit to a startup interview is just part of the gig. Do, oh, 60 minutes of reading on the internet and you'll probably be fine. Hell, email your damn recruiter and ask. He or she really wants you to get that job. 7 - For ultra-small startups, recruiting from social circles is just part of the deal. I imagine very few tiny companies really hire randoms off the internet, or whatever people did before craigslist and dice. 8 - whining about white and asian males is fine, but how on earth did he miss indian males? Has he ever seen the valley? 9 - on a serious note, it's really weird how startup demographics mirror cs degree demographics. 10 - and while I do strongly believe we should make the industry more inclusive -- holding tiny startups responsible for not creating a recruiting pipeline back to high school is ridiculous. I'm not sure where social responsibilities kick in; it's some gradient between the 1 person company and the $10B corp. But the small startups don't have the resources to do much about it.
- dagw 12y ago
  Whining about white and asian males is fine, but how on earth did he miss indian males? Has he ever seen the valley? Uh? On the maps I have India is in Asia.
  - x0x0 12y ago
    are you from the UK? In the US, colloquially, asian == japan, korea, china, vietnam, cambodia, laos and indian = people from india. Or perhaps you would call them south-east asian? But you would never call a person from india as asian.
    - taejo 12y ago
      South-East Asia generally refers to Vietnam, Thailand, etc. Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, etc. are South Asia.
      - x0x0 12y ago
        sorry, right, south-asian. I'm tired. And also american, and therefore know nothing about geography =P
  - baddox 12y ago
    The Middle East is in Asia as well. Do you refer to, say, Israelis and Saudis as "Asian"? I gather that the terminology varies.
- tempodox 12y ago
  10 ... But the small startups don't have the resources to do much about it. This is not about moral obligations. It's about how stupid it is to use such a subjective filter for potential hires while lying to yourselves how “open” and “cool” you are.
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  Ah, the good old "this hasn't happened to me so it doesn't happen" argument.
austinz 12y ago
That linked 42Floors blog post is terribly self-unaware. > Most startups take the building of their culture very seriously, especially when the culture is still new and quite fragile. If your culture is so fucking fragile that a guy wearing a suit (as opposed to a T-shirt and jeans) poses an existential threat to it, you need to re-evaluate whether you are actually building a company 'culture', or just some random agglomeration of the personality traits of the company's earliest employees. > My friend Shawn just brought organic heirloom carrots and a 6-pack of Sightglass coffee to an interview as a gift. That’s awesome. If I were a founder and you were a candidate who tried to bribe me like this, I'd politely show you the door. Why does the gift need to come before the interview? If it's a token of appreciation, why not after the acceptance or rejection? Are you hiring candidates based on their technical credentials, or their hipster credentials?
- minikomi 12y ago
  To think, all this time, I've been bringing non-organic carrots to interviews. Oh the shame.
  - tragic 12y ago
    I wouldn't want to work for a start-up that wasn't happy with a box of Micro Chips and a tin of special brew.
  - jonnathanson 12y ago
    "This is a Golden Sunrise carrot, in burnt orange with off-green foliage. Heritage. What do you think?" "Very nice, Bateman," Bryce replies. "When did a dork like you get so tasteful?" It's all going well, and then Van Patten places his carrot on the table. It's fucking magnificent. "This," he says, "Is a Pioneer Ridge carrot, in deep ochre with leaves in a color called 'hazy forest.' The seed stock is heritage, and the planting was organic." "Amazing," says Bryce. "This is the best carrot I've seen all day." I can't believe Bryce prefers Van Patten's carrot to mine.
- lilsunnybee 12y ago
  > Sometimes we’ll have a thirty minute interview extend the rest of the day and into the evening. We don’t mandate it, and we don’t ding you if you have other plans. But when it works out organically, it’s a nice thing for everyone and it moves the process along much faster. Yeah we're not going to penalize you if you don't have your schedule completely open. Like if you have kids or commitments or something. It's cool! But it's also sort of a strong signal that you're just not going to be a good fit here. > My friend Shawn just brought organic heirloom carrots and a 6-pack of Sightglass coffee to an interview as a gift. That’s awesome. If you want to improve your chances of getting hired just bring some awesome gifts along. Also it helps a lot if you're already a friend of someone here, which totally isn't insularity it's just having a strong network and connections.
7Figures2Commas 12y ago
> This implies that there is a large untapped talent pool to be developed. Since the tech war boils down to a talent war, the company that figures out how to get over itself and tap that pool wins...You want a juicy industry to disrupt? How about your own? This is a great post, but I take issue with the author's conclusion. The harsh reality is that most of these so-called Valley Culture startups aren't actually competing in a "tech war." Most have relatively simple CRUD apps with at best moderate usage. Founders delude themselves into believing that they need far more engineering resources than they really do for obvious reasons, and investors have plenty of reasons of their own for indulging and rewarding these delusions. The good news is that no disruption is needed. The majority of the Valley Culture startups will die off in the next several years and at some point, the economic and monetary policy environment will ensure that they're not replaced with a new batch of Valley Culture startups. In the meantime, there are plenty of opportunities (in the Bay Area and elsewhere) for folks who don't want to deal with the nonsense.
- lucasnemeth 12y ago
  Yes. I agree with you. The post is great but the conclusion is weak. I believe, a lot of this Culture constructo comes from marketing needs. They want to have a nice IstockPhoto start-up for investors.
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  Indeed. And this is a particular problem in tech and the valley especially. In many other industries and other locations is perfectly acceptable to just run a business. Make stuff that people want and get on with your lives. But in an SV startup you exist in this bizarre world where if you're not changing the world with engineers who are the best of the best of the best then you're somehow fucking up. They don't actually hire the top 1% (or even 10%) of engineers but they create an elaborate kabuki dance which gives them plausible rationalizability that they do. The downside is more than just passing up good engineers though. Lots and lots of research has shown that more diverse teams come up with superior and more robust solutions to problems. When everyone thinks the same way about a problem they come up with the same solutions, but this just exacerbates the problems of satisficing. When there's diversity and a true interchange of ideas combined with robust intellectual skepticism and criticism innovation is enhanced and it's easier to break out of the local minima trap.
pdkl95 12y ago
> It’s not that we’re so petty or strict about the dress code > that we are going to disqualify him for not following an > unwritten rule, but we know empirically that people who come > in dressed in suits rarely work out well for our team. I suggest comparing this...umm... shallow attitude with this example from a very different end of the economic spectrum (which was a link I found here on HN late last year): http://tressiemc.com/2013/10/29/the-logic-of-stupid-poor-people/ Type of job and income level seem to independent of the problem of gatekeepers (petty exercising of local power, often over superficial traits such as the current popular trends in apparel).
- gretful 12y ago
  It's funny, really. Even poor white men are treated this way. People judge by appearances. People want to be around people that are like them. They want a 'tribe', not diversity. It's human nature.
dkarapetyan 12y ago
I have noticed this myself at a few places I have interviewed and after the 2nd or 3rd time you can kinda smell it. Most of the time the company is just a bunch of 20-somethings running around with their heads on fire, working ridiculous hours because they have no idea what their tech stack is supposed to actually be, all the while getting paid almost nothing for wasting their best years in a monoculture bubble. Best thing you can do is just avoid those places like the plague. There are places that are run by grown ups and I don't mean people older than 20-something but people that are mature enough to understand what diversity and culture really mean. Places where there is a balance between work and personal life and where people don't pretend to be in a frat house because it is the only way they know how to handle themselves. I think the only reason those cultures persist is because they are extremely cheap to maintain from a capital perspective and you can have 10 of them running in parallel to increase your odds of hitting a jackpot and getting acquired by google or facebook and raking in some nice returns for your investors which by the way are way older than 20-something. So if you look at it from that perspective it is all about maximizing returns from an investor's perspective and the rest of it is just-so story to keep the pipeline of 20 year olds churning. I think there are some nice parallels between virgins waiting in heaven and million dollar acquisitions. The tactics being used to exploit the minds of the impressionable are the same in both scenarios. The insular cultures that result from those tactics is just a natural byproduct.
facepalm 12y ago
So what is a good/correct hiring criterion? I was under the impression that nobody really knows. And I am not convinced that it is a bad idea to look for "cultural fit". For example I don't dismiss anybody as a programmer who has never heard about Paul Graham or Joel Spolsky, but certainly consider it weird and it's probably at least a minus in my book.
- dkarapetyan 12y ago
  Some people live and breathe valley culture and others don't. I have met great programmers and just generally smart people on both sides of the fence. It's not the particular cultural understanding that makes them good or bad. It is usually something else. I wouldn't hold it against you if all you did in your spare time was paint portraits but for your day job you were a programmer. In fact that kind of variety in interests is indicative of intelligence whereas idol worshipping is not. Smart people tend to know there are no sacred cows and also tend to come from all walks of life with all sorts of passions and interests. The point of the article is that superficial matters like dress code are the last thing you should be looking at when trying to hire and that monocultures in general are something to be avoided. You can't do that though if you are only ever hiring people that think, talk, and in general act like you.
  - facepalm 12y ago
    So where is the fundamental argument against monocultures? The paypal founder seems to disagree? Is it just political correctness, or is there some hard data? In theory I am all for diversity, but I can imagine that in some endeavours it helps if you get along with the people in your team. I don't think "hiring what you know" is really that much of a mistake. I would hire my friends, for example, because I already know I get along with them.
    - belandrew 12y ago
      The fundamental argument is that if you hire more similar people, you will get similar results. Are you a billionaire yet? If not, maybe you should hire some different types of people in order to deliver different results. People with different mindsets will challenge you. They will disagree with your decisions. They will think of different approaches that may be much better than what you are doing. If you let them, they may drastically improve your business. Are your friends the best fit for the job? What if someone likes different music and whatever but is ten times as effective at that type of position? I would consider the latter far more important. You're hiring people to do a job, not socialize with.
fnordsensei 12y ago
Yet another absurdity from Monty Python has turned into reality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP0sqRMzkwo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP0sqRMzkwo
- danielweber 12y ago
  The end of that video is the perfect accompaniment to the 42floors blog. "He showed up in a suit, so he wasn't going to be hired, and we didn't tell him for the whole night! HA HA HA HA!!"
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
qwerta 12y ago
I would not call it *tocracy but business model. Company can pay under-market salary, if it inflates ego of its employees and make them feel special. It already works in science, fashion, medicine...
pron 12y ago
> Without a natural feedback loop, interviewing mostly runs on myth and survivor bias. It is a law of human nature that a chaotic environment breeds magical thinking and ingroup allegiance, and there are few business environments more chaotic than Silicon Valley, where startups succeed or fail seemingly at random. The noise calls for reason, and because there are no true known causes for success our mind demands some explanation. How many times have we read the line -- often written by some very smart people -- "correlation isn't causation, but we've found a strong correlation between....". What follows the but in that sentence is what is known as superstition. Correlation doesn't equal causation, but no buts follow. Actually, correlation plus confirmation bias equals magical thinking, and "data driven" correlation (with no confirmation bias) equals bigotry. Failing to realize that correlation without causation provides us with exactly zero predictive abilities (it might be "predictive" on unknown present data, but not on future data) is the root of a lot of evil. In fact, "data driven" correlation -- because it disguises itself as knowledge -- creates (or, usually, reinforces) a reverse causation. > Whatever else one can say about the Mirrortocracy, it has the virtue of actually working, in the sense that the lucky few who break in have a decent rate of success. This is the worst of all fallacies belying the "SV logic". Even supposing it were true, a large-number statistical observation says little or nothing about the behavior of a single random variable, or a single startup in this instance. Yes, the startup system "works" (for whom is another question) on the whole, but the vast majority of individual startups still fail. Learning back from correlative observations on the large system and implying the so called lessons to an individual company has little grounds in any rigorous reasoning. > You can protest your logic and impartiality all day long, but the only honest statement is that we're all biased. Understanding this is one of the keys to progress. How many times have we seen posts discussing sexism in tech deemed "controversial" here on HN? But the truth is that the chance a member of a society imbued with biases for millennia is not sexist (or otherwise biased) is extremely slim. The only way to fight this bias is to seek it out and see it (because it's there).
- sharpneli 12y ago
  "Correlation doesn't equal causation" I've noticed that people tend to misinterpret this sentence. In a lot of discussions it shows that people think that there can be correlation while the things don't have _ANY_ relationship between eachother, as in the correlation would arise purely trough random chance. That is blatantly false. Correlation implies at very minimum a causal link trough a third effect. The traditional example of drownings and ice cream consumption has that third link. Nice summer days. So those two are linked. I think one should say "Correlation doesn't imply direct causation". That's closer to the truth.
CmonDev 12y ago
"It's hard to find good people to hire" Oh, come on! Where is this myth coming from? I don't know about USA, but here in London there is an over-abundance of IT workforce (what else would justify the sub £60k senior dev job offers).
- KaiserPro 12y ago
  Yeah but none of them are 25, thin, tall, tattooed and have boyish mustachios. don't be hatin' bro, or what ever the vernacular is.
  - tragic 12y ago
    Let me take you round the streets of Shoreditch. Although it's more full beards at the moment than moustaches. Which I, for one, consider an improvement.
  - facepalm 12y ago
    Heh you are not supposed to judge people based on such superficial traits. Programming skill is all that counts (according to the people who dissed me in this thread anyway).
- seestheday 12y ago
  Every time I hear about salaries in London it makes me mad. Why is the pay so bad? How is it possible that the value isn't recognized? Are you able to demonstrate the value that you bring, or is it so much an old boys club that dev's are thought of as factory workers? On a related note - why aren't there more senior software dev's building their own businesses? It seems like you have so little to lose.
  - gaius 12y ago
    Yes, the old class system. Engineers, no matter how qualified, better even than managers, are "blue collar" workers still. Better to have the right tie, played the right sports, and your father to use his network to give you a leg up. Even if you only have a a Third from Loughborough or Aberyswyth or Durham or some other joke university. Only the City pays fair market wages to technical people, because contrary to popular belief, the old boys were ruthlessly driven out in the 80s.
inventor 12y ago
If like Rome, Silicon Valley should ever lose it's eminence, the blog post from 42Floors is a classic piece of evidence as to why it happened.
hellbreakslose 12y ago
I wouldn't like to work at your company in a million years... What kind of way is "come for a coffee with us" I got my own friends Nerd. My colleagues are my colleagues. I don't say I'll be rude to them or I won't be a nice person to work with... But if I don't have the time for your skateboarding or your coffee I won't have. Your company sounds the ideal company for people with no families no friends, no life ... literally no life.
rayiner 12y ago
> “Well, I grabbed coffee with the founder, and I had dinner with the team last night, and then we went to a bar together.” I'm no teetotaler, but bars can be uncomfortable to downright hostile places for the majority of people (women + people who don't drink for religious or health reasons). It's absolutely inappropriate and unprofessional to incorporate one into an interview. This is typical "old boy's club" shit, just with hipster glasses and organic carrots.
- opendais 12y ago
  Yep. I'd decline and not get the job. I know that already [hint: I don't drink]. It is quite amazing how many people are completely oblivious to their own biases.
  - facepalm 12y ago
    Who says they are oblivious? Maybe they just don't like to hire people who don't drink. Why should they be obliged to hire them?
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - opendais 12y ago
      I never said they should be obligated to hire them. It is really inefficient to pick IT, UX, Sysadmin, etc. talent based on whether they drink or not. So I'm assuming they are oblivious.
      - facepalm 12y ago
        I'm sure if they are desperate enough they will overlook the drinking requirement. Maybe the hiring situation is not that desperate yet. Edit: re "religious" argument: surely you can get some non-alcoholic drink at a bar? Water, if nothing else?
        12y ago
jasallen 12y ago
This post is brilliant and correct. The best part is where he closes with the acknowledgement that the system works... to a limited degree. He's not just slamming it. It is actually an ok way to minimize risk at the cost of upside in the short term. But it is unscalable for a couple key reasons. (1) Lack of diversity is lack of ideas and experiences, you may fail to find the "next big thing" simply because your echo chamber doesn't include that experience. (2) raw scale. There are only so many Stanford grads et al out there. When you need your 25th, 100th or 150th technical person you will need to have achieved either Google's cachet or start expending your parameters quite a lot. Finding people's value is a very important management skill that seems to have been eschewed in this "cultural fit" culture. It's true there are some people that will be poison, but if the majority of people with the right skills are bad for your organization rather than the majority being able to be a positive, you should ask yourself if your organization is adequately healthy and robust, or is it an infant in an incubator, only surviving as long as you obsessively manage every input.
- throneaway 12y ago
  What if it turns out that diversity isn't nearly as important as raw talent? I would be surprised if it were. I'm waiting for all the successful startups running diversity seminars from day one.
vfxGer 12y ago
What I find infuriating is how all these companies think they are so unique with their interviewing process then ask the same inane questions. This is worse when the same questions are asked by different people at the same company. College qualifications or any real qualifications are being dismissed by more and more people but the vacuum that has been left is being filled with crap like 15+ rounds of interviews and/or 12 hour interviews. The hiring process is currently broken. I think the only fix is to have proper, trusted qualifications (again?).
- Taek 12y ago
  Qualifications are hard. I just graduated, and now that I'm a CEO I can tell you there's no way I'd hire someone just because they have my degree. At RPI (my school), there are at least as many completely worthless developers as there are diamonds, and they all have one degree. I don't trust qualifications alone.
  - vfxGer 12y ago
    I agree, I wouldn't hire anyone just because they have my degree either BUT we need some qualifications to fill this gap otherwise the interview process will get more and more unwieldy.
JVIDEL 12y ago
I think the article makes a mistake with its use of the word "diversity" here since these days the common use its ingrained more as a matter of race/gender and not so much opinions, and really you can find plenty of groups with that idea of diversity where everyone thinks the same and there's no debate whatsoever. The word OP is looking for is groupthink, and the problem he's describing starts with deindividuation, the process when the group cohesiveness takes priority over individual freedom of expression. And well the problem with this "mirrortocracy" (which is just a new word to describe Nepotism) is the typical conundrum of " I want either less corruption or more opportunity to participate in it", basically the problem wont be solved until the number of people trying to enter the inner circle becomes smaller than the number of people trying to tear it down. But the reward for those who do make it is so high most individuals would rather live in what's essentially a tragedy of the commons than a place where there is more equality at the expense of a much lower chance of "making it big".
smoyer 12y ago
"I want to stress the importance of being young and technical. Young people are just smarter.” — Mark Zuckerberg I always chuckle to myself when I read this because I realize that one day Zuck's going to say "Hey, I'm older" and by extension he'll have to also say "Ouch, I'm dumber". I suspect he'll recant the statement due to "youthful arrogance" at some point!
- epochwolf 12y ago
  There's a half truth there, a lot of young people think they are a lot smarter than they really are. They have false confidence that goes with not knowing what they don't know.
  - smoyer 12y ago
    Agreed ... my own parents were pretty dumb until I moved out of the house, got a job, rented a house and had to completely support myself. Getting married and having kids added more responsibility (and made my parents seem even smarter).
- jamesbritt 12y ago
  "I’d rather be dead than sing Satisfaction when I’m 45." http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/08/12/jagger-satisfaction/ http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/08/12/jagger-satisfaction/
invalidOrTaken 12y ago
I agreed with the sentiment of this article, until I thought about it. No one owes you a job. If you think companies are missing out on your amazing talent, start your own and prove them wrong. This is a million times easier to do with software than with a white-shoe Wall Street firm.
- jdbernard 12y ago
  I don't think the author is looking at it from the point of view of a disgruntled interviewee, rather from the point of view of the company. This implies that there is a large untapped talent pool to be developed. Since the tech war boils down to a talent war, the company that figures out how to get over itself and tap that pool wins. He's not the guy looking for a job, he's the guy hiring, looking at all of his peers and scratching his head over their insular hiring practices.
clavalle 12y ago
>The problem is that all cliques are self-reinforcing. There is no way to re-calibrate once the insiders have convinced themselves of their greatness. Sure there is; don't join the clique. There is no law, private or otherwise, that says you can't play your own game and win. Despite the hype, the Valley isn't the only game in town even today. They can self-reinforce all they want but if they start losing because of outside forces then they will have to reexamine their assumptions or fail.
chillingeffect 12y ago
FWIW, hiring/interviews aren't just problems in SV culture. They're problematic all across the industries I've worked in. This article is simply pointing out how the lack of established practices manifests itself within SV culture. You could write a similarly outrageous article about how the people at one of my former employers knew next-to-nothing about interviewing people and how that resulted in a pileup of even more people who knew even less :)
kfcm 12y ago
This problem isn't endemic to Silicon Valley (and SFO). It's spread to almost any given company in any given location in the US.
lsh123 12y ago
I am managing software development teams in small startups and big companies in the Valley for more than 10 years now. I've probably had several hundreds of interviews, looked at thousands of resumes and hired a couple hundred people directly. One of the things I always look for during the interview is how the candidate is different from me. I obviously don't want to have weird folks who behave outside of the social norm in my team. But I absolutely love employees with different than my experience, education, background, and especially I love people who disagree with me. The team members who can argue with me are my best employees. These are the people I will be chatting to bounce ideas. These are the people I will be working hard to convince that my proposal is the right one. And these are the people whom I will go to when I need an advice (simply because they might see the problem from a different angle than I do). "The Company Culture" is important. But you do not create it by writing blog posts or even by having company off-sites every month. I create the culture in my team by re-enforcing my values every day during meetings or simple chats at the water cooler. Most software developers are smart and can easily see through the BS of startup or large company "culture building exercises" when the day-to-day processes in the company go in a completely opposite direction.
earljwagner 12y ago
I think this is more about California culture than the Bay Area specifically. Are L.A. Or San Diego really that much different?
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
> "The notion that diversity in an early team is important or good is completely wrong. You should try to make the early team as non-diverse as possible." Why the bloody hell would you optimize for uniformity?
cafard 12y ago
The thing that strikes me is that this isn't new. There is a famous story of Steve Jobs and his group abusing some guy who had shown up to an interview in a suit. DeMarco and Lister in Peopleware can be read as justifying aspects of this (see chapter 22).
jmromer 12y ago
> Well, dude, no, actually you can overdress for an interview and you just did. I can think of two reasons why someone would dress up for a dressed-down interview: (1) They don't yet understand the social terrain they've entered well enough (particularly salient: people with class/cultural backgrounds underrepresented in tech). (2) They're conscientious enough to go through the trouble of dressing well for an interview in order to signal they care about getting hired. So that's some of what you're selecting against when you reject a candidate for failing the "go-out-for-a-beer" test: irrelevant cultural differences and conscientiousness. Bizarre.

393 points by ahupp 12y ago

x0x0 12y ago

Carlos sounds like a wanker who spends too much time reading trust fund assholes on gawker bitch (and lie! Hi Sam) about startups. Way over here in reality: I've worked for 6 startups, some you've heard of, and some you haven't. At the smallest I was employee 6; at the largest ~60. Now, I'm not claiming I've never seen unprofessional behavior, but 1 - the interview process has been pretty obvious. Yes, I've grabbed dinner with founders at one company. What the hell do you think eating dinner with two people you just met to discuss their company is, exactly? 2 - In 6 startups, I've never gone drinking with the team before starting, nor do I know of anyone who has. None of my friends from those startups who are on im right now has either. 3 - At one startup, some engineers went to strip clubs. Not my thing. No known ill effects. 4 - I don't go drinking with coworkers except maybe once every three months. And drinking means 1-2 beers then out; it's been probably 3 years since I spent a whole night drinking with coworkers. No known ill effects. 5 - perhaps some people should leave sf and see the peninsula and valley. There's a whole world of startups here that have 30+ year old employees, some with kids. At many of these adult companies it's fine to come in around 9, bust ass, and walk out the door at 5:30. If you don't fuck around with pingpong and scooters all goddamn day, you'll find you don't have to spend 12 hours in the office to get your job done. Me personally: no fucking scooters, no ping pong. No known ill effects. 6 - I do wonder if Carlos would complain similarly if an employee came to an interview severely underdressed and the company held it against him or her. Probably not. So learning not to wear a 3-piece suit to a startup interview is just part of the gig. Do, oh, 60 minutes of reading on the internet and you'll probably be fine. Hell, email your damn recruiter and ask. He or she really wants you to get that job. 7 - For ultra-small startups, recruiting from social circles is just part of the deal. I imagine very few tiny companies really hire randoms off the internet, or whatever people did before craigslist and dice. 8 - whining about white and asian males is fine, but how on earth did he miss indian males? Has he ever seen the valley? 9 - on a serious note, it's really weird how startup demographics mirror cs degree demographics. 10 - and while I do strongly believe we should make the industry more inclusive -- holding tiny startups responsible for not creating a recruiting pipeline back to high school is ridiculous. I'm not sure where social responsibilities kick in; it's some gradient between the 1 person company and the $10B corp. But the small startups don't have the resources to do much about it.

dagw 12y ago
Whining about white and asian males is fine, but how on earth did he miss indian males? Has he ever seen the valley? Uh? On the maps I have India is in Asia.
- x0x0 12y ago
  are you from the UK? In the US, colloquially, asian == japan, korea, china, vietnam, cambodia, laos and indian = people from india. Or perhaps you would call them south-east asian? But you would never call a person from india as asian.
  - taejo 12y ago
    South-East Asia generally refers to Vietnam, Thailand, etc. Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, etc. are South Asia.
    - x0x0 12y ago
      sorry, right, south-asian. I'm tired. And also american, and therefore know nothing about geography =P
- baddox 12y ago
  The Middle East is in Asia as well. Do you refer to, say, Israelis and Saudis as "Asian"? I gather that the terminology varies.
tempodox 12y ago
10 ... But the small startups don't have the resources to do much about it. This is not about moral obligations. It's about how stupid it is to use such a subjective filter for potential hires while lying to yourselves how “open” and “cool” you are.
ceejayoz 12y ago
Ah, the good old "this hasn't happened to me so it doesn't happen" argument.

austinz 12y ago

That linked 42Floors blog post is terribly self-unaware. > Most startups take the building of their culture very seriously, especially when the culture is still new and quite fragile. If your culture is so fucking fragile that a guy wearing a suit (as opposed to a T-shirt and jeans) poses an existential threat to it, you need to re-evaluate whether you are actually building a company 'culture', or just some random agglomeration of the personality traits of the company's earliest employees. > My friend Shawn just brought organic heirloom carrots and a 6-pack of Sightglass coffee to an interview as a gift. That’s awesome. If I were a founder and you were a candidate who tried to bribe me like this, I'd politely show you the door. Why does the gift need to come before the interview? If it's a token of appreciation, why not after the acceptance or rejection? Are you hiring candidates based on their technical credentials, or their hipster credentials?

minikomi 12y ago
To think, all this time, I've been bringing non-organic carrots to interviews. Oh the shame.
- tragic 12y ago
  I wouldn't want to work for a start-up that wasn't happy with a box of Micro Chips and a tin of special brew.
- jonnathanson 12y ago
  "This is a Golden Sunrise carrot, in burnt orange with off-green foliage. Heritage. What do you think?" "Very nice, Bateman," Bryce replies. "When did a dork like you get so tasteful?" It's all going well, and then Van Patten places his carrot on the table. It's fucking magnificent. "This," he says, "Is a Pioneer Ridge carrot, in deep ochre with leaves in a color called 'hazy forest.' The seed stock is heritage, and the planting was organic." "Amazing," says Bryce. "This is the best carrot I've seen all day." I can't believe Bryce prefers Van Patten's carrot to mine.
lilsunnybee 12y ago
> Sometimes we’ll have a thirty minute interview extend the rest of the day and into the evening. We don’t mandate it, and we don’t ding you if you have other plans. But when it works out organically, it’s a nice thing for everyone and it moves the process along much faster. Yeah we're not going to penalize you if you don't have your schedule completely open. Like if you have kids or commitments or something. It's cool! But it's also sort of a strong signal that you're just not going to be a good fit here. > My friend Shawn just brought organic heirloom carrots and a 6-pack of Sightglass coffee to an interview as a gift. That’s awesome. If you want to improve your chances of getting hired just bring some awesome gifts along. Also it helps a lot if you're already a friend of someone here, which totally isn't insularity it's just having a strong network and connections.

7Figures2Commas 12y ago

> This implies that there is a large untapped talent pool to be developed. Since the tech war boils down to a talent war, the company that figures out how to get over itself and tap that pool wins...You want a juicy industry to disrupt? How about your own? This is a great post, but I take issue with the author's conclusion. The harsh reality is that most of these so-called Valley Culture startups aren't actually competing in a "tech war." Most have relatively simple CRUD apps with at best moderate usage. Founders delude themselves into believing that they need far more engineering resources than they really do for obvious reasons, and investors have plenty of reasons of their own for indulging and rewarding these delusions. The good news is that no disruption is needed. The majority of the Valley Culture startups will die off in the next several years and at some point, the economic and monetary policy environment will ensure that they're not replaced with a new batch of Valley Culture startups. In the meantime, there are plenty of opportunities (in the Bay Area and elsewhere) for folks who don't want to deal with the nonsense.

lucasnemeth 12y ago
Yes. I agree with you. The post is great but the conclusion is weak. I believe, a lot of this Culture constructo comes from marketing needs. They want to have a nice IstockPhoto start-up for investors.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
Indeed. And this is a particular problem in tech and the valley especially. In many other industries and other locations is perfectly acceptable to just run a business. Make stuff that people want and get on with your lives. But in an SV startup you exist in this bizarre world where if you're not changing the world with engineers who are the best of the best of the best then you're somehow fucking up. They don't actually hire the top 1% (or even 10%) of engineers but they create an elaborate kabuki dance which gives them plausible rationalizability that they do. The downside is more than just passing up good engineers though. Lots and lots of research has shown that more diverse teams come up with superior and more robust solutions to problems. When everyone thinks the same way about a problem they come up with the same solutions, but this just exacerbates the problems of satisficing. When there's diversity and a true interchange of ideas combined with robust intellectual skepticism and criticism innovation is enhanced and it's easier to break out of the local minima trap.

pdkl95 12y ago

> It’s not that we’re so petty or strict about the dress code > that we are going to disqualify him for not following an > unwritten rule, but we know empirically that people who come > in dressed in suits rarely work out well for our team. I suggest comparing this...umm... shallow attitude with this example from a very different end of the economic spectrum (which was a link I found here on HN late last year): http://tressiemc.com/2013/10/29/the-logic-of-stupid-poor-people/ Type of job and income level seem to independent of the problem of gatekeepers (petty exercising of local power, often over superficial traits such as the current popular trends in apparel).

gretful 12y ago
It's funny, really. Even poor white men are treated this way. People judge by appearances. People want to be around people that are like them. They want a 'tribe', not diversity. It's human nature.

dkarapetyan 12y ago

I have noticed this myself at a few places I have interviewed and after the 2nd or 3rd time you can kinda smell it. Most of the time the company is just a bunch of 20-somethings running around with their heads on fire, working ridiculous hours because they have no idea what their tech stack is supposed to actually be, all the while getting paid almost nothing for wasting their best years in a monoculture bubble. Best thing you can do is just avoid those places like the plague. There are places that are run by grown ups and I don't mean people older than 20-something but people that are mature enough to understand what diversity and culture really mean. Places where there is a balance between work and personal life and where people don't pretend to be in a frat house because it is the only way they know how to handle themselves. I think the only reason those cultures persist is because they are extremely cheap to maintain from a capital perspective and you can have 10 of them running in parallel to increase your odds of hitting a jackpot and getting acquired by google or facebook and raking in some nice returns for your investors which by the way are way older than 20-something. So if you look at it from that perspective it is all about maximizing returns from an investor's perspective and the rest of it is just-so story to keep the pipeline of 20 year olds churning. I think there are some nice parallels between virgins waiting in heaven and million dollar acquisitions. The tactics being used to exploit the minds of the impressionable are the same in both scenarios. The insular cultures that result from those tactics is just a natural byproduct.

facepalm 12y ago

So what is a good/correct hiring criterion? I was under the impression that nobody really knows. And I am not convinced that it is a bad idea to look for "cultural fit". For example I don't dismiss anybody as a programmer who has never heard about Paul Graham or Joel Spolsky, but certainly consider it weird and it's probably at least a minus in my book.

dkarapetyan 12y ago
Some people live and breathe valley culture and others don't. I have met great programmers and just generally smart people on both sides of the fence. It's not the particular cultural understanding that makes them good or bad. It is usually something else. I wouldn't hold it against you if all you did in your spare time was paint portraits but for your day job you were a programmer. In fact that kind of variety in interests is indicative of intelligence whereas idol worshipping is not. Smart people tend to know there are no sacred cows and also tend to come from all walks of life with all sorts of passions and interests. The point of the article is that superficial matters like dress code are the last thing you should be looking at when trying to hire and that monocultures in general are something to be avoided. You can't do that though if you are only ever hiring people that think, talk, and in general act like you.
- facepalm 12y ago
  So where is the fundamental argument against monocultures? The paypal founder seems to disagree? Is it just political correctness, or is there some hard data? In theory I am all for diversity, but I can imagine that in some endeavours it helps if you get along with the people in your team. I don't think "hiring what you know" is really that much of a mistake. I would hire my friends, for example, because I already know I get along with them.
  - belandrew 12y ago
    The fundamental argument is that if you hire more similar people, you will get similar results. Are you a billionaire yet? If not, maybe you should hire some different types of people in order to deliver different results. People with different mindsets will challenge you. They will disagree with your decisions. They will think of different approaches that may be much better than what you are doing. If you let them, they may drastically improve your business. Are your friends the best fit for the job? What if someone likes different music and whatever but is ten times as effective at that type of position? I would consider the latter far more important. You're hiring people to do a job, not socialize with.

fnordsensei 12y ago

Yet another absurdity from Monty Python has turned into reality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP0sqRMzkwo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP0sqRMzkwo

danielweber 12y ago
The end of that video is the perfect accompaniment to the 42floors blog. "He showed up in a suit, so he wasn't going to be hired, and we didn't tell him for the whole night! HA HA HA HA!!"

deleted 12y ago

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qwerta 12y ago

I would not call it *tocracy but business model. Company can pay under-market salary, if it inflates ego of its employees and make them feel special. It already works in science, fashion, medicine...

pron 12y ago

> Without a natural feedback loop, interviewing mostly runs on myth and survivor bias. It is a law of human nature that a chaotic environment breeds magical thinking and ingroup allegiance, and there are few business environments more chaotic than Silicon Valley, where startups succeed or fail seemingly at random. The noise calls for reason, and because there are no true known causes for success our mind demands some explanation. How many times have we read the line -- often written by some very smart people -- "correlation isn't causation, but we've found a strong correlation between....". What follows the but in that sentence is what is known as superstition. Correlation doesn't equal causation, but no buts follow. Actually, correlation plus confirmation bias equals magical thinking, and "data driven" correlation (with no confirmation bias) equals bigotry. Failing to realize that correlation without causation provides us with exactly zero predictive abilities (it might be "predictive" on unknown present data, but not on future data) is the root of a lot of evil. In fact, "data driven" correlation -- because it disguises itself as knowledge -- creates (or, usually, reinforces) a reverse causation. > Whatever else one can say about the Mirrortocracy, it has the virtue of actually working, in the sense that the lucky few who break in have a decent rate of success. This is the worst of all fallacies belying the "SV logic". Even supposing it were true, a large-number statistical observation says little or nothing about the behavior of a single random variable, or a single startup in this instance. Yes, the startup system "works" (for whom is another question) on the whole, but the vast majority of individual startups still fail. Learning back from correlative observations on the large system and implying the so called lessons to an individual company has little grounds in any rigorous reasoning. > You can protest your logic and impartiality all day long, but the only honest statement is that we're all biased. Understanding this is one of the keys to progress. How many times have we seen posts discussing sexism in tech deemed "controversial" here on HN? But the truth is that the chance a member of a society imbued with biases for millennia is not sexist (or otherwise biased) is extremely slim. The only way to fight this bias is to seek it out and see it (because it's there).

sharpneli 12y ago
"Correlation doesn't equal causation" I've noticed that people tend to misinterpret this sentence. In a lot of discussions it shows that people think that there can be correlation while the things don't have _ANY_ relationship between eachother, as in the correlation would arise purely trough random chance. That is blatantly false. Correlation implies at very minimum a causal link trough a third effect. The traditional example of drownings and ice cream consumption has that third link. Nice summer days. So those two are linked. I think one should say "Correlation doesn't imply direct causation". That's closer to the truth.

CmonDev 12y ago

"It's hard to find good people to hire" Oh, come on! Where is this myth coming from? I don't know about USA, but here in London there is an over-abundance of IT workforce (what else would justify the sub £60k senior dev job offers).

KaiserPro 12y ago
Yeah but none of them are 25, thin, tall, tattooed and have boyish mustachios. don't be hatin' bro, or what ever the vernacular is.
- tragic 12y ago
  Let me take you round the streets of Shoreditch. Although it's more full beards at the moment than moustaches. Which I, for one, consider an improvement.
- facepalm 12y ago
  Heh you are not supposed to judge people based on such superficial traits. Programming skill is all that counts (according to the people who dissed me in this thread anyway).
seestheday 12y ago
Every time I hear about salaries in London it makes me mad. Why is the pay so bad? How is it possible that the value isn't recognized? Are you able to demonstrate the value that you bring, or is it so much an old boys club that dev's are thought of as factory workers? On a related note - why aren't there more senior software dev's building their own businesses? It seems like you have so little to lose.
- gaius 12y ago
  Yes, the old class system. Engineers, no matter how qualified, better even than managers, are "blue collar" workers still. Better to have the right tie, played the right sports, and your father to use his network to give you a leg up. Even if you only have a a Third from Loughborough or Aberyswyth or Durham or some other joke university. Only the City pays fair market wages to technical people, because contrary to popular belief, the old boys were ruthlessly driven out in the 80s.

inventor 12y ago

If like Rome, Silicon Valley should ever lose it's eminence, the blog post from 42Floors is a classic piece of evidence as to why it happened.

hellbreakslose 12y ago

I wouldn't like to work at your company in a million years... What kind of way is "come for a coffee with us" I got my own friends Nerd. My colleagues are my colleagues. I don't say I'll be rude to them or I won't be a nice person to work with... But if I don't have the time for your skateboarding or your coffee I won't have. Your company sounds the ideal company for people with no families no friends, no life ... literally no life.

rayiner 12y ago

> “Well, I grabbed coffee with the founder, and I had dinner with the team last night, and then we went to a bar together.” I'm no teetotaler, but bars can be uncomfortable to downright hostile places for the majority of people (women + people who don't drink for religious or health reasons). It's absolutely inappropriate and unprofessional to incorporate one into an interview. This is typical "old boy's club" shit, just with hipster glasses and organic carrots.

opendais 12y ago
Yep. I'd decline and not get the job. I know that already [hint: I don't drink]. It is quite amazing how many people are completely oblivious to their own biases.
- facepalm 12y ago
  Who says they are oblivious? Maybe they just don't like to hire people who don't drink. Why should they be obliged to hire them?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - opendais 12y ago
    I never said they should be obligated to hire them. It is really inefficient to pick IT, UX, Sysadmin, etc. talent based on whether they drink or not. So I'm assuming they are oblivious.
    - facepalm 12y ago
      I'm sure if they are desperate enough they will overlook the drinking requirement. Maybe the hiring situation is not that desperate yet. Edit: re "religious" argument: surely you can get some non-alcoholic drink at a bar? Water, if nothing else?
      - 12y ago

jasallen 12y ago

This post is brilliant and correct. The best part is where he closes with the acknowledgement that the system works... to a limited degree. He's not just slamming it. It is actually an ok way to minimize risk at the cost of upside in the short term. But it is unscalable for a couple key reasons. (1) Lack of diversity is lack of ideas and experiences, you may fail to find the "next big thing" simply because your echo chamber doesn't include that experience. (2) raw scale. There are only so many Stanford grads et al out there. When you need your 25th, 100th or 150th technical person you will need to have achieved either Google's cachet or start expending your parameters quite a lot. Finding people's value is a very important management skill that seems to have been eschewed in this "cultural fit" culture. It's true there are some people that will be poison, but if the majority of people with the right skills are bad for your organization rather than the majority being able to be a positive, you should ask yourself if your organization is adequately healthy and robust, or is it an infant in an incubator, only surviving as long as you obsessively manage every input.

throneaway 12y ago
What if it turns out that diversity isn't nearly as important as raw talent? I would be surprised if it were. I'm waiting for all the successful startups running diversity seminars from day one.

vfxGer 12y ago

What I find infuriating is how all these companies think they are so unique with their interviewing process then ask the same inane questions. This is worse when the same questions are asked by different people at the same company. College qualifications or any real qualifications are being dismissed by more and more people but the vacuum that has been left is being filled with crap like 15+ rounds of interviews and/or 12 hour interviews. The hiring process is currently broken. I think the only fix is to have proper, trusted qualifications (again?).

Taek 12y ago
Qualifications are hard. I just graduated, and now that I'm a CEO I can tell you there's no way I'd hire someone just because they have my degree. At RPI (my school), there are at least as many completely worthless developers as there are diamonds, and they all have one degree. I don't trust qualifications alone.
- vfxGer 12y ago
  I agree, I wouldn't hire anyone just because they have my degree either BUT we need some qualifications to fill this gap otherwise the interview process will get more and more unwieldy.

JVIDEL 12y ago

I think the article makes a mistake with its use of the word "diversity" here since these days the common use its ingrained more as a matter of race/gender and not so much opinions, and really you can find plenty of groups with that idea of diversity where everyone thinks the same and there's no debate whatsoever. The word OP is looking for is groupthink, and the problem he's describing starts with deindividuation, the process when the group cohesiveness takes priority over individual freedom of expression. And well the problem with this "mirrortocracy" (which is just a new word to describe Nepotism) is the typical conundrum of " I want either less corruption or more opportunity to participate in it", basically the problem wont be solved until the number of people trying to enter the inner circle becomes smaller than the number of people trying to tear it down. But the reward for those who do make it is so high most individuals would rather live in what's essentially a tragedy of the commons than a place where there is more equality at the expense of a much lower chance of "making it big".

smoyer 12y ago

"I want to stress the importance of being young and technical. Young people are just smarter.” — Mark Zuckerberg I always chuckle to myself when I read this because I realize that one day Zuck's going to say "Hey, I'm older" and by extension he'll have to also say "Ouch, I'm dumber". I suspect he'll recant the statement due to "youthful arrogance" at some point!

epochwolf 12y ago
There's a half truth there, a lot of young people think they are a lot smarter than they really are. They have false confidence that goes with not knowing what they don't know.
- smoyer 12y ago
  Agreed ... my own parents were pretty dumb until I moved out of the house, got a job, rented a house and had to completely support myself. Getting married and having kids added more responsibility (and made my parents seem even smarter).
jamesbritt 12y ago
"I’d rather be dead than sing Satisfaction when I’m 45." http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/08/12/jagger-satisfaction/ http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/08/12/jagger-satisfaction/

invalidOrTaken 12y ago

I agreed with the sentiment of this article, until I thought about it. No one owes you a job. If you think companies are missing out on your amazing talent, start your own and prove them wrong. This is a million times easier to do with software than with a white-shoe Wall Street firm.

jdbernard 12y ago
I don't think the author is looking at it from the point of view of a disgruntled interviewee, rather from the point of view of the company. This implies that there is a large untapped talent pool to be developed. Since the tech war boils down to a talent war, the company that figures out how to get over itself and tap that pool wins. He's not the guy looking for a job, he's the guy hiring, looking at all of his peers and scratching his head over their insular hiring practices.

clavalle 12y ago

>The problem is that all cliques are self-reinforcing. There is no way to re-calibrate once the insiders have convinced themselves of their greatness. Sure there is; don't join the clique. There is no law, private or otherwise, that says you can't play your own game and win. Despite the hype, the Valley isn't the only game in town even today. They can self-reinforce all they want but if they start losing because of outside forces then they will have to reexamine their assumptions or fail.

chillingeffect 12y ago

FWIW, hiring/interviews aren't just problems in SV culture. They're problematic all across the industries I've worked in. This article is simply pointing out how the lack of established practices manifests itself within SV culture. You could write a similarly outrageous article about how the people at one of my former employers knew next-to-nothing about interviewing people and how that resulted in a pileup of even more people who knew even less :)

kfcm 12y ago

This problem isn't endemic to Silicon Valley (and SFO). It's spread to almost any given company in any given location in the US.

lsh123 12y ago

I am managing software development teams in small startups and big companies in the Valley for more than 10 years now. I've probably had several hundreds of interviews, looked at thousands of resumes and hired a couple hundred people directly. One of the things I always look for during the interview is how the candidate is different from me. I obviously don't want to have weird folks who behave outside of the social norm in my team. But I absolutely love employees with different than my experience, education, background, and especially I love people who disagree with me. The team members who can argue with me are my best employees. These are the people I will be chatting to bounce ideas. These are the people I will be working hard to convince that my proposal is the right one. And these are the people whom I will go to when I need an advice (simply because they might see the problem from a different angle than I do). "The Company Culture" is important. But you do not create it by writing blog posts or even by having company off-sites every month. I create the culture in my team by re-enforcing my values every day during meetings or simple chats at the water cooler. Most software developers are smart and can easily see through the BS of startup or large company "culture building exercises" when the day-to-day processes in the company go in a completely opposite direction.

earljwagner 12y ago

I think this is more about California culture than the Bay Area specifically. Are L.A. Or San Diego really that much different?

eli_gottlieb 12y ago

> "The notion that diversity in an early team is important or good is completely wrong. You should try to make the early team as non-diverse as possible." Why the bloody hell would you optimize for uniformity?

cafard 12y ago

The thing that strikes me is that this isn't new. There is a famous story of Steve Jobs and his group abusing some guy who had shown up to an interview in a suit. DeMarco and Lister in Peopleware can be read as justifying aspects of this (see chapter 22).

jmromer 12y ago

> Well, dude, no, actually you can overdress for an interview and you just did. I can think of two reasons why someone would dress up for a dressed-down interview: (1) They don't yet understand the social terrain they've entered well enough (particularly salient: people with class/cultural backgrounds underrepresented in tech). (2) They're conscientious enough to go through the trouble of dressing well for an interview in order to signal they care about getting hired. So that's some of what you're selecting against when you reject a candidate for failing the "go-out-for-a-beer" test: irrelevant cultural differences and conscientiousness. Bizarre.