Category: Entrepreneurship


Technical recruiting is broken.

Filed Under: Entrepreneurship, Rants, SF Bay, Tech
Oct.10, 2011

Sigh.

Three weeks ago, I went to a UC Berkeley career fair and dropped off a copy of my resume with a certain startup. I’d put a lot of effort into selling myself with this particular resume, and trying to stand out from the crowd (most of the attendees were undergraduate CS majors–most probably with better technical chops, but little to no real-world experience, sense of design, or communication skills). While I was at the fair, I had a nice chat with the startup guy there about the company and web development and Python and I figured I had a pretty good shot.

Payoff! The next day, I received this email (a few bits redacted):

Hi Karen,

Our engineers really enjoyed meeting you at the career fair yesterday! (Also, I have to say that I love the graphics on your resume, and the “But wait! There’s more!” :))

You definitely stood out from the crowd as one of the most talented engineering students and we think that you would be a fantastic contribution to the future of (Startup).

I would like to schedule you for a 45-minute Skype interview with an engineer next week. What is your availability Monday, 9/26 through Friday, 9/30 from 10:00am – 5:00pm PST? What is your Skype user name?

I will forward your availability to our recruiting coordinators, (John) and (Jessie), as soon as I hear back from you and you will hear from one of then them shortly after confirming the date & time for the interivew.

If you have any questions regarding the interview process or (Startup) work life, please feel free to contact me at (Jane)@(Startup).com.

I look forward to following up with you ASAP after your Skype interview next week!

Thanks & have a great interview!

(Jane Smith)
(Startup) Technical Recruiter

“One of the most talented engineering students”. What. I suspected that they were just mistaking pretty-and-organized for competency, but even so, my ego was fit to burst. Huzzah! Maybe I could get a job I’d actually enjoy, with a cool company, that could pay me enough money to pay back my student loans! I was super excited.

But then I actually had the Skype interview. Despite the fact that I was applying to do front-end web development work, my interview was with a backend engineer. And instead of talking about the web projects I’d worked on in the past, or anything relevant or interesting, I got grilled with the so-standard-it’s-frickin’-trite Computer Science questionnaire.

Things I was asked about that have little or nothing to do with being an actual web developer:

  • Red-black trees.
  • Multithreaded processing in CPUs.
  • Different types of sort functions. (I was like “I sort of remember learning about that stuff seven years ago, but I program in Python. I just use the sort() method and assume Python knows what it’s doing.”)
  • Lots of Big O questions.
  • The difference between a linked list and an array.
  • SQL queries. (Well, that could be relevant, but I’ve always used Django or another ORM so I don’t really know any raw database stuff.)

One of the questions seriously started with “In a language such as C++ or Java, how would you…?”. If you read my resume, or know anything about me, you know I don’t *do* Java. (Well, I did some Java when I took a couple CS courses in college, and hated it, and notably chose not to major in the subject. But that was seven years ago.) I do *Python*. (And HTML/CSS/JS/RoR/BBQ.) Which I mentioned, and then answered the question Pythonically.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t answer the questions. It happens to be the case that I *have* taken a couple traditional CS courses, so most of them I could at least fudge by on what I remembered from seven years ago and from INFO 206 last year. But answer or no, none of it had anything to do with the actual, real web apps I’ve coded and contributed to over the last two years, and yet it was the standard by which I was judged.

I emailed back the startup today to ask what my status was. Five minutes later I got a rejection email. In that phone interview, I went from “A fantastic contribution to the future of (Startup)” to useless reject in forty minutes flat. Because I don’t remember hardly anything about bubble sort or merge sort and frankly don’t give a rat’s ass.

So now I don’t even know whether or not to bother applying for other web developer jobs. I’ve seen this perfunctory pop quiz on CS canon before–I got another version of it when I interviewed with Google and another (stealth) startup last year. It’s likely that *anywhere* I apply, I’m going to be subject to that test, and more importantly, companies will judge my ability to do the job based on it. Not on, say, my documented open source software contributions or web app projects for class or PyCon speaking or experience teaching Python and web programming to newcomers. That would be silly.

Maybe I should just discount all my technical experience and re-enter the job market as some “UX/interaction designer” / “web designer” / “product manager” weenie. Then it’d be easier for companies to classify me. (And also pay me ~$20k less to do nearly the same damn job.)

I am a *programmer*. I am not a fucking computer scientist. It’s utterly disheartening how many Bay Area tech companies can’t tell the difference.

If you believe that there’s a shortage of programmers and other technical workers right now, consider to what degree your recruiting process assumes that the “best” applicants fit the stereotype of a dorky computer science major who’s been coding since he was 10 and solves Rubik’s Cubes for fun and thinks that job ads calling for “rockstars” and “ninjas” aren’t utterly puerile and inane. (And let’s not even get into how age, race, gender, and culture stereotypes feed into this.)

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Diaspora: Facebook slayer?

Filed Under: Art, Current events, Entrepreneurship, Pretty things, Stuff, Tech
Apr.26, 2010

The latest bit of hubbub in free culture world is a project called Diaspora, started by a couple NYU kids. They’re trying to make the StatusNet of social networks, replacing Facebook with an open-source, decentralized web app that you can run on your own server and which ties into existing services like Twitter and Flickr. Since Facebook is the Great Satan and doesn’t give a crap about its users’ privacy, yet network effects keep me trapped there, I’d kill for an interoperable, federated replacement.

Diaspora is raising money via Kickstarter, which will enable the four-person team to work on this full-time this summer. I encourage you to contribute. In the meantime, I hope they choose to release their code and find ways for the community to contribute in non-monetary ways as soon as possible.

For instance: Diaspora currently uses a picture of a dandelion as their ‘logo’. Nice photograph, but photo =/= logo. So I spent the afternoon futzing around with Photoshop and came up with this:

I emailed them it a few minutes ago, we’ll see if they like it or not.

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Thoughts on Entrepreneurship, or, Screw the Entrepreneur-bots

Filed Under: Entrepreneurship, Rants, Stuff
Feb.18, 2010

There seem to be two stereotypes that dominate the entrepreneurial field.

The first I’ll call West Coast entrepreneurs. They’re the ones Silicon Valley is famous for.

The West Coast entrepreneur is a young, 20-something white dude who attended Harvard or Stanford. (Sorry Yale. And everyone else.) At least one of his co-founders has parents who are wealthy and willing angel investors. If he’s on the techie side, he is and has always been an ubernerd. If he’s on the business side, he was also socially inept as a kid, but now overcompensates for it in ways that are functionally valid but carry a whiff of smarminess, creepiness, or desperation. He is aware of his youthful arrogance and stokes it, takes pride in it; his ego is the size of Montana. He is dead certain that his product will change the world but is cavalier about building ways for people to pay him for it. He may have an Asian male co-founder, and will have Asian males among his early employees, but no other minorities in the early stages—not by design, but “it just worked out that way.” Before exit, he brags about how long he’s gone consuming nothing but ramen and Mountain Dew. After exit, he buys a red electric sports car and eats at black-tie restaurants in his swimming trunks.

The second type is the typical entrepreneurship model everywhere else.

This stereotype is a 40-something rich, golf-playing white man who thinks he’s still hot shit because he built something fifteen years ago that was just good enough to sell. He is motivated by money, ego, and possibly the thrill of the sell. He reads business books and magazines and finds them incredibly insightful. He doesn’t realize that his business is incredibly boring to just about everyone else. If he does happen to realize how boring he is, he becomes an angel investor to live vicariously through the next young crop of entrepreneurs. Sad to say, most of the guest speakers in last year’s Shotput Ventures incubator program fit this stereotype to the T.

If I had to pick one of these to be, I’d pick the former. I have so little in common with the latter stereotype. I hate boring, mediocre products, especially when they succeed in the marketplace.* I detest selling to people. Revenue in itself doesn’t excite me. I completely loathe golf.

But the West Coast entrepreneurship model is obnoxious in its own way too. It’s a fact that venture capital firms reward startups that pitch the best, not the ones that build the best, which enables pie-in-the-sky behavior and encourages talk and smarm over results and realism. Superior products and teams are likely to die from lack of funds if they don’t play along with the Ultra Bleeding-Edge Shiny Hype of the moment. There’s also a surprising amount of snobbishness about where you went to school; unless you developed your product in grad school, if you didn’t attend one of the top of the top schools with a legacy of successful dropout entrepreneurs, forget about it. It also has a deep sexism problem bubbling up from the male-dominated computer science departments and VC firms which compose this entrepreneurial scene.

Besides the systemic problems, from a selfish point of view, I don’t fit the West Coast stereotype either. I’m not male and my parents aren’t ever going to fund me. I attended a well-ranked liberal arts college, but not Harvard or Stanford. (It was a women’s college; that probably doesn’t help!) I’m a geek, but I don’t really know how to code (yet!). I have a strong allergy to buzzwords and zero allergy to bootstrapping. I’m motivated by the dream but I’m well aware that few things are truly world-shockingly revolutionary. (Fortunately, things don’t have to be world-shockingly revolutionary to still be awesome.) Ego is certainly also a motivational factor for me—I enjoy being independent and “self-standing”**—but mine can’t compare to the true delusion you often find in this scene.

I just like doing startups for the opportunity to build something awesome, something better than anything else out there, something that people like and use. It’s that simple. I like working with great human beings; I like to see it when the good guys win. Screw the stereotypes. Screw the buzzwords, and the hype, and the machismo. Screw the entrepreneur-bots. I know there are real, live, good-natured humans who are also startup entrepreneurs; I’ve met and worked with some. Though they’re fewer and farther between than I’d like, that’s the scene I want to inhabit, the people I want to recruit, and the new stereotype I’d like to develop.

—-
* I used to work tech support. Seeing how many bugs were left to fester while the devs pumped out new feature after new feature drove me mad. I never want to be continually embarrassed by the product I’m supposed to represent ever again.

**The Danish word for “self-employed” is “selvstaendige”, pronounced much like “self-standing”.

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Linchpin, schminchpin

Filed Under: Entrepreneurship, Rants
Feb.16, 2010

I started following Seth Godin’s blog from a link somewhere. I hadn’t read any of his (many) books, but it seemed that lots of Internet people paid attention to what he said.

A couple months later, I really don’t get the hype. He’s a very good writer, and he’s had a few interesting things to say on his blog, but a lot of the content is pretty obvious when you think about it. It makes me think that he’s pushing to post something on one of his trademark themes every day, even when he doesn’t happen to have any true insight. “Don’t be phony.” “Have a product worth buying.” “Do something you care about.” Duh.

Godin’s latest book makes a big deal about the “linchpin” metaphor as the role to strive for in one’s career. The rhetoric is nice, but what his thesis comes down to is: “People who are indispensible in their jobs have better careers.” No. Shit. It contains a bunch of self-congratulatory language for people who are currently linchpins in their organizations, but has little to no advice for those of us who are, at present, eminently dispensible, other than to take pride our work and be “artists.” Gosh, that makes it so clear…

Godin’s works have the cheerleader quality of many modern business-type books. I suppose lots of people must find that useful, inspiring, or comforting, or they wouldn’t sell so well, but I’m much more interested in a how-to.

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