Translation: We can't plan, so we make up for it with burnout.
# We believe the perfect is the enemy of the good. This means we focus on getting things done, not on building the most perfect system. We strongly believe in rapid iteration."
Translation: Don't try to get it right, just get it done again and again.
It's a recipe for generating technical debt, not developing software. Unless, that is, the goal is software that's just as buggy and unmaintainable as most corporate software.
If you go bust, it's free! (You can default.)
If you win big, you pay it off out of your winnings.
Perhaps it should be treated like any other possible source of financing... does the advantage (speed out of the gate) justify the cost (fixing it later, in only the positive outcomes)?
Obviously, you can't predict the future; you'll never know if a company is going to go public at a valuation of billions, or go broke in a year. But you can use certain guidelines: How many companies in the industry have gone public/sold/failed? What were the successful companies' valuations? What's your employer's current valuation? Etc.
Moreover, anything less than a percent of equity in a startup really isn't worth your excitement. Only a tiny handful of startups ever sell for valuations of >$50 million. In the event of a sale at that valuation, your 1% stake is worth (at most) $500,000 -- nothing to sneeze at, certainly, but not enough to retire young. Yet very few engineers are granted that much equity; unless you're one of the first employees, a more typical stake is 0.1% or less. So now, that $50 million exit is going to pay you $50,000 -- a nice down-payment on a house (in Ohio, maybe). About the only way to get rich via employment is through extreme luck (i.e. find the next Google and join early), or through the gradual accumulation of shares over a long period of time.
Bottom line: demand fair compensation, and don't sell yourself out for stock options. Startups can be great places to work, they're fun, and you'll learn a lot, but unless it's your startup, you're most likely not going to get rich.
Sounds like one of those banalities you might see on the back of a T-shirt.
I'd have a real hard time working for anyone who really thinks that programming has that kind of ratio. It smells too much like the construction-worker metaphor.
37signals has been beating the drum that inspired programming can greatly decrease the required perspiration, and even then, perspiration doesn't mean Rapleaf's long hours.
-- Nikola Tesla
Of course, everyone's different, but I've noticed I have 4-6 hours of productive time in me per day for knowledge work (e.g. programming). I'm guessing I could get multiples of 4 provided there were long breaks in between, enjoyed what I was doing, and wasn't constantly being interrupted.
Honestly, unless they do some incredible work and/or have great prospects and generous options, I can't see why anyone would want to work there. And based on their product, none of those seem to be true.
Apart from this, the article itself doesn't say much - the problem being that no matter how honest you want to be, listing a few things like in his example won't be enough to give a candidate anything more than a vague idea of what the place will be like and offering below-market rates is always wrong.
This company seems to have a much better idea: http://thisisremarkable.blogspot.com/2008/05/zappos-remarkab...
In fact long hours, low pay and "your opinion can't be better than others'" say a lot. Well, at least one thing clearly: run like hell!
For example, the job description for an 'Amazing Software Engineer' is a little over the top.
http://blog.rapleaf.com/jobs/#engineer
- Amazing coder who takes no prisoners. Master of all things Internet. One of the best coders in existence. - Intensely driven and proactive person. - Extremely hard working. This is a start-up - team members work long hours. - Quick learner and real doer. Err on execution over strategy. - Thrive on working with A-players. Too good to spend long hours with B-players. - Likeable person who garners respect on and off the job. - Thrive on chaos, risk, and uncertainty. - Should be easy to get along with, nice, fun, smart, ethical, and low-maintenance. - Strong desire to build a more ethical society. - Desire to be an early employee and want to be a real owner in Rapleaf’s future. - Want to work with extremely large datasets and build portable APIs that thousands of other companies can build applications on top of.
Note: this job is really hard. You’ll be working with some of the top search engineers in the world and they are going to expect that you kick ass. We’re doing things that no one has ever done before and solving problems that have been open for years.
---------------------------------------
I think this attitude would be totally fine, were it actually consistent with the work they're doing. But it's not. I applied for an interview there, and after making a massive deal about it, they sent me this, honestly, trivial test. They chose the time -- 4pm - 5pm on a Friday, and I got it back to them, while pointing out the errors on their test, in fifteen minutes. They then said they'd get back to me Monday.
Then there's a product. It's basically just security rooted in email addresses. I admit that it's a halfway decent heuristic, but it doesn't really solve any security problems because email isn't a secure channel. I asked them about this, and they gave me absolutely no indication they knew what I was talking about. Patient rephrasings lead them to say 'oh, I understand, yes, we can't do that, that's impossible.' But it doesn't answer the question of why they're building this product with this approach in the first place.
So take what you can learn from it, but with a grain of salt.
There was another article on HN that I don't have a reference to offhand but it was something like, hiring an employee at a small company isn't like buying services from a supplier, it's like inviting someone to be a member of a community.
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...
" Apple was interesting; Larry was working on the Lisa, which was starting to look like a real computer, but for some reason it didn't appeal to me. At one point, though, Larry realized that I'd be a better fit in the Mac group, and introduced me to Andy Hertzfeld. Andy (the "soul" of the Mac software group) showed me some demos that were so amazing that I somehow thought that they didn't really need me--that the software was almost done! But I was impressed and intrigued, and mulled it over...
Meanwhile, I went to interview at VTI. The people there were wonderful. I'd be working with folks I knew and respected, and Doug even offered me a $15K signing bonus, a huge amount of money for a recent college graduate. I'd be working on advanced chip design tools, a new area for me, and it would be an interesting challenge. So I accepted the job. That was Thursday.
On Friday evening, I got a phone call. "Bruce, it's Steve. What do you think about Apple?" It was Steve Jobs. "Well, Steve, Apple's cool, but I accepted a job at VTI."
"You did what? Forget that, you get down here tomorrow morning, we have a lot more things to show you. Be at Apple at 9am." Steve was adamant. I thought I'd go down, go through the motions, and then tell him that I'd made up my mind and was going to VTI.
Steve switched on the Reality Distortion Field full-force. I met with seemingly everyone on the Mac team, from Andy to Rod Holt to Jerry Manock to the other software engineers, and back to Steve. Two full days of demos, drawings of the various designs, marketing presentations--I was overwhelmed.
On Monday I called Doug Fairbairn at VTI and told him I had changed my mind.
I was going to join Apple, where we would change the world with a little computer called the Macintosh. "
This is the only quote that I think has any meat. All others either I don't agree on or nothing profound. _However_, it also makes them seem like an hypocrite since it clearly says they prefer speed+good over perfect+slow. But if they mean what they say, then they are clearly looking for perfect candidate(filtering out good ones) + slow (process of the interview and wasting time looking for the perfect one(s) ).
