Comment by neilv
1 day ago
It sounded good, up until the examples for:
> I'll dedicate a post to specific ways you can identify motivation during hiring, but in short, look for
All will be gamed by interviewees, by the afternoon this hits the HN front page.
(And, for example, tech interview prep has already been telling people to fake passion and curiosity, for many years now.)
Here's what you do:
1. Consider that the early startup also belongs to the early hires. It's their startup too. You're the last-word decider, but it's not only your startup. You want it to also be theirs. Believe this, and act like it.
2. Reflect that in the equity sharing. "0.5%", to be diluted, as options, with ISO rules that discourage exercising at all... while co-founders divide up 70% of founder real shares between themselves... is nonsense, for that founding engineer, who you should want to be as motivated as you, and contributing as much as you do.
3. With equity like you're serious, make the salaries low-ish. Not so low that it's nonviable for modest family cost of living, but low enough to self-select out the people who aren't committed to the company being successful, or who don't actually believe in the company.
4. Have an actually promising company and founding team, or you won't get many experienced people biting.
I'm quite cynical, but all this sounds fair to me.
Modest compensation with good equity sharing is hard for candidates to game too.
I think what people miss about indexing on social signals is that convincing social performance is hard. My suspicion when people say things like "ah but if you index on a social signal then everyone will just perform the social signal" are themselves feeling as though they do not naturally signal that thing, and ironically are frustrated by the effort that it takes to appear as though they do.
Why is that your suspicion?
The context on this one is that we've gone from an environment in which kids were mocked for having curiosity and passion about nerdy things like systems, and it didn't pay that well as an adult, and those people would go home at the end of the day and also write open source code...
To one in which it's now a high-paying career, and a bunch of interview prep manuals coach on faking that, doing open source to promote your career, etc.
So if OG nerds look around at the environment and see the dynamics, of people who just want well-paying jobs (nothing wrong with that) seeming to do a performative dance with interviewers who also just want well-paying jobs (nothing wrong with that), and everyone is being told to project passion and curiosity (when they really just want well-paying jobs) and to look for it in others...
You think the problem is that OG nerds, for example, feel that they do not naturally signal that?
They may signal that just fine, but merely be questioning all the performative theater by people who aren't here for that, but some management fashion told them they should pretend to be.