Companies die from not being eaten by their competitors, but from self-inflicted wounds. They don’t have discipline. Their best people get frustrated. They chase all these shiny objects that aren’t core to the business. They become complacent because of early success.
- Drew Houston (Dropbox founder)
We are doing a research as to how most people in the tech field found their jobs. So for the purpose of this blog, simply comment telling us what you do and how you found/got the job.
Why are we doing this:
As you know, college2startup is about helping connect hiring startups to qualified candidates, we want to explore as many options as possible to find the right fit for both parties involved.
How did you get a job at 10gen?
My name is Brandon Diamond, and I’m a Database Kernel Engineer at 10gen. I’m very active in the startup community having served as the producer of the NY Tech Meetup; I’m also involved in several other groups including the Hacker Union (HackerUnion.org) as well as the Brown University NYC Meetup.
The emphasis I’ve placed on community activism has helped me to build a great network of friends and colleagues; it has also afforded me the opportunity to learn a great deal about NYC startups and organizations. Over the course of the past year, I became friends with a number of engineers at 10gen; I even began to use MongoDB in a number of my own startup projects.
When I decided it was time to start a new job, I reached out to some of the friends I had made at 10gen and asked them about open positions. Between the engineering-oriented company culture, open source MongoDB code base, and 10gen’s strong ties to the startup world, I knew that 10gen would be a great fit for me. I came in for an interview and started the following week.
What does your job entail?
The Database Kernel Team at 10gen focuses on the MongoDB database server and related systems. We construct features, implement improvements, and address bugs along with other user feedback. We also help troubleshoot unusual behavior in user’s MongoDB installations.
Working on the Database Kernel Team has proven to be a fantastic learning experience. I spend a great deal of time working with low level aspects of a wide number of systems; the code itself is well architected and efficient. Importantly, there are a great many people who enjoy using MongoDB; it’s great to work on an interesting, complex project that directly impacts so many diverse — yet technical — users.
What is it like working at 10gen?
10gen offers a uniquely awesome startup experience. The culture is technical, casual, and meritocratic. Between the fully stocked snack bar and the weekly office lunches, working at 10gen doesn’t quite feel like… well, work. The team is friendly, outgoing, and passionate — everyone is excited about what they’re doing and eager to share what they’re working on.
Hierarchically speaking, the company is largely “flat”; the CEO and CTO sit alongside the other engineers and both write a significant amount of code nearly every day. The emphasis is on progress, community, and great software engineering.
All in all, 10gen is a fantastic place to work if you’re a startup-minded engineer who doesn’t want to compromise on tech or miss out on the startup experience. I couldn’t be happier with my choice of employer.
Wanna work at 10gen? check out our most recent newsletter or contact us: support@college2startup.com for an intro.
Apply to become a Junior at 10gen Now: http://college2startup.com/apply/info/198
Found this brilliant read about how startups are getting funded nowadays on Business Insider:
There are lots of trends people have been talking about in tech financing—“superangels”; delayed IPOs; secondary market sales; and more.
But so far, few people have been putting the dots together: the entire financing landscape for companies is changing.
And, excitingly, it’s increasingly not just technology companies.
There are many new financing options for growing companies that weren’t available a decade ago.
Here’s how we break them down (we’ll visit each one in turn):
- Crowdfunding
- Accelerators
- Super-angels
- Late-stage private equity
- The long-delayed IPO
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-way-companies-are-getting-financed-is-completely-changing-2011-11#ixzz1eY3hdL2H
We’ve seen some significant growth over the past few months since our launch and have been featured in some top tech publications, we’ve also worked with some excellent startups and have helped them find prime talent. We’ve been absolutely pleased with how things have been going lately and in a bid to keep users happy, we had put in place an open door policy. We asked and encouraged users to write to us (support@college2startup.com) and give us feedback on what we could be doing better, and what they will like to see on college2startup.
There were three things in particular that kept coming up, and we are happy to share our response to all the feedback. We have implemented those suggestions in a way we felt will be most beneficial to the product.
Job seekers wanted:
i. Ability to browse through all the jobs we had submitted on the site. We have implemented a ‘jobs’ section where you can see some featured jobs, but not all. In order to have access to all the jobs we have, job seekers will still have to subscribe to College2Startup.
ii. Shorter job descriptions in the newsletters with a link to the full job description. Done.
Startups wanted:
i. A more comprehensive overview dashboard in their accounts. They wanted to be able to see previous jobs posted, what’s been applied to, how many applications have been received to each job, ability to close the job if it’s been filled etc. We have implemented majority of these changes as we feel are appropriate right now. Over the next few weeks, we plan on making more changes in this area.
Thanks again for all the feedback! keep ‘em coming.
The New York Times recently reported a zero job growth in the US in August 2011 with surveys finding that job growth over the past 3 months were at 35,000, a far cry from the 90,000 jobs expected to keep up with the growing work force. Don’t mention this in the software industry especially startups, the situation is almost the complete opposite with demand for qualified engineers more than twice the supply. Many jobs are being phased out since they can now be automated, and several others are constantly outsourced because the labor is much cheaper. If there is one thing you don’t want cheap labor for, it is building software and that has contributed to the boom in the industry. Not too many people predicted this and those who did never cared to encourage young students to consider careers in Computer Science, and now the supply of talent coming out of our universities CANNOT keep up with the demand.
We have seen this first-hand at College2Startup and it was a big reason why the startup was created in the first place. Why are there so many software engineering jobs and not enough candidates? why don’t parents and universities encourage more students to get into Computer Science & physics knowing for a fact that in a few years most human activities will be run by computers? How can we get the software jobs into the hands of the right candidates?
In the past week alone, there have been 3 different startups who have indicated in their job submissions to us that they are going to pay you $10,000 if you refer your qualified (software engineer) friend or family member that eventually gets hired. That’s how competitive the hiring space is for startups. They all want the best people and they know every other startup out there wants the same, so it’s game on. One college2startup user who got hired in early August by a NYC startup came out of college in May not knowing how he would go about finding a job with his Computer Science degree, he had planned on working for the Government but also wanted to start his own startup down the road. Two weeks after receiving a job post in his e-mail, he was on his way to NYC from his college town at Urbana champaign to start a new $82K job as a software engineer at a VC-funded startup. The jobs are there in the software industry, but not enough of the matching talent.
Are you in college and bothered about the job market ahead of your graduation, should you consider switching majors? maybe. The industry is booming and doesn’t look like it will be slowing down anytime soon. In the middle of all the unemployment, maybe we can take solace in the never ending demand for Engineers.
First and foremost, we want to thank everyone who reads this blog, subscribes to receive our jobs and the startups who trust us with their job openings. It’s been an amazing 2 months so far and things are going great. College2Startup wants to be the number 1 destination for anyone looking to work at a startup, and we believe we have started well.
We value the input of our users and always want to make the service that much better. To this regard, we are openly asking for your feedback, advice and thoughts on how we’ve served you so far. Simply e-mail us your responses to support@college2startup.com.
Your ideas are highly appreciated.
When it comes to startups, there are some cities that just completely outshine every other city in every department: number of startups, available engineering talent, groups of investors, community of early adopters and press etc. San Francisco bay area and NYC are the top two in the US at the moment, infact it is pretty evident even on College2Startup. About 70% of the jobs submitted to us are in those two cities, while the remaining 30% is unevenly spread out between the other cities.
Startups are built in many different cities, however, just like plants, they need the right combination of ‘aid’ to blossom. This is why we see a lot of startups relocating to parts of the country that are considered to be more startup friendly in pursuit of bigger success.
We got an e-mail from a founder who was about to post a job with the hopes of finding a Ruby on Rails engineer to join his startup in a rather remote city in Iowa, but wondered if there was even a chance of convincing a ‘top talent’ to move there. Overall, he was looking for up to 6 employees to fill the startup jobs he had open but didn’t want to move to a different city to do it.
Finding ‘employees’ could be easy, but finding the right startup talent isn’t. You don’t just need skill, you need a specific type of attitude and mentality. This is why College2Startup focuses so much on exploring the background and personality of everyone applying to a job opening we post. So what do you do when there isn’t a lot to choose from in your city?
1.) Consider Telecommuting. 37signals is a prime example of a company whose staff telecommutes and does it effectively. As long as you are able to designate and review the work done properly, having your employees in different cities across the country isn’t such a bad idea. Take it or leave it, most of the best startup talent are those who have gone to schools with a very active startup community or know people in the space and are interested in it. Often times, they are in cities where the supply of talent is much higher than the demand for it. It might be a little tricky convincing them to move away from where they’ve always known (just because startups are so risky), but getting these people to telecommute could solve a lot of problems.
2.) Start a tech/startup event. There are many tech meetups around the country, there’s probably one every day in Palo Alto, whereas some cities don’t have that luxury. As a founder, you may need to take it upon yourself to start a meetup and try to unearth those hidden gems. Some really talented people may be in your area, who are absolutely keen on working at startups or even building one, but have no clue where to start. Some of these people may even just need to see someone else do it to ignite a passion in them. Before you know it, your meetup is growing from 2 to 5 to 10 to 20 members.
3.) Career fairs and College campuses. Most of the prospectives who subscribed to receive startup jobs mailed to them have come from these two places. We have been pretty active at career fairs, college entrepreneurship/tech meetups etc. We have also tried to be as visible as possible online, especially on a site like Hacker News where we like to say “our target market predominantly resides”. If you can’t find the right people, going to career fairs and setting up a table isn’t a bad idea. You get to enlighten people about startups and may even find one or two people who could fit the bill.
Finally, we also get a lot of questions about our demographics. In terms of location, up to 45% of people who have subscribed to receive jobs are in the two main cities: San Francisco and NYC. But our list spans the entire country. So regardless of where your startup is located, you will certainly find a few people in that city or atleast around it who are on our list.
More startups are hiring everyday, infact there are more than 2,000 startup jobs posted on Craigslist alone - not to include other job sites. Competition for the best available talent in sky high and startups need to get creative and really dig deep to find people who can deliver when the chips are down. Hiring for startups has become so difficult, that we have started noticing a trend where some more established startups even acq-hire other startups just to get access to their staff, it’s nothing new these days.
To help you along in the hiring process, we have a number of things we believe you should pay close attention to.
1.) While “rock-star ability” is great, it shouldn’t come at the expense of team chemistry. Most startups often begin with very small teams, 1-5 people and as such, complimentary skills and being able to get along is very important. It is comparable to a team sport like soccer, having a player with amazing skill and ability can win you games but it will never win you the league title. It is a ‘team’ that wins you titles. Focus on getting people with the ability to do the job who can also fit into the company groove without causing a break in unity.
2.) It is never easy to find the best people. I have heard many HR people and startup founders who I talked to and surveyed before building and launching College2Startup talk about how difficult it is to find the right people and convince them to join. Just like you are chasing these crop of talent, there are hundreds of other startups after them too. It takes hard work, a long time to land these people. One big advice I will give is this: you must be able to sell your vision to anyone and get them to buy into it to. If you are able to do this, number 2 becomes less difficult all of a sudden.
3.) The best hires aren’t always those with 5+ years of experience. It bothers me a lot when I see all these startups posting jobs and for each listing, they require 5+ years experience as an absolute marker. Some people happen to believe that if you’ve been writing code for a company for 5 years, you are automatically better than one who is just graduating college. This may be true for certain positions, for example, a PR position. Often times, the 5 year veteran has honed their skill and also built a long list of contacts that could come in handy. However, there are some jobs at startups that don’t necessarily have to follow this route. Being a code wrangler at a company for 5 years doesn’t always mean you are better than the kid who just graduated. It’s a skill thing. Because a player has been playing professional basketball for 5 years doesn’t make him better than every rookie coming into their first season. Look at skill rather than number of years, consider projects done rather than number of full time jobs held etc.
4.) Target a larger (but targeted) pool of prospectives if you really want to capture the best. Most startups today find their new hires based on referrals of people already working there or referral of friends. There are only so many people you can reach out to by doing this. Targeting a bigger group always means you are increasing your odds of getting better talent on your team. This is why we started College2Startup. There are currently over 7k highly targeted people looking for startup jobs on the site and growing. That’s 7,000 prospectives to select from. Your odds of improving the quality of your team is better.
5.) The best talent out there want to see potential for growth. Show that you aren’t running a lifestyle startup for life. Very few of the most gifted web developers, designers, marketers etc will settle for ‘startup pay’ and ‘lifestyle’ forever. Their biggest motivation is often the desire to grow a small project from alpha to it’s best possible valuation and/or exit. Show you and your company can do that and you improve your chances immediately.
Have you hired for a startup in the past or currently doing so? what are some important things you’ve considered during the process?