[jpzisme]

Don't get down on yourself, man. I went through a job search last year and applied to ~400 companies and got strung along by several start-ups, one of which even said they were very impressed and asked when I could start, only to change their mind the next day.

Eventually, I found one that was a great fit, and I've been here for over a year and am extremely happy. What I've seen at least in the Bay Area startup scene is that many companies have unrealistic expectations and are waiting for unicorn candidates that magically fit all of their wildest dreams.

If you were at a company that started from nothing and became successful, a startup that has sense should be interested in you.

[siruncledrew]

I've noticed there's a hiring difference between startups that have at least 2-3+ years of proven financials and startups that don't. At some early stage startups (say <11 months runway in Seed/Series A) hiring seems like a shit show because they often don't have HR or recruiters/talent acquisition yet. They realize they are small and are trying to get the most bang for their (well, someone else's) buck.

Not all do this, but some things I've seen/heard done by a handful of small, "scrappy" startups:

- Interviewing candidates knowing they don't have the budget to even give them a job. It's a shitty thing to do because they are essentially knowingly wasting someone's time only to say "Yea, you're a great fit, we just need a few months to be ready to onboard someone for this role!"

- Putting up unrealistic salary ranges on angel.co to look competitive to attract more applicants, then giving an offer that's 10-20% lower in salary than what was given (or pulling the "another applicant is willing to do the $100k advertised job for $80k, but we want to hire you, would you be able to come down to meet that number?" card).

- Giving applicants "day in the life" interviews, where you sign an NDA, work a full 8 hour day, then don't get compensated for it. Sometimes 6-10 people are given these kinds of interviews for a 1 person job opening, and it's mostly just getting free work.

- Bosses setting an expectation for a great work-life balance in the interviews, talking about how "they value their employees time", then expecting everyone to work 10 hours per day or be on call at whatever whim someone needs work done.

- Assuming that because someone is foreign, they must be used to working long hours for little pay and not complaining about it. Even with contractors, there was a boss who hired a team in Ukraine, was invoiced $20k, then only paid them $15k without any legitimate reasons and said "well, that's still a lot of money for you so just be happy with it." It's amazing how shitty some people are when they make themselves seem so outwardly exuberant or buddy-buddy in person.