Corporate stereotypes, and why Microsoft could kill your startup career
Note: This post is intended for engineers who are looking to start their own company or join an early stage startup. Many of the critiques I suggest do not apply to engineers who enjoy the comfort of a larger company.
As the CTO of a growing early stage startup, I have had the experience of interviewing a number of very talented people. As with any large enough dataset, I have come to find some consistent patterns amongst the candidates. While there are and will always be a set of clearly untalented unqualified people, I am surprised by the number of genuinely talented people who––because of choices they’ve made in their career––are now unqualified to work at an actual web startup or start their own.
The provocative title to this post may sound like I’m suggesting that the problem is local to Microsoft. In reality, Microsoft just epitomizes the large bureaucratic environment that seems to confine an engineer to become just that, an engineer. This typically leads to detailed knowledge in some proprietary technology which is not compatible outside of the company it applies to. Moreover, larger companies tend to position engineers to remain engineers. If you want to someday start your own company, you will need to have a network of investors and people with diverse and complimentary skillsets to your own. And after three years at Googlesoft, the only people you know will be engineers.
This goes against a prevailing mindset amongst freshly minted, high talent engineers, which seems to be that if you aren’t ready to start a company, the next best thing to do is to go to a “startup” like Facebook or Google and get connected into the valley. This would make sense if either Facebook or Google was actually a startup. Neither one is, and this path can end up leading engineers down a decidedly non-entrepreneurial path.
The more likely outcome if you do go down this path, is that every day you become less likely to start your own company. Every day you are probably learning some proprietary technology that isn’t helping your startup career. Every day you are becoming more and more accustomed to that cushy job and fat salary.
I’ve seen this happen to too many friends that I once would have considered “die-hard” entrepreneurs. I hate to see entrepreneurs give up, it’s a truly sad thing to witness.
Below are some stereotypes that I have gathered from the larger subsets of candidates I’ve interacted with. I use the word stereotype purposely to indicate that these are unfair assumptions when considering individuals at each company, but seem to embody the culture at said company. This assessment is intended to give startup-minded engineers an idea of how experience at some of the bigger tech companies looks to a startup founder hiring early employees.
Facebook: Some of the more intelligent people I have talked with, but borderline autistic. To date, I wouldn’t want any one of the people I’ve talked with at Facebook working on my team. My impression is that this type of person would create beautiful software, but jet at the first hint of trouble. There seems to be very few risk takers.
Beyond that, for a young startup there are characteristics other than technical prowess that are vital to growing a company. Outside of Facebook, Aspberger’s Syndrome is not thought of as an “asset”. A small team can’t have the liability of someone on the team alienating other team members because they aren’t aware of human emotion. If even one of my team members is constantly getting pissed off at another member, dev team productivity can go down by 50%. Can’t happen.
If you are at Facebook and looking to someday do your own startup, make sure you are interacting with non-tech people. Get out of the office…but don’t just go and play Rock Band with the same two friends you’re used to. Make sure you are interacting with non-tech people, they actually do have value in the startup world.
Of course if the only thing you care about is working on interesting technology, Facebook sounds like a great place.
Google: The new IBM. No longer a startup culture. Despite what they like to tell themselves, the company has morphed over the past three years. Once again, Google is huge and of course there are some startup-minded people there, but that’s not the prevailing culture.
What I have seen are a lot of talented engineers who end up working on “interesting projects” that have no place in the market. I find it entertaining reading quotes from Google, such as:
“Google is still the same entrepreneurial company it was when I [Larry Page] started, encouraging Googlers to take on big ideas and high-risk, high-reward opportunities”.
Take a moment to think of what the real “risk” is at Google. What happens if you fail? Your project is just a drop in the bucket from the endless Google money pit. Most likely, you will not be scarred.
Whereas entrepreneurs systematically try to create something that people want (and will pay for), Google systematically creates things that hardcore engineers think are cool. When a company openly dismisses the value of designers and business analysts, you end up with Google Wave.
Bottom Line: The Google Search cash cow has created an inward, engineer-focused culture that is been systematically shielded from market forces and, consequently, market discipline.
If you are an entrepreneurial minded engineer at Google, don’t get stuck hanging around Googlers your entire time. Google has done a great job of creating a comfortable work environment that encourages long hours at their playground. You need to get to startup events and go out drinking with actual entrepreneurs and investors. I guarantee that you will hear completely different responses from a startup founder on how they would approach a real world problem as compared with your coworker. The technology behind the solution will only be part of the answer.
Beyond that, try launching something. Can you create something that people actually want to use? Not something that is nice to look at once and strike a fleeting interest, but something that will actually result in people wanting and using your creation. If you can, you are ready for a startup. If not find someone with complementary skillsets or a startup that can help you learn this.
Microsoft: Microsoft has kept a pretty tight screening process for engineers, but if you are an engineer there, make sure you are working outside of Microsoft. Microsoft is very tied to the .net platform. I don’t know how many startups use .net as their development environment but there aren’t a lot. In fact, if your primary development platform is Windows your are going to get bumped down a couple notches if you are looking to join a startup. I have been pretty impressed with raw aptitude from Microsoft employees, but if you aren’t exposed to non-proprietary technologies, its going to be very difficult to sell yourself to an early stage startup.
More Companies: There are many more companies not mentioned due to either lack of enough candidates to make an assessment or to keep from pissing off some of our investors.
In general, if you want to start a company some day, my best advice is to either start one NOW, or join an early stage company. If you decide to join a startup, make sure you join one where you can have direct interaction with the founders. If not, you aren’t getting the real benefits that a startup can offer.
Note: if you are a talented entrepreneurial minded engineer at any of the above companies (or just in general) drop me a line. I will either try to hire you, or give you a sense of where you fit in with what I’ve seen.
This is pretty interesting since I know of a Microsoft person who was talking to some startups in the Bay Area to find a potential role (this person is one of the most talented engineer/product manager I've met, has run some very critical initiatives for MSFT and extremely well-versed in both the Microsoft and the non-Microsoft landscape and is looking to move to the Bay Area from Seattle for personal reasons).
There were atleast two really terrible experiences with very well-known startups (think 'often on HN's front page'). In one case, the interviewer asked "So, you work in Microsoft - have you heard of this thing called an iPhone?" . And in another interview, the person at the other end couldn't hide his disdain for Microsoft and Microsoft-people in general throughout the interview.
I think there's an opportunity here for startups to hire some great engineers when they look past stereotypes (which is really what the OP's post is reflecting). Going into a hiring discussion with a preconceived notion is always a bad idea (and this post is full of stereotypes with the FB one probably being the most negative).
I would most definitely say that. I've hired from corporate cultures far more rigorous than Microsofts (Samsung springs to mind) with great results. A smart engineer who can get things done is a strong engineer regardless of where they've cut their teeth.
One only needs to look at all of the startups that IBM, famous for their bureaucratic structure, too see what rubbish this is.
Divisions and collaborative ventures that start in a large companies' research lab and eventually split off or are sold to another party are not startups.
What absolute drivel. Any engineer worth their wage doesn't pigeon hole themselves into one technology. Those that do, you simply don't hire and they fade into obsolescence.
Concepts are more important that technologies. If you embrace the Microsoft stack, that gives you but one view of how things can be pieced together. If you embrace some different stack that gives you another view and so on.
To claim that you are somehow inferior as a developer for using a Microsoft stack is just bigoted and really doesn't have any place on hacker news.
Did you read the same article I did? The article said very little about which stack you used, and spent as much time, if not more time, attacking Facebook and Google employees than Microsoft employees. He basically said two things:
1) if you're a facebook or google employee, get out more and interact with people who aren't also employees there.
2) if you're a microsoft employee, make sure you work on stuff that uses a non-microsoft stack.
In other words, he agrees with you on the Microsoft side and you're just aimlessly ranting about an article you didn't read.
There's another thing you should take away from this article: if all you want to do is work on really hard technical problems, be well compensated, and never have to worry about managing people and career-limited for it, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google are all great places to do that. Having sat on the other side of the hiring wall from the author -- as a manager doing hiring of developers at Microsoft -- I found that college students who had gone off to a startup for several years often had gained some breadth (product knowledge, used/configured more types of systems, etc.) but had failed to gain much real technical depth.
I take a little bit of issue with his characterization of risk at these big companies. I don't know anyone working at any of those companies who hasn't experienced feature or product cancellation at some point in their career. Well, except for a couple of guys who've worked on debuggers and text editors for their entire 15+-year careers, but those are special cases :-)
The title is catchy, but it doesn't seem to do justice to the contents of the post.
If anything, it seemed like the post was somewhat complimentary of Microsoft and a lot more critical of Facebook and Google. OTH the title seemed to be harsh on Microsoft and doesn't mention Facebook or Google.
I was at DDD9 on Saturday (Community MS conference) and there were a lot of startup folks there. I think it's too easy to get caught up with a subset of the community (say the mobile startup community or the rails community) and lose sight of the bigger picture.
Certainly among b2b startups BizSpark has encouraged a lot of startups to go with the MS stack where they previously would have gone with Rails, etc. While consumer startups seem in general to be more often based on non-MS stack there's plenty of MS stack consumer startups (PlentyOfFish, Just-Eat, StackOverflow) which have become the dominant players in their field.
When it comes down to it, for most startups it doesn't really matter what your stack is, just pick the stack that you're most productive with.
Slightly less TLDR: companies which foster working there all the time (Facebook, Google) are the kind of people who need to go out and meet people besides their coworkers. Companies which foster working on their own stack the whole time (Microsoft) are the kind of people who need to go out and use other programming languages.
This is a wonderful post! Mainly because I saw this happening to me before I took steps to stop it.
It is very possible to become trapped in a skillset, even one that seems highly desirable. I've got friends who are thrilled at getting jobs in certain technical spaces and I hope for their sake that they get to do a bit of everything.
One of the best things I did at my last job was become a Scrum Master, mainly because it stretched some muscles I hadn't used for a while, and discovered I actually really like using.
A stable system must have high diversity and high connectivity. If you do not have a network with strong connections to many people of many backgrounds, you will have trouble surviving/understanding changes in the world around you and you will eventually become irrelevant. The startup environment is incredibly taxing on a person and the group. If the people in a startup are not well connected and diverse in knowledge, they will not be resilient enough to survive internal or external conflict. In small groups, it only takes one person with a small network or a limited scope to make it all crumble when the pressure is on.
I try really hard to not get pigeon-holed into using my company's (one of the mentioned ones) stack but its really hard. Why? Cause when you have a full-time job then you're working 8-9 hours a day and there's really not that much time left over. I do a lot of side projects that usually revolve around non-proprietary technology but really there are only so many hours a day. I think it comes down to a decision of whether you want to sacrifice employment productivity over your own enrichment (which might never even pay off)
Read the article. It's not that people can't adapt, it's that they need to make themselves adaptable. Startups need people who can be productive on day one. Someone who has only worked with proprietary technology cannot meet that requirement.
Ergot, if you're working at a place that relies on proprietary technologies, you need to take proactive steps to not tie yourself exclusively to them.
Unfortunately that doesn't work from behind most corp proxies. They see the Google cache (and even Google Translate) as an evil way to get around their restrictions.
Corporate stereotypes, and why Microsoft could kill your startup career
Note: This post is intended for engineers who are looking to start their own company or join an early stage startup. Many of the critiques I suggest do not apply to engineers who enjoy the comfort of a larger company. As the CTO of a growing early stage startup, I have had the experience of interviewing a number of very talented people. As with any large enough dataset, I have come to find some consistent patterns amongst the candidates. While there are and will always be a set of clearly untalented unqualified people, I am surprised by the number of genuinely talented people who––because of choices they’ve made in their career––are now unqualified to work at an actual web startup or start their own.
The provocative title to this post may sound like I’m suggesting that the problem is local to Microsoft. In reality, Microsoft just epitomizes the large bureaucratic environment that seems to confine an engineer to become just that, an engineer. This typically leads to detailed knowledge in some proprietary technology which is not compatible outside of the company it applies to. Moreover, larger companies tend to position engineers to remain engineers. If you want to someday start your own company, you will need to have a network of investors and people with diverse and complimentary skillsets to your own. And after three years at Googlesoft, the only people you know will be engineers.
This goes against a prevailing mindset amongst freshly minted, high talent engineers, which seems to be that if you aren’t ready to start a company, the next best thing to do is to go to a “startup” like Facebook or Google and get connected into the valley. This would make sense if either Facebook or Google was actually a startup. Neither one is, and this path can end up leading engineers down a decidedly non-entrepreneurial path.
The more likely outcome if you do go down this path, is that every day you become less likely to start your own company. Every day you are probably learning some proprietary technology that isn’t helping your startup career. Every day you are becoming more and more accustomed to that cushy job and fat salary.
I’ve seen this happen to too many friends that I once would have considered “die-hard” entrepreneurs. I hate to see entrepreneurs give up, it’s a truly sad thing to witness.
Below are some stereotypes that I have gathered from the larger subsets of candidates I’ve interacted with. I use the word stereotype purposely to indicate that these are unfair assumptions when considering individuals at each company, but seem to embody the culture at said company. This assessment is intended to give startup-minded engineers an idea of how experience at some of the bigger tech companies looks to a startup founder hiring early employees.
Facebook: Some of the more intelligent people I have talked with, but borderline autistic. To date, I wouldn’t want any one of the people I’ve talked with at Facebook working on my team. My impression is that this type of person would create beautiful software, but jet at the first hint of trouble. There seems to be very few risk takers.
Beyond that, for a young startup there are characteristics other than technical prowess that are vital to growing a company. Outside of Facebook, Aspberger’s Syndrome is not thought of as an “asset”. A small team can’t have the liability of someone on the team alienating other team members because they aren’t aware of human emotion. If even one of my team members is constantly getting pissed off at another member, dev team productivity can go down by 50%. Can’t happen.
If you are at Facebook and looking to someday do your own startup, make sure you are interacting with non-tech people. Get out of the office…but don’t just go and play Rock Band with the same two friends you’re used to. Make sure you are interacting with non-tech people, they actually do have value in the startup world.
Of course if the only thing you care about is working on interesting technology, Facebook sounds like a great place.
Google: The new IBM. No longer a startup culture. Despite what they like to tell themselves, the company has morphed over the past three years. Once again, Google is huge and of course there are some startup-minded people there, but that’s not the prevailing culture.
What I have seen are a lot of talented engineers who end up working on “interesting projects” that have no place in the market. I find it entertaining reading quotes from Google, such as:
“Google is still the same entrepreneurial company it was when I [Larry Page] started, encouraging Googlers to take on big ideas and high-risk, high-reward opportunities”.
Take a moment to think of what the real “risk” is at Google. What happens if you fail? Your project is just a drop in the bucket from the endless Google money pit. Most likely, you will not be scarred.
Whereas entrepreneurs systematically try to create something that people want (and will pay for), Google systematically creates things that hardcore engineers think are cool. When a company openly dismisses the value of designers and business analysts, you end up with Google Wave.
Bottom Line: The Google Search cash cow has created an inward, engineer-focused culture that is been systematically shielded from market forces and, consequently, market discipline.
If you are an entrepreneurial minded engineer at Google, don’t get stuck hanging around Googlers your entire time. Google has done a great job of creating a comfortable work environment that encourages long hours at their playground. You need to get to startup events and go out drinking with actual entrepreneurs and investors. I guarantee that you will hear completely different responses from a startup founder on how they would approach a real world problem as compared with your coworker. The technology behind the solution will only be part of the answer.
Beyond that, try launching something. Can you create something that people actually want to use? Not something that is nice to look at once and strike a fleeting interest, but something that will actually result in people wanting and using your creation. If you can, you are ready for a startup. If not find someone with complementary skillsets or a startup that can help you learn this.
Microsoft: Microsoft has kept a pretty tight screening process for engineers, but if you are an engineer there, make sure you are working outside of Microsoft. Microsoft is very tied to the .net platform. I don’t know how many startups use .net as their development environment but there aren’t a lot. In fact, if your primary development platform is Windows your are going to get bumped down a couple notches if you are looking to join a startup. I have been pretty impressed with raw aptitude from Microsoft employees, but if you aren’t exposed to non-proprietary technologies, its going to be very difficult to sell yourself to an early stage startup.
More Companies: There are many more companies not mentioned due to either lack of enough candidates to make an assessment or to keep from pissing off some of our investors.
In general, if you want to start a company some day, my best advice is to either start one NOW, or join an early stage company. If you decide to join a startup, make sure you join one where you can have direct interaction with the founders. If not, you aren’t getting the real benefits that a startup can offer.
Note: if you are a talented entrepreneurial minded engineer at any of the above companies (or just in general) drop me a line. I will either try to hire you, or give you a sense of where you fit in with what I’ve seen.