Hacking on Empty

I’ve been looking for a new gig off and on for the past year. I’m pretty picky and I have a good nest egg. I also get a few contract gigs here and there that keep me from being desperate. I’m really only interested in startups and the companies I have interviewed at generally have between 5-50 employees. In this last year I’ve run across some serious BS I haven’t seen before in my 20+ years of working in this industry.

Lowballers – Even though the company employs dozens of software developers and certainly has defined both a narrow salary range that they are willing to pay for the position and a benefits/perquisites/equity package, they refuse to put together an offer unless you tell them how much you want/made first. I’ll politely say that I’ll consider any reasonable offer and that they have a better idea of what I’m worth to them than I do. An honest company will turn around and make an offer somewhere in the range they already had in mind. Lowballers just fade away. Hint: if they come out and actually say they don’t lowball then they almost certainly do.

Over Lawyering – Thanks to Business and Professionsl Code Section 16600, non-compete agreements aren’t legal in California except in a couple of well defined circumstances like being a partner in a company you just sold. Customer non-solicit agreements are also void and employee non-solicits are almost certainly not legal either. Still, as a condition of employment I’ve been asked to sign an agreement that contains both kinds of non-solicit provisions. What really got me was an attempt to get around non-compete agreements by requiring me to agree to allow this employer to contact any future employer or business associate so they can scare them about this agreement I’m supposed to sign. I’m sorry but no, I’m not agreeing to give you ten days notice of any business activity I plan to undertake for a year after leaving your company and I’m certainly not authorizing you to contact my future employers or business associates. The fact that the 1 year period reset after any breech made it clear that it was punishment.

Free Work – Tech companies have been trying to get out of paying any overtime for quite a while by bribing the legislature to change the definition of “exempt” employees. Even though exempt status is for managerial types who have the authority to assign work and set their schedule it’s used on software developers who don’t really have much choice. Still, I ran into a particularly egregious example recently with a startup. At the first couple of rounds of interviews the founder/CTO kept bringing up how it wasn’t a 9-5 job and they all work 60 hour weeks. I would too if I owned 40% of the company… Then after two rounds of interviews, including 6 hours of on-site interviews with plenty of whiteboard coding and problem solving, they wanted me to come in for a full day of hacking with them. That’s not completely unreasonable and at that point I was still interested in working with them. Well, the hacking project turned out to be some low priority project of theirs instead of something totally unrelated. It also wasn’t really something that could be done in a day by someone unfamiliar with the software involved. After a day I didn’t get very far (does anyone get much work done on their first day?) so they wanted me to come in again, because they still weren’t sure. After they offered to pay me to come in again to the tune of about $10 an hour (less than minimum wage in San Francisco) I knew they were bad news. I think they really wanted me so instead of breaking it off they said they wanted to “pause” the interview process. It’s not dead, just paused.

In case you are wondering, here are the signs of a good, well managed company:

• Has a well defined and rigorous interview process conducted by employees who really want to be sure they are only hiring good people.
• Is able to reach a hiring decision quickly, like within 24-48 hours of a full day on site interview.
• Knows how much they should be paying each position, aren’t afraid to make what they know to be a good offer to someone they want, and aren’t interested in seeing if they can get someone they are on the fence about for a really good price.
• Respects employees and understands that regularly working past the point of fatigue results in bugs and is therefore inefficient and unprofessional.
• Limits poaching by keeping employees and customers happy instead of attempting to use the force of law.