Trying to circumvent a company's hiring process by cold e-mailing ALL 730 employees at a single organisation; as well as calling out busy people who couldn't respond to your cold e-mails or couldn't take time out to meet with you personally by full name, position, and company in a self-promoted Medium post seems a highly negative signal and poor form, especially in Silicon Valley. This is likely the reason most of these companies passed.
You may want to read more carefully next time. "A Harvard Business Review study from 2008 found that as many as 50% of women working in science, engineering and technology will, over time, leave because of hostile work environments." The article then expands on that definition, including as journalistic and not scientific essays tend toward, real interviews from credible first-hand sources.
I agree 100% there is a problem and all of us need to do more to address it, but hueving's comment is correct regarding this article (well, I wouldn't go so far as to call it click-bait, but it doesn't present sufficient data to back up the premise).
> A Harvard Business Review study from 2008 found that as many as 50%
How many is "as many as 50%"? That's an odd way to word it, maybe respondents were able to select multiple unranked reasons for leaving, maybe they lost half their survey results, maybe it wasn't multiple choice and it's difficult to determine what exactly falls into this category. What is the number for men? How does this number compare to 20 or 30 years ago? This article neither linked to the study nor provided appropriate details.
> including as journalistic and not scientific essays tend toward, real interviews from credible first-hand sources
The plural of anecdote is not data. If I find "credible first-hand sources" of women who don't feel they've been treated differently that doesn't mean we don't have a problem.
Oh, no actual recruiters or talent leaders? No way would I pay essentially a peer for something like this. That's what friends advise us for. You need inside info, and engineers and PMs just don't have it.
I think you'd be surprised - we are informed by certain awesome recruiters, but we've found that people generally feel most comfortable when talking to their peers about this stuff. There's a broad mistrust around recruiters.
One thing we could do is work with more recruiters more aggressively for data and guidance - ping them every conversation for example, instead of for larger industry trends. But we'll have to see if that could truly add value.
So every time you "put it in," you are trying to make a baby? Poor people also know about the different kinds of sex acts available to humans, I'm not sure if you're a virgin, trolling, or just don't understand how human biology works.
That's simply not true. minimaxir just linked to hundreds of Twitter results (as recent as yesterday) of you favoriting and positively commenting on tweets from companies that are explicitly asking for upvotes on their products. I also learned that Product Hunt does this because I've heard/read you specifically mention it in interviews, saying "it grows the site."
I favorite to show people I'm listening (read-receipt). It's not an endorsement for asking for upvotes. I realize how this would be misinterpreted so perhaps I'll avoid that in the future.
Wait, what? By showing companies "you're listening" to their astroturfing, you are even more actively condoning it. And you ignored this part, but aside from all the tweets and favorites condoning astroturfing, you've said and written that having companies beg users and social networks for upvotes is a growth tactic for Product Hunt. Just come clean when you're called out, man.
I've never told makers to beg for upvotes and in cases where people have incentivized people (e.g. donating money to charity for every upvote -- yes, that happened), we've removed the post entirely.
Agreed, I only recently found out how much Product Hunt relies on astroturfing tactics to grow their userbase and promote the site, but whenever I'd check it I was always baffled by what was getting to the top of the "best new products" lists. Their growth hacking and employee "hustling" seem to mess with the quality, so it's just not reliable. I'd actually figured it was organic because top entries still only have about 200 upvotes despite Product Hunt having 50,000 users.
Can't say I agree that "mediocre or even slightly below average talent" should be compensated in the "mid-$150k range" (is that a way of saying $155k?), so close to excellent engineers. This seems to misunderstand how market rate is determined (especially relative to equity compensation), conflate "market rate" and "the value engineers provide their companies," or defend high compensation for mediocre performance. The logic is flawed regardless, as "mediocre or even slightly below average talent" will actually provide the company with negative value, costing the software team and the company much more than they offer.
I meant the "mid-$100k" range, as in around $150k/yr. I understand how market rate is determined. Frequently it's determined by companies' explicit collusion or other means, and almost never by an honest appraisal of the value an engineer actually provides. I was expressing the opinion that the model is flawed, and that market rate should be much higher than it currently is, across the board. That is to say, good to excellent engineers should be in the $200k-$300k/yr or more (base--not all in) range, and average (+/-) should be around the $150k/yr (base) range. At 33% above the "mediocre" range I suggest, $200k/yr isn't "so close" to good at all.
Also, the enormous quantity of applications, products, and services with very poor code backing them is a very strong indicator that "mediocre or even slightly below average talent" not only does not provide negative value, but just the opposite. Software companies these days have a lot of revenue, driven by sales of a software product that engineers get very little (relatively speaking) compensation for.
Yes, you're right. Depression is more common than AIDS, cancer, and diabetes combined; and nearly 400,000 people attempt suicide in the US every single year. Those are only the cases medically documented. Depression and suicide are more prevalent in high socioeconomic environments and nations with higher quality of life. Depression is actually more likely to make you an insider than an outsider.
This author fixates on his local software developer and entrepreneur peers (depression can make it difficult to perceive interpersonal interactions objectively) but what he doesn't realize about them is that if you're lucky enough to be born in a country where you can pursue software and entrepreneurship as a teenager (especially in a world-class city full of opportunities like Boston where he lives now) you're MORE likely to be depressed or suicidal than the majority of the world's population who could only dream of having the life and access he has. They experience the same thing, and he is far from alone.
