Hiring is a huge challenge right now in Silicon Valley, and I think it’s starting to show in the quality of startups. Some of them look like 1999 all over again. Companies with viable ideas and solid revenue streams (like where I work) are competing for talent with startups that pivot multiple times so they can find something that sticks, which is stupid product development.
Very few of these ideas are sustainable for the long term. I think it’s criminal to a certain point because they’re gambling with other people’s money, some of whom shouldn’t be angel investors.
There’s nothing wrong with working for a company that has a great business model, viable revenue stream, and is either close to profitability or very profitable. Especially if it’s an idea that actually provides a valuable service to end users (one of the reasons I like working at Jobvite).
Not everyone’s going to hit a home run. Most strike out — that’s the reality. Making sure you’re taking good swings is what counts.
Sean Parker made some interesting comments at a conference this week. Some of his comments:
A lot of the best talent in a particular domain is not necessarily the correct talent to be starting a company. So there’s a lot of fantastic engineers who really shouldn’t be product people, really shouldn’t be founders, and there’s a lot of founder product people who really shouldn’t be engineers.
Understanding your place in the ecosystem and the value you’re able to bring gets lost and distorted when there’s so much money sloshing around, and everyone you know is pushing you to go and start a company.
There’s a sense of entitlement that I’ve never seen before in Silicon Valley among people who work for a big company for a while and make a lot of money. They think the next step for them is to start a company. That’s often exactly the wrong thing for them to do. They will likely squander their own fortune or waste someone else’s money.
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Any great engineer these days, who has a good pedigree, can go and get a $250,000 or $500,000 check and start a business and they’re probably not qualified to do so.
They think they’re going to build a prototype and that’s enough. They need to be focused on building a team, and it doesn’t have to be a team of seasoned execs. It needs to be team of people who can perform all the functions necessary to run a business. I learned that the hard way–by starting companies that didn’t necessarily have a complete team.
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I think that the lesson in all this is that while this can sometimes work, it much more closely resembles gambling than it does investing. The result is going to be a lot of lost capital, but the most deleterious affects is the dispersion of human talent, human capital. The dispersion of human talent to a huge number of startups–none of which is executing with the right product or have the right team members to really succeed.
And the good businesses find themselves competing not just against Facebook and Google and Dropbox and Groupon for talent. They’re competing against literally thousands of startups, most of which will never succeed.
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Google bought 27 companies last quarter and a lot of them are talent acquisitions, in some cases paying $1 million an engineer. That can’t last forever. There’s way more startups getting founded now than there are companies than Google and Facebook want to buy.
Worrying too much about ‘the fold’ can seriously turn your user interface design from a scrollable, flowing design to a cramped and messy affair. The root of the problem is an unrealistic fear that people who use computers do not know how to scroll or that anything under the fold will never be seen.
What you need to combat ‘the fold’ is a quick way of explaining what your web app is all about above the fold. What is it? Why should users care? Is there more info further down the page? If you can make your app interesting enough above the fold, users will scroll down to experience more of the page. Leave enough content below the fold to continue to satisfy the user.
Once they’re at the bottom, you can be fairly confident that you have an interested user looking at your content. The bottom of the page is possibly the most valuable area of your site because the end is mostly for users who are likely to engage with your app than casual browsers who stay mostly at the top.
This article is great career advice. Even though it’s written for programmers, it’s really for everyone who has a job.
“Read ad. Send in resume. Go to job interview. Receive offer.” is the exception, not the typical case, for getting employment: Most jobs are never available publicly, just like most worthwhile candidates are not available publicly (see here). Information about the position travels at approximately the speed of beer, sometimes lubricated by email. The decisionmaker at a company knows he needs someone. He tells his friends and business contacts. One of them knows someone — family, a roommate from college, someone they met at a conference, an ex-colleague, whatever. Introductions are made, a meeting happens, and they achieve agreement in principle on the job offer. Then the resume/HR department/formal offer dance comes about.
This is disproportionately true of jobs you actually want to get. ”First employee at a successful startup” has a certain cachet for a lot of geeks, and virtually none of those got placed by sending in a cover letter to an HR department, in part because two-man startups don’t have enough scar tissue to form HR departments yet. (P.S. You probably don’t want to be first employee for a startup. Be the last co-founder instead.) Want to get a job at Googler? They have a formal process for giving you a leg up because a Googler likes you. (They also have multiple informal ways for a Googler who likes you an awful lot to short-circuit that process. One example: buy the company you work for. When you have a couple of billion lying around you have many interesting options for solving problems.)
There are many reasons why most hiring happens privately. One is that publicly visible job offers get spammed by hundreds of resumes (particularly in this economy) from people who are stunningly inappropriate for the position. The other is that other companies are so bad at hiring that, if you don’t have close personal knowledge about the candidate, you might accidentally hire a non-FizzBuzzer.
Engagement marketing starts with the customer and his desire to engage with the brand. So the engagement starts when the customer seeks the engagement and the engagement stops when the customer has had enough or had his/her problem solved.
The difference that social media has brought (besides the fact that you can now directly deal with customers of different cultures, which presents another completely new set of complexity) is that a brand can engage even when they haven’t been directly approached but when they are talked about. Social Media therefore enables proactive customer service and that is the real benefit for a brand.
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The main point to remember: the engagement level is defined by the individual (customer), not by the brand.
With an abundance of workers to choose from, employers are demanding more of job candidates than ever before. They want prospective workers to be able to fill a role right away, without any training or ramp-up time.
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Unfortunately, American companies don’t seem to do training anymore. Data are hard to come by, but we know that apprenticeship programs have largely disappeared, along with management-training programs. And the amount of training that the average new hire gets in the first year or so could be measured in hours and counted on the fingers of one hand. Much of that includes what vendors do when they bring in new equipment: “Here’s how to work this copier.”
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We aren’t going to get European-style apprenticeships in the U.S. They require too much cooperation among employers and bigger investments in infrastructure than any government entity is willing to provide. We’re also not going to go back to the lifetime-employment models that made years-long training programs possible.
The experiment: I’ll give you five bullet points why I would hire you or wouldn’t hire you.
I’ll also give you some tips on what direction you should go. I’ll respond to as many as possible, but can’t promise anything.
Since I’m doing this for free, I’m going to put a few requirements around this:
Send your resume and portfolios to pat@usabilitycounts.com.
When I was at IIW earlier this week, I held a session called, “A Contrarian View of Identity: Envision a World with Only Real Names.”
The ground rules of this session were:
I then asked those in the room to close their eyes. Take a deep breath. Envision all of the identities that you use online and out in the world. See them moving to the middle and coming together, becoming one identity, and that name is your real legal name. If there is any negativity coming up with this, just put it aside for the moment. Sit with this vision of your identity as your real legal name. Take another deep breath. Pause. Now open your eyes.
I’m Generation X. Thought this was classic. Not entirely safe for work, but who cares.
Some excerpts:
But Generation X is tired of your sense of entitlement. Generation X also graduated during a recession. It had even shittier jobs, and actually had to pay for its own music. (At least, when music mattered most to it.) Generation X is used to being fucked over. It lost its meager savings in the dot-com bust. Then came George Bush, and 9/11, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Generation X bore the brunt of all that. And then came the housing crisis.
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Generation X is beyond all that bullshit now. It quit smoking and doing coke a long time ago. It has blood pressure issues and is heavier than it would like to be. It might still take some ecstasy, if it knew where to get some. But probably not. Generation X has to be up really early tomorrow morning.
Generation X is tired.
It’s a parent now, and there’s always so damn much to do. Generation X wishes it had better health insurance and a deeper savings account. It wonders where its 30s went. It wonders if it still has time to catch up.
Right now, Generation X just wants a beer and to be left alone. It just wants to sit here quietly and think for a minute. Can you just do that, okay? It knows that you are so very special and so very numerous, but can you just leave it alone? Just for a little bit? Just long enough to sneak one last fucking cigarette? No?
Some User Experience designers think they are entitled to great jobs out of the gate.
They think that just going to college and getting the degree is enough. That presenting the wireframes from a college project represents a portfolio. That it’s okay to ask for $100 per hour when you really have nothing to show except for a few prototypes. That just showing up gets you a one percent raise every year, if it gets you a job at all.
For those people that think that, I don’t want to hire them.
As a hiring manager, I want people that show up AND do amazing work.
I want someone that has worked at a startup and failed. I want someone who gets excited talking about building iPhone application ideas on the side. I want conversations about the rule of thirds, food porn, and why the movie Helvetica left you speechless.
I want to ask you what you think of Jeffery Veen, Jeffery Zeldman and Dan Saffer. I want to fill a wall of inspiration with you and talk design on a Sunday afternoon over a latte at Caffe Greco. I want you to tell me the differences between Visio, Omnigraffle, Basalmiq and Axure, and which is your favorite.
Being a great designer takes motivation and going the extra mile. The best are there. You should join us.
Patrick Neeman is Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform and runs both the UX Drinking Game and Startup Drinking Game | More | Contact
If you're a UX Designer in San Francisco, ping me at Twitter. I want to add you to a list I have there.
