Why Ex-FAANG Engineers Hurt (Most) Startups

People in tech place a premium too high on the brand of a talent’s previous employer.

I’ve seen it a thousand times. Candidate is ex-Google, or ex-whatever. The decision maker is impressed by the names on the resume and pushes the candidate down the pipeline to eventually land on a hire that doesn’t work out because their work behavior and expectations are a misfit for the stage of company.

Hiring managers seem to be continuously drawn to this idea like moths to fire. Why is that? Keep reading and we will try to unpack this behavior, why it’s so persistent and how we could address it.

It should be noted that this is applicable to many roles in other industries but I will only speak to the one I’m familiar with.

The Myth, The Legend

It’s well-known that Big Tech is incredibly difficult to break into. In a given year, Google receives between 2.5M ~ 3M applications and only hires < 5,000. That’s a whopping 0.2% clearing rate. Harder than Harvard.

With stats like this, it’s very easy for those outside to think:

“in order to be in the top 5,000/3,000,000 you must be a crazy genius! One of the very best engineers in the world”

And in some aspects, they are, but just not in the way that matters to you as a small startup.

In the end, what do those big companies care about anyway? Is it reaching product/market fit? No! It’s keeping their online services up and running for the 1B monthly active users they have and the money machine that prints $10M per hour.

Thus, in their search for talent, they aren’t focused on ability to innovate in an ambiguous environment but rather ability to squeeze an extra 10Kb of bandwidth improvement to YouTube because this translates to over $50M/year straight to Google’s bottom line.

The people they hire show great potential for that kind of output and are further trained once inside to deliver on it.

The Dilemma of Hiring

On the flip side, we have to consider the positions of hiring managers in startups and how it impacts their motivations. What would you say is the number one priority of a hiring manager? Growing revenue? Improving ops?

Wrong!

Their number one priority is to keep their job. We even have a saying for this:

No one ever got fired for signing a contract with IBM.

In uncertain situations, familiarity can heavily influence us. In a case where a manager compares two resumes and sees that one works at Microsoft while the other at IcePane, the first automatically sounds better.

Nevermind if the engineer at IcePane spent 8 years in startups and he knows the 0-to-1 stage vastly better… The perceived variance of the outcome is too wide to be palatable.

The downside for ex-FAANG is low and the buck can be easily passed externally:

He appeared to be a great candidate, but it seems he was a fluke

However for a no-name hire, the reputational risk is significant:

Why did Chris think this nobody would work out?

You don’t get many chances to drop the ball as a leader before you’re done. Thus, better safe than sorry (at least subconciously).

The Exception

Of course, there are exceptions to the above. There are cases in which a Big Tech employee truly is the best person to fill a role.

Why? It’s because Big Tech is… well… big.

And because they’re so huge, they have many specialized needs with the brand and the budget to fill them.

So if you’re working at a startup that wants to map farmland by using cameras attached to drones and Computer Vision algorithms, an engineer who worked on Google Maps is a great fit! Even more excellent if they were on the Satellite Imaging team!

This unique experience is hard to acquire and makes them very valuable to you. These cases are a rare exception however. In the real world, most early-stage software engineers are writing frontend and backend code and this task doesn’t call for unique experience.

Relevant experience? Sure. But not unique experience.

Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right

So what do we do about it?

The main solution is to design your hiring process around what you actually need and filter for that. Simple idea, hard to do.

If you are moving really fast and breaking things often, finding ways to simulate that in your interview process is key. This would help you see how well they can adapt to changing environments. Another approach is to tailor your line of questions in an indirect way to see whether or not they can thrive or if they need 3 business days to review a PR.

Ultimately, the teams we have are the teams we create. In a small startup, one wrong hire in the first 25 can kill the entire operation so it’s critical to get them right. Beyond that, it’s imperative to build the right muscle as a hiring manager to build and grow an efficient operation.

If no one takes the time to design effective hiring processes, it’s ultimately a terrific opportunity for you to get an edge on your competition and find underestimated talent to build a killer team.

Onto greatness!