After being on the job search for 2 months, I have a signed an offer at a company I’m incredibly excited to work at. This Feburary, I shut down the company I founded. I was burnt out on pivoting full time and decided that it was best to go back to being a part time founder. That meant getting a job. At the start of my job search, I wanted to find a job that would:
Pay me well enough to not care about expenses
Surround me with motivated and ambitious colleagues
Give me enough free time to explore startup ideas on the side
These aren’t hard qualities to find in a tech job. You can find a team that satisfies all three in almost every technology company. It was clear my list was incomplete. BigTech satisfies all three yet I wouldn’t go back to my old BigTech role.
To figure out what I was missing from my list, I knew I needed to explore all possible options. The best strategy for me, then, would be to apply to as many interesting companies as possible, do as many interview loops as possible, and land as many offers as possible so that I could explore which version of myself I liked the most. I applied to energy startups and space companies. I did ML scientist interviews and product manager interviews.
The problem with this strategy is that I would have to do a lot of interviews, a lot of different types of interviews, and it would take me a long time to prepare and do all of these interviews. That felt okay to me, though. I was in no rush to make a decision and, more importantly, I didn’t know what I wanted to do next. I knew that if I stretched myself as far and as wide as I could, I’d figure out what I want. Yes it would be hard, I told myself. Personal growth is always hard.
So for an entire month, I poured myself into interview prep. After 3 years of dealing with intense ambiguity, it was relaxing to study known formats and quizzes. I knew what I had to do and how to grade myself. I just had to motivate myself through it all. Around the same time some friends were planning a city hopping remote work vacation across the country. In the daytime, I would study as my friends worked. At night, we would drink and party. For the 3 years I ran my startup, I lived like a monk. I abstained from anything that would ruin my ability to do work the next morning. Without a startup, I was free again.
At April’s end, I arrived home and started the application process. Here are my stats:
Looking at the numbers, I am surprised by the amount of interview I received through application portals. I expected nearly all applications to go unnoticed wholly expecting that I would have to network for referrals or cold email recruiters on LinkedIn. This was based on the experience of friends and the rumblings of the crowds that frequent Twitter and LinkedIn. I am also shocked that I got interviews from 100% of the places I was referred to. When I was working at BigTech, only 2 out of around 50 referrals I made ever got an interview.
My next largest interview channel after application portals and referrals was recruiter inbound. Most recruiter inbound was complete garbage. The AI wave has funded a ton of terrible companies—much like the ZIRP wave of 2021 that I was a part of. Once you go past the noise, there are some incredibly companies to be found, though. And these incredibly companies make all that noise worth it. Out of around 40 inbound requests, I accepted interviews at 5 places. Three were practice interviews and the other two I truly believe have an actual chance to be a $50B company based on their revenue growth and market size. Without recruiter spam, I would have been unlikely to notice them in the sea of AI startups vying for my attention.
After landing these interviews and going through the standard recruiter fluff, it was interesting to see how the engineering interview meta has progressed from when I was a new grad. Brain teaser interviews are now replaced with practical engineering interviews. Instead of abstract palindrome questions, I had to query an API, implement retries, and write unit tests. System design questions focused a lot more on specific knowledge rather than broad understanding. In one System design interview for a staff engineering role, my interviewer had me write out the React code that I said would likely power Notion’s text formatting feature.
You can also tell which companies are having a hard time hiring by the length of their interview loop. The hype AI labs have BigTech level turnaround times for their interviews. They are at a point where hiring isn’t an issue and can take their sweet time to get the best candidates. At one of these companies I had to go through 9 rounds of interviews (4 coding, 2 system design, 3 behavioral). Many of my friends are stuck in > 2 month long process to get that sweet, sweet AI Lab pay day. On the flip side, many startups are desperate to hire top talent. They give sandbag interviews or even drop interviews altogether if you let already have an offer at a big name.
I received 7 offers at the end of the whole process. Out of the 7 offers, I narrowed it down to 3. The options were:
Become a boondoggle developer at a late stage startup - Doggler
Work on a passion area of mine at a public company - Megacorp
Work as a product engineer at a small quirky startup - QuirkAI
I considered Doggler because it paid the most paper money and had great potential colleagues. Yes I was going to make boondoggles, but you know what maybe one of those boondoggles will actually become something valuable. At the very least, the money would make me feel better. Megacorp paid the most in today’s dollars and was an opportunity to work in a passion area of mine. After talking to the team, it felt like they were on the cusp of something industry changing. QuirkAI funnily enough started as a practice interview. Practice interviews are a frowned upon practice where candidates take interviews at companies they have no interested in working at purely for practice. I wanted a few rounds of practice interviews before I applied to my top companies and was happy to take those recruiters up on their offer. I wasn’t very excited about QuirkAI until I talked with the founder. He is a very weird guy with a very interesting company direction. What helped was that his company was currently profitable and growing rapidly. He couldn’t pay me as much as Megacorp or give me as many paper dollars as Doggler but he was able to shine in one area that I cared about—an interesting company direction.
After a couple conversations with friends, I decided to drop Doggler from consideration. I’ve already built enough boondoggles for a lifetime and I’m too young to work on vanity projects even if they paid me obscenely. Deciding between Megacorp and QuirkAI was much harder. Both were great businesses with a great growth outlook. Megacorp had better pay, the better project, and better commute. The only thing QuirkAI had going for it was the founder’s vision. Rationally, Megacorp was the clear choice. Why was it then that this choice was so hard for me? Was it really the founder’s vision that was winning me over? I’m usually not one to get caught up in marketing. It felt like there was something I was missing. Something else that QuirkAI uniquely had over my other options.
I decided the best way for me to pick would be to take a bunch of magic mushrooms in Golden Gate Park. As I laid under the shade on a grassy hill, the mushrooms crept up on me. All the baggage I had around pausing the founder journey melted away. Every time I closed my eyes I saw beautiful shades of orange and yellow dance around in some psychedelic tessellation I couldn’t focus on. l opened my eyes and stared at the clouds. Slowly my mind drifted to my job dilemma. Which opportunity should I pick? Why did I like QuirkAI so much? Was I willing to take a pay cut and waste 2 hours in traffic every day just because the founder was a great marketer?
I was thinking in circles. Frustrated, I closed my eyes to calm myself. I saw a burning bright orange that faded in and out as I breathed. I thought about the my last year in BigTech and how terrible I felt. The orange changed to a deep red. In BigTech, you are redundant by design. They can afford to design the system to avoid a single point of failure and that means making your role redundant. It made me feel terrible because it felt like my existence didn’t matter. If I failed, someone else would clean up after me. If I succeeded, the business was already in first place so I didn’t change much. It’s why I left and became a founder. Because it was do or die. Because if I didn’t work, my company would fail. And if my company succeeded, it was because of the hard work my team and I put in. If I got a job again, would I be miserable again?
The color red was moving violently around in jagged waves in my mind. My brow was furrowed and there was an immense pressure building in my head. It felt like I was thinking 10x faster than usual. I opened my eyes. A few yards in front of me, a man was playing the drums on a park bench. I focused on the consistent beat. Slowly, the pressure was slowly released from my forehead. I want to work at a company where the story is unclear. Where first place is still anyones game. That’s what attracted me to QuirkAI. Every other option I had, the story was already played out.
My friends stood up. We gathered our things and walked westward. Navigating through the picnic-ers and then the buffalo we eventually made it out to the beach. I stared at the waves crashing against the shore. I closed my eyes and saw a light blue glow. I accepted the QuirkAI offer a week later.