Start-ups can be great. Start-up slogans are death.
When interacting with start-ups on the job market you are bound to encounter slogans and sloganeering. These almost universally signal deep dysfunction and should be interpreted as red flags early on. This post is a list of a few examples of these slogans and what they mean in practice.
“We’re looking for mission-driven / passionate candidates who are aligned with our company values.” - Translation: We choose not to prioritize paying competitively and want to artifically create a new evaluation axis consisting of “passion” or “alignment” (often entailing lots of our internal bias) so that we can indulge our ego when rejecting candidates for compensation-related reasons.
A variation of this might be more straightforward, “we don’t pay ${X} compensation ‘cuz we’re a start-up.’” It signals a deep lack of ambition on behalf of the company leadership in addition to entitlement that just by slapping a feel-good mission or “passion” statement onto jobs employees no longer need to be valued according to their contributions, impact or competitive position in the labor market. Do you want to work for leadership that doesn’t understand the simple economics of hiring? That papers over the hard work of attracting talent with platitudes about mission? That conflates “passion” with your tangible, value-adding, real-world contributions? If they can’t even behave professionally or competently on that issue - which has to be faced by every company under the sun - how are they going to succeed at whatever novel business venture underlies the purpose of their new company?
As a separate exercise: Imagine if pro sports team executives sought to deeply underpay athletes because they “should be passionate” about the sport. Does that suggest they are somehow clever coaches, strategists and franchise operators deftly locating all the diamonds in the rough through their “just accept less money” recruiting tactics? Do you think such leadership would win the Super Bowl? They might enrich themselves at your expense and get some splashy press coverage for each new series of fundraising - but you’re not there to enrich the leadership! You’re there to earn your compensation by helping the customer. This is why it’s such a red flag even from the earliest video conference or phone call with the company recruiter. It reeks of leadership feeling entitled to enrich themselves off your sweat and investment.“Because we’re a start-up, our teams are scrappy and/or wear many hats.” Translation: leadership has no competent understanding of the comparative advantages of teams or how domain specialization relates to satisfying the customer - meanwhile the teams are starved for resources and leadership doesn’t plan to address it.
Rather than deal with the reality of resourcing that is necessary to execute on a business strategy, leadership is looking to paper over the problem with a slogan that can be used to justify arbitrary changes to your job responsibilities and arbitrary restructuring of teams and organizational alignment on the product. I say arbitrary but in truth it’s more whimsical than arbitrary. The incompetence it belies is often followed by egotistical presumption of expertise. It’s a signal that company leadership doesn’t know what they are doing and wants to curtail the ability for lower level employees to earnestly point that out and call attention to resulting problems. I’m all for shared responsibility and a sense of corporate civics in which people don’t hide behind “that’s not my job” excuses. But that’s not the issue.
The issue is that different engineering disciplines have different comparative advantages when facing different kinds of problems. Company leadership are responsible for correctly identifying those comparative advantages, structuring teams and processes to complement and enhance them and empowering domain experts to specify the investments and changes needed to make it work. If resourcing isn’t sufficient to make this happen, that’s a leadership failure. It’s not leadership’s privilege to just throw their hands up and say well we don’t have the budget to hire the people or buy the tools that we need. That’s not leading. That’s not providing context. That’s not being budget savvy. That’s called failing. And if a company is not holding failed leaders accountable do you really believe they are on a path to success? Don’t accept excuses like “this team is scrappy” or “we wear many hats.” You’re just agreeing that your comparative advantages don’t matter and by extension that actual success for you and for the customer doesn’t matter.
(Imagine if someone tried to write software this way. “This class is scrappy… it wears many hats.” No self-respecting engineer would accept this. We would push for requirements, think hard about what dimensions of the problem are susceptible to changes and design for modularity that reflects a separation of concerns. It’s no different in organizational structure. You should reflect hard on these same aspects of the problem when defining a strategy and describing how that strategy maps to separate concerns of different teams and departments. A leader who just sloppily throws tasks on top of a to-do list for teams arbitrarily, usually accompanied by pressure to get it done fast, is like a programmer who thoughtlessly extends behavior of a class. Argument lists become bloated. Testing becomes impossible. Resilience to changes breaks down. It quickly turns into an unmaintainable monolithic mess. If we don’t accept this poor quality of work in our engineering designs why would we accept it in our organizational designs?)“XYZ is everyone’s responsibility.” Translation: we can’t be bothered to understand how XYZ really works and we don’t want to invest what it takes to do it right (and/or we are happy to let corporate politics drive our thinking on XYZ).
The subject XYZ could be many things: how best to make an ML platform, how to approach data privacy or security topics, how to promote diversity and inclusion in a hiring process, how to handle DevOps or production responsibilities across many teams. In any of these cases the topic requires a great deal of leadership competence and patience to dig into the constituent tasks and understand how to separate concerns in an efficient way.
This is similar to the scrappy / wear-many-hats slogan in the previous item but with the twist that it characterizes dissenting opinions as neglecting responsibility within the company. If XYZ is everyone’s responsibility (Who could argue that!? It’s like saying you’re not willing to pick up litter you brute!) then disputes about who should do XYZ can be resolved arbitrarily because everyone is an equally valid assignee. By sleight of hand with the slogan you’d have to be, literally, irresponsible to disagree! This steps beyond mere laziness or incompetence and enters a realm of active deceit and malintent. It sets up an aspect of workplace pride - taking responsibility in one’s work - as a tool for executive excuses to whimsically ignore best practices or strategy. This requires a deliberate leadership desire to behave badly and appeal to the slogan to deflect accountability for it.
Beyond that, it’s also an insult to everyone’s intelligence. XYZ isn’t really everyone’s responsibility, right? Wink wink? The intern isn’t determining how we comply with GDPR. The engineer who makes front-end UX components isn’t determining what deep learning architecture will solve a complex search problem (nor vice versa). We all know that we have to rely on domain specialization and comparative advantage - protect the time of certain teams to solve one problem while other teams solve something else. But instead of being intellectually honest and treating people with the respect of not assuming they’ve been lobotomized leaders fall back on “XYZ is everyone’s responsibility” to justify selectively juvenile excuses on their part. Do you really feel that start-up leaders who want to get free passes on excuses for poor strategy have what it takes to make a new business succeed?“We are a start-up inside of a larger company.” Translation: we are an ill-conceived and poorly-resourced moonshot from an incompetent middle manager who thinks giving an internal TED talk with buggy demoware will catapult them to a big promotion.
This may be the only slogan for which I would advise you to run away as fast as possible. It’s fairly obvious to anyone who has worked in large corporations that absolutely nothing that happens inside them is similar to the way things work in a start-up. Innovation is stifled. Decisions are mired in layers of middle management approvals and bureaucracy. Tight control of existing market share dominates all strategic thinking. Downsizing and budget cuts are a quarterly affair. You’d have to be a total fool to believe there is such a thing as a start-up incubated inside of a large corporate entity. And indeed the hiring managers are banking on you to be such a fool.
Often these positions are marketed with promises of less red tape or chances to work on innovative projects but inevitably it’s a quagmire of heartache in which there is poor technical competence from leadership. One concrete example is data integration. In a large corporation there will be a detailed set of constraints on data processing. Things like GDPR and CCPA virtually guarantee that large corporations have tight controls on data. (Note: this doesn’t mean they actually ensure data security for customers, of course, but they will have all kinds of bureaucracy to give the appearance of making tons of effort to restrict data. It likely even manifests in inconsistent or contradictory rules that stifle internal progress without actually providing material security benefits but because of the kafkaesque nature of the corporation such inconsistencies can’t be successfully rooted out.)
But for a nascent start-up it is absolutely necessary that data integration is simple and easy. The company doesn’t yet know what flow of data best supports its business needs. It may need to suddenly draw data from a wider set of sources. It may need to migrate structured relational data into a document datastore. These things already take time and skill from overworked data engineers. If you add institutional bureaucracy, layers of approvals and adherence to a rigid set of constraints designed for a corporate monolith, it becomes hopeless immediately. Unless a hiring manager can give a fantastic explanation of how they avoided this type of problem within a larger corporation then any claim of “we’re a start-up inside a mature company” has to trigger your alarm.“In our company you need to handle a fast-paced environment and thrive when there is ambiguity.” Translation: Our leadership is a total farce. We change what we’re doing seemingly at random without evidence or data. We probably hired key people based on nepotism or as a favor to a VC’s friend of a friend. Instead of providing clarity or context the leadership just wants you to react to whatever they say today.
The first thing to note is that every company is fast-paced. Succeeding in a technology business is challenging and rapidly changing no matter what kind of company you work for. It doesn’t matter if the core business model is well-known or you are just building a brand new thing in your garage. An air of presumption that one type of work (start-up) is fast-paced, but other types are not, is a big red flag about the mindset of company leaders. Either they don’t understand that virtually all technology jobs are fast-paced and their start-up is not special or they are aware and they are including this extra phrase in a job ad or recruiter chat for other purposes.
The first situation is fairly straightforward - leadership is incompetent. They have a self-important idea that their project is fast-paced and needs to be advertised as such without understanding the landscape of broader technical work. Perhaps this can be forgiven - especially if the founders are not technical - but then again making a start-up succeed is hard enough. Do you really think it bodes well if the leaders are incompetent about this?
The second situation is a bit worse. The leaders may perfectly understand that they aren’t offering technical work that fundamentally differs from any other technical job and there is no need to distinguish it as “fast-paced.” But that phrase didn’t end up in the job ad by accident. How did it get there? As a candidate it’s reasonable to speculate that it covers up for some other issue - namely that product direction and planning are changing more rapidly than is reasonable and the company wants to filter out candidates who won’t put up with that. They believe they are entitled to treat employees badly - leave important context unspecified until the last minute, make huge strategy pivots without consulting for dissenting opinions, make unilateral decisions without the weight of legitimate evidence. The leaders want to have the freedom to do these things without the accountability to own the consequences with employees who refuse to be treated that way. Life is way too short to put up with leadership like this.
So I’ve discussed start-up slogans that are commonly used to cover up significant failure modes and incompetent leadership. We can see these are big red flags from an early stage and just ignore any start-ups that put out the kind of defensive excuses entailed by these slogans. But what are some good slogans start-ups produce? It can’t be all bad, right?
In my experience the good slogans are usually around compensation, meritocracy and taking care of employees. They act like barriers that prevent the company from receding into common laziness or patterns of excuses and signal higher commitment to employees. Netflix did this with the famous culture memo. A more recent example is Brex and their post on a bold approach to compensation. When a company actively seeks to emit these kinds of signals, it usually says something different. Leadership is willing to be precommitted to do things in a superior way. They set standards by which they can be held accountable for things early on. It might not work out - most start-ups will still fail. But at least the leadership seems like they care and they are trying. They want accountability. They don’t want to repeat naive mistakes. They at least can’t be summarily dismissed for bright neon red flags.
It is uncommon for company leaders to welcome their own accountability. I’ve never found a better indicator of start-up success. Covering up poor leadership with slogans and defensive posturing in job ads or recruiter pipelines is an immediate give away that leadership seeks to avoid accountability. You might think the sight of a phrase like “wear many hats” is small and trivial - can we really judge a whole company by it? Yes, absolutely. Most start-ups fail and most of those failures also fail to give you any useful experience along the way down. If you value your time and want chances to build on your experience, it’s critical to weed out companies even at the earliest stages. Start-up slogans are a clear red flag signal to help you do that.