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Donor
- MBTI
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The main question of interest is the one in the title: As you go through the application/interview process, what signals do you use to determine if the job is a good fit for you?
I have already signed a job offer to begin at a company in the fall, but in the meantime I have been doing interviews here and there just to get practice explaining my skillset, understand what people need from someone with my job title, and get an accurate read on my "market value." (This way of putting myself out there doesn't come naturally to me, but after studying the economics of job markets, I came to realize that a big cause of people staying in a bad job is risk aversion/inadequately exploring the pool of potential other jobs they could pivot to.)
Last night (time zones), I interviewed with a tech startup that was looking for someone with basically my exact profile, although perhaps a little more experience. I'm not sure if I will get a job offer from them—I would put the odds at 30 or 40%—but as an intellectual exercise, I'm trying to imagine what factors would motivate me to accept a job offer if one came through and I weren't already committed to the other company.
From speaking with the interviewer, my overall sense is that this company's success plan is to invest upfront in hiring a lot of people with shiny credentials from famous universities, and then see what those people build and try to monetize it down the line. They have a specific technology that they want to center this around, but the technology is very much conceptual, and they don't appear to have delivered much in the way of actual products to customers.
The company isn't, like, a hologram—they have raised lots of investor capital, and just like any tech startup, there is a small chance that they will burst through and start making real money in the short term. So if (unlike me) you like high-risk, high-reward opportunities, it might be appealing to hitch your horse to a company like this, grab some stock options, and enjoy the ride.
But I haven't spent enough time researching a variety of startups to know whether this company is more or less promising than others. Like, I want to criticize them for flexing the credentials of their employees rather than the fundamentals of their product in their marketing materials, but maybe this is just par for the course in Silicon Valley (not their actual location), and it's unfair of me to dock them points if this is an expected practice for a young startup?
On the other hand, while I'm not a marketing genius, I think that if I were applying for a company like Dropbox in 2009 (before it took off), I would have been able to see the innate value of such a product for everyday people, whereas this company's current set of offerings is much more ... hypothetical. But then again, hindsight is 20/20?
Anyway, I would be interested in hearing your thoughts not just on this particular idea of working for an established company vs. a startup and, in the latter case, how you assess its growth potential, but also on the larger question of how you extract information about the quality of the job from the interview process.
I have already signed a job offer to begin at a company in the fall, but in the meantime I have been doing interviews here and there just to get practice explaining my skillset, understand what people need from someone with my job title, and get an accurate read on my "market value." (This way of putting myself out there doesn't come naturally to me, but after studying the economics of job markets, I came to realize that a big cause of people staying in a bad job is risk aversion/inadequately exploring the pool of potential other jobs they could pivot to.)
Last night (time zones), I interviewed with a tech startup that was looking for someone with basically my exact profile, although perhaps a little more experience. I'm not sure if I will get a job offer from them—I would put the odds at 30 or 40%—but as an intellectual exercise, I'm trying to imagine what factors would motivate me to accept a job offer if one came through and I weren't already committed to the other company.
From speaking with the interviewer, my overall sense is that this company's success plan is to invest upfront in hiring a lot of people with shiny credentials from famous universities, and then see what those people build and try to monetize it down the line. They have a specific technology that they want to center this around, but the technology is very much conceptual, and they don't appear to have delivered much in the way of actual products to customers.
The company isn't, like, a hologram—they have raised lots of investor capital, and just like any tech startup, there is a small chance that they will burst through and start making real money in the short term. So if (unlike me) you like high-risk, high-reward opportunities, it might be appealing to hitch your horse to a company like this, grab some stock options, and enjoy the ride.
But I haven't spent enough time researching a variety of startups to know whether this company is more or less promising than others. Like, I want to criticize them for flexing the credentials of their employees rather than the fundamentals of their product in their marketing materials, but maybe this is just par for the course in Silicon Valley (not their actual location), and it's unfair of me to dock them points if this is an expected practice for a young startup?
On the other hand, while I'm not a marketing genius, I think that if I were applying for a company like Dropbox in 2009 (before it took off), I would have been able to see the innate value of such a product for everyday people, whereas this company's current set of offerings is much more ... hypothetical. But then again, hindsight is 20/20?
Anyway, I would be interested in hearing your thoughts not just on this particular idea of working for an established company vs. a startup and, in the latter case, how you assess its growth potential, but also on the larger question of how you extract information about the quality of the job from the interview process.