by fmerian on 3/5/25, 2:44 PM with 110 comments
by fdlaks on 3/5/25, 11:06 PM
This felt like a humble brag to help make their point about hiring good talent and how many people want to be a hogger (or whatever they call people that work there) but this just really highlights how brutal the job market is. Yes the market is also flooded with unqualified applicants and or bots that will apply to any job listing thats posted, but still this is ridiculous.
I really feel bad for the 6 people who had to endure the technical interview AND THEN were given the honor of attending the "SuperDay" which sounds like a full day of at least 5 interviews, 2 - 3 being technical, and still got rejected. Not sure what the technical interview is like at posthog, but assuming this is just an hour phone screen those 6 people still probably had more than 7 hours devoted just to interviewing at this place just to get rejected. That's not including any time spent preparing for interviews or anything else either.
There must be a better way to do interviews. Posthog is not Google, Posthog (or any other startup) does not need to hire to the same standard that Google does.
Let me know when you're on par with Google in terms of revenue or benefits or prestige, or anything else really that Google offers then sure I will jump through as many hoops as you want for the interview. Until then, hard pass.
by kevmo314 on 3/5/25, 4:13 PM
I've seen a nontrivial number of smart engineers get bogged down in wanting to A/B test everything that they spend more time building and maintaining the experiment framework than actually shipping more product and then realizing the A/B testing was useless because they only had a few hundred data points. Data-driven decisions are definitely valuable but you also have to recognize when you have no data to drive the decisions in the first place.
Overall, I agree with a lot of the list but I've seen that trap one too many times when people take the advice too superficially.
by phillipcarter on 3/5/25, 6:50 PM
by apsurd on 3/5/25, 5:17 PM
Capturing analytics is a no brainer. however, most data in most products at most companies starting out just fundamentally does not matter. It's dangerous to get in the habit of "being data driven" because it becomes a false sense of security and paradoxically data is extremely easy to be biased with. And even with more rigor, you get too easily trapped in local optimums. Lastly, all things decay, but data and experimentation runs as is if the win is forever, until some other test beats it. It becomes exhausting to touch anything and that's seen as a virtue. it's not.
Products need vision and taste.
by Chyzwar on 3/5/25, 4:14 PM
22. I saw design system fail in many companies. It is very hard to get right people and budget for this to succeed. For most startups are better to pick existing UI toolkit and do some theming/tweaking.
27. I disagree, If you put Product manager as gatekeeper to users you will transform the organization into a feature factory. Engineers should be engaged with users as much as possible.
by the__alchemist on 3/5/25, 5:58 PM
> Trust is also built with transparency. Work in public, have discussions in the open, and document what you’re working on. This gives everyone the context they need, and eliminates the political squabbles that plague many companies.
This seems prone to feedback loops; it can go both directions. If there are political squabbles, discussion may be driven private, to avoid it getting shut down or derailed by certain people.
by gwbas1c on 3/6/25, 5:56 PM
Process is important when work is handed off from one team to another team. Any company with a non-trivial product will have a non-trivial team size; and thus it'll need to standardize how people hand off work.
It doesn't have to be onerous: The best processes are simply establishing boundaries so lazy people don't throw their work over to the next person. (IE, "I won't work on a bug without steps to reproduce and an unedited tracelog that captures the failure" is a good boundary.)
by cjs_ac on 3/5/25, 4:12 PM
Do not start with an idea. Start with a problem, and then construct a solution. The solution is the product. The problem implies someone who has that problem: this is the customer. How much of a problem it is tells you how much they want it and how much they will pay for it. Because an idea doesn't necessarily have a problem, it results in a product that doesn't necessarily have a customer.
> As 37Signal’s Jason Fried says “You cannot validate an idea. It doesn’t exist, you have to build the thing. The market will validate it.”
Similarly, don't set out to change the world. Put your product into the world, and the world will decide whether to change as a consequence.
by thesurlydev on 3/6/25, 4:55 AM
by bilater on 3/5/25, 6:07 PM
by tmarice on 3/7/25, 6:40 AM
Regarding the superday controversy: my best interviewing experience was a conversational technical interview followed by a paid-either-way-the-decision-went 2 week project. I did quite a bit of competitive programming so leetcode interviews are not a dealbreaker for me, but I feel there's just too much at stake for 1-2h coding exercise, and projects allow you to showcase all of your skills, not just speedcoding.
by srameshc on 3/5/25, 5:20 PM
by light_triad on 3/5/25, 4:39 PM
This is a great point. I've seem teams apply lean startup by testing -> changing something -> testing -> changing something -> testing ...
The problem is that the changes are so small that statistically you end up testing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. You need to make a significant change in your Persona, Problem, Promise, or Product to (hopefully) see promising results.
by skyyler on 3/5/25, 7:36 PM
Is this like a trial day where you're invited to do a day of work for free?
by nestoras_design on 3/6/25, 2:48 PM
by biglost on 3/6/25, 3:53 AM
by abc-1 on 3/5/25, 4:28 PM
by pklien on 3/6/25, 5:49 PM
by ungreased0675 on 3/6/25, 6:46 PM
I’d be surprised if any startup failures were due to a dev team not being absolutely cracked. It’s always something like poor sales, PMF, refusal to pivot, lack of focus, etc.
by hk1337 on 3/5/25, 5:25 PM
by zabzonk on 3/5/25, 4:11 PM
And I have to say that "Technical Content Marketer " is one of the most dubious job titles I have ever seen.
by seasluggy on 3/6/25, 7:12 AM