Mastering The Art Of Recruiting with Aditya Agarwal | Greymatter

This episode of Gray Matter is in partnership with sfelc, a curated community of engineering leaders working to evolve the way leadership is implemented in the tech industry. At the annual SFELC Summit, Dan Portillo and Aditya Agarwal discuss the role of engineering leaders in recruiting.

Okay, so it's my pleasure to introduce.

Our moderator for this Fireside chat, Dan Portillo.

That's the back. The back is celebrating.

I love it.

All right, so Dan has spent seven.

Years at Greylock and he served in.

Previous executive roles at Ripple, which was acquired by Salesforce, as well as Mozilla.

The creators of Firefox. So, Dan Portilla, this is Aditya. He was CTO of Dropbox before that, founder of COVID and one of the best engineering leaders at Facebook Port.

The CTO there, srep doesn't lie.

So, yeah, he does not lie. All right, so I guess we'll just get into it. So have you ever not promoted an engineering leader because they couldn't recruit a good team?

So we haven't rehearsed this clearly.

So it's a great question that wasn't on the card.

The best answer to that is basically, I wish I had not promoted people who did not know how to recruit. And the reason I say that is that how many of you, I'm curious in the audience, if you don't mind raising your hand, how many of you? One of the key parts of your job today, as expressed by your direct manager versus CEO, is recruiting at a ridiculous percentage of the size of your team. Great. So I was in that position myself. I didn't quite understand that I was having to do that. I had to basically recruit at Dropbox. We went from our company, got acquired in early 2012. So we went from 26 engineers in March of 2012 to 87 engineers by the end of the year. At the end of 2012, then we went from 87 to 170 to 260 to 550, and then close to 1000. And I think today it's close to 1500. The crazy thing is that you don't know how exactly to do that yet. That is the key expectation that everybody has of you, whether it's your direct manager or the CEO. So the answer to your question is like, no, I didn't know I was having to do that.

The question was, should I have? And you answered that well. So in one of the programs that I built at Greylock was our community program where we're building networks of infrastructure leaders, data leaders, designers. And in the events like recruiting, always came up, which is just more and more recruiting is being pushed to the edges, and the managers of the individual teams are actually being asked to do more of the work. What do you believe is the role of the engineering leader in the recruiting process?

I think this might be a slightly controversial take on it, but I believe that too many engineering leaders don't really fundamentally own the fact that whether or not you hit your headcount number, whether or not you hit your recruiting number is your responsibility. And I think it's really easy to, like, you know, come up with a bunch of reasons. Recruiting didn't give me enough Top of the funnel. Our offers are not good enough for us to close for the people that we want at the bottom of the funnel. Our interview process is too hard. But what I'd say is that I've been surprised as to the lack of ownership generally in Silicon Valley about the fact that recruiting is such a core part, given how many of you raised your hands of what the role is of, like an early stage engineering leader. And I think it's something that. I'll give you an anecdote. We got acquired by Dropbox, and I remember talking to Drew early on in 2012, and he's like, drew, what do you want me to do? He's like, just go increase the size of the team. I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, just three exit. I'm like, are you serious? Because we can. He's like, yeah, but make sure you keep the quality consistent, right? I'm like, okay, okay, this is hard. But that's what he ended up doing. And it was at the expense of other things in terms of our ability to do other things. But. But you have to really own it and internalize that. This is a key part of your job.

So I'd like to get tactical a little bit. So part of it is from a recruiting perspective, there's both the sourcing piece of getting good people to come into the company, and then there's the actual closing piece of getting them to join. And there's a number of factors in there. Is there any things from either the Dropbox or the Facebook experience that allowed you to cheat or get an advantage from a sourcing perspective?

Yeah, it's a great question. This is actually super counterintuitive, and many of you might disagree with this. My goal with top of the funnel, in terms of, you can call it sourcing, you can call it, like, you know, initial the first conversation or whatever you want to call it. Whenever I meet a Candidate at the top of the funnel. My only goal in that conversation is to do right by the candidate. I take this to an extreme, which is that if in that conversation I'm like, actually, dude, Dropbox is not the right company for you. You should actually go and talk to this other company. I have made so many of those introductions after that first conversation and my take is that, number one, if you have discovered that Dropbox productivity software is not what the person wants to work on, why would you want them in the company either way? Instead you can actually pay it forward. And you'd be surprised. Every one of those people I've referred to other companies has sent me somebody else in their network who is a better fit for Dropbox. I've been surprised also by how hard kind of like a conversation that has been with other people who are smart. This seems very obvious to me, which is like, yeah, do good with a candidate and they'll basically pass it forward. But what I'm here to tell you is that it actually works. So that's actually the one biggest counter. I think you have told me the same thing.

I think it's important to take a long view on recruiting. So many managers are like, well, if they're not looking to move right now, I don't want to talk to them. So my longest from the first time I tried to recruit someone to getting them is 15 years. And so they were new grad out of Stanford and then when I finally closed them it was for an executive job. They were bald with like three kids. It was like completely different point in time. But Silicon Valley and Reader Next speaker would tell you that networks are incredibly valuable. So you have 20, 30 minutes to make an impression on someone that allows them to come back and say, you should talk to this person. I think having that valuable introduction gets referrals and gets you known as person X is trying to figure out what to do with their career. You're the person to go talk to about that because you're partial, but you care more about the outcome for the individual, not like optimizing for your own outcome.

I mean like my longest, what do you say yours was? I'm competitive, 15. Mine is about 13 years. My first day of my job ever as a 21 year old working at Oracle was Pete. And I tried to convince Pete to come join me at everywhere I worked. But eventually at Dropbox, 13 years later, he was like, yeah, he answered the call and he was like, you still actually care about me as an individual as opposed to just optimizing for yourself. So it worked out.

So I talked to one of your former engineering managers earlier today and he said, you're a beast about closing people. You guys did some interesting things on the university side that I'd love for you to talk about. And then you also got pretty creative on the compensation side, specifically when you're going after kind of staff and principal level people out of Google.

Yeah, I'm going to talk about the comp later, but let's talk about the creativity part of it. Right. My hypothesis is that most of us in this room are actually fairly intellectually lazy when it comes to closing candidates. And what I mean by that is that. Let me give you an example. I think this is elucidated there, There was a candidate, incredible engineer, when Dropbox was maybe, I don't know, like 70, 80 engineers. And he came to us, he's like, listen, I'm going to have to move out from Boston and I have a family, a growing family, and I just can't find a house and a living arrangement that makes sense. And we're like, the easy reaction would have been that, like, oh, yeah, San Francisco is expensive. Like nobody can afford to live there, so this is not somebody that we can close. And that would have been an easy out. And I saw a lot of like, honestly, like engineering managers at Dropbox taking that out. But as we dug into it further, what we found out was that he was not looking for a cheap housing solution in San Francisco. He was looking for a religious community. Yeah, he went to church every Sunday and he was looking for that setup that he had in Boston, on the east coast, here. So at Dropbox, we ended up actually working with him to find him a set of options in the Peninsula that would satisfy that. And I bring this up because you can't always find this particular thing that motivates people. But it would have been really easy to say that, yeah, he's not going to join us because housing is too expensive. Right. So the reason I bring this up is that leaders and hiring managers, we have a lot of outs to give ourselves. But do you actually want to take that out or do you want to actually understand what the candidate wants and to dig deep? And it's unlikely that it will always work, but you can do a lot more than you think.

My opinion, I see this with companies all the time, is like, they rush to offer. So they do all of this time evaluating and then they don't take that extra phone call to say, what questions do you have left? What last things do we need to answer for you? Do you want to actually work here? And then that's when you learn about whether they're missing a community piece or you still need to do some more work with their significant other.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Or they're trying to figure out, like, how do they kind of adjust if they have kids in school and what the compensation piece. And, I mean, with one specific company, they made an offer to a candidate. And then I talked to the candidate. He's like, I don't know who I'm reporting to. I don't know what job I'm supposed to do. I don't know. My core responsibilities are going to be. I'm like, there's no way in hell that guy's going to take that offer. So we had to back it all up, like, answer all of those questions, and you eventually accepted. But if you just do it ahead of time, like, you save yourself a whole bunch of thrash.

Can I share another story?

Absolutely not.

This is one of my favorite ones from Dropbox. So there was this, like, crazy good intern, we'll just call him with his initials, S.S. okay. S.S. was incredible throughout his three months over the summer in maybe 2014 at Dropbox, and he really did not want to go back to school. And I remember that I had to go talk to his parents and convince them because his parents were just like, what are you doing to my son? You're convincing him to not go back to school. You're a bad person. I'm like, auntie, Uncle. Hold on, hold on. I will make sure he gets his degree. And eventually, after working at Dropbox full time, and he was only six months away from graduating, Drew and I forced him to go and get his degree. And, well, I'm Facebook friends with his mom and dad, which is amazing. But what I'd say is that you can make these promises, but it's really important that you do not say just for the sake of hiring the person. You have to be true to your word because life is small. Karma gets back to you. And I actually am really proud of the fact that between Drew Arash and I, who all of us really care about the individual, he got his degree, his mom and dad are happy, and he's still a happy Dropbox employee. And that just really matters to me. So what I'm saying is that in the course of recruiting, you can find yourself making absurd promises. It's fine to make those, but if you mean them, like, if you mean them, then it's all good, and you should actually Stretch yourself to do the crazy things. As long as you mean them, don't say shit you're not going to do.

I do want to talk a little bit about comp.

Oh, sure.

So relative to most companies, Dropbox had a war chest. But even compared to some of the larger companies, you're still a small stack at the table. So what is your approach to how do you leverage compensation? Do you have one strategy that you always use or how do you apply it? Depending on. Depending on who you want.

I'm going to actually turn this back to you really quickly because I think you're better at the comp stuff than I am. But my simple take is that most engineers are looking to get to a point where they feel as if they're not getting screwed and they're being fairly treated. And then after that, it's about all the other things. And they might couch it, they might use comp as a way to basically talk about the other things, but it's not actually comp. They're just looking to get to the minimum level that they feel as they're being treated fairly.

I agree. So I think being able to talk about comp in a way that says here's market and understanding that there's fairness, I also believe that, you tell me, if you disagree, that there's always going to be a 10% of the company, roughly, that delivers 90% of the value in the set of things that you're doing. And so there are situations where you should be using comp selectively in asymmetric ways to make sure that you're able to keep those people.

I strongly agree with that. The way that I think of it is not to basically attach preconceived notions on. Yeah, let's assume you have like a level one through level six in terms of like, you know, an engineering career ladder. I think it's completely fine for a person who has five years of experience to be a level six. Right. Basically have some rigor in terms of the structure that you have, but then don't have bias in terms of somebody can go through the levels or jump through the levels if you need to. So you need to have the rigor and structure, but then also be unbiased in terms of how you move people through the levels, is my take on it.

Yeah, I think you need to exercise judgment and I believe 100% of having rigor. So it allows you to hire to level and make sure compensation is all over the place. But at the time, same. Same time, like if someone carries Most of the water. Make sure that you're able to.

Yeah, I mean, like, to be blunt, it's totally fine for somebody three years out of college to be at the top level of your engineering ladder if they're adding enough value.

What do you say to someone who's having to build their team for the first time?

That's a great question. What I would say is that, like, I really hope that you have a good manager. And I mean that seriously. Like, I feel as though that I've learned this the hard way myself. Most of the times the constraints are given is like, oh, you have this much money to go and grow the team or we're going to double the team and everybody just focuses on recruiting and hiring. But more and more I'm just like the biggest limiting factor in not the growth rate of a company, but the throughput rate of the company or for engineering is actually the number of good engineering leaders that they have. So how do you bootstrap engineering managers? And I guess this is why we're all here. So you have all made good career decisions, but I think that the number of good engineering managers that you have in a company is actually the biggest limiting factor that you have in terms of growth rate.

Yeah, I think that's another hour, which we don't have because I think we're running out of time. But I like this question. So does comp asymmetry reward good performers or good negotiators?

Oh, that's a good question. I actually think it totally depends on your system. I'm a big fan of Facebook system. If I can talk about it for a second. Facebook is, you know, I think it's a little bit out there. So Facebook is a seven point scale in terms of rating that you get of how you've done. And the seventh point, the top, which I never got for what it was. I was there for six years. You know, I was pretty early there. But is redefining excellence. Okay, that's how you have done. And you basically get like probably 3,4xe equity refresher than somebody else gets. And I looked at it and I was just like, boom, Amazing. There are people there who are adding that much value that are getting that. I was totally cool with it. I feel like you can negotiate, which it's way more interesting to me to understand why. What is the steady state of comp within these companies. We can also talk about in the way in, but that's just, in my opinion, not that interesting.

I agree. I think that on the way in you should strive to be as standardized as possible.

Exactly.

And then I think comp is a tool that most companies just make a mistake on. Every year you do a standard process, there's some adjustment pieces and so you kind of miss on this opportunity to reward people ahead of them asking for it.

I completely agree.

Because that changes the dynamic entirely. When you surprise someone, when you delight them to say like we see you, we see what you've done and we want to reward you for that. Like that endears them to you.

Like you said, a one hour conversation. But like my take is actually that we should only give maybe like a two year grant on the way in and then all of it should just be like based on like the mutual fit, the mutual performance. Why do we give four year grants? The length of a grant should be based on like how long people last at companies. And most people don't last for four years nowadays. Right. So anyways, long story, I think we're.

So like how does a five year person get to be level six?

I will not give a comprehensive answer, but I'll give like an answer that I think is non intuitive maybe for most managers. One of the profiles that we struggled with at both Facebook and Dropbox is how do you really value a person who is not working on the hardest shit, but is that person who is working and basically is always there working on the stuff that is not glorious, working on the stuff that is not sexy and kind of giving the heart to it. And invariably all of you come performance review. The question you're asking is not the total amount of output or the total throughput in your head. You're basically thinking what is the one seminal thing this person has done, right? And the individual who the profile that ends up getting screwed in this whole setup is a person who has not done anything seminal, but has done a lot of small things and has been there when you want them. And they never get rewarded in essentially performance reviews. So if there's one thing that I would think about as you all tailor your level 6 is how does that person who's always there for you is a super hard worker but is not working on the hardest problems or the sexiest problems get to that level. I know a bunch of people at Facebook who have done that and at Dropbox are incredible engineers. And I feel really strongly about making sure that we reward them. So I would encourage you to think about that as well. Because the easy one is to reward people that worked on hard problems. But hard is not always high utility.

So the CEO of Coda used to run YouTube. He did a Masters of Scale class three. And one of the things that he did at YouTube which completely broke com for them, was the engineering manager. So like, if you're rehiring the team, who do you draft first, regardless of level, and then they bonused accordingly. So you could be a level one, level two, but you would be getting bonus at the highest level because they focused on what was their overall impact to the team and like starting to remove like level from the calculation. So there's a question about recruiting when you don't have a brand. Every company starts without a brand. When I joined Mozilla, people thought that they had to work there for free. And so we had to educate people. Like, no, we actually will pay you if you come work for us. So you had to recruit for Cove. Like, you didn't have any brand. I guess it was your brand.

That's true. You know, I'll be honest, I don't actually have a great answer for this. I've been in the lucky situation of being with companies that have had a great brand. Facebook, Dropbox, Koves, Ruchi's brand, my wife's brand. What I'd say though is that.

You.

Can still do all the basics, right? You can be good people, you can have a good culture. Like, you can actually attract people. If you have interesting problems, you cannot essentially be slippery. You can do the basic things. Right. And after that, it's not even about the brand. It's just like, yeah, if somebody cares about what you're doing, they might work with you. And if not, probably a good thing that they don't work with you. Right. So this is not something that I would stress out about.

Well, I mean, I think your margin of error goes way down. That's fair. So therefore, like, you don't like. There's plenty of large companies, I'm sure people have interviewed with some of them and like, they take weeks to get back and you still take the offer anyways, but you have to execute really well. If you don't have a brand.

Yeah, don't make the mistakes, right? Like about, like, be quick, be genuine, make good offers. Like, don't try to like, shortchange people.

You just sell the value. We'll do one more question.

Okay, sure. Why not?

How do you teach engineering managers to sell the company to people that they're trying to recruit? Or what do you think they need to know to effectively sell the company?

This is a good question. If you are at the point that we actually in the process of closing or selling, you should be super transparent about all of the stuff that is not happy in your life right now, both yourself individually and potentially the company as well. Because candidates are smart enough. Like if you say stuff that's too rosy or if you don't actually give them the real talk, people will actually discount everything else that you say. So my take is always just to be super transparent. That is not to mean that you cannot be optimistic. You can be optimistic about your but just couch it being like, hey, this is the big upside. This is also what could go wrong. This is the stuff I'm worried about. And you'll be surprised as to how many people appreciate the super real talk.

I agree. Like there is like, this is us. This is us, the team, us the company. This is you, the individual. This is how you fit into us the team, us the company.

Oh sure, yeah.

And not enough people know how to think like an investor, so to say. And a lot of times when I'm helping portfolio companies, it is giving an investor side perspective to that of like here's all the interesting technical challenges then then understanding what it is that they care about. Some of it may be they just care about the technical challenges. Some of them want to be able to know is this the company that I could spend my next X number of years for? And so understanding both what is it that someone desires, but being able to know how to understand what they value and all of the various kind of things in the tool book about the company that allows you to kind of communicate. Okay, I think we're kicked off. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Dan. Thank you, thank you, thank you.