Someone asked me, a few months ago, if he should take a Silicon Valley (actually, San Francisco) job offer where the relocation was a “generous” $4,000. I told him to negotiate for more and, if the company wouldn’t budge, to decline. For an adult, that’s not a relocation package. That’s half-assery.
I won’t get too particular on the details, but this person lived on the East Coast and had children. For an adult of any kind facing a cross-country move, $4,000 is not a generous relocation package. It’s downright pathetic. Movers don’t work for equity. A full-service move for an adult, with a family, costs at least twice that number. When you move for a job, your employer is still going to expect you to start as soon as possible and be 100% on-the-ball in your first weeks. You can’t take on a self-move and start a new job properly. If you do have that kind of energy, it means you’re the alpha-trader type who should be on Wall Street, not taking employee positions at startups. For the 99.99% of us who are mere mortals, taking on a self-move means you’ll be slacking at your job in the first weeks and, while slacking might be OK when you’re 3 years in and just waiting for something better to come along, it’s not a way to start a job– especially not a job you moved across the country to take.
In addition to the small size of that package, I think lump-sum relocations are a bad deal in general. I think they fail for both sides. They’re bad for the employee because, in addition to losing a chunk of it to taxes, the lump-sum arrangement leaves it to the employee to make arrangements and haggle. The employer, however, risks getting the amount severely wrong, while not getting the major benefit of a relocation, which is a 100%-focused employee with high morale, because the employee still has to haggle with movers and manage minutiae. A good employer, knowing how toxic moving stress can be, will solve every niggling, stupid little problem that comes up in the process of relocation. They’ll have a trusted moving company, rather than expecting the employee to make the calls and compare costs. (If the moving company’s client is the company, rather than you, they’ll do a good job because they want repeat business– a concern that isn’t there with “man with a van” outfits.) They’ll manage the flight and, with a high-quality placement agency involved, have an interview per day lined up for the spouse until he or she gets a good job. If you’re moving internationally, you’ll get an extra week or two of vacation (and you won’t have to ask for it) each year and they’ll have tax equalization already worked out. Why? Because genuinely good employers (who are rare these days) want their best people on, 100 percent, rather than phoning it in at their jobs because they’re fighting little piss fires in their personal lives.
I know that relocation is derided as an “old-style perk” in the Valley. If you broach the subject, you risk seeming entitled, high-maintenance, and worst of all, old. Most companies in the Valley don’t fall under the “good employers” qualification. Most of these Valley “startups” are just long-shot gambles running on a shoestring budget, and their real purpose isn’t to build businesses but to try out middling product managers (called “CEOs” of semi-existent, non-autonomous companies) for promotion into the investor ranks (EIRs or associates or partners at VC firms). The reason they can’t pay or relocate properly is that, while investors are handing these half-companies pennies and saying “Humor me”, even their own backers don’t trust the companies enough to take a real risk and give them the resources that’d enable them to pay real salaries and benefits. This raises the question, for the employee: if the investors aren’t willing to bet on that business, then why should you?
Anyway, this person didn’t heed my advice, took the job anyway, left a few months later and, from the titles and prestige of the following company, the next move appears to have been a demotion. I can’t speak for what happened or whether my perception (based on LinkedIn) of a demotion is correct. I generally cut ties with people who make bad decisions, so I haven’t heard his side.
California, here we come
So, there’s an epidemic of Shitty Relo (or even nonexistent relo) in Silicon Valley and it’s California arrogance at its finest. I need to address it, for the good of society. The mythology justifying it is that California is such a wonderful place to live, with its traffic and absurd real estate prices and brogrammers, that a $2,500 relocation package for an adult (meaning, here, 25+ and no longer allowed to live without furniture, because it’s just not socially acceptable to sleep on a hand-me-down mattress with no bed) is to be taken as a perk rather than a fuck-you.
This culture of cheapness is disgusting. One time a couple of years ago, I spoke to a startup about a supposedly “VP-level” role and, when it came time to discuss an on-site interview, they asked if I could apply to another company (that would cover travel costs) and “piggyback” their interview process on the same day– that is, go to them in the evening after an all-day interview with another company– sparing them the cost of flights and a hotel. At that point, I stopped returning their calls, because I knew that if they couldn’t spring for airfare, they wouldn’t be willing or able to do the right thing when it came to relocation, so there was no point in continuing.
Frankly, I think that the “we don’t do relo” policy is short-sighted if not idiotic. I checked my almanac to be sure, but the world is very big. No metropolitan area has anywhere close to a dominating share of the global talent pool. The Bay Area has some impressive people (and a much larger number of not-impressive people who still command impressive salaries) but if you’re serious about competing for talent, you just can’t restrict yourself to one geographic area. Not in 2014. Either set yourself up to be distributed (which is hard to do) or man the fuck up and pay for talent and pay for it to move. Otherwise, you aren’t serious about winning and you deserve to lose.
Oh, and another thing…
Then there is the matter of relocation clawbacks. Many companies put a stipulation on a relocation package that it must be repaid if the employee leaves within a certain timeframe. On what moral grounds is this OK? Did that employee not suffer the costs of relocation, either way? Do movers reimburse a person who relocated for a job that turned out to be a stinker? Of course they don’t, because they still did the work and that would be ludicrous. Almost no one joins a job expecting to leave in a year, which means people only will do so if things get really shitty. Why make it worse, by imposing a ridiculous penalty, if things go bad? Chances are, if the employee is willing to leave a company in the first year, that the company is partially at fault. The purely opportunistic “job hopper” is a hated straw man for employers, because the reality is that at least 75 percent of employers are just shitty (and bad at hiding it, so savvy people leave quickly). I don’t know why it’s considered a virtue to waste one’s life by investing in an employer that isn’t invested in one’s own career. It’s not.
Clawbacks aren’t usually a big deal (it’s not hard to stay at a company for a year) but they send a strong signal: we employ at least one person who enjoys shitting in places where fecal matter doesn’t belong. That clawback clause didn’t appear by accident. It’s not likely that cosmic rays hit the hard drive where the contract template was stored and just happened to put additional words there. Someone in that company, at some time, made the decision to include a clawback clause. And I’m sorry, but the people who try to earn their keep by shitting on things should be fired. Companies are complex beasts and need a wide variety of services to maintain and grow them. What they don’t need are people who indiscriminately shit on things because it amuses them to leave festering piles of dookie all over the company. If I wanted to see creatures shitting indiscriminately, I’d go to the zoo. The issue with a relocation clawback isn’t the economic risk for employee, but the fact that the company actually retains someone who took the time to put that garbage in the contract.
The bigger problem
In this essay, I’ve Solved It with regard to relocation, because it actually is a simple issue: if you’re a company, play or go home. If you’re a prospective employee and you’re offered an inadequate relocation package, turn the job down. If the company was serious about winning, they’d give you what you need to pull off the move properly. These, “oh yeah, we offer $2000″ fly-by-night startups aren’t serious about winning. They don’t need top talent. What they need are clueless, naive, true believers who’ll throw enough hours and youthful enthusiasm behind a bad idea to continue the founders’ campaign to defraud investors. It’s best if those true believers don’t have families, because their spouses might “disrupt” (I had to use that word) them with questions like, “why are you working more than 40 hours per week, at a company that only gave you 0.02% in equity?” It’s best if they’re under 27 and don’t mind taking on the insane risk of going into an extremely expensive city without an offer of temporary housing.
Of course, there’s one exception. If you will have at least 20 percent equity in the company, you might consider taking on the risk of an unpaid relocation. That’s right, 20%. You have to be partner-level for it to make sense, and prior to external investment, anything less than 20% is not partner level. (After external investment, full relocation should be a given for all key players.) Don’t take partner-level risk for an employee-level role. It doesn’t engender respect; it shows weakness.
So what’s the bigger issue? What I’ve noticed about such a large number of startups, in the Valley and elsewhere, is that they’re disgustingly cheap. Cheap things are usually of low quality. Exceptions exist, but they’re rare and if your business strategy is based on cheapness, you’ll fail, because opportunities to buy something of high quality at a low price are usually far too intermittent to build a company on them. Also, one thing you learn in technology is that low-quality components often corrupt the whole system. If you pour a cup of wine in a barrel of sewage, you have a barrel of sewage. But if you pour a cup of sewage in a barrel of wine, you also have a barrel of sewage. Most VC-funded companies are launched with absolutely no understanding of this principle. They’re designed to be as stingy as possible in the hope that one “home run” company will emerge from the chaos and pay for the hundred failures. Occasionally, the idea is so good that even terrible health benefits and sloppy HR and closed allocation won’t block a success. These opportunities only emerge a few times in each generation, but they do exist. In general, though, a company designed poorly and with low-quality components (management, policies, mission and founding principles) will just be a loser. VCs can afford to generate hundreds of losers because they’re diversified. Rank-and-fire employees can’t.
In reality, a company succeeds not by being as cheap as possible, but focusing on the delta. What are you paying, and what are you getting? Cost-minimization usually leads to low quality and a minuscule if not negative delta. A new Volkswagen GTI for $20,000 is a great deal. A beat-up clunker unlikely to last a year isn’t worth $1,000, and is likely to cost more in headaches and maintenance than buying a quality car. In general, both extremes of the price spectrum are where the worst deals are found. The high end is populated by Veblen goods and dominated by the winner’s curse, while the low end’s psychological and technical advantages (some purchasers will always buy the cheapest option, and sometimes this is by regulation) to the supplier render it protected, often allowing quality to fall to (or below) zero. In hiring, just as with commodity goods, this is observed. Overpaid executives are often the most damaging people in an organization, and paying them more doesn’t improve the quality of people hired; on the other hand, the desperate employees willing to take the worst deals are usually of low or negative value to the business.
The actual “golden rule” of success at business isn’t “buy low, sell high”, because opportunities to do so are extremely rare, and “carrying costs” associated with the wait for perfect deals are unaffordable. Instead, it’s “maximize the spread between your ‘sell’ and ‘buy’ price” or, for a more practical depiction that sounds less manipulative, “sell something that is more than the sum of its parts”. With some components, the right move is to buy high and sell higher. For others, it’s to buy low and sell less-low. For example, in software, you probably want to take the “buy high and sell higher” strategy with employees. A competent software engineer is worth $1 million per year to the business, so it’s better to hire her at $150,000 (which, in current market conditions, is more than enough to attract talent, if you have interesting problems to solve) than to hire an incompetent at any salary. Talent matters, which means that to spend on salary and benefits and relocation is worth it. The way you win in software is to buy high and sell higher. That said, “buy high” also means you have to buy (in this case, to hire) selectively, because you can’t buy many things if you’re buying high. Unfortunately, people who have sufficient talent to make those calls are rare (and most of us are irrelevant bloggers, not investors). MBA-toting VCs like cheapness because, without the ability to assess talent and make those calls, the scatter-shot approach is all they have.
I think it’s important, before I go further, to focus on the difference between genuine constraint and stupid cheapness. Before venture capital got involved in small-business formation to the extent that it has (largely because bank loans now require personal liability, making them a non-starter for anything with a non-zero chance of failure) most emerging firms were legitimately limited in their ability to hire more people. “Lean” wasn’t some excuse for being mean-spirited or miserly; it was just the reality of getting a company off the ground. If the constraints really exist, then play within them. If you can barely afford salaries for your three founders because you’re bootstrapping on scant consulting revenue, then maybe you can’t afford to pay their relocation costs. The problem with the VC-funded cheapness is that those constraints really don’t exist. “We can’t afford $X” is predicated on “We only have 100X and need to hire 100 people” which is predicated on “We’re going to hire such mediocre people that we need 100 of them to get the job done”, and that mediocrity wouldn’t be such an issue if $2X were offered instead. If $2X were offered, the job might be feasible with 15 people, but the VCs aren’t able to assess talent at that level, nor pick founders who can, so it’s easier for that class of people to just pretend that talent differentials among engineers don’t exist and implement a closed-allocation MBA culture.
Mindless, stupid cost-cutting isn’t limited to startups. Large corporations show this behavior, as well, and it’s easy to explain why it’s there. Those who can, do. Those who can’t, evaluate and squeeze. This evaluation process can take many forms, such as micromanagement; but a complementary form is the senseless and mean-spirited penny-shaving of the modern corporate bureaucrat (“I don’t think you need that!”) It takes no vision to “cut costs” in a way that, in 99% of cases, actually externalizes costs to somewhere else (low-quality technology, morale problems, environmental impact). Penny-shaving is what stupid overpaid fuckheads do to justify their executive positions when they don’t have the vision to actually lead or innovate. They cut, and they cut, and they cut. They get good at it, too. Then they start asking questions like, “Why are we paying full relocation for these experienced programmers, when there are a bunch of starry-eyed 22-year-olds with California dreams?” Six months later, that’s answered by the cataclysmic drop in code quality, which is starting to bring major pain to the business, but the cost-cutting idiot who had the idea has already gotten his promotion and moved on to fuck something else up.
When companies balk at the concept of offering a proper relocation, the message it sends to me is that they’re in the business of squeezing zero-sum petty wins out of their employees, rather than vying for actual wins on the market.
Conclusion
Most software engineers don’t know what they’re getting into when they enter this industry, and spend more time than is reasonable being a loser. I can’t claim innocence on this one. There were jobs where I worked for shitty companies or inept managers or on pointless projects for a variety of reasons that seemed to make sense at the time, but were almost certainly errant. Don’t make that mistake. Don’t be a loser. The good news is that that’s rather easy to control. One can’t change one’s level of talent or influence the large component that is truly luck, but avoiding loserism has some straightforward rules. Don’t work with losers. Don’t work for losers. (Don’t fight against losers either. That’s a mistake I’ve made as well, and they can be vicious and powerful when in groups.) Don’t make excuses for people who don’t seem to be able to get it together and play to win. Stick to the people who actually want to achieve something and will bet big on the things that matter, not the 95% of VC-funded founders and executives just trying to draw a salary on a venture capitalist’s dime (despite all that paper-thin bullshit rhetoric about “changing the world”) while squeezing everyone else at every opportunity.
Unless you’re a founder and the resources simply don’t exist yet, never relocate unpaid. If the company actually sees you as a key player, and it cares about winning more than zero-sum cost-cutting, it will solve your moving problems for you, so you can get to work in earnest on your first day.
