Sure, I took job hunting 101 too. I've also been involved in a lot of hiring decisions and a number of these sorts of discussions.
The gap in your chances between "I know someone in the company" and "I don't know someone in the company" is so huge that I can't/couldn't imagine a cover letter making a big difference if you don't already know somebody. So my recommendations have normally been around networking or canvasing friends-of-friends to know somebody and then go that route.
That said, I have to admit it's been a long time since I've had to do a cold round of applications so I totally accept I've underestimated.
This is really interesting, I think we've experienced some very different companies! Where I currently worked, I've been the "inside source" for 4 people (2 of which I initially reached out to first), all of them were rejected :(
Quicksilver also has a "shelf" area that acts as a temporary holding place for files. It's not as simple and friendly as Unclutter, but there's a pretty open-ended shortcut system with a mouse-gestures plugin available.
"You can either put a million dollars of your own blood, sweat and tears in, in which case it'll be the wildest ride of your life, or you can deploy capital."
Generally you double an engineer's salary to arrive at the total cost to the firm of retaining their services. So that's 5 engineers for a year. This article puts a final estimate at 2.7x:
You also need to realize just how new and unproven Lean Startup ideas are in the larger context of business. In that world, a million is just getting started. Most software products in the world took much much more than a million dollars to make. You have to pay the project managers, creative team, etc etc.
> Generally you double an engineer's salary to arrive at the total cost to the firm of retaining their services.
It's a fair point thought I do think 1-3 engineers is still plenty for "most" startup products to get to MVP (not universal but general rule of thumb).
> You also need to realize just how new and unproven Lean Startup ideas are in the larger context of business. In that world, a million is just getting started. Most software products in the world took much much more than a million dollars to make. You have to pay the project managers, creative team, etc etc.
Established (and assumedly) revenue generating software is not the topic of the discussion. The comment I was referring to was that $1m is needed to make a marketable product. Its a bogus claim.
OK, we need to qualify what is meant by 'product'. I'm not talking about a palette swapped iteration on an existing product. I'm talking about something new that the market hasn't yet quite seen before. The sort of product Silicon Valley funds.
Even the palette-swaps generally cost anywhere from a quarter to half a million dollars to do properly, unless it really is cookie-cutter. I don't know the exact figures, but the company I worked for spent a sum in that neighborhood on an e-commerce site, and laughed at me when I told them I'd build them a new site in house for a modest pay raise. Software is really expensive, programmers have this blind spot around it I think because it's psychologically easier to undervalue software than it is to face the reality of economic exploitation.
It seems you have experience in this area and I don't want to belittle it, I won't contest your claim that you've done it for less, but I want to be clear that the expertise that allows you to do that is worth a lot of money, even if you didn't get paid for it. How much? Take $1 million and subtract what the firm actually paid to bring the new product to market, and there you go.
If it's your company, then you get to enjoy the competitive advantage that the cost savings affords you. If not, the people owning the company are arbitraging your expertise and they're getting the competitive advantage.
But it's not just your expertise. Your team has to be a cut above in order to build software products for less than the general market rate. Again, they are either getting compensated for it or they're not, in which case they form part of the competitive advantage of the firm. The entire Silicon Valley startup industry is organized around creating and exploiting this advantage, which is really why it seems to you that a million bucks is an outlandishly huge number.
> OK, we need to qualify what is meant by 'product'. I'm not talking about a palette swapped iteration on an existing product. I'm talking about something new that the market hasn't yet quite seen before. The sort of product Silicon Valley funds.
Something never seen before like Snapchat? Or something never seen before like Hyperloop? If its the latter then clearly you're correct in your assessment but most startups ambitions fall much closer to the former.
Your post here has got some valid points but you've moved away from the very specific "minimum $1m for a marketable product" to some very vague generalities.
> Even the palette-swaps generally cost anywhere from a quarter to half a million dollars to do properly
"Properly" is subjective. I could have a Snapchat clone developed easily for $100k - probably considerably less - lets just say iOS App and corresponding web app & server architecture. With the exception that it clearly wouldn't be able to handle the load Snapchat handles - but certainly enough to be marketable.
> which is really why it seems to you that a million bucks is an outlandishly huge number.
I never said a million dollars is a large number. I know how easy it is to blow through such an amount.
My argument was you don't need that amount to create a marketable product - whether you're a developer or not.
Perhaps In SV, you may be correct but most people do not live in SV.
The reason I feel so strongly about this is that your sentiment is a very dangerous one to propagate to new or would-be startup founders. Based on the number of downvotes I've received for disagreeing with your comment, it would seem that people believe you need $1m in the bank before you can go to market.
That's a very good way of making sure some entrepreneurs never bother trying.
Now you're backpedaling while accusing me of doing so.
> I could have a Snapchat clone developed easily for $100k - probably considerably less
Bearing in mind that a Snapchat clone by itself wouldn't be marketable, you'd need a lot of marketing to differentiate it, so could I. But you and I have expertise, and expertise is valuable and needs to be factored into the price. That's the point I'm trying to make. My old CEO knows nothing about software, he paid half a million for an e-commerce site. For a real software product built by someone who doesn't know what he's doing, a million dollars is the minimum. Anyone who comes to the table with less than that is going to get really badly burned.
If you come to the table with half a million worth of expertise, and zero dollars of capital, you will probably fail unless you focus hard on getting funded. I'd rate the skill of getting funded as worth around $150-200K. If you don't already have it, you're going to have to pour in more of your blood, sweat and tears.
> it would seem that people believe you need $1m in the bank before you can go to market.
No, they understand the meaning of "a million dollars of your own blood, sweat and tears".
It does absolutely no good to would-be founders if they try their hand at doing a startup thinking it's going to be easy. When I see these kinds of post-mortems, I see that clearly, a million bucks worth of effort wasn't put in. They worked too hard, and not smart enough. They didn't have the expertise to enter the market that they wanted to be in. They may not have literally thought that all of their competitors and potential partners were stupid and / or naive, but their business model implicitly assumed it. They failed to de-risk the business and the risk killed them.
> Are you telling me that to "make a marketable product" you would need to pay 10 engineers $100k for a year?
Engineering, product design, graphic design (these are not the same), marketing, and sales are all needed in various proportions, depending on the product, to make a "marketable product." Between all of those roles you could easily chew up $1million in 1 year when you account for e.g. ~2x salary:total cost of employee ratio and standard Silicon Valley compensation levels.
> Engineering, product design, graphic design (these are not the same), marketing, and sales are all needed in various proportions, depending on the product, to make a "marketable product."
I'm well aware. I've done this many times.
> Between all of those roles you could easily chew up $1million in 1 year
You could easily chewup $100 million too. Does that mean we should go ahead and say we can't make a marketable product for $100m? Of course not. Constraints are a fact of life - whether that be time/money/whatever. The challenge is getting to market given the resources at your disposal.
> standard Silicon Valley compensation
The business in question is based is OR. Also, and I'm going to sound facetious here but I'm really not trying to be, most businesses are not based in SV.
I agree with you with one caveat: there really was a social contract in place that said something along the lines of "Finish third level and you'll walk into a job thats better than flipping burgers".
That contract has been broken. I think it was stupid to begin with but it was a message very clearly sent from generations, society, government that went before. As you say, it still is.
So does the writer have reason to be aggrieved? I think so. However, at some stage in an adults life they need to do some critical thinking and independently decide whats the optimal way to climb the pay ladder (legally).
That critical thinking is something that is simply not taught in schools. Perhaps its not teachable at all.
> there really was a social contract in place that said something along the lines of "Finish third level and you'll walk into a job thats better than flipping burgers"
Was this ever true for a Masters in Creative Writing? My understanding is that this class of degree has always been a social signal for "my family is so wealthy, I will never need to work."
With the advent of government subsidized mass higher education in the US starting in the 1960s, that changed. Many high school teachers and college professors began heavily encouraging their idealistic, young, poor students to "follow their passion" and study creative writing and other non-marketable subjects.
This group feels that it is vulgar and crass to even mention money or economics in the context of art or pure academics, much less integrate it into your life's plans, thus setting almost all of their naive students up for massive disappointment when they graduate with a huge pile of student loan debt and no jobs available except picking kale for rich people for barely above minimum wage.
"This group feels that it is vulgar and crass to even mention money or economics in the context of art or pure academics" - I'm not sure where you're gleaning that from - my point was there was/still is a social contract in place that tells young people that graduating from a third level institution will be a signifier of above average intelligence and/or work ethic thus leading to at least better than working class job.
Perhaps you had the foresight (or your parents did) to see that such qualifications would drastically decrease in social value. Others didn't. Then again, maybe you just happen to work in tech and lack empathy for those who didn't luck out in their chosen industry.
No, actually, I speak from painfully learned experience, as a former poor student who is now the holder of a non-marketable university degree in history and philosophy, and a pile of student loan debt.
But my personal experience is entirely irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
Let's keep the personal stereotyping and passive-aggresive insults out of this discussion.
The cover letter is your chance to explain Why you want to apply and Why you'd be a good fit.
The resume explains Who you are (professionally).
The Why is just as (and sometimes more) important than the Who.