Hot take: many (most?) startups don't need talented senior engineers and won't even pay for them. They have products that do not have performance constraints or that would benefit from mastery of any one specific technology.
What startups need is engineers who can show up to work, understand requirements, point out potential shortcomings, write code on an approximate timeline and be willing to fix their mistakes. As it turns out, you don't always need a senior engineer to do that. You certainly don't need a 10x rockstar ninja engineer.
Where I've seen startups struggle in the past is fostering a culture of mentorship. When you're hiring fresh grads or people early in their careers, your employees will want someone to give them honest and personalized advice. It's pretty hard for people that are early in their careers to fill that role, so you may need some senior engineers to do that.
Overall, I think this article is a bit fanciful in the expectations it makes around recruiting. Sharing stuff like internal processes, team size etc are definitely helpful to the candidate but are costly to the employer. This information may be confidential or provide a competitive advance. They may also vary by team will definitely vary over time. Overall I think it's unrealistic to expect the company to be very forthcoming about this type of thing until they make the offer.
The interviewing stuff also seems to come from a good place but represents wishful thinking. Companies (even startups) hold significant leverage in 99% of interview situations and therefore are strongly inclined to err on the side of false negative. Their thought process goes like this: "sure, you may be amazing but because you're not willing to jump through my arbitrary hoops (6 hour coding exercise, 3 rounds of onsites, etc) I'm willing to hold out for someone who is equally as good."
I'm not saying any of this is good for the candidate, but it's unrealistic to expect companies to start to treat senior candidates any better given the way the labor market is set up. In fact, I'd expect this kind of treatment to get worse as the bumper crop of younger engineers trained in the late 2000s starts to level up in experience.
What startups need is engineers who can show up to work, understand requirements, point out potential shortcomings, write code on an approximate timeline and be willing to fix their mistakes. As it turns out, you don't always need a senior engineer to do that. You certainly don't need a 10x rockstar ninja engineer.
Where I've seen startups struggle in the past is fostering a culture of mentorship. When you're hiring fresh grads or people early in their careers, your employees will want someone to give them honest and personalized advice. It's pretty hard for people that are early in their careers to fill that role, so you may need some senior engineers to do that.
Overall, I think this article is a bit fanciful in the expectations it makes around recruiting. Sharing stuff like internal processes, team size etc are definitely helpful to the candidate but are costly to the employer. This information may be confidential or provide a competitive advance. They may also vary by team will definitely vary over time. Overall I think it's unrealistic to expect the company to be very forthcoming about this type of thing until they make the offer.
The interviewing stuff also seems to come from a good place but represents wishful thinking. Companies (even startups) hold significant leverage in 99% of interview situations and therefore are strongly inclined to err on the side of false negative. Their thought process goes like this: "sure, you may be amazing but because you're not willing to jump through my arbitrary hoops (6 hour coding exercise, 3 rounds of onsites, etc) I'm willing to hold out for someone who is equally as good."
I'm not saying any of this is good for the candidate, but it's unrealistic to expect companies to start to treat senior candidates any better given the way the labor market is set up. In fact, I'd expect this kind of treatment to get worse as the bumper crop of younger engineers trained in the late 2000s starts to level up in experience.