ling a game was even solvable. In fact, a very relevant blogger wrote an article, titled “GDC: Why OnLive Can’t Possibly Work.” Needless to say, the intellectual challenge of proving this kind of statement wrong was a major motivation. Similarly, imagine the challenge of building a system that enables storage of information across all possible user devices at Dropbox. Now scale that system to support hundreds of millions of users. You want to find an interesting problem and commit to solving it. This challenge is going to be a big part of the motivation that will push you to the office every morning.

Team Quality. To keep yourself constantly challenged, you want to work with smart people. This will allow you to learn something new every day, and, more importantly, will increase the chances of the company being successful. Most of the time, a smaller team of great people moves much faster than a big company; this is what makes startups exciting (again, as an example, Dropbox’s engineering team is less than 40 people). My advice is to check out the LinkedIn profiles of the people you talk with during the interview process and hopefully find people who are similar to your interviewers and ask their opinions. Needless to say, quality is not only about being smart so make sure that you indeed like the people you are going to work with.

Management. One of the most understated rules during the interview process is that “you hire your manager.” In good companies, management is a service layer whose purpose is to improve employee focus and productivity by facilitating communication and helping people develop skills. On the contrary, some companies consider management as a power layer. You want to avoid these companies— they rarely succeed anyway. Even in good companies, you might find a manager that is clueless about his or her responsibilities. You should try to discern that early on and avoid these managers, as they are likely to make your life difficult. You will learn over time how to distinguish capable from incapable managers. At the beginning of your career, a good question to ask

In research,
just like in industry,
big things come
out of great people
working together.
Having a good
network of people
you can exchange
ideas with is crucial
as you progress
in your career.

your prospective manager is why he decided to enter management. Make sure you like the answer.

Culture. A popular recruiting buzz-word, “culture” cannot be ignored. All the best companies will try to sell you on their internal culture. This is something you want to pay lots of attention to. First of all, you want to find out if the employees actually care about their company culture or if they are just trying to sell you on it. The best way is to chat with folks in the company outside of the interview setting. A company with a strong positive culture will likely invite you to visit their offices during normal working hours. This is a very good sign because it shows that the company has nothing to hide and it gives you a chance to look at how things really work on a day-to-day basis. Note that there is no magic recipe for “good company culture.” You just have to decide if that specific set of values works for you. On the other hand, there are a variety of factors that can contribute to a very bad culture. As an example, a high degree of internal secrecy is often discouraged in startups. There are obviously exceptions, but, in general, good companies trust their employees to be responsible and sharing of information is encouraged.

Healthy Environment. Yes, health
is important, and you don’t want to
be irresponsible about taking care of
yourself. Some startups, perhaps a bit
stereotypically, follow the mantra of
“free beer and cheap food and your
employees will be happy.” That philos-
ophy might have been okay 20 years
ago, but it won’t fly in today’s world. It
is in your own, as well as the compa-
ny’s, best interest to take measures to
keep your body healthy and efficient.
The best companies are very careful in
the choice of food they provide. They
often subsidize the membership to a
gym as part of the compensation, or
hire ergonomic consultants to ensure
employees keep good posture during
work hours. For instance, at Dropbox,
we have our own gym in the office
and many people use standing desks
to improve posture. There is no way
around it: You are going to go through
crunch times with very tight dead-
lines, and the value of working for a
company that cares about your health
shouldn’t be underestimated.

 

HOW TO WEIGH THESE FACTORS Unfortunately, there is no magic solution to the simple formula I proposed. The weighting factors are different for each individual, and the way you assign those weights will ultimately define which journey you take. Joining a company is sort of like entering a relationship; you don’t want to settle, but on the other hand, you shouldn’t obsess too much over trying to find the “perfect” one. You might get incredibly lucky and land your dream job on the first try, or, more likely, you’ll need to readjust those weights a few times. The only way to determine what factors matter the most to you is to get out there, try a few things, and learn as much as you can in the process.

 

Biography

Pierpaolo Baccichet was born in Milan, Italy and currently lives in San Francisco, CA. He holds M. S and Ph.d. degrees in computer science from the University of Milan, and worked as a researcher at the national Research Center in Turin focusing on error resilience techniques for media transmission over the Internet. After completing his Ph.d., he joined the Max Planck Center for Visual Computing and Communication as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering department at Stanford University. He co-founded dyyno, a company that enables low latency peer-to-peer video transmission, and was also the director of Engineering at onLive, Inc., where he helped build a system to enable high-end gaming online. recently, he joined dropbox, where he works on scaling the backend infrastructure to provide better service.