Wanted - FT System Engineer at Mahalo in Santa Monica

[Poster Rabid]

If you apply and get the job, I want credit because I will get a free dinner

here's the details given by Jason & Mark @ Mahalo.com
............................................................................................................
Doubling the size of our technical staff here in Los Angeles to keep up with the growth of Mahalo
We're looking for a really killer Systems Engineer here in Los Angeles to work at our very cool factory in Santa Monica where they will make their own hours (provided they at least make it in for the free staff lunch every day at noon :-), get whatever equipment they want, soak in stock options in the next big thing, and work with a team of totally kick-ass no BS developers who are KILLING it every day.

It's amazing job, really. Our tech team is lead by Mark, a seasoned 12+ year Internet vet who has been through a number of startups. Our current Iron Man Systems Engineer Dan is looking for a second Iron Man to help scale our service from four million uniques a month to 40 million. Yes, we're going big here at Mahalo. :-)

The basic job description Mark put together can be found below. Please send your deets to jason at mahalo.com and cc mark at mahalo.com with the subject line "I kick ass"

Rock on Jason
Systems Engineer, Los Angeles
Mahalo.com, Inc. is a new human-powered social search service backed by Sequoia Capital (the world's #1 venture firm), Newscorp, CBS, Elon Musk (Paypal founder), and others. This kind of opportunity is extremely rare in LA: these high-profile rewards are usually found only in Silicon Valley.

We're looking for a seasoned Systems Engineer. You should be expert in massively scalable architectures, how MySQL and Linux interact, how MySQL and memcache interact, sharding, replication (including multiple
master replication) and how to tune MySQL based on various schemas for maximum performance and availability. You are a HANDS ON implementor, a get-it-done kind of developer. The right person is a self starter
with the "general get it factor". You work well with a team of like-minded engineers, and have a genuine desire for excellence.

You should be expert with:
Applications: PHP 5.x, MySQL 5.x, memcache 1.2.x
Protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, Unicast and Multicast socket programming
Scripting languages: Unix shell scripting
Other languages: Applicants with C, Java, and Objective-C experience preferred
Bonus: Hadoop / HBase, Lucene, Nutch, Spread

Well rounded candidates such as release engineers with a background in both large corporate environments and small startups have an edge.

[codger]

I think that someone should kick Jason's ass. What an immature, ego-centric jerk.

[John Masterson]

Translation: your "superstar's pay" will be primarily artificially created bragging rights and phony status.

Your hourly rate will be about $19/hour for 90 hours a week mandatory.

Oh, and because you are so important, you will wear a beeper...even in the shower.

[Poster Rabid]

But it looks like you do From what I hear, either you love him or hate him. I am personally kinda neutral, bit it looks to me that all the preliminary patter in the posting is typical corporate egospeak to pump up the candidate.

I don't work on the left coast, so my opinion on most of the dot-com crowd are just what I hear. But it looks to me that the biggest value in an internet startup is perception from both the public and your investors. That's why a CEO of a high-profile startup has to have a big ego just to keep going every day. Most of the small companies (non-dot-com) I have worked at seem to have a person like this. But usually it is just a shell to hide real feelings of insecurity. When there are "bad times" in a startup (and this happens a lot), you have to walk out in front of your employees and tell them that everything is great.

Either way, this looks like an interesting company and I just ran across the opportunity posted in a blog.

[codger]

I wouldn't last ten minutes in that type of environment. The very thought nauseates me.

[Poster Rabid]

I informally checked on this and the pay is a lot higher, but the hours are probably somewhere between normal and what you said. I also found out that the stock options are pretty good. I also did some background work and found they are pretty well financed.

Maybe the reason this company (Mahalo) appeals to me is because it reminds me of a place I worked at a long time ago. It was a large toy company that had a mix of creative designers vs engineers and was a really good eye-opening experience for me. Most of the employees at Mahalo are not engineers, but are liberal arts types doing web research and creating content. It looks like the engineers keep the server going and build specialized web tools for the liberal-arts types.  

In contrast, the Google/Yahoo environment started out with an engineer-only gearhead mentality. They sincerely believe that search should be presented to the end-user from computer algorithms. (And don't get me going on AI and the promises of MIT LISP). My only point here is that the machine-only approach has serious limits. The Mahalo people are combining the machine with human editing to refine the content. Google and Yahoo used to be pretty good, but now the algorithms are being "gamed" by SEO companies. Most of people just put up with crap like this because it's all they have. It's the same reason that your VCR can't remember the time after power loss, or why you have to click "Start" to shut OFF your damn computer.

Typically, engineers have a narrow perspective and never get a chance to work within an environment like this. For that reason, most engineers reading this won't have a clue what I'm talking about. So yeah, maybe the hours are more than you like and maybe the CEO is an ass and maybe this new place isn't what I perceive and maybe you have it good where you are.   Personally I'm over the hill, on the right coast and don't work with web technology. But if you are looking for a job and you can take the risk it might be worth it.

Rabid - (earning his name)

[John Masterson]

Poster,

Yes, well, maybe it would be a fun experience for a person getting started. After all, it is their own perception of themselves that matters, and if this job makes them feel special, then they would be happy about that.

And just maybe it might be a great, fun place to work.

I perceive that today's young (and I mean young!) CEOS at startups are Super Capitalists: get the most work out of your underlings, feed 'em free pizza, and then YOU take all the cash.

They are not children of the 60s with visions of improving the lot of the poor.

It's a generalization, maybe, but I read a blog by one of these types, and that's how it really sounded to me.

[Poster Rabid]

I think the work environment is somewhat (high expectations) like Codger implied, but then I found out that they are distributing 15% of the stock to 50 employees. If the company is even partly successful and maybe evaluates to 500 million in 2 years, well ...you can do the math but I get 1.5 Mil each. I know thety are ahead of schedule on their inventory of search pages. All this info is public from internet searches I did.

Also they have a lot of money in the bank, enough for 4 years.

and ... due to the cultural-specific nature of their business .. (drum roll).. they only hire Americans!!

[The Gorn]

They want talent. They are willing to pay for it. They have some early stage stock options they will be handing out. They have a unique angle on a supposedly commoditized industry, internet search

BFD on their style.

Their ad made me laugh.

[codger]

"they only hire Americans!!" Now that is a real plus! How can anyone project $500 million two years in the future? Is this supported by a business plan? Is it projected revenue, or is it the company's anticipated net worth? Or? Is it a WAG? I would want to know a lot more than their cash position before I signed on. You say that they have cash enough for 4 years. What is included in that projection?

I can't help it. I'm a financial guy at heart, and have little confidence in someone else's unsubstantiated numbers.

As I said earlier, I couldn't hack the inflated egos for longer than 10 minutes, for any amount of payout. I value my self esteem and my sanity more than money.

[pxsant]

You are a big time optimist.   The odds of a small company being worth even a fraction of 500 mil  2 years from now is very remote.   And, regardless of their perceived value at that time, the stock is worthless unless and until the company goes public.  As far as I can tell right now, they are still privately held.  Just because they are backed by a venture capital group does not mean they will ever go public.  Any time you are served a carrot of stock options in a currently non public company, you need to consider it a remote potential benefit.   It should not greatly influence your decision on whether to accept a position or not.

[Poster Rabid]

OK you got me on the 2-year 500 Million one. I was probably optimistic, but they have to be worth 100 Mill right now based on the 5:1 venture capital ratio. With Microsoft in a buying mode, search is getting more valuable. I assume that they will build value and sell before they run out of money. The VC's will see to that.

If they didn't have a plan, I don't think Sequoia, Elon Musk, CBS & others would have invested (rather heavily). Investors like this can provide enough outside influence and partnering to make it happen. As we all know, it's the hype and perception that makes value.

They started last year with enough venture money to last 5 years. They now have 50 employees with enough cash to last 4 more years. The goal was create the top 10,000 search result pages. They exceeded their goal and are now around 50,000 search result pages. It looks to me that the site is attractive to the yuppie "pop" crowd searching for news, video games, entertainment, "how to" stuff. No pages on "how to program a Vax" , but I did find this http://www.mahalo.com/Sheyla_Hershey

More seriously, it is the simple organization of each search result page that I like, with a nice guide's summary at the top of each one.

There is currently no significant revenue as far as I know, but the plan seems to be to build a brand and a following.  They are still in Beta and going strong.