How Reddit hired so many engineers when the company was still toxic and losing employees

Steve Huffman is cofounder and CEO of
Reddit.
Guru
Khalsa

• Reddit, known as the “front page of the internet,” has
  weathered a lot of storms. Over the years, the site has been
  dogged by user revolts, controversial content, and public
  oustings of its leaders.
• The situation made hiring a nightmare. When Steve Huffman,
  the site’s cofounder, rejoined the company as CEO in 2015, he
  learned that very few people in Silicon Valley wanted to work at
  Reddit.
• This is a story about how Reddit convinced hundreds of
  engineers to come work for the company — and gave Reddit its mojo
  back.

 

Steve Huffman returned to Reddit, the company he helped launch
and later abandoned after its
multimillion-dollar acquisition, to find it had become one of
the most radioactive companies in the Valley.

Almost no one wanted to work at Reddit in 2015.

In seeking to hire engineers, Huffman told Business Insider, “It
was hard to get people to respond.” 

He explained, “Reddit was in the press for all the wrong reasons.
All of them. … Our reputation was in the dumps across pretty
much every dimension.”

Reddit, known as the “front page of the internet,” is the
fifth
most-visited website in the US. And yet, it’s nearly imploded
on several occasions over the last decade. The site has been
engulfed in controversies fueled by internet trolls and
disgruntled users. A revolving door of CEOs did little to
stabilize the startup’s reputation or improve morale among a
shrinking number of Reddit employees.

Huffman stepped back into the role of CEO to save Reddit, but he
didn’t do it alone.

Despite a series of crises, the San Francisco-based company would
double its staff, growing from approximately 75 to 150 employees,
over 2016. They would transform the site from looking like
a dystopian
Craigslist — or “hot garbage,” as one top Reddit
executive described it — into a place where new users could more
easily find their people online and share news, images, memes,
and video.

Today, Reddit has more than 400 employees on its payroll, with
the biggest gains in engineering.
The company raised $200 million last year from a number
of well-known Silicon Valley investors, including Andreessen
Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, to continue its hiring spree. It
seems that Reddit’s renaissance has just begun.

Business Insider spoke with Huffman and a handful of
engineers at Reddit — as well as checked out journalist Christine
Lagorio-Chafkin’s excellent, upcoming book about Reddit called

“We Are the Nerds” — to learn how the internet’s front page
got its mojo back.

Reddit put out a call to ‘every engineer in the Valley,’ Huffman
said

Reddit hadn’t hired an engineer in nine months when Huffman — who
left Reddit after his contract with the company’s buyer,
publisher Condé Nast, ran out — rejoined in 2015. And it showed.

The site looked very similar to the original version that Huffman
and his cofounder, Alexis Ohanian, launched ten years
earlier. 

“It wasn’t really hard at that time to look at Reddit and think
about ways to improve it,” Nick Caldwell, vice president of
engineering at Reddit, told Business Insider.

Reddit got a new — but still familiar — look in
2018.
Reddit

Over the course of 15 years, Caldwell had worked his way up from
intern to general manager at Microsoft. When a recruiting firm
approached him about going to Reddit in 2016, he was skeptical.

“I visited Reddit like four times before I took this job,”
Caldwell said.

Huffman needed help trying to staff up Reddit. New hires would
allow the company to give the site a refresh, replace much of the
original, clunky code, and build new products and features aimed
at stamping out hate speech and other noxious content on Reddit.

That was easier said than done. Not only did few people want to
work at Reddit in 2015, but the San Francisco Bay Area faced a
shortage of engineering talent. The problem worsened over the
years, according to a recent
Workforce Report from LinkedIn, as demand for data scientists
in particular outstripped supply.

In addition to its struggles recruiting engineers, the company
had trouble holding onto its existing employees.

According to Lagorio-Chafkin’s book, about fifty
staffers quit or were terminated in the months following
Huffman’s return to Reddit. Some of those defectors
left in protest of Ellen Pao’s ousting. (The Silicon Valley
power player was asked to resign as CEO of Reddit amid a user
revolt.) Others said they
couldn’t get behind Huffman’s vision for a new era at Reddit,
the CEO told Lagorio-Chafkin.

Reddit hired a recruiting firm that, according to Huffman,
“called every engineer in the Valley” in a “brute force” attempt.

After accepting the job, Caldwell also hired as many Microsoft
employees who were interested in jobs at Reddit as he could.

“That turned out to be not a huge number of people,” he said.

With his network tapped out, Caldwell had to search in new places
for candidates. It required a change in perspective.

Reddit widened the pipeline for talent

At Microsoft, Caldwell
has admitted to being one of those hiring managers who
scanned people’s résumés for top schools and major companies
before “taking a deeper look.” This strategy can often surface
the usual suspects: white male engineers in the Bay Area.

Nick Caldwell, Reddit’s vice president of engineering,
said the stigma against hiring from coding bootcamps is
fading.
Reddit

In seeking to widen the net, Caldwell began recruiting from
coding bootcamps, such as Hackbright Academy, whose
mission is to help women from diverse backgrounds land jobs in
tech. It specializes in providing opportunities to women with a
few years of work experience under their belts, those who want to
explore a new career path.

There’s an old stigma that people who emerge from coding
bootcamps are less skilled than those with computer science
degrees. That’s changing rapidly, according to Caldwell.

“People are realizing that technology changes so fast nowadays
that you don’t necessarily get practical knowledge from a college
degree,” he said. “And bootcamps are like only practical
knowledge.”

As a bonus, companies who aim to improve the ratio of male and
female employees may find that “bootcamps bypass a lot of the
traditional problems that people have with the pipeline,”
Caldwell said. These programs are often much more affordable than
college and can be completed in weeks or months, not years, which

makes them accessible to a wider range of potential students.

Building a diverse organization is especially important when you
run a site viewed by
millions of people each month.

“You cannot build a product that appeals to a diverse set of
people without having a diverse set of people designing product,”
Huffman said.

Reddit declined to release its hiring or diversity statistics.
However, the company has hired half a dozen graduates from
Hackbright Academy alone — and has even more employees, including
Huffman, serving as program mentors to aid in recruiting
efforts. 

Reddit has over 400 employees today.
Reddit

Having an impact matters

With its headcount ticking up, Reddit began shipping product
again. 

In 2016, the startup overhauled its mobile app, created new tools
for tracking site traffic, and launched a new department,

known internally as the “anti-evil” team, that was dedicated
to ridding the site of harassment, spam, and abuse. Their efforts
slashed the number of spam reports coming from users
and moderators by 90%.

Huffman set out to double staff again the following
year.

By then, the team had made a key discovery about how to get
people to come work for Reddit: It had to sell them on the

story.

Bhavana Shanbhag was comfortable with her gig as an engineering
manager at Groupon when she received a cold message on LinkedIn
from one of Reddit’s directors of engineering in 2017. In it, he
described some of the problems they were trying to solve for.

“We need people like you,” Shanbhag remembered him saying.

Shanbhag, who described herself as a “lurker” on Reddit
more than a hardcore user, made arrangements to interview with 12
employees — more than what was required of her — before accepting
the offer.

“I didn’t want to switch my job for the sake of switching it,”
she said. “I wanted to make sure that I would actually have an
impact.”

Caldwell heard this from potential hires a lot. The team started
to think critically about how they pitched candidates on the
startup.

“What we settled on in those early days was — the value of Reddit
was really about building community. And people coming into the
company had huge amounts of opportunity to pick up the
low-hanging fruit, to help us toward that mission,” Caldwell
said. “Once we really understood that, the pitch was pretty
straightforward.”

He explained: “Hey, you can be the first person to come into
Reddit and help us build our machine learning processes. And by
first person, I mean literally, there’s no one else here. Please
come help us.”

Alexis
Ohanian, a cofounder of Reddit, drew the company’s little alien
mascot, Snoo, while he was sitting, bored, in class at the
University of Virginia.

Flickr
/ Anirudh Koul

A more established company like Facebook or Google could pay them
better, Caldwell said. But Reddit offered ambitious engineers
huge amounts of impact on a product under rapid development.

“It’s pretty cool, as well,” he said.

In her role as senior director of
engineering, Shanbhag said she often hears the
question she asked — “Will I have impact?” — from people she’s
trying to recruit. She gives them a resounding “yes.”

The startup is still hiring, but not without growing pains

There’s still more to do, according to Huffman.

“I don’t think the pitch has changed tremendously,” Huffman said.
“Everything is changing here, like we’re rebuilding this company
that has more potential energy than any company that you’re
talking to or thinking about joining. I can guarantee you that.”

Reddit grew the number of engineers by 270% since the start of
2017, and it’s still hiring. There are about two dozen job listings on the
website, spanning data science, engineering, legal, and
marketing, across offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New
York, and Chicago.

It hasn’t been all kittens and rainbows.

Employees agreed that Reddit grew too quickly, and the situation
left some new hires feeling underutilized. The company
slowed recruiting over the past summer to catch its breath and
see what the full capacity of all its new hires was before
ramping back up.

“We’re 400-some people now, and fewer than 20 of those people
were here in 2016,” Huffman said. “Every quarter, we joke that
it’s a new company. And it is a new company.”