The first coder we hired didn't have directly on-point experience, and we ended up firing him six months later, telling him "you're unable to keep up the pace we need, which is a pace someone who directly knew this stuff wouldn't find too onerous." This was shocking and hurtful to the coder, difficult for us, and slowed us a lot at a critical time. Replacing him with good (not PhD rocket scientist quantum mechanicians) people with direct experience in their area gave us a huge speed boost.
From my years of meeting, talking, and working with business people, I've learned that those who stand in the shoulders of others end up being more successful. No need to learn everything directly. You can hire someone more experienced who can teach a lot you while reducing the amount of time spent learning. That's why it boggles my mind when startups pay top dollar for programmers, but cheap out on business talent. Stupid mistake.
? Top dollar for programmers mean finishing the product and shipping, also quality work.
Agreed. But the product is defined by the business talent, and not the programmers. If I give Linus Torvalds a job to make me Facebook for cats, he will deliver FB for cats. But I cant then turn around and say that Linus failed delivering the product. No. It was me, the guy in charge of the product.
Usually the founders are the business talents (regardless of profession) (or I'd hope so)
And that's the issue. Most "founders" are just people with an idea and not a fucking clue on how to sell something. Then they go and hire programmers, spend their ass out on stupid shit, and blame everyone but their own stupid self. The role of a "founder" is to get the fuck out of the way and try to be as useful as possible to those he/she hires to build a product. Nothing else. Founders are more like evangelists than anything.
Exec is a perfect case for this. I just tried it for two jobs with good results, and my top request for Exec to offer people who are even more experienced e.g. hire an Exec person with accounting experience to find well-reviewed CPA firms, or a person with paralegal experience to find well-reviewed law firms, or an HR-experienced person to help with various startup forms like insurance.
Granted, specialists rarely are unexperienced, a guy to be a master at something, must do that something a lot.
But nothing prevents your startup from finding the specialist that you need, inexperienced.
Neither finding a generalist for your early development issues, when you are still pivoting around, experienced!
In general, the more experience the better, what matters is finding the best guy for what you need, and early you lean toward generalists, later toward specialists, you might find in both cases great inexperienced people, and poor experienced people, but usually the more experience, the better a person is at whatever it do.
I have to agree with this point: Experience is orthogonal to the specialist/generalist axis.
I was Justin.TV's first engineering hire, and I was an "old guy" there, but I'm very much an experienced generalist. At one point I was the sole developer responsible for:
- Justin.TV's chat system (front and back end; The back end was at the time the world's largest public IRC network, by a factor of at least 3)
- All of the site's Flash code - the video players (live and prerecorded), the broadcaster, an embeddable version of chat, and so on
- All of the site's advertising code, including our own custom video ad server
You can't hire someone who's a specialist in all of the above ;)
