
How Are You Staffing Your Startup? - arthurk
http://www.protocolostomy.com/2008/12/15/how-are-you-staffing-your-startup/
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swombat
1) Awful title. This is not really an article about "how you are staffing your
start-up", it's an article about "start-ups should hire more sysadmins".

2) Awful central point (about the sysadmins). Early start-ups are staffed
primarily with developers because developers are what start-ups need early on,
before the product is launched. Put it this way: if you have a lion running
after you to eat you, carrying some extra water and food might be very wise
for the later part of your trip, but is completely irrelevant at this point in
time, and you're better off throwing it to the ground to run faster. First,
you have to escape the lion, or get the start-up off the ground and get users
to love it. Until then, every penny spent on "problems that will hurt you
later" is wasted.

Start-ups _must_ be super-optimised in that manner, unless they're floating in
an ocean of cash - but that's not the case of most start-ups, and that has
other problems.

3) More awful points: "They’ve also given very little thought to how to enable
their workforce to communicate". If your stealth-mode technology start-up
needs to give thought to how to enable its workforce to communicate, you're
fucked. Pack your bags and do something better with your time, stop wasting
your money.

4) "they’ve either assumed that systems folks’ jobs are so easy that it can be
handled by the developers" >> If the 2-3 developers in your pre-launch start-
up aren't capable of sorting out their own development environment, you're
fucked. See point above. If you've got a lot more than 2-3 at this point in
time, you're probably fucked too.

5) Hiring someone that specialises in X isn't the only way to do X. Huge
fallacy here that because "start-ups don't hire specialised sysadmins",
therefore "they don't care about systems administration". That's utter
bullshit. Good start-up developers are generalists and can do anything that
needs to be done. Those who can't, aren't good start-up developers.

In short, this article is a fantastic example of premature optimisation
applied to start-up hiring strategy.

~~~
russell
I agree. My advice on the sysadmin problem is to get a hosted development
machine. Use it for email accounts and backup or source control. It's cheap
and you have solved a bunch of sysadmin tasks in an hour or so.

I do think scaling should be a consideration from the beginning, but it is
sufficient to have someone on the team who has actually worked on a high
volume web site. If your team doesnt have a developer with the experience, ask
around. Most developers are willing to contribute a few hours of advice.

~~~
aristus
I agree -- a 20X jump in traffic or data is almost a different country. If you
have someone on the team who's been to that country before, everything goes
much more smoothly. Mostly because they can give you earlier warning, suggest
solutions that have worked, what not to say in front of the locals, etc.

If anyone has questions about architecture or scaling I have built some pretty
large (>500 million queries/month) sites and I like helping out. You can find
my email in my profile.

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Flemlord
My current startup lost a developer and I jumped in and have been writing code
(I'm the CEO/Founder). We're hiring another developer (C#/WPF if anybody is
interested), but may put that on hold because we found a perfect fit COO-type
who could be the first hire for support.

We're targeting a well-established business vertical and support is an
important component of our offering. We had been planning on hiring a more
entry-level person and keeping more of the resources focused on development,
but I can keep coding until we hit beta and we can push that hire back a bit.

~~~
swombat
Bear in mind that to many investors, having both a CEO and a COO in an early
start-up is a bit of a warning flag.

Still, if support really is so central to your business, that might make
sense.

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edw519
OP has it backwards. What he calls "bad", I call "good".

You shouldn't have to worry about things like systems administration, email,
and scaling from the start. If you are, you're probably not focused on the
most important things and may well run out of runway before you ever really
need them.

OTOH, if you focus on your app and your customers and are so successful that
your infrastructure can no longer support you: what a great problem to have.

~~~
swombat
ltns, edw519 :-) Where have you been lately?

Good to see we agree on something for once.

~~~
edw519
Hey, swombat. If I'm not writing text here, then I'm writing code somewhere
else. (Either way, I'm a hacker at a keyboard.)

When I read your comment here, I thought how much better you said the same
thing.

I don't remember disagreeing with you much, now I have an excuse to explore
searchyc later today :-)

~~~
swombat
We have disagreed quite strongly on some project management topics... :-)
(particularly to do with the need or lack of need for "business analysis")

Happy hacking!

------
okeumeni
Me, my wife and my friends; particularly the non-paycheck dependant ones.

