

Hiring the First 5 Engineers - mkramlich
http://blog.eladgil.com/2010/02/hiring-first-5-engineers-what-sort-of.html

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hga
" _4\. Generalist technical knowledge._ " is good, but the ending of "* You
need someone who can optimally work on all parts of the stack. _" is
delusional. You want most of your people to be able to do credible work on all
parts of your stack, but doing really good work requires_ some* degree of
experience and the specialization that comes with it.

In general while the author's biases are by and large good I can seem someone
following all these points ending up with a _lot_ of technical debt, something
that companies don't always survive.

~~~
beagle3
Not delusional for 99% of startups.

The people who are simultaneously good at writing device drivers in ARM
assembly, JSP pages using Spring, and natural language processing are indeed
rare.

However, most startups don't require that breadth; rather, they need a good
grasp of web technologies, a good grasp of databases, a good grasp of
networking and a good grasp of the problem domain. THAT'S NOT AS RARE. You
just have to know where to look, and how to be attractive enough -- usually
these people are happily employed and make good money. To attract them, you
need to offer better terms (money; interest; title; whatever)

~~~
hga
Historically that has not been "most startups", although maybe in today's
world that's severely financing constrained but has a rich web/Internet and
FOSS ecosystem that's true.

Which would be a shame, since that means "We aren't inventing the future
anymore". I.e. no new microprocessor macroarchitectures, no new weird fun
thinks like FPGAs, just endless variations on today's lowest level and most
expensive to establish technical foundations, improved by sustaining
innovation but very little disruptive.

That said, I'm a bit skeptical that there are all that many people who are
_really_ good at the forward facing stuff _and_ seriously scalable backends
... but I could be wrong, and I've seen it reported that many if not most
companies seem to be focusing on the first and then if they're hugely
successful they spend a year or more paying down their backend technical debt.
Some companies fail at that.

Which _is_ the way to do it in my experience. The most frustrating startup
failure I experienced was dead when I joined it, since a combination of ultra-
stealth mode plus building a massively scalable custom database system ended
up spending their first angel's available money (he'd promised more, but then
ran into trouble with another company).

So they got some new angels who turned out to be devils, had done no Customer
Development (a finer example of "there are no facts inside the building, only
opinions" I cannot imagine), but it hardly mattered since the devils preferred
to have all of nothing instead of most of something.

------
phreeza
Two great new terms:

\- Do-What-It-Takes-edness

\- Beer hiring test

~~~
hga
I refer to the first as "Never be too proud to sweep the floor."

