

Small Teams Need Redundant Skills - acl
http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2010/05/27/small-teams-need-redundant-skills

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abstractbill
In the early days of justin.tv (I was employee #6 if you include the 4
founders) there was almost _no_ overlap in skill-sets. Everything in the
company had a bus-count of exactly 1, we were permanently on-call, and I don't
think anyone had a vacation for a very long time. It probably sounds painful
(and it was!), but it meant we got an _incredible_ amount of work done.

Of course there's often more than one way to skin a cat, and YMMV ;)

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marcus
If you are trying to build a long haul business one of your key tasks is
getting your Bus Factor above one.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor>

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kiba
A team entirely composed of E.coli experts will nonetheless will be slower
than a team composed of physicist, biologists, etc in finding solutions
because of the low diversity in ideas.

A programmer often have domain expertise in many area but they can still
specialize by developing different domain knowledge, while retaining a wide
range of knowledge.

A "business" guy, I presumed, not only know just how to run a business, but
have domain knowledge in various area that a programmer would not normally
know about?

So yeah, one guy can be on vacation, while another work and switch in between.
However, you lose that creative edge and perspectives.

So there's no such thing as a free lunch in gaining redundancy in programming
expertise.

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fjabre
What about complementary skill sets? The 2 Steve's of Apple fame or example?

I think while it's just fine to have 2 technical cofounders it's also fine to
have 2 founders where one is primarily business/design oriented while the
other is more engineering/backend oriented [Frontend + Backend].

It's mostly about being able to maintain perspective on different parts of the
startup even if both founders are technical and are capable programmers.

I think you'd always want one of the founders to be more marketing/biz
oriented while the other stays in the scalability/performance arena. Why?
Because going too deep into either domain forces you to lose perspective in
the other. It's the same old not being able to see the forest through the
trees problem.

Two heads are better than one precisely because they can complement each other
- not because they can imitate one another.

~~~
_delirium
If you have a single technical person, it seems that'd work best for some sort
of product dev that doesn't involve maintaining a live service, wouldn't it?
In the two-steves case, if Woz was on vacation for a week, or sick or
something, all it meant was that no hardware design got done that week, but
servers didn't start to fall over or anything.

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delano
I agree! Having overlap between skill sets also helps communication about
problems and solutions.

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JoeAltmaier
Great if you can find several multi-skilled people. obviously got to be better
than having the same people, but take some skills away from some of them. But
good luck finding more than one engineer-marketeer-manager.

