

Ask HN: Early employees – What won you over? - beat

Early non-founder employees (first ten or so) at startups - what attracted you to the job? Why did you choose your company over other opportunities? How did the company find you? And what advice do you have for founders looking to make those first critical hires?
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kat
I took a job where I was the 4th employee at a start-up. The biggest selling
point was they were willing to hire me despite my lack of web-dev experience.
Coming from a .NET background, I had never used PHP until my interview. The
interview involved setting up a MVC application and my interviewers were able
to answer my technical questions succinctly. I realized they would be great
people to learn from. I think the most important thing about hiring first
employees is making sure everyone works well together.

I found the company thru craigslist, I'm not too sure if that applies to all
cities, but Vancouver developer jobs show up regularly on CL.

~~~
beat
So you were looking for work in a field where you had little experience. That
makes a lot of sense. I suspect it's a common answer with less experienced
employees.

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jmspring
The last three startups I was part of the early team at:

#4 - a hardware token that was going to be tied in with web services. A twist
on security that interested me as well as a plethora of things to work on.

#9 - a group of people I had previously worked that also included some
challenges specifically around some stringent performance requirements at
scale.

#6 - a very heterogeneous environment that had me working in Java, in C/C++,
on mobile. It included doing some ugly things involving Windows server.

I guess for me, the typical factor is a breadth of interesting problems to
tackle.

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beat
Thinking about this after a thread on the Clojure 1.6 discussion. As a founder
who will have to start hiring at some point, I'm really curious about what
actually _works_ , versus what I think will work.

