Ask HN: CTO with no experience, how do I make my first technical hire?

#1

Post by questifer » Thu, May 07, 2015, 4:00 PM UTC

A year ago I co-founded a company with a classmate (both non-CS students). I knew the basics of building rails web applications from teaching myself during the evenings and weekends and could somewhat navigate myself around a basic stack (AWS, Rails, SASS, Salesforce etc.).

We're launching our beta in several weeks and are about to close our seed round. I've relied heavily on SO, tutorials and gems to get our application to where it is today. I've never had anyone review my code. I've taught myself how to use a continuous deployment flow, write tests, design and integrate REST APIs like Salesforce and Docusign.

With our funding, I need to begin building a technical team. One thing I'm concerned with is bringing on a developer (senior, full stack, or backend) that won't respect me as a programmer. The work I've done to this point has had the aim of reducing the time to goto market and cost- quality has taken a hit to meet those two goals.

As a CTO with no computer science background and no previous experience programming at another company, what role should I hire for first? And when I do, how do I "manage" that individual if they don't respect the work I've done as a programmer?

Re: Ask HN: CTO with no experience, how do I make my first technical hire?

#2

Post by cjbprime » Thu, May 07, 2015, 4:10 PM UTC

It sounds like you don't actually think that someone ought to respect the work you did as a programmer; you had little training, little time, and weren't following good coding practices.

I think it would be healthy to approach it from an attitude of communicating that you did what you needed to to get traction, but now you're ready to learn about how to write code that scales while meeting deadlines, and you need their help and experience to do that. It is possible.

Respecting you as a person is a prerequisite, and that'll come from your sincerity to improve as a programmer and build a team that trusts each other and keeps getting better. Respecting your code isn't a prerequisite. Your code is bad. It's okay. It would happen to anyone in your situation. Rewriting a startup's codebase from scratch after a seed round is not uncommon!

Hope that helps and isn't condescending; I'm writing this comment quickly.

Re: Ask HN: CTO with no experience, how do I make my first technical hire?

#3

Post by rosspanda » Thu, May 07, 2015, 4:16 PM UTC

As a CTO you will hopefully ALWAYS have better developers than you working for you, that's the point, the CTO role is not to be the best tech guy in the room. Its the guy that sets the vision, talks to investors, sets high level tech strategy (with a lot of team involvement), hires, fires, keep sales guys away from dev's etc

Eg. sort out everything that would distract your developers from building.

Re: Ask HN: CTO with no experience, how do I make my first technical hire?

#4

Post by osetinsky » Thu, May 07, 2015, 4:18 PM UTC

I'm in the same position with similar circumstances. You did what you had to do - instead of going back to school and learning the theory, you decided to focus on the problem and build practical solutions in the form of prototypes/mvps. There's no shame in that.

My approach will be to stay humble and eager to learn. I want to hire people smarter than me so that I can grow by working with them.

Re: Ask HN: CTO with no experience, how do I make my first technical hire?

#5

Post by rosspanda » Thu, May 07, 2015, 4:23 PM UTC

rosspanda wrote: post #3

As a CTO you will hopefully ALWAYS have better developers than you working for you, that's the point, the CTO role is not to be the best tech guy in the room. Its the guy that sets the vision, talks to investors, sets high level tech strategy (with a lot of team involvement), hires, fires, keep sales guys away from dev's etc Eg. sort out everything that would distract your developers from building.

I'd Hire the full stack guys first, but spend a lot of time talking with them, the first hire is always the hardest but the most important. Its also hard not to hire people like yourself so take it slow, some of the best guys I have ever worked with are mid 30 with wife and kids that just know how to get stuff done.

Re: Ask HN: CTO with no experience, how do I make my first technical hire?

#6

Post by cjbprime » Thu, May 07, 2015, 4:24 PM UTC

rosspanda wrote: post #5

rosspanda wrote: post #3

As a CTO you will hopefully ALWAYS have better developers than you working for you, that's the point, the CTO role is not to be the best tech guy in the room. Its the guy that sets the vision, talks to investors, sets high level tech strategy (with a lot of team involvement), hires, fires, keep sales guys away from dev's etc Eg. sort out everything that would distract your developers from building.

I'd Hire the full stack guys first, but spend a lot of time talking with them, the first hire is always the hardest but the most important. Its also hard not to hire people like yourself so take it slow, some of the best guys I have ever worked with are mid 30 with wife and kids that just know how to get stuff done.

The programmers-are-male assumptions in your comments are disturbing.

Re: Ask HN: CTO with no experience, how do I make my first technical hire?

#7

Post by quotedmycode » Thu, May 07, 2015, 4:26 PM UTC

Well, I'd ask for a portfolio, and if you do have some programmer friends that do have the experience, I'd ask them if they can sit in an interview with you. If a portfolio is not possible, I'd ask for some technologies that they've worked with, and try to find a project which uses those technologies. I'd ask for a work sample using whatever they are comfortable with, such as the 'TodoMVC' implementation, something small that can be finished in 4 hours that shows their skill. This isn't like you are hiring just a programmer, this is going to be one of the first programmers you hire, the one likely to set the standards. Yes, he may not respect your programming skill, but that's to be expected, programmers are prideful of their work. However they can be respectful of you while giving you the rundown of why what you wrote was wrong. You want to hire someone who is better than you at programming. At the same time you don't want someone who is an ass, that should be pretty easy to figure out.

Re: Ask HN: CTO with no experience, how do I make my first technical hire?

#8

Post by joeld42 » Thu, May 07, 2015, 4:31 PM UTC

This is actually a good thing. You've got something working, it doesn't matter if it's pretty. I've seen a lot of successful things that started out as ugly code. The ones that start out pretty and "architected" always collapse under their own weight before they ship.

We've all written crufty legacy code, at least if anyone is any good they've written bales of it. I would respect that ugly code, because it shipped. What I don't respect is someone who claims code is great and doesn't need fixing.

Now you need someone who can come in and turn it into something beautiful and scalable and whatever. So when you interview them, just lay out the situation. "How would you turn a terrible codebase into something great?" "Give me some examples of legacy code that you cleaned up 'in-flight', without starting over or disrupting operations or putting things on hold for six months". "What are some difficult bugs you had to deal with in a messy pipeline, and how did you fix them"? Ask about how they would improve real pain points in your current pipeline.

If their answers are broad, ask them to be specific. You don't have to know what they are talking about, but if they can talk about specific steps and strategies, it will be clear they've done this kind of work before. If they are hand-waving about best practices and generalizations, and can't drill down any further, move on. Make sure they can actually write code, too, there's plenty of people out there who can talk about code but don't sit down and write it every day. If it's going well, take them out to lunch, tell them about this post. You need someone who you can trust and be honest with, someone who will give you honest feedback on technical decisions. You don't want someone who resents that you have less technical experience and are in a more senior role.

Re: Ask HN: CTO with no experience, how do I make my first technical hire?

#9

Post by kashif » Thu, May 07, 2015, 4:35 PM UTC

In my opinion you shouldn't be a CTO but a founder. I don't think any serious tech team can respect a technically inexperienced or poor CTO for long and this will cause problems later.

It might be a better idea for you to go for a Chief Product Officer or just Founder and hire someone experienced to do the CTO role.

If you think you can lead from the front without being competent in a subject - you have another thing coming.

Re: Ask HN: CTO with no experience, how do I make my first technical hire?

#10

Post by rosspanda » Thu, May 07, 2015, 4:38 PM UTC

cjbprime wrote: post #6

rosspanda wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd Hire the full stack guys first, but spend a lot of time talking with them, the first hire is always the hardest but the most important. Its also hard not to hire people like yourself so take it slow, some of the best guys I have ever worked with are mid 30 with wife and kids that just know how to get stuff done.

The programmers-are-male assumptions in your comments are disturbing.

Sorry about that, I was using "guys" as a generic term, but it got me thinking that in 18 years of development, I have worked with over 200 Dev Guys and only 2 Dev Girls.