261–270 of 325 posts
Since this is an audience of passionate technologists, here's the top piece of advice I have: Do not be seduced by the technology! I killed one of my startups this way. I've seen many many die this way. It can hurt your pride as a passionate technologist to choose non-cool but mature and easy-to-hire-for tools. But it's those tools that are the most economical. Remember, your customers care 0% about the backend techn…
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Since hiring for engineers is so competitive, it is arguable that choosing fancy tech can give an advantage there. It has been done successfully (in a hiring sense)... Twitter pushing Scala, Jet.com on F# are two I can think of. The downside is it could backfire on who you're able to hire. It could just lure people who will either want to migrate to the next new-and-shiny or just leave quickly.
I think one thing a lot of startups think is that they absolutely have to be able to attract the best and brightest. In 90% of cases, average level programmers can build your product just fine. Unless you are building for enormous scale or your product is using cutting edge technology, you simply don't need a bunch of programmers from the top 1% or even top 10%. In my company, we hire middle of the pack programmers f…
Your main focus should always be to ship good user tested product, and I agree you don't have to be the best programmer to build something that users want and like.
Since this is an audience of passionate technologists, here's the top piece of advice I have: Do not be seduced by the technology! I killed one of my startups this way. I've seen many many die this way. It can hurt your pride as a passionate technologist to choose non-cool but mature and easy-to-hire-for tools. But it's those tools that are the most economical. Remember, your customers care 0% about the backend techn…
This is true and I totally adhere to it, but, I also think sometimes it's useful to choose the latest and greatest not for the technical aspect, but to attract good devs to work for you.
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Have you started a side project and after 3 months you were making 10k per month?
No, but I've been in a startup that got to $10k MRR in under three months after launching the product... And that opened my eyes to what all the talk about the mythical "traction" actually meant. If it's a side project, that's a different game. A side project doesn't need traction to be successful for its creator.
Since this is an audience of passionate technologists, here's the top piece of advice I have: Do not be seduced by the technology! I killed one of my startups this way. I've seen many many die this way. It can hurt your pride as a passionate technologist to choose non-cool but mature and easy-to-hire-for tools. But it's those tools that are the most economical. Remember, your customers care 0% about the backend techn…
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I remember when ruby was the hot tech a few years ago, frowned upon by conservative developers. I learnt ruby back then. I'm glad ruby is now recognized as a more mature ecosystem that does things well, even though it is one of the boring technologies now.
Is Ruby/Rails faster now? I built a few simple sites on Rails 2.3 via Passenger, and my God, it was such a performance hog compared to every other web stack I'd ever used. Probably mostly a function of how heavyweight RoR was, but I never got deep enough to figure out what was so slow about it. It may also have been user error, but it seemed like others were bragging about getting it to levels of performance that wou…
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A full time job is a 9-5. Let's say you commute from 8-9 and 5-630. That means you can gym from 645 to 8 (including travel time), eat decently, do some coding, hit bed around 1030, and be sleeping around 11 (so you have enough time in the morning by waking up at 7). Cook on the weekends, code on the weekends, social life Friday and Saturday night... Do you work more than 40hrs a week? Why? Sounds like you're creating…
In my country I work from 08-15, excercise 1 hour. I still have 6 hours left for cooking food and coding before i go to sleep 22
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> Do not be seduced by the technology! I want to emphasize this, and expand on it: Your cool tech startup is not about the tech . You exist to solve a problem. Sure, you might use your Cool Tech(TM) to solve the problem. But the salient point is that the problem gets solved. Your customers don't give a rats ass if you solve it with automatic hyperparameter selection for LSTMs, or if you solve it with an Excel macro.…
I would like to add that Excel macros are excellent; If Google Docs spreadsheet functionality were exportable I reckon that many existing startups could be built as a mere UI change on top of that backend.
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Since hiring for engineers is so competitive, it is arguable that choosing fancy tech can give an advantage there. It has been done successfully (in a hiring sense)... Twitter pushing Scala, Jet.com on F# are two I can think of. The downside is it could backfire on who you're able to hire. It could just lure people who will either want to migrate to the next new-and-shiny or just leave quickly.
I think one thing a lot of startups think is that they absolutely have to be able to attract the best and brightest. In 90% of cases, average level programmers can build your product just fine. Unless you are building for enormous scale or your product is using cutting edge technology, you simply don't need a bunch of programmers from the top 1% or even top 10%. In my company, we hire middle of the pack programmers f…
Having done some recruiting at a startup last year, even getting the top 50% to reply to an email is a tough proposition. The problem really stems from brand awareness. No one has heard of your startup, so in a sea of "help wanted" postings on Angelist, Stack Overflow or Craigslist or cold emails, it's extremely easy to be ignored.
Using novel technology and getting the word out (as Twitter and Jet.com did), can at least get technical awareness within a motivated subset of engineers who are interested in said new stuff -- and of all skill levels.
That said, Peter Norvig made a pretty good refutation of your core point[1]. Say your initial site was successfully launched by average engineers. If you're not always trying to hire better than the average employee at your company, your team just gets worse over time.
[1] - https://research.googleblog.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-wobegon-...
[edit] -- btw, using the new-shiny stuff is not all-or-none. You can still use tried and true tech along the way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since hiring for engineers is so competitive, it is arguable that choosing fancy tech can give an advantage there. It has been done successfully (in a hiring sense)... Twitter pushing Scala, Jet.com on F# are two I can think of. The downside is it could backfire on who you're able to hire. It could just lure people who will either want to migrate to the next new-and-shiny or just leave quickly.
I think one thing a lot of startups think is that they absolutely have to be able to attract the best and brightest. In 90% of cases, average level programmers can build your product just fine. Unless you are building for enormous scale or your product is using cutting edge technology, you simply don't need a bunch of programmers from the top 1% or even top 10%. In my company, we hire middle of the pack programmers f…