How to Hire Your First Engineer
blog.ycombinator.com
How to Hire Your First Engineer
1–10 of 133 posts
Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer
#2I remember hearing as a high schooler that The Italian Mob acquired great loyalty through only hiring people whose family they knew or had met before. Maybe a dumb metaphor, but the painpoints, lonely nights, long hours and competing offers you're gonna face with your Engineer #1 are going to require some deeply rooted trust.
We're lucky enough to live in a time where our skills are in great demand and compensation can be matched without blinking an eye - my advice to business minds hiring their first engineers is to get to know them, build trust and find the ones who are committed to building cool shit with you for the long haul. Don't just make it about comp and perks.
> As I said at the start, hiring your first engineer is incredibly hard unless you’re lucky enough to have a friend you can convince to join
Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer
#3I find it interesting how many startups try to remove all bias from the hiring process, make interviews as objective and metric based as possible, but in the end, personal connections (friendships even) are still most important for your first hires.
Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer
#4I find it interesting how many startups try to remove all bias from the hiring process, make interviews as objective and metric based as possible, but in the end, personal connections (friendships even) are still most important for your first hires.
It makes sense to me. Either you validate someone through knowing them or, if you don't know the person, use interviews and other tests.
Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer
#5I find it interesting how many startups try to remove all bias from the hiring process, make interviews as objective and metric based as possible, but in the end, personal connections (friendships even) are still most important for your first hires.
There is so much risk in hiring an early employee, it's totally reasonable to try and only hire from a personal network for the first three.
Managing great employees can be challenging; managing someone you don't know is great can be 10 times more difficult.
Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer
#6I find it interesting how many startups try to remove all bias from the hiring process, make interviews as objective and metric based as possible, but in the end, personal connections (friendships even) are still most important for your first hires.
There is so much risk in hiring an early employee, it's totally reasonable to try and only hire from a personal network for the first three. Managing great employees can be challenging; managing someone you don't know is great can be 10 times more difficult.
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Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer
#7before you hire an engineer, make sure you have your onboarding streamlined
Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer
#8I remember hearing as a high schooler that The Italian Mob acquired great loyalty through only hiring people whose family they knew or had met before. Maybe a dumb metaphor, but the painpoints, lonely nights, long hours and competing offers you're gonna face with your Engineer #1 are going to require some deeply rooted trust. We're lucky enough to live in a time where our skills are in great demand and compensation c…
"Comitted to building cool shit" is not a motivation that will persist through hard times.
Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer
#9before you hire an engineer, make sure you have your onboarding streamlined
This is the worst advice. You don't want to spend resources on problems that are not yet even problems. Especially extremely early when you don't have any resources to burn.
One super power startups have is being frugal with money, why would you want to throw it away?
Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer
#10Some traits I look for in engineer #1: a) should obsess about architecture and code organization (they will be laying a foundation so having a bit of OCD helps), b) should make good tradeoffs and optimize for speed (they will be building the wrong things initially), c) mature enough to understand that they will be writing and rewriting a lot (see (b)) and d) last but not least, should have a strong desire to do a startup (knowing all the risks)....