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How to Hire Your First Engineer

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#71

Post by hkmurakami »

stemuk wrote: post #34
brianwawok wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on pay, right? If you are offering employee #1 market pay, why would you give them 10% equity? That is potentially millions of dollars for not taking a risk. I have been on both sides of this, and have thoughts. What do you think is fair for employee #1 making at or near market rate?

Even if you pay your #1 employee at market rate he is taking huge risks and should be compensated accordingly. Working at an early stage company often comes with huge job insecurity, loss of medical benefits more mature companies might be able to offer (better insurance etc.) and a possible kink in your CV (3 years at Microsoft look much better than spending 3 years at an unsuccessful company that eventually shut dow…

There is a name for this. It is called a cofounder ( Who is comparatively more junior than the rest of the team ).

Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#72

Post by hyperdimension »

a13n wrote: post #68
stemuk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you pay your #1 employee at market rate he is taking huge risks and should be compensated accordingly. Working at an early stage company often comes with huge job insecurity, loss of medical benefits more mature companies might be able to offer (better insurance etc.) and a possible kink in your CV (3 years at Microsoft look much better than spending 3 years at an unsuccessful company that eventually shut dow…

Why assume #1 engineer is a he?

Can we just charitably assume that s/he knows that English lacks a gender-neutral second-person pronoun and picked one out of he or she (like those baby books that alternate between gendered pronouns) to finish what s/he said so s/he didn't have to use the thought-interrupting construct "s/he"?

Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#73

Post by astura »

Moodles wrote: post #21

I wonder what proportion of HN would have different careers if software engineering paid, say, as much as humanities while humanities paid like software engineering. It seems like everyone here (myself included) isn't really in it for the money, but who knows what would happen.

I'm only in it for the money.

I'm good at my job and I enjoy it for the most part, but I'm only doing it because I get paid well.

Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#74

Post by tomhoward »

a13n wrote: post #68
stemuk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you pay your #1 employee at market rate he is taking huge risks and should be compensated accordingly. Working at an early stage company often comes with huge job insecurity, loss of medical benefits more mature companies might be able to offer (better insurance etc.) and a possible kink in your CV (3 years at Microsoft look much better than spending 3 years at an unsuccessful company that eventually shut dow…

Why assume #1 engineer is a he?

It'd sure be great if people didn't make that assumption, but the HN guidelines ask you to make the strongest-possible interpretations of comments when responding, as doing otherwise leads to unnecessary, off-topic flamewars.

Other commenters use different pronouns when describing hypothetical scenarios, and that's great, but it also sometimes triggers flamewars from a different direction.

Best to just avoid playing that game altogether.

Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#75

Post by lmilcin »

scarface74 wrote: post #47
lmilcin wrote: post #11

1. Find somebody that is very good and passionate at something. 2. Present your idea the best you can. 3. Only hire if he/she is interested in your idea. 4. Offer stake in your business so it is also his/her business.

Why would I be interested in your idea? More than likely you aren’t trying to feed starving children. I might pretend like I’m interested, but at the end of the day, it’s just a paycheck.

Well, this is simple. You want somebody invested and passionate about the project.

Have you ever noticed, you can move mountains if you are genuinely interested in something? That it is difficult to focus and too easy to procrastinate if you don't want to do something or find something boring?

Corporations are good at solving large problems because they can throw funds and money at the problems. They can absorb the damage caused by people who are barely productive.

When you are startup you can't do that. But the advantage you have is that you are looking for one person at this point in time and you can be picky and wait until you find the one. Bad hire at this point in time can frequently spell disaster for your budding enterprise.

I don't want to say that it is totally impossible to find somebody who might not be interested about your idea but will still do good job. But it is unlikely and then remember, you are not only looking for your first engineer but also your first manager, possibly CTO, etc.

Look at stories of successful startups -- in most cases first hires seem to have been critical and mostly seem to be passionate people who then established themselves close to the top of new organization.

Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#76

Post by lmilcin »

repsilat wrote: post #61
scarface74 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t the founder have the same motivation? To make money?

Founders do not treat their company as "just a paycheck". They're not just turning up to punch the clock. Early on, the company is their life -- their efforts determine its success, and their company's success is their own success. The same goes, to a lesser extent, for early employees. Maybe that's not widely agreed, though. I saw an ad on the "Who's Hiring?" post this month looking for a first engineer with a broad…

I got an offer recently to be a first engineer where two founders (non-technical guys) would ask me to solve some major problems but could not offer competitive salary and absolutely refused any stake in the company when asked. So no technical knowledge and no common business sense.

Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#77

Post by arikrak »

mful wrote: post #60

Anyone else getting a little tired of the immediate reduction of any conversation around early-stage startup job opportunities to "comp vs FAANG"? As someone who spent the last 5 years in early stage startups, before recently accepting a FAANG offer, I'm starting to realize folks who only think about comp probably aren't good fits for startups. Here are a few quick reasons to take less comp at a super early stage sta…

For future career prospects, a stint at FAANGM is a safer bet than joining a small startup. Most startups fail and it may not easy to find another job right away. If you're at a big tech company, you'll have the credential to find a job more easily (and with their job stability you can generally choose to look for one while working there).

Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#78

Post by localhost3000 »

stemuk wrote: post #34
brianwawok wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on pay, right? If you are offering employee #1 market pay, why would you give them 10% equity? That is potentially millions of dollars for not taking a risk. I have been on both sides of this, and have thoughts. What do you think is fair for employee #1 making at or near market rate?

Even if you pay your #1 employee at market rate he is taking huge risks and should be compensated accordingly. Working at an early stage company often comes with huge job insecurity, loss of medical benefits more mature companies might be able to offer (better insurance etc.) and a possible kink in your CV (3 years at Microsoft look much better than spending 3 years at an unsuccessful company that eventually shut dow…

lol @ startups with no engineers yet paying “market rate”... they will maybe pay market rate within their stage band i.e. compared to other SV seed-stage startups, but this will still be way below the liquid total comp at a post IPO tech company. At this point in the tech cycle the math is so out of whack in favor of big co that I can’t with a straight face recommend to anyone that they join a seed startup as an early employee engineer unless they’re already well off financially (5-7 years ago I felt like I could). There are exceptions, of course.

Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#79

Post by westoncb »

brianwawok wrote: post #30
jazzychad wrote: post #25

These are good points for finding your first engineer, but here is a tip for helping close your dream hire: offer more equity. Your first eng hire will shoulder nearly all of the technical burden soon after as the founders transition into more of the non-technical roles (sales, outreach, recruiting, fundraising, business strategy). The amount of blood, sweat, and tears poured in by the first eng hire is somewhat less…

Depends on pay, right? If you are offering employee #1 market pay, why would you give them 10% equity? That is potentially millions of dollars for not taking a risk. I have been on both sides of this, and have thoughts. What do you think is fair for employee #1 making at or near market rate?

> If you are offering employee #1 market pay, why would you give them 10% equity?

So that they care about the company on a similar level to the founders, and feel a real sense of ownership, dedication, and responsibility.

I've been in a position several times now where at work I'll have a reputation as a very capable engineer, typically placed on or leading the most critical projects etc. —but, my employers still have no idea what my contribution could have been if I were made to feel like the company was partially my project too, and that there wasn't some massive (though never explicit) social divide between the founders and everyone else, the rest of us being mere tools for the founders' use (only one job I was at really gave that impression—the others were pretty good about creating an environment where everyone felt equal. But from speaking with many other prospects, it appears to be a typical attitude).

There are thresholds in perception of ownership which when crossed give access to new categories of behavior in the perceiver. Think about 1%, 5%, and 10% equity in terms of sharing an object among a corresponding number of people: how much do you feel that thing is yours when sharing it with 100 people? With 20 people? With 10 people?

For me, 10% is about where the line would be where I'd be willing to drop side projects etc. and seriously dedicate myself to the company. (And in my experience, this is not atypical: in the very early stage startup I was in, basically everyone was laying groundwork for their own startups on the side, or at least had other projects they were more interested in—but they'd make sad, fake displays of their dedication to the company to try and cover. At our largest there were still only ~7 people in the company.)

Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#80

Post by ryandrake »

scarface74 wrote: post #45
thatjsguy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...why would you give them 10% equity? Because they’re taking on a gigantic risk too?

What risk?

The huge career risk of having a string of no name companies on the resume rather than Google, Microsoft or Apple. I am quite certain I’d be much farther along in my career today had I taken the job at the big name 20 years ago instead of horsing around with a bunch of failing small companies.
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