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How to Hire Your First Engineer

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#121

Post by icebraining »

zorpner wrote: post #113
brianwawok wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, maybe not. Startups offer a lot of non-financial benefits over working at the big established companies. 1) Looser culture. Less likely to have a dress code or an attendance policy. 2) Less meetings, more coding. For someone that wants to get stuff done, way more to do in a startup. 3) Sense of purpose. A huge part of life satisfaction is doing something that actually matters. WAY easier to do this when you ar…

Sense of purpose. A huge part of life satisfaction is doing something that actually matters. Truly, and it's changed my life for the better. I'm unclear, however, on the relevance of this statement to the extant startup scene -- ref: the latest YC class, for example.

There are quite a few health-related startups in the latest YC class that seem to be doing important, such as Hepatx.

Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#123

Post by yeukhon »

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…

The best #1 engineer is someone who is willing and will want to help do some cold call as well. Offer not just more equity but better base pay. They deserve better base, real cash. Then we talking. If you offer me my current salary (not faang level), plus a very good equtity (2-5% stake?) then I will work 15 hours every day likr I do now anyway. I will pull in 18 if you want. As a workalochic, I am up for all night. I will do cold call and go out to reach new users as well. I will clean the office with you. You want your founding team to feel they own a stake.

Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#124

Post by rimliu »

mful wrote: post #97
ryandrake wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who did a long string of failing small companies and finally settled in among the FAANGs, I respect your experience but disagree with everything you said. Wide breadth of skills? If you’re hired as a code monkey you’re going to monkey code. Nobody ever asked me what I thought about the latest business partnership or synergy strategy. Just code. Career progression? Another nope. With only a few people in th…

I think your edit hits the nail on the head, as we’ve clearly had different experiences. I should clarify that a lot of the hard problems at early stage cos are around creating something that is not only new, but is also a viable business, with minimal resources and huge time pressure. Whether the technical side is hard or not is another question entirely. Anyways, thanks for the comment — in addition to providing a…

I wonder, how often "huge time pressure" is more imagined than real. Unless "time"="investors".

Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#125

Post by h4b4n3r0 »

angersock wrote: post #116
h4b4n3r0 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was employee #1 at a startup. Right out of the gate our medical was better than Google’s. Having been exposed to the financial side of things, the cost difference between shitty and decent insurance for employees was inconsequential in the overall cost of doing business.

I was engineering hire #1, and we had no insurance and pay was half market rate, but at least the founders were incompetent and abusive depending on the day.

And therein lies a valuable lesson: don't be employee #1 if you don't know the founders personally, or can otherwise make sure they have a good track record.

Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#126

Post by alexpetralia »

philfreo wrote: post #16

I've been hired as Engineer #1 at two startups (both doing well). I wrote some thoughts recently about how I was recruited into that role: https://twitter.com/philfreo/status/1012171080834969601 On the hiring side, I also incorporated some hard lessons learned about growing our Eng team from 2 to 14 here: http://philfreo.com/blog/when-who-how-to-hire-an-engineering...

Fantastic blog post on hiring. Thanks!

Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#127

Post by scarface74 »

ryandrake wrote: post #101
scarface74 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average software developer V in San Francisco makes about $190K according to salary.com. In most other major American cities outside of New York/DC area its about $140K. If you compare the cost of living in any of those cities, it starts looking a lot worse for Silicon Valley. https://qz.com/906086/san-francisco-is-actually-one-of-the-w... If you go the billable consultant route with the right skill set, you can…

Software Emgineer V on Salary.com represents the tippy top outlier of the elite senior engineer totem pole. It’s a stretch to call that an average anything. For a more realistic median salary range, just look at the figures for plain Software Engineer.

The Software Engineer V salaries at salary.com for the cities that I'm familiar with seems to represent salaries for a developer/architect with 10-15 years of experience who avoided management.

But the idea that software developers can't do well in other lower cost cities without working for a FANG or even companies that most people have never heard of is another example of the SV/HN bubble.

Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#128

Post by vonmoltke »

adrianN wrote: post #120
solatic wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but those exceptions are pretty big. The hiring pipelines at FAANG are so over-tuned for false negatives that there are plenty of engineers who are good enough to work at a FAANG for FAANG-level compensation yet are not actually getting offers from FAANG companies. They're on the market for (market minus FAANG)-rate compensation. Then you have to remember that FAANG companies are large enterprises, by definition…

There are many companies that offer pretty good pay and great job security outside FAANG. Try Microsoft, Oracle, Siemens, Airbus, SAP or one of the million medium sized companies whose name you've never heard of unless you're in the same line of business.

My experience has been that those companies (except for Microsoft and Oracle) have been well below FANG compensation levels, while being in line (and sometimes lower) than what I can get from later stage startups and not much higher than I have heard from early stage startups. I have only looked for opportunities in NYC and Dallas, though, so that might skew my observations.

Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#129

Post by needlepont »

As the first engineer at a successful startup.

Responsibilities- * Take over everything technical I was good at and hired for. * Take over policy and progress on everything I was good at. * Be on call 24/7. * Do whatever the CEO/CIO didn't want to do.

Think this is pretty standard from my reading of other startups. The one lesson I should have learned and didn't is that as first engineer you should get 10% or more equity if you stay > 5 years.

Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#130

Post by ryandrake »

fma wrote: post #108
ryandrake wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who did a long string of failing small companies and finally settled in among the FAANGs, I respect your experience but disagree with everything you said. Wide breadth of skills? If you’re hired as a code monkey you’re going to monkey code. Nobody ever asked me what I thought about the latest business partnership or synergy strategy. Just code. Career progression? Another nope. With only a few people in th…

Career progression IMHO is best at mid size companies. Small enough to get the progression, large enough to actually get experience.

I’ll also point out something I learned the hard way. Junior folks take note: Career progression, if important to you, is something you absolutely must ask about and confirm during your interview. Some employers want to hire you as a mid level engineer and have zero intention of ever promoting you past that. You need to be able to identify and walk away from those companies. You also need to take responsibility for it. Your manager won’t. For a long time I had this romantic notion that if only I did a really awesome job, someone would notice and career growth would happen. It just doesn’t work this way. You need to take direct action.

I remember several exit interviews where I told my managers that one of the reasons I’m leaving was no upward career movement. They looked shocked, like they couldn’t imagine that would be important! Maybe they were legitimately surprised, I dunno. I’ve also had managers say things like: “oh trust me, you don’t want to get promoted or go into management, it’s so much stress!” They will try to gatekeep and you need to push through that.

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