I am actively looking to hire - either freelance or full-time - an engineer to write open source golang code for my YC startup. However, I literally cannot afford FAANG salaries at my stage. It would literally bring my runway from n to n/5 years. And many candidates are asking for 400k+ salaries. I’d love to hire someone who knows what they’re doing but I’m just not able to find people who are both qualified and inte…
Avoid recruitment channels (like HN!) where FAANG people and FAANG-apirants congregate.
> with lots of FAANG experience
Use FAANG experience as an exclusion filter, not an inclusion filter.
First, as you said, you can't afford the compensation that they're used to.
Second, FAANG companies can absorb tons of bad talent in their hiring process and have mechanisms to both push that talent back out and table it internally once it's known for what it is. There are many awful FAANG engineers. Some of the top performers in the world work for FAANG companies and they're often better at recruiting those people than almost anyone else, but FAANG experience does not identify someone as one of those top performers. It's a really misleading and noisy signal on resumes.
Third, even among talented people who shined in their roles at FAANG, they did so in a radically different work environment than you'll be offering them. The way they spend their days, the pace of deliverables they're calibrated to deliver, the amount of support/independence they need, etc are nothing like what suits your organization. Some may do well (or better) in your startup, but many are not going to be suited to it at all and (if hired into FAANG early) may not even have had the experience to know for themselves.
TLDR; you are not a FAANG company and looking anywhere near FAANG-associated candidates is your problem.