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Ask HN: What do you look for in your first 10 hires?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you look for in your first 10 hires?

#11

Post by justinludwig »

"Get shit done" is by far the most important attribute of your first few employees. You need people who can work independently without a lot of direction, and focus on the right things while the rest of the world burns around them.

They don't need fancy credentials or to be super smart or have a great internet presence; what you should look for is a track-record of shipping, and evidence of independent work; and when you interview them, find out if they have good judgement, if they have a sense of when to trade off perfect for good enough, if they're able to diagnose and fix things when they're broken.

As you grow, you can add more traditional engineers to build a more conventional, well-rounded team. But most companies don't get to 20 employees if their first 5-10 aren't able to work quickly & make good decisions without getting side-tracked on all the myriad little distractions of designing the perfect framework for the framework, office politics, dev environment isn't quite right, etc, etc.

Re: Ask HN: What do you look for in your first 10 hires?

#14

Post by purrcat259 »

rvz wrote: post #2

Something that is not in the 1M+ people studying for interviews and throwing pieces of paper (CVs, cover letters, degrees) at the job application: A verifiable track record beyond the CV, that is extremely hard to fake with valuable experience that you did not know you needed. As I said before at least 2 of the following: 1. Open source contributions to high-profile / major repositories (with code-review in the open…

Basically no one who has a life outside of work, or a household to upkeep or a family to take care of.

Your criteria heavily biases towards very performative and obvious signs of hard work in a commercial setting, completely oblivious to hard work and character outside of it.

Re: Ask HN: What do you look for in your first 10 hires?

#15

Post by rvz »

purrcat259 wrote: post #14
rvz wrote: post #2

Something that is not in the 1M+ people studying for interviews and throwing pieces of paper (CVs, cover letters, degrees) at the job application: A verifiable track record beyond the CV, that is extremely hard to fake with valuable experience that you did not know you needed. As I said before at least 2 of the following: 1. Open source contributions to high-profile / major repositories (with code-review in the open…

Basically no one who has a life outside of work, or a household to upkeep or a family to take care of. Your criteria heavily biases towards very performative and obvious signs of hard work in a commercial setting, completely oblivious to hard work and character outside of it.

> Your criteria heavily biases towards very performative and obvious signs of hard work in a commercial setting, completely oblivious to hard work and character outside of it.

Hiring people based on knowing what should be built, how to build and especially knowing how to make the business money is not performative. I'd rather optimizing the hiring process for builders instead of rest-and-vest day-care slackers or leetcode grinders just for passing the interview.

There is nothing more performative than anyone doing these puzzles and answering quiz trivia, which doesn't make you or anyone money and it is only a waste of everyone's time.

Re: Ask HN: What do you look for in your first 10 hires?

#16

Post by orwin »

kathir05 wrote: post #9

Low ego, More passion and drive, hustling mindset, Generalists, Good judgement. Simple thing i would do is Ask lot of "Whys" Why you did this?, why this way? , why you joined this company? This gives good understanding of both Personality and Hard skills.

Low ego about their ideas and what they build. I.e they can be wrong, thrash their own code without any issues, and work on other people idea.

But if they can't strongly advocate for an idea or against an idea they don't like and just give up, you don't get their full 'utility'. Which, tbh, is not a big issue with juniors with not a lot of experience, but still.

'low ego', but not too low. You want passionate debates.

Re: Ask HN: What do you look for in your first 10 hires?

#17

Post by 1jreuben1 »

rvz wrote: post #2

Something that is not in the 1M+ people studying for interviews and throwing pieces of paper (CVs, cover letters, degrees) at the job application: A verifiable track record beyond the CV, that is extremely hard to fake with valuable experience that you did not know you needed. As I said before at least 2 of the following: 1. Open source contributions to high-profile / major repositories (with code-review in the open…

If someone has side-projects with paying customers, why would they be seeking employment ?

Re: Ask HN: What do you look for in your first 10 hires?

#18

Post by wvh »

First you probably need some silent, persistent and occasionally cantankerous folks that can grudgingly work on annoying boring problems all night just because they want to solve it no matter what. If you have a few of those, you really have to start looking for more social people that can glue the herd of cats together so all noses point the same way.

My experience has been that solving a very technical problem and solving a social one are very different skill sets and very few people have both skills and are capable of using both of those skills at the same time.

Re: Ask HN: What do you look for in your first 10 hires?

#20

Post by TYPE_FASTER »

There is a difference between somebody who has used an algorithm/component/framework/library, and somebody who knows how to solve a problem using an algorithm/component/framework/library.

In the beginning, you need the person who knows how to solve the problem. They are harder to find.

If you are pressured to grow quickly, you might be tempted to lower the bar. You can, as long as you understand that the person who knows how to solve the problem is still critically important, because they will be telling people which algo to use.

I think every company that uses tech needs at least one of these people to start with.

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