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Ask HN: How do I find a team of 10-15 developers a project to work on?

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Re: Ask HN: How do I find a team of 10-15 developers a project to work on?

#31

Post by kls »

fsk wrote: post #30

I thought the way it usually works is that the leader of the group gets hired as CTO somewhere, and then brings the rest of the team with him as subordinates?

Yes this has been a pattern we have seen as well, but as the market has shifted away from employees and more towards contract based employment we have seen that dynamic shift some. Also as we have focused on being a distributed team we have seen more contract based work. That is the piece we are all missing is a longer term relationship with a company that we are more of a permanent fixture with.

Re: Ask HN: How do I find a team of 10-15 developers a project to work on?

#33

Post by petervandijck »

Aim at fast growing startups that don't have strong tech teams. Be a tech team in a box. Have someone in SanFran selling you as that. Take equity from each client.

Your pitch is basically: you (the startup) have funding and product market fit, but don't have a strong tech team. It's gonna take you 3-6 months to build one. We can get you one today. You pay us market + equity.

Re: Ask HN: How do I find a team of 10-15 developers a project to work on?

#34

Post by kls »

CmonDev wrote: post #32

"...though none of the developers were equity holders..." Why?

Young and inexperienced, at the time of the first wave aka the .com boom, would be the main reason. I did have a little equity in the start-up that we exited to Hotels.com on but honestly I did not know my value or the advantage I hade in negotiations at the time. Knowledge like the stuff shared on HN was locked away and not readily available so each member was going thru start-ups on their own. The second reason would be that after that wave start-ups started to centralize in the Vally so we see a lot less start-up opportunities now. We do have a few guys out in the Vally but they are the younger guys that we have worked with who took the older guys in our groups advices and headed out there while their life situation allowed for it.

Re: Ask HN: How do I find a team of 10-15 developers a project to work on?

#35

Post by fsk »

kls wrote: post #31
fsk wrote: post #30

I thought the way it usually works is that the leader of the group gets hired as CTO somewhere, and then brings the rest of the team with him as subordinates?

Yes this has been a pattern we have seen as well, but as the market has shifted away from employees and more towards contract based employment we have seen that dynamic shift some. Also as we have focused on being a distributed team we have seen more contract based work. That is the piece we are all missing is a longer term relationship with a company that we are more of a permanent fixture with.

My employer has one contracting firm where they are the primary client.

They bought a 3rd party software package. It was poorly written and they couldn't figure out how to get it to work. They looked at the comments in the code, saw the author's name, hired him has a consultant, and he was able to get it to work.

He has a good strategy for maximizing his team's job security. Use a heavily obfuscated style, so now your client is dependent on you to keep their business running. I can just barely maintain his code (I.e., it takes me a day to do something that would take 15 minutes if it was written cleanly.).

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