Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

From my experience, a good manager can ship with bad enginners but good engineers cannot ship with a bad manager. This is from the perspective from an engineer.

We engineers need to stop kidding ourselves. We are good at certain problems but getting something out the door and running a company requires much more than what we are expected to be good at. This is why blogs like PG's and Joel Spolsky have such a following. They explain difficult concepts to engineers in a way engineers will understand. Not everything they write about are revelations to the whole world but they are to many engineers. Human-centric design? Other industries have done it for decades, etc. We need to know our own limitations if we want to go beyond them or make the conscious decision to not get better at it and let someone else handle it.

1) Throwing engineers at something without asking the engineers

a) Twitter b) Spotify c) Soundcloud

Tweetie.app Lorens vs current twitter application.

2) Not allowing remote work.

3) Shitty domain knowledge that isn't worth crap.

Startups I see here are usually looking for the same kinds of people to help build their products (Rails, iOS, UI/UX, etc.).

They look to really only hire people who are really good at things like this to build their product. Are these people the best people to have around later? Once your company has bigger problems than just getting something out the door are these people a hinderance?

I don't want to sound like these people are not smart but being REALLY good at one thing generally means you are lacking in other domains (only so many hours in the day right?)

I ask because I'm honestly curious. I'm not involved in the startup world at all but this was always a question I had when reading job postings here.

I haven't seen that. Usually I see the whole "my tech team are all the best awesomest rock ninjas" tripe from the CEO, and entirely because it is an extension of their personal arrogance and massive ego. You talk to the CEO and they have the best tech team in the world solving impossible problems nobody else can do, and you talk to that tech team and they are like "We're making a website, there's nothing special about it". The CEO believes the quality of their tech team reflects their ability as a CEO, thus they must have the best team since they are the greatest CEO.

A sidenote you can ignore but I just need to vent: these massive ego CEOs then insist on making their tech team do this: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell because they "know people", so they know what people want.