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Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

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Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#101

Post by karnajani »

fleitz wrote: post #88

OTOH, most startups don't really need a great tech team. Exactly what highly technical problem is Evernote, Airbnb, Snapchat, or Twitter, or Facebook solving? I mean really deep technical problem like the news feed absolutely will not work with out some sort of huge breakthrough in AI, not that deep learning is 5% better than an SVM. Look at how well something simple like the points*timedecay system than HN uses for…

They may have not had 'hard' problems to solve as part of their core app.

But it seems as though, solving how to scale a CRUD app is a problem whose solutions are still being discovered.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#102

Post by pedalpete »

fleitz wrote: post #88

OTOH, most startups don't really need a great tech team. Exactly what highly technical problem is Evernote, Airbnb, Snapchat, or Twitter, or Facebook solving? I mean really deep technical problem like the news feed absolutely will not work with out some sort of huge breakthrough in AI, not that deep learning is 5% better than an SVM. Look at how well something simple like the points*timedecay system than HN uses for…

Though I agree most startups don't need amazing developers, some of the start-ups you listed do.

Evernote is far from a CRUD app, while the challenges of scale at Twitter were noticeable very early on. Facebook also had to overcome some serious scalability issues, though they were able to push those out to later in their growth.

AirBnb and SnapChat, you are probably correct about.

The thing about being a great brilliant tech team, to me, doesn't necessarily all come down to being the smartest technologists in the room. It's about being the best team for the chosen product. Developers who understand what they are building and why can influence and make good decisions for the long-term of the company, where others who may be smarter developers might not be able to see the long-term implications of some of their design decisions.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#103

Post by mahyarm »

StavrosK wrote: post #93
brianpgordon wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HFTs. This story hit HN a couple of months ago: > A year into his new job he had a job offer from UBS, the Swiss bank, and a promise to bump up his salary to $400,000 a year. Serge didn’t particularly want to leave Goldman Sachs just to go and work at another big Wall Street firm, and so when Goldman offered to match the offer, he stayed. http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2013/09/michael-lewis-gol... But yeah, reali…

This baffles me a bit. Why would you even want this much money? These sums of money are comfortably beyond anything I could reasonably spend, so after a certain amount it's all moot. You could live in a nice, cheap country with a good standard of living instead, and spend a tenth of what you make while living very well with your family. People keep wanting more money and what do they do? Get a car. Get a house. Get a…

Money isn't just for spending, and money isn't just for your personal desires as you seem to imply. You can also invest and be financially independent, free to work on whatever projects you want without ever having to really worry about money again. A lot of money is a form of freedom.

Want to write good secure texting application that works on all major desktop and mobile OSes and make it fully open source? You could do that if you were financially independent. You could also hire people to do so if you wanted to.

Also real estate is expensive in NYC/SF where you would get these kinds of wages.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#104

Post by 6d0debc071 »

drewcrawford wrote: post #36

Personally I think we (engineers) made this bed ourselves. I mean there are a few possibilities: one is that a CEO says their tech team is not so great. And of course behind that door lies Dilbert. Another is that the CEO says nothing about the engineering team itself at all, and it's all product, product, product. On that path lies Apple, and I have heard many say (myself included) that we would not work somewhere w…

I think the OP was less about the team getting praise and more about the team being expected to solve hard problems with silly constraints. Why can't we be experts without the need for mythical estimations or our abilities?

But how about "Our team is competent?" "Our team are subject specialists." "Our team are pretty good." ?

...

And then I find myself wondering, how much domain knowledge do you need to identify a hard problem. Are founders just bad at estimating difficulty?

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#105

Post by aryastark »

staunch wrote: post #91
aryastark wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was under the impression Dropbox is a UI to Amazon S3. I use them and don't mean to deny it's a slick package. But I could duplicate the entire thing in about a day with inotify and rsync. The scaling is mostly on Amazon. That said, I must point out that the scaling issues all of these super modern "change the world" companies, such as Twitter and Facebook, have are purely for the purpose of centralizing power. It'…

> But I could duplicate the entire thing in about a day with inotify and rsync. The scaling is mostly on Amazon. No, you could duplicate a narrow piece of Dropbox's functionality in a day. You could not even get anywhere near duplicating the product and the service in anything less than months.

Dropbox pretty much uses librsync and, I believe, inotify on Linux. With Amazon S3. That is Dropbox. Literally.

Polishing any product takes time. But that's universal and has nothing to do with engineering. What exactly is non-trivial about Dropbox?

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#106

Post by hangonhn »

Sakes wrote: post #18
hangonhn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what made you think the primary reason for their failures is the lack of good engineers?

I can't speak for management, but our team would inform their team on what was broken, and it would not get resolved in a timely fashion. We would get contacted by the client to resolve an issue on our end, and after some debugging we would consistently discover it was broken because of the other company. They couldn't produce code that worked. This could have been a management problem. For example maybe they simply…

"I guess the most direct answer would be, since it was a problem that I could have resolved with tech, I didn't see a reason why they couldn't resolve it with tech."

That really captures how engineers think. I think I often think the same way but my gut feeling is that there might be a fallacy in that way of thinking. I can't think of it right now but your statement does give me a bit to think about. I'm not saying you're wrong. In fact, I think the same way and that worries me :-)

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#107

Post by tsmith »

drewcrawford wrote: post #36

Personally I think we (engineers) made this bed ourselves. I mean there are a few possibilities: one is that a CEO says their tech team is not so great. And of course behind that door lies Dilbert. Another is that the CEO says nothing about the engineering team itself at all, and it's all product, product, product. On that path lies Apple, and I have heard many say (myself included) that we would not work somewhere w…

I don't think the point is so much around what the CEO says about the engineering team publicly. It's one thing to proclaim that your engineers are the smartest in the world/industry/space; it's a completely different thing to expect them to work miracles.

The toplevel post is a warning to not drink your own kool-aid when making executive decisions about what your team can and should accomplish; e.g. your team may be extremely smart and talented, but so are the teams of everyone else, therefore don't think your team will be able to accomplish miracles.

Pretty sound advice.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#108

Post by randomdata »

fleitz wrote: post #88

OTOH, most startups don't really need a great tech team. Exactly what highly technical problem is Evernote, Airbnb, Snapchat, or Twitter, or Facebook solving? I mean really deep technical problem like the news feed absolutely will not work with out some sort of huge breakthrough in AI, not that deep learning is 5% better than an SVM. Look at how well something simple like the points*timedecay system than HN uses for…

As far as I am concerned, Evernote's core competency is their scanned document handling. Extracting meaningful information from bitmaps is not exactly an easy problem, but Evernote does it very well. Far better than a lot of other solutions I have looked at. Ultimately you need some CRUD to get the documents into that processing pipeline, but that doesn't mean it is just a CRUD app.

Now, we're maybe not talking cutting edge computer science research here, but I'm skeptical that the average programmer could put the same thing together in reasonable time. The algorithms involved are fairly complex and who knows what they had to discover on their own to achieve the desired results?

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#109

Post by czbond »

meowface wrote: post #78
skrebbel wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've wondered about exactly the same. Are generalists appreciated at all in the startup world?

I've never founded or worked for a startup, but I would imagine that especially at the early stages, all your engineers will need to be pretty good generalists. You're (probably) going to need a website, a product frontend, a product backend, an infrastructure, etc... And if that work's being split between 3 - 8 people, most of them are going to have be generalists.

IMHO - By generalist - he also means closing customers, finding new clients, and crafting value props.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#110

Post by czbond »

theboss wrote: post #97
meowface wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never founded or worked for a startup, but I would imagine that especially at the early stages, all your engineers will need to be pretty good generalists. You're (probably) going to need a website, a product frontend, a product backend, an infrastructure, etc... And if that work's being split between 3 - 8 people, most of them are going to have be generalists.

Maybe in 2004 but this is 2013. Rails, iOS, Digitalocean, heroku, aws, with a front-end designer. You no longer need to know anything about infrastructure.

Until you scale. I've met too many developers who say this until they're in a high growth environment.
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