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How to Hire Your First Engineer

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#31

Post by jschwartzi »

Moodles wrote: post #21

I wonder what proportion of HN would have different careers if software engineering paid, say, as much as humanities while humanities paid like software engineering. It seems like everyone here (myself included) isn't really in it for the money, but who knows what would happen.

I'm doing this because this is one of the few things I'm good at that people will pay me lots of money to do. If it paid less than being a teacher, I'd go become a teacher instead. It's not that I'm dispassionate about it, but I have to eat.

Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#32

Post by sidlls »

brianwawok wrote: post #30
jazzychad wrote: post #25

These are good points for finding your first engineer, but here is a tip for helping close your dream hire: offer more equity. Your first eng hire will shoulder nearly all of the technical burden soon after as the founders transition into more of the non-technical roles (sales, outreach, recruiting, fundraising, business strategy). The amount of blood, sweat, and tears poured in by the first eng hire is somewhat less…

Depends on pay, right? If you are offering employee #1 market pay, why would you give them 10% equity? That is potentially millions of dollars for not taking a risk. I have been on both sides of this, and have thoughts. What do you think is fair for employee #1 making at or near market rate?

Two tranches: one a number of shares at par value to make up the difference in pay, the other the same grant you'd give any employee. Really though either pay cash market rate or else give them a meaningful stake.

Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#33

Post by Moodles »

Swizec wrote: post #28
Moodles wrote: post #21

I wonder what proportion of HN would have different careers if software engineering paid, say, as much as humanities while humanities paid like software engineering. It seems like everyone here (myself included) isn't really in it for the money, but who knows what would happen.

I love engineering. But you know what, when rent is $3000+ per month, there's only so far my rational mind will let me go. I loved art and drawing too. But I wisely chose not to master in art when going to college.

Yeah, same. I think I could have enjoyed going into history but the huge salary disparity certainly helps make the choice between two otherwise more or less equal paths.

Also, rent in some cities might not be as much if fewer people went into tech ;-)

Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#34

Post by stemuk »

brianwawok wrote: post #30
jazzychad wrote: post #25

These are good points for finding your first engineer, but here is a tip for helping close your dream hire: offer more equity. Your first eng hire will shoulder nearly all of the technical burden soon after as the founders transition into more of the non-technical roles (sales, outreach, recruiting, fundraising, business strategy). The amount of blood, sweat, and tears poured in by the first eng hire is somewhat less…

Depends on pay, right? If you are offering employee #1 market pay, why would you give them 10% equity? That is potentially millions of dollars for not taking a risk. I have been on both sides of this, and have thoughts. What do you think is fair for employee #1 making at or near market rate?

Even if you pay your #1 employee at market rate he is taking huge risks and should be compensated accordingly. Working at an early stage company often comes with huge job insecurity, loss of medical benefits more mature companies might be able to offer (better insurance etc.) and a possible kink in your CV (3 years at Microsoft look much better than spending 3 years at an unsuccessful company that eventually shut down).

To sum it up, I would expect a #1 engineers equity to be at least half of a founders equity AND payed at near-market rate.

Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#35

Post by [deleted] »

brianwawok wrote: post #30
jazzychad wrote: post #25

These are good points for finding your first engineer, but here is a tip for helping close your dream hire: offer more equity. Your first eng hire will shoulder nearly all of the technical burden soon after as the founders transition into more of the non-technical roles (sales, outreach, recruiting, fundraising, business strategy). The amount of blood, sweat, and tears poured in by the first eng hire is somewhat less…

Depends on pay, right? If you are offering employee #1 market pay, why would you give them 10% equity? That is potentially millions of dollars for not taking a risk. I have been on both sides of this, and have thoughts. What do you think is fair for employee #1 making at or near market rate?

[deleted]

Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#36

Post by PeterisP »

phamilton wrote: post #18
nosseo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No engineer taking a role like this is going to expect an onboarding process. Many of them are specifically drawn by the idea they'll get to sit down and solve a problem on day 1.

> Many of them are specifically drawn by the idea they'll get to sit down and solve a problem on day 1 I don't see how engineer #1 or engineer #100 changes that. When I onboard a senior engineer, they get a problem on day 1.

The difference is that when hiring engineer #1 there's no technical infrastructure to which you'd onboard someone, and nobody who's really qualified to make a decent technical onboarding process - you're hiring a person to create this process (among others) from scratch, make the initial decisions themselves (instead of being told them during onboarding) and onboard others.

Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#37

Post by pnathan »

Moodles wrote: post #21

I wonder what proportion of HN would have different careers if software engineering paid, say, as much as humanities while humanities paid like software engineering. It seems like everyone here (myself included) isn't really in it for the money, but who knows what would happen.

Well, the other option going into college was music. Although it's also quite likely I would have landed as a historian or linguist.

I would probably have continued programming in the evenings, but doing history as the day job. Today I program in the day, and often read history in the evenings.

Ultimately, I like paying rent/mortgage, soo.... yeah.

Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#38

Post by orsenthil »

philfreo wrote: post #16

I've been hired as Engineer #1 at two startups (both doing well). I wrote some thoughts recently about how I was recruited into that role: https://twitter.com/philfreo/status/1012171080834969601 On the hiring side, I also incorporated some hard lessons learned about growing our Eng team from 2 to 14 here: http://philfreo.com/blog/when-who-how-to-hire-an-engineering...

I see you mentioned something like. Make sure you’re still excited after 30 days (or fire fast).

That's a big NO-NO for me. 30 days is way too small for any company to make a decision on a hire. It just means your process for hiring is not good. We must start with firing people who were responsible for the that bad hire first.

Re: How to Hire Your First Engineer

#40

Post by wolco »

Moodles wrote: post #21

I wonder what proportion of HN would have different careers if software engineering paid, say, as much as humanities while humanities paid like software engineering. It seems like everyone here (myself included) isn't really in it for the money, but who knows what would happen.

If we could go back to role where we worked on our own. Where we created our own programs from our ideas. We work on waterfall projects by day and hacked our own ganes at night. Never to be included in business meetings never to talk to the customer and never to have a standup meeting.

Where everyone loved something about technology programming/hardware/etc and continued day or night.

In many ways things would be better. This represents a time before everyone liked computers and most feared them. Salaries were not as high as today. The work was harder but more meaningful.

We can't go back. The future looks more like turning programmers into interchangable pieces that can be commodized. Defining all work into smaller pieces.

I think many of us would trade big salaries for jobs at places like bell labs.

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