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Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent
41–50 of 131 posts
Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent
#42On the upside, most problems startups are working on aren't necessarily extremely technically difficult.
A huge portion of the "talent shortage" is simply technical interviews that assume the exact opposite, and that only the best 1% of technical talent will do when you're running an ecommerce site selling unicorn horns.
Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent
#43My question is this: 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…
I've wondered about exactly the same. Are generalists appreciated at all in the startup world?
I suspect it has more to do with not wanting to train somebody rather than not wanting generalists. Once you get in, you'll be expected to do a little bit of everything if the company is small.
Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent
#44My question is this: 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…
I've wondered about exactly the same. Are generalists appreciated at all in the startup world?
Yes, the good ones become CTOs at startups :-)
No-one appreciates a bad generalist, but a good generalist, who can pick up any piece of code or system you happen to have lying around or need to work with (e.g. can use tcpdump to debug a problem connecting to a client's server, or write a useful shell script, or do some C# coding for an integrated version of your Ruby app) is worth their weight in bitcoins.
Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent
#45I thought everyone knows that it isn't true, it's like a BS marketing talking point. The things most of us in startups work on isn't technically difficult or pushing the envelope, and that alone should point to not having the best people or teams. Because these places will never gain the interest of or the pay the price for the for the very best, which can easily reach $400k/yr starting. The only technically challeng…
Dropbox wasn't a trivial engineering problem. While making facebook for a couple thousand users isn't too hard, scaling it to hundreds of millions was no trivial feat either.
In his post he acknowledged the scaling difficulty, but the point is, having to scale is a good problem to have and you'll be able to afford good engineering at that point since you have "traction".
Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent
#46[deleted]
Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent
#47I thought everyone knows that it isn't true, it's like a BS marketing talking point. The things most of us in startups work on isn't technically difficult or pushing the envelope, and that alone should point to not having the best people or teams. Because these places will never gain the interest of or the pay the price for the for the very best, which can easily reach $400k/yr starting. The only technically challeng…
Dropbox wasn't a trivial engineering problem. While making facebook for a couple thousand users isn't too hard, scaling it to hundreds of millions was no trivial feat either.
ha yes but his point is that once these problems reach a non-trivial point the big guns get brought in. It's not the startup team solving them...
Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent
#48Personally 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…
Good point. On top of that, pretty much every CEO in every industry says some variation of the following:
"Our true strength is our team. They're the best and most talented group of programmers/butchers/bakers/candlestick makers ever assembled by mankind."
There's really no downside for the CEO to saying this. If he doesn't say those things it seems like he's trying to steal all the credit.
Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent
#49I thought everyone knows that it isn't true, it's like a BS marketing talking point. The things most of us in startups work on isn't technically difficult or pushing the envelope, and that alone should point to not having the best people or teams. Because these places will never gain the interest of or the pay the price for the for the very best, which can easily reach $400k/yr starting. The only technically challeng…
Yeah I don't want to get too venty because I'm too cynical/pessimistic as it is but..... I'm a professional web engineer now & especially as the cloud hosting universe stabilizes, most stuff seems so trivial. Can still be interesting, but yeah most startup level stuff is solved.
Previously I completed a master's thesis on audio signal processing / machine learning. Trust me, the work I was doing in that world was 1000x more advanced because it was essentially ALL r&d, but you get paid more in today's world to implement CRUD sites at an acceptable flow rate. It's a good way to sharpen some CS skills I was missing, but I think algorithmic development is much more of a dream job.
Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent
#50Personally 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…
Good point. On top of that, pretty much every CEO in every industry says some variation of the following: "Our true strength is our team. They're the best and most talented group of programmers/butchers/bakers/candlestick makers ever assembled by mankind." There's really no downside for the CEO to saying this. If he doesn't say those things it seems like he's trying to steal all the credit.
also, the contrary is also kind of true - they say that no matter what they tell you, it's a people problem.