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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

#51

Post by jsoo4 »

DevX101 wrote: post #37
mahyarm wrote: post #33

I 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.

Trivial is not necessarily the opposite of difficult though. Solving an easy but non-trivial problem can be done with average engineers, if you a sufficient number of them to get the work done.

This is what happens when a company hires genuinely exceptional people to do easy but non-trivial work:

http://www.quora.com/Working-at-Google-1/Whats-the-worst-par...

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#52

Post by sblawrie »

sieva wrote: post #41

We're looking for an awesome web developer (oh the irony). Let me know if you're interested :) StudySoup.com

It took me about 30 seconds to figure out what your product does. You might want to move the bit about your partners to the bottom of the homepage and the stuff about the product and its features to the top of the page. I don't really care about your partners if I don't even know what you do in the first place. Good luck.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#54

Post by wmcreate »

mlaccetti wrote: post #5
Sakes wrote: post #2

I don't know. If you have a team that is able to consistently ship products that work and are well received by your existing client base, you probably do have some badass tech guys. You don't necessarily have to claim that you are better than all other startups, you just have to claim to have a tech team that is magnitudes better than average teams at other companies. It is crazy to me how many failed projects are fl…

How much of the failure is related to process or project management vs. the tech teams's skills?

Bingo! I have seen the smartest engineers (Princeton PhD in one case) rot in bad environments and mediocre engineers provide solid contributions in strong, engineering focused environments. I have rarely come across an engineer that doesn't want to build great products. If you want to suck the energy and enthusiasm out of team, add in weekly 120min planning meetings, required daily progress reports, and 4-5 product pivots.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#55

Post by mattgreenrocks »

DevX101 wrote: post #37
mahyarm wrote: post #33

I 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.

Scaling is not domain complexity. Scaling may require significant technical expertise, but it's a safe problem: you only do it when you need to, which implies traction.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#56

Post by soneca »

I think this behavior is created by the fundraising process as we know it. From angels to VCs to YC everybody focus on the team to decide wheter to invest or not.

The CEO is supposed to be inspiring leader and a good teamworker, if he praises the CTO as a genius he is perceived as both, with the plus that, if he is a good salesman, the investors believe that the CTO is a genius. So there it is, the startup dream team, a inspiring leader and a tech genius, the next Jobs+Woz.

And the best performances are usually of those who actually believe in it, so no surprise that after a few years successfully saying that, they start to believe in it.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#57

Post by forgottenpaswrd »

Well, in my experience managing my own software company(I guess I am CEO but I did code a lot in the early days so I know what it is) it is not so much about the quality of the people.

The quality is something very important when your company is made by two developers. When you go up from this, you have lots of interactions and complexity.

You have love, hatred, you have admiration and envies, you have people that need money or need time to see their family. You have people that is afraid of their own mediocrity that try to protect their knowledge or "own" part of the company(fiefdoms).

You have people in some areas fight against others(marketing or sales vs it), you have different personality types that don't understand each other.

If you get all this right, life becomes easier and you have time for writing in HN, or kissing your kids, because it is a fantastic machine that works alone, and yes your tech people will kick ass.

Get this wrong, and most people do it not wrong, terribly wrong, and life is hell(I know because as a geek I did terribly wrong in the past).

If the best engineer does not sleep, you have a sh*t engineer(Chernobyl).

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#58

Post by rfnslyr »

mahyarm wrote: post #33

I 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…

Who are these mystical dev-fairies pulling in such salaries? Which sectors? Positions? Companies? I've had my fair share of jobs and I've never run into anyone who made that much as a developer. I'm talking strictly developer, not a PM, not a director.

What kind of people make this money?

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#60

Post by rfnslyr »

theboss wrote: post #17

My 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…

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