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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

#71

Post by mathattack »

Let's start by accepting that 50% of CTOs can't be above average. What can you do about this as a CEO? I see variations of two themes:

1) Find some benchmark, and reset internal expectations if they're wrong. Replace the technical talent if they're not great.

2) Claim that they're the best, and set high expectations.

My belief is that once you've chosen your team, you're better off going with #2. This isn't to say putting your head in the sand is good, but setting a high bar can be better than second guessing folks in an area you're not knowledgable about.

Perhaps it's ok to make a good judgment over time, but I think there's a lot to be gained from saying, "You're the top team, I believe you can do it." If over time they struggle to make the grade, then you have to recalibrate.

This is very tough, because studies have shown that most people of all fields do believe they are better than average.

Much more on this phenomenon here -> http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57568186/

Thank you for starting this discussion.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#72

Post by Silhouette »

fat0wl wrote: post #49
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…

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 100…

Can still be interesting, but yeah most startup level stuff is solved.

If you'd said that the challenges facing most start-ups don't involve solving a particularly interesting technical challenge on day one, I'd agree that this was likely.

However, if most start-up level stuff more generally were solved, everyone would be running successful start-ups, which clearly most people aren't.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#73

Post by dmourati »

I was recently on a college recruiting trip for my startup and I said something similar to a candidate and I meant it.

I've worked in four startups in the valley and while each team had a large number of really smart engineers, all but my current one had some real lackluster ones as well. Maybe it just takes time to figure out who those folks are. I've been here less than a year.

This company has extremely high hiring standards and will turn away viable candidates who fail to impress. We spend a ton of time in recruiting, but I'd like to think the result is worth it.

Reminds me of a talk about 10x engineers I watched recently:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGkVM1B5NuI

That was from the Eng VP at joyent.

Since then, I've had a really bad experience working with one or more joyent engineers who were anything but 10x. More like x/10.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#74

Post by andrewljohnson »

Maybe it's less important to have the best developers than it is to have the best developers in your market. That means you want better devs than the competition, and potentially domain knowledge that matters.

I wonder if that's a good explanation to give a VC - "Our guys are pretty decent, but it's not the quality of developer you are investing in. Our idea does not require rocket science right now."

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#75

Post by meowface »

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…

I would argue Dropbox probably took quite a bit of serious engineering, especially considering the scale it's at today. I'd pretty much agree with the rest, though.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#76

Post by tensor »

Silhouette wrote: post #72
fat0wl wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 100…

Can still be interesting, but yeah most startup level stuff is solved. If you'd said that the challenges facing most start-ups don't involve solving a particularly interesting technical challenge on day one, I'd agree that this was likely. However, if most start-up level stuff more generally were solved, everyone would be running successful start-ups, which clearly most people aren't.

Technical problems being essentially solved has nothing to do with a startup actually succeeding in the market place.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#77

Post by aryastark »

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.

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's a self-inflicted headache. It's great business to be in control of millions of users. But it's a sad state of affairs for the internet in general. We've gone from open, decentralized, and peer-to-peer protocols to one company controlling everything.

There are interesting scaling problems. But Facebook isn't one of them.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#78

Post by meowface »

skrebbel wrote: post #23
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…

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.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#79

Post by meowface »

300bps wrote: post #3

If startup technology people didn't believe they were superior to everyone else they probably wouldn't be in a startup. I am under no illusions of my superiority; I am a developer at an investment bank.

I've worked with and encountered a lot of talented developers and tech people working in the finance industry.

Hell, look at Walmart's tech team: https://github.com/walmartlabs

There isn't necessarily a correlation between intelligence or talent, and the industry or company you work in.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#80

Post by tensor »

mathattack wrote: post #71

Let's start by accepting that 50% of CTOs can't be above average. What can you do about this as a CEO? I see variations of two themes: 1) Find some benchmark, and reset internal expectations if they're wrong. Replace the technical talent if they're not great. 2) Claim that they're the best, and set high expectations. My belief is that once you've chosen your team, you're better off going with #2. This isn't to say pu…

And of course, this applies to CEOs too. What is a CEO to do when they realize that they are worse than average? What can you do about this as CTO or another part of the team? Sadly, the only option appears to be to quit.
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