12 ms·

Traits Needed In Your First 5 Engineering Startup Hires

35 points by eladgil 17y ago

j_baker 17y ago
"Have the candidate come in to work with you for a day. " I'd only agree to this if I got paid for it. Interviewing is one thing, but actively contributing to a company's codebase is another. I don't think it's asking too much to get paid for what I do. Plus, it would be difficult for me to shake the impression that such a company is cheap and is trying to get free labor. If they're not going to pay me a day's pay, how can I trust them to pay me a yearly salary or provide me the tools I need? How likely are they to be in business a year from now?
- sorbits 17y ago
  “actively contributing to a company’s codebase” You think you will provide value which exceed the knowledge you might gain from learning about their systems and working/talking with their other employees, etc.? It is a great chance to get to work with new people if the domain is exciting. I would welcome such opportunity w/o demanding money for my “services” which probably consists of asking a lot of questions :)
  - barrkel 17y ago
    Such "opportunities" to donate work for free quickly get old.
    - sorbits 17y ago
      If I were seeking a job, the primary motivator would be having peers/assignments from which I can learn, I will gladly invest a day of my time to ensure the place I am going to spend the next many months/years of my life, is actually an interesting place — even if the other party might (also) get something out of it. Though if I know in advance that the “trial day” will consist of me “donating work for free” then I doubt it is a place for me. This might sound like a cliché, but money is the last thing on my mind when selecting a job or employee (I am presently an employer), and I am somewhat surprised by the point assignments given to the parent and grand parent comments.
      - j_baker 17y ago
        "Though if I know in advance that the “trial day” will consist of me “donating work for free” then I doubt it is a place for me." It sounds like you and I actually agree for the most part. Both the hirer and the hiree have the same problem: hiring is almost like extracting War & Peace from a newspaper. Is it necessarily fair for me to turn somebody down for wanting me to do a "trial day"? Of course not. But I have to go on what I have to go on. Just like it's not fair for an employer to hire me using a cover letter, a resume, and a couple of hour-long interviews. So if a company asks me to work for free for a day, should I draw the conclusion that they're really wanting to evaluate me well or that they're cheapskates who won't pay people for doing work? Just like you'd probably rather turn away a superstar than hire a dud, I'd rather turn down a kickass company than work for a crappy one. So I'm probably going to go with the latter. Don't get me wrong, money isn't what I'm in this for either. But that doesn't mean I should let people take advantage of me.
        sorbits 17y ago
        Presumably we have different views of what was originally meant with “come in to work with you for a day”, seeing as this has now turned into “work for free for a day” ;) Of course the intent was not to just get someone in to work for free, but more like when you take a first meeting with a new accountant or similar, you may ask him lots of questions related to your situation, and he will answer you based on his knowledge and experience. Most will not charge for the first meeting, presumably under the assumption that providing the client with useful information only increase the chance of having the client pay for future services. Similarly if you come work with me for a day, and I am impressed with your abilities, you can be rather sure I will hire you. If I am not impressed by your abilities, I am almost certain that you will have learned something from the experience (either about your own skills or the tech. we work with), so for the client I would say this is win/win.
      - barrkel 17y ago
        Maybe it's something that happens as you get older. The risk / reward trade-offs change. Taking a lower salary in return for a chance of big rewards starts looking less appealing than selling your accumulated skills and experience for the market rate. The breadth of skills and experience are themselves what will help select for interesting work; and if the new place doesn't work out, no big deal, it's easy to move on to somewhere else.
  - j_baker 17y ago
    "You think you will provide value which exceed the knowledge you might gain from learning about their systems and working/talking with their other employees, etc.?" That's not the point. I program for money. Therefore, me writing code for someone else is a business transaction. If I want to get experience without compensation, I'll contribute to an open-source project. But I'm not donating my time to a for-profit organization unless they donate money to me.
    - sorbits 17y ago
      The disconnect probably stems from types of job. You say you can get the same experience from contributing to open source, so it sounds like the job you have in mind is pretty much just a consultant gig, i.e. “here is your assignment, write the code” — that is not exactly the type of job I had in mind when involving giving a day of my time to find out if the job is a good match (for both parties).
- gfodor 17y ago
  I don't know about you, but in my experience it takes a pretty long time for new hires to produce anything of much value. If you're going in for a "trial day" at a place full of engineering neophytes who will look to you as a God for 8 hours, then you didn't do a good job of screening that company out as a potential place for you to work. (This is assuming "trial day" happens after an initial pass of the usual phone screens and whiteboard coding sessions.)
- eladgil 17y ago
  Thanks for the comments! In our case we would explicitely tell the people who interviewed that we would throw away all their code at the end of the day. It was pretty unlikely anything they did would actually be valuable to us in such a short period, and giving the candidate something mission critical to work on was a no go. In 1 case, we did have someone come in for a week (on the UX side) and we paid the person for their week of work. She actually was the one who suggested a full week with us, so she could really get to know the team and see if it was a fit (it wasn't, so it is good we tried it out) It is not unusual to end up spending 5-8 or more hours interviewing with a company - you would not ask to get paid to come interview, and the code exercise was another form of interview. Finally, this was a great opportunity for the candidate to get to know us as well - how did we collaborate on stuff? What process did we use? What was the team environment? This allowed a candidate to come in with "eyes wide open" (well, more open) regarding our workplace....
indiejade 17y ago
I'm going to go out on a limb here and disagree. What most startups need is not another engineer. What most startups need is a business person who understands engineering. We can quantify value. After attending the Hacker Fair 0 (Mtn View) . . . flying out there especially for it, having my demos ready and talking to way too many "recruiter" types who understand nothing about code, this really rang true. Technically-oriented business people are not recruiters any more than engineers are recruiters. Recruiters are people who read articles like this (parent) and manipulate people to work, solving a company's problems for free. They're usually the last ones a company must resort to to find talent. I've yet to find a company intelligent enough to hire me.
- j_baker 17y ago
  "I've yet to find a company intelligent enough to hire me." Not to be rude, but do you think this attitude might have something to do with it? I'm asking this because sometimes us geeks really don't know when we come off as condescending. Bear in mind that I say this as someone who has put my foot in my mouth and said more stupid things than I would admit to publicly.
  - krakensden 17y ago
    I don't think he's being particularly condescending. I know I'm not very bright, but I've walked away from recruiters simply because they were clueless and condescending. You can pitch me to work for peanuts, but if you're a slimeball, it's probably not going to work.
    - j_baker 17y ago
      He could be absolutely right, but whether or not he's right, statements like that are likely to be interpreted as being about attitude than circumstance.
  - indiejade 17y ago
    do you think this attitude might have something to do with it? No. I say this as a person who has been homeless because nobody would hire her. I'm not the most genius on the planet, but I'm also not an idiot. I've dealt with far too many people who, when bragging about being an "engineer", fail to understand the value of having somebody on the team who knows and talks business.
trunnell 17y ago
Not religious about technology (or anything really). This is useful at any size company, but at a startup you really don't want to waste time debating the merits of Python versus Java. The take-away should be that start-ups prioritize completeness over correctness. I think everyone agrees with that. Getting a feature out the door is more important than whether that feature was built in Python or Java. The question is, how do you get tons of features out the door at a sustainable rate? I think the answer lies in finding passionate people-- hackers who some people might call "religious about technology." The real traits needed in your first hires are all related to aligning peoples' passions: 1. Hire people who passionately believe in the product. Make sure they are well-aligned with the founder's vision. This reduces the chance of needing to argue about completeness vs correctness. 2. Hire a group of hackers who share the same vector of programming language and programming culture. For hacker-entrepreneurs, this is easy: hire hackers who share your values in technology choices. This reduces the chance of arguing over the definition of correctness.
ChillyWater 17y ago
Is it just me or does the misuse of the label "Engineer" bother anybody else? Do people who work in software startups generally take Physics, Chemistry, Calc 1-4, Diff Eq, Statics, Dynamics and so on while at University? I was a little squeamish calling myself an engineer since I never took the certification exam to become a Professional Engineer after graduating with a BS in Aerospace Engineering...
- philwelch 17y ago
  The term "software engineer" has always been problematic to me for this reason, and a lot of real engineers agree, but among software people it's just become accepted. Whether you keep on arguing about it it mostly a matter of your own stubbornness. I'm stubborn enough about it to distinguish "software engineers" from real engineers, but I'm not stubborn enough to turn down a job just because the job title contains the term "software engineer".
- mechanical_fish 17y ago
  Do people who work in software startups generally take Physics, Chemistry, Calc 1-4, Diff Eq, Statics, Dynamics and so on while at University? As a Ph.D. in EE, who did indeed take all of these things before becoming a software engineer [1], I feel eminently qualified to say: Engineering is a thing you do. It is not the name of a course, a piece of paper, or a certification exam. Don't let the maturity and professionalization of other forms of engineering blind you to the real meaning of the word. I believe there was a time, in the 18th and 19th centuries, when there were significant numbers of engineers who were "practical men" and didn't go to college. They were engineers, and so are we. An engineer is someone who designs and builds machines that do work. [2] And software engineers design and build machines -- some of the most complex machines ever built by conscious mind. We count. --- [1] I highly recommend studying all of these things, by the way. They are not just useful subjects, but very beautiful ones. Don't neglect biology, either. [2] People who build machines that look pretty are artists. People who understand why the computing machines work are computer scientists. Nothing stops one from being all of these things at the same time -- indeed, many people, including myself, think that it helps a lot -- but neither art nor science are synonymous with engineering.
joelhaus 17y ago
Good points in the article, but my favorite advice on this topic comes from here: The Interview Question You Should Always Ask ( http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2009/01/the_interview_question_you_sho.html http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2009/01/the_interview_question_you_s... ). In short, here's the article's main argument: After you have narrowed the pool of applicants down to those with the skills, experience, and knowledge to do the job, ask each candidate one question: What do you do in your spare time? Would this conflict with point #7 (Do "just enough"), or can a passionate candidate be taught to accept less than perfect results? Regardless, I have trouble seeing how you can accurately measure a persons ability to accept "just enough" without input from a trusted third-party.

35 points by eladgil 17y ago

"Have the candidate come in to work with you for a day. " I'd only agree to this if I got paid for it. Interviewing is one thing, but actively contributing to a company's codebase is another. I don't think it's asking too much to get paid for what I do. Plus, it would be difficult for me to shake the impression that such a company is cheap and is trying to get free labor. If they're not going to pay me a day's pay, how can I trust them to pay me a yearly salary or provide me the tools I need? How likely are they to be in business a year from now?

sorbits 17y ago
“actively contributing to a company’s codebase” You think you will provide value which exceed the knowledge you might gain from learning about their systems and working/talking with their other employees, etc.? It is a great chance to get to work with new people if the domain is exciting. I would welcome such opportunity w/o demanding money for my “services” which probably consists of asking a lot of questions :)
- barrkel 17y ago
  Such "opportunities" to donate work for free quickly get old.
  - sorbits 17y ago
    If I were seeking a job, the primary motivator would be having peers/assignments from which I can learn, I will gladly invest a day of my time to ensure the place I am going to spend the next many months/years of my life, is actually an interesting place — even if the other party might (also) get something out of it. Though if I know in advance that the “trial day” will consist of me “donating work for free” then I doubt it is a place for me. This might sound like a cliché, but money is the last thing on my mind when selecting a job or employee (I am presently an employer), and I am somewhat surprised by the point assignments given to the parent and grand parent comments.
    - j_baker 17y ago
      "Though if I know in advance that the “trial day” will consist of me “donating work for free” then I doubt it is a place for me." It sounds like you and I actually agree for the most part. Both the hirer and the hiree have the same problem: hiring is almost like extracting War & Peace from a newspaper. Is it necessarily fair for me to turn somebody down for wanting me to do a "trial day"? Of course not. But I have to go on what I have to go on. Just like it's not fair for an employer to hire me using a cover letter, a resume, and a couple of hour-long interviews. So if a company asks me to work for free for a day, should I draw the conclusion that they're really wanting to evaluate me well or that they're cheapskates who won't pay people for doing work? Just like you'd probably rather turn away a superstar than hire a dud, I'd rather turn down a kickass company than work for a crappy one. So I'm probably going to go with the latter. Don't get me wrong, money isn't what I'm in this for either. But that doesn't mean I should let people take advantage of me.
      - sorbits 17y ago
        Presumably we have different views of what was originally meant with “come in to work with you for a day”, seeing as this has now turned into “work for free for a day” ;) Of course the intent was not to just get someone in to work for free, but more like when you take a first meeting with a new accountant or similar, you may ask him lots of questions related to your situation, and he will answer you based on his knowledge and experience. Most will not charge for the first meeting, presumably under the assumption that providing the client with useful information only increase the chance of having the client pay for future services. Similarly if you come work with me for a day, and I am impressed with your abilities, you can be rather sure I will hire you. If I am not impressed by your abilities, I am almost certain that you will have learned something from the experience (either about your own skills or the tech. we work with), so for the client I would say this is win/win.
    - barrkel 17y ago
      Maybe it's something that happens as you get older. The risk / reward trade-offs change. Taking a lower salary in return for a chance of big rewards starts looking less appealing than selling your accumulated skills and experience for the market rate. The breadth of skills and experience are themselves what will help select for interesting work; and if the new place doesn't work out, no big deal, it's easy to move on to somewhere else.
- j_baker 17y ago
  "You think you will provide value which exceed the knowledge you might gain from learning about their systems and working/talking with their other employees, etc.?" That's not the point. I program for money. Therefore, me writing code for someone else is a business transaction. If I want to get experience without compensation, I'll contribute to an open-source project. But I'm not donating my time to a for-profit organization unless they donate money to me.
  - sorbits 17y ago
    The disconnect probably stems from types of job. You say you can get the same experience from contributing to open source, so it sounds like the job you have in mind is pretty much just a consultant gig, i.e. “here is your assignment, write the code” — that is not exactly the type of job I had in mind when involving giving a day of my time to find out if the job is a good match (for both parties).
gfodor 17y ago
I don't know about you, but in my experience it takes a pretty long time for new hires to produce anything of much value. If you're going in for a "trial day" at a place full of engineering neophytes who will look to you as a God for 8 hours, then you didn't do a good job of screening that company out as a potential place for you to work. (This is assuming "trial day" happens after an initial pass of the usual phone screens and whiteboard coding sessions.)
eladgil 17y ago
Thanks for the comments! In our case we would explicitely tell the people who interviewed that we would throw away all their code at the end of the day. It was pretty unlikely anything they did would actually be valuable to us in such a short period, and giving the candidate something mission critical to work on was a no go. In 1 case, we did have someone come in for a week (on the UX side) and we paid the person for their week of work. She actually was the one who suggested a full week with us, so she could really get to know the team and see if it was a fit (it wasn't, so it is good we tried it out) It is not unusual to end up spending 5-8 or more hours interviewing with a company - you would not ask to get paid to come interview, and the code exercise was another form of interview. Finally, this was a great opportunity for the candidate to get to know us as well - how did we collaborate on stuff? What process did we use? What was the team environment? This allowed a candidate to come in with "eyes wide open" (well, more open) regarding our workplace....

indiejade 17y ago

I'm going to go out on a limb here and disagree. What most startups need is not another engineer. What most startups need is a business person who understands engineering. We can quantify value. After attending the Hacker Fair 0 (Mtn View) . . . flying out there especially for it, having my demos ready and talking to way too many "recruiter" types who understand nothing about code, this really rang true. Technically-oriented business people are not recruiters any more than engineers are recruiters. Recruiters are people who read articles like this (parent) and manipulate people to work, solving a company's problems for free. They're usually the last ones a company must resort to to find talent. I've yet to find a company intelligent enough to hire me.

j_baker 17y ago
"I've yet to find a company intelligent enough to hire me." Not to be rude, but do you think this attitude might have something to do with it? I'm asking this because sometimes us geeks really don't know when we come off as condescending. Bear in mind that I say this as someone who has put my foot in my mouth and said more stupid things than I would admit to publicly.
- krakensden 17y ago
  I don't think he's being particularly condescending. I know I'm not very bright, but I've walked away from recruiters simply because they were clueless and condescending. You can pitch me to work for peanuts, but if you're a slimeball, it's probably not going to work.
  - j_baker 17y ago
    He could be absolutely right, but whether or not he's right, statements like that are likely to be interpreted as being about attitude than circumstance.
- indiejade 17y ago
  do you think this attitude might have something to do with it? No. I say this as a person who has been homeless because nobody would hire her. I'm not the most genius on the planet, but I'm also not an idiot. I've dealt with far too many people who, when bragging about being an "engineer", fail to understand the value of having somebody on the team who knows and talks business.

trunnell 17y ago

Not religious about technology (or anything really). This is useful at any size company, but at a startup you really don't want to waste time debating the merits of Python versus Java. The take-away should be that start-ups prioritize completeness over correctness. I think everyone agrees with that. Getting a feature out the door is more important than whether that feature was built in Python or Java. The question is, how do you get tons of features out the door at a sustainable rate? I think the answer lies in finding passionate people-- hackers who some people might call "religious about technology." The real traits needed in your first hires are all related to aligning peoples' passions: 1. Hire people who passionately believe in the product. Make sure they are well-aligned with the founder's vision. This reduces the chance of needing to argue about completeness vs correctness. 2. Hire a group of hackers who share the same vector of programming language and programming culture. For hacker-entrepreneurs, this is easy: hire hackers who share your values in technology choices. This reduces the chance of arguing over the definition of correctness.

ChillyWater 17y ago

Is it just me or does the misuse of the label "Engineer" bother anybody else? Do people who work in software startups generally take Physics, Chemistry, Calc 1-4, Diff Eq, Statics, Dynamics and so on while at University? I was a little squeamish calling myself an engineer since I never took the certification exam to become a Professional Engineer after graduating with a BS in Aerospace Engineering...

philwelch 17y ago
The term "software engineer" has always been problematic to me for this reason, and a lot of real engineers agree, but among software people it's just become accepted. Whether you keep on arguing about it it mostly a matter of your own stubbornness. I'm stubborn enough about it to distinguish "software engineers" from real engineers, but I'm not stubborn enough to turn down a job just because the job title contains the term "software engineer".
mechanical_fish 17y ago
Do people who work in software startups generally take Physics, Chemistry, Calc 1-4, Diff Eq, Statics, Dynamics and so on while at University? As a Ph.D. in EE, who did indeed take all of these things before becoming a software engineer [1], I feel eminently qualified to say: Engineering is a thing you do. It is not the name of a course, a piece of paper, or a certification exam. Don't let the maturity and professionalization of other forms of engineering blind you to the real meaning of the word. I believe there was a time, in the 18th and 19th centuries, when there were significant numbers of engineers who were "practical men" and didn't go to college. They were engineers, and so are we. An engineer is someone who designs and builds machines that do work. [2] And software engineers design and build machines -- some of the most complex machines ever built by conscious mind. We count. --- [1] I highly recommend studying all of these things, by the way. They are not just useful subjects, but very beautiful ones. Don't neglect biology, either. [2] People who build machines that look pretty are artists. People who understand why the computing machines work are computer scientists. Nothing stops one from being all of these things at the same time -- indeed, many people, including myself, think that it helps a lot -- but neither art nor science are synonymous with engineering.

joelhaus 17y ago

Good points in the article, but my favorite advice on this topic comes from here: The Interview Question You Should Always Ask ( http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2009/01/the_interview_question_you_sho.html http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2009/01/the_interview_question_you_s... ). In short, here's the article's main argument: After you have narrowed the pool of applicants down to those with the skills, experience, and knowledge to do the job, ask each candidate one question: What do you do in your spare time? Would this conflict with point #7 (Do "just enough"), or can a passionate candidate be taught to accept less than perfect results? Regardless, I have trouble seeing how you can accurately measure a persons ability to accept "just enough" without input from a trusted third-party.