4 ms·

What makes one a good programmer for a startup? Wouldn't it make sense to have them as experienced as possible (i.e. worked at xyz)?

by s1k3s 7y ago

cosmodisk 7y ago
If one has business sense. Understands that projects can't run forever and they have to be either completed or killed by a certain date.Has a concept of cashflow. Isn't arrogant with ' the customer should know better' or 'Why would anyone do that?'. Knows the balance between 'this needs to be improved long term' and 'we need sales today' and how to keep both running. Doesn't get involved in idiotic keyboard wars about spaces vs tabs,etc.
- s1k3s 7y ago
  Agree, didn't think of a lot of the points you make. However from my experience, "this needs to be improved long term" will stay exactly as is, forever, in favor of business requirements and it will be improved only when the business absolutely demands it to be.
  - Benjammer 7y ago
    "this needs to be improved long term" isn't really something you can put on a quarterly roadmap though. I think a good startup engineer knows how to keep track of these things themselves, and knows when and how hard to push on project leaders to get something done about it. Imo, most of the "UGH why doesn't the business side care about this!?" is really a lot of engineers failing to properly communicate in business-speak with the rest of the company. If we can barely explain the bounds of what "technical debt" means and how we handle it to ourselves within our domain in software, how can we possibly expect people involved with business requirements and money numbers to ever meaningfully understand this concept?
ratww 7y ago
I'd argue that not all experience is equal. Sometimes developers with deep big-company experience have a skillset and habits that is great for big-company but terrible for a startup environment. The opposite is also true. Plus all the things @cosmodisk said on the sibling comment.
streetcat1 7y ago
No. It depends on where their experience lies and the balance of their skills. For a startup, you want wide and somewhat shallow experience. Since everything is an experiment, you want to crank out features and see what sticks. I.e. you want a programmer that can do some UI / some app logic / some data science / some database / some infra/ops, (Not unlike a special forces person). If you come from a big company, most roles are very specific / very deep - for example, a person works for 2 years on a file system kernel.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Except for UI - which I avoid like the plague - this describes me. UI is the easiest thing to outsource or get temporary contract labor or a boot camp grad to design to spec.
  - streetcat1 7y ago
    The problem with outsourcing in the early stages (MVP), is the speed of delivery. If you outsource it to a temp contract you are introducing a weak link in your delivery pipeline. In addition, for your customers, the UI IS the product. Especially for the CxO level. So most of the "go/no go" decisions will be done based on the quality of the demo UI.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      I’ve never worked at an early stage startup. For the last decade, I have been hired at four companies after they had found product/market fit, they “moved fast and broke things” and saw their velocity slow to a crawl because what got them here won’t get them there. (I never fault a company for having a horrible architecture if it got them off the ground, they got funding and survived to get to the point they are (see Twitter). They needed to hire people to mentor and to help them implement better processes but at the same time being a hands on developer. But, I have seen plenty of times where the company had an in house designer to design mockups of the UI and hire either a contractor that worked on site or a junior boot camp grad that knew $frontend_framework_of_the_week to save the heavy lifting for the senior devs/FTEs. On one hand it seems like competent front end developers who can do “good enough” front end development and design are a dime a dozen and you can pay them peanuts. On the other hand, while I know HTML/CSS well enough to do some ugly internal site and I know JS well, I could never go from empty git repo to a well designed single page app on the front end. There is some type of mental barrier when it comes to me being a modern front end developer. But if you give me a budget, time, and admin credentials to an AWS account, I can go from empty repo, no infrastructure to a fully baked backend solution with a full network infrastructure, database, cache, CI/CD solution easily (been there done that).
red_admiral 7y ago
Spolsky's "smart and gets things done" still sounds like wise advice to me.
bdcravens 7y ago
In a startup you need to wear many hats. At a large company you may have had a specific role ("front-end developer", "database administrator", etc). In a startup you don't have the luxury of not-my-jobism. Experience is of course great, so long as you have breadth.

What makes one a good programmer for a startup? Wouldn't it make sense to have them as experienced as possible (i.e. worked at xyz)?

by s1k3s 7y ago

What makes one a good programmer for a startup? Wouldn't it make sense to have them as experienced as possible (i.e. worked at xyz)?

cosmodisk 7y ago

If one has business sense. Understands that projects can't run forever and they have to be either completed or killed by a certain date.Has a concept of cashflow. Isn't arrogant with ' the customer should know better' or 'Why would anyone do that?'. Knows the balance between 'this needs to be improved long term' and 'we need sales today' and how to keep both running. Doesn't get involved in idiotic keyboard wars about spaces vs tabs,etc.

s1k3s 7y ago
Agree, didn't think of a lot of the points you make. However from my experience, "this needs to be improved long term" will stay exactly as is, forever, in favor of business requirements and it will be improved only when the business absolutely demands it to be.
- Benjammer 7y ago
  "this needs to be improved long term" isn't really something you can put on a quarterly roadmap though. I think a good startup engineer knows how to keep track of these things themselves, and knows when and how hard to push on project leaders to get something done about it. Imo, most of the "UGH why doesn't the business side care about this!?" is really a lot of engineers failing to properly communicate in business-speak with the rest of the company. If we can barely explain the bounds of what "technical debt" means and how we handle it to ourselves within our domain in software, how can we possibly expect people involved with business requirements and money numbers to ever meaningfully understand this concept?

ratww 7y ago

I'd argue that not all experience is equal. Sometimes developers with deep big-company experience have a skillset and habits that is great for big-company but terrible for a startup environment. The opposite is also true. Plus all the things @cosmodisk said on the sibling comment.

streetcat1 7y ago

No. It depends on where their experience lies and the balance of their skills. For a startup, you want wide and somewhat shallow experience. Since everything is an experiment, you want to crank out features and see what sticks. I.e. you want a programmer that can do some UI / some app logic / some data science / some database / some infra/ops, (Not unlike a special forces person). If you come from a big company, most roles are very specific / very deep - for example, a person works for 2 years on a file system kernel.

scarface74 7y ago
Except for UI - which I avoid like the plague - this describes me. UI is the easiest thing to outsource or get temporary contract labor or a boot camp grad to design to spec.
- streetcat1 7y ago
  The problem with outsourcing in the early stages (MVP), is the speed of delivery. If you outsource it to a temp contract you are introducing a weak link in your delivery pipeline. In addition, for your customers, the UI IS the product. Especially for the CxO level. So most of the "go/no go" decisions will be done based on the quality of the demo UI.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    I’ve never worked at an early stage startup. For the last decade, I have been hired at four companies after they had found product/market fit, they “moved fast and broke things” and saw their velocity slow to a crawl because what got them here won’t get them there. (I never fault a company for having a horrible architecture if it got them off the ground, they got funding and survived to get to the point they are (see Twitter). They needed to hire people to mentor and to help them implement better processes but at the same time being a hands on developer. But, I have seen plenty of times where the company had an in house designer to design mockups of the UI and hire either a contractor that worked on site or a junior boot camp grad that knew $frontend_framework_of_the_week to save the heavy lifting for the senior devs/FTEs. On one hand it seems like competent front end developers who can do “good enough” front end development and design are a dime a dozen and you can pay them peanuts. On the other hand, while I know HTML/CSS well enough to do some ugly internal site and I know JS well, I could never go from empty git repo to a well designed single page app on the front end. There is some type of mental barrier when it comes to me being a modern front end developer. But if you give me a budget, time, and admin credentials to an AWS account, I can go from empty repo, no infrastructure to a fully baked backend solution with a full network infrastructure, database, cache, CI/CD solution easily (been there done that).

red_admiral 7y ago

Spolsky's "smart and gets things done" still sounds like wise advice to me.

bdcravens 7y ago

In a startup you need to wear many hats. At a large company you may have had a specific role ("front-end developer", "database administrator", etc). In a startup you don't have the luxury of not-my-jobism. Experience is of course great, so long as you have breadth.