4 ms·

The best companies hire relatively green engineers and develop them.

ebiester 1y ago
Not as their first 4 engineers. The fifth engineer can be a junior. Once you've built a base you can start expanding and hiring on potential.
- AlwaysRock 1y ago
  I dont know about that! In theory it sounds good. I know a company that hired a very good hands on cto who then hired 5 50k entry level engineers that was largely the extent of their team for 1-2 years. Then they started to hire more senior people. I'm sure the cto did a massive amount of training early on but this is a near billion dollar company in a fairly complicated industry. You dont HAVE to have 4 incredibly senior super engineers as your first hires. It might make coding easier early on, but its going to make hiring much much harder.
  - ebiester 1y ago
    I don't think you need "super engineers" either. They just should have made it through their first mistakes on someone else's money. If your founding team is not technical, it's important that one of them has seen the problems that will come up in your first 5 years. No matter what you do, you will make wrong decisions and need to fix things once you need to scale. That's the way of startups. However, you also need to prevent the high level footguns such as OWASP top 10 and exponential algorithms with minimal supervision.
propter_hoc 1y ago
This is the answer As a startup you don't have Google's money. You don't have Google's employer brand. You don't have Google's work environment. in fact as a (hopefully) fast-growing startup the only thing you really have to offer is growth. So make it clear how you are going to help the candidate grow their career and experience faster at your startup than at the established company, and offer the best you can do on comp and work environment. This doesn't mean fresh grads, but more like someone with a bit of experience who's ready to jump into a team lead or architectural lead role.
w10-1 1y ago
When JavaSoft spun out of Sun to build Java, they hired recent graduates, many out of CMU: Mark Reinhold, Josh Bloch, Anand Paliswamy (?), David Connelly, et al. The exception was the Swing team, who had done GUI frameworks before (though never in just one year). Their key virtue (imho): no politics. They hadn't learned to play the game, buy time, pad estimates, defend their technical choices, and so on ad infinitum. Instead they mostly tried to gain the respect of each other. Granted as the team grew into 2D and the 10K API's of Java 2, some political teams came on board. sigh. And it wasn't "companies" hiring and developing them. It was 1-2 senior managers with long histories who managed to extract JavaSoft from Sun to get some breathing room.

Not as their first 4 engineers. The fifth engineer can be a junior. Once you've built a base you can start expanding and hiring on potential.

AlwaysRock 1y ago
I dont know about that! In theory it sounds good. I know a company that hired a very good hands on cto who then hired 5 50k entry level engineers that was largely the extent of their team for 1-2 years. Then they started to hire more senior people. I'm sure the cto did a massive amount of training early on but this is a near billion dollar company in a fairly complicated industry. You dont HAVE to have 4 incredibly senior super engineers as your first hires. It might make coding easier early on, but its going to make hiring much much harder.
- ebiester 1y ago
  I don't think you need "super engineers" either. They just should have made it through their first mistakes on someone else's money. If your founding team is not technical, it's important that one of them has seen the problems that will come up in your first 5 years. No matter what you do, you will make wrong decisions and need to fix things once you need to scale. That's the way of startups. However, you also need to prevent the high level footguns such as OWASP top 10 and exponential algorithms with minimal supervision.

propter_hoc 1y ago

This is the answer As a startup you don't have Google's money. You don't have Google's employer brand. You don't have Google's work environment. in fact as a (hopefully) fast-growing startup the only thing you really have to offer is growth. So make it clear how you are going to help the candidate grow their career and experience faster at your startup than at the established company, and offer the best you can do on comp and work environment. This doesn't mean fresh grads, but more like someone with a bit of experience who's ready to jump into a team lead or architectural lead role.

w10-1 1y ago

When JavaSoft spun out of Sun to build Java, they hired recent graduates, many out of CMU: Mark Reinhold, Josh Bloch, Anand Paliswamy (?), David Connelly, et al. The exception was the Swing team, who had done GUI frameworks before (though never in just one year). Their key virtue (imho): no politics. They hadn't learned to play the game, buy time, pad estimates, defend their technical choices, and so on ad infinitum. Instead they mostly tried to gain the respect of each other. Granted as the team grew into 2D and the 10K API's of Java 2, some political teams came on board. sigh. And it wasn't "companies" hiring and developing them. It was 1-2 senior managers with long histories who managed to extract JavaSoft from Sun to get some breathing room.