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Ask HN: How Do You Hire?
I'm a new founder. Like really new. Dunno if you could call me a founder. anyway, I was thinking of hiring a couple interns. But how do you actually do it? Good thing is that I'm a senior at my uni, so its pretty easy to broadcast it to fellow students. But its pretty hard to actually evaluate whether they can infact build. It makes the job a whole lot worse when you(me) aren't a very good programmer. Sure, I can code. Built a few projects in the my first couple years. But all of my recent projects were sorta vibe coded. I understand what I'm building but that's obviously not the metric. Simply put, I need to hire someone far more skilled than myself. I am confident that I can convey the task without any ambiguity, and can clarify whatever might come up. Past experience, leetcode ratings, even side projects are proxies in some sense to whether they can understand and finish the task. The fact that I never actually took an engineering interview makes it worse, I don't know how its done.
TL;DR: How to interview for an engineering role when you need them to be more competent than you.
Relevant context: Its a Applied AI/Agent startup(Yes, I know)
- akerl_ 1y agoDo you mean interns? Or do you mean early employees? Or do you mean co-founders? Also, what are you bringing to the table for this company?
- lazaruslong 1y agoInterns for now, I would assume the basic principles would extend to any other technical hire. As far as what I bring to the table. I can tell them what to build, right down to the implementation details. Which external services/APIs should be used where, which frameworks might be needed where. I wanna say I can give the "architecture", but not in the rigourous sense ig. Its not like I can't write code, its that I haven't done it nearly as much as I would like to. So its gonna take me much longer. Also, it might be useful to know that I'm the sole founder, and currently sole employee. So I also do the ideation, feasilibity checks for the idea, some market research etc.
- akerl_ 1y agoThis honestly sounds like a nightmare. A couple things: 1. "Do the ideation" is baloney. It sounds like you had an idea and decided how you wanted it built and then realized you couldn't do it, which is exactly why ideas are so cheap. 2. If you're bringing folks on as the initial engineers at your startup, they are not interns, and the only world where you're calling them interns is if you're trying to extract cheap labor from them because they don't know any better. 3. As an engineer, having somebody hire me who can tell me what to build, right down to the implementation detials and what APIs and frameworks to use sounds absolutely bonkers. You're basically describing micromanagement.
- lazaruslong 1y agoOkay, a couple things: 1) ideation is baloney. But you do need to have ideas. I dont particularly care how it’s built. I did try building it on my own, i just have other things to do. So I want someone more efficient to take it off my plate. 2) That would be true if they committed full time. I’d love it if they do. But until then, they are interns. As far as pay goes, i wouldnt pay any less per hour. Actually, i dont pay any less per hour considering I already have an “intern”. I just need to get one more to work with him. 3) I was only trying to tell what I can bring to the table. I guess a better way of saying it is that I would be someone who can understand their plan/strategy/implementation rather than someone who just has the user experience in mind. I rather not micromanage either.