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That's very well written, however there's a better way to put it: when hiring, neither side should be trying too hard to sell themselves. A candidate telling a

by strlen 17y ago

That's very well written, however there's a better way to put it: when hiring, neither side should be trying too hard to sell themselves. A candidate telling a company "I am a rockstar ninja" is a candidate selling themselves too hard. A company talking about "hiring the top C/C++/Java hackers, from a top-ten CS program" to create CRUD screens in PHP is selling themselves too hard as well. If you want top talent, give them top challenges. You can find plenty of people who are passionate about web development who would be interested in writing PHP for you. May be they can't implement a red-black tree on the white board (yes, I have literally heard of a PHP/Perl web developer being asked to do that), but they may have a great deal more knowledge when it comes to UI/UX, requirements gathering or people/project management. I do think there is room for "top talent" in a start-up, but the key thing is that they will almost certainly be doing work that is "below them" at one point or another. As pg pointed out, YC presently has a tenured MIT professor as their Systems Administrator. There's also a corollary to that: if you're coming straight out of college and are looking for serious technical career growth, you may want to hold-off joining an early stage start-up unless they're doing something truly uniquely challenging (e.g. Netscape in the early 90s, Google in 1998 or -- right now -- Directed Edge or the YC start-up making an alternative storage engine for MySQL). It's also true that seemingly "simple" sites such as various social networks, e-commerce and media sites (Facebook/Ning/LinkedIn, Digg, Twitter) do grow to present many fascinating scalability and algorithmic challenges, these do not occur until the stage where these companies are no longer early-stage start-ups (particularly now, when powerful web frameworks abstract away any systems programming). (EDIT: some start-ups do have many scaling and algorithmic challenges, but usually not in the early stages)

mechanical_fish 17y ago
many fascinating scalability and algorithmic challenges... do not occur until the stage where these companies are no longer start-ups I agree with your point that you shouldn't think about scaling too soon, but you're overstating the case. Twitter is still a startup. And they emphatically did have to worry about algorithms and scaling while they were still a startup.
- strlen 17y ago
  Good point, corrected my post. My point isn't "don't worry about scaling" (in fact, large scale distributed computing is pretty much my own area of expertise/interest). My point is that there's a lot of glory stories of grand technological challenges, but they do not occur at your typical early stage start-up. If you want to solve these kind of problems, you're best off joining a company that's experience them (and not joining an early stage start-up and wishing they would: been there, done that).

by strlen 17y ago

mechanical_fish 17y ago

many fascinating scalability and algorithmic challenges... do not occur until the stage where these companies are no longer start-ups I agree with your point that you shouldn't think about scaling too soon, but you're overstating the case. Twitter is still a startup. And they emphatically did have to worry about algorithms and scaling while they were still a startup.

strlen 17y ago
Good point, corrected my post. My point isn't "don't worry about scaling" (in fact, large scale distributed computing is pretty much my own area of expertise/interest). My point is that there's a lot of glory stories of grand technological challenges, but they do not occur at your typical early stage start-up. If you want to solve these kind of problems, you're best off joining a company that's experience them (and not joining an early stage start-up and wishing they would: been there, done that).