Traits Needed In Your First 5 Engineering Startup Hires

http://blog.eladgil.com/2010/02/hiring-first-5-engineers-what-sort-of.html

by eladgil • 16 years ago

35 40 16 years ago

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j_baker5• 16 years 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?

sorbits4• 16 years 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 :)

barrkel2• 16 years ago

Such "opportunities" to donate work for free quickly get old.

j_baker5• 16 years 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.

gfodor• 16 years 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• 16 years 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....

indiejade3• 16 years 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_baker5• 16 years 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• 16 years 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.

indiejade3• 16 years 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.

dannyr2• 16 years ago

"What most startups need is not another engineer. What most startups need is a business person who understands engineering. We can quantify value."

Can a business person who understands engineering build the site? Nope.

You're basically hiring a business person who would hire engineers. I believe the engineers in a company are good enough to hire engineers.

indiejade3• 16 years ago

This line of thinking is failure waiting to happen.

Sooner or later, a team of engineers needs to have the value of its time-consuming product quantified. If you hire somebody who is on your side, then the variable is certain to go up, and a business person will end up making everybody on the engineering team more money by adding a quantifiable value to the efforts of the collective. Business people are engineers' advocates. Failing to hire a business person means product will almost certainly get "ripped off" or valued less than its market value, at the detriment of every body on the team.

anamax• 16 years ago

> We can quantify value.

That's not enough - you have to be able to produce value.

trunnell• 16 years 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• 16 years 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• 16 years 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• 16 years 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.

Gunnar• 16 years ago

I like your second point. One of my older engineering professors (PhD in '64) made an observation that I found particularly astute:

"Scientists discover what is, engineers create what never was. Think always about how things can be improved, or how new things can be created."

asmithmd1• 16 years ago

"Engineering is a thing you do. It is not the name of a course, a piece of paper, or a certification exam."

Actually it is a piece of paper. In every state in the United States you have licensed by the state to call yourself and engineer and sell engineering services. The same as doctors, nurses, lawyers, barbers, and whatever other professions states deem required to have licenses.

jedberg2• 16 years ago

Out of curiosity, what is your definition of a "real" engineer.

Or to put it another way, why isn't someone who writes software worthy of the title "Engineer"?

> Do people who work in software startups generally take Physics, Chemistry, Calc 1-4, Diff Eq, Statics, Dynamics and so on while at University?

That is kind of a broad question. But I can tell you that at Berkeley, everyone in the School of Engineering takes those classes, whether you are going to be a materials engineer or a software engineer.

Edit: I'll throw this out here too:

Definition of Engineering: The application of scientific and mathematical principles to practical ends such as the design, manufacture, and operation of efficient and economical structures, machines, processes, and systems.

I would posit that someone writing software uses scientific (debugging) and mathematical (algorithms) principles to practical ends.

Lazlo_Nibble2• 16 years ago

In many engineering disciplines you're legally forbidden from self-applying the title of "engineer" -- you have to be licensed and take formal legal responsibility for the quality of your work. That level of discipline and rigor is what most people are referring to when they distinguish between "software engineers" and "real" engineers.

bugs• 16 years ago

I am also curious as to whether software engineers are exposed to as much ethics and consequences of their actions as the other engineering disciplines (ME,EE,CE).

joelhaus• 16 years 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_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.

Traits Needed In Your First 5 Engineering Startup Hires

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