How to Hire Your First Engineer

https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-hire-your-first-engineer/

by runesoerensen • 8 years ago

219 127 8 years ago

blog.ycombinator.com

elpakal2• 8 years ago

I remember hearing as a high schooler that The Italian Mob acquired great loyalty through only hiring people whose family they knew or had met before. Maybe a dumb metaphor, but the painpoints, lonely nights, long hours and competing offers you're gonna face with your Engineer #1 are going to require some deeply rooted trust.

We're lucky enough to live in a time where our skills are in great demand and compensation can be matched without blinking an eye - my advice to business minds hiring their first engineers is to get to know them, build trust and find the ones who are committed to building cool shit with you for the long haul. Don't just make it about comp and perks.

As I said at the start, hiring your first engineer is incredibly hard unless you’re lucky enough to have a friend you can convince to join

Ceredron• 8 years ago

"Comitted to building cool shit" is not a motivation that will persist through hard times.

elpakal2• 8 years ago

Maybe you didn't make it this far

< Don't just make it about comp and perks.

newnewpdro• 8 years ago

There's an argument to be made that you want someone incentivized by something rational like compensation.

If your critical employees joined the company for romantic and/or emotional reasons, it can be very difficult to retain them should they somehow become disillusioned.

You can far more easily acquire funding to increase compensation than you can make someone change their mind about how they feel about something the leadership has done or the direction the company is heading.

toomuchtodo• 8 years ago

I find it interesting how many startups try to remove all bias from the hiring process, make interviews as objective and metric based as possible, but in the end, personal connections (friendships even) are still most important for your first hires.

maxxxxx• 8 years ago

It makes sense to me. Either you validate someone through knowing them or, if you don't know the person, use interviews and other tests.

sbilstein• 8 years ago

There is so much risk in hiring an early employee, it's totally reasonable to try and only hire from a personal network for the first three.

Managing great employees can be challenging; managing someone you don't know is great can be 10 times more difficult.

kache_• 8 years ago

before you hire an engineer, make sure you have your onboarding streamlined

lmilcin4• 8 years ago

This is the worst advice. You don't want to spend resources on problems that are not yet even problems. Especially extremely early when you don't have any resources to burn.

One super power startups have is being frugal with money, why would you want to throw it away?

nosseo• 8 years ago

No engineer taking a role like this is going to expect an onboarding process. Many of them are specifically drawn by the idea they'll get to sit down and solve a problem on day 1.

snowwrestler• 8 years ago

What should the onboarding look like for the first engineer?

duggan• 8 years ago

Have you been in the position to hire many folks for startups?

Could you share a bit more about why, in your experience, this is something to prioritize with your first engineer?

mvpu• 8 years ago

Some traits I look for in engineer #1: a) should obsess about architecture and code organization (they will be laying a foundation so having a bit of OCD helps), b) should make good tradeoffs and optimize for speed (they will be building the wrong things initially), c) mature enough to understand that they will be writing and rewriting a lot (see (b)) and d) last but not least, should have a strong desire to do a startup (knowing all the risks)....

gregw134• 8 years ago

Don't you mean not optimize for speed, since they will be building the wrong things initially?

fredophile• 8 years ago

I think they meant optimize for speed of writing code not running it.

lmilcin4• 8 years ago

1. Find somebody that is very good and passionate at something.

2. Present your idea the best you can.

3. Only hire if he/she is interested in your idea.

4. Offer stake in your business so it is also his/her business.

scarface749• 8 years ago

Why would I be interested in your idea? More than likely you aren’t trying to feed starving children. I might pretend like I’m interested, but at the end of the day, it’s just a paycheck.

repsilat2• 8 years ago

it’s just a paycheck

This is probably part of why it's hard to find a good first engineering hire -- for better or worse, most engineers aren't a good fit for that stage of a company's growth.

lmilcin4• 8 years ago

Well, this is simple. You want somebody invested and passionate about the project.

Have you ever noticed, you can move mountains if you are genuinely interested in something? That it is difficult to focus and too easy to procrastinate if you don't want to do something or find something boring?

Corporations are good at solving large problems because they can throw funds and money at the problems. They can absorb the damage caused by people who are barely productive.

When you are startup you can't do that. But the advantage you have is that you are looking for one person at this point in time and you can be picky and wait until you find the one. Bad hire at this point in time can frequently spell disaster for your budding enterprise.

I don't want to say that it is totally impossible to find somebody who might not be interested about your idea but will still do good job. But it is unlikely and then remember, you are not only looking for your first engineer but also your first manager, possibly CTO, etc.

Look at stories of successful startups -- in most cases first hires seem to have been critical and mostly seem to be passionate people who then established themselves close to the top of new organization.

lordnacho• 8 years ago

Hiring is a difficult task that I'm currently in the middle of attempting, so Harj's article is something I recognize. I'm not after a first dev, but I am part of a team that is after a dozen or so devs and I've now been day 1 on three different ventures.

The problem is that the main piece of advice is correct but unuseful. Indeed, you should look at people you've worked with. In some sense they've all interviewed with you already, so you know what it's like to work with them, you know how good they are at communicating, and you know their limitations.

Unfortunately, most people haven't worked with enough people to have more than one or two likely candidates for whatever they're thinking of doing. Your homies are either not right for the role, unwilling to move from a position of comfort, or not willing to put your friendship on the line.

The same is also the reason why your company cannot grow via connections of employees past some point, the r < 1 on that series and it will converge on some low number.

Where my problem is a bit different to the article is that before you have any devs, you have a really big problem identifying good devs. Heck even hiring for devs outside your specialty is hard. If you can't do X, how are you going to find a good X? You will end up falling back on recommendations and reputation, and you'll pay up for a branded individual if one is around. Not in itself terrible, but every penny counts early in a startup.

I was talking to a shop who were after their first programmer a few months back, and they did the sensible sounding thing of bringing in a trusted friend from a FAANG to interview people. Main issue with that is that person is thinking about how a megacorp hires people. Mainly avoid guys who can't reverse a linked list, and stick the new guys into a process that already exists. But it's not quite the same things you care about as a day 1 startup.

Day 1 guys need energy. Sad to say it, but this probably tilts against people who have kids. In my first day 1 jobs, I didn't have kids, I could wake up at 6 and code to 11 at night. Or you do like my current firm, where I was also day 1, but let people work from home. Then you suddenly have a very big carrot for experienced hires. The guys in the previous paragraph did the same.

Day 1 guys also need a high degree of autonomy. When you've got nothing, as in not even a chat about what stack you're using, day 1 guy needs to put down those foundations. This is a lot harder than you think. Not only do you need to consider budget, you need to think about what a small team can do, you need to think about what imaginary future employees will want to work with, and you need a way to get from little team to big team where your hands aren't tied by your day 1 decisions. And you gotta balance current technical debt against future payments on that account.

You also need to be broadly read. You can be highly specialized, but you need to have some idea of what's going on in the software world in general. Chances are you will end up picking the most standard choice of everything that isn't your specialty, like Django for a web framework or SciKit for a bit of ML. But you need to have an idea about a huge variety of things to know what the landscape roughly looks like.

So how do you find a person like that? Well actually none of the methods other than "network" will actually check for these qualities. Most people are specialists with a label that enables them to move to other jobs with similar titles (Low Latency c++ dev), and recruiters are on the lookout for the label. Inbound and Outreach are also not going to tell you how broad someone is, because everyone writes stuff on their CV to look specialised, with a bit of breadth to catch a few interviews. Meetups, maybe, depends on how good you are at directing the conversation. A skill in itself.

philfreo• 8 years ago

I've been hired as Engineer #1 at two startups (both doing well). I wrote some thoughts recently about how I was recruited into that role:

https://twitter.com/philfreo/status/1012171080834969601

On the hiring side, I also incorporated some hard lessons learned about growing our Eng team from 2 to 14 here:

http://philfreo.com/blog/when-who-how-to-hire-an-engineering...

mark-r• 8 years ago

I've done the #1 employee thing too. The founder was someone I had worked for previously. He was technical enough that I didn't have to worry about growing the team from there, he handled it all.

orsenthil• 8 years ago

I see you mentioned something like. Make sure you’re still excited after 30 days (or fire fast).

That's a big NO-NO for me. 30 days is way too small for any company to make a decision on a hire. It just means your process for hiring is not good. We must start with firing people who were responsible for the that bad hire first.

alexpetralia• 8 years ago

Fantastic blog post on hiring. Thanks!

Moodles2• 8 years ago

I wonder what proportion of HN would have different careers if software engineering paid, say, as much as humanities while humanities paid like software engineering. It seems like everyone here (myself included) isn't really in it for the money, but who knows what would happen.

ravenstine• 8 years ago

I like software engineering and have always had a personal interest in it. In fact, I'd say that I'm more passionate about it than 90% of the programmers I've worked with and spoken to.

Having said that, software engineering as a profession is shitty in some respects. I don't think I would do it if it paid as little as the humanities. I'd continue doing it on my own time, but the drudgery of dealing with other people's bad code, corporate practices, clueless bosses, clients who undervalue and lowball you, etc. wouldn't be worth dealing with.

It's not so much that I wouldn't be able to make a living, because I think I'd be content living on relatively little(as I am currently experiencing), but life is just too short to deal with professional software engineering when I'd get so little out of it.

Alternatively, I'd just go into woodworking. Income becomes relative to the quality of work produced (I've never worked anywhere that actually cared about or rewarded quality code) and I could say or do whatever I want without someone else reaping most of the benefits and judging my actions by outdated 1950s office standards.

Swizec• 8 years ago

I love engineering. But you know what, when rent is $3000+ per month, there's only so far my rational mind will let me go.

I loved art and drawing too. But I wisely chose not to master in art when going to college.

Moodles2• 8 years ago

Yeah, same. I think I could have enjoyed going into history but the huge salary disparity certainly helps make the choice between two otherwise more or less equal paths.

Also, rent in some cities might not be as much if fewer people went into tech ;-)

jschwartzi• 8 years ago

I'm doing this because this is one of the few things I'm good at that people will pay me lots of money to do. If it paid less than being a teacher, I'd go become a teacher instead. It's not that I'm dispassionate about it, but I have to eat.

pnathan• 8 years ago

Well, the other option going into college was music. Although it's also quite likely I would have landed as a historian or linguist.

I would probably have continued programming in the evenings, but doing history as the day job. Today I program in the day, and often read history in the evenings.

Ultimately, I like paying rent/mortgage, soo.... yeah.

wolco2• 8 years ago

If we could go back to role where we worked on our own. Where we created our own programs from our ideas. We work on waterfall projects by day and hacked our own ganes at night. Never to be included in business meetings never to talk to the customer and never to have a standup meeting.

Where everyone loved something about technology programming/hardware/etc and continued day or night.

In many ways things would be better. This represents a time before everyone liked computers and most feared them. Salaries were not as high as today. The work was harder but more meaningful.

We can't go back. The future looks more like turning programmers into interchangable pieces that can be commodized. Defining all work into smaller pieces.

I think many of us would trade big salaries for jobs at places like bell labs.

scarface749• 8 years ago

That’s Silicon Valley thinking. Most software engineers are no more “passionate” than any other endeavor.

I go to work every day just for the money. I keep on top of tech trends for optionality.

opportune2• 8 years ago

Weird, I think it’s almost the opposite. I wouldn’t be in software if it didn’t at least allow for an upper-middle class lifestyle - I would probably have tried to either become a scientist, a brewer, or a banker. As a scientist I would maximize my mental interest and engagement in the work, as a brewer I would have the best lifestyle, and as a banker I would have the most money. Software right now is great because it does pretty well in all three categories, but if it paid just as well or a little more as being a scientist, I would have little reason to stick around in software.

Age is probably somewhat of a factor here since people who went into software before it was so highly paid likely didn’t have money as a huge motivator, compared to people who went into software more recently

astura• 8 years ago

I'm only in it for the money.

I'm good at my job and I enjoy it for the most part, but I'm only doing it because I get paid well.

ummonk4• 8 years ago

I was doing rocket science but switched to software engineering for the money. I certainly enjoy software engineering, and am not in it solely for the money, but had there been no difference in compensation, I would never have switched. I like having a chance at owning a decent home in the Bay Area (where I've grown up) some day.

fma4• 8 years ago

When I started college in 2001 I knew I was going to be an engineer but was undecided between computer, mechanical, aerospace and chemical. I loved tinkering. If I recall, at that time the salary for undergrads wasn't a huge difference where salary would have driven your decision.

I ended up in computer engineering because it came natural (and now, software engineering as that's where the jobs are). If humanities salary was swapped I'd be a history major while tinkering on the side :)

yacn• 8 years ago

well i think software engineers would likely be unionized if that were the case.

jazzychad• 8 years ago

These are good points for finding your first engineer, but here is a tip for helping close your dream hire: offer more equity.

Your first eng hire will shoulder nearly all of the technical burden soon after as the founders transition into more of the non-technical roles (sales, outreach, recruiting, fundraising, business strategy). The amount of blood, sweat, and tears poured in by the first eng hire is somewhat less than a founder, yes, but not the 30-50x typical equity ratio we see today.

brianwawok5• 8 years ago

Depends on pay, right? If you are offering employee #1 market pay, why would you give them 10% equity? That is potentially millions of dollars for not taking a risk.

I have been on both sides of this, and have thoughts. What do you think is fair for employee #1 making at or near market rate?

sidlls3• 8 years ago

Two tranches: one a number of shares at par value to make up the difference in pay, the other the same grant you'd give any employee. Really though either pay cash market rate or else give them a meaningful stake.

stemuk2• 8 years ago

Even if you pay your #1 employee at market rate he is taking huge risks and should be compensated accordingly. Working at an early stage company often comes with huge job insecurity, loss of medical benefits more mature companies might be able to offer (better insurance etc.) and a possible kink in your CV (3 years at Microsoft look much better than spending 3 years at an unsuccessful company that eventually shut down).

To sum it up, I would expect a #1 engineers equity to be at least half of a founders equity AND payed at near-market rate.

thatjsguy• 8 years ago

...why would you give them 10% equity?

Because they’re taking on a gigantic risk too?

zorpner2• 8 years ago

Depends on pay, right? If you are offering employee #1 market pay, why would you give them 10% equity?

Because this is how you get good people. If you want to offer them what they could get by working someplace else, they may as well work someplace else (likely without the hours, stress, or potential instability of a startup).

westoncb2• 8 years ago

If you are offering employee #1 market pay, why would you give them 10% equity?

So that they care about the company on a similar level to the founders, and feel a real sense of ownership, dedication, and responsibility.

I've been in a position several times now where at work I'll have a reputation as a very capable engineer, typically placed on or leading the most critical projects etc. —but, my employers still have no idea what my contribution could have been if I were made to feel like the company was partially my project too, and that there wasn't some massive (though never explicit) social divide between the founders and everyone else, the rest of us being mere tools for the founders' use (only one job I was at really gave that impression—the others were pretty good about creating an environment where everyone felt equal. But from speaking with many other prospects, it appears to be a typical attitude).

There are thresholds in perception of ownership which when crossed give access to new categories of behavior in the perceiver. Think about 1%, 5%, and 10% equity in terms of sharing an object among a corresponding number of people: how much do you feel that thing is yours when sharing it with 100 people? With 20 people? With 10 people?

For me, 10% is about where the line would be where I'd be willing to drop side projects etc. and seriously dedicate myself to the company. (And in my experience, this is not atypical: in the very early stage startup I was in, basically everyone was laying groundwork for their own startups on the side, or at least had other projects they were more interested in—but they'd make sad, fake displays of their dedication to the company to try and cover. At our largest there were still only ~7 people in the company.)

poof131• 8 years ago

The problem is market rate. You mention market pay and equity as two separate things. But market rate is really total comp: base, bonus, and equity. For a senior engineer in the valley this is hitting $300k+. Saying we are close to market on salary and ignoring the rest of a total compensation package is disingenuous but suits startups (and others). A package with a value of $1.2M over 4 years would take a significant chunk of equity from a seed stage startup, or about 10% of equity on a convertible note round at a 10M cap, right around what the parent suggested. It’s fair to say we can’t give that up, but it’s also fair to say you aren’t matching market rate.

throwaway57522• 8 years ago

I disagree with you on different grounds. Your points downthread about how it's not a risk are on the nose. No stigma for being part of a startup (the opposite) and even startup benefits are pretty great these days. This isn't ramen/buddies closet sort of work any more.

I'd say the reason you want a strong equity package is a question of alignment and incentive, though. Ideally this person is going to be a VP of Engineering for you someday if you scale up and on top of that needs to have architect + SRE + hacker + sysadmin skills. On top of that, you'll probably want them to make similar sacrifices that you (as the founder) are making to get the business off the ground. It shouldn't be founder equity, and maybe the standard 4 yr + cliff structure isn't right for it, but you probably want this person to have a substantial vested interest in the success of the company.

ummonk4• 8 years ago

Market comp for a talented experienced engineer is 250-450k. If you are paying that much, you can go ahead and skimp on equity.

dasil003• 8 years ago

Well what do you mean by market pay? Because savvy engineers playing the SV game will say 300-400k total comp they get from FANG is "market". However that's assuming A) you can jump through the hoops to get one of those positions and B) you can stomach the politics of whatever team you happen to land on.

Neither of those things are much of an indicator of a good #1 engineer hire—yeah you want an above average engineer, but you don't want someone who is dependent on world-class tooling, world-class colleagues, or is so focused on tech that they can't see the forest for the trees of the business landscape they are in.

You need a solid engineer who is a hustler, willing to dive deep into whatever area is necessary, but doesn't fetishize some aspect of technology or become obsessed with implementing something in-house because it's an interesting technical problem. Current hiring practices are largely cargo-culted off of successful tech giants who face very different problems from what the average startup does.

If you find someone who gets it and has the skills to back it up then they deserve to be brought in with both a real salary and real equity because at this stage every hire is still life and death for the company. The challenge is whether you can recognize this person.

angersock3• 8 years ago

5-20% depending on how much you're using their expertise.

If you offer tiny or no equity, they have no incentive to align for growth. Also, founders are usually way less useful than the people they hire.

mavelikara• 8 years ago

I understand your point, but I won't take market pay for being the first employee. If I wanted market pay, I will go with a well-established company.

I am assuming that you won't sell goods and services you produce at cost price. If that is case, you'd have worked as an employee of that buyer. Similarly, if I don't get a share of the value I produce, I won't join any startup as a early employee.

benatkin• 8 years ago

This isn't generally a good idea because you run the risk of giving equity to someone who doesn't care about it, which is foolish for the company for the same reason that it's foolish for the prospective employee to not try to get more equity.

yeukhon• 8 years ago

The best #1 engineer is someone who is willing and will want to help do some cold call as well. Offer not just more equity but better base pay. They deserve better base, real cash. Then we talking. If you offer me my current salary (not faang level), plus a very good equtity (2-5% stake?) then I will work 15 hours every day likr I do now anyway. I will pull in 18 if you want. As a workalochic, I am up for all night. I will do cold call and go out to reach new users as well. I will clean the office with you. You want your founding team to feel they own a stake.

danbrooks• 8 years ago

Nice article.

On TripleByte - they should make it clearer that the platform is only for the Bay Area and Software Engineering.

fermienrico• 8 years ago

I am being cynical but this article feels like a reason to promote/plug TripleByte complete with a $15,000 offer at the end.

suyash• 8 years ago

The article offered no new insights, it was more like an infomercial for the author’s company.

mmt• 8 years ago

Indeed, the title is startingly misleading, but it's par for the course.

It seems that "Engineer", in the context of hiring, for anything YC-sponsored, means programmer. Even "Work at a Startup" was (and likely still is), exclusively for software engineers.

This is despite the fact that YC actually accepts/funds companies that aren't pure software plays.

Fede_V• 8 years ago

An interesting exercise: assume the first engineering hire you want has to be at least the senior engineer bar at a top tech firm.

In order for the engineer's median compensation to match the median compensation he would make working at FANG, how much stock would you have to give them making reasonable assumption about valuations (ie, assume your start up will have a trajectory in the top 30% percentile, but not in the top 0.1%).

opportune2• 8 years ago

I think FANG is not the right group to look at when it comes to “top” tech firms unless you also mean other companies like FANG wrt how competitive they are, such as MS, unicorns, hedge funds, etc.

Depending on what you’re making you also might be doing yourself a disservice by only wanting to hire from “the best” - if you’re making a simple website or CRUD app as part of a larger business strategy such as online ordering, you don’t need to hire an expert in big data

k__• 8 years ago

I think with a good business side you can get away with mediocre first technical hires, which you will probably end up with.

dasmoth2• 8 years ago

How have we ended up with “engineer” as the only acceptable job title for people who build software? What happened to programmer? Developer? Or even (glances at title bar...) Hacker?

mful2• 8 years ago

Anyone else getting a little tired of the immediate reduction of any conversation around early-stage startup job opportunities to "comp vs FAANG"? As someone who spent the last 5 years in early stage startups, before recently accepting a FAANG offer, I'm starting to realize folks who only think about comp probably aren't good fits for startups. Here are a few quick reasons to take less comp at a super early stage startup:

- You will develop a wide breadth of skills you simply can't develop at FAANG, as you will be involved in product meetings, business strategy conversations, and will regularly eat lunch with the CEO. I imagine the reverse of this is true as well, in that there are skills developed at FAANG that are hard to develop as employee <50.

- You will get to fast-track your career progression, in that you will be in line for promotions much earlier than in large companies, as opportunities emerge.

- Companies (including FAANG) will look for folks with your skillset (my startup experience was a huge plus in my recent job search).

- You will work on hard problems, with passionate people; folks aren't punching the clock here. This is fun.

Also, for folks just thinking about comp, I'd like to gently point out that a 40 hour week on work you feel "meh" about is ~35% of your waking life. That's not to say you can't find exciting work at FAANG (I hope I have), but rather that there is more to a job than comp or career progression, and working with passionate folks on hard problems can be incredibly fulfilling.

Edit: formatting

austhrow743• 8 years ago

Its ~35% of your awake hours during work weeks. At FAANG comp rates there's no reason that has to be anywhere near ~35% of your life.

thrownaway1337• 8 years ago

But, as "First Engineer", you get maybe 1/25th or 1/50th the equity of a founder, and you might join 3 months after the company's "founding" pre-product / pre-product market fit. The company might pivot substantially 5 times before finding fit, or might not find fit at all, or it might take 10 years to see any benefit in the 1% of cases where the company does make it.

I'm not disagreeing with your comment, but if the reason you join is to work on hard problems with passionate people then there ought to be a strong reason why it makes sense to be engineer #1 and not yourself a founder.

arikrak• 8 years ago

For future career prospects, a stint at FAANGM is a safer bet than joining a small startup. Most startups fail and it may not easy to find another job right away. If you're at a big tech company, you'll have the credential to find a job more easily (and with their job stability you can generally choose to look for one while working there).

ryandrake4• 8 years ago

As someone who did a long string of failing small companies and finally settled in among the FAANGs, I respect your experience but disagree with everything you said.

Wide breadth of skills? If you’re hired as a code monkey you’re going to monkey code. Nobody ever asked me what I thought about the latest business partnership or synergy strategy. Just code.

Career progression? Another nope. With only a few people in the company, you can’t go up and you can’t build a team under you. Who are you going to manage? There’s nobody under you! My startup coworkers used to jokingly give each other fake “Senior Director” titles which were meaningless of course because there were two managers in the whole company, one was the CEO. Even if you did somehow get a fancy title or a team under you, and got bought by a big company, you’re back to “3rd engineer from the left” in their hierarchy.

Hard problems? I don’t know, not in my experience. Just problems unappealing to the bigger players.

And for all that you risk the company not being able to make payroll or canceling your benefits. Sorry, I can say definitively that working at small companies probably set my career back 10 years.

EDIT: I suppose it’s highly dependent on the company.

mful2• 8 years ago

I think your edit hits the nail on the head, as we’ve clearly had different experiences.

I should clarify that a lot of the hard problems at early stage cos are around creating something that is not only new, but is also a viable business, with minimal resources and huge time pressure. Whether the technical side is hard or not is another question entirely.

Anyways, thanks for the comment — in addition to providing a good counterpoint, it’s a good reminder for me that my experience is neither universal nor even necessarily the general case. YMMV.

ericd• 8 years ago

These might be not be unrelated to the fact that those small companies failed.

fma4• 8 years ago

Career progression IMHO is best at mid size companies. Small enough to get the progression, large enough to actually get experience.

ummonk4• 8 years ago

Anyone else getting a little tired of the immediate reduction of any conversation around early-stage startup job opportunities to "comp vs FAANG"?

The difference is so big, that I hope it continues to get repeated, until we start seeing a fairer distribution of equity.

- You will develop a wide breadth of skills you simply can't develop at FAANG, as you will be involved in product meetings, business strategy conversations, and will regularly eat lunch with the CEO. I imagine the reverse of this is true as well, in that there are skills developed at FAANG that are hard to develop as employee <50.

Yes, this is true. Note, however, that this exposure isn't necessarily that transferable, unless you plan to become a founder yourself (which isn't a bad idea).

- You will get to fast-track your career progression, in that you will be in line for promotions much earlier than in large companies, as opportunities emerge.

Only internally. It won't transfer to long term career progression unless your startup happens to be widely successful.

- Companies (including FAANG) will look for folks with your skillset (my startup experience was a huge plus in my recent job search).

Nah. Experience in general is a huge plus in today's job market - but non-founder startup experience is no better than any other experience, unless your startup happens to be widely successful.

- You will work on hard problems, with passionate people; folks aren't punching the clock here. This is fun.

People are passionate and not punching the clock in most places. You certainly do get to work on hard problems at small startups much more though.

Also, for folks just thinking about comp, I'd like to gently point out that a 40 hour week on work you feel "meh" about is ~35% of your waking life. That's not to say you can't find exciting work at FAANG (I hope I have), but rather that there is more to a job than comp or career progression, and working with passionate folks on hard problems can be incredibly fulfilling.

And your comp today directly determines how much of your waking life down the road you will need to spend on work. Higher comp today means financial independence tomorrow (allowing you to work on whatever the heck you like).

Note: I'm a happy early engineer at a startup that offers competetive comp (based on my personal evaluation - and I'm normally a skeptical person - the expected value of my compensation is clearly higher than what I would get at FAANG), so I'm not agains startups; it's just highly unfortunate that most startup founders are incredibly stingy with equity.

heurist• 8 years ago

They are stingy with equity because it's easy to make a bad hire and then be unable to fix the cap table. I do think there should be a better balance, though, and agree that they can be quite stingy even with those who turn out to be good hires.

I feel being first engineer at a startup gave me the skills to found my own company and make a living on my own terms, which is ultimately what I want from life. Being super rich isn't too important to me as long as I feel I have broken out of the mold and am on a path to greater personal and creative freedom. I honestly wanted to kill myself after a few years at a well-liked, growing 1000 person company. It was too confining and I was too distant from the real world. I can't imagine ever being happy at a FAANG Corp, even if the work is initially interesting. The weight of layers of managers above always becomes unbearably heavy for me, especially since I naturally struggle against authority.

lordCarbonFiber2• 8 years ago

Not to say it can't happen, but I dislike the meme that early engineers for startups are working on "hard problems". From a business and social sense, for sure, having to develop quickly, pivot even more so, and pound dirt to carve out a fit is an experience in itself. But, from a technology side, most startups are positively mindnumbing for engineer one. Think your Ubers, your Instagrams, your Facebooks, your Dropbox, the problems don't get technologically interesting until you start doing them at scale. Until then you've got a bog standard php/phython/whatever web/mobile app. Compare that to the opportunity to work with the cutting edge in machine learning, or deployment at scale, or bleeding edge hardware that you'd get at your Facebooks, your Googles, your Microsoft. To me working at a startup I expect hefty comp to be giving up getting to work on interesting problems for the chance of having more agency and winning the lottery if we get huge. YMMV of course, but for me and I think a lot of tech people I'd rather do interesting work for a soul crushing application than soul crushing work to #changeTheWorld (especially if the former pays upwards of 5x more and the latter only pays out to the founder(s)).

throwawax911911• 8 years ago

Almost all the early employees I have met in successful startups have been towering contributors to say the least. Many of them enjoyed very very comfortable jobs in FANG (or equivalent money companies) before taking this up OR moved into one afterwards.

Unless the startup founders themselves are technically up to the bar required, I would think this is going to require huge motivation to make folks like that join. That can be either in the way of convincing them with your software potential enough for them to make the switch OR a ton of money/equity (And not FANG level money, even better). I would go with the latter in 90+% of cases, probably both.

IOW - I don't think we have a proper market place today that serves these high tier developers who will single handedly make or break it for you. I don't think the normal recruiting methods apply to excellent established candidates. You might luck into one, but it is going to be real hard unless you draw from known sources.

FWIW, I am very curious if there is one such premium marketplace as well. (Sorry if this sounds gentrifying, but there are a bunch of engineers I know whose gross comp is close to 1MM/yr or more and I don't think you are going to find them prowling LinkedIn or responding to regular methods anytime soon. Anecdotally I do believe many of them have the capacity to do magic technically though).

projectramo• 8 years ago

How do you tell a good engineer from an average one?

If you can’t do that then all the time you spend taking them out to dinner is wasted.

trumped• 8 years ago

How to make sure that you can fire your first engineer without too much damage? maybe state-by-state instructions...

deepGem• 8 years ago

As engineer no 1 at an early stage startup, you don't need ths same skills that are needed at FAANG. I may be wrong, but you are constantly iterating and mostly building software that has a shelf life of may be 3-6 months. You are not building for reliability or scale. You are building mostly ad-hoc and to fulfil an immediate market need (which may or may not exist 2 months from now). Where as at FAANG you are by design building for reliability and scale from day 1. Very different skills.

I can't comment which skill is more valuable. They are somewhat orthogonal to each other right ? The better you get at software engineering the more process oriented you become. Hopefully an early startup gives you that kind of progression, but very unlikely, since the progression is directly correlated to the startup's scale and success.

If someone desires to put good software engineering into practice from day 1, then engineer #1 at an early stage startup is not the right choice.

This is all based on anecdotal experiences so am happy to stand corrected.

ristem• 8 years ago

I think it is important to offer more equity to your engineers.

needlepont• 8 years ago

As the first engineer at a successful startup.

Responsibilities- * Take over everything technical I was good at and hired for. * Take over policy and progress on everything I was good at. * Be on call 24/7. * Do whatever the CEO/CIO didn't want to do.

Think this is pretty standard from my reading of other startups. The one lesson I should have learned and didn't is that as first engineer you should get 10% or more equity if you stay > 5 years.

How to Hire Your First Engineer

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