Ask HN: What do you look for in your first 10 hires?
I've been helping a few companies recruit founding engineers. After doing a lot of screens I have a rough idea for what to look for. For others that have done a lot of hiring what do you look for specifically besides their technical ability?
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 64.7 ms ] threadA verifiable track record beyond the CV, that is extremely hard to fake with valuable experience that you did not know you needed.
As I said before at least 2 of the following:
1. Open source contributions to high-profile / major repositories (with code-review in the open with core maintainers). No hello world / demo projects.
2. Production-grade shipped projects / side-projects with paying customers or high-profile companies using it and is bringing in recurring revenue.
3. Given several presentations at conferences discussing anything from your project as a library author, maintainer or at a company showcasing your engineering expertise.
All are extremely difficult to fake and easy to verify and requires a level of effort on the applicant to qualify which filters 90% of noise out there. Years of experience is not a requirement but a bonus.
The rest of the other methods like leetcode, hackerrank, take home projects or quiz trivia, wastes time on both the interviewer and the candidate and both can be cheated easily using AI.
It is that simple.
Some of the absolute best candidates were always the ones with a github that hadn't seen a commit in half a decade, nary a presentation or conference mentioned in their cv. This was true at two different FAANGs and a couple of other FAANG-adjacent companies.
And surgeons should also have a track record where they can talk about how they do open heart surgery during their free time at home…
You are the founder but even for you once you take outside funding, your “passion” is irrelevant, your investors only care about the “exit” and if you do get acquired, two weeks later you will more than likely have a blog post on your website about “Our Amazing Journey” announcing the sunsetting of your product.
It is naive for anyone to go into any company and treat it as any more than a trade for money for labor.
Your first hires need to be people who make the company faster, not slower. A single bad hire can sink the ship. Someone who is great in a large corporation can ruin an early start-up.
Personally, I'm hoping for low-ego high achievers. But that's up to you. This is where you get to define what the company culture will be.
Why you did this?, why this way? , why you joined this company?
This gives good understanding of both Personality and Hard skills.
They don't need fancy credentials or to be super smart or have a great internet presence; what you should look for is a track-record of shipping, and evidence of independent work; and when you interview them, find out if they have good judgement, if they have a sense of when to trade off perfect for good enough, if they're able to diagnose and fix things when they're broken.
As you grow, you can add more traditional engineers to build a more conventional, well-rounded team. But most companies don't get to 20 employees if their first 5-10 aren't able to work quickly & make good decisions without getting side-tracked on all the myriad little distractions of designing the perfect framework for the framework, office politics, dev environment isn't quite right, etc, etc.
My experience has been that solving a very technical problem and solving a social one are very different skill sets and very few people have both skills and are capable of using both of those skills at the same time.
So you want people who are willing to be overworked and underpaid with the statistically worthless equity?
What next? You also want people who after they do a 996 work schedule to also have enough “passion” to work on open source projects during their free time?
I find this attitude and expectation disgusting.
In the beginning, you need the person who knows how to solve the problem. They are harder to find.
If you are pressured to grow quickly, you might be tempted to lower the bar. You can, as long as you understand that the person who knows how to solve the problem is still critically important, because they will be telling people which algo to use.
I think every company that uses tech needs at least one of these people to start with.
Give me 10 of those and you can kiss anyone goodbye.
So the first hire must be a 10x programmer
The second one obviously also must be a 10x programmer but keep in mind the bar has now moved so he has to be 10x the previous one (100x)
In short it gets very challenging trying to find the final 10^10x programmer
In the general population about 20% of people shows some traits that qualify as autistic with about 10% showing those traits enough that could qualify for a ASD diagnosis. Among software developers those numbers are roughly double. People with autism are prone to high anxiety with deliberate habits of trying to hide it, masking behaviors. You don’t want Dunning-Kruger type behaviors as the common establishment of your organization. Instead you want people who aren’t afraid to risk doing original things and will bluntly tell you about product risks as opposed to putting their personal preferences first.
Ability to communicate determines how a person organizes their thoughts on the fly. It also exposes their potential for working closely with others. Strong teams come from people that support each other as opposed to people who lack empathy or demonstrate low social intelligence. Strong skills alone can tank a team if communication is garbage.