Thoughts on finding the hidden gems in early-stage startup hiring.

"maybe even a high production value promo video showcasing happy employees, rare wood office counters and a shoes-off policy."

Don't forget surfboards!

This was a great post, Alex. Thanks for sharing! Hunger and high agency are such important traits in every startup hire.

Meta, but why does the HN title change the kuril . in domain into just `kuril` here?

edit: interestingly, that happens even in comments..

In all humility I think I at least loosely embody those qualities. Right now I’m in a comfy F500 remote job that is stable, and it’s been at a time where stability has been important for my family. There will come a time when I’m ready to start or work at a startup. When I do, I want to find a place where my values are valued. I come to work engaged no matter what, but my work is able to be far more impactful when it comes from my self, not only my work avatar.

I’m on HN a lot, and I usually tend to passively browse Who’s Hiring and interesting looking YC ads. Outside of that, I don’t think I would pursue a startup job through job search sites. I would most likely want to find projects I think are neat and start to research and maybe contribute if they have OSS projects, then do individual outreach. I’d probably also start blogging and posting more so people can see if I am a fit for them. Agents may be involved, but only insomuch as I could spend more time doing human stuff like writing, listening, and ideation.

I hope this helps a CTO find a good candidate. I’m personally not on the market right now, but AMA if you want help finding similar folks.

This completely misses the reason why you need to hire the best initially. It has nothing to do with the hardness of your own company's problems. It has to do with the distribution of productivity among any kind of engineer.

Engineers follow a pareto distribution. In a normal sized team, with a typical hiring funnel, you will have a few high performers, who are responsible for most of the team's productivity. If you can only hire one person from that team, then it is more likely than not that you will hire someone with productivity below the team's mean. At an early startup, this could be a death sentence. Especially since we typically reason and plan in terms of means, so it may come as a surprise that your single engineer is less productive than the mean of most teams that you have worked with.

The other reason (also not mentioned) is that you eventually want to scale hiring. That means that you need to have people, that you have hired yourself, hire more people on your behalf. The best people (A players in the metaphor) don't have imposter syndrome, they know how good they are, and how good they aren't. They want to work with other talent, that makes their lives easier, more interesting, and less stressful than covering for/babysitting other people. It's also the only way they can grow from where they are at. So they can be trusted to hire more A players, out of self interest.

The median engineer (let's call them a B player) often knows about where they stand as well, and often they will have started to diversify their skillset into organizational politics. They intuit: hiring people more competent than them gives them less leverage, and they are pretty good at zero-sum status games, that's their edge. They don't want true competition, so they hire C players.

So the reason you want to start with the best is because it's the only way to ensure you can move fast when you need to, and the best way to keep the organization effective long enough to exit. All organizations decay into incompetence, but hopefully you can get yours and get out before that happens.

In my opinion as a hiring person at FAANG for almost 20 years, what’s described here has always been the goal. Lots of people work at FAANG who don’t meet this bar because a need to fill seats exceeded the need to hold the line / bar on quality. So tenure pedigree doesn’t say much.

But this candidate profile is the best anywhere. It’s also a bit like writing an article and saying “you shouldn’t try to buy shares in the most well known tickers, try to buy things that are undervalued but will be great in the future”. Yeah, but also duh.

I built my first company on engineers I hired from the local college by simply asking them to send me students who had clear talent but weren't engaging well in the academic side. We became a local clearing house where we quickly found out whether they could thrive outside of the academic environment. Two of them became "The Best" you talk about. One in DevOps (earns way more than me now) another found his talent in DevEx.