6 ms·

> The best engineers make more than your entire payroll. They have opinions on tech debt and timelines. They have remote jobs, if they want them. They don’t go

by fitzn 1y ago

> The best engineers make more than your entire payroll. They have opinions on tech debt and timelines. They have remote jobs, if they want them. They don’t go “oh, well, this is your third company, so I guess I’ll defer to you on all product decisions”. They care about comp, a trait you consider disqualifying. They can care about work-life balance, because they’re not desperate enough to feel the need not to. And however successful your company has been so far, they have other options they like better. Yep

zuppy 1y ago
it's more like short term gain vs long term gain. experienced engineers can design an architecture that will allow you to scale cheaper and faster in the future, at the high initial cost. it will be cheaper to maintain, better for security. depends at what point your business is at the moment of hiring and what you plan to do with the product. do you need volume or quality (both variants are right)?
- throwway120385 1y ago
  If your business is going to cease to exist in 4 months, who cares about scalability? Pay the interest when it comes due and when you can afford it. If someone is serious about building a company they will be okay with that.
  - binary132 1y ago
    unpopular opinion with engineers but unfortunately true startups are generally moreso a business endeavor than an engineering one, although the engineering must correctly support the business the engineering begins to take the driver’s seat as the tech debt and cost of scaling catch up to successful companies and begin to create excess drag but for many years, such companies can typically still afford to throw away money to solve business problems, including these problems of scale
    - rachofsunshine 1y ago
      Depends on the business. Some startups (like mine) are delivering a service, and the technology used to deliver that service is instrumental. Our back-end is an Airtable I configured myself, and it's been sufficient so far; better tech is not make or break for what we do. Other startups, like Flexport some years ago, fundamentally depend on technical function because that's the core of what they do. One of the common mistakes founders make, in my expetience, is not asking which camp they're in. It's not a hard question to answer (usually), but it's an easy one not to ask.
    - datavirtue 1y ago
      I'm in full tech debt black hole right now. Avoid this shit, if at all possible. The excess drag is real AF and is greatly threatening the business.
      - binary132 1y ago
        I’m honestly happy to hear (sorry!) that it matters to someone’s business but the counterargument is of course that if it’s become a threat to the business then it should have taken a front seat sooner….
  - gedy 1y ago
    Sure but then incentivize engineers to hack it out knowing they'll have to deal with the shit show if you become successful. Sorry but most "startup engineers" aren't , and it's basically bad for their careers to implement "the vision" in a throw-away manner.
    - throwway120385 1y ago
      I don't think it's true that it's bad for your career to do it that way. What happens a lot is we think we have to tell the story of how we gloriously implemented some powerful overkill technical stack in a startup with 4 months of runway to be taken seriously as a Real Engineer. You can also tell the story of how you worked really hard to engineer a solution that was good enough to carry a startup to viability given the 4 months you had. I would choose the second person over the first person because they have a sense of practicality which is really important. But it can be career limiting to not communicate that in your resume somehow, so I understand how you can think it would be a bad thing. And as always you have to be aware that your employer is in that situation, and so if they don't tell you then you're screwed. There are a lot of people out there who want to hire practical engineers. It's just a different market and you have to signal differently in your resume.
    - datavirtue 1y ago
      Let's be real. Most first builds are done by very low talent Indian and Vietnamese developers with zero technical direction. Once the business grows, real engineers and architects are brought in to fight the horrendous, almost laughable, mess to pull the company back from certain failure...without getting any credit.
  - swiftcoder 1y ago
    Yes, this is a very important aspect. An early stage startup needs zero-to-one engineers. People who build fast, aren't afraid to break things, and don't mind YOLO'ing a year of their career on a gamble. If you find product/market fit before you run out of money... that's when you need to hire engineers who are in it for the long hall. People who focus on reliability and scaling. People who might stick around for 5 years to see if your startup becomes a unicorn.
- jerf 1y ago
  You know, three years ago I would have said that I can give you a pretty good architecture fairly quickly but if you just want banged-out code I'll be beaten by someone who just plows forward for at least a couple of months... but after some vibe coding I've done I think I could do both at the same time now fairly well. Vibe code very quickly that I also know I can make scale fairly well with not much more effort.
- rrr_oh_man 1y ago
  Counterpoint: Experienced engineers will design the architecture that is appropriate for the current state of the business.
guywithahat 1y ago
The only addendum to this I'd add is the best engineers rarely have to go through the hiring process in a meaningful way, it's usually someone recognizes them from a previous job and vouches heavily for them. I say this because if you're going through the hiring process like a chump, I'd leave the ego at the door and not talk about compensation or try to demand remote work on a desirable position.
- bityard 1y ago
  Yes. The more experienced you are, the more your network does all of your job searching for you in the background. (Of course, this assumes you are actively building and maintaining your network.)
  - guywithahat 1y ago
    I'm not sure it's just a network thing. Certainly you need experience to be a great engineer, but I've known plenty of engineers with 30 years experience who find themselves competing with everyone else when they lose their job. The best engineer I've ever known spent most of his career doing drivers at Qualcomm. When he left his job they offered him significant raises to stay, offered months of paid leave, and then said he could always come back. Later, an OSS project he worked with heard he was free, and they changed their remote work policies to hire him. He's under 30, and despite working remotely at an OSS project makes significantly more than me. I like to think I'm a good engineer, but when I work with customers they aren't setting linkedin alerts on my name for if I leave my job. To qualify for what this article is getting at, you really need to be the best engineer out of 100's, not the best engineer in your team of 5.
  - mrandish 1y ago
    > this assumes you are actively building and maintaining your network. Frankly, being a consistent super-star engineer on a team of good engineers, is more important than actively maintaining a network. Experienced founders ask everyone in their small circle of long-time, highly credible, proven associates "who's the best engineer you've ever worked with?" If the answer is interesting, they follow up with "Where are they now? In my startups, I recruited nearly all of the star engineers this way. In most cases, getting them on board required significant sustained effort. Sometimes just finding them wasn't easy. So - if you're really the engineer on your team who most everyone else would identify as "the best", please don't waste any time maintaining a network. Just keep doing truly great work that others will still be telling stories about over drinks years from now. If you're not that engineer... then by all means be a reliable, likable, good communicator and maintain your network! Because as a founder, I never had enough high-credibility sightings of "great engineers" in the wild, so I had to mostly build teams out of credible referrals of best "good engineers" and even best "intern or new grad engineers with potential" you've worked with.
feoren 1y ago
This is ignoring the fact that there are very few opportunities for the best engineers to thrive. I guarantee you there are thousands of John Carmacks laboring away at mid-tier companies with mid-tier managers, inventing paradigm-shifting technologies that get underutilized and shelved behind IP protection by their clueless leadership, living in a B-tier tech city with kids in school and a wife with a job, not able to move, looking at job postings every few weeks and seeing the same dumb-as-bricks derivative adtech vibe-coding middleman companies looking for someone to fill a seat, not developing a network because the few good engineers they know are all in the same situation as them. If you define the best engineers as those that are already incredibly successful, you're doing a terrible job of recruiting for your company. Even a little effort to recognize under-appreciated talent would skyrocket your team's ability, but instead you're salivating over some over-hyped over-paid Silicon Valley rockstars? What a waste. But it doesn't really matter, because your company is also dumb-as-bricks derivative adtech vibe-coding middleware, so why are you even trying to recruit talented engineers at all? Just fill your seats with someone who knows how to type a prompt into an LLM and make your exit before everyone realizes you're a sham.

by fitzn 1y ago

zuppy 1y ago

it's more like short term gain vs long term gain. experienced engineers can design an architecture that will allow you to scale cheaper and faster in the future, at the high initial cost. it will be cheaper to maintain, better for security. depends at what point your business is at the moment of hiring and what you plan to do with the product. do you need volume or quality (both variants are right)?

throwway120385 1y ago
If your business is going to cease to exist in 4 months, who cares about scalability? Pay the interest when it comes due and when you can afford it. If someone is serious about building a company they will be okay with that.
- binary132 1y ago
  unpopular opinion with engineers but unfortunately true startups are generally moreso a business endeavor than an engineering one, although the engineering must correctly support the business the engineering begins to take the driver’s seat as the tech debt and cost of scaling catch up to successful companies and begin to create excess drag but for many years, such companies can typically still afford to throw away money to solve business problems, including these problems of scale
  - rachofsunshine 1y ago
    Depends on the business. Some startups (like mine) are delivering a service, and the technology used to deliver that service is instrumental. Our back-end is an Airtable I configured myself, and it's been sufficient so far; better tech is not make or break for what we do. Other startups, like Flexport some years ago, fundamentally depend on technical function because that's the core of what they do. One of the common mistakes founders make, in my expetience, is not asking which camp they're in. It's not a hard question to answer (usually), but it's an easy one not to ask.
  - datavirtue 1y ago
    I'm in full tech debt black hole right now. Avoid this shit, if at all possible. The excess drag is real AF and is greatly threatening the business.
    - binary132 1y ago
      I’m honestly happy to hear (sorry!) that it matters to someone’s business but the counterargument is of course that if it’s become a threat to the business then it should have taken a front seat sooner….
- gedy 1y ago
  Sure but then incentivize engineers to hack it out knowing they'll have to deal with the shit show if you become successful. Sorry but most "startup engineers" aren't , and it's basically bad for their careers to implement "the vision" in a throw-away manner.
  - throwway120385 1y ago
    I don't think it's true that it's bad for your career to do it that way. What happens a lot is we think we have to tell the story of how we gloriously implemented some powerful overkill technical stack in a startup with 4 months of runway to be taken seriously as a Real Engineer. You can also tell the story of how you worked really hard to engineer a solution that was good enough to carry a startup to viability given the 4 months you had. I would choose the second person over the first person because they have a sense of practicality which is really important. But it can be career limiting to not communicate that in your resume somehow, so I understand how you can think it would be a bad thing. And as always you have to be aware that your employer is in that situation, and so if they don't tell you then you're screwed. There are a lot of people out there who want to hire practical engineers. It's just a different market and you have to signal differently in your resume.
  - datavirtue 1y ago
    Let's be real. Most first builds are done by very low talent Indian and Vietnamese developers with zero technical direction. Once the business grows, real engineers and architects are brought in to fight the horrendous, almost laughable, mess to pull the company back from certain failure...without getting any credit.
- swiftcoder 1y ago
  Yes, this is a very important aspect. An early stage startup needs zero-to-one engineers. People who build fast, aren't afraid to break things, and don't mind YOLO'ing a year of their career on a gamble. If you find product/market fit before you run out of money... that's when you need to hire engineers who are in it for the long hall. People who focus on reliability and scaling. People who might stick around for 5 years to see if your startup becomes a unicorn.
jerf 1y ago
You know, three years ago I would have said that I can give you a pretty good architecture fairly quickly but if you just want banged-out code I'll be beaten by someone who just plows forward for at least a couple of months... but after some vibe coding I've done I think I could do both at the same time now fairly well. Vibe code very quickly that I also know I can make scale fairly well with not much more effort.
rrr_oh_man 1y ago
Counterpoint: Experienced engineers will design the architecture that is appropriate for the current state of the business.

guywithahat 1y ago

The only addendum to this I'd add is the best engineers rarely have to go through the hiring process in a meaningful way, it's usually someone recognizes them from a previous job and vouches heavily for them. I say this because if you're going through the hiring process like a chump, I'd leave the ego at the door and not talk about compensation or try to demand remote work on a desirable position.

bityard 1y ago
Yes. The more experienced you are, the more your network does all of your job searching for you in the background. (Of course, this assumes you are actively building and maintaining your network.)
- guywithahat 1y ago
  I'm not sure it's just a network thing. Certainly you need experience to be a great engineer, but I've known plenty of engineers with 30 years experience who find themselves competing with everyone else when they lose their job. The best engineer I've ever known spent most of his career doing drivers at Qualcomm. When he left his job they offered him significant raises to stay, offered months of paid leave, and then said he could always come back. Later, an OSS project he worked with heard he was free, and they changed their remote work policies to hire him. He's under 30, and despite working remotely at an OSS project makes significantly more than me. I like to think I'm a good engineer, but when I work with customers they aren't setting linkedin alerts on my name for if I leave my job. To qualify for what this article is getting at, you really need to be the best engineer out of 100's, not the best engineer in your team of 5.
- mrandish 1y ago
  > this assumes you are actively building and maintaining your network. Frankly, being a consistent super-star engineer on a team of good engineers, is more important than actively maintaining a network. Experienced founders ask everyone in their small circle of long-time, highly credible, proven associates "who's the best engineer you've ever worked with?" If the answer is interesting, they follow up with "Where are they now? In my startups, I recruited nearly all of the star engineers this way. In most cases, getting them on board required significant sustained effort. Sometimes just finding them wasn't easy. So - if you're really the engineer on your team who most everyone else would identify as "the best", please don't waste any time maintaining a network. Just keep doing truly great work that others will still be telling stories about over drinks years from now. If you're not that engineer... then by all means be a reliable, likable, good communicator and maintain your network! Because as a founder, I never had enough high-credibility sightings of "great engineers" in the wild, so I had to mostly build teams out of credible referrals of best "good engineers" and even best "intern or new grad engineers with potential" you've worked with.

feoren 1y ago

This is ignoring the fact that there are very few opportunities for the best engineers to thrive. I guarantee you there are thousands of John Carmacks laboring away at mid-tier companies with mid-tier managers, inventing paradigm-shifting technologies that get underutilized and shelved behind IP protection by their clueless leadership, living in a B-tier tech city with kids in school and a wife with a job, not able to move, looking at job postings every few weeks and seeing the same dumb-as-bricks derivative adtech vibe-coding middleman companies looking for someone to fill a seat, not developing a network because the few good engineers they know are all in the same situation as them. If you define the best engineers as those that are already incredibly successful, you're doing a terrible job of recruiting for your company. Even a little effort to recognize under-appreciated talent would skyrocket your team's ability, but instead you're salivating over some over-hyped over-paid Silicon Valley rockstars? What a waste. But it doesn't really matter, because your company is also dumb-as-bricks derivative adtech vibe-coding middleware, so why are you even trying to recruit talented engineers at all? Just fill your seats with someone who knows how to type a prompt into an LLM and make your exit before everyone realizes you're a sham.