Hiring for startups: You're doing it wrong (opens in new tab)

Though one could argue if you higher smarter people you might have less "oh shit" days?

And if you are a prospective employee joining a company that is planning to have "oh shit" moments, just make sure you are being compensated with a lot of equity. There basically is no worse deal than joining a risky company at the stage where they already have some funding and employees.

Assuming you are the resilient type who is capable of founding a startup, you'd get a much better deal either founding your own company or just joining a runaway success startup and get experience and build your network while saving up dough.

Hire who's right for your startup, not who someone (who may have really only written this blogspam as a way to get eyeballs on job postings) tells you to hire.

These "how to hire" posts are getting so tired. Not because its a bad subject but because they are completely empty.

Paul Graham talks about hiring people who aren't hapless: http://www.paulgraham.com/relres.html (2009)

Which I agree with. I've worked with people who started crying at the first sign of trouble. I've worked with people who wanted to make every single encounter into a fight. Both of these are completely toxic to a start-up.

I really worry, though, about these hiring practices that are just psychological tests designed by non-psychologists, like this:

Hire people who emailed you a dozen times before you had a chance to reply

I usually stop emailing after 3 or 4 times, figuring that that 4th email already made me look desperate.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: a lot of these "how to find good employees" are as rigorous as dating advice in the latest issue of Cosmo.

The article seems to subtly suggest that if you do not have an advanced degree [1], you do not have "brains." As someone who has "brains" but has chosen not to pursue and advanced degree, if I were working for the author, my reaction would be to question this person's judgment on several levels: 1) Implicitly putting down those who work with him who don't have advanced degrees. 2) Susceptibility to autobiographically-based irrationality, aka too much Koolaid.

Why is this an irrational viewpoint? Sure, someone who has an advanced degree is unlikely to be dumb. But as any remotely educated person should know, it does not follow that someone who does not have an advanced degree is not smart.

I think the obsession with advanced degrees is fascinating though. Do people really believe that getting an advanced degree will make one a more productive web developer? Are the years spent getting that advanced degree remotely comparable to years of meaningful industry experience? Or comparable to using the countless online resources to educate oneself in topics that are directly applicable to web development?? Hint: no.

[1] "Brains don’t matter as much as resilience in your first couple of years as a startup. I borrowed a lot of money to put myself through one undergraduate and two masters programs so, yes, it hurts to write that."

I like this concept, you're right that brains and resilience aren't always the same. Some really smart people need stability and can't handle rapid change.

However, I do think culture-fit (which is way more important than personality) is as important of a criteria, even more so for early stage start-ups. When you're building an organization, you have a vision not only for what you want that org to achieve, but what you want it to look like. In an early stage company, even one person that goes against that culture could represent 25% of the company. Their mere presence serves to undermine what you want to build, and as they say... the one rotten apple rots the rest.

I'm not saying these are bad people, a culture-mismatch at one org is a culture-fit at another org, but this is an important criteria. I recognize also that this really drags down the recruiting process. There are some ways to get around it (e.g., trial work weeks, part-time contractor positions), but these have been discussed on HN before and are not immediately relevant.

Just more food for thought.

I would reframe the suggestion as two ideas. 1) "hire for your culture" and 2) conditioning on a cultural expectation of individuals putting up with lots of problems on their own, "make sure new hires can cope."

The latter is an important point, but the idea that all startups have this attitude towards employees and crisis management is not accurate.

How important is it for potential candidates to know if the culture at a startup they are considering working for has these values? I'm guessing a blog like this turns off a lot of people, but to the author's point, not anyone they would hire. Effective :D

FD: back end dev at Mighty Spring, we do startup hiring. (mightyspring.com)