Whom to hire for a startup?

You're building a new startup and hiring a team. It's quite clear you need experienced people for key positions down to team leaders but what to do with "simple" programmers? What demands to their experience will you make? Will you seek for experienced people that need not much of coaching and attention or go for interns and newly fledged graduates? Will you mix from both extremes and if yes in what proportion? What are the no-go criteria and what are the types of people that you better off leaving some positions vacant than taking them on board?

One may ask why not to hire the best possible people for every position but there maybe many answers why a dream team is not the best fit for a startup. It does make sense to assume that "A Great Programmer is Worth Fifty Good Ones"  but your instant abilities may not satisfy the fictitious great programmer or, more importantly,  who is the great programmer for each of the positions?

Of course, to boost your startup you need the best core team: 3-5 really experienced geeks (or simply the owners of the idea) that will start from scratch and make things running. Once a pilot, a demo, or a prototype gets an approval and the team - initial funding - these guys will take the core leading positions in the crew. Very soon you'll find types of the job that can and should be delegated to less experienced folks since the experienced ones a) should be utilized for more intelligent tasks and b) can't deal with "copy-paste" programming for a long time (by "copy-paste" programming I mean here those 80% of a task that left after 20 creative percent of the  job is done). In reality, though, it's hard to separate "intelligent" programming from "copy-paste". It's interwoven: even a less demanding task may bring damage that only knowledgeable people can fix. Not after a long you reach a situation when it's clear that both - more and less experienced people - are needed in a team. It is another question how to get mature people - build in-house or buy from outside - and the question deserves its own blog.

We agree we need both types in the crew. What is the ratio of mature/novice stuff in the team? It depends, as usually. If you go for a formal team-shaped way of organizing the hierarchy then it's one option. Each team should be consisting of up to 4-5 people with a formal team leader heading the group. I'd suggest that if the team leader is a subject matter expert (as she should be) you may need another guru in the team and the rest (2-3 people) could be novices to a variable degree. The leader and the guru ought to play a mentoring role on them to teach and coach the novices and grow them to professional maturity.

There is another interesting approach to organizing teams. In this approach there are no formal hierarchical titles and no formal team leads. Every big task gets staffed "just in time" and a team is comprised depending on expertise requests. A task leader is assigned every time from a pull of people "ready" to drive and the lead then behaves like a team leader. It doesn't vary significantly from the first option in a sense of who does what but the flatted relationships between the members has a number of advantages. First, it gives you more maneuver for growing people, especially in coaching and probing novices bringing them into action. Second, undoubtedly more democratic environment may help you to motivate and encourage people. On one hand, demonstrating to them equal opportunities (don't mix up with equal rights) and, on the other hand, implanting an environment of "one for all and all for one" by removing boss-subordinate relationships. Both benefits further to the "mossad" paradigm of a company but can be adopted to a certain extent even by big enterprises.

The last question we yet to answer is what types of people we don't want. Of course, we don't want to have any pathology or folks with bad recommendations. But recurring to the question of  "copy-paste" programming would you want a simple driver in the team? I like the rough classification Jeffrey Joerres and Dominique Turcq bring for a general case but do we want to hire the driver type people for our startup where we count on each and everyone? If one has no ambition but simply wants to drive (read - to do what others order her) wouldn't it be a waste of a headcount in the startup's staff? If she's neither an Ambassador nor a Craft Master do we need her in the startup? My personal beliefs - we do not. I didn't say there is no place for such people in the industry. I just mean that for a startup ideally you need people waiting for a week-end to end, willing to try new things, and daring to experiment on their own - the Creators are the prototype for a novice you should seek for, hire, and willing to educate. The passion is the only thing that can compensate her inexperience and then become a pledge of success for such a venturous investment (yes, hiring anybody is a venture, but hiring a novice is a double).

I have to confess that the question of how and whom to hire for a startup is quite oversized for a blog but believe this blog can flow into the variety of discussions on the topic and waiting to hear your comments on the point.

Technorati tags: startup, team, career

Comments

[viinnie mirchandani]

It is marvelous to see you talk about the right engineers and geeks to hire in a start up. It's a shame as I write in my blog that a tech leader like IBM only spends 7% in R&D and other s/w companies get to only 10- 15% of revenues on R&D The sales guys in blue suits have long overshadowed the engineer in blue jeans.

As I like to say if the Red Cross epent so little on charity, we would be upset. S/w companies need to produce outstanding products and passionate engineers are a start.

One word of caution. The economcis of start ups have changed dramatically due to cheaper chips, boradband, SaaS, global labor. If you hire a serial entrepreneur, they may be stuck in thinking about economcis from 5 years ago

[David Maister]

Roman, you were kind enough to point out that, on the same weekend, we posted blogposts on the same subject (see www.davidmaister.com/blog/108 )

I'll contribute here what I did not say there: my general rule would always be to hire people with fewer qualifications and give them a big opportunity with lots of responsibility. That way, they will stretch, be grateful and be loyal. And most people are more cpable than have been asked to be, and are often more capable than they themselves know!