Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

That's because you shouldn't hire them but you should grow them internally. Outside hires for executive positions are usually a great way to de-stabilize your company, early hires tend to be loyal to the founders and if you then hire some 'suit' to sit between them and you you risk them breaking off.

So the solution to this problem is to ensure that your early hires are all top notch with the potential to eventually build out to become your C-suite, and to treat them as generously as you can when it comes to equity.

And if you're really smart you stick to that mantra: hire quality over quantity, it will allow you to push back the typical organizational struggles until you've achieved an order of magnitude or more in revenues (assuming product market fit).

View on HN

It’s insane how many don’t realize this when it’s so obvious. Seen so many big shot c-levels wander in from Amazon, Microsoft and the like, institute some changes to make a mark and hit promises they made coming on, then leave 8 months or under 2 years later with the thing they were in charge of in disarray only for another to roll in and do the same.

Company I work at was almost ran into the ground until we fired all the c-levels for hire and empowered the top levels of individual contributors instead.

What are examples of things/changes the C-levels did?

Push for us to move out direct to customer business into putting out product in stock in physical stores like Walmart, which really just ended up with our product being shifted at great discount.

Pushing us to build our product line around IP partnerships with major companies, diminishing our brand value and compromising the product experience.

> ensure that your early hires are all top notch with the potential to eventually build out to become your C-suite

Are we talking about developer early hires, or sales, or whom?

The skills and character required to be a succesfull developer are totally different than whats needed for C level. Thr training required to get there is a lot. Finding the right people and keeping them is hard enough.

But all means try to grow them internally and probide training, but as a 'solution' it is not realistic.

> The skills and character required to be a succesfull developer are totally different than whats needed for C level.

The skills required to be a Lead and/or Principal developer seem to overlap quite a bit with those that an executive needs.

I’m sure there must be some, but I certainly haven’t noticed any extra skills in the executives I’ve met except a larger willingness to compromise and do things that are globally suboptimal (e.g. bad for the company in the long run, but good in the short one).

Is it possible you didn't actually have that much insight into what they do day to day? I'm currently running a small company (<10 people) and I was working as a developer (including lead) for about 15 years before that & the skills required are indeed quite different. There's a lot more planning and decision making, the impact of your decisions are much greater, a lot more uncertainty and your people skills are a lot more important.

> The skills and character required to be a succesfull developer are totally different than whats needed for C level.

I would disagree. Hiring for a small company/startup typically leans towards people with a breadth of skills. You need the first set of engineers to be thinking about the product and the business in addition to how to build something. Good leaders will also emerge from those early hires, otherwise the company will struggle to grow. Those early hires are often well suited to eventually move into executive roles.

I think the bigger issue is whether the early engineers want to stop coding and be in management where their primary job is hiring, strategy, and sales (everyone sells all the time in a small/medium sized company).

let me put this another way - we are in a thread, where the headline is 'founders suck at hiring C level execs' and your solution is to make founders find people who are simultaneously C level execs and engineers?

That's not what GP matwood said. Instead, 1) find good engineers. And later 2) leaders will emerge from those.

And, giving everyone in the company a bit soft skills & planning & management etc practice & courses can make that process work even better.

Eg everyone reads Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. And everyone reads The Great CEO Within.

Just a reminder: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com