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Comment by ClumsyPilot | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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?

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

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.

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