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Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

It’s not that simple though, is it.

There are plenty of highly paid engineers who couldn’t build a decent product given all the coffee in Shoreditch.

As a non-tech person, how do I know to whom I should give all this money? Maybe a hands-off CTO or a hands-on architect cum engineering manager? Or a product person? Or maybe a skilled UX designer? Or a good infrastructure person? Or a DBA, and in which database? Or should I lower the money and get cheaper people in all those roles? Or maybe outsource the whole thing to an agency?

There are plenty of stories of companies who have hired all the above on good money and built an over-engineered, unmaintainable mess that solved zero real world problems.

I would argue that instead of money, you should build it with patience. Hire slowly. Solve one small problem at a time.

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When it comes to over-engineering and solving zero real-world problems, that's mostly a company, management and/or investor problem. There's many startups out there where the primary goal is not to solve a business problem profitably but to build a complex engineering playground so they can be part of the "cool kids" club and justify the next VC round.

This translates to hiring - if your job spec is nothing but buzzwords you'll attract the kind of people that "engineer" for engineering's sake and resume value as opposed to solving your business problem (hell, does the job spec even include the actual business problem you're solving beyond vague platitudes about changing the world and boasting about their VC funding?).

Salaries need to reflect it too - if you pay too low, the only people that can afford to work for you are those that do so for the resume value rather than the money or the fun of playing in an engineering playground and potentially becoming its lead - with again zero concern as to whether they're solving the business problem. The kind of engineer you'd actually want usually already makes good money and no longer needs the resume value nor can be bothered to over-engineer.

Even as a contractor I've had plenty of leads where it became clear they weren't looking for an efficient solution to their business problem but an over-engineered mess to expand their engineering playground and my counterpoints fell on deaf ears.

If you are a decision maker, especially a CTO, you should be able to know who to give all the money. True, there are too many people making the wrong technical decisions and by this increasing the complexity of a project easily by 10x or more. But, to answer your question, if someone doesn’t know, (s)he’s actually simply not in the right position.

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