Ask HN: Dealing with Our First Hire

> He's pedigreed from a great CS school and worked at multiple well known big-tech companies, so have assumed that he's a high performing, action orientated programmer prior to start up life.

This is often a formula for being very competent at execution within given rules. Top school has a formula for getting in. Big tech companies have product people to guide you on what to do. My team has UX people to design the buttons, product to tell us the inputs and outputs, operations to define those inputs and outputs in detail, QA to ensure it is correct, devops to run all the tests, etc. I really do just write code to execute a vision.

I went to a well recognized school. I work for a big tech firm as one of my jobs (haven't done multiple yet). Nowhere in there was I really making open ended decisions and frankly I would be a bit terrified of decision making as I haven't made a non code related one for years. It is my job to build the dream, not define it. There are a whole pile of automated guardrails present from devops to QA to product that prevent bugs, so while I do my best, it is hardly the same as having to be completely responsible.

I couldn't even demo the product I have contributed to for the past two years even, simply because as a backend engineer I never open the whole thing so have no idea where the buttons are on frontend (teams have both).

I once joined a much smaller team without those guardrails and I was considered an underperformer on that team for not redesigning the form to be more user friendly. I was given a sketch and I just built it, despite knowing that it probably wasn't great. But with my current employer, that is what you are supposed to do. With that employer, they were unhappy I didn't change things to improve it.

I don't think you are being unreasonable, but you picked up on some wacky signals that I don't think signal what you believe they do.

You need someone who regularly hacks projects in their spare time and has built something from scratch on their own before, ideally multiple things. You want a product engineering person, which I suspect this guy has never done.

that's great perspective - how did you grow into working without those guard rails?

I didn't.

I quit that job after a lot of managerial discussions about my poor performance and went to the big tech unicorn with guardrails where I am now. They were very clearly relieved that I quit.

I can't say I have any advice on how to fix this. It is more that I think you may have hired someone fundamentally unsuited for the role or at least zero experience with half of what the role is, i.e. product management.

Even worse, they may have spent their life having a product manager of sorts, from a teacher/guidance counselor in high school or parent to tell them how to get into a great university, a clearly defined and frankly easy and straightforward path into tech, and then a hive of order givers for anything outside the technical realm once there. My life was kind of that way.

Your options are probably either to let him go or have the product side taken over by somebody else. Maybe they can be trained, but I didn't succeed in switching mindsets within the 5 months I worked for that org, so I doubt you have the time.

Thank you for your honesty - yeah, it sounds like either I decide to become his PM and give him strict guidance or let him go.

> he only wants to chain existing solutions, rather than trying to imagine how we can make things better.

You have to meet in the middle. Nobody wants to reinvent the wheel - it's not good faith to accuse someone of laziness for trying to suggest a realistic product roadmap. If you're more caught up on the current SOTA in your field and feel that there's a better solution, the onus is on you to write that code. Your employee could still be a 10x engineer if you delegate meaningful work to them, but right now it sounds like you do have unrealistic expectations for them.

You shouldn't expect to find anyone more passionate about your product than you are. I'm not sure if you can focus on "other projects" while paying someone to invent your Magnum Opus for you.

sorry to clarify - I meant im always passionate because I've been a founder at a couple of couples that have exited for low $$ms, so always felt a sense of ownership.

> we've been sprinting towards building a MVP

Have you got a firm target ideal scoped out yet .. or are you still flopping about changing spec on what should be achieved as a first plateau?

yep, got 5 LoIs that represent $10m ARR with a defined product scope.

Is he a "first hire" or a founding engineer? "Hiring" founders isn't really normal...

Does he have equity?

founding engineer - we gave him a lot of equity; c. 8%