Ask HN: Why do startups try to hire for more specific skills? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do startups try to hire for more specific skills?

It seems like when large companies (like Google) are hiring software engineers they mainly look for generalists that don't necessarily have experience with any specific technology (like Rails or PHP). But startups tend to look for people with specific skills.

Why is that? Are startups potentially missing out on hires that are dissuaded from applying by the overly specific requirements? After all, most web programming is fairly similar, and it doesn't take all that long to get up to speed with a different framework.

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Startups tend to not have the time or ability to train in specific disciplines. Once they find out they need a skill in the team, they can't divert someone from another task (they're already busy!) to learn it. So they hire people with that skill already.

OTOH, it's hard to find engineers. So given your choice is between not hiring anyone and hiring someone with slightly different skills from exactly what you want, why do startups prefer the former?

Because startups don't have the ability to train.

There's little use in hiring someone that doesn't have the skill you need: all you could hope to do is pay them to sit there for a couple of months reading and practising before you can set them onto your actual product.

I understand that, but some of these startup posts have a list of 7-10 technologies. Surely there's some that are essential and others on the "nice to have" list? You want a Django person who knows JQuery, but if they have Rackspace experience rather than AWS, or if it's a Rubyist who knows gem A but not B, it seems like they'd be excluded on some of the job listings.

I'm not really sure which posts you refer to.

Job posting tend to mention large frameworks (such as django or rails) or ask for experience with certain vendor software (such as postgres or redis).

Specific libraries would be highly uncommon, as they would only be used for a single task (and not what you deal with every day). I'd be wary of any job posting that does this: they could just have a single problem that they'll get you to solve as an interview question.

engineering resources are precious, diverting one team-member to train a new team member is time-consuming and will render two engineers non-productive.

Compare this to somebody who already knows the technology used, you can explain the basics in a few hours, get him access to the codebase and then answer questions he might have.

Startups do not have the cushion or luxury of time and resource compared to larger companies like Google. They usually have a specific tech. stack that they use especially in the early days. OTOH, Google etc. have engineers building things in every possible language. So there is no specific need to only hire say Python engineers.

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