I hired the wrong first engineer twice before I figured out what I was actually buying. Here is what I would tell myself in 2020.
When I started looking for my first engineering hire, every guide told me the same thing: "find a technical co-founder." I did not have one. I did not know any. The advice was useless to me.
The first person I hired was a senior engineer from a Big Tech company. CV was incredible. He lasted four months. He was used to working on a team of forty, with PMs writing specs, designers handing him Figma files, and a senior engineer reviewing every PR. I had none of those things. When I gave him a one-line description of a feature and asked him to build it, he froze. The job he was good at was not the job I needed done.
The second person I hired was a freelancer who built fast and cheap. We shipped a lot. Six months later, when paying customers started using the app, the entire architecture had to be torn out and rebuilt because none of it had been written with a second user in mind, let alone five hundred. The job he was good at was not the job I needed done.
The third hire. the one that worked. was someone with five years at a small startup. Not a name-brand company. Not the cheapest freelancer. He had two qualities I had not known to look for: he had been the only engineer at his last job for a while, so he knew how to make decisions without a senior reviewer; and he had inherited a codebase that grew from 100 users to 50,000, so he knew which corners you can cut at 100 users and which ones you cannot.
What I wish someone had told me in 2020: the first engineer at a one-person startup is doing a different job than an engineer anywhere else. They are deciding the database schema, the deployment story, the code review standards, and the bug triage all by themselves. They are talking to customers. They are reading your support tickets. They cannot specialise. They have to be a generalist who is calm with ambiguity.
You are not hiring "an engineer." You are hiring the person who will be alone in a room with your codebase for the next eighteen months. Look for someone who has done that before. at a small company, on a small team, with a small budget. and you will save yourself two firings.
, Marcin
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