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Comment by RKoutnik | Hacker News Reader

sama, if you're reading this, I'd love to hear more about

> Senior People: In the early days, hiring senior people is usually a mistake.

I know a lot of folks (including myself) are of the opposite opinion - it's a mistake to hire non-seniors to build the first round. Senior folks can often see pitfalls ahead of time and dodge them, saving valuable time while the company is pre-product/market fit. I can think of plenty of definitions of "Senior" that I _wouldn't_ hire (overspecialized, 'senior' in years only) though. Our disagreement may only be one of definitions [0].

I have seen startups die due to lack of talent early on (I worked at a startup that died due to technical debt, but that's another story). What scenarios have you seen that were caused by senior folks that causes you to see hiring them as a mistake?

[0] More on my opinions on what 'senior' should mean: https://rkoutnik.com/2016/04/21/implementers-solvers-and-fin...

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There are multiple ways to be a "senior" employee.

The first is to be a very experienced individual contributor. Amazing programmer with deep experience, world class designer, sales person who can get to the right person in any org. These people are gold. Hire the best and most experienced you can.

The second way to be senior is to be great at hiring and building organization. These people are very valuable later, and will save you a lot of heart ache. Hiring them early is a mistake in general, because their instinct for solving problems is to hire great people and develop great process rather than to simply solve the problem themselves. For an early stage startup there are too many unknowns and this amounts to premature optimization. Later on this is the a critical skill set.

Inexperienced managers are nearly universally terrible. Inexperienced individual contributors can often make up for it with raw talent, and you gain experience fast at a startup. Therefore early on experience is not at a premium, you should hire primarily for talent above everything else. Later on experience becomes increasingly valuable.

Short version: Hire the best makers you can early even if they're junior, hire the best managers you can later which means more senior folks.

> Short version: Hire the best makers you can early even if they're junior, hire the best managers you can later which means more senior folks.

Interesting - this jives a lot better with my experience while still not contradicting what sama has to say. (I've worked under some abysmal managers...).

I like to say "Hire for first derivative, not Y-intercept" and it sounds like you agree with that as well. Good thoughts, and thanks for replying!

This is a strategy that has been proven to work, but history would state that it's not the only way. There are plenty of examples where senior people have started nice large growing software companies. In fact I'd dare to say that many more senior people have created more economic value from their startups then those who haven't...you just never read about them in TechCrunch. The valley specifically is littered with former Oracle/HP/Apple/etc execs (aka "senior people") that go on to create very big companies (Dave Duffield, Marc Benioff, etc).

(1) I totally agree that there are people who violate this rule and do great. Hiring really senior early can totally work, especially if you get the product right the first time. In fact, it can be a huge accelerant.

(2) There's a difference between the founder of a startup and early employees. The founder has to be a manager from day 1. I wish I had been more experienced starting Twitch. I generally think more experience for founders is a positive, especially when it comes to management.

> Hiring really senior early can totally work, especially if you get the product right the first time.

Spot on. I do find in practice that "senior people" get the product right the first time, but are less risky to try to steer the company in directions that may appear "disruptive".

I personally have experienced two problems with experienced people in the early days:

1) The last company I worked at started out with an experienced founder/CEO and a few entry-level people (including me). The company was in the heavily-regulated and very conservative health benefits space, and we were attempting to do something pretty radical. Things were going great.

After raising the series A, they brought in a bunch of executives who had been very successful working at more traditional healthcare companies. Those people immediately started executing the playbook they already knew which meant our startup went from being agile and disruptive to basically being a smaller version of all the existing companies in the industry. It didn't go well.

2) After that, I co-founded my own company. We're bootstrapped so it took a while before we could hire people, but when we did start hiring, there was a big difference between the entry-level people vs. the more experienced people we hired. This is almost entirely my fault, but here's what happened: I knew the entry-level people would need guidance and mentorship, so I invested heavily in onboarding them, making sure they understand the mission, and so on. With the experienced people (who I already knew well) I trusted them to know what needed to be done and do it, so I didn't spend nearly as much time trying to align them with the goals of the company. Big shock: that didn't work out very well for some of those experienced hires.

Once again, this is my fault, not necessarily a problem with hiring experienced people in general, but it doesn't change the fact that our entry-level hires have all worked out great while the experienced hires were much more hit-or-miss.

I have no idea if that's what sama is talking about, but I definitely nodded my head a bit when I read his advice.

Fascinating - I've heard many variations of the "MBAs come in and apply Process to terrible results". I wouldn't hire these folks either, though I haven't worked in such regulated industries, so I can't comment as to what happens there.

As to #2, I've met folks with lots of experience who think that makes them right all the time, and folks with lots of experience who have learned that they still have much more to learn. It sounds like you've hired the former - and I'm not trying to say "You hired bad, don't do that". This is an incredibly tricky thing to filter for, it may not be apparent until six+ months down the line. I'm thankful my current employer (Netflix) has worked hard to hire & retain only the latter. I'm also impressed by your humility near the end - it's clear to me that you're the sort of experienced folk who keeps learning.

Thanks again for your perspective, especially from the regulation side of things.

I think you touched a key characteristic for a good hire. When you can find someone that is humble, and of course talented, in my opinion the rest will follow.

When you hire some senior people, you may run into issues because how successful they have been in the past. When they get stuck, problems arise. It is natural, they were really successful in the past doing X. Now, you want them to do Y but they think X is they way to go because it has worked before. Who can blame them?

I came here to say the same. I'm pretty sure he meant "don't hire people with senior sounding management titles from big companies" but it could be read as "don't hire old people with experience" which despite being terrible advice is pretty common in this industry.

Agreed. I've worked at enough startups full of young folks powered by Dunning-Kruger [0] for several lifetimes. We've lost the meaning of 'Senior' such that the folks who do have tons of useful experience are afraid to show it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

I don't think you have to link the DK effect on this forum.. Half of us know it like the back of our hand, and the other half are too dumb to think they can learn it. Not sure which half is which though.

> I worked at a startup that died due to technical debt

That's interesting. I've never heard that before. My understanding is that most startups die because no one wants what their making. No market. Did you actually have a product that was selling? How did technical debt kill the company?

Lots of folks wanted what we were selling but the sales pitch didn't line up with what the software did. It was entirely technically possible but the 'technical' cofounder had saddled us with so much techdebt that we couldn't iterate fast enough to keep customers happy. Once we'd lost the attention of the early adopters, it was all over.

Could you go into some of the things he did that made the technical debt so bad?

I think the rest of that paragraph makes a distinction that suggests he's talking about c-level or VPs and such.

I think he means something like a very senior sales director, when in the early days, the best salespeople should be the founders and the team members touching customers every day

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