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Comment by kache_ | Hacker News Reader

before you hire an engineer, make sure you have your onboarding streamlined

This is the worst advice. You don't want to spend resources on problems that are not yet even problems. Especially extremely early when you don't have any resources to burn.

One super power startups have is being frugal with money, why would you want to throw it away?

No engineer taking a role like this is going to expect an onboarding process. Many of them are specifically drawn by the idea they'll get to sit down and solve a problem on day 1.

> Many of them are specifically drawn by the idea they'll get to sit down and solve a problem on day 1

I don't see how engineer #1 or engineer #100 changes that.

When I onboard a senior engineer, they get a problem on day 1.

The difference is that when hiring engineer #1 there's no technical infrastructure to which you'd onboard someone, and nobody who's really qualified to make a decent technical onboarding process - you're hiring a person to create this process (among others) from scratch, make the initial decisions themselves (instead of being told them during onboarding) and onboard others.

Onboarding become here are the bathrooms, there is a great place to eat down the street.

Agreed. Even if I’m not #1, or even #10, you’ll stand a much better chance of hiring me if you never, ever, mention the O-word in my presence.

shudder

Have you been in the position to hire many folks for startups?

Could you share a bit more about why, in your experience, this is something to prioritize with your first engineer?

What should the onboarding look like for the first engineer?

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