Startups: Stop Trying To Hire Ninja-Rockstar Engineers

It is interesting how strong the idea of not paying developers decent salaries is, even among people where the quality of such hires determines success or failure of their company.

"While companies fight tooth and nail over engineers with MIT or Stanford degrees with years of experience, as CTO of designer pages, my best hires were consistently entry-level developers that I developed on the job."

Is this really all that surprising? An MIT trained engineer with years of experience probably would find 'designer pages' boring, and would rather be principal engineer at Google (or wherever), getting paid an "unfair" (note quotes!) wage and great stock options and working on highly interesting technical problems.

If such an elite engineer wants to tackle business problems, why not run his own startup vs working where his skills are not valued?

That said, I am all for hiring and training people just out of school. There is a place for people of all temperaments and skill levels in the industry.

I thought this was pretty spot-on.

Why not hire junior devs (or marketers, or any other staff for that matter), train them in your company's culture and work methods, and let them grow into the senior role once they have a better understanding of your company and it's customers/users?

It seems to me like this approach would give entry-level folks a chance to develop their skills while also producing far more learning and teamwork than you'd have otherwise. All while saving cash for other strategic needs.