My experience has been that solving a very technical problem and solving a social one are very different skill sets and very few people have both skills and are capable of using both of those skills at the same time.
So you want people who are willing to be overworked and underpaid with the statistically worthless equity?
What next? You also want people who after they do a 996 work schedule to also have enough “passion” to work on open source projects during their free time?
I find this attitude and expectation disgusting.
Why you did this?, why this way? , why you joined this company?
This gives good understanding of both Personality and Hard skills.
But if they can't strongly advocate for an idea or against an idea they don't like and just give up, you don't get their full 'utility'. Which, tbh, is not a big issue with juniors with not a lot of experience, but still.
'low ego', but not too low. You want passionate debates.
In the beginning, you need the person who knows how to solve the problem. They are harder to find.
If you are pressured to grow quickly, you might be tempted to lower the bar. You can, as long as you understand that the person who knows how to solve the problem is still critically important, because they will be telling people which algo to use.
I think every company that uses tech needs at least one of these people to start with.
Your first hires need to be people who make the company faster, not slower. A single bad hire can sink the ship. Someone who is great in a large corporation can ruin an early start-up.
Personally, I'm hoping for low-ego high achievers. But that's up to you. This is where you get to define what the company culture will be.
The truth is that most people are mids. They need to be able to learn and improve, but if they actually care about what you’re building, they will do their best to do their best for the mission.
I’m not saying hire a bozo, but let’s be real. Think about places you’ve worked. How many of your peers were also “exceeds expectations” tier? Probably not that many.
So technical is important. But anyone can be trained. And it’s far easier when they will use what they learn to work on something they care about.
I think it also depends on what you’re building. If it’s something “cool” (either you get it or you don’t) people will be less motivated by equity (ie second order motivation) and more in making it success.
They don't need fancy credentials or to be super smart or have a great internet presence; what you should look for is a track-record of shipping, and evidence of independent work; and when you interview them, find out if they have good judgement, if they have a sense of when to trade off perfect for good enough, if they're able to diagnose and fix things when they're broken.
As you grow, you can add more traditional engineers to build a more conventional, well-rounded team. But most companies don't get to 20 employees if their first 5-10 aren't able to work quickly & make good decisions without getting side-tracked on all the myriad little distractions of designing the perfect framework for the framework, office politics, dev environment isn't quite right, etc, etc.
So the first hire must be a 10x programmer
The second one obviously also must be a 10x programmer but keep in mind the bar has now moved so he has to be 10x the previous one (100x)
In short it gets very challenging trying to find the final 10^10x programmer
You are the founder but even for you once you take outside funding, your “passion” is irrelevant, your investors only care about the “exit” and if you do get acquired, two weeks later you will more than likely have a blog post on your website about “Our Amazing Journey” announcing the sunsetting of your product.
It is naive for anyone to go into any company and treat it as any more than a trade for money for labor.
In the general population about 20% of people shows some traits that qualify as autistic with about 10% showing those traits enough that could qualify for a ASD diagnosis. Among software developers those numbers are roughly double. People with autism are prone to high anxiety with deliberate habits of trying to hide it, masking behaviors. You don’t want Dunning-Kruger type behaviors as the common establishment of your organization. Instead you want people who aren’t afraid to risk doing original things and will bluntly tell you about product risks as opposed to putting their personal preferences first.
Ability to communicate determines how a person organizes their thoughts on the fly. It also exposes their potential for working closely with others. Strong teams come from people that support each other as opposed to people who lack empathy or demonstrate low social intelligence. Strong skills alone can tank a team if communication is garbage.
A verifiable track record beyond the CV, that is extremely hard to fake with valuable experience that you did not know you needed.
As I said before at least 2 of the following:
1. Open source contributions to high-profile / major repositories (with code-review in the open with core maintainers). No hello world / demo projects.
2. Production-grade shipped projects / side-projects with paying customers or high-profile companies using it and is bringing in recurring revenue.
3. Given several presentations at conferences discussing anything from your project as a library author, maintainer or at a company showcasing your engineering expertise.
All are extremely difficult to fake and easy to verify and requires a level of effort on the applicant to qualify which filters 90% of noise out there. Years of experience is not a requirement but a bonus.
The rest of the other methods like leetcode, hackerrank, take home projects or quiz trivia, wastes time on both the interviewer and the candidate and both can be cheated easily using AI.
It is that simple.
What sort of positive signal is this supposed to be? Why would presenting point towards a productive employee?
In my experience, this correlates more with soft skills and “one man band” founder/maker companies that tend to sell training products or (if they do exist in a company environment at all) invariably work in DevRel and aren’t pushing code.
This can be found all the time, from many tech talks or conferences large or small and 99% of the time, the person presenting already covers most of the requirements and makes the selection process easier, not harder.
One part I did miss in my post was to require at least 2 out of 3 of them so, I added that in. But I'd rather optimize for hiring candidates who are builders and know what they are talking and what to build even with AI and can easily answer deep technical questions (because they have experience and have done it), than those studying for the interview and need constant hand-holding and are over-reliant on AI.
Remember, this is for recruiting founding engineers and the bar has to be high way above the noise.
Your criteria heavily biases towards very performative and obvious signs of hard work in a commercial setting, completely oblivious to hard work and character outside of it.
Hiring people based on knowing what should be built, how to build and especially knowing how to make the business money is not performative. I'd rather optimizing the hiring process for builders instead of rest-and-vest day-care slackers or leetcode grinders just for passing the interview.
There is nothing more performative than anyone doing these puzzles and answering quiz trivia, which doesn't make you or anyone money and it is only a waste of everyone's time.
Some of the absolute best candidates were always the ones with a github that hadn't seen a commit in half a decade, nary a presentation or conference mentioned in their cv. This was true at two different FAANGs and a couple of other FAANG-adjacent companies.
And surgeons should also have a track record where they can talk about how they do open heart surgery during their free time at home…
Give me 10 of those and you can kiss anyone goodbye.