Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent | Hacker News Reader

Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

156 pointsjoeemison126 comments

I have been struck recently over many conversations with different VC-funded startup CEOs (series A or B money, all at least $5M) at how strong the CTO/tech team rockstar/ninja kool-aid seems to be. "Our tech guys are smarter than everyone else in the world" seems to be a pervasive sentiment. Generally speaking, the CTO/tech team also seems to believe that about themselves, and usually the CEO is personally self-effacing and does not have that kind of personal arrogance.

I know that there are dark days and uncertainty within a startup, and that you do have to "fake it until you make it", but there's a real danger in drinking that kool-aid and missing out on the fact that everything reverts to the mean, and not everyone can even be "above average", let alone the smartest people in the world. The reality is that your startup that's survived to series A likely has pretty decent tech talent, but it's unlikely that they're significantly better than the tech talent at other startups that have survived similarly.

In particular, it is a big mistake to assume that your tech team is going to be able to solve problems that were really hard for other tech teams, unless you're willing to make solving those problems one of your core competencies (and the other tech teams were not willing to do so).

As a tech co-founder, I am extremely appreciative of the support that I get from my CEO, but I would never want her to (nor does she) assume that I will be able to solve problems that other talented teams have failed to solve for way less money and/or in way less time and/or with way less organizational focus than they have.

So if you're a tech CEO who believes that your CTO and tech teams are far superior to everyone else out there, I would say: the confidence is good, and probably necessary, but you have to make sure that you spend some of your time sober enough to acknowledge reality.

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Personally I think we (engineers) made this bed ourselves. I mean there are a few possibilities: one is that a CEO says their tech team is not so great. And of course behind that door lies Dilbert.

Another is that the CEO says nothing about the engineering team itself at all, and it's all product, product, product. On that path lies Apple, and I have heard many say (myself included) that we would not work somewhere where engineers are rarely seen and never heard. Although, obviously some smart people do.

And when CEOs give praise to the teams, they get flack like this.

So I mean, what do you want them to say? This is hacker culture; don't whine, submit a patch. If you think they are better ideas, go work at DilbertCorp, or for Apple. Or, if you think there is some other path, describe for us what it is. Or better yet, go start a company that behaves that way.

But the way I see it, CEOs like this are just following principles that we ourselves have asked for: we want to be taken seriously, we want to make decisions, we want to sit at the executive table, we want to be perceived as an integral role that uniquely contributes to the success of the venture. Saying "our tech team is really great" is a direct consequence of those principles.

Good point. On top of that, pretty much every CEO in every industry says some variation of the following:

"Our true strength is our team. They're the best and most talented group of programmers/butchers/bakers/candlestick makers ever assembled by mankind."

There's really no downside for the CEO to saying this. If he doesn't say those things it seems like he's trying to steal all the credit.

also, the contrary is also kind of true - they say that no matter what they tell you, it's a people problem.

Your interpretation is really nice, but I'm afraid it isn't true for many companies. IMHO "we've got top talent" is nowadays just another form of marketing bullshit that replaced "we are the leader" or "we are number 1" phrases which were mindlessly repeated by everybody for last 30 yrs. And in fact "we've got the smartest people" is even much worse because companies don't (and never will) have any metric to support this claim. It's just like yelling "we are the best". Pointless and kind of pathetic.

It doesn't have to be all black and white.

Over praising your tech talents, saying nothing about them or saying something that isn't particularly good in nature are just all extremes.

It's really not a two side of a single coin, either this or that.. No, it's more of a spectrum.

Humility has never demoted a person nor has it affected their odds of succeeding in their endeavor. I think the real issue at hand here is the line of thoughts that "My company just got itself a VC round, I must be the BEST".

Well, maybe they are good, maybe they are even really good. But by all means with 7 billion humans on this planet, I'm pretty sure someone else is better out there.

I think the OP was less about the team getting praise and more about the team being expected to solve hard problems with silly constraints. Why can't we be experts without the need for mythical estimations or our abilities?

But how about "Our team is competent?" "Our team are subject specialists." "Our team are pretty good." ?

...

And then I find myself wondering, how much domain knowledge do you need to identify a hard problem. Are founders just bad at estimating difficulty?

I don't think the point is so much around what the CEO says about the engineering team publicly. It's one thing to proclaim that your engineers are the smartest in the world/industry/space; it's a completely different thing to expect them to work miracles.

The toplevel post is a warning to not drink your own kool-aid when making executive decisions about what your team can and should accomplish; e.g. your team may be extremely smart and talented, but so are the teams of everyone else, therefore don't think your team will be able to accomplish miracles.

Pretty sound advice.

OTOH, most startups don't really need a great tech team.

Exactly what highly technical problem is Evernote, Airbnb, Snapchat, or Twitter, or Facebook solving?

I mean really deep technical problem like the news feed absolutely will not work with out some sort of huge breakthrough in AI, not that deep learning is 5% better than an SVM. Look at how well something simple like the points*timedecay system than HN uses for ranking works.

Fuck, even Google was a 20 year old algorithm.

We're building CRUD apps on what 20 years ago were $75 million dollar computers, not putting men on the moon with pocket calculators.

I disagree. Evernote, Airbnb, Twitter, Facebook, etc. could not be built without a great tech team.

Whether they solve new technical problems in the context of computer science is irrelevant to needing a great tech team to properly execute something like the aforementioned companies.

I think he means as a startup company you don't need the great tech team, you need the idea.

Yes, ability to execute is key, for the most part though you need people who are great with databases, rather than great at creating databases.

eg. Hire the guy that can optimize queries rather than the guy making PAXOS algorithms.

That's what I mean by great, and to be clear about startup I mean Facebook, et al, when they were at the stage of only having raised $5 mm, not Facebook post-IPO.

They may have not had 'hard' problems to solve as part of their core app.

But it seems as though, solving how to scale a CRUD app is a problem whose solutions are still being discovered.

Though I agree most startups don't need amazing developers, some of the start-ups you listed do.

Evernote is far from a CRUD app, while the challenges of scale at Twitter were noticeable very early on. Facebook also had to overcome some serious scalability issues, though they were able to push those out to later in their growth.

AirBnb and SnapChat, you are probably correct about.

The thing about being a great brilliant tech team, to me, doesn't necessarily all come down to being the smartest technologists in the room. It's about being the best team for the chosen product. Developers who understand what they are building and why can influence and make good decisions for the long-term of the company, where others who may be smarter developers might not be able to see the long-term implications of some of their design decisions.

As far as I am concerned, Evernote's core competency is their scanned document handling. Extracting meaningful information from bitmaps is not exactly an easy problem, but Evernote does it very well. Far better than a lot of other solutions I have looked at. Ultimately you need some CRUD to get the documents into that processing pipeline, but that doesn't mean it is just a CRUD app.

Now, we're maybe not talking cutting edge computer science research here, but I'm skeptical that the average programmer could put the same thing together in reasonable time. The algorithms involved are fairly complex and who knows what they had to discover on their own to achieve the desired results?

> Now, we're maybe not talking cutting edge computer science research here, but I'm skeptical that the average programmer could put the same thing together in reasonable time. The algorithms involved are fairly complex and who knows what they had to discover on their own to achieve the desired results?

How hard is it going to be for the "average programmer" to a) read a fucking research paper. b) optimize based on aforesaid paper to "achieve the desired results.". After all, every company in the bay who is anyone asks you enough C.S. fundamental questions.

I think you vastly overestimate the average programmer. Every company in the Bay area asks for CS fundamentals because they think they need a great tech team.

Among many serious engineering projects at Facebook:

* HHVM (open source) - A PHP runtime and JIT compiler (http://www.hhvm.com/blog/)

* Presto (open source) - A distributed SQL query engine working on hundreds of petabytes of data (https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/presto-i...)

* Running graph algorithms on a graph with a trillion edges (https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/scaling-...)

* Open Compute (open source) - Custom designed data centers down to the motherboard (http://opencompute.org/)

Are (were) any of these essential for Facebook's success? I doubt it. They are by-products of Facebook hiring talented people after they already had a leading product.

Of course they are, facebook handles petrabytes of data. Their infrastructure will fall apart without such projects.

Yeah. OP has never worked near any of these companies. Writing some basic linear algebra routines in python doesn't mean you're doing the same work that Google has to.

Given that Facebook is motivated by profits, one must assume that these projects are, in fact, essential to the continued success of the product.

> one must assume that these projects are, in fact, essential to the continued success of the product.

In the same way that Google Reader, Google Wave, Google Base and dozens of other products were essential to continued success of Google for a while (before they were discontinued), just because they were developed at Google?

Almost all of these projects are the result of the size and scale of Facebook not the nature of the problem they are solving or their core business.

The nature of Facebook (or Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat) is a simple CRUD application that many people are capable of writing. The additional complexity is mostly due to the size of their user base.

I thought everyone knows that it isn't true, it's like a BS marketing talking point. The things most of us in startups work on isn't technically difficult or pushing the envelope, and that alone should point to not having the best people or teams. Because these places will never gain the interest of or the pay the price for the for the very best, which can easily reach $400k/yr starting. The only technically challenging item is scaling a large software service doing relatively simple things, and that happens once you've gotten traction. Once you have traction you can pay for those people.

Is text chat hard? No. Facebook? Nope. Video Chat? Yes that is a bit harder, but still relatively solved. Social _____? Probably not. Any casual video game? No. Salesforce.com? Nope. Zoho? No. Airbnb? Nope. Dropbox? Nope.

The more interesting things are the google self driving car, machine learning and the occulus rift to a point. But those things are few and far between.

Dropbox wasn't a trivial engineering problem. While making facebook for a couple thousand users isn't too hard, scaling it to hundreds of millions was no trivial feat either.

Scaling a LOLCats database to hundreds of millions of users isn't trivial either.

In his post he acknowledged the scaling difficulty, but the point is, having to scale is a good problem to have and you'll be able to afford good engineering at that point since you have "traction".

ha yes but his point is that once these problems reach a non-trivial point the big guns get brought in. It's not the startup team solving them...

Trivial is not necessarily the opposite of difficult though. Solving an easy but non-trivial problem can be done with average engineers, if you a sufficient number of them to get the work done.

This is what happens when a company hires genuinely exceptional people to do easy but non-trivial work:

http://www.quora.com/Working-at-Google-1/Whats-the-worst-par...

Scaling is not domain complexity. Scaling may require significant technical expertise, but it's a safe problem: you only do it when you need to, which implies traction.

Also, I have to admit that I used to be wayyyy too stoked on scripting languages until I did a thought exercise realizing that the most interesting thing I could then ever do in the web-world is make an RPC to a far more interesting service.

Do you know about Facebook's architecture? I'll give you a hint which was brought to my attention a couple weeks. PHP is sitting on their front end, but trust me it is NOT doing any heavy lifting...

Lately I feel much more like "everything has its place" and I'm not so invested in hack hype. Java I'm seeing is a great language because it's kindof nestled between C++ and the web scripting/framework world. Lots of possibility for unique, almost C++ desktop-software-level but many strong frameworks and libraries for the web as well. And there are a lot of JVM languages that tie neatly together, so there is kindof a well-knit multi-lingual toolkit that is slightly less daunting than working with alien PHP-to-C++ RPCs (though this may be all psychological).

I'm not sure of the implication you're making there, and it confuses me.

Defined 'frontend' in that context? Also, are you referring to the HipHop compiled PHP as the 'backend', or are there some fancy Go/Erlang/Lisp/whatever tricks acting as MQ layers, shuttling data around that I'm not aware of?

I was implying that PHP wasn't doing any of the heavy business logic, but then I re-read some articles (most notably this one) & I'll admit I'm a bit confused.

https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2010/02/02/hiphop-...

I WAS referring to PHP as frontend, but based on the article it seems like there may be a lot more HipHop PHP than I suspected, because they mention that it would be too niche to write a ton of C++ code. However, there is this line which I think clarifies somewhat -- "HipHop allows us to write the logic that does the final page assembly in PHP and iterate it quickly while relying on custom back-end services in C++, Erlang, Java, or Python to service the News Feed, search, Chat, and other core parts of the site."

It seems like even though PHP is compiled & heavily utilized, it is still used mostly for page assembly on top of a Service-Oriented Architecture, with services written in C++, Erlang, Java, & Python.

I was under the impression Dropbox is a UI to Amazon S3. I use them and don't mean to deny it's a slick package. But I could duplicate the entire thing in about a day with inotify and rsync. The scaling is mostly on Amazon.

That said, I must point out that the scaling issues all of these super modern "change the world" companies, such as Twitter and Facebook, have are purely for the purpose of centralizing power. It's a self-inflicted headache. It's great business to be in control of millions of users. But it's a sad state of affairs for the internet in general. We've gone from open, decentralized, and peer-to-peer protocols to one company controlling everything.

There are interesting scaling problems. But Facebook isn't one of them.

> But I could duplicate the entire thing in about a day with inotify and rsync. The scaling is mostly on Amazon.

No, you could duplicate a narrow piece of Dropbox's functionality in a day. You could not even get anywhere near duplicating the product and the service in anything less than months.

Dropbox pretty much uses librsync and, I believe, inotify on Linux. With Amazon S3. That is Dropbox. Literally.

Polishing any product takes time. But that's universal and has nothing to do with engineering. What exactly is non-trivial about Dropbox?

Some of the technical challenges I can think of:

1. Version control.

2. LAN sync.

3. Dropbox probably also does a lot to try and minimize their S3 costs - so probably a good deal of compression/duplication-detection on the backend.

4. Any and all networking issues. Even if using OSS gets you 98% of the way, Dropbox probably gets you 100% of the way.

5. Performance. I don't know what Dropbox is doing, but about a year ago I tested out Google Drive, SkyDrive, Dropbox, and SugarSync. I didn't want to use Dropbox because it gives you the least free storage, but Dropbox was consistently 2x faster than the competition (without using LAN sync). That makes a huge difference so I switched to it, and if Dropbox engineers are beating out Google and Microsoft engineers, they're clearly doing something special.

It's a shame that the "Shit HN Says" Twitter account is dead. This would be a dead cert to end up on there.

In all seriousness, from a highly abstracted view, Dropbox isn't all that complicated. However, the same things are said about numerous other projects. I remember when Stack Overflow took off, and everyone around here said "I could build Stack Overflow in a weekend".

It turns out that, yes, you can build Stack Overflow in a weekend. However, all you've managed to build is a basic Q&A site. What you've missed is practically everything that makes Stack Overflow work. The rep count probably doesn't work as well, the moderator controls aren't there, the OpenID integration isn't there, the markdown controls aren't as sophisticated, it's slower, etc.

I don't have a link to it, but not long ago there was a repost of the original "Show HN" for Dropbox, where there were similar criticisms of how "trivial" Dropbox is to implement. The devil is in the details.

I think there's something to be said for acknowledging that your team isn't the smartest out there. I don't think being smart is, in and of itself, a guarantor of'success'.

It seems to me that successful business is not just about having the smartest solution, but having the right solution at the right time... and having a thousand other things fall in to place perfectly as well.

Yeah I don't want to get too venty because I'm too cynical/pessimistic as it is but..... I'm a professional web engineer now & especially as the cloud hosting universe stabilizes, most stuff seems so trivial. Can still be interesting, but yeah most startup level stuff is solved.

Previously I completed a master's thesis on audio signal processing / machine learning. Trust me, the work I was doing in that world was 1000x more advanced because it was essentially ALL r&d, but you get paid more in today's world to implement CRUD sites at an acceptable flow rate. It's a good way to sharpen some CS skills I was missing, but I think algorithmic development is much more of a dream job.

Can still be interesting, but yeah most startup level stuff is solved.

If you'd said that the challenges facing most start-ups don't involve solving a particularly interesting technical challenge on day one, I'd agree that this was likely.

However, if most start-up level stuff more generally were solved, everyone would be running successful start-ups, which clearly most people aren't.

Technical problems being essentially solved has nothing to do with a startup actually succeeding in the market place.

My personal (albeit naive) belief is that the limiting factors on most startups is a good idea. Start-ups only work when they are based on real consumer desires.

"Necessity is the mother of invention" but what is the mother of a start-up....? There are few who understand this realistically.

The talent is there but where is the business plan? It's not very often you hear a start-up idea that rattles you. If I heard one I'd hop on board just for some stake in the company. Also founder/managers are a pain... I imagine it must suck to be the engineer-slave of an ivy leaguer who is going out to another bar for a fund-raising meeting that will affect your future salary working on their hair-brained idea.

Who are these mystical dev-fairies pulling in such salaries? Which sectors? Positions? Companies? I've had my fair share of jobs and I've never run into anyone who made that much as a developer. I'm talking strictly developer, not a PM, not a director.

What kind of people make this money?

HFTs. This story hit HN a couple of months ago:

> A year into his new job he had a job offer from UBS, the Swiss bank, and a promise to bump up his salary to $400,000 a year. Serge didn’t particularly want to leave Goldman Sachs just to go and work at another big Wall Street firm, and so when Goldman offered to match the offer, he stayed.

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2013/09/michael-lewis-gol...

But yeah, realistically only a few programmers in the world are probably pulling down the kind of salary.

Which fits with the idea of "pay the price for the for the very best"

Also finance machine learning guys making $500k/yr (so I've heard). That also might be HFT.

This baffles me a bit. Why would you even want this much money? These sums of money are comfortably beyond anything I could reasonably spend, so after a certain amount it's all moot.

You could live in a nice, cheap country with a good standard of living instead, and spend a tenth of what you make while living very well with your family. People keep wanting more money and what do they do? Get a car. Get a house. Get a second car. Bigger house. Big whoop.

Few people spend their money on experiences, or enjoying their life, because they work too much to have any free time, just so they can go back to their stately home, which becomes "eh, my house" after a month anyway.

My "recipe for success" is "make enough money so you won't have to think about it, make sure you have many good friends, and try to make others happy from time to time". Most people don't even seem to know what makes them happy, really.

Money isn't just for spending, and money isn't just for your personal desires as you seem to imply. You can also invest and be financially independent, free to work on whatever projects you want without ever having to really worry about money again. A lot of money is a form of freedom.

Want to write good secure texting application that works on all major desktop and mobile OSes and make it fully open source? You could do that if you were financially independent. You could also hire people to do so if you wanted to.

Also real estate is expensive in NYC/SF where you would get these kinds of wages.

Money is freedom. Simple.

I know a guy: several knuth checks, hardcore systems programmer, extraordinarily well read, does advanced math (talking topology), nuclear physics, taught at a respected engineering school. He's being fought over at that level.. Which companies? Theres only the usual suspects who could play on that field

I would argue Dropbox probably took quite a bit of serious engineering, especially considering the scale it's at today. I'd pretty much agree with the rest, though.

Well, in my experience managing my own software company(I guess I am CEO but I did code a lot in the early days so I know what it is) it is not so much about the quality of the people.

The quality is something very important when your company is made by two developers. When you go up from this, you have lots of interactions and complexity.

You have love, hatred, you have admiration and envies, you have people that need money or need time to see their family. You have people that is afraid of their own mediocrity that try to protect their knowledge or "own" part of the company(fiefdoms).

You have people in some areas fight against others(marketing or sales vs it), you have different personality types that don't understand each other.

If you get all this right, life becomes easier and you have time for writing in HN, or kissing your kids, because it is a fantastic machine that works alone, and yes your tech people will kick ass.

Get this wrong, and most people do it not wrong, terribly wrong, and life is hell(I know because as a geek I did terribly wrong in the past).

If the best engineer does not sleep, you have a sh*t engineer(Chernobyl).

so how do you get it right?

what is right - focus on technical excellence and product fit or are you meaning trust and honesty levels in the company?

My question is this:

Startups I see here are usually looking for the same kinds of people to help build their products (Rails, iOS, UI/UX, etc.).

They look to really only hire people who are really good at things like this to build their product. Are these people the best people to have around later? Once your company has bigger problems than just getting something out the door are these people a hinderance?

I don't want to sound like these people are not smart but being REALLY good at one thing generally means you are lacking in other domains (only so many hours in the day right?)

I ask because I'm honestly curious. I'm not involved in the startup world at all but this was always a question I had when reading job postings here.

I've wondered about exactly the same. Are generalists appreciated at all in the startup world?

You have to be careful with the word "generalist." It specifies a (lack of) specialization, not an absolute level of competence.

People who are equally mediocre at everything are worthless. People who are savvy and hustle at everything are worth their weight in gold. But it's hard to sell that.

I suspect it has more to do with not wanting to train somebody rather than not wanting generalists. Once you get in, you'll be expected to do a little bit of everything if the company is small.

Yes, the good ones become CTOs at startups :-)

No-one appreciates a bad generalist, but a good generalist, who can pick up any piece of code or system you happen to have lying around or need to work with (e.g. can use tcpdump to debug a problem connecting to a client's server, or write a useful shell script, or do some C# coding for an integrated version of your Ruby app) is worth their weight in bitcoins.

My preference, as a (long-time) startup CTO, is to always hire generalists. The work at a startup tends to be varied and require people with lots of flexibility. I can't imagine anyone would hire any other way.

I've never founded or worked for a startup, but I would imagine that especially at the early stages, all your engineers will need to be pretty good generalists. You're (probably) going to need a website, a product frontend, a product backend, an infrastructure, etc... And if that work's being split between 3 - 8 people, most of them are going to have be generalists.

Maybe in 2004 but this is 2013. Rails, iOS, Digitalocean, heroku, aws, with a front-end designer. You no longer need to know anything about infrastructure.

Until you scale. I've met too many developers who say this until they're in a high growth environment.

My original point exactly. They get all these rails cloud heroku iOS guys and then how aren't the startups trapped? Ive never seen a job posting for an infrastructure all-around-guy

>Ive never seen a job posting for an infrastructure all-around-guy

I've seen plenty of such job postings, though typically for big boring companies; not startups.

Fair. I've seen a lot of 'full stack' or 'back end' engineer postings - which i think is 'their version' of an infrastructure guy. If you think about it, how would a designer who has mainly pushed pixels describe that type of offering besides 'back end'?

IMHO - By generalist - he also means closing customers, finding new clients, and crafting value props.

Coders are the construction workers of the computer world. Software Engineers are the Architects of the computer world.

I don't know. If you have a team that is able to consistently ship products that work and are well received by your existing client base, you probably do have some badass tech guys.

You don't necessarily have to claim that you are better than all other startups, you just have to claim to have a tech team that is magnitudes better than average teams at other companies.

It is crazy to me how many failed projects are floating out there. And once you are tasked with trying create a solution that requires coordinating with another tech team from another company, you will realize just how badass your team really is, and how many terrible tech teams are out there eating as if they create value.

In my experience tech and market success aren't nearly as related as your post suggests. As a 40 year old developer I've worked at a good number of companies (including startups and established ones) over the years including some that were, on average, technically very weak and yet very financially successful and some that were technically extremely strong and failed miserably.

All the tech talent in the world won't help if you are building something nobody wants, and if you are building something many people want you can get away with iffy technology, at least for a while (see: the first years of twitter).

I'm 100 percent on board with your last sentence. But I didn't mean to imply that all you need is a good tech team to be successful. I was simply making an argument that maybe the OP is undervaluing his own / his tech team's technical abilities because he is comparing himself to an elite subset of devs/engineers.

Maybe these CEOs bragging about their rockstars is not so unreasonable when compared against the nation as a whole.

Yep. If technical merit was all the mattered, we would all be using Xerox or Symbolics computers today. Those were some really smart guys. But you can't sell things no one can afford or needs.

How much of the failure is related to process or project management vs. the tech teams's skills?

I wouldn't be able to make a definitive judgement on that. But what I can say is that at my previous place of employment, we had a number of projects that never saw the light of day because the other organization couldn't meet their milestones. We were in direct contact with their dev team.

But what made you think the primary reason for their failures is the lack of good engineers?

I can't speak for management, but our team would inform their team on what was broken, and it would not get resolved in a timely fashion.

We would get contacted by the client to resolve an issue on our end, and after some debugging we would consistently discover it was broken because of the other company. They couldn't produce code that worked.

This could have been a management problem. For example maybe they simply did not care enough about the project to allocate the necessary dev resources. But it also could have been resolved on the dev side if they did a better job of testing their code that they claimed was complete.

Edit: I guess the most direct answer would be, since it was a problem that I could have resolved with tech, I didn't see a reason why they couldn't resolve it with tech.

"I guess the most direct answer would be, since it was a problem that I could have resolved with tech, I didn't see a reason why they couldn't resolve it with tech."

That really captures how engineers think. I think I often think the same way but my gut feeling is that there might be a fallacy in that way of thinking. I can't think of it right now but your statement does give me a bit to think about. I'm not saying you're wrong. In fact, I think the same way and that worries me :-)

There can be a lot more that's going on than just they are bad programmers:

- They are solving a fundamentally hard problem: it's a problem that at first glance looks easy, but turns out to be really really hard (for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem)

- They are under-resourced and/or over-committed: they know how to fix your problem, they just don't have time to do it.

- Your not paying them enough to make it worth fixing: similar to the above, but in this case you simply don't represent enough revenue to make the doing the fix cost effective. Especially if it's a problem only you have.

- They have architecture constraints that make it hard to fix the problem: a bad/simple/incorrect design may make fixing the problem very hard

- They have legacy code which was poorly written or simply coded very fast and is now brittle and difficult to fix.

- They have internal political problems which are preventing them from fixing the problem.

I'm sure there are more that others here on HN have seen.

The worse case I saw of this was with a contractor who underestimated how hard the problem was, under-resourced the project and the resources that where on the project where not very good engineers. That project crashed and burned so hard there were lawsuits.

Oh, for sure - worked in capital markets and getting any integration between the different teams was an unpleasant affair. However, it usually wasn't due to a lack of talent, but due to politics or personality - somebody who likes to say "no" a bunch, or refuses to allow some other approach. Most of the devs were grumpy, but liked the steady pay and stuck around. Probably the root of the problem - if retention became an issue, perhaps things would change?

Bingo! I have seen the smartest engineers (Princeton PhD in one case) rot in bad environments and mediocre engineers provide solid contributions in strong, engineering focused environments. I have rarely come across an engineer that doesn't want to build great products. If you want to suck the energy and enthusiasm out of team, add in weekly 120min planning meetings, required daily progress reports, and 4-5 product pivots.

I don't think that the mediocrity of other tech organizations implies that functioning ones are "badass". It's a sad state of the world that "actually shipping products that work" qualifies for awesome/genius.

Writing software is hard. To quote Douglas Crockford "Writing software is the hardest thing you can do."

So if as a team you are able to, manage client expectations, deliver on schedule, build a project that works to specifications, has good UI/UX, has a low user learning curve, meets performance requirements (obamacare site), is well received by users, I'd say your team is pretty great.

I know a lot more people who write software well than can guard Lebron James well.

Then how about choosing a higher threshold than writing software well? How many programmers do you know who are above John Carmack's level, for example?

"I don't know. If you have a team that is able to consistently ship products that work and are well received by your existing client base, you probably do have some badass tech guys."

From my experience, a good manager can ship with bad enginners but good engineers cannot ship with a bad manager. This is from the perspective from an engineer.

We engineers need to stop kidding ourselves. We are good at certain problems but getting something out the door and running a company requires much more than what we are expected to be good at. This is why blogs like PG's and Joel Spolsky have such a following. They explain difficult concepts to engineers in a way engineers will understand. Not everything they write about are revelations to the whole world but they are to many engineers. Human-centric design? Other industries have done it for decades, etc. We need to know our own limitations if we want to go beyond them or make the conscious decision to not get better at it and let someone else handle it.

Good engineers can ship with a bad manager, but it basically requires one of the engineers "managing up" and taking on the role of manager without pissing off his actual manager. That's a delicate balance to strike, but there are some folks (usually experienced engineers who have been around the block a few times, or folks who have previously held manager/executive positions but "downshifted" because they really like to code) that can pull it off.

That sound like my situation where my team leader is not very experienced (or good in my opinion). As such I often refuse to do things the way he suggests. "Just do it like this". When the word "just" is part of the phrase, it means that he probably hasn't thought it out very thoroughly.

When I've seen this done effectively, the engineer never outright refuses to do things the way their manager says. Instead, they take responsibility for educating their manager, in a way that the manager can understand and without threatening their ego. So if the manager says "Just do it like this", your response should be "That won't work because X, Y, and Z. However, I could do it like this, and it will have these costs and benefits and take me this long, and that's why I believe this is a superior course of action." At all points the decision is still up to the manager, but the senior engineer has brought enough data and experience to bear that they can convince their manager that it was a good idea to begin with.

I am all too familiar with only being good at certain things. My zombie startup almost failed before we had a chance to breathe. I was a developer driving around Houston, beating on doors to sell my product. And of the 30 organizations I approached, it did not result in one single meeting. I suck, so severely suck, at sales and anything to do with communicating with non technical people.

But about going beyond my own limitations, rather than trying to be all things, we just brought on some new partners to handle the marketing/sales, and things are finally starting to look up.

On the upside, most problems startups are working on aren't necessarily extremely technically difficult.

This is really quite true.

Couldn't agree more!

Definitely true for software. Compared to other engineering disciplines software development isn't necessarily easier but there's a tendency of software developers to overestimate their achievement. I know from my own experience that the ease with which complex SW systems can be created out of nothing is very satisfying and can lead to a positive feedback loop with a runaway effect.

When I work on EE or mechanical projects the physical elements involved have the opposite effect and create a negative feedback loop and (perhaps) lead to more deliberate development and more realistic views of the relative difficulty of the development effort. Anyone who has studied controls knows that negative feedback is generally what is wanted to reach the point you're aiming for.

Good clarification: Software startups.

A huge portion of the "talent shortage" is simply technical interviews that assume the exact opposite, and that only the best 1% of technical talent will do when you're running an ecommerce site selling unicorn horns.

Let's start by accepting that 50% of CTOs can't be above average. What can you do about this as a CEO? I see variations of two themes:

1) Find some benchmark, and reset internal expectations if they're wrong. Replace the technical talent if they're not great.

2) Claim that they're the best, and set high expectations.

My belief is that once you've chosen your team, you're better off going with #2. This isn't to say putting your head in the sand is good, but setting a high bar can be better than second guessing folks in an area you're not knowledgable about.

Perhaps it's ok to make a good judgment over time, but I think there's a lot to be gained from saying, "You're the top team, I believe you can do it." If over time they struggle to make the grade, then you have to recalibrate.

This is very tough, because studies have shown that most people of all fields do believe they are better than average.

Much more on this phenomenon here -> http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57568186/

Thank you for starting this discussion.

And of course, this applies to CEOs too. What is a CEO to do when they realize that they are worse than average? What can you do about this as CTO or another part of the team? Sadly, the only option appears to be to quit.

If your boss is a weak performer, your options are to transfer, quit, or organize a coup. The third option is very risky, and doesn't work often outside of investment banks. If your boss is a weak performing CEO, then transfering is taken away.

I'll add a question though... "What makes you think you know your boss's job enough to judge their performance?" This isn't aimed at you, but people in general. As a manager of managers, I've seen people 2 levels below think that their failing manager was outstanding. The reality is they didn't see the things that were important in that manager's job. (This goes for the CEO valuing the CTO)

Understanding other people's performance is very difficult.

It's not necessarily the CEO's fault here. If investors, and press would stop asking questions like "Why is your team better than everyone else" the CEO's wouldn't have to make up ridiculous statements.

When dealing with externals, winning isn't important. It's the appearance that you're winning, and having the CEO brag about tech talent is just part of the game.

Just like when CEO's brag about having former MSFT, GOOG, FB, engineers on staff, or having someone who went to MIT, Caltech, and yada yada yada.

In the end, what really matters is building a great product that helps your customers scratch an itch.

If startup technology people didn't believe they were superior to everyone else they probably wouldn't be in a startup.

I am under no illusions of my superiority; I am a developer at an investment bank.

I've done tech at a hedge fund. I'm an engineer at big tech company. I'm friends with many startup engineers. The whole lot is a mixed bag. You can't imply anything from their place of employment. Some really brilliant engineers stay in finance because they like the problems they work on and they get paid a ton. At some point, it's really a life style and values question.

The best engineers I know are usually quite humble. They don't lose their sense of wonder and are always hungry. Everything they see is shit, including work they've done. They have a relentless drive to improve.

I've worked with and encountered a lot of talented developers and tech people working in the finance industry.

Hell, look at Walmart's tech team: https://github.com/walmartlabs

There isn't necessarily a correlation between intelligence or talent, and the industry or company you work in.

This is spot on and my company is exactly like this. We get the rockstar team label slapped on us all the time when we're really just a bunch of mediocre programmers.

I don't think there are that many truly talented teams out there even though you get impression every other hip startup has one.

I think this behavior is created by the fundraising process as we know it. From angels to VCs to YC everybody focus on the team to decide wheter to invest or not.

The CEO is supposed to be inspiring leader and a good teamworker, if he praises the CTO as a genius he is perceived as both, with the plus that, if he is a good salesman, the investors believe that the CTO is a genius. So there it is, the startup dream team, a inspiring leader and a tech genius, the next Jobs+Woz.

And the best performances are usually of those who actually believe in it, so no surprise that after a few years successfully saying that, they start to believe in it.

I agree, the 'we have the best team ever' marketing is for investors. Or there is a big implicit disclaimer of 'for the level of difficulty we are working on'.

I was recently on a college recruiting trip for my startup and I said something similar to a candidate and I meant it.

I've worked in four startups in the valley and while each team had a large number of really smart engineers, all but my current one had some real lackluster ones as well. Maybe it just takes time to figure out who those folks are. I've been here less than a year.

This company has extremely high hiring standards and will turn away viable candidates who fail to impress. We spend a ton of time in recruiting, but I'd like to think the result is worth it.

Reminds me of a talk about 10x engineers I watched recently:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGkVM1B5NuI

That was from the Eng VP at joyent.

Since then, I've had a really bad experience working with one or more joyent engineers who were anything but 10x. More like x/10.

Consider the domain and the comparable.

For a limited subdomain (data anlytics, content distribution, Internet routing), I think it can be true that startups that are focusing on those areas are started by, or attract, world experts in those areas. Not because their brains are bigger than the random startup geek but because they have experienced frustrations in the space, have seen the history and evolution, and wake up thinking about solving problems in a particular space.

Also, the comparable. An environment where people can protoype, implement, test on customers, and then flesh it out will be > 10 x cheaper and 10 x faster than a 9-5 environment where you have 10 engineering and ops groups to convince and add headcount to to do anything, and often non-technical product managers in the way who need to be educated and can block or at least massively slow down GSD.

A symptom of the acqui-hire culture? If the CEO sells the team, he could sell the company

The trouble is less that CEOs believe they have a superior tech team, because any set of reasonably smart people working on a problem domain day in, day out will eventually gain a level of expertise in that domain beyond what most people have. The problem is, to believe you have more innate talent than others, rather than accepting that hard work is what makes people good at what they do. Arrogance is an easy trap to fall into though. Creating a truly humble team is the real challenge.

It depends of your market sector. In my main market (Application Virtualization) my tech team is critical. I have few developers who are the famous 10X (or 50X?) ones. Without them it would be impossible to ship the kind of products we are doing. It's not about being faster.

But that team is not enough for being successful and you are overestimating it if you think it's enough. Marketing and Selling capabilities are the other side of the coin.

My thought is that so many are using "fake it 'til you make it" as a marker for their ambition. So, if they want to make it big, they are going to fake it big. This leads to, among other things, all of the job ads we have all seen that say, "Join CompanyX and help us change the world of shopping." Of course, how that world is going to change ("do I still have to use money?") is left unsaid.

Maybe it's less important to have the best developers than it is to have the best developers in your market. That means you want better devs than the competition, and potentially domain knowledge that matters.

I wonder if that's a good explanation to give a VC - "Our guys are pretty decent, but it's not the quality of developer you are investing in. Our idea does not require rocket science right now."

High motivation + high specialization. Any competent team that dives really hard into a specialization can very often become the best in the world at it. That's not because other people couldn't do better, it's just that they haven't put in the effort to do so.

CEO's make shit up all the time. They have to convince the world that they're the next best thing, so they say stuff like that to give others confidence in their, and their team's ability.

Don't underestimate the power of confidence.

I think its like being married, everybody has to claim their wife is the most beautiful woman in the world, even though its not true :)

As long as you don't believe your own hype, I think its okay.

That's different. Beauty is subjective, so she may be the most beautiful woman in the world (to you).

> unless you're willing to make solving those problems one of your core competencies...

"Unless you're willing to solve hard problems, don't try solving hard problems"?

You're absolutely the victim of selection bias. Most of this does not reflect what I've seen in successful startups.

We're looking for an awesome web developer (oh the irony). Let me know if you're interested :) StudySoup.com

It took me about 30 seconds to figure out what your product does. You might want to move the bit about your partners to the bottom of the homepage and the stuff about the product and its features to the top of the page. I don't really care about your partners if I don't even know what you do in the first place. Good luck.

That's quality feedback! I really appreciate you taking the time to write that out.

We figured since we're so small and unknown at this point, it would make sense to wear the partner badge high on our chest...but your msg makes complete sense.

In case the website didn't make it clear, we provide course creation tools so any educator can create or curate a textbook replacement.

>usually the CEO is personally self-effacing and does not have that kind of personal arrogance.

I haven't seen that. Usually I see the whole "my tech team are all the best awesomest rock ninjas" tripe from the CEO, and entirely because it is an extension of their personal arrogance and massive ego. You talk to the CEO and they have the best tech team in the world solving impossible problems nobody else can do, and you talk to that tech team and they are like "We're making a website, there's nothing special about it". The CEO believes the quality of their tech team reflects their ability as a CEO, thus they must have the best team since they are the greatest CEO.

A sidenote you can ignore but I just need to vent: these massive ego CEOs then insist on making their tech team do this: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell because they "know people", so they know what people want.

In my experience, those who have made it to Series A have had enough humbling experiences to have learned how to hide obvious arrogance. I would agree with your assessment of brand-new CEOs, though.

Until you get a new hr director (who has their own agenda to reduce the pay qantum) and suddenly your stack ranking and magically a load of "B" and "c" players arrive.

Problems with incompetent leaders in Software/Startups.

1) Throwing engineers at something without asking the engineers

a) Twitter b) Spotify c) Soundcloud

Tweetie.app Lorens vs current twitter application.

2) Not allowing remote work.

3) Shitty domain knowledge that isn't worth crap.

Twitter and Spotify and Soundcloud have incompetent leaders?

Where can I learn to be so incompetent!?

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