Tag Archives: Technology

Startup Stories: Don’t hire for Now

12 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by in Recruiting, Technology

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, ,

If you’ve ever hired someone under pressure from someone above you, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

“We need an iOS developer! We need a Rails guru! We need one more Java developer and we’ll get the launch out on time!”

And you know exactly what the result of this is: you get a hired gun who might know the technology or skill you want, but doesn’t jell with the team. Or you switch technologies and that hire isn’t happy to work in the new stack. Or after a while, you don’t need as much of that skill any more and you end up with layoffs (or downsizing by attrition) that leaves everyone unhappy.

Despite these obvious results, it still happens all the time. You can see the effects everywhere: standard job requests have slots for “Skills required”, and recruiters use resume filters that look for specific acronyms.

Worst of all, candidates think they need to learn certain technologies to get hired (because, most of the time, they do). They focus on becoming an expert in a particular technology and then walk into interviews firmly set on working in that technology. You’ve no doubt seen these candidates before: they focus solely on the benefits of whatever technology they know. They subconsciously defend the technology and pooh-pooh others because they have so much sunk cost into the tech. It’s a vicious cycle. There’s almost no way to end an interview with me faster than saying that your career goal is to become an expert in a particular technology (even if we happen to use it).

The reality is none of this matters. Really strong engineers can learn a new technology in weeks (if not faster). We even had undergrad CS interns with no Rails/JS experience this past summer who became productive members of the team in just 2 weeks. Hiring for experience in a particular skill is really just judging a book by its cover, assessing a candidate by one of the most shallow criteria possible.

(Now, some might say that a candidate with Rails experience demonstrates a forward-looking, cutting-edge engineer. I do agree about that in part, but then you should consider Django engineers, too, right?)

What really matters? The two A’s: Attitude and Aptitude.

You want team players who believe in your company’s vision and culture. You want someone who will stay loyal to the team when the numbers aren’t growing as fast as you want. You want someone who will help their neighbor with their work, instead of worrying about getting all the credit. You want someone who will help further the company’s goals even if that means doing work they don’t like to do.

You want someone who can learn new things quickly. You want someone with strong fundamentals (those things that are really hard to teach). You want someone who can grasp abstract concepts quickly that aren’t always well explained in documentation. You want someone who can creatively see how different APIs can fit together to make a fantastic whole.

So hire for attitude and aptitude. And stop hiring for acronyms.

It’s a lot more work (more interviews) but it’s worth it. You’ll be hiring for The Future instead of hiring for Now.

Advertisement

7 Things you can’t think when brainstorming startup ideas

19 Monday Sep 2011

Posted by in Patents, Startups, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

A couple weeks ago, I wrote up several things to keep in mind when you’re dreaming of your next (or first) Internet startup.  Now’s here’s the other side of the story.  Here are things you might find yourself saying or find your co-founder/best-bud saying during your fantastical dreaming.  If you do, stop, back up, and try again.

  1. “I just found out that Apple/Google/NewShinyStartup.com is already doing that; we can’t do that.”
    Everyone in the valley says this so often, it’s completely trite, but it still catches people all the time: ideas are pretty much worthless.  It doesn’t matter if someone else has already done it or is about to do it; if you think you can do it better, it’s still a good idea.And doing something better doesn’t necessarily mean that the product is better. You just have to believe that you can beat the competition in one business dimension: product (Apple), price (Walmart), marketing (Coca Cola), service (Zappos), etc.  If you can beat the competition in a business dimension that matters for your chosen product/service, then you’ve got something.Then there’s the flip side to this…
  2.  “NewShinyStartup.com and AnotherStartup.com are doing something like this. This validates the space.”
    Startups are a dime a dozen; they’re falling out of trees, coming up from storm drains, like zombies that you can’t shoot in the head.  And like zombies, they take up all available space, even it doesn’t make any sense. You don’t need me to rattle off hot-to-trot startups that claimed to find a new market only to run out of money in months.You need to do enough research to believe that your market exists and is big. That research might include other competitors in the space, but that is only one factor. Those competitors may be on to something or just may be smoking something…
  3. “We’ve come up with this cool new technology/design/product that does ____.”
    This one’s a bit tricky because that statement sounds pretty good on its own. That is, until you realize that you haven’t said that your market actually needs or wants to do _____. This is the trap of coming up with a solution that’s looking for a problem, and many, many, many companies with really smart designers/engineers/business people failed here.Remember all of those browsers that showed your search results in a mind map you could fly through? Cool demo, didn’t solve a problem. And my latest predictions on failure on this one? Latest Techcrunch Disrupt winner Shaker. But I could be totally wrong: I didn’t think Twitter solved any problems either.
  4. “You know what (insert major product/service here) needs? A better way to do ____.”
    This one’s also tricky, because what you may have discovered is an opportunity to disrupt a major player. Or you may have discovered a missing feature, not a product. It’s happened so many times: a better way to organize your contacts, absorbed into your email service; a better way to backup your computer, absorbed into your OS.My latest prediction on failure here? Lytro.  Very cool, but are you going to buy a camera from an otherwise unknown camera maker because of it?
  5.  “Our product will post to the user’s wall/tweet something out on the user’s Twitter account every time they finish a task and then all their friends will try it!”
    Just read that again. Now with feeling. Realize how silly it sounds. Move on.
  6. “We just have to get the product right, and it’ll take off!”
    A lot of companies, big and small, have somehow developed a build-it-and-they-will-come attitude. Homestead had a lot of that problem early on. I saw many examples of that at Intuit. We want to be product companies, and we want to believe that in the end, the best product (design and technology) wins.This thinking often sneaks up on you because you don’t think you’re that naive. But watch out for signs: if your growth plan is based mostly on word-of-mouth, you might be headed for trouble. If you’re focusing almost all your energy on net promoter scores and user surveys, you may not grow at all.So come up with a launch plan and a growth plan. And, please, “marketing” isn’t a bad word. And that’s coming from a CTO.
  7. “We’ve got a patent on it.”
    Can you tell I have issues with patents?
Got anymore? Any good examples of companies that failed for any of these reasons?

The Commoditization of Technology

24 Wednesday Mar 2010

Posted by in Software Development, Startups, Technology, Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , ,

I’m a software engineer by training, somewhat by practice, and, in a sadly diminishing way, by mindset.  Maybe some of the real engineers around me can back me up on some of that. (Please?)

So it is with a heavy heart that I say that software technology has become a commodity.  Evidence is everywhere:

  • Increasingly, technical work is contracted out to third-party developers, sometimes offshore.  “Here’s a spec; how cheaply can you build it?”
  • Platforms are getting faster every day.  You can stand up a Rails site now orders of magnitude faster than what you could do just a few years ago.  Hell, you can configure a WordPress site to do almost anything you want orders of magnitude faster than a Rails site, for free.  Why stop there?  You can pick-and-click your way to a Ning site orders of magnitude faster than configuring a WordPress site.  (I know all those technologies/platforms don’t serve the same need, but you get the idea.)
  • Software technologist supply is increasing; i.e., there are more software developers now than ever.  The ease of building things is dropping the bar so low that a 17-year old kid can build Chatroulette in a few days.  Culture and technology is changing so that everyone can be, and is becoming, a technologist.
  • Costs of apps are dropping.  Mobile apps cost $0.99, not per use, not monthly, but once ever.  That’s because it takes a 17-year old a few days to build it.  If you make $500 on your app, you’re ecstatic.

There’s nothing terribly radical about this observation; I’m sure it’s out there everywhere.  It is very interesting to me, though, to take it to its logical conclusion.

Imagine if technology becomes so easy, so ubiquitous, so accessible that if you can imagine it, you can build it (or have it built) for nearly free.  I think we would all agree that that’s where we’re headed, amazingly quickly.  How would the software/internet industry change?

My take (thanks for asking) is you end up with something like the mass-market clothing industry (forget haute couture for this comparison).

Stick with me for a bit. Now, I won’t pretend to really know the clothing industry, but my naïve view is that it’s driven by designers and marketers.  The “builders” are outsourced to the cheapest suppliers possible such that if a designer can imagine it, they could have 20,000 units drop shipped to their warehouse in a week.  The success of a designer or a retailer or a brand is never about whether it can be built, or how efficiently it can be built, or how cheaply can it be built, but is only about whether enough people will buy it.

You can already say the exact same thing about the software industry, and I run into this all the time at Intuit.  An engineer or architect will have or hear about an idea and jump straight to the standard question: how are we going to build it?  They start thinking about data models, class structures, engineering processes, etc., stuff that I personally love arguing about.

But whenever I’m in these conversations I ask the same questions: what is the big unknown about whether or not this will be a successful idea? “Can it be built?” or “How efficiently can it be built?” is almost never the issue.  Put another way: if you ask the engineer/architect if they think it can be built, their answer is always “Of course”; if you ask them if people will actually use it/pay for it, the answer is typically “I don’t know”.  Voila, your big unknown.

I’ve rambled on for long enough, but I’d love to know what people think.  I actually have many, many more thoughts of what the software/internet world would be like with free technology, but strangely, they all have one common theme: we’re here already.