Re:Anti-Patterns in Startup Engineering Hiring
by polskibus on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @04:15PM
(#33335563)
In startup context, when still experimenting with product-market fit and trying to win early customers, you need generalists to be able to quickly change direction when necessary. Specialists have too much inertia in such cases.
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Re:Anti-Patterns in Startup Engineering Hiring
by ivan_gammel on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @04:53PM
(#33336036)
When searching for product-market fit the last thing you need is changing your tech stack on the fly. Generalist can help you to bootstrap your initial stack if she has a good knowledge of all components, but specialists allow you to focus on what really matters, building foundation of your ops while you experiment.
Re:Anti-Patterns in Startup Engineering Hiring
by ghiculescu on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @05:18PM
(#33336305)
A good generalist will not change your tech stack on the fly. Of course that’s a bad idea.
I think what GP meant is more like they will be willing to change what they are working on day to day in response to what you learn from the market, and will be fine with throwing lots of things away if they don’t work.
If you focus on foundational work too much that comes with the trade off that you can’t spend as much time building features. It’s common to see engineers fall into this trap.
Re:Anti-Patterns in Startup Engineering Hiring
by ivan_gammel on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @06:08PM
(#33336797)
If we are not talking about one person team, frequent context switching is counterproductive and same jobs are better done by two specialists (e.g. FE and BE) than two generalists. It’s also a common trap to build a lot of features without any evidence that users need them, 30-40% of effort wasted on something that does not have enough business value or on validating with code hypotheses that could be validated by one email with typeform.
Re:Anti-Patterns in Startup Engineering Hiring
by matai_kolila on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @07:41PM
(#33337717)
Nooo, as literally a person doing this right now, splitting up the work is a terrible idea.
Almost everything you do is wasted effort at this stage (until it suddenly isn't), you need to be okay with that when in this role, and everyone needs to know how to do everything if you want to even have a prayer of a chance at a normal life.