Ask HN: What do you look for in your first 10 hires?
I've been helping a few companies recruit founding engineers. After doing a lot of screens I have a rough idea for what to look for. For others that have done a lot of hiring what do you look for specifically besides their technical ability?
Something that is not in the 1M+ people studying for interviews and throwing pieces of paper (CVs, cover letters, degrees) at the job application:
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:
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.
> Given several presentations at conferences discussing anything from your project as a library author, maintainer or at a company showcasing your engineering expertise.
What sort of positive signal is this supposed to be? Why would presenting point towards a productive employee?
neilk17