Hiring Engineers When You Aren’t One
As an MBA interested in entrepreneurship who used to build web applications for a living I am often asked by non-technical folks how they can find good engineers to start a company with. It’s a tough problem, especially these days.
Sean Corfield links to a nice summary of how to recognize good programmers when you aren’t one. The article isn’t a magic bullet, but it does a nice job talking about the culture of software development that one should look for when hiring.
Starting a software-driven business as a non-engineer is an uphill climb in most cases — if you aren’t someone making substantial contribution to product development in the early days of a company chances are you are overhead, even as a founder. Great engineers tend to want to work with other great engineers, so seeding your technology team with greatness if you don’t have it yourself is doubly rough.