The CEO's job

The bit about hiring contractors, especially for vital functions such as infrastructure and support is bad advice. A high quality contractor charges a very high hourly rate (it also usually isn't feasible to give them a sizable equity grant in its place), so you're left hiring people who would prefer a full time job but can't get one. This creates a poisonous and unpleasant atmosphere, which makes you even less likely to hire strong people full time.<p>I understand that "war for talent" is a popular narrative, but you note that those writing about it are almost always journalists who aren't programmers themselves. Non-technical writers don't understand quality developers want something more than a paycheck: they want to work on challenging problems, with people who they can learn from and in a company that has a shot at making an impact on the world. If you want to hire quality people than you should take hiring (all steps: from employment branding to interviewing to closing) a top priority: give employees time to interview candidates (expect each engineer to interview at least two or three candidates each week), be willing to let a position go unfilled for a _long_ time until the right person is found.<p>In short, be ready to reply "we'd like to do Y, but either we must strip out a feature X from Y, spend more time working on it or transfer an engineer working on Z to work on Y". If you're working on a hard technical problem, then your investors and customers shouldn't have a problem with that. If you're not (and there's nothing wrong with that), change your hiring strategy appropriately e.g., if you're building CRM software, stop trying to go after TopCoder finalists and ex-Google Search Engineers and instead look for engineers who are interested in business and product design/development. The former aren't going to be interested in joining you (other than at an exorbitant rate) until you're ready to use their talent, the latter will help you build the business to the point where you will need their help scaling it.<p>To use a vulgar analogy, the strategy of hiring a contractors to "move faster" is analogous to a man having nine one night stands hoping to conceive a baby in a month ("because I can't find the right long-term partner, and nine months is too long to wait anyway"): it's wrong on many levels and will poison your culture. It's long been known (Brooks' Law) that adding more "bodies" to a project to a project that's at risk of being late will only make it <i>more</i> late. Creating a company full of dubious quality contractors (with no loyalty, no "fire in the belly" about the product) will make your company look toxic to engineers used to working at "talent brand" companies where engineers are passionate about what they're working on and are confident in their technical abilities.<p>The CEO's real job is to manage the managers ("no, we don't have the resources to ship X at time T"), and sell the company (including to prospective employees). The blog post doesn't read "wow, this is a company worth leaving or turning down an offer from {Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc...} for!".

I agree that a startup should hire multi-talented people. But it's a bit extreme to say that startups should hire people who can do UI design, backend programming, and do business deals. Certainly such people are useful, but they're incredibly rare and are probably more interested in founding their own startup.<p>Also, I don't agree with the "just contract it out" philosophy. The problem you run into with contractors is that even if they're good, they don't have anything invested in what they produce. They don't have to live with it long-term.<p>I'm not saying that it's bad to hire contractors, only that you have to be careful with them. And I certainly don't think that it's a good idea to hire contractors because they're easier to find and fire than full-timers. In fact, many times it can be harder.

I come from a retail management background, so I'm a newbie to the tech industry.<p>The guys who taught me retail management put extreme emphasis on training. Training and knowledge dissemination was a top priority for the management teams I worked with. Once I was managing my own stores, I adopted this world view and had great success.<p>Coming from this background I'm sometimes surprised there aren't more articles about improving the flow of knowledge and communication within organizations.<p>So what gives? I learn a lot of stuff on my own (as do most of my tech savvy friends), is that the way things work in tech? Or are training and communication just not discussed very often because they're seen as so elementary?

&#62; Someone who can do business deals, write code, and do user interface design, is 5X more valuable to us than a typical backend engineer.<p>Absolutely.... If you can find someone who is _equally_ good at all of those. Very rarely (I personally have never) you will see someone _equally_ apt (and good) at both left (Writing programming logic, Solving tough technical problems etc. ) and right ( designing User Interactions, Doing business deals etc.) brained work. Humans are not programmed like that.<p>Sure there are people who can get by doing multiple domains, but they are rarely fit/enjoy/brilliant at all of them.

After reading most of the posts in this discussion, I really feel like people here see contractors as uninvested workers. I always invest 100% of myself in every single project I join as a contractor, and this is very important for me, which makes me read your comments like insults to what I do.<p>My age and relative lack of typical corporate experience may of course give me a bad vision of the market. Maybe most contractors are not working the way I do, which would make the advice Jessica gives a bad one. But even in this case, generalization may prevent you from working with interesting people.<p>Disclaimer: I'm working as a self employed engineer, mostly doing jobs with my team, and far from being someone "who would prefer a fulltime job but can't get one".

I like reading Jessica Mah's blog, so I'm sorry to jump right into the nitpicking. But something in she wrote doesn't sit quite right with me...<p>She writes that finding talent in silicon valley is like trying to find water in the sahara, but then a few sentences later says "We had a lot of talented people apply for full-time jobs, but they either lacked culture fit, or cost too much money."<p>Unfortunately, there's a lot left unsaid here, and it would help to hear something more specific. For example, what was "too much money"? What attributes contributed to a candidate's "lack of culture fit?"

If you're looking for fast on-boarding I would recommend Vagrant (<a href="http://vagrantup.com" rel="nofollow">http://vagrantup.com</a>). It's built for reducing project setup overhead which can be an expensive proposition if you're juggling resources as she suggests in the article.

5. His name should sell company products/services

&#62; It's typically difficult, if not impossible, to scale up and down your engineering team in the way you can spawn up new cloud servers. We're trying to change that by having a reliable source of contract engineers who can help us grow non-essential components of our codebase.<p>Sounds like an awful place to work. Treating your most valuable asset as a commodity? Let me know how that works out for you.