As someone who has reasonable experience founding a company, hiring, training, motivating and managing developers and teams, I feel I can tell you what I really believe:
Forget 10x developers. Forget berating developers for checking in code that doesn’t compile.
If you are planning to build a real growing company, You need to progressively put more stress on your SYSTEM. That is your job.
Have a kickass onboarding set of tutorials and documentation for everyone. Have a culture that anyone can assign an issue to anyone, instead of interrupting them. They can get feedback via updates on issues.
Use pre-commit and post-commit hooks to catch as many mistakes as possible, and clean up team formatting standards for your code.
Hire developers who are super familiar with whatever technology (language, platform, techniques) that you need them to work on. But NO ONE SHOULD BE A HERO, everyone’s code should be easily understandable, use only the simplest language features to get the job done (but no simpler), and be documented. Accrue no code code debt.
Each developer’s work should be documented and tested, preferably by someone other than themselves.
Each developer should be replaceable. That extra 30% cost spent on fully documenting and testing their code means months saved onboarding someone to take over.
Working remotely is actually GOOD. Working asynchronously 90% of the time is even BETTER. Everything in your system should assume people don’t share time or space.
People live lives. Companies build products. That is our motto. It means exactly this... ask yourself whether you are building a product, and if so, do not give responsibility to PEOPLE, but to the system. If they take a day off to spend with their kids, or work 3 hours a day, it shouldn’t have a major effect on the product.
And our compensation model reflects this, too. Instead of full-time employees, feel free to take anything from this:
As someone who has reasonable experience founding a company, hiring, training, motivating and managing developers and teams, I feel I can tell you what I really believe:
Forget 10x developers. Forget berating developers for checking in code that doesn’t compile.
If you are planning to build a real growing company, You need to progressively put more stress on your SYSTEM. That is your job.
Have a kickass onboarding set of tutorials and documentation for everyone. Have a culture that anyone can assign an issue to anyone, instead of interrupting them. They can get feedback via updates on issues.
Use pre-commit and post-commit hooks to catch as many mistakes as possible, and clean up team formatting standards for your code.
Hire developers who are super familiar with whatever technology (language, platform, techniques) that you need them to work on. But NO ONE SHOULD BE A HERO, everyone’s code should be easily understandable, use only the simplest language features to get the job done (but no simpler), and be documented. Accrue no code code debt.
Each developer’s work should be documented and tested, preferably by someone other than themselves.
Each developer should be replaceable. That extra 30% cost spent on fully documenting and testing their code means months saved onboarding someone to take over.
Working remotely is actually GOOD. Working asynchronously 90% of the time is even BETTER. Everything in your system should assume people don’t share time or space.
People live lives. Companies build products. That is our motto. It means exactly this... ask yourself whether you are building a product, and if so, do not give responsibility to PEOPLE, but to the system. If they take a day off to spend with their kids, or work 3 hours a day, it shouldn’t have a major effect on the product.
And our compensation model reflects this, too. Instead of full-time employees, feel free to take anything from this:
qbix.com/blog/2016/11/17/properly-...