His point is that's insane :). The general consensus on Hacker News is a good brand new start-up is 2-3 people, who are all coders. I tend to agree with this, except for exceptional projects like search engines. Most websites can be handled by a hacker or two at the beginning.
This site could be done by just one mostly incompetent programmer in short order. What the other six guys could possibly be doing is a mystery. They are probably just slowing down the one guy doing any work.
It takes all sorts of people to make this world :) Since this is start-up news site I'd think we're more hot-blooded and non-corporate coders who might appear incompetent to you, but we make stuff happen in days instead of weeks and we like to make tools and sites.
Me being a co-founder of a start-up too, any insight on hiring that gives us a better chance to get good coders is worth a post on HN :)
If such a team of 3 people comprised of script kiddies and 5y PHP coders are going to create a $20m/year product, you can be sure that they will take precedence over anyone who was 'properly' educated in cs when it comes to hiring.
> I'm sure it happens
Yeah it does happen. While using the Internet, quite frequently, you are looking at such products developed by such teams, making millions of dollars a year. Even as the good engineering that is being done at FAANG is now being questioned over profitability, with even Google talking about 'inefficiency'.
It is completely insane that some places want 20-30 people for a CRUD website. Yes, there is domain complexity there (that’s what makes the job actually interesting, unlike the tech we have to use) but that much?
Really the issue is we continually subvert engineering needs for business wants.
Until that is no longer the norm the fractal of WTF will grow deeper.
Yeah, that's worrisome after their long track record of competent diligence in web dev. "If you hire all A people, he said, they'll also hire A people. But if you hire B people, they'll hire the C people and then it's all over."
Even worse, amateurs from overseas with no programming study or talent, trying to quickly create a portfolio to get a remote job. This is how you have websites exploding nowadays.
I think many people in the germany hacker community don't want to be associated with "those startup guys" because many of "those guys" lack technical understanding. Like you said, many business guys hire developers to build yet another ecommerce site.
We're a small Company (https://futurevps.de/) that offers custom Servers fully based in Germany (for data privacy reasons) and get much less media coverage than "ecommerce" companies. I think that nearly 99.9% of the german startup newssites cover ecommerce-ish businesses.
I think websites like Stack Overflow, GitHub and HackerNews attract a certain type of programmer, which might not always be the sort of person a business is looking for. Or, at least, it will exclude a lot of people who aren't interested in being involved with online development communities. That is, they are too hardcore.
So you want to hire a master-of-all-trades super-coder capable of building a webserver, a web application, database development, DBA duties, front-end development, CSS, Photoshop design duties.
LOL.
You guys are fucking crazy. Unless you're willing to pay half a million a year for a some kind of supercoder capable of doing all the tasks of your company and doing so instead of starting his or her own company... then good luck.
Honestly these fucking dumbass newly funded YC companies must be smoking some nice weed.
Looks like we found the person “building and leading amazing teams” in the thread. How could those lowly coders ever figure out how to secure a product?
I don't think that post is the same situation at all - there, Crew made side projects that became popular and then received traffic from them. Here, corporate sponsors skew which tools a ChallengePost employee recommends for hackers - some of which I personally believe are not at all good tools for the listed jobs (S3 for static website hosting??).
Nope, this is like everyone doing websites in the 90's during the dotcom bubble.
All small business trying to find honest people ended up hiring someone's 12yr old cousin (trhu a spiffy LLC front) and ended up with worst-than-useless websites full of security holes and zero accessibility.
Hope those projects are all games and fart apps and not mission critical stuff. and since i have a very hard time thinking of mission critical apps, i think the world will endure.
This site could be done by just one mostly incompetent programmer in short order. What the other six guys could possibly be doing is a mystery. They are probably just slowing down the one guy doing any work.
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