Building an Engineering Team by Ammon Bartram and Harj Taggar

Former YC Partner and founder of TripleByte Harj Taggar, along with his cofounder Ammon Bartram discuss a topic startups often struggle with most: finding and hiring the key engineers who will build your product.

[albaqawi]

I love the give algorithm to implement and ignore credentials recommendations to reduce noise!

[tethron.]

Love this topic on building specific departments.

[minhphan]

Concise, valuable and highly practical advice, thanks YC and TripleByte!

[VicZ]

First of all, good talk, very informative. Thank you YC and instructors. 2nd, given the actual scope ot this talk, the subject of this talk is probably better to narrow to sth like How to conduct hiring for startup Engineeriny team. I'd expect 'Building a eng team' to also include post-hiring integration, new hire training (or no training), pivot and retaining engineers, layoff and firing etc.

[HughGuiney]

Ammon’s cadence made me think I had accidentally set my playback speed to 1.5x.

[akbarberlian]

Hi Ammon & YC team
Thank you for uploading. Great content of Tech Hiring fundamental,

I have a question :
What values we should find first in technical leaders, in order to build technically capable, strong, cohesive, always growing engineering organization?

[mccall]

Ammon, please reduce your talk speed from 1.5x to 1.0x :)

[mattyjmar]

This talk only applies if you're located in Silicon Valley and you want to hire physically on-site engineers living in SF Bay Area. Outside of SV, there's scores of good engineers looking for gigs and it's a numbers game to efficiently find the good ones.

[peiditube]

Great content. Has any research been done on hiring for raw general talent, and just giving them primarily coding work?

[softwarelabstelecast]

Sometimes I think coding interviews is basically hazing.

[joshuamurphy]

Most good engineers don’t want trial periods, and most of them can get good jobs without a 5+ interview hazing process.

[AlinNemet]

all this cultural fit stuff is just time wasting bs...unless your company is doing something "esoteric" ie not agile at all, or has really bad management or teams made up of egotistic psychos, the only few things an engineer is actually looking for might as well resume to great offices in a nice location, at least 12-15% salary increase compared with what they currently make, and all or partly familiar tech stack, with not too much legacy code. Really, the rest is just noise.