Leave your thoughts. How do you build an engineering team that stays together for decades when building early startups?
It's getting more and more salary obsessed and culture obsessed with young minds and mid level folks these days. While it's important that those two are important, sometimes I wonder how founding folks build a team that feels together, ships fast with great quality, don't give up on each other and stay longer in the company. If you have been a part of such teams or managing such, leave thoughts here on what helped to achieve that state - could be how framworks, culture, customer obsession, etc are used.
My personal opinion. Retaining Young team is tough, instead you should have 30+ age bracket for better retention. As the adventurer/explorer in you dies down and sense of purpose / be part of something big etc etc ..
Not an answer to the post, but I think Zerodha is doing good in this area
Coy Carmden
Stealth
8 months ago
Exactly right. India needs more of this and we need to build frameworks by learning from such companies to grow.
Dezi Lee
Stealth
8 months ago
Their engineering team doesn’t need to think about what other companies are providing as compensation, plus last I checked they hired two in engineering team in 4 years
I’ve been working for a SV startup that started in 2019. Was the third hire at the company. Only 1 of 7 initial engineers have resigned. Here are some things that help an early stage team together.
- Success: There is no better reason to stay than success. Initially this might be a good pre/seed stage funding, good founder credentials, and then a product that actually makes sense and money.
- Experience engineers: Too many early stage engineers are a recipe for perfect failure. Hire a handful of experienced, both generalists as well as domain experts. The team needs to be really good at what it does and complement each other. That’s how people respect each other and solve difficult problems.
- Transparency & Ethics: These go a long way. Not just in early stage but through out the career.
- ESOPs: Experience engineers generally know how they work, the risk involved and have already seen it work some place else. They understand that a 20% extra salary won’t make or break their career. They are in it to ensure they don’t have to work for money again.
- Room to grow: Allow people to switch between roles. Own their outcomes. Coach them into their new roles. Hire world class managers but just 1-2 of them
It’s not just Engineering. If you get a group of highly talented and motivated people together, show them the upsides of solving really difficult problems, and don’t try to scam/manipulate, people will stay for way longer and be themselves while they are at the company.
From my perspective give them good salary decent hike make them feel important part of the company value their thoughts
Don't hire entitled people. Hire good, humble talent from Tier 1.5 colleges, pay them well. Good talent looks for 15-20% hike every year. They will compare with MNC pay. If you can't pay that, hire mediocre talent. Be ready to face slower shipping. Back them during tough times. Tough times might be for either the employee or the company. Flexible work timings, wfh are other perks you can give them - make sure you are able to manage performance if you are giving these
