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0 pointsJonChesterfield4y ago0 comments

Can you think of any amazing software written by one person who was working for another person who owned the company that owned said software?

I sympathize with the argument that one engineer can be sufficient but am doubtful about them being an employee as opposed to founder.

0 comments

urthor4y ago

That's exactly what happened with Twitter. It was at a company named Odeo.

But yes, I think you can have two high quality employees make good software? I mean they're employees, you're going to give them marching orders to do something presumably.

jokethrowaway4y ago

This is hard to achieve because generally good engineers are either working high pay tech jobs OR they work in a startup as founders / early employees with make-me-rich shares.

Sure, there are exceptions who don't know their worth. In general it's hard to find mediocre technical cofounders and very very hard to find good technical cofounders.

urthor4y ago

I think the assumption here is that this is a Hackernews thread about someone asking how to make their startup succeed.

Therefore, I wrote the post with some sort of assumption that OP is the technical founder. Hence OP is supplying the stuff like the vision, the outline of the tech stack, OP probably made a lot of stuff themselves.

Hence, it was more a guide on how to find extremely dedicated and good engineers to work for you, the founder. And how to deploy them to take load off you as the technical founder.

As a technical founder you rapidly become far more important as a store of technical knowledge. You're off to customers doing technical sales, networking with people you know for hints at how to solve your technical problems, etc etc.

Hence,what OP needs is top quality execution while they go off and do all that stuff. And ye ole Ghanian FOSS committer is the tree I'd shake.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

urthor4y ago

That's exactly what happened with Twitter. It was at a company named Odeo.

But yes, I think you can have two high quality employees make good software? I mean they're employees, you're going to give them marching orders to do something presumably.

jokethrowaway4y ago

This is hard to achieve because generally good engineers are either working high pay tech jobs OR they work in a startup as founders / early employees with make-me-rich shares.

Sure, there are exceptions who don't know their worth. In general it's hard to find mediocre technical cofounders and very very hard to find good technical cofounders.

urthor4y ago

I think the assumption here is that this is a Hackernews thread about someone asking how to make their startup succeed.

Hence, it was more a guide on how to find extremely dedicated and good engineers to work for you, the founder. And how to deploy them to take load off you as the technical founder.

Hence,what OP needs is top quality execution while they go off and do all that stuff. And ye ole Ghanian FOSS committer is the tree I'd shake.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse