As a former founder, I often spend time with other founders to help them with problems I may have gone through already.
One of such problems β and a big one β is hiring.
In particular, many founders struggle at figuring out when it is the right time to hire more engineers.
If you search online (or talk to people), you often find conflicting advice:
β¬ οΈ You should hire early β before problems get too big.
β‘οΈ You should hire late β to avoid premature scaling and burning money.
This dilemma is particularly high-stakes, for two reasons:
πΈ Hiring is extremely expensive β both in terms of compensation money, and time your team will spend on the process.
π ββοΈ Reverting is hard β firing sucks for everybody, so you want to optimize for doing that as least as possible.
So, of course, the solution is to hire just at the right time. But how do you decide? What are the signs that you need more people?
In this article I collected the best of my knowledge about this, and that of the best founders and hiring managers I know. We will cover:
β±οΈ Timing β hiring takes time, a lot of it.
βοΈ Opportunities vs bottlenecks β a healthy mental model to think about hiring.
π¨ Signs you should hire engineers β clues that you need more coding power.
πΌ Signs you should hire managers β for when the bottleneck is about something else.
β Anti-signs β false clues that you shouldnβt take into account.
Letβs go!