> I am always surprise when well funded startups hire former big-tech engineers, rather than experienced startup engineers
i'd say that if you plan on scaling, you need a bit of both. a lot of tricky scale/process/architecture questions have effectively been "solved" in big orgs, it's useful to have people who can bring this experience
to take a completely random examples: setting up a performance improvement plan, performing incident post-mortems, organising oncall rotas, branching strategies when you have a mix of small customers on standard product and big accounts with customisations etc
The risk, and I see that currently in non-software functions, is hiring people from big corps that know how to manage the people that solved those scale/... problems instead of the problems themselves. With the result that those senior people default back to building an organization that looks like the one they are used to. Which doesn't solve a single one of those solved problems.
Quite likely to happen of the founders / existing hiring managers have no idea themselves how big corp solved these problems.
Exactly, scaling doesn't help you solve product-market fit. It adds operational complexity/overhead with, in this specific case, no benefits, and solidifies the product that doesn't have market fit. Watch this for a laugh: https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ
i'd say that if you plan on scaling, you need a bit of both. a lot of tricky scale/process/architecture questions have effectively been "solved" in big orgs, it's useful to have people who can bring this experience
to take a completely random examples: setting up a performance improvement plan, performing incident post-mortems, organising oncall rotas, branching strategies when you have a mix of small customers on standard product and big accounts with customisations etc