One of the more common responsibilities of a VP of Engineering joining an early stage startup, around the series-A stage, is to scale an engineering team. The simple way of looking at this endeavor is to assume that this task is just a matter of hiring more engineers. Nothing could be further than the truth. Hiring is the tip of the spear and represents a fraction of the challenges the engineering team will face. In this post, I cover some of these challenges
Productivity
The desire to scale an engineering organization often stems from the need to increase the velocity of product development, which should happen in the long-term. In the short-term, meaning over the first 6-12 months of scaling, the team productivity will likely drop. This is counter-intuitive, especially for the rest of the business who make a linear assumption: more engineers implies more features. In time, this should be true, but initially it will not. Scaling a team is a big investment spanning two major efforts: hiring and onboarding.
In my experience it takes interviewing anywhere from 5-10 candidates to make a single software engineering hire. The range is a function of the technical bar and the competitiveness of the software engineering market. If you structure your interviews well, you should be filtering candidates out earlier in the process and only progressing ones who have a high chance of both passing the entire interview and accepting. The average time a candidate will spend interviewing, regardless of how far or early in the process they make it, tends to be 4 hours spanning a recruiter screen, hiring manager screen and ~2 technical interviews. Therefore to hire 10 engineers you will need to invest anywhere from 200 (5x4x10) to 400 (10x4x10) 400 hours. That’s anywhere from 10% to 20% of the working hours of a single engineer per year (assuming 2000 hrs/year). More critically, this doesn’t take into effect the impact of context switching between interviewing and product development. Context switching takes its toll and has a big impact on productivity.
Congratulations, you’ve hired 10 more engineers and doubled your team. You now have a bigger challenge on hand; making those engineers productive. It is not unusual, during that first scaling period to end up with a bi-modal distribution of tenure amongst the engineering team. Half of your team will have been with the company since the very early days, and the other half very recent.
Therefore, the onus on onboarding all of these new hires will fall on the more tenured, and critically more productive, engineers. This again results in a drop in the overall team productivity.
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