Hiring your first engineer: A quick guide for non-technical founders

By Dmytro Grechko, founder and CEO at Deskree

Inevitably in your journey as a startup founder, there will come a point for you to hire your first engineer. While a technical founder may have a pretty clear understanding of how to approach this task, it may not be as easy for non-technical people.

Building your dev team is a time-consuming and expensive process, but if done right, it will prove to be fundamental to your startup’s success.

To hire or to outsource?

One of the first dilemmas founders come across is deciding when to hire an engineer, when to use existing tools, and when to outsource. Understanding if you really need a dev team comes down to knowing where the innovation of your product comes from and how fast you need to move.

Ask yourself, is your software proprietary and unique? A great example of this would be a new image compression software. In this case, it’s best to keep your development in-house to protect and nurture your IP. On the other hand, if you’re building a marketplace, tapping external development resources early on can be a smart move to save both time and funds.

Just remember: If you’re outsourcing, perform due diligence to make sure the agency follows best practices. Sorting out IP ownership from the get-go is a must with outsourcing.

A balanced approach often works best — developing pivotal features internally while outsourcing the mundane. Remember, assembling a dev team is no small feat and can stretch over months. If rapid market entry is your goal, outsourcing initial development phases could work well for you.

Hiring soldier vs. general?

Hiring your first engineer can be tricky, and you need to keep a few things in mind to ensure you get the best fit.

Soldier vs. general: If you are a technical founder and have a solid understanding of the technical task at hand, you can hire someone who will focus on execution (soldier). If that’s not the case, you’re better off looking for someone who can take the lead and start building the project from scratch (general).

Whomever you choose, it’s crucial to have clarity on the project vision and set explicit goals from the start to make it easier for a new hire to perform and meet your expectations.

Cost of hiring

The financial implications of building a tech team are twofold: hiring and management.

Hiring costs account for all the time it takes to find and hire an engineer, as well as the time spent on training and onboarding. The recruitment phase alone can be lengthy, and there's no guarantee of a perfect match on the first try.

Management costs involve time and resources spent on task assignments, reviews, compliance, and more. Non-technical founders would often need to hire a team lead in order to create an efficient development process.

Bear in mind the financial requirements for both initiating and completing the hiring process.

Tech stack and interview

When preparing to assemble your team, keep in mind the essentials: defining your tech stack and conducting job interviews effectively.

Tech stack must be defined. Because to hire a developer, you must understand the technology stack in which he/she needs to have expertise. For non-technical founders, we recommend hiring an expert or a consultant who will assist you with this.

Interviewing is best done in a 3-stage process: a general screening, a technical deep dive, and a practical task to gauge the candidate's real-world capabilities.

Alternatives: No-code, low-code tools, and outsourcing to tools

If getting a dev team early on is not your best option, there are alternatives.

No-code platforms are ideal for early-stage development (tools like Webflow and FlutterFlow). They're user-friendly and quick to deploy. Disadvantage: They may lack scalability and depth in system design. With these platforms, you can build small prototypes or systems that do not require a lot of functional elements or complex business logic.

Low-code tools like Deskree, which is developed by my own company, are suitable for those with basic tech skills, offering more scalability than no-code platforms. They also facilitate easier handover to a development team. These tools can handle more complex tasks and applications that involve a bigger number of functional components.

And then, there’s outsourcing to tools, which provides a lot of flexibility. The tools available come with great existing frameworks for rapid development, and you can continue scaling as you grow. With this option, you have full ownership over your IP. Examples range from design services (Awesomic, Design Pickle) to website development (Awesomic, Flowout) and API development (my company’s tool: Deskree Accelerate).

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