Many firms in our space only hire bright engineers and do not hire sales or marketing people. In practice, what happens is that some of the engineers over time naturally migrate into a sales, marketing, or business development role. And since they started out as engineers, they are better able to sell to other technical people.
In our space, the core hires we are constantly searching for are top notch CUDA or OpenCL developers. Those are niche skills. A small subset of all programmers have those skills and an even smaller population can do it well.
Yet, not all of our tasks involve CUDA or OpenCL development. Sometimes there are related tasks, like multi-threaded programming or regular C/C++ programming without parallelism. Sometimes the tasks are more far-afield, like web development. And sometimes the tasks are effectively sales and marketing related tasks, like working with customers, doing support, writing whitepapers, or blogging.
Our options are:
- Always seek to hire only for the core position of CUDA or OpenCL and then adapt those people to the tasks at hand. Pros: we constantly are staffed in our core competency and everyone has an ongoing ability to contribute to the core aspects of our business. Cons: we may end up asking people to do things that push them out of their comfort zone, require training, or were unanticipated at the time of hire.
- Try to find people uniquely suited to the various functions. Pros: less training required. Cons: everything outside of the core competency areas are subject to fluctuations in demand so the positions may not be around for the long run.
In general, I steer more towards the first option than the second.
Does your startup face a similar dilemma? How do you manage this?
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