My unsolicited advice (for founders) is to hire the best people you can afford.
I've seen startups blow 2-3 headcount worth of budget to secure a FAANG engineer, only to realize that engineer needed an SRE to deploy their code, a tools engineer to setup their CI/CD, etc. The founders were so excited to add "FAANG engineer" to their Series A deck.
Firing this engineer was tough because the startup went to the board to get approval for the salary + equity offer letter. To make matters worse, this engineer was kept on for 6+ months without shipping anything ... because firing would've gone into the next board and investor update.
100% agreed, but for the CEO's who are making the above mistake, if they have other bad news to deliver to the board (low revenues, etc), then they might be afraid to deliver yet another piece of bad news on the hiring side.
Yep, and a mis-hire is one of the easiest problems to push off. You can talk yourself into believing the first project wasn't a good fit, your management skills aren't good so it's your fault, and so on.
All of those things might even be true! But doesn't change the reality that you're burning 2-3 engineers of runway on 1 engineer with no valuable outputs.
I've seen startups blow 2-3 headcount worth of budget to secure a FAANG engineer, only to realize that engineer needed an SRE to deploy their code, a tools engineer to setup their CI/CD, etc. The founders were so excited to add "FAANG engineer" to their Series A deck.
Firing this engineer was tough because the startup went to the board to get approval for the salary + equity offer letter. To make matters worse, this engineer was kept on for 6+ months without shipping anything ... because firing would've gone into the next board and investor update.