Ask HN: How do you hire your first programmer?

[POTUS]

TLDR: How does a company with no technical people hire their first programmer? What should we be thinking about? How do we get the right person?

Context: We're in Europe in a medium sized town outside of any big startup/tech city. The company that I work for is slowly pivoting to becoming a tech company. It started out doing workshops and organizing events. About a year ago we had a software company develop a piece of (customer facing) software that would aid us in our offline ventures. Now that we've worked with that software for a while, and even expanded on it a little, it's becoming more and more clear: we need to become a tech company to reach our goals. Where most of the people in the company currently still largely work in the offline part of the company we've realized that a digital-only product is our future.

Since this is becoming way bigger than originally anticipated, we're hesitant to continue doing this with an outside contractor. So we're looking into hiring developer(s).

There's currently no technical people working at our company and there's no real knowledge about this either.

Question: We wouldn't even really know where to start. How does one hire the first developer to a company? What should we be thinking about? What do we put in a job posting? How do I even go about the interviewing process? How do we get the right person with the right skills to apply? How do we create an environment for a developer to fit in?

[gtsteve]

Telling programmers what to do as a non-programmer can be like herding cats. Your first step should be to hire in a technical manager who can build the rest of the team for you. If you believe this is the future of the company, you should consider hiring someone at the director level who speaks your language and also the language of developers.

This person doesn't even necessarily need to be a programmer or a good one but they do need to know how to run a software development team. You will have to use your experience and intuition to tell if they are a good fit.

You can find this individual at networking events perhaps but if you have the money to spend then you might consider hiring an executive recruitment agency. You also might consider employing a management consultancy company to interview this person to check their technical knowledge and management style but I have no way of knowing what that costs.

This person can then answer all the other questions you have with full knowledge of the context of your company and your local area.

[JoeAltmaier]

This is important to do early, or not at all. I was in a technically-driven startup. Couple of years in, the management team changed and development got a less-technical manager who could talk manager-ese to the President. But he quit paying the slightest attention to Engineering, made silly decisions and bogged the product down in a quagmire it never recovered from.

So, the right hire here from the start is critical.