[nnythm]

I generally disagree with what this guy is saying. This is reasonable from the perspective of, "How to pitch yourself to a non-technical founder."

A. Programming languages do matter. Talking to other programmers, a good way to find people who actually love programming is to ask people what languages they use. People who have experimented with haskell or clojure are usually people who love programming more. PG has a good essay on why it makes sense to start a startup based around an esoteric language. I know for a fact that Jane Street uses their heavy reliance on ocaml as a recruiting tool. Your life will be much, much easier if you can hire better programmers. Hence, the startups with the really good engineers will want to know what programming languages you know. So yes, I agree that resumes are not that interesting, but also, programming languages are useful indicators for certain kinds of employers. The recruitee's github should reflect this. [1]

B. Sending links to apps or websites is all well and good, but as another commenter said, for some startups, it is basically useless. If you are trying to be the CTO of a company like 10gen (their CTO is a co-founder, but bear with me) you will want to know about their systems skill, not how pretty they can make a website. Backend talent, or understanding of algorithms is something you absolutely cannot get from this.

So at startups where backend technical skill is not highly valued, and the founder is very non-technical, this might be useful. If you are trying to work at a Palantir or a DropBox, you should probably ignore this advice, although admittedly, both are much further along than this guy is thinking of.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html

[brianscordato]

Thanks for the comment - lot of good stuff in here. As for the languages piece, broad knowledge on languages definitely shows something, I agree. And I want to know what the applicant knows. I just meant that I could get a lot of that from the github account (as you point out), and that it doesn't need to be displayed in a resume. A resume telling me you know things is one thing, a github acct showing me you know things is another.

The links note is a good point. I was tailoring this towards my specific startup, and really early startups in general making their first "tech" hire. Once you've got a CTO or someone technical on staff, they'll handle the technical hiring and will understand the process and applicants far better than a non-technical founder ever will.