Simon Willison’s Weblog

What are the top five items to pique interest in developers to join a startup?

22nd September 2012

My answer to What are the top five items to pique interest in developers to join a startup? on Quora

It’s all about shipping.

In larger organisations, it’s very easy to end up with a bunch of steps between you and actually shipping code. There are the people who decide what’s going to be built, the people they need buy-in from, the people who sign off on the budget for the work, the people who write the requirements, the people who review the requirements, the people who schedule the work, the people who decide which tools will be used for the work, the people who change their mind about how the thing should work half way through the work, the people who test the work and the people who actually get to deploy the work.

Some of those roles are shared, but it’s still a very complex environment to Get Stuff Done in.

Then there are the people who step in after 6 months and decide to cancel the entire project before it sees the light of day!

At a small startup, there’s hardly anything in between you having an idea, writing the code and shipping it to customers. Our startup has a “everyone ships on the first day” policy which ensures that new hires have the capability to ship to production within a few hours of us handing them their computer. For people who have previously worked in more bureaucratic organisations, this is a huge breath of fresh air.