Updates from the Talent War Frontline

WIP

Members of the technical staff. Founder's associate roles.

These titles are increasingly common in early stage startups because of the increasing need for generalization in all roles.

On the pendulum scale of technical to non technical roles, everybody is trending towards the middle.

Engineers become members of the technical staff because they are increasingly forward deployed and need to make product decisions. AE's/SDR's/Growth folks are becoming "Founder's associates" where recruiting and communication with technical team members are ever more important to be nimble.

The evident answer is AI-productivity gains in bimodal startups where people are AI-native means everybody needs to be more of a generalist because instead of just the founders needing to where multiple hats, everybody has to wear multiple hats because of lower headcount. Being able to stack shift seamlessly across functions, aided by technical understanding, just creates an insane premium there.

That's of course not going to help the fact that founding engineers are some of the hardest folks to hire right now. YC is taking dozens of exceptional founding engineers off the market and there are ever more programs nowadays that back people (pre-pre-seed investing). In some way, sexier role titles that are more full stack like member of technical staff or founder's associate is a natural reaction here. Equity comp, or a similarly motivating factor, hasn't caught on yet though.

At the time of writing this, the more outlandish people on LI/X are calling for just compensating founding engineers at 2-5% equity. That's an arms race nobody will win and still doesn't surmount exceptional engineer's costs nowadays.

More on how I think we should compensate better (I think Ethan Ding from TextQL does an amazing job explaining this, and Paraform is blowing up here) when I have more time.