I have written before on Tech Tuesday on how to grow engineering teams but wanted to tackle this issue again from a slightly different perspective: what is the role of experience? Startup engineering teams often start out skewing very young as young founders tend to hire more young people. The overall bias tends to be to hire “bright young people who will figure it out” (whatever the relevant it may be). Many companies will go so far as having what they consider tests for brightness.

The problem with this approach is that it denies the role of experience. And having been young (once upon a time) I know quite well how easy it is to dismiss experience, especially when you believe that the world is changing massively and hence experience may be of the wrong kind. And I might even go as far as saying that in the early days of the Internet that was even true in engineering, but it is no longer true. You can now find engineers who have 10,000 hours or more of experience in a particular domain of Internet engineering (and that even includes mobile). And as you grow you should seek out that experience.

Let me give a concrete example. Let’s say you are providing a service that has to scale globally and is latency sensitive (for instance because it is delivered to a mobile device as the endpoint). You could try to crack this with just young bright and highly motivated engineers or you could hire someone who is a genuine expert in global low latency routing with 5+ years of experience. I strongly recommend you do the latter. Sure the former could probably get something working just reading up on BGP but they are likely to be re-inventing the wheel and in the process will learn many lessons the hard way.

So the ideal strategy for growing engineering teams these days is to find some truly experienced engineers and then complement them with folks relatively fresh out of school (who don’t yet have any bad habits acquired elsewhere). The right mix of experience and eagerness is very powerful.