Hiring the first five engineers in India
Notes from staffing a small team where every hire moves the culture by twenty percent.
At five engineers, each person is a fifth of your engineering culture. That maths is unforgiving, and it means the first filter is not seniority — it is whether someone writes down what they decided and why.
The interview that predicted the most for us was small, real, and paid: a scoped change against a repo they had never seen, with a written explanation attached. Whiteboard puzzles predicted nothing.
The part that took longest to learn was rejecting well. A candidate who gets a clear reason within two days tells other candidates about you. That is most of early recruiting.
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