The 3 Types of Engineers That Built My Startup (And Almost Broke It)
I used to think “great engineers” were just... great engineers.
Smart. Fast. Skilled.
But that thinking nearly killed my startup.
In the early days, we were all about speed. MVPs hacked together over coffee-fueled weekends. We shipped bugs. We broke stuff. But we moved. And that momentum gave us our first traction.
Back then, I hired what I now call Hackers. Scrappy. Unreasonable. The ones who saw Jira tickets as optional. They weren’t thinking about elegant systems—they were trying to survive. These people saved my company in year one.
But by year two? They nearly burned it down.
That’s when the Scalers showed up.
You know the type. They spot an API call that might spike AWS costs in six months—and they lose sleep over it. They document. They automate. They clean up the mess. Without them, our codebase would’ve collapsed. Without them, we’d still be playing whack-a-bug every Friday.
Still, there were moments where even the Scalers got stuck. Complex data edge cases. Infrastructure that didn’t fit our mental models. Big, strategic tech bets we had to get right.
That’s when we brought in the PhDs.
Not actual PhDs, always—but people who think like them. Deep thinkers. Systems-level minds. They’re the ones who say “wait, but what happens when this scales to 10 million users?” even when we’re at 10,000.
Each of these archetypes saved us. And each, at the wrong time, almost sank us.
The mistake I see too many founders make? Expecting one engineer to be all three.
You hire a Hacker and expect clean infra. You bring in a PhD and ask them to slap together a prototype in 24 hours. You onboard a Scaler and ask why they haven’t pushed anything to prod in week one.
I’ve done this. I’ve hired the wrong person for the right job.
Here’s the breakdown I use now:
- Hackers: You need them in the wilderness. Zero to one. Build fast or die.
- Scalers: You need them when the machine starts making money. When uptime matters more than features.
- PhDs: You need them when you’re making irreversible bets. Think AI infra, deep integrations, data architecture.
Building a serious company isn’t about hiring “great engineers.”
It’s about hiring the right ones—at the right time.
That’s how we scaled from a scrappy side hustle to a real company.
And that’s how I learned to stop expecting unicorns... and start building a stable.