Building Great Software Engineering Teams: Recruiting, Hiring, and Managing Your Team from Startup to Success

CHAPTER 12

Technical vs. Management Tracks: Helping Your People Grow

In the early days of a startup, when there are only a handful of people and every one of those people is consumed with the challenge of finding traction with the product, there isn’t much time or need to discuss things like career development. It just doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of time talking about such long-term goals when the short-term future of your company is in doubt.

In early 2011, I was part of the founding team of Suitable Technologies, a robotics startup building a totally new type of technology. We called it remote presence.

Our first product, a telepresence robot called Beam, was a remotely operated mobile videoconferencing unit. By integrating multiple ...