The Hidden Cost of Hiring "A-Players" from Big Tech (And Why It's Bankrupting Your Runway)
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Here’s what actually happens: you burn 6 months of runway on someone who can’t ship without 3 layers of approval, expects infrastructure that doesn’t exist yet, and quits after 4 months because “there’s not enough process.”
The Big Tech Trap
Big tech companies don’t just pay more. They’ve built entire ecosystems that make talented people look more talented than they are. When you hire someone from Google, you’re not just getting an engineer - you’re getting someone whose last five years of output depended on:
Dedicated DevOps teams handling deployments
PMs who wrote perfect specs
Legal reviewing every feature
Design handing over pixel-perfect mockups.
Unlimited compute resources
Strip all that away, and you often find someone incredibly good at one narrow thing, but can’t wear multiple hats or move fast in ambiguity.
The Real A-Players Are Already Remote
The dirty secret of remote hiring? The best startup talent isn’t trying to get INTO big tech - they’re trying to stay OUT of it. They’ve already figured out they can make $120K working remotely for a startup with autonomy and ownership, rather than $250K at Meta, spending half their time in meetings justifying their headcount.
These are the people who:
Ship features end-to-end without hand-holding
Thrive in chaos and ambiguity.
Actually, read the error logs instead of filing tickets.
Care more about impact than title inflation.
And they’re not on LinkedIn with “Ex-FAANG” in their bio. They’re building, quietly, from wherever they want to live.
What Startups Actually Need
Early-stage startups don’t need specialists. They need athletes - people who can code the feature, design the UI, talk to customers, and deploy to production in the same afternoon.
You find these people by:
Evaluating for resourcefulness over pedigree. Ask about times they shipped something with zero budget or support. Big tech experience often teaches the opposite skill.
Testing in realistic conditions. Give them an ambiguous problem with incomplete information. If they ask 20 clarifying questions before starting, they’re not startup-ready.
Prioritizing global talent over local prestige. A senior dev in Nairobi who’s been freelancing for 5 years has probably solved more diverse problems than someone who spent 5 years on Google’s ads team.
The Math That Matters
Let’s say you have $500K in runway. You can either:
Option A: Hire one ex-FAANG engineer at $200K + equity, burn 4 months recruiting them, spend 2 months onboarding while they “learn the codebase,” then watch them leave when they realize startups are messy.
Option B: Hire two strong remote engineers at $100K each, start them next week, and have a functioning team shipping features while Option A is still in “culture fit” interviews.
The companies that figure this out early compound their advantage. While competitors are burning runway on logo-chasing, they’re building product and finding product-market fit with a team that costs half as much and ships twice as fast.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Hiring remote isn’t about compromise. It’s about optimization. The best talent for startups isn’t concentrated in SF or NYC - it’s distributed globally, it’s hungry, and it’s not impressed by your Series A announcement.
Your job as a founder isn’t to hire the most credible-looking team. It’s to hire the team that helps you survive long enough to win.
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Region:
Australia
Author:
blog@Jobserver.ai
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