Essay · ~15 min read

How to Hire Your First Engineer

Harj Taggar · Y Combinator Free Intermediate

When referrals are not available, you have to manufacture signal yourself, and this is the canonical piece on doing that through cold outreach on GitHub, LinkedIn, and Hacker News. Taggar is blunt that cold outreach is slow (plan for months) and only works when every message is genuinely personalized to what that person built. Read it as honest expectation-setting, not a promise of a quick hire.

• Look at public work (GitHub contributions, shipped projects) to judge people you have never met, since that is real evidence a resume is not.
• Cold outreach can work but is a grind: expect it to take months, and never send a generic message.
• Reference the specific work that made you reach out. That single detail is what separates a reply from being ignored when you have no shared connection.