My biggest concern about you joining a startup is that you don’t have enough breadth of expertise in building products.
This sort of runs counter to what my beliefs are and I thought the ethic in this country is: As long as you have that urge or passion in you (he mentions it himself), it doesn't matter what your "expertise" is. Sure, you need to have a baseline of "technical" skills, but this candidate clearly has it. Especially in these days where it is hard to find willing talent, I dont think you can afford to be picky, especially with such seemingly arrogant(right word?) demands
I don't know, there seems to be a lot of people here disagreeing. I agreed with most he had to say. I speak as someone who did exactly what he is describing- worked at huge company doing a pinhole role and going to a start-up doing end-to-end full stack (including DB stuff!) application. My technical skills were there but there was still a very big learning curve for all the frameworks out there. Especially since at large companies there is a lot more homegrown stuff and legacy infrastructure and at start-ups there is a ton of reliance on opensource. I agree that his statement only makes sense if they really have a lot of applicants then they can chose to be picky and maybe pass up top-talent like that until they get their feet wet. The flip-side of that coin is losing out on the opportunity, but again it only makes sense if all applicants are top-talent and they only need to choose between them.
So he doesn't know how to configure nginx, or the db. So what? It's already running. Database skills are fairly important (since they are your bottleneck), and it's important to have some internet knowledge (to prevent security breaches), but if a startup is hiring it should already have the stack in place. The big advantage of a "starup generalist" is they have probably played with a few different stacks, and know which one to pick, but it's too late for that.
And big company people know all the stupid mistakes that big companies do, and can help warn you about them as you grow.
My biggest concern about you joining a startup is that you don’t have enough breadth of expertise in building products.
This sort of runs counter to what my beliefs are and I thought the ethic in this country is: As long as you have that urge or passion in you (he mentions it himself), it doesn't matter what your "expertise" is. Sure, you need to have a baseline of "technical" skills, but this candidate clearly has it. Especially in these days where it is hard to find willing talent, I dont think you can afford to be picky, especially with such seemingly arrogant(right word?) demands