Yeah, that rubbed me the wrong way too. Engineers are completely overrated; your best bet is to hire no engineers and outsource to India or odesk, or if you absolutely must hire engineers, hire them for rock-bottom prices and fire them if they ask for more.
That is the dumbest piece of advice you could give a founder.
A start-up that outsources its core competency is doomed.
If you have an idea, and can't find a technical co-founder, learn to program yourself. PHP aint that hard.
Yeah, it must be a huge pile of valuable IP if someone without tech knowledge can hack it together with self-taught PHP in a few weeks...
Aren't startup people supposed to be all focused on getting results? If it takes paying someone else to hack up v1, rather than you spending time on it when you should be out selling or interviewing potential customers, etc, do that.
We never hear the stories from people who self-taught PHP or Rails for 6 months hacking on an idea only to then try to give it to users and have it rejected for multiple reasons. But they happen. Probably more than anyone realizes.
Skype outsourced it's development to Estonian developers, which as we know went very well. Though it's a prevalent opinion on HN, outsourcing is not inherently bad for a startup. What matters it the quality and the skills of the people, local as well as remote.
